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Posada Carriles and the National Security Archive "Documents"

By Servando Gonzalez (2005)

 

"Papers connect exile to bomb plot. Documents say that Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban militant seeking U.S. asylum, attended two meetings at which the1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner was planned," is the title of an article by Oscar Corral, published by the Miami Herald on May 10, 2005. According to Corral,

Luis Posada Carriles attended at least two planning meetings for the bombing of a Cuban jetliner in 1976 that killed 73 people, according to once-secret document Washington.

The records, made up of FBI and CIA files that were part of an investigation into the airliner bombing and other anti-Castro terrorism in the 1970s, may further complicate Posada's bid for U.S. asylum.

The National Security Archive, a private research institute and library at George Washington University, plans to post the rest of the Posada documents online today at http://www.gwu.edu/~nsar chiv/. The archive catalogs and releases declassified U.S. documents often obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

''There is no way the Bush administration can ignore the historical record as it evaluates his petition for safe harbor,'' said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst and Cuba specialist at the archive.

I have not studied in detail de case of the bombing of the Cubana plane, but I know a lot about the so called National Security "Archive", therefore, I suggest to take these documents with a grain of salt.

Planes have been the vehicle of choice for Castro's self-provocation exercises. I heard in Havana some years ago an interesting rumor about the Cubana de Aviación airliner allegedly sabotaged by anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada Carriles in 1973, killing all people on board, including the Cuban Olympic fencing team. According to the rumor, Beatriz Márquez, a Cuban singer in vogue at the time, was on a tour in Venezuela and was scheduled to fly back to Cuba in that plane. But, at the very last moment, she allegedly changed her mind and decided to cancel her flight. The plane took off with the rest of the passengers and was blown out of the sky. Everybody aboard the plane died. Beatriz Márquez was very lucky, and her last moment decision saved her from a sure death.

But Beatriz Márquez was probably not only lucky. Her husband was a senior officer of Fidel Castro's personal security team, and she had very good contacts at the highest levels of the Castro government. Some people in Cuba believe that, though the Castro government perhaps was not directly involved in the terrorist action, they knew the plane was doomed, and they saved Ms. Márquez' life. The rest of the people in the plane, including the team of young Olympic fencers, were expendable. Revolutions need martyrs, and Castro has never been shy in committing terrorist actions in order to provide martyrs for his revolution.

I am copying below part of a chapter of my book The Nuclear Deception: Nikita Khrushchev and the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which I devoted some space to show that the National Security "Archive" is not what it purports to be, and its disinformation job has nothing to do with documents.

I have come to believe that the guys at the NSA are not only a bunch of liars, but that the NSA is most likely a CIA front. Having in mind that, for some strange reason, the CIA always ends up by playing Castro's hand and vice versa, I would not be surprised if some day we discover that the spy agency has strong interests in having Castro get a hold on Posada Carriles. Perhaps Mr. Posada knows too much about both Castro and the CIA.

If any friend of Mr. Posada Carriles reads this article, I would appreciate if he passes it to him.

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The National Security "Archive"

According to information posted on its Web site, "the National Security Archive began a concerted campaign in 1987 to advance the historical record on the missile crisis." "The availability of previously classified material has enabled scholars both to challenge the conventional wisdom and to revise long-standing historical interpretation of the events that took place before, during, and after October 1962." But, as I have proved above, far from advancing, the historical record on the Cuban missile crisis, since 1987 it has moved backwards -among other things, thanks to the concerted campaign headed by the National Security Archive. Therefore, an analysis of the work of the National Security Archive is in order.

The first thing that calls the attention of an inquisitive reader is the name of this organization. I asked several educated persons, including several college professors and librarians, what was, according to their belief, the National Security Archive. All of them, with the single exception of an archivist who was familiar with it, thought that the National Security Archive was a government organization -which I myself believed for some time.

