The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 11 (12)

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Transcript

0:00 Good afternoon, Colonel. Hello. How are you? Good. It got up to 80 degrees today. Wow. Right? Mark it on the calendar. That's amazing. All right. Now, oh, my gosh. If it's not one thing, it's another. Hold on a minute. Rumble won't let me back in. I'm telling you, I think it's a demonic attack. Oh, God.

0:40 Stop that. Put that over there. Turn my camera and my microphone back on. There we are. Oh, my gosh. Crazy. All right. This is crazy. Okay. Now, we're going to start. All right. We're still in the adventures in Asia. William J. Donovan.

1:06 wartime chief of OSS and Eisenhower's appointment in 1953 to ambassador of Thailand. Why Thailand? Because that's where they're going to run all the drugs out of. Oversaw the attempt to clean up the Lee Mai mess. This repatriation of Chinese nationalists from northern Burma came at the express wish of the Burmese government.

1:36 Lai Me returned to Taiwan in October of 52, but his soldiers stayed in Burma. A four-power conference in Bangkok among Burma, Thailand, Nationalist China, and the U.S. agreed to remove them. This led to Operation Repat, like repatriation. A civil air transport airlift

2:02 of Chinese nationalists, basically their KMT army, who crossed from northern Burma to Thailand and were then flown back to Taiwan. An initial group of 50 nationalist soldiers entered Thailand on November 8, 1953, with no weapons but bearing a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek. Flights began the next day. Civil Air Transport used C-46 aircraft.

2:32 with extra fuel tanks. In an initial phase, almost 2,000 troops and several hundred dependents was returned to Thailand. In the second phase, February through March 1954, another 3,000 nationalists and 500 dependents. People flown out later brought the total to 5,600 soldiers and over 1,000 dependents. Each one

3:06 cost the U.S. government at least $128 per person via the CIA proprietary because they were billing us. Something of a farce, Repat included evacuees who were Shan and Laihu tribesmen, not Chinese. And dependents swelled the numbers without Burma's consent.

3:39 In addition, the many troops brought out were not coming out with their weapons. A thousand rifles, 66 machine guns, and 22 mortars, some of them antique pieces, not the modern arms that the CIA had equipped them with. Numerous evacuees contrived to return to Burma. Nationalists maintained forces in Burma.

4:09 no longer under CIA control. Yeah, don't believe that part. The nationalists maintain that these later grew to as many as 12,000 and continued their drug trafficking, which is why the author wants you to believe they weren't under CIA control. That's not true. Significant changes now occurred in the Taiwan Straits. The 7th Fleet

4:39 had had orders to bar the straits to forces of both sides. Eisenhower changed that, blocking only Beijing, which freed Chiang Kai-shek to attack anywhere he desired. In early 1953, the U.S. gave the Nationalists their first jet aircraft, F-84 fighters, and sanctioned an expansion of Nationalist Marine Corps to three brigades.

5:11 tripling shankai shek's amphibious force the importance of this um and i don't remember if he covers it i don't think he does um is william polly's role in all of this william polly had the curtis aircraft contract him and his brothers for southeast asia and was using it to equip shankai shek that's why it's important to read more than one book

5:41 In connection with the jet deal, the nationalists agreed not to use the American weapons, particularly aircraft, on offensive missions without first consulting with the U.S. But Chiang Kai-shek sought no approval several months later in July of 1953 when he committed the planes to support the nationalist raiding forces. And again, this is not exactly true because

6:09 They know exactly what Chiang Kai-shek is going to do with these aircraft. And by providing them to him, they're acquiescing to exactly what he's going to do with them. In July of 1953, when he committed the planes to support a nationalist raiding force, Chiang Kai-shek's chief of staff later apologized. You don't ask for permission, but just say you're sorry when you're done.

6:40 The raiders were being driven into the sea and needed to buy time for an orderly withdrawal. That was his excuse. The Nationalists promised, we won't do that again, but immediately did it again. Chiang Kai-shek's Navy used its American supply destroyers to seize a Soviet tanker on the high seas between Luzon and Formosa. Eisenhower administration assumed a posture of neutrality.

7:13 While it's not neutral to be supplying the KMT Army, their newly minted Navy at our expense, their newly minted Marine Force, all of their weapons, that doesn't make you neutral. Sorry. Overall, apart from its creation of a supply network, the CIA's paramilitary campaign against China continued not to get.

7:44 There had been some military impact in Korea, though this was limited because of the partisan units materializing only after most active mobile phase of the war. The CIA operations in Manchuria and Yunnan were almost totally ineffective. Moreover, they prompted stringent communist security measures.

8:14 So may even have impeded the CIA's developing intelligence sources in China. They're not interested in actual intelligence choices. They're interested in the paramilitary operations. As in the Burma project, some CIA efforts were detrimental to the larger U.S. foreign policy interest.

8:39 and those along the China coast contributed to the inception of a series of crises in the Taiwan Straits that repeatedly brought America near war with China during the 1950s, which is the entire purpose. Covert action by the CIA irritated the Chinese without producing any positive results. Among the important covert operations in Asia,

9:11 that were combined with political action and psychological warfare, took place in the Philippines. Again, the initiative would be the opposite of what our motto was in Safe for Democracy. The Philippines became independent in 1946, and we should put air quotes over independent. At the time, there were a number of partisan groups.

9:43 that had actively fought Japanese occupiers with the U.S. help during World War II. And guess what we're going to do to those people? The same thing we did to the Vietnamese and the same thing that we did to Korea. We're going to kill them. These people on the Philippines were called the Huks, H-U-K-S. They were a peasant base group that we promptly labeled communists.

10:13 And they had formed the National Peasants Union. And there were a few other groups, but that was the primary ones that were aggressively anti-imperialism. The alliance won all of the congressional seats for the key parts of the island of Luzon. But President Manuel Roxas alleged fraud and refused to seat any of the delegates. You know.

10:45 Because of democracy. The Hucks resumed fighting under their warlord leader, Louis Turok. In 1947, the U.S. signed a military base agreement with the Philippines. Providing naval and air bases in exchange for U.S. foreign aid and military assistance. Military advisors naturally were concerned of the Huck uprising.

11:15 decided to help the illegitimate government of the Philippines who refused to recognize democracy and elections and fight the quote-unquote guerrillas. The government called its strategy the mailed fist. This approach did little to defuse the resistance. Newly elevated President Carino

11:44 who had been formerly the vice president, enticed the Hucks into negotiations in 1948, but they failed. Then the CIA comes in. Well, the CIA never actually left. They were there in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The agency had a station in Manila and a base at Subic Bay, which had become the U.S. Navy installation. The covert element of the CIA

12:17 had detailed, had a detailee, a guy loaned from the Air Force working for the CIA, none other than Major General Edward Lansdale, who we just talked about on the Alpha Warrior Show. He was an expert in political psychological warfare. He became the darling of the psyops experts in the CIA. His background had been in advertising. He had been living

12:54 In Hollywood, he attended UCLA. Lansdell had served in the OSS and then returned to the Army and then transferred to the Air Force when it was created. In the Philippines, the 43-year-old PSYOP's whiz found the perfect vehicle, Ramon Macese. He was the Filipino defense minister.

13:27 that had been appointed in the summer of 1950. Masese, a Filipino congressman and wartime guerrilla fighter who came from Luzon, had a more evolved view of the resistance forces. He began a land redistribution program financed through the government corporation to wean the peasants away from the hucks.

13:53 Masese also benefited from these splits internally and used them to their advantage, strategy of tension. Lansdale began promoting Masese using all the resources of the Wisner operation, eventually making the Filipino a larger-than-life figure. In the conflict, Lansdale added psyops.

14:23 to the standard military protection measures. He used massive sound amplifiers on airplanes to saturate Huck areas with pre-recorded messages and simply noise that capitalized on peasants' superstitions. The land program was adapted to encourage defections from the Hucks. The CIA also installed a New York political operator, Gabe Kaplan.

