by James Corbett | The Corbett Report | Nov 22, 2023

Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report.

I’m your host, as always, James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, coming to you from the increasingly chilly climes of western Japan here on November 22, 2023, with Episode 454 of The Corbett Report podcast, “JFK: From Mongoose to Gladio.”

Now, as you can divine from that title, if not from the particular date that this podcast is being released—November 22^nd—yes, this podcast is about the JFK assassination. And I’m sure everyone in the audience—in The Corbett Report audience, anyway—probably does know that November 22, 2023, marks the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963.

But today also marks another anniversary—the 33rd anniversary of something that took place on November 22, 1990. And if you don’t know the significance of that particular date, you are about to learn it, along with many, many other facts besides.

In fact, there is a lot of information to go through in this episode, so I hope you will get your pen and paper and notebook handy, because there is an awful lot of information that you are about to get data-dumped.

And really, this represents the presentation that I made to the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, Texas, this past weekend.

Of course, I was here in Japan presenting virtually, but this is the presentation that I made to the JFK Lancer Conference.

If you’re unfamiliar with the JFK Lancer Conference, of course I will throw in the link to JFK Lancer so that you can find out more about it and the conference that is held there in Dallas every year around the time of the anniversary—this past weekend’s conference—and the speakers who were presenting there, some very illustrious JFK researchers that I am honored to be presenting alongside, and how you can get access to the virtual panels and things that were conducted, anyway.

So, all of that information will be in today’s episode at corbettreport.com/jfkgladio, where you will also find a complete hyperlinked transcript of this entire presentation, with all the links to all the documents and books and videos and everything that I mention in this.

As I say, there’s a lot of information to go through, so I hope you’re ready for it.

All that being said, for people who don’t know, I will only further add that, if you are interested, I presented at JFK Lancer three years ago on the topic of “The JFK Fed Myth.” That is in The Corbett Report podcast archives, so I will also include the link back to that, if you have not seen my presentation on that particular topic.

But today, let’s talk about “JFK: From Mongoose to Gladio.”

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Greetings and welcome to all of you attending the JFK Lancer Conference.

I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, and I welcome you here today from the Land of the Rising Sun.

That’s right, I am here in Japan, where it is already tomorrow and—spoiler alert—I can let you know that, yes, the sun does indeed rise tomorrow. Prepare accordingly.

But all silliness aside, I’d like to thank the organizers of this JFK Lancer Conference for giving me this chance to talk to you today here on November 22^nd of 2023 on “JFK: From Mongoose to Gladio.”

Now, as you are all too well aware, on November 22, 1963, the President of the United States of America was assassinated in broad daylight in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas.

But, as you may or may not be aware, on November 22, 1990, the European Parliament passed its “Resolution on the Gladio Affair,” in which they acknowledged the startling and then-very-fresh revelation that took place earlier that year of a clandestine network of NATO-run “stay-behind armies” that had been operating off the books and completely secretly in Europe for the previous five decades.

Specifically, that resolution acknowledged that “these organizations operated and continue to operate completely outside the law, since they are not subject to any parliamentary control” and that the secret armies have “at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources” that “jeopardize the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating.”

The resolution then goes on to “condemn the clandestine creation of manipulative and operational networks” and “protested vigorously at the assumption by certain U.S. military personnel at SHAPE and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operation network.”

Now, as I say, you may or may not be aware of that particular resolution.

You may or may not be familiar with the history of Operation Gladio, or, more broadly, the stay-behind armies that were being run by NATO throughout Europe for, well, at any rate, documentably for the latter half of the 20th century.

But once you do become familiar with that operation and with the clandestine networks that populated those stay-behind armies, at first glance you may think that, barring the coincidence of date—namely, November 22nd, 1963, and November 22nd, 1990—there’s really nothing to connect these two seemingly disparate events.

But I will argue today that, well, there may be more of a connection than appears at first glance, at any rate. And in order to make that argument, I will start in the most unusual place—in the annals of Tinseltown—for some Hollywood predictive programming.

President Jordan Lyman: And there are the wagering activities of yours, General. Particularly a betting pool on the Preakness.

 

Gen. James Mattoon Scott: Oh, come now, Mr. President.

 

Lyman: Perhaps more aptly classified: your personal and private code. It covers your plan for the military overthrow of the United States government.

 

Scott: I presume, Mr. President, you’re prepared to back up that charge?

 

Lyman: I am prepared to brand you for what you are, General. A strutting egoist with a Napoleonic power complex. And an out-and-out traitor.

 

SOURCE: Seven Days in May (1964)

Now that, for those not in the know, is Seven Days in May, the 1964 John Frankenheimer adaptation of a 1962 best-selling novel by Fletcher Nabel and Charles W. Bailey II, which posits a near-future crisis in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States plot to seize power and control of the federal government in a coup d’état against the fictional president of that near-future universe who is trying to sign a nuclear treaty with the Soviets.

And oh, by the way, they use a military alert as cover for their plot.

Now, of course, I am not suggesting that movies or books or popular entertainment have any connection whatsoever or in any way portend events that may be about to take place—like, say, when the Lone Gunmen spin-off series from the X-Files depicted a group of political/military insiders plotting to take control of a commercial airliner and slam it into the World Trade Center in order to gin up wars in the Middle East for the benefit of the military-industrial complex—as if that had anything whatsoever to do with the events that took place five months later. I mean, phew, you’d have to be a conspiraloon to suggest anything of that sort, wouldn’t you!?

I mean, the idea that a 9/11 inside job could be portrayed on national TV just months before the events of 9/11/2001 . . . Pfft! Who’s connecting those dots? Certainly not me.

But I am certainly suggesting that Seven Days in May was not a prediction of a military coup in the offing in the JFK White House, but a warning, at any rate, of things to come in the ongoing power struggle that was taking place in the corridors of power there in Washington, D.C., and which a Washington columnist of many years—someone like Fletcher Nabel—would know something about.

And, in fact, as we now know, one of the biggest champions of this book—this bestseller, Seven Days in May—was JFK himself.

That’s right. As I say, we now know that he was sent an advance copy of the book by Fletcher Nabel and was exhorted by friends to read it, and, upon doing so, he found it to be quite interesting, for reasons that should become obvious. So he was personally excited about the project and he personally encouraged Frankenheimer and Kirk Douglas and others to get on board with the project—as reported, for example, by Thurston Clark in JFK’s Last Hundred Days, where he writes:

[W]hat is certain is that by the fall of 1962 the president [JFK] not only believed a coup was possible, but had repeatedly discussed its likelihood. That fall, Harper and Row published Seven Days in May, a thriller by Fletcher Nabel and Charles V. [sic] Bailey II about a coup against the U.S. president instigated by his decision to sign a controversial nuclear arms pact with the Soviet Union. Nabel got the idea from an interview with Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay shortly after The Bay of Pigs. . . .

More on which later.

