JFK, LeMay, Mary, and that Fateful Day (Part Two)

(Continued from Part One…)

4. “The shock, for me (Ellsberg), was to realize that the Joint Chiefs were, after all, aware of it. Their planning process was not so mindless of overall consequences as I had come to suppose. It was worse. What was beyond surprising—it was unfathomable—was that they felt they could afford to be so candid about this particular answer, so prompt, responsive, realistic, while they stalled on all the others.” “Far from being accompanied by any offers to resign, there was no evident embarrassment, no shame, apology, or evasion: no apparent awareness of any need for an explanation of this answer to the new president. I thought: this was what the United States had come to, sixteen years after Hiroshima. Plans and preparations, awaiting only presidential order to execute (and, I’d discovered, not requiring even that in some circumstances), for whose foreseen consequences the term “genocidal” was totally inadequate.

5. The Joint Chiefs had underestimated the impact. Ellsberg wrote, “Yet even in the sixties the firestorms caused by thermonuclear weapons were known to be predictably the largest producers of fatalities in a nuclear war. Given that for almost all strategic nuclear weapons, the damage radius of firestorms would be two to five times the radius destroyed by the blast, a more realistic estimate of the fatalities caused directly by the planned U.S. attacks on the Sino-Soviet bloc, even in 1961, would surely have been double the summary in the graph I held in my hand, for a total death toll of a billion or more: a third of the earth’s population, then three billion.”

It is against this backdrop that Operation Blue Gill Triple Prime occurred. My father was tasked with preventing the Soviet ICBM threat they faced in Cuba from ever happening again. The obvious answer would be an Anti-Ballistic Missile system. But the scientists told my father that the math was too hard. There was no way to hit an incoming ICBM mid-air. We’d have to hit them before take-off. This helps explain why the US military quietly moved to a first-strike stance against both the Soviet Union and China and Soviet satellite states, a stance which they knew would also annihilate much of Western Europe, especially Finland, Scandinavia, and Germany. But the optics of this stance looked bad. It had to be made so secret that even the President and the Secretary of Defence could not know. But my Dad’s buddy Daniel Ellsberg knew. He shared his insights with my father. That’s why my Dad stood up to LeMay so forcefully. Dad said the men in the situation room at the Pentagon all looked in their laps when LeMay said it was time to drop nukes on the Soviets. Dad knew that this meant all the nukes all at once to Le May. It meant one billion dead.

Ellsberg wrote, “In 1961 there were about seventeen hundred SAC bombers, including over six hundred B-52s and a thousand B-47s. In the bomb bays of the SAC planes were thermonuclear bombs much larger than those I had seen in Okinawa. Many were from five to twenty-five megatons in yield. Each twenty-five-megaton bomb—with 1,250 times the yield of the fission bomb that destroyed Nagasaki—was the equivalent of twenty-five million tons of TNT, or over twelve times the total bomb tonnage we dropped in World War II. Within the arsenal there were some five hundred bombs with an explosive power of twenty-five megatons. Each of these warheads had more firepower than all the bombs and shells exploded in all the wars of human history.” “The plan called for a total of forty megatons—megatons—on Moscow, about four thousand times more than the bomb over Hiroshima and perhaps twenty to thirty times more than all the non-nuclear bombs dropped by the Allies in both theaters during more than four years of WWII …”

So, knowing all this, my father said to those assembled in the Situation Room, “Maybe we could just drop one because they might want to negotiate after that.” LeMay was outraged, but the others in the Sit Room thought it was a good idea. Then, Dad asked what the target would be. “Obviously Moscow,” replied LaMay. “But, if we hit Moscow, we won’t have anyone to negotiate with. Who can we call?” The men in the Sit room wildly concurred with my Dad. Then he said, “And if we let it leak to the Soviets that we won’t hit Moscow, maybe they won’t hit Washington DC.” That was the clincher. LeMay was livid and stormed out of the Sit Room. It was only this last year, when my father and I had lots of leisurely time to talk and reflect, that he clocked that LeMay would not have let that anger go. I pointed out that LeMay was suspiciously absent and obviously gloating at various points around JFKs assassination. That’s when Dad fully realized that the events had been influenced by a missile test that he helped run during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Operation Blue Gill Triple Prime. This refers to “the fourth and final high-altitude nuclear test in the Operation Fishbowl series, conducted on October 25, 1962, from Johnston Island, aiming to study the effects of nuclear detonations as defensive weapons against ballistic missiles.” Remember that the Cuban Missile Crisis runs from October 16-29^th 1962.