But, a close look at the Archive's Web site reveals that they are a non-governmental institution that receives no government funding. According to its own definition,

The National Security Archive was founded in 1985 by a group of journalists and scholars who have obtained documentation from the US government under the Freedom of Information Act and sought a centralized repository for these materials. Over the past decade, the Archive has become the world's largest non governmental library of declassified documents.

Therefore, one thing is certain: The name National Security Archive is misleading. It is also misleading that the above paragraph does not mention that the "group of journalists and scholars" who founded the Archive were mostly leftists and left-wing liberals.

It is not a coincidence that the main goal of the Archive has been to obtain documents that prove the evil doings of the CIA, the Department of Defense and other government organizations, particularly about events occurred during Republican administrations, or documents that show the evil intent of the right wingers in the Army and other branches of the government during Democrat administrations.

The second notable thing that calls one's attention about this non-governmental organization's name is the use of the word "archive." Reading on the Archive's Web site I found that it is called an archive, "Despite the Archive's non-traditional role (since the originals remain inside the government -hopefully)."[sic] A cursory view at some of the "documents" the National Security Archive allegedly keeps, shows that they are actually photocopies, not the original documents. Actually, they are not just photocopies, but photocopies of photocopies.

Due to the fact that no mention is found in the site about any authentication procedure of the copies of copies of the documents they keep, one may safely surmise that the archivists at the National Security Archive have never seen, touched or scrutinized the original documents of which they keep alleged faithful copies. This is simply amazing, because in the archival profession the process of authentication, that is, the evaluation of the physical veracity of a document, is a long, difficult and painstaking job. In the case of documents whose source is dubious or have a reputation for dissembling, extra care is taken. But, apparently, the persons in charge of the National Security Archive have trusted the certification of the copies of alleged documents whose originals -they hope- remain inside the government, the very same organizations most of them despise because of their lying and cunning.

According to the Random House Webster's College Dictionary, 1977 edition, an archive is "a place where documents and other materials of historical importance are preserved; the documents and other materials preserved in such a place." This is more or less the definition of the word "archive" found in most dictionaries. No mention is made in any of the dictionaries I consulted about an archive being a place for the preservation of copies of documents. Therefore, if an archive is a depository of documents, and the National Security Archive is actually the depository of photocopies of alleged documents provided by non-reliable sources which hopefully remain in the government's possession, one has to reach the conclusion that the name National Security Archive is also misleading, because its role is so "non-traditional" that it is not an archive in the proper sense of the word.

Then, if it is not an archive, What is actually the National Security Archive? The National Security "Archive" is, at best, a hoax or a clever joke; at worst, an extraordinarily successful exercise in deception.

The Value of Documents

Intelligence professionals believe that all documents are suspect, particularly the ones purposely left as "historical evidence". As Daniel Ellsberg puts it, "The idea that official documents contain the real history of what transpires within the circles of power is a questionable assumption made by too many historians," adding that "So much of the official record is deception written as cover or justification for existing policy."

Sir William Stephenson, the famous spymaster, once said that nothing deceives like a document. To intelligence analysts, all official recorded information is potential disinformation. This includes official records, memos, letters, photographs, etc., including audio recordings and, particularly after the advent of computer generated imaging, film, video recordings and all types of computer data.

It is useful to keep in mind that declassified documents are as untrustworthy as any other source. The fact that a document was labelled classified, and it has been declassified after some period of time, does not guarantee that what it says is the truth, nor that its original intent has not been disinformation.

It seems that, at least in the case of studies about the Cuban missile crisis, Stephenson was close to the truth. In the Introduction to a recent study of the missile crisis, Blight and Welch assert that "While an irreducible element of mystery enshrouds the event, and while imbalances in sources remain, the Cuban missile crisis remains the most thoroughly documented historical encounter of all time." Paradoxically, the Cuban missile crisis remains full of unanswered key questions. Proof of it is that, after so many scholarly studies about the crisis, Blight and Welch's words closely resemble Castro's words when, less than six months after the crisis, he said, "This is a mystery. Maybe historians will be able to clarify this twenty years hence. I don't know." But it is evident that, far from clarifying the event, historians have been adding confusion to it. This doesn't says good of their love for documents.