But, as Thurston Clark reports later on in that book:

The actor Kirk Douglas was serving himself in a buffet dinner line in the White House in January 1963 when Kennedy came up behind him and asked, “Do you intend to make a movie out of Seven Days in May?” Douglass confirmed that he was producing and starring in a film version of the book being directed by John Frankenheimer. Kennedy said, “Good!” and as their meals cooled spent twenty minutes explaining why Nabel’s book would make a great movie.

 

Pierre Salinger told Frankenheimer that the president wanted the film made “as a warning to the Republic.” Schlesinger thought he hoped “it would raise the consciousness about the problems involved if the generals got out of control,” and might also serve “as a warning to the generals.” After the Defense Department denied Frankenheimer permission to film at the Pentagon, Kennedy took a long weekend in Hyannis Port so the director could shoot crowd scenes outside the White House.

So, more than a tangential connection. And, lest it needs to be spelled out, JFK’s interest in this book was not based on any literary merits it may or may not have had, but was precisely because it could serve as that “warning to the Republic” about the very real events that were taking place behind the scenes in Washington, D.C., in those critical years of the early 1960s.

And, to be clear, you did not need to be a James Bond supersleuth with top secret clearance—or a Beltway insider even—to know and to pick up on the very ominous signs of a potential military coup d’état that were evident there in the early 1960s.

For example, what real-world events could people possibly point to—events the average citizen in the United States would undoubtedly have seen or witnessed, to make them think along those lines?

Well, how about the very preface of the Seven Days in May book? What did they open with? Of course, a quotation from President Eisenhower’s infamous farewell speech, in which he not only coined the term “military-industrial complex” but warned against its acquisition of power.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

 

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development, yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

 

SOURCE: President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961)

“. . . we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought. . . .”

Hmm . . . I wonder what he meant by that?

Well, anyway, given the escalating series of military/intelligence “surprises” that were awaiting Kennedy as he entered the Oval Office, from his literal first surprise in the door of “Hey, Mr. President, you know that whole missile gap thing that you were campaigning on? Well, it turns out, yeah, that was totally made-up BS propaganda” to, of course, as Richard Nixon infamously called it, “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” aka Operation Zapata (Zapata Oil? CIA front company? George H. W. Bush? Pfff, more coincidences) aka that CIA-sponsored-and-crafted operation to use a bunch of Cuban counterrevolutionary guerrillas to try to overthrow Castro in Cuba, about  which CIA director Dulles told JFK, “Don’t worry, we’ve got this whole thing covered from soup to nuts. You can just sit back and relax!”

Oops, that didn’t go so well.

Because, as was determined and disclosed in General Maxwell Taylor’s after-action report, actually Dulles and the CIA knew that the Soviets had advance warning of the plot and thus knew that it was going to fail, but they kind of didn’t bother to inform you about all of those niggly little details.

So, it’s perhaps no surprise that the idea of a military coup in the United States was so much a part of the 1960s zeitgeist that it was not only being picked up on by Beltway insiders and writers like Neville and Bailey but by the average Joe—including, of course, some of JFK’s friends, who did pressure him on this particular topic.

For example, as we can read in Paul “Red” Fay’s memoirs about his time as JFK’s confidante, The Pleasure of His Company, he relates the story of how a friend of the Kennedys was asking JFK about the possibility of a Seven Days in May scenario happening in the United States, and JFK reportedly replied:

It’s possible. It could happen in this country, but the conditions would have to be just right. If, for example, the country had a young President, and he had a Bay of Pigs, there would be a certain uneasiness. Maybe the military would do a little criticizing behind his back, but this would be written off as the usual military dissatisfaction with civilian control. Then if there were another Bay of Pigs, the reaction of the country would be, “Is he too young and inexperienced?” The military would almost feel that it was their patriotic obligation to stand ready to preserve the integrity of the nation, and only God knows just what segment of democracy that would be defending if they overthrew the elected establishment.

 

As if steeling himself for the final challenge, he continued, “Then, if there were a third Bay of Pigs, it could happen.”

 

Pausing long enough for all of us to assess the significance of his comment, he concluded with an old Navy phrase: “But it won’t happen on my watch.”

How reassuring. Alright, so then, if the idea of a military coup of the, say, Joint Chiefs of Staff or high-ranking military officials in the United States was not the LSD-induced fever dream of some wild-eyed conspiraloons and was being picked up on by the general public, then what specifically was swirling in the zeitgeist? What were people seeing in the daily news and other outlets that would get them to pick up on this idea and amplify it and even send it back to JFK himself?

Well, as it turns out, there was no shortage of candidates for a real-life General Scott who might have been the basis for Nebel and Bailey’s novel, let alone some of the rumors that were swirling around at the time.

So let’s take a look at some of these candidates, because there were several of them that contributed to this growing palpable sense that the military may, in fact, stage some form of coup d’état and may have the means and opportunity to do so.

For example, we have Edwin Walker, who was a US Army Major General, a decorated combat vet of WWII and Korea and a rabid Kennedy-hater who was targeted for assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald, according to the Warren Commission. I know this is absolute bread-and-butter, first-grade kind of stuff for the hardcore, dedicated JFK researchers in the Lancer crowd, but I wonder how many people in the general public know anything about that whole Lee Harvey Oswald, Edwin Walker assassination attempt diversion?

I think, once again, probably the gap between people who have researched this their whole lives and people who have kind of heard something about it once or twice would be quite vast.

But anyway, yes, that Edwin Walker.

To be fair, he wasn’t just a Kennedy-hater, he was an every-president-since-FDR-hater. As a card-carrying member of the Birch Society, he was opposed to racial integration. He did lead the federal troops in the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, but only after President Eisenhower refused to accept his resignation on the matter. And he was later officially admonished by the Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Europe, General Bruce C. Clark, for his attempts to indoctrinate troops in political matters, which became something of a scandal and which ultimately led to his resignation in 1961, when he refused to accept a reassignment to Hawaii. Rather than serve any longer for the Kennedy administration, he became the only US general in the 20th century to resign.

That was obviously a political statement, which he then immediately parlayed into a political career—his post-military career, essentially—as he became something of a political activist, making fiery speeches of the McCarthyite variety . . . and becoming an honorary Dallasite?

It is my pleasure and privilege, General Walker, to present to you at this time this certificate endowing you with all of the emoluments and the privileges of honorary citizenship in this great city of Dallas.

 

SOURCE: December 13, 1961 – Mayor Earle Cabell declaring General Edwin A. Walker an honorary Dallasite

Ah, that’s right. Edwin Walker was made an honorary citizen of Dallas in December of 1961 by then-Mayor Earl Cabell, brother of the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Charles P.

Cabell, who was forced to resign in 1962 along with Dulles—Earl Cabell himself having been a CIA agent since 1956. Well, those might be some interesting tidbits to file away in the information bank when it comes to Walker and his associations.

But what else did General Walker get up to? Oh, that’s right, he helped to incite the Battle of Oxford aka the Ole Miss Riots of 1962 that JFK, for one, referred to as a Bay of Pigs—or compared to the Bay of Pigs, anyway. As we now know from the now-released Kennedy tapes, he said, “I haven’t had such an interesting time since the Bay of Pigs” in those recordings. I wonder if that counts as Bay of Pigs number two in JFK’s postulated “three Bay of Pigs” countdown to a military coup d’état.