14:55 to create a movement of influence in voting, beginning in the Philippines congressional elections in 1951. Oh, the CIA interfering in elections? What? Lansdale engineered a supposed grassroots movement to draft Massese as a presidential candidate. George Aurel, A-U-R-E-L-L, worried about the CIA's

15:27 involvement in political warfare. But Desmond Fitzgerald forged ahead with gusto. Ramon Macese won the 1953 elections, but that proved only the beginning. The CIA remained a player in the Filipino elections for years to come. Macese died in a plane crash four years later. And by the time the 1957 election, George Aurel,

15:57 had become the station chief in Manila. The CIA could not decide who to support in the contest. John Richardson replaced Arell in time for the next congressional elections, and this time they were the CIA favorites. Manila became an important agency base for Far East operations, particularly in its China mission, which transferred there from Japan in 1955.

16:27 led by Desmond Fitzgerald, who had desperately wanted a field assignment. The mission purported to be a theater command for actions against Beijing. The barons at headquarters disliked having anyone come between them and their station chiefs, while the station chiefs wanted to operate, not deal with the paperwork.

16:56 They wanted to go to the highest level at headquarters, which meant the Far East Division Chief. The China mission became huge. At the same time, back in D.C., the Psychological Strategy Board was in its heyday. Fitzgerald finally returned to Washington, succeeding Tracy Barnes as the head of the political paramilitary staff. Just in time.

17:32 for the reorganization after the Guatemala coup. Meanwhile, the Hux rebellion sputtered on but came close to disappearing. By 1954, almost 10,000 people had been murdered. Half the number were prisoners and a couple of thousand had been wounded. An almost equal number had been induced to give up by land offers and other enticements.

18:03 Louis Taruc himself surrendered in May of 1954, but at about the same time, Ed Lansdell was promoted for his work in the Philippines. No grass grew under Lansdell's feet. He had already moved on to the next secret war, Vietnam. Vietnam became another theater for the CIA, known as the French Indochina, after World War II.

18:31 the countries of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia were caught up in a revolution. Yeah, they were trying to kick the French out. The French had ruled them as a colony since the late 19th century, but independence movements had evolved. And with the end of the World War II, they opposed the restoration of French colonial rule. In Vietnam, the Viet Minh nationalists,

19:05 formed a government in August of 1945 and issued a Declaration of Independence similar to the United States in 1776. As a matter of fact, this is Ho Chi Minh, and the OSS officers that were assigned to Ho Chi Minh during World War II helped him draft that. The Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, sent letters to President Truman soliciting aid for this new nation state.

19:36 Americans of the OSS and other military intelligence were still at work in Indochina, and these Americans had high expectations. The Viet Minh ran the country for 17 months before the French armies came back, taking it back, trying to. The French proved quite successful at painting Viet Minh as the

20:05 communist while the U.S. also worried about the weakness of French post-World War II. Again, at this point, Ho Chi Minh is a nationalist. He is not a communist. The result was that when the U.S. involvement in the Far East began to grow, French Indochina became one of the most active scenes.

20:30 What seemed to some as new American initiatives in the Cold War inevitably appeared to others as colonialism, especially their support for the French trying to recolonize Indochina. The CIA first sent people to Vietnam as part of a U.S. delegation that opened in Saigon in the summer of 1950, right before the Korean War.

21:00 Two years later, the agency's presence had expanded to the northern area as well, with an officer heading a base in Hanoi. Jurisdiction fell to the same branch of the Far East Division that handled the Burma operation. In mid-1951, Truman approved a policy for cooperating with friendly governments in operations against quote-unquote guerrilla movements.

21:30 which were basically just rebels against imperialism, the kind of warfare central to the Indochina conflict. About that time, the agency suggested to the French that he form partisan units behind Viet Minh lines, you know, like stay behind units, following the same formula that the CIA had used in Korea, stay behind units. The French were not enthusiastic about the idea.

22:01 The issue came up again in mid-1952 when the French applied for more aid to create infantry battalions. French generals continued to resist CIA proposals. A widening U.S. paramilitary effort began with secret discussions in 1953. You know, hey, we've got this war in Korea that's coming to an end. We've got all of these weapons in theater. Let's use them.

22:37 The French were strapped for money and they were asking for military aid, including special warfare capability. With the new Eisenhower administration, they were very interested in helping recolonize Vietnam. Ed Lansdale participated in the military group that surveyed Vietnam in the course of these deliberations.

23:07 The French ran the partisan units behind enemy lines in the north. Again, stay behind units. In the south, there were two religious movements or sects, one called the Kaldai and the other one Hohe. They were basically a band of river pirates. They had private militaries financed.

23:36 by French intelligence. Now, this is the same SDECE that ran the Operation Gladio OAS elements of France. There is evidence that the French, in briefing a senior CIA officer about their activities in Saigon in December 1953, offered the CIA a role to control these forces in return for financial aid.

24:09 The briefing was repeated for another CIA official in March of 1954. Nevertheless, there were Saigon rumors of American contacts with these private armies, especially in late 1953, when two women connected with the U.S. Embassy were found dead in a jeep on a rubber plantation close to Kaldei headquarters. And another incident also hushed up for diplomatic reasons.

24:38 A consul at the embassy stopped for an identity check at a bridge, was found to have plastic explosives in his trunk. But Joe Smith, a young Far East division officer, believes the Saigon station agents refused to contact the religious minorities because they were Catholic and considered the groups blasphemous. Special warfare experts were also active in the northern sector of Vietnam.

25:08 In the north, the French had about 10,000 partisans in 19 separate bands or stay-behind units. This increase over previous levels was encouraged by the Americans. Beginning in December of 53, two U.S. Army officers were permanently assigned to the French Special Warfare Command to handle the logistics of supplying them with weapons.

25:42 Titled Detachment P, the Army Attaché Unit, another U.S. covert office appeared in Hanoi to furnish combat intelligence for these stay-behind units. Major Roger Tranquil, the French commander, visited Korea to observe American-organized stay-behind units used there. By February of 1954, the American ambassador to Vietnam was reporting,

26:13 that we are already making a contribution in unconventional warfare. Eisenhower was not satisfied with the progress, though. In June of 54, in a letter to a friend and fellow general, Alfred Gruenther, then serving in France with NATO, I complained that the French had rebuffed most U.S. offers, quote,

26:45 That would tend to keep our participation in the background, but could nevertheless be very effective. I refer to our efforts to get a good guerrilla organization going in the region, unquote. Early agency involvement included civil air transport, of course. The civil air transport action flowed from the military aid program, which loaned the French some C-1.

27:15 19 flying boxcar transports. 21 civil air transport pilots familiarized themselves with the aircraft and began flying from Japan. A whole class went to Indochina where they actually outnumbered the French crews on that aircraft. They were being trained at the Filipino Clark Air Force Base. The civil air transport personnel

27:46 brought everything they needed down to their own refrigerators and beer. The first civil air transport flight in Indochina was a supply lift to a camp, not in Vietnam, in Laos. You know where all the opium is. That was on May 6th, 1953. Within a year, two dozen civil air transport pilots would be caught up in...

28:17 Den Ben Phu, which is where the French got clobbered. The Civil Air Transport crews performed combat missions while a full squadron of U.S. Air Force C-119s, its pilots, often moonlighting with the Civil Air Transport, flew ostensibly less dangerous flights to support the French. The Air Force people, housed at a hotel in Haiphong,

28:46 which is in North Vietnam, by the way, help from the CIA base chief in Hanoi. So as bad as we're supposed to have all assumed Ho Chi Minh was, these guys in the 1950s are operating out of North Vietnam because Ho Chi Minh still thinks that the U.S. is an ally. For a time, their messages moved on CIA radio currents.

