Don Fulsom

April 30, 2012

Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon

A “Top Secret” CIA report accuses then Vice President Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

by Don Fulsom

One of Richard Nixon’s vice presidential secrets surfaced only in recent years.  And it’s a doozy: a “Top Secret” CIA report accuses Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This CIA document—completed in 1983—is known as “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951- January 1961.”  (The CIA declassified only Volume III of the five-volume history in 1998.  It was discovered in the National Archives by Villanova professor David Barrett in 2005, and first posted on his university’s Web site. This volume is now posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive, which is suing the CIA for the release of the other volumes.)

Of course, it would not be the first nor the last time that Nixon—one of the stickiest fingered politicians in modern times—would be caught doling out favors to fat cats. 

Yet this declassified document exposes something even seamier than Nixon’s run-of-the-mill pay-for-play illegalities. Seamier, for example, than soliciting congressional campaign funds from L.A.’s top gangster; or keeping a secret senatorial slush fund rounded up by rich businessmen; or widespread presidential financial corruption – including the sale of ambassadorships; soliciting bribes from billionaires; or a go-easy attitude toward the ultra-generous Mafia godfathers and their thuggish Teamster allies.

These fresh revelations involve war and peace, life and death.  They lie buried among 295 pages of a CIA critique of the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles.  Written by a CIA historian, this document provides rich new details on Richard Nixon’s central role in plotting the invasion of a foreign country, Cuba, and the attempted assassination of its leader, Fidel Castro. It faults Nixon for taking risky anti-Castro actions, in large part, to satisfy a well-connected Castro-loathing U.S. plutocrat, William Pawley.

Historian David Kaiser, in his book The Road to Dallas, notes that Pawley worked closely with the CIA “on building anti-Castro organizations both inside and outside of Cuba.  He was, in effect, an informal (CIA) case officer.”  As such, it is almost certain that Pawley was aware of the recommendation, in early January of 1960, by CIA heavyweight J. C. King for Castro’s “elimination.”

 Aug. 15, 2011

James “Whitey” Bulger

Accused in the mid-1990s of nearly a score of gangland murders, James “Whitey” Bulger, the reputed boss of Boston’s Irish Mafia, fled town and evaded the FBI for an astonishing 16 years.

by Don Fulsom

Nick-named for the color of his hair, Bulger had gained a reputation as a guy who would kill anyone he thought might betray him. Indeed, he was the inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s murder-happy mobster in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 big screen crime thriller The Departed.

One of the grisliest murders attributed to Bulger was the strangling of his top lieutenant’s girlfriend, apparently to keep her from snitching about the gang’s operations.  Bulger is accused of chopping off all of the dead woman’s fingers and pulling out all of her teeth so she couldn’t be identified.

Were it not for his own girlfriend, it turns out, Whitey might still be a Top Ten fugitive with a $2 million bounty (the most ever for a domestic fugitive) on his head.

When arrested in June 2011, the 81-year-old Bulger and his 60-year-old companion, Catherine Greig, were living in Santa Monica, Calif. They had been hiding in plain sight—about four miles from an FBI office—for fifteen years.

May 30, 2011 Updated Dec. 10, 2012

Dominique Strauss-Kahn

A questionable history of sexual indiscretions caught up with the man considered to be the next president of France, but not enough to bring him down.

(Editor’s Note:  On August 23, 2011 all criminal charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn were dismissed by the New York Supreme Court at the request of the Manhattan Attorney General’s Office.

On December 10, 2012 New York Supreme Court Justice Douglas E. McKeon announced in court in the Bronx that the civil suit filed against Strauss-Kahn by former hotel housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo had been settled in his chambers 10 minutes earlier. Ms. Diallo said after the hearing, “I thank everyone all over the world who supported me and everyone at the court. God bless you.” The terms of the settlement were kept confidential by agreement of both parties. Attorneys for Strauss-Kahn adamantly denied a report in a French newspaper that the settlement was for $6 million.)

by Don Fulsom

“I deny in the strongest possible terms the allegations which I now face; I am confident that the truth will come out and I will be exonerated. In the meantime, I cannot accept that the Fund—and you dear colleagues—should in any way have to share my own personal nightmare. So, I had to go.”