What else did he talk about during those frantic hours of the Ole Miss riots, when Bobby and various aides were scurrying around giving him news about what was happening?

Oh, that’s right. Of course. As we can find from the Kennedy tapes, one speaker in the tape says:

Speaker ?: Have you read Seven Days in May?

 

JFK: Yeah.

 

Speaker ?: Damned good book.

 

Speaker ?: I thought that . . .

 

Sorensen: Very interesting.

 

Speaker ?: Yeah.

 

Sorensen: I read it straight through. It’s interesting.

 

Speaker ?: [Why didn’t you like it? Or did he say “I didn’t like it”?]

 

Speaker ?: Unrealistic?

 

[Words unintelligible.]

 

[Laughter.]

 

Sorensen: And you thought it was, uh, too far-fetched then.

 

O’Brien: No, I thought this sort of awful amateur’s dialogue.

 

Speaker ?: You know, it was a thirty-five . . .

 

Speaker ?: No, it’s not great, uh, writing . . .

 

JFK: I mean, it’s not any good [at that point?]. The only character that came out at all was the general. The president was awfully vague. But I, well, thought the general was a pretty good character.

And then they go back immediately to talking about General Walker.

So, you don’t have to go very far out on a limb to connect some of these people and events.

What else was Edwin Walker famous or infamous for? Oh, that’s right, as was eventually found out, remember those “Wanted For Treason” handbills that were being passed around Dallas on the day of November 22, 1963?

Well, who was behind that? Oh, right, Edwin Walker was one of the people responsible for that handbill. I can’t find any direct admission from Nebel or Bailey that Edwin Walker was necessarily considered as a type for the General Scott character in Seven Days in May. But one of the President’s aides in the book Seven Days in May does specifically cite General Walker as an example of a general who “got out of line in 1961” and was promptly “relieved” by Kennedy.

So, there is that connection. And, in another extremely interesting coincidence, there was another piece of paper that was slated to be released on November 22, 1963, that bore some eerie resemblance to Walker’s handbill.

As David Talbot reports in his book Brothers:

The day Kennedy was assassinated, Paramount Pictures, the distributor of Seven Days in May, planned to run an ad for the film, using a quote from one of its fictional military conspirators: “Impeach him, hell. There are better ways of getting rid of him.” The studio yanked the ad at the last minute, fearing it was too provocative, “narrowly avoiding an embarrassing coincidence on the very day the president was shot,” Variety later reported.

Indeed. Well, I don’t believe, as far as I know, there has ever been a reproduction of that ad or any image of that ad has ever surfaced. But one can certainly imagine it might have looked eerily similar to that “Wanted For Treason” handbill that was in the hands of certain Dallasites even as JFK was being shot at.

So, a lot of very interesting connections and parallels there.

But let’s move on to the next character in this rogues gallery of military madmen—specifically Curtis LeMay.

Of course, like Walker, as you may or may not know, LeMay was also a decorated general—this time a US Air Force general. He has become known to history as a man of psychopathic bloodlust—exemplified, perhaps, in his exuberance for Operation Meetinghouse, which is better known as the Tokyo Firebombing, in which, according to the US Bureau of Naval Personnel, “probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.” And perhaps the relevant Curtis LeMay quip on the incident is, “If, as a result of the bombing, the war has been shortened by even one day, then the attack will have served its purpose.”

You know, come to think of it, I think I have a clip of him saying that.

Leslie Stahl: We have heard that a half-a-million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

 

Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price . . . we think the price is worth it.

 

SOURCE: Watch: Madeleine Albright Saying Iraqi Kids’ Deaths ‘Worth It’ Resurfaces

Sorry, my mistake there. I tend to get those two confused.

Anyway, at any rate, LeMay has been suggested by various film critics over the years and book reviewers and others, as a potential source of inspiration for the fictional General Scott in Seven Days in May. But perhaps he was more accurately lampooned in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove as the cigar-chomping, foul-mouthed, straight-talking, fluoride-toothed, truth-telling General Jack D. Ripper. Whatever the case, LeMay certainly did hate the Kennedy administration—”the vindictiveness of those people,” “how ruthless they were.” They “expected to be stepped on like the cockroaches they were” when LBJ came into power—at least according to LeMay’s very colorful oral history that he provided the LBJ Library a few years later.

And, at any rate, at the bottom line, we can say—according to Nebel, anyway—that LeMay certainly was an inspiration for the fictional coup of Seven Days in May. Nebel was a Look magazine columnist at the time, writing about Washington for many years. He was interviewing LeMay when LeMay kept going off record to talk about the “cowardice” of JFK and the Kennedy administration at the Bay of Pigs. That definitely caught Nebel and Bailey’s interest. The more they probed around and started asking questions, the more they found there were high-ranking military and intelligence establishment figures who definitely had an axe to grind with Kennedy, and who, in Nebel’s own account, led him to thinking of the great “What if?”

And, bada bing bada boom, we have a story about a military coup in the United States. So, definitely LeMay is in that mix of sources for inspiration of this idea.

Moving right along in our cavalcade of characters we come to Edward Lansdale. Edward Geary Lansdale was a general in the US Air Force who was appointed as the chief of operations of Operation Mongoose in November of 1961.

Specifically, I’ll direct you to the actual memorandum that was provided to Bobby Kennedy and others in the JFK administration at that time, summarizing the meetings that had been taking place in November 1961 about the Cuba project—the ongoing Cuba project.

This was the formalization of what became Operation Mongoose—specifically, directive #1 of this memo: “We will use our available assets to go ahead with the discussed project in order to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime.”

And #2: “This program will be conducted under the general guidance of General Lansdale, acting as Chief of Operations.”

So, you can go on reading that document and the various others associated with Operation Mongoose that have come out over the years. But, long story short, yes, he was tasked with overthrowing the regime, which is vague enough language that it may or may not encompass assassination.

At any rate, we do know that assassination was very much a subject of interest of Lansdale’s Mongoose compatriot/CIA psychopath Bill Harvey  and his ZR/Rifle, which I’m sure JFK researchers in the crowd will be very familiar with.

Now, why was Lansdale brought in specifically? Supposedly it is because of his very theatrical style of psychological operations, exemplified in the infamous story of his efforts against the Filipino communist guerrilla fighters, in which he supposedly—and who knows how much of this is PR?—but, at any rate, supposedly, infamously, managed to convince some of those guerrilla fighters that they were being haunted and hunted by aswangs—which are essentially vampire-like creatures, blood-sucking demons from Filipino mythology—by capturing some of those fighters, killing them, draining them of their blood, and leaving them to be found by their compatriots.

Lovely stuff. Anyway, that was apparently what attracted JFK and RFK and others in the administration to him—JFK being quite a James Bond devotee and interested in those types of very theatrical ideas.

