John Newman - Nobody can fill Peter Dale Scott’s shoes. Peter to me is the dean, just an all around super person, and someone who like many of you has suffered for his courage in taking this on. He did go underground at some point in his life. So, I want to share with you a little anecdote of my own, I called him up one day, I was still a Major in the Army, I was at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas going through the General Staff College which is a kind of finishing school for Lt. Colonels and Colonels and was at that point streaming towards the end of my manuscript on “JFK and Vietnam” and I called him up and I said is this Prof. Scott, and he said yes it is, and I said, Peter Scott I am about to revive you, and I meant that, cause I knew I had not seen anything from him in a long time, and of course as most of you know or some of you know anyway that he wrote chapter five to the Gravel edition of the Pentagon papers and without the benefit of a lot of the documents, [and] figured out, I think, very early on, an awful lot about the whole Vietnam issue. It was a tremendous tribute to his intellect that he did that.
Now Peter has some special skills. He was a Foreign Service Officer in Canada and has traveled extensively overseas so I can’t possible fill in what he would have told you this morning, and he certainly could give us a very interesting perspective, from an international perspective. So, it’s too bad that Peter isn’t here, and I’m sure he would like to apologize for not being here and we can look forward to more from Peter. Let me just finish that anecdote by saying that recently he’s been in my basement with my documents three or four times. He’s been helping me and he said I just want to help you John I don’t ever want to write anything again, and happily that’s not true. Once Peter was revived and up and running again he is again bitten and writing some very fine material, and I would expect to see that maybe go to press next year sometime. You have not heard the last from Peter Dale Scott by any means on this subject.
I would like to thank my colleagues, Al [Navis], Frank, and Ian [Griggs], for some very interesting perspectives, more interesting than you might think as Americans to hear, what it seemed like what it felt like to people in other countries. I am not exactly out of school here, although I was born in Dayton, Ohio, when I was seven I moved to to England, and [in a cockney accent] was born within the sound of Bow bells, a cockney through and through mate, and actually played soccer on the Holland Park Private, which for us is a public school, and spent some time in Switzerland, and most of my military career has been in East Asia. So, I have spent a great deal of my time overseas and [have] listened to the views of people from other countries about the assassination, and I would sum it up this way, they think, have always felt that the American people were a bit naive about this, that we were immature, politically, and there is a lot to that, but I think they are wrong about this particular issue and it’s not because they should have known, or shouldn’t have known, it really has to do with the media, with the national media. And I think most people like Frank, I think Frank’s reaction is very interesting to come to a place like this and to see how serious, and how many people, and how we really feel about this. But the public opinion polls tell the story, and the American people haven’t been fooled, really, about this, so on this particular instance there is less naivete then our foreign colleagues might actually think, until you actually get up close with American’s on this issue. I must say I’m not trying to defend American’s in particular for naivete I think we probably are in many ways, but this is an issue where the American people are surprisingly resilient.
I happen to have been 13 years old at the time. My parents were at the rib room at the Carlton Hotel. It was a Saturday, as you know, in England, it was dark, and I was sick, I didn’t get to go, and prime rib was the speciality there, and I liked prime rib, well I couldn’t go get my prime rib cause I was sick and I was in my bathroom watching Wide World of Sports, ITV Wide World of Sports as a matter of fact, and I never saw the news that he had been injured, I was just there to hear that he had died. My parents at that time were in the restaurant, the waiter had come up to them and had informed them that the president was dead and they left and they came home. And that’s my remembrance, I was in England at the time when it happened.
I would like to contribute something to this international perspective discussion this morning from the work that I’ve done, and I would like to talk to you about U.S. -Soviet strategic relations and the U-2 program, and somebody who for right now I am going to call Private X, and hopefully, this will contribute to a broader discussion and understanding of the international ramifications of the case. Now this particular international piece or perspective I want to give you isn’t at the assassination or after the assassination obviously, which is what we’ve been talking about so far but is before.
In other words what is the international situation before the assassination? Who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Does he matter to this? And it turns out it’s quite interesting.
If you go back to those years, they were very, very different years, you would have had to have grown up through them, and I even at 13 was not old enough to really appreciate what it must have been like to dash under your desk at school and do rehearsals for nuclear war, and people who were digging holes in their back yards and this sort of thing, it was an unusual time by any standard. I mean the American-Chinese blood letting in Korea was still fresh in everybody’s mind in 1957 when Oswald went into the Marines. The country was still in the grips of the paranoid years, the very paranoid years of the Cold War, and McCarthyism. The Soviet Union had just finished it’s bloody invasion of Hungary in 1956. The United States and the U.S.S.R. were on the threshold of what I would call the second great technological chapter in the arms race which was ballistic missiles. The bomb itself, of course that threshold had been crossed in 1945 and between 1945 and 1950 [when the Russian got the bomb] Well at this point, ‘57, ‘58, ‘59 the competition is on delivery systems. Up to this point we are talking about SAC bombers. It takes quite a bit of time, especially if you don’t have them in the air, even if you have them in the air you’ve got to fly over the pole, or fly through air defense, you put one of these things, one of these nuclear warheads on top of a ballistic missile and it goes over there in twenty minutes. And so the whole nature of the strategic balance of power was being transformed by this deadly new technology, a capability to place something on the other side of the planet instantly, a capability I would add which also allowed us to put satellites in space and take a look and see around on the ground.
So, the technology we are talking about here really has two functions, number one to kill the enemy, and number two to monitor what the enemy is doing, you see. So, it’s a particularly interesting technology that we are talking about here in the ballistic missile race.