29:22 At least one of the Air Force pilots, Alan Poe, resigned to join Civil Air Transport, which paid a lot more for the same work. Beginning in late 1953, the French tried to break the Viet Minh by tempting them to attack a strong male camp at Dinh Ben Phu. Squad 2 became Civil Air Transport's name for Dinh Ben Phu Airlift.

29:52 Squad 1 having been the Laotian mission in the spring. In all, the CIA proprietary flew 684 times to the camp. Chief Pilot Paul Holden was wounded by anti-aircraft fire on his fifth mission. The top flyer, A.L. Junkins, made 64 flights. Next was Steve Cusack.

30:22 at 59. Pilots recalled flak over Dinbin Fu as being heavy, heavier than anything that they had experienced in World War II. Cusack himself was flying a mission alongside James McGovern on May 6, 1954, when McGovern was shot down in his C-119. Nicknamed Earthquake Magoon, after a popular magoo, after a

30:52 comic strip, McGovern died just hours before the final collapse of the French at Din Ben Phu, one year to the day after civil air transport had first flown in Indochina. McGovern's body and other artifacts were discovered in 2002 at a crash site in Laos, almost five decades after his plane went down by Americans searching for those still missing in action in the U.S. Now,

31:24 The weird thing about that, and it's super weird, my air war college class in the spring of 2003 was the first military people back in Laos after we lost in Vietnam. They had just brought in the first ambassador, US ambassador to Laos. He arrived about a month before we did for our air war college seminar.

31:54 Because we were the Southeast Asia focused group. And this was huge news. Huge news. So weird reading this stuff. At one point in the Dien Bien Phu crisis, the French asked Washington for the loan of B-29 bombers. The U.S. discussed encouraging the French to add an air component to their foreign legion.

32:25 they could give the B-29s to and which American crews would be encouraged to fly. The Eisenhower administration was nonetheless so impressed with this civil air transport performance that it had considered creating an entity to fly combat aircraft and help the French. Another entity? They're already doing it with the civil air transport. At the request of the National Security Council.

32:59 Operation Coordination Board, the staff of General Graves Erskine, Assistant to the SecDef for Special Operations, prepared a plan. The concept provided for an international volunteer air group, almost like the Flying Tigers, that could be sponsored by France and other Asian governments. The unit would have several squadrons of F-86

33:30 jet fighters. And there was even talk of giving it B-29s. Only eight months would be necessary to set up this aviation group. Officials were told at an initial cost of $120 million and would operate on an annual budget of $200 million. You know, to basically be mercenaries from the sky. Although first discussed in the context of Indochina.

34:03 this aviation group could possibly be used for much wider covert actions. No kidding. And the potential was clearly perceived by the Pentagon special warfare planners. Quote, such a unit will always be useful as a ready strike force in the event of renewed aggression in any part of the Far East. Without it,

34:29 No airstriking force exists which can be employed on short notice in circumstances that it is undesirable to employ official U.S. air power, unquote. In other words, we want a covert aviation group to do covert operations outside of Congress and the American people. And the Pentagon is actively advocating for this.

35:01 In the event of a declared war, the aviation group could be officially inducted into the Air Force as an additional wing, which is exactly what happened with Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. So again, they're just talking about another version of that with fighter aircraft. Pentagon planners believe the creation of this aviation group would work within the framework of U.S. national polity.

35:33 policies, but felt the project required National Security Council confirmation. No kidding. You mean the Pentagon isn't just going to go out and create their own Air Force outside of the jurisdiction of the government and Congress? The opinion from the Attorney General confirmed the legality of enlistment by U.S. civilians and military volunteers.

36:04 The original plan called for the creation of the unit before the end of 1954, which was the rainy season in Indochina. But the National Security Council didn't make a decision. The U.S. considered a private firm. The name of it was Aviation International Limited to recruit U.S. aircraft maintenance troops to assist the French Air Force in Indochina.

36:35 In the interim, they decided they'd just use active duty people to do it. The OCB recommendation to form an international volunteer air group was nevertheless taken up that summer. The National Security Council approved it on August 18, 1954. Although the end of the Indochina War briefly shelved it, it became the responsibility of the CIA.

37:08 With the Pentagon's Office of Special Operations and proponents of a foreign legion air force, we're never able to work out all of the problems of how to hide it and where it would be based. Nonetheless, this exercise established the National Security Council approved role for the kind of covert air force the CIA was basically already using.

37:37 The French defeat at Dinh Vinh Phu led to a negotiated settlement at Geneva, which provided for a temporary division of Vietnam into two regroupment zones, which became known respectively as North and South. Now, this again was on purpose because they're not done. Divide and conquer. The partisans in the North, meaning the nationalists, ended up

38:10 being taken over by the CIA. In June of 1954, an agency special unit, 10 men under Colonel Lansdale arrived undercover as Saigon military mission. They worked independently of John Anderton's Saigon station. Geneva provided a two-year hiatus after which elections were to be held to unify the nation.

38:40 Lansdale's mission specific for operations had that much time to fuck it all up. Lucien Koenig, who we see later on in, he's a big drug dealer, weapons guy, and was in close personal contact with the French mafia and drug trafficking in Marseille. He became the deputy.

39:13 For the North, he managed to smuggle a few shipments of weapons and explosives into North Vietnam under cover of the French withdrawal and carried out psychological operations, but he had no capacity for long-term support. He's equipping stay-behind people. In 1956, the last of his projects had failed miserably. The secret warriors were more successful in the South.

39:42 There, Lansdale established a close friendship with Diem. Then, President Eisenhower sent a new U.S. envoy to Saigon in late 1954, General J. Lawton Collins. He received a briefing from Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, and Pierre Cabal, advising him to make full use of Lansdale to equip.

40:15 the South to resist the North. They had no intentions of a unifying election. Later, Alan Dulles secretly visited Saigon and was chauffeured around by Lansdell, reminding him of the excitement of wartime Switzerland. Beginning in January of 55, the CIA stopped giving the French cash to pay for a political, religious, paramilitary army.

40:45 Instead, Lansdale funneled the money to Diem, who took over and made that his first power base. The tab amounted to tens of thousands of dollars a month and steadily increased. Several additional CIA subsidies went directly to Diem's palace contingency fund used to pay off politicians.

41:10 A visiting agency officer saw so much cash passed around the station that he told a colleague in Singapore that this kind of money in Malaya could have ended the entire resistance movement simply by handing every ethnic Chinese a first class ticket to China. Diem consolidated his power base in Saigon by neutralizing all of the different sects. Lansdale

41:41 stood with him every step of the way, basically directing the effort. Lansdale would arrange for the different sects to basically pay for anybody that didn't want to work with the CIA to be cued, handing out money along the way. Lansdale advised Diem daily, but the Saigon leader failed to deliver on promises of political reforms.

42:15 Eisenhower's envoy and friend, General Collins, finally decided to end U.S. support, at which point Lansdell used a CIA back channel to alert his bosses. In Washington, Allen and John Foster Dulles conspired to undercut General Collins. It was Collins, not Lansdell, who would be replaced. Lansdell also convinced Diem to claim nation status for the South independently.

42:45 of what had already been promised as an election. In October 55, Lansdale was awarded a National Security Medal, just like Kermit Roosevelt, for creating the fucked up mess of Vietnam in which we would end up with tens of thousands of dead Americans, thanks to Ed Lansdale and the rest of them. The Geneva settlement provided for all Vietnam.

43:17 elections in July of 1956, which Eisenhower, of course, was afraid that it would not go under their control. Diem thus cast the die for a second Indochina war in which both special warfare and the CIA would play an even larger role. The U.S. saw its new Southeast Asian ally in Cold War terms.

43:49 They didn't see them that way. They propagandized all of us that way. American planners designed the South Vietnamese Army, the basic strategy embodied in U.S. In 1955, war plans set the CIA to ensure that there was opposition in the South and had already increased their presence in Laos.

44:22 So that they could neutralize any role that the Laos government would play in the conflict. This included Pacific Fleet raids and special warfare units to harass everybody. But when war returned to Vietnam, it took the form of an uprising. The Americans prepared themselves and the South for the threat.

