Sheep Dipping CFR Style: The Kerry and Ellsberg Cases By Servando Gonzalez Copyright © 2004 by Servando Gonzalez. All rights reserved. Sheep Dipping: CIA parlance for blurring the links to the CIA of an intelligence officer, agent or asset, by placing him within a legitimate organization for the purpose of establishing false, clean credentials that can be used later to penetrate or subvert adversary groups or organizations. The Vietnam war has become an important issue for American voters to decide this November which members of the Council on Foreign Relations will control the U.S. government during the next four years: the ones in the Republican Party or the ones in the Democratic Party. Although CFR members usually send other people to die in wars, but keep themselves out of the actual fighting, John Kerry and Daniel Ellsberg are notable exceptions: CFR members who went to Vietnam and came back to protest against a war they considered cruel, unnecessary and unjust. Like in a Hollywood movie, their stories are beautiful, moving, and have a happy ending in which the hero, against all odds, wins the final battle and destroys the evil doers. The problem with this is that Hollywood films are fiction. The CFR and the Vietnam War Like most wars in which the U.S. was involved in the past century, the Vietnam War was a profitable operation concocted way in advance in the CFR's conclaves . On September, 1939, less than two weeks after the outbreak of WWII, some senior CFR members met with Assistant Secretary of State George Messersmith, himself a CFR member, and outlined a long-range project called the War and Peace Studies Project. The project consisted in several study groups to analyze the problems of the current war, and the eventual peace. The groups met regularly between 1940 and 1945. Some of the groups concluded that, because of its economic and strategic importance, control of Southeast Asia was of paramount importance to the security of the United States, to the point that it justified engaging in war with any competitors. The alleged purpose of the Vietnam war was stated in the usual cryptic language in articles that appeared in Foreign Affairs, and in books written by senior CFR members since the mid-fifties. Then, CFR members who were infiltrated at the highest levels of the U.S. government, none of them elected by the American voters, put the plan into action. Key characters in selling the American public this extraordinary work in mass deception were Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Walter Rostow, Averell Harriman, John McCloy, Henry Cabot Lodge, Dean Rusk, Charles Bohlen, William Bundy and his brother McGeorge Bundy, Dean Acheson, Arthur Dean, Gabriel Hauge, and, last but not least, David Rockefeller. All U.S. ambassadors to Vietnam from 1963 to 1973 -- Henry Cabot Lodge, Maxwell Taylor, and Ellsworth Bunker -- were CFR members. The fact may explain why CFR member and Kissinger protegé Paul Brenner is the U.S. current colonial administrator in Iraq. Concurrent with this effort to push the U.S. into a war in Indochina, was the new developed theory of "containment," advanced by senior CFR member George Kennan in an article he published in 1947 in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "X". In it, he stated that, The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be a long-term, patient but firm vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies. Almost immediately, President Truman, a CFR member, made containment the basis of his administration's foreign policy. (Any resemblance to Bush accepting in toto the suggestions of the CFR-controlled 7-11 Commission is not a coincidence.) Ten years later, another CFR member, James E. King, Jr., expressed it even more clearly in an article that appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1957, Moreover, we must be prepared to fight limited actions ourselves. Otherwise we shall have made no advance beyond "massive retaliation," which tied our hands in conflicts involving less than our survival. And we must be prepared to lose limited actions. In a nutshell, the containment theory meant fighting wars not to win them. Actually, from a practical -- and cynical -- point of view it makes much sense. Only long, unwinnable wars provide good profits. This explains why, as predicted in King's article, the Vietnam War was already lost before it even began. The stories about the U.S. government tying up the hands of our military leaders in Vietnam are well known. Less known is the story of how some American transnationals in which CFR members played important roles were selling goods to the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries, which helped them supply the North Vietnamese with war materiel to fight the American troops. Not happy with making a profit with our side of the conflict, they were also making a profit selling goods to the other side -- exactly as they did during WWII, doing business with the Nazis. Apparently John Kennedy made the mistake of thinking about pulling out of Vietnam on his own, but his untimely death stopped him from doing so. Pushed by a council of hawkish "Wise Men" from the CFR, Johnson pressed on the War. The CFR-concocted Gulf of Tonkin incident, which, contrary to the Maine, Lusitania and Pearl Harbor incidents was a notional one - it existed only in some people's imagination -- gave Johnson another excuse to escalate the war and augment the warmongers' profits. But, suddenly, for reasons we cannot fathom, the same CFR's guys who had created the war in the first place, decided to put an end to it. In November 1967, the group of presidential advisors called the Senior Advisory Group on Vietnam, all of them CFR members, met with President Johnson, and all of them supported the continuation of the war. But then, in early 1968, the very same CFR's "Wise Men" who had been hawkishly pushing Johnson to continue and escalate the war, had a long meeting with the president, at which Johnson asked each of them to express his personal view about the conflict. All of them, without exception, suddenly declared themselves