I think it’s fair to say that, especially given the fact that the Soviets launched first, SPUTNIK they called it, their satellite, in 1957, especially because there was this appearance that we were behind, that whole race, ballistics missiles became the real focus of national security policy and therefore the focus of the U.S. intelligence community, so that in 1957, 1958, 1959 it was really all about who is ahead, how many do we have, how many to they have. There were projections, I mean dire, dire projections after SPUTNIK went up about how far behind we were, and coming on the heels of the McCarthy period and the things that I have been describing to you. These were very, very troubling developments.
Now it’s interesting that in this particular race, the race to acquire the darn things, and more importantly to monitor what the other guy had, in other words how much more money do we have to spend, that was dependent on knowing where they were, it was the U-2 that was the key piece in this particular arms race and intelligence race.
You see, to launch a missile, I mean an ICBM requires rather a great distance, now Russia has great distances as you know, to understanding and monitoring a program like that, a ballistic missile program requires more than humint sources, you know, human beings sort of ferreting out stuff, and even radar emissions, you don’t know whether a program is successful unless the thing actually lands where it is supposed to land. And there’s only one way you can find that out. You got to go take a picture of it, even the country that launches it. They fly over the impact areas and photograph it, did it hit the X or not? So in order for us to monitor the impact areas for the Soviet test ranges we had to be able to get out over there, and there was a place in Japan called Atsugi, Atsugi Naval Air base and it was that air base that gave us the coverage, the photographic coverage of these impact areas, okay? And it’s very interesting.
Detachment C, they called it. Detachment C, an advance party of security and communications personnel that departed from the United States on 20 February, 1957. The second echelon of administrative personnel departed 4 March with the main detachment with two U-2 aircraft, and equipment began deployment on 15 March, 1957 and Detachment C was operational by the week of April 8th, 1957. That is out of the new files, by the way, that is brand new information. And I’ll tell you how new, 1994. In the January, 1994 release.
The Atsugi start up was good timing for the Soviet ballistic missile program was just getting into full swing and the first American intelligence report on a successful Soviet test launch of an ICBM lands on Eisenhower’s desk in late August of 1957. The news looked grim. And the U-2 coverage continued to show hard evidence of a Soviet lead in the ballistic missile development program. By March of 1958 ten to fifteen Soviet ICBMs had been successfully launched to distances of up to 3,700 miles to impact areas, of course, in the remote locations of the Soviet Union. And besides the CIA personnel actually stationed there, and there were many of them in Detachment C, only a few Marines who saw and could track these planes even knew of the program’s existence. People in the CIA didn’t know about it, even analysts who had a need to know information were never allowed to see the photographs and nothing was put into reports that would betray the existence of this super, yes, high techno-weapon if you want. It flew above known radar, altitudes, I should say and it was certainly out of the range of Soviet air defenses at the time.
On September 12, 1957, in other words a few days after this first report lands on Eisenhower’s desk, a young Marine, let’s just call him private X for the time, because it works better, you know if you say Oswald we have this problem cause you know he [allegedly] shoots the president and it screws everything up, you can’t really appreciate, he’s just a private, a Marine private arrives at Atsugi Naval Air Station. 22 days later the Soviet Union launches SPUTNIK, 22 days after Private X arrives there SPUTNIK went up on the tip of an ICBM. The Soviets followed with more launches, and an American attempt failed.
So, the sequence jolted America’s sense of its own preeminence in science and technology to the point where a Top Secret, it’s called the Gaither report, at the time recommended the United States had to engage in a massive all out effort to modernize our ballistic missile program, this period, we called it the missile gap then. We don’t call it the missile gap anymore, we call it the missile bluff. It’s how it’s written up in the history books, and the reason is because Khrushchev really didn’t have them. He was feeding our fears by hinting at having this capability and the willingness to use it in several incidents that were threats and not even veiled threats to nuke Paris and London during various Middle East crisses.
The Missile Gap was not yet however, nor would it ever be concrete, for the ICBM had only been used for the space launch, and one or two tests. It was something which was anticipated, you see, and CIA intelligence estimates in 1958 and 1959 projected the early prospects for Soviet ICBM in the hundreds.
Senator Stuart Symmington actually predicted that the Soviets would have three thousand ICBMs by 1959.
The only factor which diminished the rising hysteria linked to the perceived imminent missile gap was the U-2.
Given the size of the Soviet Union an assessment of their missile program required a global strategy. Allen Dulles, then Director of the CIA, no not then, he’s writing in 1963, two years after he was fired by Kennedy, recalled then how it was in 1957 and 1958 he said, “When the Soviets started testing their missiles they chose launching sites in the most remote and unapproachable wastelands.” The locations, of course that the U-2s at Atsugi were designed specifically to get at, at those ranges. Still the limits to the number of possible U-2 flights rendered total coverage of all of the Soviet Union impossible and the U-2 program was therefore insufficient to resolve the argument over the nature of the Soviet strategic threat. Ultimately, difficulties developed in the Soviet test program, difficulties which led to an interruption of their missile testing program between April 1958 and March of 1959. The resulting negative intelligence provided by U-2 coverage vitiated against the doomsday predictions of the Soviet ICBMS and allowed President Eisenhower to privately discount the arguments of the missile gappers.
Publicly, however, Eisenhower faced journalists like the Alsop brothers who wrote articles under such imaginative titles as “After Ike, the Deluge,” and “Our Gamble with Destiny.” Ike was beset by these right-wing attacks because he wasn’t launching this Cold War into this huge program. Actually he had sped up our program.