So Lansdale was brought in to provide—and boy, did he provide—many ideas for tactical subversion techniques and sabotage and other such things that could be done, various fireworks of various sorts that could be waged in an ongoing counterrevolution against Castro.

Now, the question is: Did Bobby, or JFK himself, actually approve assassination specifically on the record, in black and white, as part of these operations?

Well, that depends who you ask.

If you ask Lansdale, he will tell you, “Yes, Bobby Kennedy did approve that.”

As per the Mary Ferrell Foundation:

Whether plots to assassinate Castro were part of this operation [Operation Mongoose], and whether Robert Kennedy or President Kennedy condoned them, has remained a point of controversy to this day. Lansdale himself said that Robert Kennedy was aware of assassination plotting. One memo from Lansdale to RFK in early 1962, uncovered by the Church Committee, says that “we might uncork the touchdown play independently of the institutional program we are spurring.”

So, some indications along those lines. At any rate, certainly Cuban meddling, assassination operations, Lansdale—there’s quite a stew brewing there.

But who was in charge of Lansdale? And what were they cooking up? Oh, well, of course, that brings us to the next cretin in this rogues gallery of military psychopaths, Lyman Lemnitzer.

Lyman Lemnitzer: In recent months, it has quite commonly been suggested that the military function of NATO and of Allied Command Europe within NATO is losing some of its urgency. The reason usually ascribed is an alleged softening by the Soviets in their relations with the Atlantic nations. The argument most frequently cited to support this view is the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

 

SOURCE: CAN 023 NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER LEMNITZER SPEAKS AT NATO CONFERENCE

Now that, of course, was the very real US General Lyman Lemnitzer, who was appointed as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Eisenhower in 1960 and served in that position until he was shunted off elsewhere by JFK in late 1962. He was warning about those who would use the excuse of a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets to go soft in the Cold War.

He is not to be confused in any way with the Seven Days in May film’s fictional General Scott, who heads a military coup in order to depose a president that he accuses of going soft with the Soviets in the Cold War by signing a nuclear test ban treaty with those damn Ruskies. No relation at all. Got it? Okay, good.

Anyway, Lemnitzer was an unlikely candidate for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you might say—a devout Lutheran by upbringing and also a Freemason. Lemnitzer was a middling student of no particular skills who left no particular impression on any of his classmates or teachers. He graduated near the bottom of his class from West Point in 1920 and failed to make any waves whatsoever in the military or be noticed by anyone.

I will point even to his fawning biography, which notes that “his first twenty years of service were unremarkable.” Not the first year or two, not the first five, not the first ten—no, the first twenty years of his military service were unremarkable.

So let’s skip over that and jump to World War II, where he was plucked from relative obscurity by Eisenhower, who personally recruited him to plan the Allied landings in North Africa and Sicily in World War II. It was Eisenhower who basically stewarded over Lyman and his career from that point onward, making sure to help him rise through the ranks. And it was thus, then, after “We Like Ike” achieved his “Ike for President” aspirations in 1952, that Lemnitzer’s military career really began to take off.

Suddenly he was having all sorts of successes. He was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Far East Command in 1955; Vice Chief of Staff of the Army in 1957, and finally, as I say, appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff by Eisenhower in 1960. A pretty remarkable rise after twenty years of completely unremarkable service.

But Lemnitzer, too, found that he was not a fan of the Kennedy administration. After having served in the war hero General/President Eisenhower administration, he found that the Kennedys were a little less to his liking.

It didn’t take long for sparks to begin to fly between the two camps—the military camp and the incoming Kennedy administration. So we saw, for example, in July 1961, specifically at a National Security Council meeting that was held on July 20th of 1961, Lemnitzer came in guns blazing, figuratively and literally, proposing a surprise nuclear attack on the Ruskies, which prompted Kennedy to walk out of the meeting in disgust, remarking bitterly to Dean Rusk, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

Well, Lemnitzer, need it be said, was not popular in the Kennedy White House. For example, Special Assistant to the President Arthur Schlesinger told David Talbot in 2007: “He [JFK] thought Lemnitzer was a dope.”

Even Jackie did not hold back her acid tongue to lash out at the boor Lemnitzer: “We all thought well of him until he made the mistake of coming into the White House one Saturday morning in a sport jacket.”

How dare he?

But after the Bay of Pigs shenanigans and the unhinged nuclear warmongering, it was ultimately a Cuban invasion proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March 1962 that sealed Lemnitzer’s fate with the Kennedy Oval Office.

Specifically, tasked by Operation Mongoose Chief of Operations Ed Lansdale to furnish “pretexts which they consider would provide justification for US military intervention in Cuba,” the Joint Chiefs of Staff, led by Lemnitzer, tabled what has been referred to as “the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government“—which, of course, is a pretty tall order to fulfill, but I think this one does it.

This was Operation Northwoods. And if you’re in my regular audience, I’m sure you have heard about and hopefully read this document by now.

But if not, well, the document, which is a preliminary submission plan intended to be harmonized with inputs from different agencies in a time-phased plan of action, really does have to be read to be believed.

So of course it will be provided in the hyperlinked transcript for this presentation that will be posted to my website at corbettreport.com/jfkgladio in the coming days. If you are watching this at the JFK Lancer Conference, stay tuned for that.

But, anyway, if you do go and read this document, you will find that here, in these pages, in black and white, the top-ranking officials of the US military, presided over by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer, put their pen to paper and signed on the bottom line on blatantly, undeniably illegal and treasonous acts in order to justify a military invasion of Cuba in the minds of the American public. Such acts including:

·          staging a false flag attack on the US base in Guantanamo, to be blamed on the Cubans;

·          staging a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on the Cubans;

·          staging a false flag “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington”;

·          “sinking a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”;

·          staging the assassination of Cubans living in the United States;

·          faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner by swapping out a real civilian aircraft with an exact duplicate drone, then pretending that the drone came under attack by Cuban MiGs, broadcasting a “MAY DAY” message from this drone and then blowing it up—blaming it, obviously, on Castro.

Absolute madness—and psychopathic madness, at that.

There is no record of precisely how Defense Secretary McNamara, to whom the Operation Northwoods memo is addressed, actually responded to the memo, but the plan wasn’t pursued, for whatever that is worth.

What we do know is that Lemnitzer was hauled into an Oval Office meeting with JFK three days after Northwoods was forwarded to McNamara. That meeting did not go to Lemnitzer’s liking, as Talbot reports in Brothers:

On March 16th, three days after his meeting with McNamara, Lemnitzer was summoned by President Kennedy to the Oval Office for a discussion of Cuba strategy that was also attended by McCone, Bundy, Lansdale, and Taylor. At one point the irrepressible Lansdale began holding forth, as usual, on the improving conditions for popular revolt inside Cuba, adding that once the glorious anti-Castro revolution began, “we must be ready to intervene with U.S. forces, if necessary.” This brought an immediate reaction from Kennedy, ever alert after the Bay of Pigs, about being sandbagged into a military response in Cuba. The group was not proposing that he authorize U.S. military intervention, was it? “No,” Taylor and the others immediately rushed to assure him.

