JAMES RASENBERGER Just In Time For Another Election

The Brilliant Disaster:  The Brilliant Deception

     by Winsip Custer CPW News Services

     James Rasenberger’s book The Brilliant Disaster was published by Simon & Schuster in 2011 almost 50 years after the Bay of Pigs invasion that cost President John F. Kennedy significant political capital only a year after his election.  That was then.  Today, according to a new book it was a “brilliant disaster”.  That was in April, 1961, but the build-up of the planned invasion had begun during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.
     Why Rasenberger’s new book on this well-worn story?  Why now, 50 years later on top of a heap of other books on the subject?  He has claimed that it is because it takes time for the dust to settle on history so that the real story can be told.  So what is new in the Rasenberger coverage of this tragic event?  That Kennedy was conflicted over it?  No.  That  there was anti-communist hysteria in the U.S.?  No.  That air support for the invasion was withheld by Kennedy who feared a world-wide negative reaction including a threat from the former Soviet Union?  No.
      There is only one conclusion that can be drawn.  Rasenberger’s book was designed to tweek history’s descended dust cloud, not to find the truth just under a thin layer of now settled and nearly transparent powder.  So where does he push the debris into a deeper camouflaging  hump?  There is only one place and that is in the assertion that the work of NY Times reporter, Paul P. Kennedy, was cover for the Bay of Pigs invasion force rather than a gum-shoe, on the ground, honest evaluation of a U.S. backed clandestine operation as chilling as a William Walker filibustering attempt or Ollie North’s Iran-Contra training camps in Belize on property provided by Coca-Cola, or the invasion of Iraq under false pretenses or the protracted war in Afghanistan on the argument that drone fly-bys are controlling terrorism.

     That Simon & Schuster published Rasenberger’s book is further witness to the fact that history is mythologized and that the truth, as Winston Churchill notes, “is always covered with a swarm of lies.”  In this case, the only new material in the entire book is one seemingly insignificant assertion.  One undocumented tweek in a book claiming to be based on recently unclassified material.  As Peter Brewton, the Houston Post reporter covering the 1980’s and 90’s Savings & Loan scandal discovered  in his investigative series turned book,  The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (NY, Shapolsky, 1992),  which was to have been released by Simon & Schuster well before the 1992 election, the same players in the S&L scandal were also key players in the  Iran-Contra scandal.  According to Brewton, Simon & Schuster had his book in the hopper and his editor was to have been the editor of Woodward and Bernstein’s All The President’s Men, Alice Mayhew. 
    Simon & Schuster was influenced, Brewton believed, by Hugh Leidtke, president of Pennzoil and George Herbert Walker Bush's close personal ally in Houston, Texas, in time to avoid any embarrassment for the 1992 campaign that included threats against Independent candidate, Ross Perot’s family.   Some have speculated that those threats were for Perot’s  inclusion of Vietnam veteran and outspoken Bush critic, Perot supporter Col. Bo Gritz, in Perot's 1992 presidential bid against both GHWB and Bill Clinton.  The well documented Mena, Arkansas drug connections to the CIA  as well as the CIA/Iran-Contra drug connection uncovered by reporter Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance, have collaborated Gritz’s criticisms.  In addition, the key money laundering bank for the Contra operation was in Clinton's home state, not far from Mena in Little Rock, BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
     It is widely reported that the  historical marriage between the CIA and Mafia can be traced to a CIA agent named Robert Maheu.  It is not known if Robert Maheu and Alice Mayhew are related, but the names share a common root and Robert and his son, Peter, started a Las Vegas global security company with the nephew of CIA director William Casey.  When called to testify in the Iran-Contra hearings, William Casey's speech became mysteriously unintelligible.  Robert Maheu had, after all, been the go-to-guy for the CIA/Mafia plot to kill Castro employing both the Chicago Mob and Las Vegas' Johnny Roselli.  Maheu was also the man responsible for recruiting what is known as the "Mormon Mafia" that surrounded Howard Hughes, former husband of Houston, Texas socialite and family namesake of Rice University, which Hughes also attended, Ella Rice.