To counter Khruschev’s bullying then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles proposed to make the U-2 program public, after the launch of SPUTNIK, this was his recommendation. Eisenhower declined to make a public spectacle out of our most sensitive and best means of verification, the U-2 program. Eisenhower did not want to give the Russians who had vigorously protested U-2 violations of their airspace a diplomatic and political coup. And he refused to declassify the program.
So, the U-2 program continued under very, very tight security and its missions in 1958 and 1959 were increasingly critical in steering the intelligence community towards a more realistic assessment of the Soviet threat. Based on U-2 coverage U.S. intelligence had concluded that the expected Soviet ICBM deployments would take place in late 1959 instead of early 1959 and by 1960 a CIA inspired national intelligence estimate predicted that the Soviet Union would deploy 35 ICBMs by mid-1960, and 140 to 200 by 1961. Actually, in the end, they had only deployed 4 by 1961, a far cry from the thousands that Senator Symmington had been predicting.
The critical intelligence provided by the U-2 program impacted therefore on the U.S. strategic calculus in the major crisses, all the major crisses of 1957 to 1959. U.S. behavior changed from constraint when we feared SPUTNIK, and the successful part of their program, it changed from constraint to emboldened, notwithstanding the highly publicized missile gap myth as the truth about the Soviet missile program’s failures and interruptions began to emerge at the Top Secret and actually above Top Secret level.
During the initial period of Soviet successes American strategy was restrained, an American backed Turkish invasion using 50,000 ground forces in Syria to topple pro-Soviet leadership there was pre-empted by SPUTNIK and the American invasion force poised to invade Indonesia in December of 1957 was never sent in.
As fate would have it, our Marine Private X who had been at Atsugi just at the point before and after SPUTNIK became entangled in the Indonesia mess himself. From November 20th 1957 through March 6th, 1958 his unit MACS-1 joined other Marine units from numerous units [to form a new unit] code named Operation Strongback in the South China sea and the Philippines.
Private X left for the Philippines on 20 November 1957 and returned to Atsugi in March of 1958. This deployment was in fact part of the plans to intervene in the Indonesian crises, like the planned Turkish action in Iraq it didn’t happen.
Private X’s unit found another mission and landed in the Philippines at Cubic Point just before January 1, 1958. They set up their little radar bubble at Cubic Point airbase next to a special hangar that they recognized all too well, and inside that hangar was a U-2. From this location Private X often tracked the U-2s as they approached Communist China.
In March of 1958 Private X’s unit returned to Atsugi. Then at precisely this important junction the Soviet launch program hit the rocks. Publicly, Khrushchev continued to brandish his missiles during the ensuing Middle East crises of May-August 1958. For his part, Eisenhower in a speech to the UN charged Khrushchev with ballistic blackmail but this time the President gave the order to intervene in Lebanon with American ground forces. Negative intelligence from the Atsugi operations undoubtedly factored into the President’s decision to intervene.
What I mean by that if I wasn’t clear enough before is we now know that their program is on the rocks, and therefore Eisenhower’s actions in these crises are more bold and aggressive. Let me be very clear about that.The Soviet reaction to the American and British troop landings in Lebanon was therefore in the following crises muted. But, the unfolding crises soon widened to the Far East. With the Americans in Lebanon Chinese leader Mao Zedong in a struggle with Khrushchev at the time and wanting to embarrass him saw an opportunity, so Mao provoked a crises of his own by shelling Chinese nationalists islands [Quemoy and Matsu] in the Taiwan straits in August.
And naturally, guess who’s unit took a little trip in for a closer look see. Yeah, you guessed it, Private X. His unit [was] deployed to Taiwan from September 14th through October 6th, 1958, right bang in the middle of the crises, moreover guess what was right by the location where Private X’s unit worked? You got it, a U-2. Eisenhower emboldened by intelligence from U-2 flights that the Soviet missile program hit a snag intervened in Lebanon and ignored the Chinese provocation, with the geopolitical initiative slipping away from him Khrushchev launched a strategy to reverse this process by trigging a major new crises in Berlin.
In the protracted Berlin crises which followed during the winter of 1958 to 1959 Khrushchev’s renewed claims to strategic weapons supremacy were the crucial linchpin in his attempts to deter the West while making his demands over Berlin. Eisenhower however, was still receiving good news from those U-2 flights that our Private X was watching take off and land every day at Atsugi. So, Eisenhower forced Khrushchev to back down.
This crises created favorable conditions actually, though for a revolutionary success in Cuba, which I’m not going to go into today, because we were distracted because American attention was focused on Berlin. And Washington did not effectively handle the unfolding situation in Cuba, and actually missiles are going to be involved in this, so it’s a very complex story but it’s outside of the scope that I want to share with you this morning so I’m going to ignore Cuba. But, I just mention it now because it is part of the unfolding story and Cuba is going to end up being the real struggle by 1961 and 1962 and 1963.
The U-2 flights and its fragmentary but consistent evidence suggested Khrushchev’s missile claims were bluff, were the crucial linchpin in Eisenhower’s calculus in not letting the perceived missile gap soften his resistance to Khrushchev’s pressures. In short the intelligence provided by this high flying tecno-spy plane was the most important intelligence in the entire U.S. intelligence community. It was the critical intelligence on the Soviet threat and the lengths to which Washington was prepared to go to meet that threat. This makes our Private X a pretty interesting little fellow.