Not being trained in the black arts of intelligence and espionage, most scholars involved in the study of the Cuban missile crisis have been accepting raw data, that is, information, -i.e., documents, interviews, etc.- as if it were what in the field of intelligence and espionage is called intelligence. They seem to ignore that intelligence is not the product of the collection, but of the analysis of all types of data. It is not until the collected information has been thoroughly evaluated according to certain specific rules and criteria, that it becomes true intelligence. An important element in the evaluation process is the verification that the information has not been intentionally created for disinformation purposes, that is, that the person or persons who created it has intentionally lied. A close reading of the books produced by these scholars, however, show that the possibility that some of their sources may have intentionally lied for disinformation purposes seems to have been totally absent from their minds.

Documents or Images of Documents?

As in Magritte's famous picture of a pipe with the caption "This is not a pipe," a copy of a document is not the document. Some naïve reader may think that my contention that some of the copies of the documents archived in the National Security Archive may not be a faithful rendering of the original, or that some of them may be total fabrications, is far-fetched. On the contrary, it is totally justified.

My main objection to accepting copies of documents at face value is simply that, for obvious reasons, it has never been an accepted practice among archivists. Moreover, how can one accept without verification alleged copies of documents provided, among others, by the CIA, an organization that has a whole department devoted to the falsification of documents? How can we accept at face value the word of people from an organization whose main job is lying and deceiving?

My concerns about the possibility that some of these "declassified' documents may be faked is not the product of a paranoid mind, but a legitimate one based on objective facts. It is widely known that the CIA and other U.S. government agencies have falsified documents. The CIA makes considerable use of forged documents. Just last year, an internal inquiry found that the very Pentagon agency charged with discovering and exposing fraud destroyed incriminating documents and replaced them with falsified ones to avoid embarrassment when its own operations were audited. The Soviet (and now Russian) intelligence services has a department exclusively working full-time in the falsification of documents. Some of the KGB cobblers boasted that their falsifications were better than the originals. The Cuban DGI is proud of the quality of the works of its Technical Support Division, the department responsible for the production of false documents.

Government officials would not accept a copy of a birth certificate or a certificate of naturalization in lieu of the original document. Why is one supposed to accept from this same government copies of documents instead of the originals? Apparently Americans have become so fascinated with images that they have lost the dividing line between things and their images. But, despite general agreement of the contrary, a thing and its image are not the same thing. In the same fashion, a copy of a document is not the same as the document itself.

Have the signatures and other handwritten notations undergone calligraphic analysis to verify that they are not forgeries? Have the watermarks on the paper been checked to make sure that the documents were typed on similar paper as the one used in similar documents typed at the same place and at approximately the same time? For example, in the particular case of Castro's speech mentioned in the previous chapter, did Brenner and Blight actually listen to the original recording? Assuming that they did, did they electronically analyzed the tape looking for alterations or forgeries? If what Castro gave them was a transcript of his speech there is a strong possibility that they have been shortchanged. It is known that Castro heavily edits his own speeches before, and sometimes after, publication. Therefore, if this was the case, what they actually got was not what Castro said, but what Castro would like to have said.

A historian may consider the physical analyses of documents I have mentioned above pure and simple paranoia, but they are standard operating procedure for intelligence professionals, who have been using them successfully for centuries. The main reason for these precautions is that all intelligence services have whole sections devoted to the forging of documents. As a matter of fact, document forgery is an important specialization in the intelligence field. Consequently, intelligence officers are very careful not to fall in the same traps they normally set against their opponents.

Most scholars believe that true history only comes out of the study of original documents. Scholars are apparently satisfied when they verify the authenticity of a document. Intelligence officers, go a step further and try to verify its reliability, which is mostly given by the reliability of the person or persons who created it in the first place. Therefore, the last thing they would do would be to trust documents produced by opposing intelligence services-unless those documents, disregarding their truthfulness, help them to prove their point. For example, CIA officers would happily accept any declassified KGB document proving that Penkovsky was a traitor, while they will never accept a similar one proving that Penkovsky was a Soviet plant.