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in an e-mail to employees of the Washington, D.C.-based International Monetary Fund after tendering his resignation as its $500,000-a-year managing director.

Few Americans had ever heard of Dominique Strauss-Kahn when news broke that New York detectives had snatched him from a soon-to-depart Paris-bound jetliner and charged him with attempted rape. His arrest came with lightning speed on Saturday afternoon. May 14, 2011.

A powerful French politician and a top global economist, Strauss-Kahn maintained such a low U.S. profile that—even weeks after his arrest rocked the French political landscape—many people in the States still best knew him as “the French IMF Guy.”

This “guy,” it was later realized, had been the likely next president of France. Polls there had predicted Strauss-Kahn would have defeated President Nicolas Sarkozy by a 61-to-39-percent margin.

April 11, 2011

Frank Sturgis

Three years after he was arrested as a Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis told Senate investigators he was a CIA agent who would do anything for the agency—even kill. To flaunt his expertise, Sturgis volunteered a grisly “How to Get Away with Murder” tutorial for the committee. He bragged that his reputation as a hit man led the FBI to grill him as a prime suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   

 by Don Fulsom

Best-known as one of President Richard Nixon’s five inept Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis would undoubtedly prefer to be recalled as a swashbuckling CIA assassination specialist who would gladly bump off anyone for the agency.  In fact, in secret 1975 testimony before a Senate committee, Sturgis proudly described himself a “whore” who “would do anything” for the CIA.

Sturgis’s boast lies buried in his lengthy, closed-door testimony to a post-Watergate Senate investigation of alleged CIA and FBI crimes and abuses.  A bi-partisan committee chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, conducted the investigation.  Sturgis’s testimony was declassified—but mostly ignored—in the 1990s.

March 6, 2011

Between March of 1969 and August of 1973, President Nixon illegally bombed Cambodia, causing over three-million tons of bombs to rain downs on the neutral country and the deaths of an estimated half-million Cambodian citizens.     

by Don Fulsom

In mid-March 1969, President Richard Nixon launched “Operation Breakfast,” the first assault in the first stage of the Henry Kissinger-inspired covert carpet-bombing of defenseless and neutral Cambodia.

From the start of this surreptitious warfare, records were falsified to hide the attacks.  They were reported as strikes against Communist forces within Vietnam.

In the first attack, scores of Guam-based B-52 Stratofortresses—operating in waves—struck enemy ammunition dumps, fuel depots and troop concentrations three miles inside the Cambodian border.  Initial reports indicated that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces there had been disabled.

Jan. 10 ,2011

Daniel Ellsberg (left)

The WikiLeaks disclosures of top-secret government documents recall the time in 1971 when the intrepid Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” to The New York Times to hasten the end of the Vietnam War.   

by Don Fulsom

In the summer of 1971, The New York Times published the "Pentagon Papers,” a top-secret Defense Department study critical of U.S. war efforts in Vietnam.  The huge report had been methodically stolen and duplicated by Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst who had turned against the war.  He leaked copies to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

Newly declassified tapes show President Richard Nixon first realized the seriousness of the leak during a June 13th noontime telephone call from National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger’s top deputy, Alexander Haig:

Haig:  This goddamn New York Times expose [is] of the most highly classified documents in the war.

Nixon:  Oh, that!  I see!  I didn’t read the story.  You mean that was leaked out of the Pentagon?

Haig:  This is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude of anything I’ve ever seen.

By the time Nixon talked to Kissinger himself a short time later, the President was climbing the walls over the leak:

Nixon:  That Henry, that to me is just unconscionable, this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.

       Kissinger: Exactly, Mr. President.

Nixon: Doesn’t it involve secure information, a lot of other things? What kind of—what kind of people would do such things?

       Kissinger: It has the most—it has the highest classification, Mr. President.

       Nixon: Yeah. Yeah.

Kissinger: It’s treasonable! There’s no question it’s actionable. I’m absolutely certain that this violates all sorts of security laws.

Next on the tape, the President gives his chief foreign policy advisor permission to call Attorney General John Mitchell to determine the options for prosecuting the newspaper.