His movements in the Far East nicely dovetail with the salient points of the U-2’s contribution to the strategic debate in Washington. He was at Atsugi from September through late November ‘57 a period which precisely overlays the launching of SPUTNIK and the early active phase of the Soviet ICBM test flight program. His participation in Strongback led to his knowledge of U-2 operations over China. The same is true of his deployment in Taiwan. The tracks of these Chinese overflights which Private X personally plotted with his grease pencil presumably would have given the U.S. valuable intelligence on Chinese military intentions at this crucial junction. In between the Philippine and Taiwan deployments he was back at Atsugi. This period from March to August of 1958 was the period when the Soviet ballistic missile program had ground to a halt. After Taiwan, Private X was back at Atsugi yet again, October through November, 1958. These were the exact months leading up to KhrushchevÕs ultimatum over Berlin.
So, while it’s true that Private X wasn’t in the U-2 program himself, he obviously possessed a great deal of knowledge of U-2 flight activity which had occurred over Russia during the early ballistic missile test flights and during the subsequent stand down of their program. This information would have been very, very useful information for the KGB for its assessments of what the Americans had learned of the Soviet capabilities. Private X also possessed knowledge of the U-2’s flights over China, obviously. And the U-2 flew 30 penetration flights over Soviet territory between June ‘56 and May 1960. Two of those flights occurred after our own Private X defected to the Soviet Union in 1959. The first of those two flights on April 9, 1960 was successful but the second one was shot down. Its very interesting.
The pilot Francis Gary Powers survived, and his own analysis leads him to conclude that our own Private X betrayed the height at which the U-2 flew to the Soviets. In Power’s view Private X’s work with something called the MPX-16 was a height finding radar, very advanced at the time, just coming into the Marine inventory was crucial, and given Private X’s extensive knowledge of U-2 operations in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines the Soviets could be expected to be very interested in him.
Therefore, any files after his defection to the Soviet Union should have been very, very carefully examined and stored. This is just the troubling point. Ill tell you what, it isn’t surprising that, and this is right out of the new files, that shortly after Francis Gary Powers was shot down in Russia, Atsugi was dismantled. I mean that tells, that says a lot to me right there. What is surprising, however, to me anyway, is that nothing was done about Private X, or so we are told. And the CIA felt that no 201, which is the standard counterintelligence type dossier was necessary on him. Nobody mentioned his U-2 knowledge at the time of his defection to Moscow.
Now isn’t that interesting? How is this possible? This is the heyday of the Cold War, and a Marine, a Marine, you’ve seen the advertisements, who has seen little but U-2s defects to the enemy capital while announcing to the American embassy, stunned American embassy personnel there that he intends to give up radar secrets and something of special interest? Someone needs to be very upset by this man! But as fate would have it our Private X was a very special man indeed. He turns up 4 years later in the parade route here in Dallas, Texas. Whether we look at Oswald as a lone nut or a fall guy in the assassination of John F. Kennedy we now know that he knew a hell of a lot about the most sensitive program on the planet.
And I give you this vignette this morning not to give you any answers in the case but I guess to make the point that you can connect this story to the larger geostrategic game that was going on and Oswald was definitely involved in this because of his knowledge. Now I have more to say on that on Monday night, I would like to close on a lite note myself, my own joke and I told this at COPA. it’s actually true, but I’ll tell it here. One morning I woke up and my wife told me that I had done something funny the evening before, and I said well what’s that, and she said well you reached over and touched a certain part of my anatomy and squeezed it and said to me, “Mmm, nice file, nice file.”
Q and A session (edited to those that were asked of John Newman, or that John Newman responded to )
Hal Verb - ...my question and comment to John Newman, John I don’t know if you are aware of this and I have mentioned part of what I am about to say publicly before in previous forums, but what I’m going to say now has new information that I’ve subsequently discovered on my own, in prior forums I’ve mentioned that when Oswald was stationed at Atsugi he was involved in a very highly sensitive operation that perhaps is even higher than the U-2 program called METO. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, John, I’ll get into that in my comment. I have subsequently asked a researcher to get a FOIA request to see if he could find out if there was a METO. They said there was no such operation that they could release any information on. And I also spoke to a general who was an aide to Kennedy who said that he did not know of it. In Washington, at the recent conference [COPA ‘94] I learned that such an operation did exist. And I had my own view as to what the initials stood for and this individual confirmed yes that’s exactly what they stood for except for one change in one of the initials. Now, John, my question to you is were you aware of METO, are you aware of this operation, and if not we can discuss this further, it’s one of the things I want to discuss with you anyway...
John Newman - Hal, this meto (spelling) M-E-T-O? Mike, Echo, Tango, Oscar? Okay, no is the short answer. But I will say that I do have a lot of documents about the JKTO, and I don’t know what that means either. I have some guess about that. And I do know there is a CIA operation outside of the U-2 at Atsugi, and it may be called JTEC (he spells it) and it has political actions, probably for the whole theatre, I think JKTO is Japan-Korea Theatre of Operations, that’s just a guess. It’s interesting, the Japanese press, just recently was running a big story about these CIA operations in the ‘50s in Japan and I mean I got some calls from (names a Japanese press company) and so did others that I know of, got some calls recently because what’s coming out now is the extent to which the CIA was actually financing and paying the LDP during the early years of its existence. So I don’t know, I think we are just beginning to learn a lot about the CIA assets in Atsugi and elsewhere over there. For me to get into this, in this book that’s coming out (Oswald and the CIA) as I’m really up against the wall I would have to have a documentary trail to include it. So, I’m interested in talking to you later.
Hal Verb - The general who I interviewed was an aide to Kennedy happens to have been at Atsugi and was with the CIA.
Newman - Well, it could be that he just has the letters wrong. We’ll talk later, this is too haphazard.