Intelligence officers are aware that, particularly in recent history, some of the documents have been left for the sole purpose of disinformation. Moreover, most scholars apparently ignore that a great part of dirty politics is based on orders never put to paper or never spoken, but merely "understood" by subordinates. Therefore, an important part of modern history is systematically left out of the reach of scholarly work.

The comments above do not mean that I think that all the copies of the documents in possession of the National Security Archive are false. Most likely the majority of them are true copies of the original documents they claim to be -though probably some of them are not, and at least a few may be total fabrications. The point I want to emphasize is that, because these copies have not been validated against the original documents, and there is no way they can be validated for the time being -hoping that they still exist somewhere in the government's archives- and that the originally documents have not been authenticated, the copies of documents in the possession of the National Security Archive are suspect and do not constitute a reliable source of information until they have been scientifically authenticated by qualified professionals. Moreover, all scholarly work based on information whose source is these documents should be considered suspect and unreliable. I think that, given the provenance of these documents, and the irregularities in their authentication (or lack of it), such skepticism is merely prudent.

This concern is even more justified when we see that, based on these "documents," some scholars have arrived at new explanations, sometimes diverging considerably from previous ones, about what really happened in some seminal historic events -like the Cuban missile crisis for example. The main danger I see in this trend of accepting spurious documents at face value is that studies based on them, which may be the product of erroneous data and, therefore, erroneous themselves, may one day be used by American leaders as a guide for future actions -the "lessons of the Cuban missile crisis" mentality. This is a mistake that may bring momentous consequences to America.

The Ouroboros of American Politics

According to the National Security Archive's web site, its close to $1.8 million yearly budget comes in part from private philanthropists. Among the organizations providing funds for the Archives are the Arca Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Rockefeller Family Fund, just to mention a few.

What is difficult to understand is why the same people who made billions as the direct results of the evil doings of the CIA and other U.S. government agencies, are now out with the apparent intention of crucifying them. Like the medieval depiction of the ouroboros -a serpent biting its tail- they are shooting themselves in the foot. This, at least to me, is highly suspicious. May it be that this is precisely what they are trying to avoid?

A significant detail is that, though apparently damaging, most of the areas of interest of the National Security Archive do not deal with subjects which may be a cause of embarrassment for the people who are economically supporting the Archive. No documents in the National Security Archives mention the collaboration of some members of the US government and their friends in the industry and banks with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. I particularly have not heard of any "document" in the National Security Archive mentioning the CIA's role in overthrowing Batista and helping Castro grab power in Cuba. And this brings us to another obscure area of the "documents" in the National Security Archive.

Even though the role of the National Security Archive in the procuring of documents is a proactive one -usually they ask based on the Freedom of Information Act for a document they presume exists- the documents the different branches of the U.S. government eventually declassify are those that, for some reason, they believe are not smoking guns. Therefore, this is a case of deception by omission. We can safely assume that the truly damaging documents will never be made public.

One of the most pernicious side-effects of the activity of the National Security Archive is that it has contributed to create the illusion that one can write truthful history based on the information provided by "declassified" documents provided by any government organization of any country -particularly intelligence organizations. But the idea is fallacious. In the first place, there is no guarantee that some of the key documents have not been doctored or fabricated from scratch. Secondly, the fact that some of the declassified documents have deletions shows that perhaps the most important bits of information are not provided. Finally the declassification process itself, by which a government organization controls which documents are declassified and which are not, is a form of censorship which guarantees that the overall image that will come out is a distorted, slanted one tailored to benefit the interests of the declassifiers-cum-censors.

As I mentioned above, there is the possibility that the National Security Archive may be an exercise in deception. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moyniham has shown, the main goal of government secrecy is not keeping them out of the eyes of the enemy, but of their own people.