44:57 Because already the indigenous people in Vietnam was fighting back against Diem because they saw him as another Western puppet. All of this was a piece with the evolution of the CIA secret war in Asia, which grew far beyond the Korean conflict. The true expectations Dwight D. Eisenhower had was in a greatly expanded playing field for covert operations.

45:27 It was welcomed not only by Eisenhower, but the CIA as well. This is where the next chapter starts. And I'm just going to read like the first little bit of it. Just kind of set the tone and we'll go through the rest of it next week. As one of CIA's Princeton group consultants, Richard Bissell spent his final months before actually joining the agency, circulating his latest policy.

46:01 among key players. The true weakness in America's defense, he argued, lay not in the inability to face the Soviet Union or a potential invasion, but in the third world, where Bissell feared revolutions would ultimately be exploited by Moscow. The CIA's activities in Indochina and the Philippines had aimed directly at this threat.

46:30 except for it didn't exist. Not at the time they were doing covert operations. They just wanted control of all of these different outposts. They framed it as a communist adventure, but history does not substantiate that. But Bissell and the CIA

47:01 The first real crisis of the Eisenhower era erupted in Middle Europe, Germany specifically. One catalyst of events was Stalin's death in March of 1953, while Radio Free Europe, then Radio Liberty, busied itself with saturating the airwaves using the Psychological Strategy Board, quickly cobbled together an overall response.

47:31 Russian spy chief Beria briefly held power in Moscow, loosening the reins of Soviet control over Eastern Europe. And East Germany recently clobbered with production quotas that further increased hopelessness. The liberalization was one of the aspects was the right to protest. In mid-June, construction workers in East Berlin began work slowdowns.

48:00 That blossomed into demonstrations. Protests reached peak intensity and workers had made plans for a public march on June 17th. The news spread throughout East Germany by word of mouth, but also courtesy of Radio in the American Sector, another one of their propaganda outfits. Although it had worked with the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany with eight Americans and 650 Germans.

48:30 on its Berlin staff. East Germans made the demonstration a spectacle never before seen behind the Iron Curtain. Documents in Russia and former East Germany's archives released after the Cold War showed that East German authorities and Soviet occupiers had lost their nerve. Two entire armored divisions entered East Berlin. Strikes and labor protests continued for the next two days.

48:57 The CIA had recently issued a national intelligence estimate specifically to predict the impact of a Berea peace offensive on Germany. But looking at Berlin, the analysts concentrated on the possibility of something like the Berlin blockade, that is the Soviet harassment against the West. No one expected internal unrest. Again, you're paying for intelligence.

49:27 And they had no clue. Beria was an opportunity to seek peace. At the CIA's Berlin base, led by William Harvey, surprise intelligence officers scrambled for any information they could get and obtained information generally from word of mouth.

49:56 as did many in both East and West Berlin. The CIA lost track of Soviet forces in East Germany. Only Harvey's deputy, Henry Hexer, himself German-born, understood the demonstration's threat to communist power in the East. Hexer argued that the CIA should give the strikers weapons from the agency's stockpile in West Berlin.

50:23 David Murphy, a subordinate at the Berlin base, denies that the field submitted any request to approve CIA intervention, citing the recollection of Tom Polger and Gordon Seward, both senior officers in the overall German program. Murphy notes that General Trescott, to whom Polger was a deputy, would have fired anyone who suggested such a thing. Other Berlin base officers recall that Bob Harvey,

50:51 not Hexer, sent a cable recommending a U.S. show of force, not arms to East Berliners. Alerting American forces in Germany might have put the Russians on warning. The cable reached CIA headquarters after Allen Dulles had left for the day. Division Chief John Bross bucked it up the line to Wisner. A military alert beyond the agency would have to go through Eisenhower.

51:19 In this fast-moving situation, Washington had little possibility of acting in time. Wisner rejected Bill Harvey's suggestion. A paper prepared for the Psychological Strategy Board on June 17th noted that John Foster Dulles at State Department had similar cautious attitude. They don't want to lose their boogeyman too prematurely.

51:43 On June 19th, Alan Dulles briefed the National Security Council on the riots and protests in Czechoslovakia. Then, C.D. Jackson speculated on exploiting events for propaganda purposes. President Eisenhower injected that if the U.S. intervened to fan the flames of discontent, the heads that rolled would be those of the Americans. Jackson argued that the riots might be

52:14 An indication of the disintegration of the Soviet empire, but the president's view prevailed. Ike saw supplying arms as an invitation to slaughter the protesters. The U.S. could not risk a major war with the Russians, one that might go nuclear. Washington's only official action was offering food. Soviet secret reports found in the archives decades after the estimated number of rioters in eastern Berlin at 66,000.

52:44 About 10,000 of them were actually from West Berlin. Over the following weeks, about 10,000 East Germans fled to the West. Almost 3,000 were arrested and 100 were killed in street clashes. During the summer and fall, the Psychological Strategy Board prepared a plan to take advantage. Eisenhower approved the NSC policy paper with both short-term and long-term measures.

53:14 Among the long-term actions, CIA had primary responsibility for a program to implement a Volunteer Freedom Corps initiative. Training and equipping, you guessed it, stay-behind units to sustain warfare. The president also ordered an overall strategic review dubbed Solarium. It was a study for the White House where the panelists met and presented their final report.

53:45 Three task force assembled, each to argue for a particular line of action. The rollback approach was subsumed in Solarium's Alternative C, designed to increase efforts to disturb and weaken the Soviet bloc, attacking the communist apparatus worldwide and missing no opportunities. Task Force C program foresaw preparations for atomic warfare, expediting development of the Volunteer Freedom Corps.

54:15 and the employment of Chinese nationalist troops, Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT army, and focused on China, not Russia. Planners estimated the cost at $60 billion for two years. That's just literally crazy. George Kennan, chief of the task force A panel, argued for an alternative of containment and offering lower costs and less risk of war.

54:51 Eisenhower took Kennan's point. The president jumped up and said he wished to summarize. Rollback, Ike said, would strain American alliances and represent a departure from our traditional concepts of war and peace. I'm sorry, but covert operations did that already. You can hear the justification. We don't want the Soviet Union going away. What are we going to use as a boogeyman? He chose to restrict military spending.

55:26 And option B was continuing previous policies. Few have noticed that Eisenhower did not select a pure strategy, containment. Kennan's option A, he mixed with elements of Task Force C, in particular, covert action. That this was the decision is clear from the record of the NSC meeting on July 30th, 1953.

55:54 where participants discussing solarium results explicitly raised the possibility for actions in Guatemala, Iran, and Albania. Alan Dulles noted that he had already sent a CIA paper on Albania to the Psychological Strategy Board. Dulles also asked the National Security Council to make new policy decisions for his action he was planning in Guatemala.

56:26 Only in the case of Albania did President Eisenhower inject a cautionary note, quote, because of the question of who gets it and who gets hurt, unquote. Both the Guatemala and Iran covert actions were carried out. What an interesting meeting that is. The meeting was supposed to be about Germany and the potential opening to engage with the Soviet Union.

56:58 And the Soviet Union's archives suggest that that was the perfect opportunity to do that. So what do we talk about? We don't talk about addressing the Soviet Union. We talk about overthrowing Iran and Guatemala using the Soviet Union as the boogeyman. Just wanted to make that clear. Okay. Crazy, crazy, crazy. All right. What you got, Bridget? I just, you know.

57:34 It is more relevant than ever, you know, especially once you understand the strategy of tension to watch what's going on today. And I think this book highlights it beautifully, ties it all back in with what's going on now. They really hate losing their boogeyman. And that's why, to your point, the...

58:03 Iran is such a big deal because Iran has served as the boogeyman in the Middle East for a very long time. And there's a lot of people that rely on Iran being there as the boogeyman. Exactly. Yeah, because they can accuse it of funding all of the shit that they're actually funding. And I'm not saying Iran's not funding some of it, but they're funding it with the trade that the Europeans are doing with them and have done with them over...