Q. - I want to ask John two questions. First is it your opinion that the U-2 was shot down or sabotaged with explosives?
Newman - Well, I don’t have an opinion on that. Let me answer your question this way. There is a book by Michael Beschloss maybe it’s just about the U-2, [ “MAYDAY” by Beschloss] in any event in the back of that book, and I don’t believe it’s the Kennedy-Khrushchev years, but anyway Michael Beschloss is an historian and in the back of one of his books is a transcript of Eisenhower and John McCone who was the CIA Director after Allen Dulles was fired, and Eisenhower was engaged in writing his memoirs, “Waging Peace” at the time, and he was dealing with the U-2 problem, and he was very angry, you know Eisenhower lied, publicly. I don’t know whether you know that, but he denied, publicly, that we had anything to do with that U-2 when it went down. And he had been assured that Powers, well that the plane would have blown up, and Powers would have committed suicide and so on. So, he was told don’t worry there would be no evidence, and he got caught, and he was very upset about that, and there was a long discussion in the transcript that relates to your question about whether the thing was blown up and how it was blown up. One possibility may have been that they shot a lot of missiles and exploded them in the vicinity of the plane and got it that way. I don’t think anyone really knows definitively the answer, so that’s as much as I can tell you.
(responding from input by the audience) The book is Mayday, by Beschloss? Thank you very much. He has an interesting transcript in the back of it.
Q. - How about your thoughts on whether Oswald’s mission was to leak just enough information to have it brought down to forestall detente, or whether he was sincerely coopted-
Newman _ You see, that’s a tremendous leap. Did everyone hear the question, was Oswald there to leak information about the U-2? I don't have an opinion on that because the evidence is too fragmentary. Certainly, it’s consistent. One can argue that case. I could argue that case. You just phrased the question. I think, what I am going to end up arguing in my book is that his whole file, in this period, he looks like a spy, he walks like a spy, he talks like a spy, he probably was, at least in his own mind, the files are incomplete, there are a lot of things still classified.
If he was, was it a U-2 mission. Francis Gary Power, thinks so. I’ll tell you somebody else who’s commented on this publicly is Richard Synder, the American counsel, and he thought that what Oswald meant when he said “I’m going to give up radar secrets and something of special interest,” was the U-2. So, he’s guessing. And in accord with my comments last night, I don’t want to guess.
Q. - Well, it makes sense that it was his mission except that they did change their codes at Atsugi afterwards.
Newman - Yeah, and a lot more, now this was for Naval air, this is not the
U-2. He compromised call signs, and frequencies and so on, so yes, our entire operations were affected by that.
Q.-Thanks.
Newman - Sure.
Q. - Are you familiar with the article coauthored by John Galbraith that appeared in the American Prospect magazine this Fall having to do with President Kennedy’s reaction to the military and the CIA intelligence reports when national intelligence estimates were being presented to him for the first time in 1961 and these as I understand it these intelligence estimates had been annually given to President, to Eisenhower, and were centered, of course, on the missile gap and the missile relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States. This is an extremely interesting article, Galbraith claims it’s based on a newly released document, not necessarily an assassination document. Are you familiar with that article?
Newman - Yes. Can I rephrase that question?
Q. - Yes, if you would-
Newman - for the benefit of the audience. Do we know about this article by Jamie Galbraith, jr.? What’s it about, and what’s my opinion of it? And yes, I’m aware of it, it’s a very interesting article. In fact the source we are talking about is Howard Burris, for those of you who read my JFK and Vietnam you will know Howard figures very prominently in that. He was LBJ’s military aide. And what we are talking about here is another Burris memo, a lot of it has been blacked out. That article is about planing in the United States for a first strike against the Soviet Union. And it is an extraordinary article. It was something called the Net Evaluation Group and we are learning about it for the first time from new documents that the LBJ library up here in Austin, that’s where the information is coming from, the LBJ library. If you’re interested here, check out something we call the Vice-Presidential Security File, a lot of people overlook this. There is a Vice Presidential file that has information on a number of issues. I got a lot of my stuff out of the LBJ library, out of that very archives, in any event this article by Jamie Galbraith, jr., son of the John Galbraith, Sr.., a very famous U.S. official during the Kennedy administration, and before and after actually, wrote an article about this document and the research he did along with Heather Percell (sp?) who is right here at UT (Univ of Texas) and they advance the argument that we were very seriously considering a first strike against the Soviet Union, and actually I like your question because it fits in exactly with what I was talking about earlier, only it’s where the story goes after the part that I told you here today. Eisenhower did in fact speed up the United States ballistic missile program as a result of all those events and the fears I described, the missile bluff, missile gap, and so on, and therefore we were deploying a number of these ballistic missiles in a few short years. And guess when they came online, over the course of 1960. And John Kennedy came in as president when we had, literally, a tremendous capability just coming into our hands, and the satellites to see, to verify what the U-2 only hinted at, that they didn’t have any.
And what we are talking about here is a very unstable period in the history of U.S.-Soviet strategic relations there are only two periods like this, one is right here in the John Kennedy years and the other period is in the Reagan years, or let’s just say instead of Reagan let’s just say the end of the 70’s and the early 80’s. And in both instances one side had a significant advantage over the other side in strategic programs. And the case we’re talking about, and the question you’ve asked about, and Galbraith’s article, what we are talking about is a period where the United States had the advantage, a very huge advantage, and I analyze the entire panoply of foreign policy issues here, that would be Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Berlin, where the United States is very aggressive with the Russians, wants to roll them back everywhere. And in fact there were advocates for a first strike while we had the opportunity, one of the people who advocated this was Curtis LeMay, and if you’re interested in just how serious he was about that read my, I forget what chapter it is in JFK and Vietnam, it’s in the beginning of the book which deals with the Laos crises and how even though LeMay didn’t think the Chinese would come in he wanted to nuke them anyway and bring them in.