But Lemnitzer could not restrain himself. He jumped in at that moment to run Operation Northwoods up the flagpole. The general spared the president the plan’s more gruesome brainstorms, such as blowing up people on the streets of Miami and the nation’s capital and blaming it on Cuba. But he informed Kennedy that the Joint Chiefs “had plans for creating plausible pretexts to use force [against Cuba], with the pretexts either attacks on U.S. aircraft or a Cuban action in Latin America for which we would retaliate.”

Kennedy was not amused. He fixed Lemnitzer with a hard look and “said bluntly that we were not discussing the use of U.S.

military force,” according to Lansdale’s notes on the meeting. The president icily added that Lemnitzer might find he did not have enough divisions to fight in Cuba if the Soviets responded to his Caribbean gambit by going to war in Berlin or elsewhere.

But some people just don’t get the message, so, continuing with Talbot:

Despite the president’s cold reaction, the Joint Chiefs chairman persisted in his war campaign. About a month after the White House meeting, Lemnitzer convened his fellow service chiefs in “the tank,” as the JCS conference room was called. Under his direction, they hammered out a stern memo to McNamara, insisting “that the Cuban problem be solved in the near future.” That would never be accomplished by waiting around for Ed Lansdale’s fairy-tale popular uprising, the memo made clear. There was only one way of getting the job done: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff recommend that a national policy of early military intervention in Cuba be adopted by the United States.”

Lemnitzer was wearing out Kennedy and McNamara’s patience. After a National Security Council meeting in June, the president took the general aside and told him he wanted to send him to Europe to become NATO’s new supreme allied commander. Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer as the nation’s top military man with the more amenable Max Taylor. He would have one less warmonger to harass him about Cuba.

Alright, I suggest people who are unfamiliar with this history really familiarize themselves with the documents that we have about this.

It is truly remarkable—especially that memo that was sent to McNamara (obviously to JFK via McNamara, really, for JFK’s attention), saying, “We have to solve this problem and we have to use a military solution.” It was about as close to outright military subordination as you can get within an administration. And JFK knew exactly what was on the table—if for no other reason than because he’s read Seven Days in May and knows how the story ends in the book versus how it might end in real life.

Anyway, if JFK thought he was going to take care of his military problems by telling Lemnitzer, “Oh, you know, we’re shuffling you off, don’t worry,” well, in October 1962 he got another surprise. It was called the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Somehow, miraculously, Kennedy was able to thread the needle, not just with the Soviets but with the military, which was on his back about this problem—with JCS Chief still being Lemnitzer at that time—by using his brother Bobby as a secret backdoor channel to Soviet ambassador  Anatoly Dobrynin.

And as Khrushchev Remembered in his autobiography, quoting Bobby Kennedy:

Even though the President himself is very much against starting a war over Cuba, an irreversible chain of events could occur against his will. That is why the President is appealing directly to Chairman Khrushchev for his help in liquidating this conflict. If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power. The American army could get out of control.

Again, it might be a question of which source you’re believing, because other people didn’t back Khrushchev up on that. But at any rate, that’s the way Khrushchev remembered it.

But once through that craziness, with not only his reputation intact, but his body and the bodies of everyone else on the planet still intact, amazingly, JFK had to dispose of Lemnitzer. And this is the way Richard Cottrell puts it in his book, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe:

JFK emerged from the crisis [the Cuban missile crisis] with his prestige vastly enhanced everywhere, that is, except Pentagonia. Kennedy’s refusal to snuff out Castro and worse, permitting the United States to be humbled in the world arena by the Soviet Union, united them once again under Lemnitzer’s authority. The danger to the head of the state returned with renewed intensity. Barely had the heat of the immediate emergency cooled than Kennedy struck with an iron fist. He decided on a clever “constructive dismissal” of his troublesome commander. Lemnitzer would be denied his due right of a second term of office as chief of staff, effectively cashiered, and given his marching orders right away. A humiliating demotion would be disguised, somewhat at any rate, by secondment to the top NATO command in France. If it was a signal that Kennedy intended to stop the rot in the military, then his decision to install his court favourite, General Maxwell Taylor, in Lemnitzer’s stead, could only be seen as another calculated insult. It was a Solomonic judgement in which Kennedy excelled, like his calm resolution of the Missile Crisis. Sending Lemnitzer into quarantine on the other side of the Atlantic, in charge of America’s frontline with the Russians, his mischievous hands would be too preoccupied to plot trouble on the home front. Deprived of Lemnitzer’s presence in Washington, trouble in the ranks would gutter out. Kennedy miscalculated badly on both counts.

Why was it a miscalculation? Well, for many reasons, but also because Gladio, that’s why.

And what was Operation Gladio? Good question.

First of all, FACT CHECK, to satisfy the fact checkers in the crowd. What most people commonly refer to as Operation Gladio—well, they’re misnaming that. Because, in fact, Operation Gladio refers specifically to the Italian branch of a much broader program of a NATO clandestine network of secret stay-behind armies that were put in place in NATO member states in Europe and in Turkey and even some neutral states—non-NATO members—with (or usually without) the knowledge of those nations’ security forces or political leaders, supposedly to commit sabotage and subversion in the event of a Soviet invasion. But, in reality, it was a bunch of fascists and literal “ex”-Nazis and others who staged false flag terror attacks to blame on left-wing governments, assisted in and/or organized and/or helped in various ways with political assassinations and other assorted nastiness.

And there is a lot more to say on this front. If you want to hear that, you would best turn to NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser, who I had the privilege of interviewing very recently on The Corbett Report about his work, including his work on Operation Gladio.

Daniele Ganser: I wrote this book, NATO’s Secret Armies, and the subtitle is Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. That’s my PhD. I put four years of my life into this. And I really spent a lot of time working on this. And what I can say is that people don’t know what Operation Gladio is. I mean, ask your average friend, “How about Operation Gladio? What do you think about it?” They go, “Operation Gladio?” and they basically say they know the film Gladiator. And they go, “Oh, yeah, that’s the film, which is really cool. It’s 2,000 years ago, where the gladio is this short sword—that’s a gladio.” And that’s also the reason why it was called Operation Gladio.

 

But in the historical context, the main person there is Giulio Andreotti, who was the Italian prime minister. And he blew the whistle in the year 1990. So that’s just at the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. And in the year 1990 there was a bit of a transition period in Europe. Many things changed. Germany reunited. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989. It was a period where we had secrets from the Cold War coming to the surface. Very interesting. At the same time, you know, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and then we had Operation Desert Storm and all that.

 

But Giulio Andreotti was an insider in Italy. He was prime minister and he really knew Italian politics inside out. And he said, “There’s a secret army in this country.” And people were like, “Really? Are you kidding?” Obviously, there cannot be a secret army in a country. If you have an army in a country, the leader of the army, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the generals have to be known. The defense minister has to be known. The size of the army has to be known. The budget of the army has to be known.