58:32 The decades since 1979. I mean, we supplied Iran with missiles after 1979 on at least two different occasions that we know about. That doesn't mean that we didn't do it more than that. We just have documentation. We did it at least twice. So if you're telling me that they're the god-awful-est country in the whole wide world, why the hell are you selling them missiles? And sending pallets of cash.

59:02 And I just, again, you know, the patterns in history are just proving what's going on today. You know, and the fact that they're weaponizing, or supposedly, I should caveat with that, weaponizing the Kurds when up until now, weren't the Kurds a boogeyman?

59:25 No. So let's talk about that for a second. I find this one of the most interesting conversations out there right now. So almost immediately, there were talking points issued that the CIA was arting the Kurds. That actually did not happen. And the number two guy in the Kurdish quasi-government structure came out and said that,

59:55 Not only is that not happening, it will not happen because the Kurds, who has been used repeatedly by the CIA with promises that never have been fulfilled, are not getting involved, according to this guy. And I follow a lot of them because you guys know I spent six months around the entire Kurdish government.

1:00:22 or leaders, I guess we'd say, because it's not an official government, the Kurdish leaders in northern Iraq for six months in 1991. I talked personally to several of them because I was the aide to Major General Jay Garner, who was Task Force Bravo's commander in the northern sector.

1:00:42 So we had to have dinner parties and receptions and all of these different VIP. Every time some VIP came in and there were coming in on several of them a week, as I was dual-hatted as a protocol officer. So I had to go to all of these events, which totally pissed them off because I was the only female at most of them.

1:01:06 But sometimes we were visited by Red Cross officials. And so sometimes there would be another female at some of these dinners, but generally not. And so it was kind of a novelty. So a lot of them just wanted to kind of chit chat about stuff.

1:01:28 They have been used by this, and I didn't know this at the time. I was a lieutenant, you know, with big eyes just looking around at all the crap that was going on. But they've been used by the CIA repeatedly and promised a whole bunch of different things. You guys remember when we were talking about Turkey and how a lot of the current borders.

1:01:54 landed Diyarbakir and several of the Turkish cities in the southern part of Turkey, which were predominantly Kurdish, there in Turkey. And it was another one of those strategy of tension scenarios where they intentionally drew those borders so that you can use these minority people.

1:02:22 in your own domestic strategy of tension. So the Turkish government with their stay behind gray wolf units, and they have a few others by different names, but they had a whole slew of them. Actually, they had the most at one point of any NATO country as far as stay behind terrorists. And Turkey would dress up like Kurdish people,

1:02:52 They would attack their own citizens in the South and then use that false flag to attack and remove Kurdish people out of their homes and create destabilization in any area that they wanted to destabilize. They didn't just keep these operations in the South, though. They would conduct something like that, kill a whole bunch of Kurdish people as a result and their own.

1:03:22 non-Kurdish people to then commit an atrocity in one of their major cities, again, like retribution from a Kurd that they would dress up like, because none of those people were actual Kurdish people, and persecute by monitoring and all of that other stuff, blocking supplies, blah, blah, blah.

1:03:52 The Iraqi government did the exact same thing to the Kurdish people. The Iranian government, under our control, was doing the exact same thing to the Kurdish people that got trapped in these artificial boundaries post-World War II. So as a population, the Kurdish people have been treated like shit since World War II. And the thought...

1:04:18 after however many times they've been stabbed in the back by the CIA, that they would run across the border or even the Kurds in Iran would rise up in support of the U.S. And he made it very clear in the post he made most recently that any participation by the Kurdish population would require a signed contract backed up by the full force of the U.S. military that they're getting their own.

1:04:48 um land they're going to have an official recognition of as a country and absent that you guys can kill each other all you want of course i'm paraphrasing but that's basically what he said thank you and then well said yeah any other comments on this friday afternoon i threw war hamster a mic but he may not be able to speak today okay

1:05:25 Yeah, I've already stolen enough of his time. Although, of course, he's always welcome. He has such a vast knowledge. Oh, there he is. Howdy. Hi. I just got here, so I missed the entire gist of the conversation, but I wanted to plug in for the commentary if I could. Sure. I heard you talking about the Kurds. Yes. So there's absolutely zero chance that the Kurds are getting a homeland because Turkey will never allow it.

1:06:02 The Turks are adamant that the Kurds will never, ever have a homeland. The Iranians agreed with that, and so did the Iraqis. The Kurds are straddling four different borders. We've abandoned them time after time after time. Of course, half of them are full-blown flag-carrying communists, or to some degree. Of course, we know how often that's exaggerated. Yeah, I don't know that to be true at all. None of the people that I met.

1:06:31 They all wanted independence and trade. So I don't know of any of them. I've met, as a matter of fact, when I was just in Washington a couple of months ago, I met one of the independent media people. That's not in their vocabulary. So I know that's been thrown around. That's not my personal experience. Yeah, I'm relaying, and I get where your doubt comes from on that, because we do use that label a little bit too easily, especially in academic circles.

1:07:00 I did have a good friend back in San Diego who was active duty back when I knew him, and I asked him about the Kurdish situation. He goes, well, are all Americans the same? No, of course not. He goes, well, all Kurds aren't the same. You're going to have various different degrees. But what they are is they're very tribal people, and it's hierarchical. It's paternalistic and everything like that. And he goes, you're definitely susceptible to Marxists just as they'd be susceptible to any other ideology. At the end of the day, I don't think there's any people on the planet.

1:07:29 And the last 50 years have been screwed any more than the Kurds. I don't think so either. And you're right in the fact that they're very tribal. But let me just tell you, I was in many of their cities. We traveled every single day by Black Hawk helicopter across the entire northern sector of Iraq. I was expecting.

1:07:54 When you talk about them being tribal in nature, that's what I was expecting. I was expecting to visit. So in the Adana area of Turkey, where Incirlik Air Force Base is, a friend of mine was stationed there and she had several Turkish friends in the area. So I visited a few of the Turkish families through my friend.

1:08:22 They lived more in like what I would consider a hut as opposed to a house. When I got to Northern Iraq, Dahuk, Sirsink, Al-Ahmadiyah, all of those cities, those were very nice, well-off cities. The houses.

1:08:46 were Mediterranean-style homes, those concrete homes with the gates that are in front of them, kind of like you see in the Dominican Republic and those types of, that's what it all looked like. They had high-rise buildings. I was shocked because I was expecting, based on what I assumed of the conversations about how the Kurdish people lived,

1:09:14 That's not at all what I saw. I was literally shocked. The hotel that was being built in, not Zaku, Dahuk, that entire city after the war started, because what the Saddam Hussein was notorious for doing is anytime he wanted to deflect attention away from his

1:09:44 shit, he would attack the Kurtz. And they had gassed that city that's up on the mountain and killed all the people there. That city hall building, we actually walked through on one of the VIP visits and the pictures of the women and children laying in the streets after the gas attack will be something that I will never forget. I mean, it's akin to the killing fields as far as a vivid memory.

1:10:13 just the pictures of it. So they were very afraid when Desert Storm kicked off. So they all fled to Southern Turkey, which based on what I had said and what Warhamster just echoed, because the Turkish hates the Kurds, UCOM was tasked to immediately go to Northern Iraq.

1:10:39 reestablish security in Northern Iraq so we could get the Kurdish people back out of Turkey because they were not safe there. And that was the mission of Operation Provide Comfort was to get those people back out of the mountains in Southern Turkey and back into their homes. And in the meantime, after they fled, Saddam Hussein had booby-trapped a bunch of their homes. So when they first started coming back,

1:11:07 And they would purposely booby trap little kids' rooms. So we had field hospitals that when one of the bombs would go off and someone was injured, they'd be medevaced into one of our field hospitals. The whole thing was horrific.