Geoff Cruickshank has done an excellent job of detailing what happened during the test here. But, in short, the missile contained an X-ray machine in the nosecone. The idea was to see if the X-Rays could divert or blow up an incoming ICBM if it got within a reasonable distance of it. There are two videos of this test on the net. One shows a white orb circling around the US missile. The X-rays knocked it out of the sky. The US Navy retrieved the orb out of the ocean. The other video shows the same video but with a triangle that obscures the view of the orb. I said, “So, Dad. You are smack in the middle of a national security emergency. What the heck did you think that orb was?” He said, “We called them “tagalongs.” I said, “So you knew they weren’t Russian?” “Yes,” he said. “You knew they were benign. Obviously, the word “tagalong” implies you saw them all the time and you knew they were harmless?” “Yes”, he said. “And you never asked what the heck is that thing?” He looked a little blank. It was the military. Everything is on a need-to-know basis. Dad did ask what happened to the orb after the Navy scooped it out of the Pacific. But, he was told that, despite holding all the Q clearances, he did not “need to know.” As Cruickshank explains, the retrieved orb left a radiation imprint on the Navy ship that retrieved it.

Here's what really matters. My Dad said it was the first time “we knocked a “tagalong” out of the sky.” It was historic. So, he flew out to Albuquerque to be briefed by the Head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lawrence Gise, (Jeff Bezos’s Grandfather) who apparently received materials from the crashed craft. He kept them on his desk, handed them to my Dad, and then asked him to describe how he felt. Dad said a voice began talking to him inside his head. That’s all Gise wanted to know. Dad never recalled or would not say what that voice said. Apparently, he said, some people interact with the materials, and others don’t. This led to briefings at Los Alamos and an invitation from Richard Bissell. Bissell was a legend, having been a founder of both the OSS and the CIA. He was reputed to have been put in charge of Area 51 just weeks after the supposed Roswell crash and he helped design the facility. He was responsible for the testing and launch of the famed U-2 spy plane. Bissell said to my Dad, “You are the youngest of the Whiz Kids. I am going to tell you things because someone needs to know this in the future, and you’ll still be around”. They had dinner every Friday night for many months after that. When he passed, my Dad said, “We Guardians of the MJ” more than once and not just to me. People who follow this subject will know what he was referring to.

What matters is that JFK and LBJ also jumped out West to hear what had happened for themselves. On December 7^th, 1962. They had quickly scheduled a grueling series of highly classified briefings at three locations: The Strategic Air Command HQ in Offutt AFB Nebraska, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (the 1st Presidential visit ever) in New Mexico, and at Kirtland AFB, and at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, all in one day. LeMay was present at many, if not all, of these briefings. On the back of these visits, JFK began finding ways to reach The Soviet Premier, Khrushchev, through private and unofficial go between’s including Norman Cousins. By November 22, 1963, after JFK had managed to get the Soviets to agree to ban all atmospheric nuclear testing. The Limited Test Ban Treaty was signed in Moscow on August 5, 1963. It was clear that Kennedy was proposing to explore space jointly with the Soviets and to reduce the number of nuclear weapons as well. All this was LeMay’s worst nightmare.