     Paul P. Kennedy’s reporting in both The Nation and The NY Times gave America advanced warning of an impending clandestine invasion of Cuba from a secret base in Guatemala.  Was Paul P. Kennedy a member of the John Fitzgerald Kennedy family?   Was he seeking to garner public support for an alternative mission to Cuba?   A mission less violent for a nation whose many citizens had lived under years of organized crime and corruption of the Fulgencio Bautista regime? Cubans initially welcomed Castro’s arrival as a promise of a better day.    For the U.S. power elites who knew that the Kennedys had, like most of them, made their family wealth in smuggling, Paul P. Kennedy’s reporting may well have been a threat to the delicate concordat between dark family forces that aligned within traditionally Irish and Italian Catholic and Puritan Protestant New England enclaves.  The Irish with their own crime syndicate were sandwiched between the pinnacle New England Brahmin’s-Puritan Protestant-Ivy League-CIA based crime syndicate of the American establishment and the lowly Italian’s who along with the Jewish cabal of Meyer Lansky, had controlled Cuba under Bautista and would, as Peter Brewton showed in The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, frequently join forces to pull off an Operation Zapata, an S & L scandal, an Iran-Contra affair, a coup in Iran, Argentina or Chile, a civil-war in Iraq….any number of scourges that raped the average citizen regardless of their nationality.

      What does Rasenberger say of Paul P. Kennedy’s reporting?   With no footnote, no disclosure of the documentary proof that his publisher, Peter Brewton's would-be-publisher Simon & Schuster, said bolstered the book, The Brilliant Disaster makes this claims on page 107…..

     Reading on it turned out that the CIA had no reason to worry.  Paul Kennedy had been duped by his Guatemala sources.  The commandos were Guatemala soldiers.  Kennedy was told and their training was a purely defensive measure, undertaken in anticipation of an attack---from Cuba.  The CIA itself could not have devised a better cover story.
 

    The Bay of Pigs invasion team didn't need a better cover story.  They needed air cover.  If the secret base in Guatemala was such an effective ploy, why not go all the way?  Or at least half-way.  Guatemala military planes to provide what was essential?  What no pilots?  The CIA is good at providing them, too.  Remember Eugene Hausenfus?  JFK, the skipper of PT-109 surely knew the value of close air support.  Oh yes, but he was conflicted over Cuba and afraid of Cuban MIG's?  Or was he at odds with what looked to him like another William Walker filibustering attempt that made us no better than Castro or the Russians? 
  It is exactly here at page 107 that we would expect  to see the all new previously unavailable references to the recently unclassified material that Simon & Schuster promises in its Madison Avenue hype....hype for an author whose books have in turn hyped Madison Avenue and Wall Street skyscrapers, the place of Henry Ford in American folklore that never mentions his dependence on the collective of American laborers and tax-paid roadways over which his cars travel.  Instead we get only a footnote referencing another NY Times reporter who "seems to imply" not a Paul P. Kennedy duping, but a below par "CIA cover story knowingly".  So Rasenberger states of Harrison Salisbury:

      So which was it Mr. Rasenberger?  A duping or a below par cover story?  The subsequent events of JFK's life indicate all too strongly that it was neither, but in fact something far clearer.  In fact, Paul P. Kennedy had begun working on this rumored CIA operation much earlier having published on November 19, 1960 in The Nation the article titled "Are We Training Cuban Guerrillas?".
     Simon & Schuster's own web site reviews of The Brilliant Disaster unflinchingly lay it out there:  "What I love about Jim Rasenberger's richly detailed, startlingly revisionist account of the Bay of Pigs invasion is his sheer storytelling ability, the wonderful, steady march of plot and counterplot, of heroes and foils. His tale is chock full of larger-than-life characters," writes young Austin, Texas author, S.C. Gwynne, who writes not unlike his fellow Austin, Texan and Bush apologist, Lawrence Wright, whose Pulitizer Prize winning book, The Looming Tower, was awarded its prize in spite of glaring omissions in the story of the 911 disaster.  "Startlingly revisionist," is as exact as any review can be of this book.  And "chock full of larger-than-life charcters" is in keeping with another Simon & Schuster formula.

      Rasenberger will never write a book titled The 1930's, like his book 1908, but exposing the American Fascist's support of Hitler's Germany and the "business plot" that would have had the larger than life two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, a self-confessed pawn of the "National City Bank Boy's" and their war profiteering backers the proposed leader for a planned overthrow of FDR.  Who made up the plot?   Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, John Burroughs, Charles Lindberg and Prescott Bush among others....and a plot that no one has....in true revisionist fashion....ever heard of.   Simon & Schuster did not publish Butler's book War Is A Racket.   Neither did Alice Mayhew ever edit a book by Robert Maheu about his role as a Canadian Nazi sympathizer during World War II who infiltrated the Germany American Bund that so appealed to these business leaders and coup plotters.  It would have made an excellent read along with the work of O. John Rogge who investigated the group for the Justice Department.