It is highly suspicious that some of the people who created the CIA, like Allen Dulles, for example, were close associates of some of the people who control several of the organizations that are now bankrolling the National Security Archive. As professor Teresa Odendahl has pointed out, "contemporary American philanthropy is a system of 'generosity' by which the wealthy exercise social control and help themselves more than they do others." One has to be a gullible fool to believe that the same people who created the CIA, and used it for the benefit of their businesses in Guatemala and Iran, just to mention two well-known examples, are going to fund an organization devoted to find and expose their dirty linen.

Some of the very foundations that provide the funds for the operation of the National Security Archive, "namely, Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie, have been conscious instruments of covert U.S. foreign policy, with directors who can only be described as agents of U.S. intelligence." The fact that Fidel Castro, who is everything but a fool, has been so eagerly cooperating with the National Security Archives' folks, is perhaps an important clue to discover where his true allegiances really lie.

It would be a sad, but not surprising paradox, if some day it is found that the CIA has been all the time behind the supposed efforts to unmask the CIA. That would be the ultimate blowback operation, the consummation of the ouroboric goal.

In his well known novel 1984, George Orwell wrote that he who controls the past controls the present, and he who controls the present controls the future. The intelligence services discovered a long time ago that he who controls the enemy controls the outcome of the battle. Thus, successful penetration of the opponent's ranks has always been the golden dream of all intelligence services.

Servando González' novel La madre de todas las conspiraciones: una novela de ideas subversivas, just appeared. You can buy it at http://www.intelibooks.com
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Notes:

36 www.gwu.edu/~nsarchive/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/declass.html.

37 This, of course, is no surprise. Paradoxically, the American Left has always been indirectly bankrolled by the most reactionary elements of the Right. See, i.e., Evan Gahr, "Looking at Philanthropy The Gift of Giving: Paymasters of the PC Brigades," The Wall Street Journal, Jan 27, 1995; Joyce Price, "Media Give Liberal Causes Millions More, Study Says," The Washington Times, Nov. 14. 1993; Marshall Robinson, "The Ford Foundation: Sowing the Seeds of a Revolution." Environment, v. 35 n. 3 (April 1993) 10-20; Goldie Blumenstyk, "New Head of Ford Fund's Education Program is Champion of Women and Minority Students," The Chronicle of Higher Education, v. 39 n. 16 (Dec 9, 1992), A27; Daniel Brandt, "Philanthropists at War," NameBase NewsLine, No. 15 (October-December, 1996). The fact perhaps explains why the American Left is perhaps one of the most reactionary Lefts in the world. Of course, they see themselves as "progressives."

38 I refuse to use the word "democratic" when I mention the Democratic Party because, as it fits to this era of semantic deception, the Democratic Party is not democratic. Moreover, I think that it is time to begin talking about the Repucrat (or Demoblican, if you wish) party, the one that truly controls American politics.

39 Unfortunately, even serious scholars apparently believe that the National Security Archive is in possession of the actual documents. After mentioning some documents, Richard Ned Lebow affirms that, "All documents, unless otherwise noted, are found in the National Security Archive." See, Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 377, note 9.

40 Some of the documents show deleted areas, so one can safely assume that the deletions have been made on copies, not on the originals.

41 Ellsberg quoted in Michael Parenti, History as Mystery (San Francisco: City Lights, 1999), p. 153.

42 "What can Intelligence tell us about the Cuban missile crisis, and what the Cuban missile crisis tell us about Intelligence?," in James G. Blight and David A Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban missile crisis (London: Frank Cass, 1998), p. 3.

43 Fidel Castro in interview with Claude Julien, Le Monde, 22 March 1963.

44 In 1973, during the investigations of the Watergate scandal, E. Howard Hunt, one of the burglars, was questioned about his forgery of a State Department cable linking the Kennedy administration to the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. Hunt told the federal prosecutor that he had been given some training in his past CIAcareer to do just this sort of thing "... floating forget newspapers accounts, telegrams, that sort of thing." Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Dell, 1974), p. 170. In his book The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in the CIA (New York: William Morrow, 1999), ex-CIA officer Antonio Mendez offers a candid behind-the-scenes view of his career as CIA's foremost specialist in disguises. He also explains in some detail the artistic abilities and state-of-art techniques to forge official documents.