against the war. The hawks became overnight doves. According to a witness, Johnson was "visibly shocked by the magnitude of the defection." A few days later he went on television to announce the de-escalation of the war and his decision not to run for a new presidential term. According to the New York Times, the decision was a "stunning surprise even to close associates." After having betrayed the American President, the CFR guys now were ready to betray the American people. For this, they had to convince Americans that, what up to this time had been right, now was wrong. The American Left: A Tool of the Reactionary Right Just by following the money trail, one finds out that the most reactionary right through their useful "charitable" foundations has always bankrolled the American left. Publications as far to the left as Mother Jones, just to mention one of them, show the Ford and Rockefeller foundations among its financial supporters. The fact indicates that most of the American left is only a mirage created by the right to muddy the waters and control public opinion from the inside. American leftists believe that the right controls the media, while rightists are convinced that the left controls it. The confusion arises from the fact that both of them are right. The right owns the American mainstream media, while most of the journalists working on it have leftist leanings. One has to be very gullible, though, to believe that people like Dan Rather or Barbara Walters, both of them CFR members, are advancing the leftist agenda behind the back of the unsuspecting media owners. Therefore, one has to arrive at the conclusion that the reactionary rightists who own the American mainstream media are actually advancing the leftist agenda. The only explanation for this apparently irrational behavior is that, for reasons that are beyond our understanding, the leftist agenda benefits Wall Street bankers and monopoly capitalists. This begins to make sense once we stop seeing Communism as a political system to stop the exploitation of the oppressed massess, as defined by Marx and Lenin, but as a system created by international bankers and monopoly capitalists to better exploit the workers. Just a brief analysis of Communist China and Castro's Cuba shows that capitalist exploitation under communism in these two countries is ten times worse than in any country, under the worst capitalist exploitation. No wonder the guys at the CFR love both countries. Until 1968, only a few San Francisco hippies were protesting against the Vietnam War, but the warmongers had been keeping them under control by having the CIA subreptitiously feed them large quantities of LSD and other drugs. But the warmongers now realized they needed to galvanize American public opinion against the war, and devised a clever plan to do it fast, efficiently, and without showing their hand. It consisted in infiltrating some of their agents into the ranks of the left and using the well-intentioned idealist fools as their unwitting tool. The problem the conspirators faced was how to make their agents, most of them members of the most reactionary right, palatable to the left. The answer to the problem was sheep dipping them to blur out their rightist links. And the CIA, the intelligence branch of the CFR, had a lot of hands-on experience in the process. (Probably the most important sheep dipped CFR agent of all times is Fidel Castro, a rightist, fascist gangster, turned into a leftist world leader thanks to the machinations of the CFR controlled press, particularly the New York Times. But this will be the subject of another article.) The John Kerry Case A Yale graduate and member of the Skull and Bones secret society since 1966, John Forbes Kerry was not the typical leftist, to say the least. But apparently the CFR guys thought he was the right man for the job, and decided to sheep dip him before infiltrating him into the ranks of the left. His mission was to act as an agent provocateur to incite anti-Vietnam feelingsin the U.S. After graduating from Yale, Kerry enlisted in the Navy in December 1967, and was assigned as an Ensign to a guided-missile frigate, the USS Gridley. In June 1968, he was promoted to Lieutenant. In November 17, 1968, he arrived in Vietnam and was given command of a swift boat operating in the Mekong Delta. But here comes the best part of the story. According to Kerry's bio posted in one of the internet sites backing his candidacy for president, in December 2, 1968, Kerry got his first taste of intense combat, and was wounded in the arm. He was awarded the Purple Heart. In February 20, 1969: he was wounded again, taking shrapnel in the left thigh, after a gunboat battle. He was awarded a second Purple Heart. In February 28, Kerry and his boat crew came under attack while patrolling in the Mekong Delta, and he decided to counterattack. In the middle of the ensuing firefight, Kerry left his boat, pursued a Viet Cong fighter into a small hut, killed him, and retrieved a rocket launcher. He was awarded a Silver Star. In March 13, a mine detonated near Kerry's boat, wounding him in the right arm. He was awarded a third Purple Heart. He was also awarded a Bronze Star for pulling a crewmember, who had fallen overboard, back on the boat amidst a firefight. In April, 1969, war hero John Kerry, who had risked his life so many times for his country, discovered an obscure Navy regulation which stated that sailors that have been wounded three times in combat were eligible to be transferred to the U.S. for noncombat duty. He requested separation from active duty, which was immediately granted, and was transferred to desk duty in Brooklyn, NY. In January 3, 1970, Kerry requested that he be discharged early from the Navy so that he could run for Congress in Massachusetts' Third District. The request was granted. Soon after returning home, John Kerry, now transformed into a hippie-like, radical peace lover, became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). He devoted himself full time to organizing opposition in the United States against the Vietnam War. There are, however, many