    According to Stephen Brill (How Woodward Went Wayward, 1999), Alice Mayhew' genius was that she pushed Woodward and Bernstein to be dramatic in a big way.  A big story with big personalities would sell.  The Nixon break-ins?  How was Brewton's book about the intricate connections between the Iran-Contra players with what we now know had a drug connection and their involvement in the S&L Scandal NOT a bigger story?   Iran-Contra's leadership went straight to the White House, but stopped short of indictments of Reagan and Bush whose Bay of Pigs connections have been laid out in the documentary Dark Legacy.  That legacy would morph from the Bay of Pigs into the Iran-Contra scandal, but stopped short of impeachment for Reagan and Bush and only indicted Oliver North, John Poindexter, Eliot Abrams and Casper Weinberger.  Since then North's shredding expert and secretary, Fawn Hall, married the former agent of The Doors lead singer, Jim Morrison, whose father was took the lead as the Navy Admiral was in charge of the LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin Affair triggering the escalation of the Vietnam War.   The attorney for the U.S. Justice Department that helped to firewall the Iran-Contra investigation,  Michael Bromwich, went on to investigate the corruption created at Houston's Harris County Medical Examiners Office, then spring boarded into the investigation of BP's Deep Water Horizon disaster that had all the earmarks of a ship wrecking and salvage operation. 
     Was Nixon who disliked the drama of dancing around an owl in the Bohemian Grove in bed sheets and calling the powerful frolickers "the most faggety goddamn thing you can imagine" enough to brand him a hot literary target by the power elites especially given his leadership in closing down the Vietnam War which Gritz confirmed had its drug connection like Iran-Contra?  Or was he part of the ploy as Dark Legacy proclaims?  Was having Nixon so close to  the Bush compound at the Ocean Reef Club in Miami near where Cuban ex-patriots had also been in secret training in 1960 and where Nixon's close friend, Bebe Rebozo, lived as Brewton also covers extensively in his book on the Bush, the CIA and Mafia?
     One must remember that the Nixon speech writer who also penned Nixon's resignation letter was none other than David Gergen who was by his own admission ambushed by the gate crasher at the Bohemian Grove, Alex Jones.  A staunch defender of the group that Nixon loathed, Gergen will discuss the relationship between Nixon and Bill Clinton whose wife, Hillary, was a key attorney on the Nixon impeachment team.  Gergen relates how, ironically, at a meeting with Clinton's chief of staff at a Washington Hotel on DuPont Circle, along with Monica Crowley, Nixon tells Gergen to tell Clinton to support NAFTA and to read about England's repeal of the "Corn Laws" from the 19th Century as justification for supporting NAFTA.  According to Gergen those laws in Nixon's eyes were responsible for fueling the great economy of the British Empire.  In the 19th Century?  When England was already beginning a steep post-industrial decline?  Ross Perot would oppose NAFTA which was initiated by George Herbert Walker Bush, even as Perot marshaled anti-Bush support in 1991-92 using Bush critics like Col. Bo Gritz who would claim that the U.S./Golden Triangle drug liaison was Bush aide, Richard Armitage.  Perot told Americans that they would hear from GATT and NAFTA a "huge sucking noise from U.S. jobs departing the country."
     In time, Hillary Clinton who had conveniently swept the White House clean of U.S. memories of the illegal Nixon/Kissinger bombing of Cambodia as a prelude to peace in Vietnam that left 50,000 American GI's and millions of Indo-Chinese dead, would become Secretary of State after Colin Powell and Condeleeza Rice.  Hillary would add to her staff Huma Mahmood Abedin as chief of staff.  Abedin has been criticized for long standing ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that spawned Al Qaeda which was incubated by the MB in Hosni Mubarrak's repressive, but protective environment. Fighting alongside the Mujaheddin in USSR occupied Afghanistan and working with the highest elements of the CIA and NSA, Al Qaeda initially did much of these agency's dirty work across the Arab world up until 911 when, the story goes, they penetrated the U.S. along established drug routes and through U.S. flight schools that often trained drug smugglers supplying the CIA back channels.
     Was Nixon in the cross-hairs of the U.S. military complex because of his continuation of Kennedy's rejection of unrestrained militarism, an idealism clearly checked by Nixon's handler, Henry Kissinger who many say should be hauled before the International Criminal Court in the Hague like Augusto Pinochet?   As events of the later Cuban missile crisis have shown, JFK had no handler like Kissinger, not even Averill Harriman, heir of the railroad baron whose company had employed Prescott Bush, father of two U.S. Presidents.
