WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

A partial list of the Knights and Dames of Malta reads like a Who’s Who of American Catholicism:

• William Casey – CIA Director.

• John McCone – CIA Director.

• William Colby – CIA Director.

• William Donovan – OSS Director. Donovan was given an especially prestigious form of knighthood that has only been given to a hundred other men in history.

-- "The Origins of the Overclass," by Steve Kangas

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A former CIA deputy station chief and an American diplomat admitted in May 1990 that U.S. officials supplied both arms and the names of thousands of PKI members to the Indonesian army and CIA-funded Muslim student death squads, who hunted the leftists down and murdered them. The first order by military officers to Muslim students in early October was the word sikat, meaning "clean out", "wipe out" or "massacre." U.S. officials were well aware that the people named on the lists "were destined for extra-judicial firing squads." CIA officers "later checked off the names of those who had been killed." Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA operation run from half a million to over one million people.

Former CIA Director William Colby compared the Indonesian operation to the CIA's Phoenix Programme in the Vietnam War (whose goal was to "neutralise 3,000 people a month" and which murdered between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese). Colby admitted: "The people getting killed in Indonesia were not soldiers. They were not even the "enemy" in an on-going war. They were members of a popular, grassroots political party. Or they were in the way."

-- The CIA in Indonesia, by wakeupmag.co.uk

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CIA director William Colby later admitted in secret testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the CIA had "penetrated" all of Chile's major political parties, that it had secretly furnished "some assistance" to certain Chilean groups and that the executions carried out by the junta after the coup had "done some good."

-- The CIA in Chile, by wakeupmag.co.uk

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When the Pine Gap Treaty, which would determine the future of the CIA's most valuable overseas base, was due for renewal on December 9th 1975, Whitlam's comments that he might not renew the treaty raised major alarms in the Agency. CIA Director William Colby later wrote that the "threat" posed by the Whitlam Government was one of the three "world crises" of his career, comparable with the Middle East war two years previously, when the United States considered using nuclear weapons.

The CIA Station Chief in London, Dr John Proctor, contacted MI6 and asked for British help with "the Whitlam problem." William Colby directly approached his opposite number, head of MI6, Sir Maurice Oldfield, to emphasise to British intelligence that Australia was "traditionally Britain's domain" and that if Pine Gap was closed down, "the Alliance would be blinded strategically." The CIA also sought assistance from MI6 and MI5 liaison officers based in Washington.

British intelligence has long had a vested interest in Australian politics. MI6 operates its own base at Kowandi, south of Darwin, where its highly secret activities are concealed from the Australian government and people. They include widespread interception of communications and covert operations in Asia. The Australian Secret Intelligence Service, ASIS, also operates from this base and is highly integrated with British intelligence.

At the same time as U.S. intelligence was targeting the Australian Labor Government, Peter Wright (of Spycatcher infamy) and his colleagues in British intelligence were busy destabilising the British Labour Government of Harold Wilson. Wright conspired with his close friend, James Jesus Angleton, the extreme right-wing head of CIA counter-intelligence, to "target" the three Western leaders they regarded as "Communist agents": Harold Wilson, Willy Brandt in Germany and Gough Whitlam.

After discovering that the British and American intelligence services based in Australia were secretly involved in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, Whitlam ordered the dismissal of the heads of ASIO and ASIS in the autumn of 1975, and then began to make moves against the CIA. Then, at the beginning of November, it was revealed in the press that a former CIA officer, Richard Stallings, had been channelling funds to J. Douglas Anthony, leader of the opposition National Country Party, and was a close friend and former tenant of Anthony's Canberra home. Whitlam accused the opposition of being "subsidised by the CIA."

In Parliament, Doug Anthony admitted that Stallings was a friend but challenged Whitlam to provide evidence that Stallings worked for the CIA. (Stallings' name was not on the official list of "declared" CIA officers working in Australia, but on a "confidential" list held by the Permanent Head of the Australian Defence Department, Sir Arthur Tange). Whitlam prepared a reply, which he intended to give when Parliament resumed the following week, on Tuesday November 11th.