 

And Giulio Andreotti said, “Well, you know, this army is secret. Parliament didn’t know about it. Judges didn’t know about it. Journalists didn’t know about it. Professors at universities didn’t know about it. And people on the street certainly didn’t know about it. So there was a huge scandal. It was called the scandal of Gladio.”

 

The Belgian defence minister at the time was in Italy. He was talking to Andreotti, and he was going, “Well, that’s typical Italy. You have all these secret structures. I’m so glad we don’t have that.” And then Andreotti said to the Belgian defence minister, “Well, you have a secret army in Belgium as well.” And literally his jaw dropped. And he was going, “What? I am the defence minister. I mean, I should know about it.”

 

So he flew back from Italy to Belgium. His name was Guy Graham. And he talked to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, “I have something to ask you. Do we have a secret army here?” And then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said “Yes.”

 

And then the Belgian defence minister said, “Why am I not in the loop? Why am I not being informed?” And the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “Well, you know, defence ministers come and go. We professional military people are here to stay.”

 

That was a huge scandal, because at that point you could really say that defence ministers in some countries were not involved and not informed. In Switzerland, which is not a NATO country, we had Kaspar Villiger, who was the defence minister.

 

Now Villiger was not aware that there was a secret army in Switzerland with the code name P26. And when the scandal broke, he said, “I didn’t know about it.” So, it was not only that people on the street or journalists or people in Parliament didn’t know about it. Some people on the level of defence minister had no clue.

 

And when I looked at the data in more detail, I found out that these secret armies had been set up by the CIA and the MI6.

 

William Colby at the time in the ’70s admitted that these secret armies existed, and then it was forgotten again. Giulio Andreotti then confirmed, “Yes, these secret armies existed.” The overall name is called Stay Behind. The idea is that if there is a Soviet invasion in Western Europe, then these secret armies would become active in the sense of a guerrilla network. They would use explosives and guns and small guerrilla tactics to blow up supply lines of enemies who would then occupy Western Europe.

 

NATO had a meeting in 1990, because it was very embarrassing for NATO, because Andreotti said, “NATO is coordinating this.” And the Supreme Allied Commander Europe then said, “OK, well, let’s have a meeting.” Manfred Wörner was the Secretary-General of NATO at the time, and he said, “This is explosive. Let’s see that the media doesn’t dig deep.”

 

So one day they said, “Yes, we had a secret army.” And on the second day, they had another spokesman coming forward in Brussels at NATO headquarters who said, “What we said yesterday is wrong. And furthermore, we cannot comment on Gladio.”

 

Corbett: And I love the little nugget that you have in your book—that they even denied the existence of that previous spokesperson who admitted NATO’s role in Gladio to you, right?

 

Ganser: Yeah, it was a total—I mean, yeah, they messed it up. I mean, it was one of those things where you say, “That’s the way you shouldn’t do it.”

 

But then they had a closed meeting of just NATO ambassadors. We’re still in the year 1990. So that is now exactly 33 years ago. [Yet] so many people don’t know it. It’s just history. These NATO ambassadors came together. And most of these NATO ambassadors didn’t even know, okay? So even on the level of NATO ambassadors, it was top secret. And the problem that we have now with Operation Gladio is, it is known that it existed. We have confirmation from former generals who were in the networks. It is known that it existed not only in Italy, but also in Greece, in Turkey, in Germany.

 

In Germany we had former Nazis who were in the network. That’s also confirmed. We have these secret armies in neutral countries like Sweden and Austria and Switzerland. We shouldn’t, because it was a NATO network. Why have them in neutral countries? And why have former SS people in it in Germany? There’s lots of questions coming to mind. It’s really quite the opposite of what you learn when you study history or international politics.

 

If you study politics, let’s say you’re 20 years old, you go like, okay, democracy, it works like that. You have the executive branch, with the President and Defense Minister and the foreign minister and the boss of the CIA and whatever. But you also have Parliament, the House and the Senate, and they really control what the executive is doing. I mean, they control that. That’s how it’s done. And if something is done against the law, then you have the Supreme Court, who will really say, “Stick to the law.”

 

I mean, that’s what you’re being told when you’re a student. You take notes, and you say, “Oh, okay, the executive is controlled by the legislative branch and the judicative will intervene if there’s a problem.” And then you look at real life, and you find out the legislative branch—parliaments all over Europe—had no idea. They just had no idea. The judicial branch, they never even touched upon the topic. And within the executive branch, you had the level of “need to know”: some were informed, others were not.

 

So I wrote the book from that perspective and said, okay, this is clearly unacceptable. You cannot call yourself a democracy when you don’t even know whether you have a secret army or not. I mean, we’re not talking details. These are armed people.

 

SOURCE: Interview 1843 – Daniele Ganser Exposes The Ruthless Empire

Now, obviously, there is so much more to say about Operation Gladio and what it was and what it achieved. And Ganser does go on to say a lot of that in that interview, so I hope you’ll go and check it out. But more importantly, I hope you will check out the book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe, which really was some groundbreaking original research that was conducted by Ganser and remains a key book on the subject in the English language.

So, in the interest of time, since I am already running out of time in this presentation, I will just say that, long story short, Operation Gladio was all of the Northwoods-style dirty tricks and disgusting deeds rolled into one sprawling, decades-long, attempt to ensure that NATO and its paramilitary minions could direct European democracy—”democracy”—in whichever direction they wished. The greatest dream of General Scott, perhaps. Well, Lemnitzer, at any rate.

And Gladio has been implicated in everything from military coups and assassination attempts against, for example, de Gaulle in France, who got so galled—or de Gaulle’d—that he kicked NATO out of France. And the horrific string of bombings and terror attacks in Italy, known as the Years of Lead, the advent of which just exactly happens to overlap with Lemnitzer’s tenure as Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO, in which he would have undoubtedly had some connection to the goings-on of the Gladio network, although exactly what those connections are remains hidden and covered in layers and reams of official secrecy. But at any rate, Lemnitzer, hmmm, did he just happen to coincide with the advent of the Years of Lead, or was it part of a Northwoods-style plan that had been transplanted over to Europe?

Obviously, much more information and digging needs to be done on that front. Suffice it to say: did JFK solve his problems by shuffling Lemnitzer over to Europe? Well, apparently not.

Okay, so what does this mean in terms of November 22, 1963? That’s the real question we’re addressing today. We can say there was real talk of a military coup d’état during Kennedy’s presidency. And there were multiple high-ranking military officials and, of course, intelligence officials involved in various plots, both overt and covert, to effect  some sort of military coup or some sort of takeover of power from JFK specifically—[from] the Kennedy administration.

And JFK himself was concerned about the possibility of a military coup and did have his own connection to operations like Mongoose and tangentially through Lemnitzer to Gladio. But is there any indication that any of these disparate pieces on the chessboard played an operational role in the events of 11/22/63?

Well, spoiler! For those of you who are waiting on the edge of your seat, I am not going to solve—signed, sealed, delivered, finished—the JFK assassination in this presentation. Sorry to get your hopes up.