(some audience members laugh)
And yeah it is a bit funny, I mean it’s a bit surrealistic to think about it that people were serious about this. But the article that you mentioned is the first time that this has been written up actually, and it’s a respected journal, and it’s very, very interesting. I mean, I knew about it. I know Jamie. I knew about this document. And it’s very integral to what I’ll be doing with Kennedy and Cuba. I’m sorry I took so long to answer that question, but it’s an important one I think.
Q. - Can I make one other observation on that article? It is interesting to ponder that the national intelligence estimates indicated that the most favorable time, i.e., the greatest gap in favor of the United States to make a preemptive strike would have been in the Fall of- 1963
Newman - 1963. Thank you
Newman - Can I just intrude and ask if any of you have a question for Frank? Cause if you don’t I do. And Frank [Nzeakor], I don’t mean to mean, I’m just going to ask Frank if you don’t mind, and this is not to but you on the spot at all, cause you may know nothing but I’m curious if you do, have an opinion on the Lumumba assassination. Are you familiar with this, could you give us your perspective if you do have one?
Frank Nzeakor - Yeah, I don’t think I have much, you know, about the assassination...
Newman - The reason why I ask is that we are learning from these files that Lumumba was a target of ZR/RIFLE one of the first targets and the CIA claims not, well, they wanted to but they were not successful, someone else was . I was curious if you could tell us anything about that.
Frank Nzeakor - On that one you are talking about when I was 11 years old.
(they kind of laugh) That was in 1957 Patrice Lumumba was killed. As far as his killing, we believe now has some impact on what is going on [in the Congo.]
Newman - Is there a feeling today that the CIA was involved in that?
Nzeakor- Well, I won’t speak for the Congos, I’m from Nigeria. I don’t know what is the opinion about that now.
John Bevilaqua - Yes, this is a question for John. I’ve been trying to put together a chronology of Lee Harvey Oswald during certain periods in 1957 as you’ve done, and you’ve done an excellent job for a certain time period, but I didn’t hear the part about his location around October 10th through the 15th of ‘57. Was that part of your listing chronology, or can you recall from memory?
Newman - Yeah, well first of all he gets there in as I said, whatever September, right after, or before SPUTNIK, and his deployment to the Philippines is at the end of the year. So, I mean, I would have to sit down with you. I have the entire chronology now, to see exactly, I have the date that the ship leaves, and when they come back and so on. Is there a specific thing that you’re interested in?
Bevilaqua - Yeah, I’ll ask the other two parts then I’ll tell everybody what the specific thing is. Was there any period of hospitalization or incarceration-
Newman - Oh yeah, oh yeah-
Bevilaqua - of Oswald in ‘57.
Newman - And I don’t deal with that right now because it doesn’t really get me into the material. For me, the reason why I’m dealing with the U-2, incidentally is because of the lack of any investigation of Oswald when he defects. It is very important. Now if we can tie him to the JTEC or any other program over there, that’s fine too. The problem is I need hard facts, I need documents. I’m well aware of the shooting incident.
Bevilaqua - What was that, I’m not even, does anybody else here know,-
Newman - Yeah, the story is that Oswald, you know, inflicted this wound, it was a self inflicted wound, so he could get away and talk to his agent handlers, etc., etc., that is the conspiratorial, you know the possibility that did he do that.
Bevilaqua- But what was the date and approximately how long was he in the hospital, can anyone help me with that, what was the date of the self inflicted gunshot wound, and how long was he in the hospital, what was the date of the self inflicted gunshot wound and how long was he hospitalized?
Someone from the audience - It’s in the back of “Alias Oswald” [a book by Robert Cutler]
Bevilaqua - But was it the Summer or Fall of Ô57
Audience member - I don’t recall, I think, Fall, but the whole chronology is in the back of that book.
Bevilaqua - Well, it’ll be fun to know it today.
Newman - No, it’s a matter of record, it’s in his record, exactly the date.
Bevilaqua - And the third question is the meeting in Taiwan of the Asian Peoples Anti-Communist League. I have that as November of ‘57, maybe Dick Russell could tell us if he’s still here, I think he’s disappeared, does anybody know that date? And I’ll tell you why all three may be linked. Basically, the reason why I’m interested in those dates is that two very close associates and friends of Spas T. Raiken met their unfortunate and untimely demise in I think dates of mysterious disappearances where Oswald’s whereabouts are not very well known, one was October the 15th of 1959, Dr., I’m sorry not Doctor, but Prof. Stephan VanDara died in West Germany at the hands of the Minsk assassin (?) Voshinsky, and now I’m focusing on the first death of a friend of Spas. T. Raiken’s. On October 12th of ‘57, also at the hands of Voshon Voshinsky, where I am trying to go with this is the period of hospitalization and incarceration could also have been a period of indoctrination or programmed assassin, you know, for Oswald, and literally, as silly as this may sound the meeting of the Taiwanese Asian People’s Anti-Communist [League’s] meeting has been suggested to me by a source who should know that literally one of the items on the docket was a Manchurian Candidate type of demonstration and discussion, also on 11 ‘57, so it may go there. Do you think there is any possibility of linking those three events together?
John Newman - Without documents, I would never do a thing like that. It’s interesting, as all the details of Oswald’s past are interesting.
Bevilaqua - Obviously, you would prefer the documentation.