The CIA was frantic. The Australian Prime Minister was about to blow the cover of the agent who had set up Pine Gap and to reveal that the supposedly "joint" facility was a CIA charade. Furthermore, the future of the base itself was to be subject to parliamentary debate. The day before his speech was due, Whitlam was informed of a telex from the ASIO station in Washington, which stated that the Prime Minister of Australia was a security risk in his own country. The message had been virtually dictated by Theodore Shackley, head of the CIA's East Asia Division (and whose plethora of illegal covert activities have been outlined in other articles on this site).

On Sunday November 9th, the Australian Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, was briefed on the "security crisis", while the head of the Defence Department declared publicly: "This is the greatest risk to the nation's security there has ever been." The CIA was certain that Whitlam would announce the cancellation of the Pine Gap agreement on December 9th, and set into motion a plan to install in power a political party to "protect the sanctity of U.S. bases."

Six weeks earlier, during a visit to Indonesia, opposition politician Andrew Peacock had briefed government officials there on the current state of the Australian political crisis. He described in detail a sequence of events that were about to take Australia by surprise. A record of his briefing was later read into Australian Hansard:

"Whitlam will not agree to hold an election.... The Governor-General would be forced to ask Malcolm Fraser to form a Cabinet. But this Cabinet would not be able to get a mandate to govern, because Parliament is controlled by the Labor Party.... Fraser is appointed PM, a minute later he asks the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament, following which a general election is to be held."

And that was exactly what happened. On November 11th, the day Whitlam was to inform Parliament fully about the CIA and American bases in Australia, he was summoned by Kerr from Parliament House. Without warning, Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Prime Minister, dissolved both houses of Parliament and appointed Malcolm Fraser, leader of the Liberal Party, to head an interim government until new elections could be held in December. An unelected official (whose position was traditionally only that of a figurehead representative of the Queen of England) had, in one arbitrary and unconstitutional act, overthrown a legitimate and democratically elected government.

-- The CIA in Australia:  America's Foreign Watergate, by wakeupmag.co.uk

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Under the guidance of William Colby, head of the CIA's Far East Division, the 1960's saw the Agency's programmes in South East Asia rapidly expand. The CIA's "secret" war in Laos was launched; guerrilla raids and bombing operations by the CIA's proprietary company Air America killed tens of thousands of Laotians. And in Vietnam, the notorious Phoenix "counter terror" programme was begun. Wayne Cooper, a Foreign Service Officer, reported: "CIA representatives recruited, organised, supplied and directly paid teams whose function was to use techniques of terror - assassination, kidnappings and intimidation against the Viet Cong leadership." William Colby also supervised the establishment of a network of Provincial Interrogation Centres in each of south Vietnam's 44 provinces, mainly for the use of torture tactics against suspected Vietcong.

A former US military intelligence officer in Vietnam, Barry Osborn, reported: "By late 1968, the Phoenix programme was not serving any legitimate function that I know of, but rather had gone so wrong that it was the vehicle by which we were getting into a bad genocide programme." Osborn testified before a House Committee that suspects caught by Phoenix were interrogated in helicopters and sometimes pushed out. He also spoke of the use of electric shock torture. Jeff Stein, a senior CIA agent, stated: "I learned of the insertion of a six-inch dowel into the circular canal of one of my detainee's ears and the tapping through to the brain until the person died; the starving to death of a Vietnamese woman suspected of being part of the local education cabinet . Atrocities are normal; atrocities are taught to us as being normal." Stein also stated: "I would send in a report which would say, one person who was suspected of being VC, unconfirmed, uncorroborated, should be at this point, co-ordinate, at this time on this day, and I would find out later that a B-52 strike had hit that spot at that time and wiped out the whole village."