But here’s what we do know. We can at the very least trace what has been said about the whereabouts and operational capacities of the various players involved in these plots on the day of November 22, 1963. For example, speaking of Operation Mongoose and Ed Lansdale, where was good old Eddie on the day of November 22, 1963?

Well, there are people who have something to say about that. For example, Colonel Fletcher Prouty—”Mr. X,” of course. His assertion about the three hobos’ infamous pictures was that the hobos were distraction and unimportant in and of themselves. The real money part of that money shot was the man passing them in the opposite direction—the man that he identified, at any rate, as Edward Lansdale.

So when researchers had arrived at that point, one of them came to me one day and said: “Look. Of all the pictures we’ve studied, this little episode of these men being marched right across in front of the school book depository building where Oswald was supposed to have been, and across the street by Dealey Plaza, where the President’s car had just gone, into the sheriff’s office—there’s something wrong about these pictures.”

 

So we looked at them very carefully. And in the very first picture, in addition to the two policemen and the three “tramps,” as they’re called, is another man. And he’s walking in the other direction. But the thing about it is: . . . his side and his back are more or less to the photographer rather than face forward.

 

The “something about it” is: How is it possible that anyone at Dealey Plaza that day . . . And here these men are probably being marched across there five minutes after the President was killed — everybody was running around, people were excited, sirens were blowing — and here’s this man in a business suit just casually walking along. He doesn’t even turn. He’s not looking at anybody, just walking past, and he happens to be standing by these men as they’re being marched along. The least he would be doing is looking at the prisoners or looking at the policemen. Anybody would, especially at that time. This man’s looking at nobody. And I recognized immediately that that man is General Lansdale.

 

Now, Lansdale is a very interesting figure in the Kennedy era. And I know Lansdale. I worked with him off and on from about 1952 to 1963. So he retired. Now this is interesting. He retired from the Air Force on October 31, 1963. Well, of course, the picture could have been a hundred other people, and I could be wrong, but I know him very well.

 

SOURCE: Gen. Ed Lansdale in Dealey Plaza

Well, who can argue with “Mr. X,” right? About “General Y”? Well, at any rate, the Easter egg for people who haven’t seen JFK, if you look carefully at the nameplate of the general who orders “Mr. X” to the South Pole, it’s Major General E . . . D . . . G? . . . something “dale” or something like that. Anyway, it’s Lansdale. And there have been various versions of this proffered by Prouty over the years. I will leave you with his testimony to the ARRB on the matter, if you want to delve into this even further and his identification.

And you could continue exploring that particular photographic rabbit hole and scrying the tea leaves and taking the Rorschach inkblot test of . . . “I think I see the glasses of Lansdale in that photograph” and other such speculations that I’ve read online.

Anyway, is that definitive proof? Hardly, but potentially it might be Lansdale? Anyway, it might be something for further exploration.

Speaking of which, how about some of the other people who are involved in this swirl of military madness? How about LeMay? Our good old friend Curtis LeMay. Was he involved in this somehow? Well, of course, there’s a whole rabbit hole with regards to the whereabouts of General Curtis LeMay on November 22, 1963.

You could, for example, go to JFKFacts.org for their post on “Where was General Curtis LeMay on November 22, 1963?” which talks about his various movements and what we do and don’t know about those movements on that day.

Navy Petty Officer Paul K. O’Connor, a hospital corpsman whose job it was to assist the pathologists at the autopsy, recounted consistently over the years that when he was ordered by the chief pathologist at JFK’s autopsy to tell whoever was smoking in the morgue to put out their cigar, he walked over to the gallery and discovered that the offender was Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay. LeMay contemptuously blew cigar smoke in O’Connor’s face and, of course, refused to extinguish his cigar.

As I say, there’s a lot more to pursue with regards to that story, but there is at least some evidence that has been pointed to that LeMay was indeed there at the autopsy and helping to cover up whatever was covered up with regards to that.

There’s, for example, General Walker. Let’s not forget General Walker, who I know was featured in a discussion, I believe, earlier today at the JFK Lancer Conference. I’m here virtually. I’m not in attendance. So, as I’m recording these words, I have no idea what was discussed about General Walker.

But I will just point people, for example, to the Dick Russell Introduction/Foreword to the H. P. Albarelli, Jr. book Coup in Dallas, talking about the 1963 date book of Jean-Pierre Lafitte, in which Russell notes that that date book includes “the name of Walker,” who “appears more than once, initially concerning the shooting attempt on his life that Oswald was later accused of: April 7 — Walker — Lee and pictures. Planned soon — can he do it? Won’t.” (It’s possible that the word is Wait.) The indication is, someone was setting up Oswald to do this, but he didn’t want to. The shot was fired at Walker on April 10. Later references indicate that General Walker was in fact aware of, if not in on, the plot to kill JFK.”

There’s more to explore in that regard.

How about Lemnitzer, since we’re talking about the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff committing a Seven Days in November-type operation—or at least the possibility of such a thing. I don’t think there is any serious JFK researcher out there who attempts to pin the blame or even really deeply implicate Lyman Lemnitzer in particular in the events of Dealey Plaza in 1963, if for no other reason than that Lemnitzer has a pretty good alibi, being across halfway across the planet at the time. I don’t know about serious JFK researchers . . .

But anyway, speaking of Cottrell’s NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe book on Gladio, he does say something about this. He says:

Of all the juries that have probed the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, official and informal, none have expressly pointed the finger of suspicion at General Lemnitzer. Yet if one man had the motive and desire to see the brothers off the scene, commencing with the president, then it was a soldier in the grip of hatred so powerful that any lengths were acceptable. Northwoods and its offshoots demonstrated that he regarded morality in the defence of American interests as a distraction. Here was a man who would enlist Mafia hoodlums in the service of his objectives. He cheerfully waved volunteers off to certain death in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He planned to unleash terror on innocent Americans going about their everyday business so that he could get his way over Cuba. He contemplated extinction of a quarter of the human race — and very possibly life itself — with magnanimity. He hired Nazi war criminals with equanimity. He was not alone in that, but gave every impression of complete disinterest in their crimes against humanity, which he brushed off like dandruff.

I’m sure you could have your quibbles with various things that are assigned to Lemnitzer in that paragraph and some of the conclusions therein. But at any rate, that is what Cottrell writes on the subject.

So, long story short, the connections between these various plots, overt and covert, and what happened in Dealey Plaza is a seriously understudied subject. Obviously, every bit of this is extremely well-studied, but the combination of these particular elements and how specifically these players come together—there aren’t as many books on that subject specifically.

I will point people in the direction of one of the few analysis articles of this that I am aware of that comes from the Kennedys and King website, which published Rob Couteau’s analysis, NATO’s Secret Armies, Operation Gladio, and JFK, which concludes:

From all this we may conclude that Gladio, far from being a local phenomenon strictly anchored within its respective host nations, was in reality a fluid network with complex international appendages. (As mentioned earlier, this nexus extended even to Latin America.) Whether such poisonous strands reached into Dallas in 1963 through figures like Yves Guérin-Sérac—with his sick dream of a “planetary dimension” of State-sponsored terror—remains a question. And the implications of his OAS colleague, Jean Souètre, shadowing the movements of JFK on that fateful day are intriguing.