Newman - Well, yeah, or the source, I would need to know who they are, I would want to talk to them. I just canÕt tell you how important it is to have a conservative methodology, and not to guess, or not to advance a theory without enough substance. So, letÕs just say youÕre in the research stage at this point with this material and accumulating data, and then see how it works out. You have to sort out, I mean I would, what is anecdotal and what is documentary at least for the time being.
Q. - This is sort of a natural follow up for Doctor, or Major Newman, I agree with what you told us about Oswald’s relationship to the U-2 but as you know Gerald Posner has questioned whether there is any hard evidence of Oswald having had any real knowledge of the U-2,-
Newman - Yes, he did indeed
Q. - other than after the fact stories told by Lt. Donovan and specifically at Cubic point, my question is do you have any documentable evidence of him having watched radar blips or whatever at Cubic Point or anything else connected to the
U-2?
Newman - Sure. I was reading from the Detachment C history. Of course, they don’t mention Oswald’s name because the Marines were not in Detachment C, but we now have hard facts, we know where those U-2’s were, and it’s interesting to look at what the CIA has released. So we know that physically he is there. We know where his barracks were, it was on the runway, right, well, not on the runway, but next to the runway. They take off, they land, they see them. The pilots jump out, they throw black sheets over their heads, they go into the club and they talk to them at night. The pilots say, Oh we’re just doing local reconnaissance. We have a lot of documents about that. We know also, for example that Oswald’s unit at Cube point the patrol duty they were pulling was to guard the hangar. So, we do know some facts from documents, at least enough to get me interested to actually write about this, because I know I’ve got enough to get started
Q. - Yeah, I know, and circumstantial evidence, is evidence, but what I wanted to know is is there anything directly,
Newman - Oh yes there is.
[Was this goofball even in the room when John gave his presentation?]
Newman - But it’s not convincing, but it’s enough to take this very seriously and get started with it. So I’ve written a whole chapter, in fact, well, since you’ve asked me let me just tell you, these documents do have one error in them, there is a special classification for the U-2 program, and it was above Top Secret, they left the Top Secret on all these documents, but you can see clearly a redaction, it’s white, it’s neatly done, but you can see it, it’s missing, in every page, except one page, at the very end of the document, somebody screwed up and it says in big capital letters “EIDER CHESS,” Top Secret, Eider Chess. And we know a lot more about it now. And we know that Oswald’s unit knew a lot about it. They talked to those pilots, they tracked those planes. In fact, it’s interesting that at that time planes were not thought to be able to go above 60,000 feet or so, approximately. And the U-2 pilots would call in to the Marine unit as they hit 60,000 feet and check in and then as they were leaving at 80,000 and 100,000 feet say, “Siagnora!”, just to impress, you know, wow, the Marines and their little radar bubble down there. There isn’t any question about this, that Oswald’s unit was very, very involved, had to be by their physical locations.
Q. - Well, I can’t wait for your book, thank you.
Q. - Mr. Newman, you relate to us a story of how the Soviets had engaged in a strategic deception-
Newman - Maskarova, it’s called.
Q. - to convince us that they were strong when they were really weak. Could our whole U-2 program have represented a strategic deception to cover the fact that we knew the inside details but we had to have a way to cover our knowledge?
Newman - Well, you have to understand what the U-2 is, it’s a plane, that has, it’s a platform, and then it’s got camera’s on it. It can’t do anything except take pictures or intercept signals. It can’t do any cover-up. Now what people do with the intelligence, you can package that into..., but the U-2 itself can’t be anything to cover-up anything. In fact, I really believe just what I’ve told you, that the U-2 was crucial to get out and take a look at those impact areas, without the U-2 you couldn’t know whether any of those shots were successful, and I certainly wouldn’t want him to bank American lives, and war, nuclear war on a humint report out of Russia. I’d want photographs.
Q. - You would think that spy intell would be more important than human intell.
Newman - It’s another int, and you have to consider all the ints, humint, sig int, imagint, and the most convincing int in a ballistic missile test program is going to be photographic coverage of those impact areas, along with the radar emissions of the take off and flight, you know, telemetry is important too.
Q. - Thank you.
Newman - Sure.
Q. Mr. Newman, I would like to address this question to you, you mentioned that you were researching into OswaldÕs defection, will you also be researching into how he got back into the United States, because I feel this is a very important area that doesnÕt seem to be, or hasnÕt been covered, specifically to explain how he got back in and why no one has really come forward and explained-
Newman - What's your name sir?
Q. Steven Morley.
Newman - And you came from England?
Q. - I did. Yeah.
Newman - Welcome. I’m glad that you traveled all this way, Steven. And it’s a very incisive question, um, it just drove me crazy. You know, I don’t mean this as a criticism, but all the books that we have on this subject don’t do justice to 1960, 1961, and 1962. Part of it I supposed is that the documents haven’t been there, but there has been. If you look at those 26 volumes there’s a lot of material in there on this period. It’s tough. It’s tough to understand the four and five little compartments in the State Department that are dealing with this problem, and we’re talking about State Department security, I would add there, and the CIA, and the FBI, and the ONI, and believe it or not Air Force intelligence.
Peter Dale Scott and I tore our hair out for two straight weeks in my basement trying to tack together the complicated story of his, not just the return but dealing with [the question] had he expatriated himself or not, cause this affected whether he could come back in, and the entire panoply of issues is very difficult [but] we did it, and I think the answer is, if I could just use a sound bite, if I was on Bryant Gumbels, what is it, TODAY show, there you go, somebody lifted the gate.
Steven Morley - Do you think that had some of the earlier researchers investigated this, say 20 years ago, or spent more time in that particular area of Oswald’s return, we may well have learned more about why or how he got back into the country.