45 See, "Anti-Fraud Agency Fakes Documents," Associated Press, Washington, June 5, 2001.

46 Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation (Washington, D.C.: PergamonBrassey's, 1985). See particularly Chapter 5, The Art of Forgery, pp. 91-107. See also "Soviet Covert Action: The Forgery Initiative," Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Oversight of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, House of Representatives, 96th Congress, 6,19 February, 1980, Washington, D.C., U.S. Government Printing.

47 In spy lingo, a passport is a "shoe." Hence the name "cobbler" for the person who falsifies passports.

48 See, Manuel Cereijo, "Cuba's Adversary Foreign Intelligence Operations," INGMCA@aol.com, July 2001; also Domingo Amuchástegui, "Cuban Intelligence and the October Crisis," in Blight and Welch, Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis, p. 98. In May 1967, after a dispute with American black leader Robert Williams, the Cuban intelligence forged an issue of William's publication The Crusader, and mailed thousands of copies to the U.S. and Africa. In the forged issue Williams accused the Chinese of different political crimes. See Daniel Tretiak, Cuban Relations with the Communist System (Waltham, Mass.: Advanced Study Group, June 1940 [monograph 4), cited in Carlos Moore, Castro, The Blacks, and Africa (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), pp. 265-266.

49 Usually, after giving a speech Castro goes directly to Granma, the official newspaper, and personally edits his speech before it gets printed. When he is too tired to do it, Granma's presses wait patiently until he comes by or approves the printing over the phone. In the case of his speech at the trial for the Moncada attack (later published under the title "History Will Absolve Me") and his famous "I am a Marxist" speech, so many different versions have been officially published that it is almost impossible to know what he actually said.

50 One must keep in mind that, long before we had historians, there were spies. Sun Tzu is still considered obligatory reading by many intelligence officers. Blight and Welch's criticism about the Russian and American intelligence services reluctance to declassify SIGINT and HUMINT information "that would compromise certain by-now-surely-defunct sources and methods," only shows their lack of understanding of the essential work of intelligence services. The basic practices of tradecraft, particularly HUMINT, don't change much over the years, and intelligence services keep information about it under tight control. See "What can Intelligence tell us about the Cuban missile crisis, and what the Cuban missile crisis tell us about Intelligence?," in James G. Blight and David A Welch, eds., Intelligence and the Cuban missile crisis (London: Frank Cass, 1998), p. 2.

51 According to Amuchástegui, "Cuban intelligence became very adept at falsifying identities, forging documents, and other techniques of deception." See, Domingo Amuchástegui, "Cuban Intelligence and the October Crisis," in Intelligence and the Cuban Missile Crisis, James G. Blight and David A Welch, eds. (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 98.

52 Proof of it is their preoccupation about forgery and document integrity. Studies in Intelligence, a CIA scholarly publication with a very restricted circulation among members of the American intelligence community, has published several articles and book reviews about graphology and scientific examination of documents.

53 Norberto Fuentes points out that, once the Castroist regime has disappeared, no one will be able to find any compromising documents in the DSE (Department of State Security) archives. The reason for this is that "Castro has never dictated to his secretaries any assassination order, or a guerrilla landing or the kidnapping of an American diplomat in Central America. Those papers, of course, do not exist. Fidel Castro has won his main battles whispering to the ears of his Antonios de la Guardia. Dulces guerreros cubanos, p. 153. Col. Antonio de la Guardia was Castro's main hit man, who boasted of having killed more than sixty people abroad following Castro's direct orders. Eventually Fidel had his assassin assassinated.