1:11:24 But I saw firsthand how all of this stuff goes down. So we immediately built tent cities, got them all back out of Turkey, settled in the tent cities. And then our EOD guys went into all of these well-established cities and went through house by house with bomb-sniffing dogs to make sure that they were safe for the people to return.

1:11:51 Watching this entire thing drove all of those points home to me. So the administration of their government that they have, because they do have a quasi-independent government, it is very traditional from the patriarch standpoint, but that's expected in that part of the world.

1:12:22 They did not wear traditional Muslim clothing or anything else. They dressed like Western people. And I found the guys, the men, the leaders to be, many of them were very wealthy. They traveled around the world. I told you guys that story about the one coming up to me just before I left.

1:12:49 He traveled all over. His favorite thing to do was gamble. And he says, yeah, I make the circuit every year. I go to Bora Bora. I go to Las Vegas. He says, maybe I could come pick you up and you could come with me. And I'm looking at him, I'm going, I'm not going anywhere with you. But they're very cultural and not what I expected at all.

1:13:17 Not having any firsthand experience with Kurdish people, I can't really say too much about it. I'm curious as to how you get an area that does not have a whole lot of industry and you get these multimillionaires able to go globetrotting. And the first thing that comes to my mind, I got to think it's sort of institutional corruption even in their quasi-government. But you expect that. That happens everywhere in the world. It doesn't make them better or worse than anyone else.

1:13:44 And to say that there's obviously trade, and I don't know because I didn't ask any of them where they got their money. But again, I'm talking about that was not the general population. The guys that came to meet with, so they had kind of their own.

1:14:08 um sectors of responsibility in northern iraq and there were four guys that basically was the leadership one of the four that had his own territory of responsibility think of them like as states so and think of these guys as the governors of those four states um one of them was definitely the leader of the other three um you can tell by the deference that was paid to him um and

1:14:37 I had to do the seating charts. That guy was always sat next to General Garner. So he was the leader. I have a picture of him that I took with him at the last dinner when I was already notified that I was returning. And so those people apparently was well off, but

1:15:05 Again, I'm telling you, these cities, what I was going to tell you is the story about this hotel in DeHook. So this was going to be an affiliate of like a Hilton or a Holiday Inn or something like that. It was unfinished because the construction stopped as soon as Desert Storm started. But it was about, well, it was five stories tall.

1:15:32 it probably had about a hundred rooms on each floor. So again, you're talking about regular cities. I don't know what they did because the only people I was ever exposed to other than I met some of the families returning to the different cities on some of our trips, but those are the only people that I talked to.

1:15:54 at any length. So I don't know what they did for industry or whatever, but they have huge big silos at many of the locations that we visited. So obviously agriculture is a big deal up there. So when we were flying over that territory, you could see those types of things. But it was, again, it looked way more Western.

1:16:23 as far as the cities than I ever imagined. Renee, go ahead. Hey, good afternoon. A couple things, please. This chapter, isn't it, aren't there a lot of origins of the modern torture, what would you say, techniques, tactics?

1:16:57 from the theater in the Indochina colonies from the French. I kind of recall a lot of the French when looking into the OAS commanders and paratroopers, et cetera, who were over there in that theater. When they came back to France, they joined the OAS.

1:17:27 And they were part of that whole Algeria and whatnot. And then when that ended, they actually kind of had to flee to Spain and Argentina. So to answer your question, this book does not get into that type of thing. This is more of a higher level. You are absolutely correct. That we got in the Phoenix program where he went into the history.

1:17:56 a little bit, Doug Ballantyne. We've gotten it in several articles that we've read over the course of the last three years, but that is an accurate statement. It's just not going to be reflected in this book. Okay, cool. And then a second thing, if you don't mind. Well done, Warhamster. I'm sorry, Renee, you were fading in and out. Okay, how about now? You were talking about...

1:18:31 Yeah, that's better. You had my ears perking, so I want to have you repeat it. It sounds like you were saying something nice. Go ahead, Renee. Yeah, I just heard. We can't hear you, Renee. I think she was just saying that she really enjoyed our show today. I enjoyed it, too. It was a fun one. It was definitely. Yeah. They're always fun. They're always fun. But, you know, it's always fun when I'm basically I'm trying to, you know, paint a story step by step.

1:19:06 And then the colonel swoops in and jumps three steps ahead and gets the conclusion before I'm even done giving all the clues. Well, you don't share with me what you're going to say. I'm just talking off the top of my head. Go ahead, Renee. Honey, you keep fading in and out. We can't hear but like every fifth word. Yeah, I don't know if you have bad reception, but we're only getting like every fifth word.

1:19:54 Bridget, can you drop her down and try to bring her back up? I don't know. That damn sabotage shit again. Let me take her down and bring her back up. I got her. Okay. Well, I took her. Okay. Hopefully she can get back. She always adds good stuff. You want to try it again, Renee? Yes. How about now? Yes, that's much better. Okay, great. I was just going to say thank you. And since we're hamsters here, I kind of had a...

1:20:42 A question. Yesterday's conversation after the chapter, we discussed, I believe it was SR71 brought up Yale and China. And I did some further digging and I found the skull and bones connection to Mao and Yale and China. And it was actually brought up by Anthony Sutton. Warhamster, are you familiar with Ruben Holden, the Bonesman?

1:21:14 I don't think that's one that I've featured. The name doesn't jump off the page to me, so enlighten me. But it's not surprising to me that you found the connection between China and China. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, he is a, he's, I don't know, I seem to have gone in a hole again. Can you hear me? No, we can hear you. Hello? Okay. We can hear you. He seems to be a cousin.

1:21:44 Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yep. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. He seems to be a cousin. He was a Bonesman, I think, class of 1940. He was a cousin, first cousin by marriage to Bush. He married a walker. And he was over in Yale in China.

1:22:11 Around this time of this book and the chapter we read yesterday, he apparently has written his own book, but I couldn't get access to it anywhere. I tried. I couldn't get access to it, but I just wanted to share that connection. Information and the missionaries and the universities and.

1:22:37 Peking University, but there's a lot of stuff. But maybe someday, I know we've got a lot on our plate of amazing information that you all are about to do, but maybe we hit China someday and that whole... This similar pattern there is like they did with Thy Will Be Done and the Rockefellers in...

1:23:07 Latin America and it's connected to the missionaries that they send and they put them in the schools and that's how they kind of infiltrate via linguists and espionage yada yada yada but this Ruben Holden Bonesman who was over there seems to be

1:23:29 He wasn't, I can't find any connections to OSS or whatever, but it seems he could have been an operative or a liaison of some sort. I'd love to address that. Go ahead. So I don't have him on any of my skull and bones lists, but let me see if I can just check one more place. So it's Reuben Holden IV and his brother that were skull and bones. Reuben Holden III.

1:24:03 has a wiki page, but you'll be hard-pressed to find too much about the two bonesmen. I'll get on that. Make sure I have the name. It's Ruben Holden. What's fascinating to me is you said he's got a relationship to the Bushes and Walkers. Now, I've talked quite a bit about how the fact is that the Rockefeller Stooges are the ones who opened up China in 1971. That's going to be a big part of our series. We're going to go deep into that.

1:24:35 What's interesting about what Renee just said is it was the Bush family that were the gatekeepers to China in the early 70s. They determined which businesses got to go and get most favored status in China and make all those early connections. This is basically your Yankees and Cowboys compromise and that wing of, I guess, international and corporate diplomacy.

1:25:02 This was your chamber of commerce, picking winners and losers. This is the entire movement, the beginning of the movement to offshore American jobs. So this guy Holden, who, like I said, I didn't feature him. I hadn't seen him. Or for whatever reason, skipped over him. I'll take a look at some other sources. But it is absolutely no surprise that there's a Bush connection, and I think it's fascinating, and I'm dying to dig into that. Okay, so here I just found that it said Ruben Holden.