     The place to really look to that question is to Alice Mayhew, Woodward and Bernstein and especially to indicted and pardoned FBI agent, Mark Felt, AKA, "Deep Throat."   Mysterious Mr.Felt, who dribbled an anonymous trail to Nixon's White House basement plumber's group, was indicted in his pursuit of the Weather Underground and an accompanying violation of civil rights that Ronald Reagan saw as forgivable given the threat. "Reagan didn't want Felt dribbling anything about Nancy's astrologer to Kitty Kelly," said one Reagan insider.  The Weather Underground, of course, is the radical student group of which Chicagoan William Ayers, the conflicted son of a compromised U.S. industrialist, who not unlike John Walker Lindh and son of the U.S. Navy admiral in charge of LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin affair, Jim Morrison of The Doors, rejecting their father's values.
     Felt has written his own account of his FBI years titled A G-Man's Life, an irrationally sympathetic book that was heartily panned.  His co-author, California attorney who represents companies like Hewlitt-Packard, Sony and Pacific Gas and Electric, John O'Connor, called Mr. Felt "the original whistle blower" and "a hero" concerned about "transparency" in government and especially the FBI.
     John W. Dean who unlike Felt publicly indicted Nixon during the Watergate hearings,  writing for the NY Times about Felt's book ("The Source Runs Dry", May 7, 2006) said:   "A G-Man's Life," like "The FBI Pyramid," views the Federal Bureau of Investigation through rose-colored glasses. Felt virtually ignores the F.B.I. that was described in the 1976 reports of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities (better known as the Church committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church), and he completely ignores the bureau that was more recently found to have let several men serve 30 years in prison for a murder it knew one of its informants had committed. If Felt's account were even close to accurate, some Republicans and Democrats would not be pursuing legislation to remove Hoover's name from the F.B.I. headquarters building. As Laurence Silberman, a senior federal judge, has nicely summed it up, "it is as if the Defense Department were named for Aaron Burr."
    This, of course, fails to show that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI took the lead in investigating the "business plotters" and the hard right, Nazi-sympathetic American business leaders including the grandfather of a future CIA Director, George Herbert Walker Bush, who many believe have their own connection to Aaron Burr-type personality, ie., flamboyant filibusterer of the 19th Century and close ally of Barbara Pierce Bush ancestor, Franklin Pierce, William Walker.  At least two films about William Walker's exploits have been made one with politically eye-opened actor Marlon Brando.
    Aaron Burr, of course, was the pre-William Walker era filibusterer who had tried to annex everything west of the Mississippi and appoint himself as "monarch",  "president for life" or some other equally fitting title unbecoming of his Presbyterian heritage. Had Burr never read about John Knox's rejection of the tyrannical, murderous, British monarch Bloody Mary?  Burr's work set the stage for Willam Walker's misguided adventures that went west and then south to Central America where Walker's only major support came from Franklin Pierce.   Many historians believe that William Walker was seeking a Pacific seaport that would cut short the New England China Traders smuggling routes like the ones that serendipitously fell into the laps of the U.S. insurance company AIG with the collapse of the Dubai "ports deal".  AIG had its beginnings in insuring shipments of goods from Shanghai, China to America in the 19th Century with mail routes guaranteed by the U.S. Navy and guaranteed routes funded with tax dollars just as in Henry Paulson's 2008 toxic-asset-purchase-turned-bank-and-insurance-company-bailout....an early example of Capitalism's failure to avoid "mixed-markets". 
     Mrs. Bush's family had migrated spiritually in recent years from the representative faith of John Knox to the more oligarchical Anglican tradition of Queen Elizabeth, caught as the young queen was between her bloody sister, Mary, and bloodier father, Henry VIII, the church's founder.   It was there that Mrs. Bush found her  husband's Skull & Bones nickname of "Moloch" less problematic. Meanwhile, Latin Americans are calling for the exhumation of the body of William Walker for DNA analysis and comparison to the Walker-Bush clan in the same way that Thomas Jefferson's remains compare to the family of Jefferson's slave, Sally Hemmings.
     Rasenberger's father is reportedly an attorney and Washington insider who worked to free over 1000 Bay of Pigs invaders imprisoned in the brilliant disaster....most of whom have never felt that there was anything brilliant about it.
      Ironically, or perhaps not, Paul P. Kennedy’s wife helped found the Austin, Texas restaurant where  George Walker Bush is said to have proposed to his wife, Laura Welch Bush, Fonda San Miguel.  Kennedy’s wife, Diana Southwood Kennedy, is a world renowned author and chef specializing in classic, hot, Latin American dishes.  None as hot as the Bay of Pigs also CIA code named  "Operation Zapata", the same name as George Herbert Walker Bush’s oil company at the time of the CIA-backed invasion.
     A young future president Bush would not propose to his bride in a restaurant associated with the leading CIA cover-story provider on the Bay of Pigs.  Especially if that reporter had been duped.   Meaning that whatever Paul P. Kennedy was doing in writing the NY Times story it was not assisting the Bay of Pigs invaders nor the U.S. military adventurers behind them.   Not even dogs return to their own vomit.  What?  They do?