54 For example, I bet that Castro's letter to Khrushchev, published by Granma, is a toned down fabrication. See, Prime Minister Fidel Castro's letter to Premier Khrushchev, October 26, 1962 (reproduced from the international edition of Granma), The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, A National Security Archive Documents Reader, Laurence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds. (New York: The New Press, 1992) p. 189. The original letter was written in Spanish, not in English as the one published by the NSA. In it, the Cuban maniac, excited about the possibility of provoking a nuclear holocaust which may have caused the death of half the world's population, urged the Soviet Premier to launch a preemptive nuclear attack on the United States. Faithful to their role as propagandists of the Castro regime, the folks at the National Security Archive published the false letter, disingenuously purporting it as the real document. Of course, the NSA folks don't want the rest of us to discover that their hero is actually an evil monster. For a detailed analysis of Castro as an evil monster, see Servando González, The Secret Fidel Castro, pp. 306-318.

55 The authentication of a document whose source is suspect may involve verifying that the signature or any hand writing on them really corresponds to the persons who producedthe document, as well as the typewriters in use at the time. But, as the Hitler Diaries hoax proved, none of them is conclusive. If an organization with the technical means and know-how were intent in forging a document, the most rudimentary precautions they would take would be to find the proper typewriter and use a paper of the same size. The only way to really be certain is to have chemical tests made on the paper and its age, and the ink, looking for inconsistencies like, for example, the use of synthetic fibers in papers purporting to have been made at a time when this had not been yet introduced in paper manufacturing.

56 It is interesting to see that some of the foundations contributing to the National Security Archive are the same ones author Christopher Simpson identified as those that, working close with the US military and intelligence services, provided the largest single source of funding for major scientific research in the 1950s a research sponsored by the CIA. See, Simpson, Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War (New Press, 1968), quoted in Mooney, "For Your Eyes Only," p. 36.

57 Out of unavoidable oversimplification, people always refer to actions taken by intelligence services as "the CIA knew," "the KGB acted," "the Mossad believed," etc., forgetting that intelligence services are not homogeneous entities. Due to the application of the need-to-know and compartmentation principles, a common characteristic of intelligence services is that the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and vice versa. Therefore, when one says "the CIA knew," it actually means "some people at the CIA knew." In the case of critical operations, as in the case of assassination attempts on a foreign leader, it is likely that most people at CIA, including very senior officers, were left out in the dark about the operation. On the other hand, there is some evidence that, since the sixties, the CIA has been not only teeming with liberals but it has had some crypto-leftists among its ranks. Contrary to what most people think, Castro has always haveh many secret admirers among CIA officers. Some CIA defectors, like Philip Agee, are notoriously pro-Castro. Given the strange coincidence of interests between Castro and the CIA, there is the remote possibility that both of them may just be different sides of the same coin. The strange coincidence of interests between Castro and the CIA will be the subject of my next book, Fidel Castro Supermole: Walking Back the Cat in the Cuban Operation.

58 As an example I can bring the case of Paul Wolf, who has been for many years engaged in a legal battle with the CIA trying to obtain through the Freedom of Information Act the release of documents related to the assassination of Colombia's leader and presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. But the Gaitán case has many ramifications, and is a potential can of worms the CIA does not want to unlid. Therefore, it is not surprising that the CIA folks, so eager to comply with the requests filed by the National Security Archive, have not been cooperative at all with Wolf's requests. For a detailed account of this legal battle as well as interesting details of the Gaitán case, see www.derechos.net/paulwolf/gaitan/gaitan.html. By the way, some people, Gaitán's daughter among them, suspect that some of the Gaitán documents, so secretly kept in the CIA files, may contain incriminating information about Fidel Castro. On Castro's magnicidal inclinations see Servando González, The Secret Fidel Castro, pp. 96-131.

59 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

60 Teresa Odendahl, Charity Begins at Home: Generosity and Self-Interest Among the Philanthropic Elite (New York: Basic Books, 1990), p. 245. See also Francie Ostrower, Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). The classic of all these studies still is Rene Wormser, Foundations: Their Power and Influence (New York: Devin-Adair, 1958).

60 Daniel Brandt, "Philanthropists at War," Name base NewsLine, No. 15 (October-December, 1996)

 

 

 
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