1:25:33 The dad, it makes it look like, it doesn't give us which one this is. But it says that he was the secretary of Yale, second only to the president in power on the campus, was a director at Connecticut Savings Bank. It also says that he was,

1:26:04 married to the daughter of a Yale trustee. He was in the lawn club and the graduate club. But you can't find basically anything on a regular search engine. But if you use Yandex, you can find a little bit more. I'm going to use some of my other sources and I will get back to you both on that one because this is pretty darn interesting. Yeah. Especially if he's class of 1940 because that's McGeorge Bundy. And yeah.

1:26:36 I will DM you some links as well, Warhamster, that I found that may be able to help you. Yeah, feel free. And I'll cross-reference it and see if I can come up with anything more. But thank you for bringing that to my attention. Yeah, that's very interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Anybody else got anything? Nope? All right. Well, you guys have a nice weekend. And sometime this weekend, I'm going to...

1:27:12 hopefully finish up the U2 and figure out how to download them so I can load them so everybody can see them videos. So I'll be on the phone with Bridget burning up our telephone time trying to figure out how to do that. And I'm always available. Using the stupid new Rumble Studio thing. I might have to get my daughter over to help me with that. But anyway, we'll figure it out.

1:27:40 And let's just look ahead real quick at next week. We've got just on Monday is just the normal space. Tuesday, we have the space. And then at six o'clock, we'll do a book club with the Badlands group. On Wednesday, I will have that interview with Drea.

1:28:11 the former soprano actress. It's going to be recorded and I will let you guys know when it's available for everybody to see. And then of course we have the Alpha Warrior Show and then Friday is the War Hamster at noon and then our normal spaces on Friday. So that's it. Should be just a regular normal week.

1:28:40 All right. Like I said, I appreciate everybody being here and have a nice weekend, everybody. Take care.

Entities here

CIA43 Vietnam25 France25 Kurdish people20 Dwight D. Eisenhower20 West Germany18 United States18 China15 Iran14 Philippines14 Edward Lansdale14 Soviet Union14 Hukbalahap10 Air America9 West Berlin9 Chiang Kai-shek7 Allen Dulles7 Reuben Holden IV7 Ngo Dinh Diem7 1953 East German uprising6 Burma6 Ramon Magsaysay5 Richard M. Bissell Jr.5 Dien Bien Phu5 Turkey5 South Vietnam5 Washington, D.C.4 Thailand4 Guatemala4 Frank Wisner4 Desmond Fitzgerald4 William Harvey4 Yale University4 National Security Council4 Bush family4 Ho Chi Minh4 Psychological Strategy Board4 Skull and Bones4 George Atterer3 George F. Kennan3

Claims made here

Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed William J. Donovan documented ▶ 1:06

“wartime chief of OSS and Eisenhower's appointment in 1953 to ambassador of Thailand. Why Thailand? Because that's where they're going to run all the drugs out of. Oversaw the attempt to clean up the L…”

Li Mi carried_out_attack Burma documented ▶ 1:06

Air America carried_out_attack Operation Repat documented ▶ 1:36

“Lai Me returned to Taiwan in October of 52, but his soldiers stayed in Burma. A four-power conference in Bangkok among Burma, Thailand, Nationalist China, and the U.S. agreed to remove them. This led …”

Chiang Kai-shek member_of China documented ▶ 2:02

“of Chinese nationalists, basically their KMT army, who crossed from northern Burma to Thailand and were then flown back to Taiwan. An initial group of 50 nationalist soldiers entered Thailand on Novem…”

CIA financed_via Operation Repat documented ▶ 3:06

“cost the U.S. government at least $128 per person via the CIA proprietary because they were billing us. Something of a farce, Repat included evacuees who were Shan and Laihu tribesmen, not Chinese. An…”

China trafficked Burma host_asserted ▶ 4:09

“no longer under CIA control. Yeah, don't believe that part. The nationalists maintain that these later grew to as many as 12,000 and continued their drug trafficking, which is why the author wants you…”

Dwight D. Eisenhower supplied_arms_to China documented ▶ 4:39

“had had orders to bar the straits to forces of both sides. Eisenhower changed that, blocking only Beijing, which freed Chiang Kai-shek to attack anywhere he desired. In early 1953, the U.S. gave the N…”

William J. Polk supplied_arms_to Chiang Kai-shek host_asserted ▶ 5:11

“tripling shankai shek's amphibious force the importance of this um and i don't remember if he covers it i don't think he does um is william polly's role in all of this william polly had the curtis air…”

Chiang Kai-shek carried_out_attack China documented ▶ 5:41

“In connection with the jet deal, the nationalists agreed not to use the American weapons, particularly aircraft, on offensive missions without first consulting with the U.S. But Chiang Kai-shek sought…”

Edward Lansdale recruited Ramon Magsaysay documented ▶ 13:53

“Masese also benefited from these splits internally and used them to their advantage, strategy of tension. Lansdale began promoting Masese using all the resources of the Wisner operation, eventually ma…”

CIA funded Ramon Magsaysay documented ▶ 13:53

CIA installed Gabe Kaplan documented ▶ 14:23

“to the standard military protection measures. He used massive sound amplifiers on airplanes to saturate Huck areas with pre-recorded messages and simply noise that capitalized on peasants' superstitio…”

George Atterer spied_on Philippines documented ▶ 14:55

“to create a movement of influence in voting, beginning in the Philippines congressional elections in 1951. Oh, the CIA interfering in elections? What? Lansdale engineered a supposed grassroots movemen…”

Desmond Fitzgerald headed CIA documented ▶ 16:27

“led by Desmond Fitzgerald, who had desperately wanted a field assignment. The mission purported to be a theater command for actions against Beijing. The barons at headquarters disliked having anyone c…”

Desmond Fitzgerald succeeded Tracy Barnes documented ▶ 16:56

“They wanted to go to the highest level at headquarters, which meant the Far East Division Chief. The China mission became huge. At the same time, back in D.C., the Psychological Strategy Board was in …”

CIA supplied_arms_to France documented ▶ 20:30

“What seemed to some as new American initiatives in the Cold War inevitably appeared to others as colonialism, especially their support for the French trying to recolonize Indochina. The CIA first sent…”

France supplied_arms_to Vietnam documented ▶ 23:07

“The French ran the partisan units behind enemy lines in the north. Again, stay behind units. In the south, there were two religious movements or sects, one called the Kaldai and the other one Hohe. Th…”

CIA funded France documented ▶ 23:36

“by French intelligence. Now, this is the same SDECE that ran the Operation Gladio OAS elements of France. There is evidence that the French, in briefing a senior CIA officer about their activities in …”

SDECE front_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 23:36

Roger Trinquier spied_on Vietnam documented ▶ 25:42

“Titled Detachment P, the Army Attaché Unit, another U.S. covert office appeared in Hanoi to furnish combat intelligence for these stay-behind units. Major Roger Tranquil, the French commander, visited…”

Air America carried_out_attack Dien Bien Phu documented ▶ 27:46

“brought everything they needed down to their own refrigerators and beer. The first civil air transport flight in Indochina was a supply lift to a camp, not in Vietnam, in Laos. You know where all the …”

James McGovern carried_out_attack Dien Bien Phu documented ▶ 30:22

“at 59. Pilots recalled flak over Dinbin Fu as being heavy, heavier than anything that they had experienced in World War II. Cusack himself was flying a mission alongside James McGovern on May 6, 1954,…”

Graves Erskine founded Aviation International Limited documented ▶ 32:59

“Operation Coordination Board, the staff of General Graves Erskine, Assistant to the SecDef for Special Operations, prepared a plan. The concept provided for an international volunteer air group, almos…”

CIA recruited John Anderton documented ▶ 38:10

“being taken over by the CIA. In June of 1954, an agency special unit, 10 men under Colonel Lansdale arrived undercover as Saigon military mission. They worked independently of John Anderton's Saigon s…”