Note also that Wright-Patterson Airbase is reputed to be the home of the black programs associated with the “Non-Human Intelligence” and anomalous phenomena that have been to target of Congressional investigations in recent years. This was LeMay’s home base. It is where he learned to fly. It seems odd how he responded to Barry Goldwater, his great friend from WWII, when he asked to see Wright Patterson. Remember that Goldwater had been an ace pilot during WWII. He was, “one of 10 pilots to fly P-47 Thunderbolts across the North Atlantic to Europe. He retired as a Major General in the U.S. Air Force Reserves. By the end of his career, he logged 15,000 hours of flight time, flew over 250 aircraft, and received numerous awards, medals, and commendations.” He piloted everything from ferry planes to supersonic jets. Goldwater went on to run for the Presidency in 1964. LeMay was one of his advisors. He recounted the tale of his run-in with his old friend LeMay on Larry King Live and elsewhere, saying, “I think the government does know. I can't back that up, but I think that at Wright-Patterson field, if you could get into certain places, you'd find out what the Air Force and the government knows about UFOs ... I called Curtis LeMay and I said, 'General, I know we have a room at Wright-Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Could I go in there?' I've never heard him get mad, but he got madder than hell at me, cussed me out, and said, 'Don't ever ask me that question again!” LeMay himself went into politics only a few years after that, running as the VP to George Wallace, a racist segregationist from the deep South. LeMay was a strange choice, given his generally condescending attitude toward Presidents, politicians, and the general public. He must have been in an incredibly powerful position to be chosen for that role in defiance of his refusal to interact with voters.

Well, we know how all this ended. Kennedy got shot. If we were to roll modern-day AI over the evidence, which somebody will surely do), it seems gravely doubtful that the traditional lone gunman theory holds up. George Wallace also got shot and LeMay left both the military and US politics. Then JFK’s last girlfriend - Mary - got shot too.

This is one more intriguing piece of the puzzle that deserves attention. JFK was known for his affairs. But, it was his last affair that may hold a key to understanding what happened. JFK was obviously under enormous stress from everything I’ve explained. He suffered from a back injury as well. He turned to his friend Mary Pinchot Mayer, a stunning blond artist who had been an editor of The Atlantic. She had left her husband, Cord Meyer, in 1958. Cord Meyer was a very senior CIA operative who came from a wealthy family that made their money from the sugar trade in Cuba. He is said to have been deeply involved in the efforts to overthrow Castro and including the Bay of Pigs fiasco for which JFK had refused to give the green light. This resulted in the loss of many CIA officials, operatives and assets. Some say that these people tried to reconstitute themselves and JFK actually ordered the destruction of their training camps to prevent them from trying to overthrow Castro again. Cord Meyer was thought to run the CIA’s hit squads from his perch under Frank Wisner, then the director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). OPC became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. Richard Bissell, who I mentioned above, said Cord Meyer, "the creative genius behind convert operations." Remember that Bissell was the fall guy for The Bay of Pigs debacle. He had been the Deputy Director for Plans, at the CIA and had planned and executed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy pushed him, and the Head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, out in February 1962. So, here we have a lot of very angry spies with certain specific skills led by a man whose wife walked out on him and ended up in the President’s arms.

Dulles was the first civilian Director of the CIA and set up his residence in Bern, Switzerland, with the express purpose of remaining outside the reach of US law. My father explained to me that this was widely understood within intelligence circles. It was an overt defiance of Congress and the Executive. The Dulles brothers understood geopolitics well. Allen Dulles’ brother John had been President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Both brothers had been part of the Paris Peace Conference at the end of WWI in 1919/1920. Cord Meyer was also a writer and deeply involved with the world’s leading scientists, especially physicists, including Albert Einstein. Meyer led the CIA’s International Organizations Division from 1954 until 1962 and then he headed the Covert Action Staff of the Directorate of Plans from 1962. From 1967 to 1973, Meyer was assistant deputy director of plans before he became the CIA station Chief in London between 1973 and 1976.

Meanwhile, Mary was close friends with Timothy Leary. It seems she asked him to teach her how to administer LSD in safe doses because she and her closest friends were all married to the world’s most powerful men, and they were all intent on igniting wars, including nuclear wars. This raises a fascinating question. Were JFK’s