Frank Snepp, another senior CIA agent, reported: "I would put together a list and I would turn it over to Mr Colby's people. He would feed this list out to the strike teams and they would go to work. The hit teams became impatient and they decided to take the law as such into their own hands. And instead of bringing the sources in, they began killing them piece-meal. I looked at a list of the Phoenix programme's latest casualty count and I discovered it ran about 20,000 killed. And that is how you became a collaborator in the worst of the terrorist programmes, in the most atrocious excesses of the U.S. government."

US Senator Stephen Young of Ohio was reported to have said that while he was in Vietnam, the CIA told him that the Agency disguised people as Vietcong to commit atrocities, including murder and rape, so as to discredit the Communists. In 1975 a Senate committee investigating the CIA's secret operations in Vietnam reported: "Two Vietcong prisoners were interrogated on an airplane flying towards Saigon. The first refused to answer all questions and was thrown out of the airplane at 3,000 feet. The second immediately answered all the questions. But he too was thrown out. Other techniques usually designed to force onlooking prisoners to talk involved cutting off the fingers, ears, fingernails or sexual organs of another prisoner."

According to William Colby's own testimony before a congressional committee in 1971, 20,587 suspected Viet Cong were killed under the Phoenix programme in its first two-and-a-half years. The South Vietnamese government credited Phoenix with 40,994 deaths. Colby, the architect of the murder programme, said: "I was not able to say that no-one had been wrongly killed. But the purpose and the effect of the Phoenix programme was to bring decency and intelligence to our side of the battle." Two years later, Colby became Director of the CIA.

During later congressional hearings into the activities of the CIA, William Colby meticulously detailed decades of assassinations, destabilisation campaigns and domestic surveillance in the U.S. itself, going so far as to bring along dart guns, vials of snake poison and other Company hardware as exhibits. George Bush replaced Colby as CIA Director in early 1976 and the year-long House investigation of the CIA under Otis Pike and Senator Frank Church was wound down. In terms of reform or control of the CIA's covert operations, those investigations produced little more than the establishment of intelligence oversight committees in both chambers and recommendations for future legislation. However, a couple of weeks after the House of representatives voted to allow the White House to censor the Pike Committee's report, it was leaked to the Village Voice. It was sensational, with details of CIA intervention in foreign elections, paramilitary operations and black propaganda.

-- The CIA:  An Expose of the Agency's History and Covert Operations, by wakeupmag.co.uk

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[William Colby]:  "Of course the CIA in particular was involved in investigating, learning and, on occasion, using, everything we could learn about mind control -- and with extremely good reason. Following the Korean War, this country's military and intelligence communities went through a period of absolute paranoia about just how far our enemies were ahead of us in mind control and related activities.

"There was no particular program called 'Monarch,' contrary to what you want to think. 'Monarch' was merely a name that some participants in the program -- who knew very little about it, other than from their own limited participation -- were given to identify themselves. But, as far as the CIA was concerned, there was no such program named 'Monarch.'

"But, with respect to mind control, I will tell you that this country spent millions upon millions supposedly catching up to our Cold War adversaries, because we believed they had developed mind control technology which exceeded anything we had. In fact, we at the Company [CIA] truly believed for a substantial period of time, that technology and techniques and drugs had been developed by Russia which would enable them to have agents who in fact really were able to have and use ESP-extra sensory perception.
  "Can you imagine," Bill continued, "how dangerous for this country it would be if you could have had someone meeting the President of the United States, who was actually able to read what was in the President's mind?
  "I know," Bill continued, "it may sound silly today to get all carried away with this fear; but I can tell you that we took it all very seriously and believed this ESP thing for some significant time period.
 

"I will tell you one other thing," Bill said, somewhat ominously, "we are not behind in knowledge of mind control. In fact, we never were, but we only found that out much later, after we had poured incredible resources into this area. And yes, I am sure, there were some problems and abuses that occurred and we will talk about them at another time."

-- The Franklin Cover-Up, by John W. DeCamp