CIA recruited Edward Lansdale documented ▶ 38:10

Edward Lansdale appointed Lucien Conein documented ▶ 38:40

“Lansdale's mission specific for operations had that much time to fuck it all up. Lucien Koenig, who we see later on in, he's a big drug dealer, weapons guy, and was in close personal contact with the …”

CIA recruited Lucien Conein documented ▶ 38:40

CIA recruited Edward Lansdale documented ▶ 38:40

CIA recruited Ngo Dinh Diem documented ▶ 39:42

“There, Lansdale established a close friendship with Diem. Then, President Eisenhower sent a new U.S. envoy to Saigon in late 1954, General J. Lawton Collins. He received a briefing from Frank Wisner, …”

Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Lawton Collins documented ▶ 39:42

CIA recruited Pierre Cabal documented ▶ 39:42

CIA recruited Richard M. Bissell Jr. documented ▶ 39:42

CIA recruited Frank Wisner documented ▶ 39:42

CIA recruited Lawton Collins documented ▶ 39:42

CIA recruited Allen Dulles documented ▶ 40:15

“the South to resist the North. They had no intentions of a unifying election. Later, Alan Dulles secretly visited Saigon and was chauffeured around by Lansdell, reminding him of the excitement of wart…”

Edward Lansdale funded Ngo Dinh Diem documented ▶ 40:45

“Instead, Lansdale funneled the money to Diem, who took over and made that his first power base. The tab amounted to tens of thousands of dollars a month and steadily increased. Several additional CIA …”

CIA funded Ngo Dinh Diem documented ▶ 40:45

Edward Lansdale funded Kurdish people documented ▶ 41:41

“stood with him every step of the way, basically directing the effort. Lansdale would arrange for the different sects to basically pay for anybody that didn't want to work with the CIA to be cued, hand…”

Allen Dulles removed_from_power Lawton Collins documented ▶ 42:15

“Eisenhower's envoy and friend, General Collins, finally decided to end U.S. support, at which point Lansdell used a CIA back channel to alert his bosses. In Washington, Allen and John Foster Dulles co…”

CIA recruited William Harvey documented ▶ 49:27

“And they had no clue. Beria was an opportunity to seek peace. At the CIA's Berlin base, led by William Harvey, surprise intelligence officers scrambled for any information they could get and obtained …”

CIA recruited Henry Hexer documented ▶ 49:56

“as did many in both East and West Berlin. The CIA lost track of Soviet forces in East Germany. Only Harvey's deputy, Henry Hexer, himself German-born, understood the demonstration's threat to communis…”

Henry Hexer proposed CIA documented ▶ 49:56

CIA recruited Tom Polger documented ▶ 50:23

“David Murphy, a subordinate at the Berlin base, denies that the field submitted any request to approve CIA intervention, citing the recollection of Tom Polger and Gordon Seward, both senior officers i…”

CIA recruited David Murphy documented ▶ 50:23

William Harvey proposed CIA documented ▶ 50:51

“not Hexer, sent a cable recommending a U.S. show of force, not arms to East Berliners. Alerting American forces in Germany might have put the Russians on warning. The cable reached CIA headquarters af…”

Frank Wisner removed_from_power Henry Hexer documented ▶ 51:19

“In this fast-moving situation, Washington had little possibility of acting in time. Wisner rejected Bill Harvey's suggestion. A paper prepared for the Psychological Strategy Board on June 17th noted t…”

Frank Wisner removed_from_power William Harvey documented ▶ 51:19

Dwight D. Eisenhower approved Operation Solarium documented ▶ 53:14

“Among the long-term actions, CIA had primary responsibility for a program to implement a Volunteer Freedom Corps initiative. Training and equipping, you guessed it, stay-behind units to sustain warfar…”

CIA trained Volunteer Freedom Corps documented ▶ 53:14

CIA recruited Kuomintang documented ▶ 53:45

“Three task force assembled, each to argue for a particular line of action. The rollback approach was subsumed in Solarium's Alternative C, designed to increase efforts to disturb and weaken the Soviet…”

CIA recruited Volunteer Freedom Corps documented ▶ 53:45

CIA recruited Chiang Kai-shek documented ▶ 53:45

Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed George F. Kennan documented ▶ 54:51

“Eisenhower took Kennan's point. The president jumped up and said he wished to summarize. Rollback, Ike said, would strain American alliances and represent a departure from our traditional concepts of …”

CIA carried_out_attack Guatemala documented ▶ 56:26

“Only in the case of Albania did President Eisenhower inject a cautionary note, quote, because of the question of who gets it and who gets hurt, unquote. Both the Guatemala and Iran covert actions were…”

CIA carried_out_attack Iran documented ▶ 56:26

CIA supplied_arms_to Iran documented ▶ 58:32

“The decades since 1979. I mean, we supplied Iran with missiles after 1979 on at least two different occasions that we know about. That doesn't mean that we didn't do it more than that. We just have do…”

CIA recruited Kurdish people host_asserted ▶ 1:01:28

“They have been used by this, and I didn't know this at the time. I was a lieutenant, you know, with big eyes just looking around at all the crap that was going on. But they've been used by the CIA rep…”

CIA recruited Grey Wolves host_asserted ▶ 1:02:22

“in your own domestic strategy of tension. So the Turkish government with their stay behind gray wolf units, and they have a few others by different names, but they had a whole slew of them. Actually, …”

Turkey carried_out_attack Kurdish people host_asserted ▶ 1:02:52

“They would attack their own citizens in the South and then use that false flag to attack and remove Kurdish people out of their homes and create destabilization in any area that they wanted to destabi…”

Iran carried_out_attack Kurdish people host_asserted ▶ 1:03:52

“The Iraqi government did the exact same thing to the Kurdish people. The Iranian government, under our control, was doing the exact same thing to the Kurdish people that got trapped in these artificia…”

Saddam Hussein carried_out_attack Kurdish people documented ▶ 1:09:14

“That's not at all what I saw. I was literally shocked. The hotel that was being built in, not Zaku, Dahuk, that entire city after the war started, because what the Saddam Hussein was notorious for doi…”

United States Central Command carried_out_attack Iran documented ▶ 1:10:13

“just the pictures of it. So they were very afraid when Desert Storm kicked off. So they all fled to Southern Turkey, which based on what I had said and what Warhamster just echoed, because the Turkish…”

Operation Provide Comfort carried_out_attack Iran documented ▶ 1:10:39

“reestablish security in Northern Iraq so we could get the Kurdish people back out of Turkey because they were not safe there. And that was the mission of Operation Provide Comfort was to get those peo…”

Reuben Holden IV member_of Bush family caller_asserted ▶ 1:21:44

“Yes, I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yep. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, great. He seems to be a cousin. He was a Bonesman, I think, class of 1940. He was a cousin, first cousin by marr…”

Reuben Holden IV member_of Walton family caller_asserted ▶ 1:21:44

Reuben Holden IV member_of Skull and Bones caller_asserted ▶ 1:21:44

Reuben Holden IV member_of Skull and Bones host_asserted ▶ 1:23:29

“He wasn't, I can't find any connections to OSS or whatever, but it seems he could have been an operative or a liaison of some sort. I'd love to address that. Go ahead. So I don't have him on any of my…”

Reuben Holden IV spied_on China speculative ▶ 1:23:29

Rockefeller funded China host_asserted ▶ 1:24:03

“has a wiki page, but you'll be hard-pressed to find too much about the two bonesmen. I'll get on that. Make sure I have the name. It's Ruben Holden. What's fascinating to me is you said he's got a rel…”

Bush family funded China host_asserted ▶ 1:24:35

“What's interesting about what Renee just said is it was the Bush family that were the gatekeepers to China in the early 70s. They determined which businesses got to go and get most favored status in C…”

Reuben Holden IV headed Yale University caller_asserted ▶ 1:25:33

“The dad, it makes it look like, it doesn't give us which one this is. But it says that he was the secretary of Yale, second only to the president in power on the campus, was a director at Connecticut …”