Newman - Absolutely. I’m very interested to see what happens this spring. I mean my own book is rather narrow, it’s focused on his internal files, but you got Norman Mailer, who spent a lot of time over there in Minsk, and David Lifton, everybody sort of screaming toward this deadline, we should have a nice melee about this issue, round about April or May of next year.
Steven Morley - Thank you very much
Ian Griggs - Can I just, just dealing briefly with the actual defection the journey of Oswald between this country and the Soviet Union, part of the research that is going on in England at the moment with one particular guy who is doing this, he is researching the stop over in England, methods of travel, dates, times, etc. and I’ve got to say this, he’s already dug up a lot of information that appears to have escaped researchers on this side of the Atlantic, he has also established that a lot of the so called facts published about this period on this side of the Atlantic are in error. He’s been in touch with the hotel in Finland, he’s been in touch with the airlines, timetables, and he’s tried to speak to fellow passengers. Hopefully, this will be developed over the next few months and hopefully, will be edited, written up, and published probably in the Fourth Decade, so Steven, there may be something here for you, just keep watching The Fourth Decade. Thank you.
Newman - Is there somebody in the audience who told me the story about Marina’s latest comment on the Helsinki trip? Well, that’s too bad. It’s very interesting, apparently she claims Oswald said now he took a hop. A hop. A military hop. Do you know this? Why don’t you tell us.
Ian Griggs - I know a little bit about this. I think she says it was a military hop. This is based mainly on the fact that he was wearing what appears to have been some sort of military uniform, and he wouldn’t have got on a military plane without this. We know that he had a certain kind of pass.
Newman - An ID card.
Griggs. - ID card, that would not have been available to a bona fide civilian. This would indicate some sort of intelligence connection, and Marina has now stated that she recalls, I think it was some sort of raincoat that he wore which was a military issued thing, and he obviously would not have gone on a military flight without this. This slightly goes against what my colleague in England is working on, these are directly opposite views but it’s certainly a valid point, and I don’t know why Marina hasn’t come up with this before, but she’s been talking about this for the last few months. We’ll wait and see.
Moderator - Okay, this will be our last question. Okay, yes, sir.
Q. - This is directed to Mr. Newman here. It’s a pleasure. Just some comments and a follow up maybe. I’m aware of the ‘56 of the late ‘56, of the first strike, I read it somewhere, but during the Cuban situation where the missiles were deployed my understanding, and of course at that time I was old enough to fight, and would have, cause I can remember the ships coming to the quarantine line, and we were listening to it, and we were very
John Newman - You were in the Navy at the time?
Q. - No, no, I was just a civilian, and just barely old enough to get into the military. And I know that the fellows I was with, a number of them are no longer with us as a result of ‘Nam, the point I wanted to make is, John Kennedy was aware that there was missiles or equipment coming into Cuba long before October of ‘62.
Newman - The answer to that is yes.
Q. - Why did he allow that in your opinion?
Newman - Did he allow what?
Q. - This to go on until he was forced -
Newman - Okay-
Q. in October of ‘62 to deal with it.
Newman - Let’s rephrase the question for clarity here. The question on the floor right now is was there awareness prior to the summer of 1962 of those Soviet missiles in Cuba and the answer is yes. And if that’s true what is the story then of Kennedy being surprised, and the American public being surprised by these photographs of these missiles, and the answer I would give you is that it’s part of a political struggle, and that article that somebody mentioned or asked about earlier, I think, is very much a part of this story, and I think that what we are going to find and this is early on for me, but if I were to answer you now how this looks or may look in those chapters that are going to be covering that period it looks to me like this was a pressure tactic to provoke a confrontation. I’m very concerned that some people may even have wished it to escalate. If I could just in closing, cause it is time to finish up, say that we have learned something about not exactly the question you’ve posed, earlier knowledge of the missiles, but that’s coming out, and not just in the book I’m going to do, I know of a very fine doctoral dissertation that has examined this and will argue, I think persuasively of earlier knowledge. But something that has fallen out of the American-Cuban-Russian retrospective discussions on the Cuban Missile Crises is very extraordinary, and the Americans didn’t know this at the time and were shocked, McNamara was one of the people, and Schlesinger was another one of the people representing America at these discussions, the Americans were absolutely shocked to find out that the Soviet commander in Cuba had authorization to fire those missiles if the United States attacked by air or land. And it’s interesting in retrospect now to know that Kennedy was given all these options, all of which included American attack, except for the one he picked which is to set up that blockade, and had any other option been chosen, this city might have been incinerated.
Q. - There’s no doubt about it. Last and final question, are the statements that were made that not all the missiles were removed from Cuba, and that was the last thing I wanted to-
Newman - Yeah, I don’t know what the state of the evidence is on that. I know there’s a lot of controversy about that-
Q. - That they still have ‘em.
Newman - How many of you have heard of the Bayo-Pawley mission? A number of you. Hinckle and Turner wrote about it, it's in a lot of books, Gaeton [Fonzi] has written about it, Peter, Peter Scott's written about it, these new files that we're looking at now have the CIA report, the wrap up of the Bayo-Pawley mission, it wasn't the Bayo, the actual name of it was Operation Tilt and apparently to exfiltrate four not two, Hinckle and Turner thought it was two, it's four, Soviet officers, intelligence officers, from a missile base that was still supposed to be there after they were supposed to have been taken out. Whether it's true or not I'm not sure, and of course this Tilt mission failed, they never came back. So, there is a lot of new information on that and it may be that not all of them were taken out. We are going to have to wrap it up.
Q. - I thank you for you thoughts.
Newman - You’re welcome sir, thank you.
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