So, there is, I think, much more research to be done on these different threads and some of the players involved in this, and specifically how something that I think has not really been talked about a lot with regards to Kennedy, specifically Gladio, and some of those tentacles and Permindex and all of that—how that ties into this.

I guess what I’m saying is that: this presentation is really just the beginning of the broaching of this subject. It is certainly not the definitive conclusion. But, generally speaking, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and do the collective work on this.

I will point people in the direction at the end here of just a very, very select bibliography of some books that I think are helpful in starting and spurring this research.

For example, I’ve cited David Talbot’s Brothers many times already in this presentation, and that’s no coincidence. I know it is not a new book, but I have recently read it for the first time myself and found it to be extremely enlightening with regards to the overall painting of the picture of the internal struggle that the Kennedy brothers were facing in the JFK administration concerning the Cuban operations with the military, the intelligence agencies. It paints a very, very vivid picture of the impending threat from within and all of those various pieces of the puzzle, so I think it is worth your time and attention, if you haven’t read it.

With regards to Gladio in particular, again, of course, I will commend Ganser’s work to your attention: NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio, and Terrorism in Western Europe.

And for what it’s worth, I will put Richard Cottrell’s Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe on this list, with an asterisk. It is a kind of phantasmagoric, strangely put together book. Sometimes within a period of a few paragraphs, it transitions continents and transitions time frames of decades. There is no serious footnoting here. There are just a few notes in the back and a couple of notes scattered throughout the book. Some of the details and easily verifiable facts are flat-out wrong, like saying Seven Days in May was published in 1961 and then saying in a footnote, 1962. Etc., etc. So do not take everything in here as some sort of Bible truth. But there is enough information in here that is intriguing that at the very least could be cookie crumbs for real researchers to follow up on.

I will again point people to what I just mentioned: Rob Couteau’s, as I see it, one of the few short-form analyses of this subject in particular, NATO’s Secret Armies, Operation Gladio, and JFK.

And, of course, I will exhort you, if you haven’t seen it or read it yet, to watch and/or read Seven Days in May. And I will beg to differ with JFK? or one of his aides? or whoever was caught on that particular presidential tape talking about the “awful, amateurish dialogue” in the book. No, I disagree.

And as an Anglo-Irish master from Trinity College, Dublin, I have the professional credentials to say it isn’t awful, amateurish dialogue. Sure, it’s not exactly realistic, but it’s snappy in that pulp fiction-y kind of way that I find entertaining, at any rate. And it is, at the very least, a very, very, very, very interesting book to have been released in 1962.

There’s just one more thing about Seven Days in May that I keep forgetting. What was the name of the President in that story?

President Lyman: I know you think I’m a weak sister, General, but when it comes to my oath of office and defending the Constitution of the United States . . .

 

General Scott: Nobody has to teach me how to salute a flag.

 

President: Somebody has to teach you about the democratic processes that that flag represents.

 

General: Don’t you presume to take on that job, Mr. President. Because, frankly, you’re not qualified. Your course of action in the past year has bordered on criminal negligence. This treaty with the Russians is a violation of any concept of security. You’re not a weak sister, Mr. President. You’re a criminally weak sister. And if you want to talk about your oath of office, I’m here to tell you face to face, President Lyman, that you violated that oath when you stripped this country of its muscles, when you deliberately played upon the fear and fatigue of the people and told them they could remove that fear by the stroke of a pen. And then, when this nation rejected you, lost its faith in you, and began militantly to oppose you, you violated that oath by simply not resigning from office and turning this country over to someone who could represent the people of the United States.

 

President: And that would be General James Mattoon Scott, wouldn’t it? I don’t know whether to laugh at that kind of megalomania or simply cry.

 

General: James Mattoon Scott, as you put it, hasn’t the slightest interest in his own glorification. But he does have an abiding concern about the survival of this country.

 

President: Then, by God, run for office! You have such a fervid, passionate, evangelical affection for your country! Why, in the name of God, don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hellbent to protect? You say I’ve duped the people, General! I’ve bilked them! I’ve misled them! I’ve stripped them naked and made them defenseless! You accuse me of having lost their faith. Deliberately and criminally shut my ears to the national voice.

 

General: I do.

 

President: Well, where the hell have you heard that voice, General? In freight elevators? In dark alleys? In secret places in the dead of night? How did that voice seep into a locked room full of conspirators? That’s not where you hear the voice of the people, General. Not in this republic. You want to defend the United States of America? Then defend it with the tools it supplies you with: its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.

 

General: Are you serious, Mr. President? Are you honest-to-God serious? Why, I could . . . I could walk out of here tonight and offer myself as candidate for the Office of Presidency. And by tomorrow morning, I’d be sitting at that desk with precisely the mandate you hold so dear. And what’s more, Mr. President, you know it, and I know it, and this country knows it. So don’t tell me I’d have seized an office tomorrow without the benefit of support. If you really had the guts to call for a show of hands, you’d be on an airplane right now back to Ohio.

 

President: You can ask for and get your show of hands, General. Just wait a year and nine months for something called election.

 

General: A year and nine months from now, I don’t think there’ll be an electorate, let alone an election. I think we’ll be sitting in our own rubble, a minimum of 100 million dead, and on the gravestone we can carve, “They died for Jordan Lyman’s concept of peace.”

Oh, that’s right. Lyman. President Jordan Lyman. Coincidence, surely. It’s a very common name.

Anyway, I think we will leave this exploration here today. As I say, this is just the beginning, not the end of this particular line of research. But I trust that the researchers in the JFK Lancer crowd will have at least some cookie crumbs to follow, if they are so interested. And if you are interested, I would exhort you to check out the hyperlinked transcript of this presentation at corbettreport.com/jfkgladio.

As I say, if you’re watching this presentation live at the Lancer conference, it will not be up yet. It will be up in the coming days.

If you are watching this from my website, then obviously it is up on the website. But there will be a hyperlink transcript with every word that I have said and a link to every document, every movie, every video, every article that I’ve cited—every book as well. So, it will all be up there on the website. I hope you’ll make use of that resource.

I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com. Thank you for your time and attention. And thank you to the JFK Lancer Conference for allowing me to make this presentation today.

President Lyman: There’s been abroad, in this land, in recent months, a whisper that we have somehow lost our greatness, that we do not have the strength to win, without war, the struggles for liberty throughout the world. This is slander, because our country is strong. Strong enough to be a peacemaker. It is proud. Proud enough to be patient. The whisperers and the detractors, the violent men are wrong. We’ll remain strong and proud, peaceful and patient. And we will see a day when on this earth all men will walk out of the long tunnels of tyranny into the bright sunshine of freedom.

 

Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, that was the President of the United States.

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