things in Kerry's official bio that are somewhat questionable. In the first place, he spent less than four months on active duty in Vietnam. In this short period he allegedly won a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and three purple hearts, a feat accomplished only in Hollywood films, but not in real life. Secondly, he allegedly was wounded in February 20, won a Purple Heart, and, a week later, on February, was wounded again, winning another Purple Heart. What kind of wound was it that allowed him to fight the enemy just a week later? Did it deserve a medal? What is simply incredible are his actions on February 28, which won him a Silver Star. Allegedly, a Viet Cong soldier on the shore fired a B-40 rocket launcher against his gunboat and missed. The soldier raised his head to see the result of his shot, and the bow gunner cut him down with his twin-barrelled .50 caliber machine gun. Then Kerry beached the boat, jumped off, pursued the Viet Cong fighter into a small hut, killed him, and retrieved the rocket launcher, But, according to a Vietnam vet who spent some time doing exactly the same type of job, if this is true, he didn't deserve a medal, but a strong reprimand, because he did everything wrong. Standard operating procedure for that type of ship established that, when you took rocket fire from shore you had to put space between your boat and the shore. The B-40 has an effective range of less than 50 yards, so you have to put more than that distance between your boat and the launcher as fast as possible. Once your boat is beyond the B-40's range, you shoot back with your twin-barrelled .50 caliber machine gun. Now, if Kerry's story is true, and the Viet Cong soldier was shot at with a twin barrelled .50 cal. machine gun from less that 25 yards, he would have not been only dead, but also totally destroyed by the barrage of lead. How come he managed to escape to a hut and wait for Kerry to kill him again? In 1971 Kerry participated in an antiwar congressional testimony, the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation, which gathered testimonials of alleged atrocities committed by American soldiers. Kerry regurgitated stories of rapes, beheadings, torture and pillaging ("in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan") as part of his indictment against the Vietnam War. He was joined in his anti-war efforts by Hanoi Jane and some other fools who considered themselves progressives, liberals and leftists while, wittingly or unwittingly, were advancing the secret agenda of one of the most rightist and reactionary organization in the United States. Just a few years later, probably as a way of payment for services rendered to the cause, Kerry was asked to join the Council on Foreign Relations, the very organization that planned and executed the Vietnam War he claimed to oppose. He did it gladly. The CFR has a long history of pushing their agents to the top ranks of their organizations, being it the State Department, the CIA, or the military. Perhaps the two more prominent cases are Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, who jumped from anonymity, got their stars, and played key roles on behalf of their CFR masters. The Daniel Ellsberg Case Daniel Ellsberg, a man of integrity, courage, and passion, became known to the American public when he allegedly followed his conscience and gave the New York Times a secret report -- eventually referred to as "The Pentagon Papers" -- proving the Pentagon's evil doings. The Times published the report, and it created such outrage in the American public that the government was eventually forced to pull American troops from Vietnam. Ellsberg became a true American hero. There is an important detail about this rosy story, however, which may give us a clue of its true meaning: its timing. It seems that Ellsberg discovered that the war was evil in 1968, the same year the CFR conspirators decided it was time to pull out of Vietnam. Coincidence? Probably not. One of the main players behind the scenes in the Pentagon Papers incident was Anthony Joseph (Tony) Russo. Tony was an analyst and field operator for the Rand Corporation, a think tank with close ties to the CFR. Russo had worked from 1965-68 on the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale project, a top-secret psy-war study for the Pentagon. According to Tony Russo's own story, he was the one who, in 1968, "briefed Dan Ellsberg almost daily for the entire year on the Rand Intelligence project explaining the legitimacy of the so-called enemy (the "Viet Cong" and the "North" Vietnamese; i.e., the Vietnamese independence movement) and the unlawfulness of U.S. presence." It was in the context of these briefings when Russo "repeatedly and urgently exhorted Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers." Another "leftist" who played a role in the release of the Pentagon papers was Morton Halperin, a veteran in campaigns against the CIA and an apologist of communist tyrannies. Halperin was a close associate of Philip Agee -- a CIA "defector' and a close friend of CFR's man-in-Havana Fidel Castro -- who was a crusader for unilateral U.S. disarmament. Halperin had strong support from powerful, influential people. He was a friend of Leslie Gelb, a New York Times' "left-wing" journalist who had evolved into President of the CFR. It was Halperin and Gelb who, while serving together in the Defense Department, gave Ellsberg unauthorized access to the Pentagon Papers. Ellsberg passed the papers to some friends at the Institute for Policy Studies, a "leftist" organization heavily funded by the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie and other CFR-controlled "phylanthropic" foundations. It was the IPS folks who passed the Papers to the New York Times. The CIA and the NYT are probably the two most important fronts of the CFR in the implementation of their psy-war against the American people. Because of his act of uncivil obedience to his CFR masters, Ellsberg became overnight the hero of civil disobedience of "progressive liberals" and "leftists" like Richard Falk, Noam Chomsky, John Dean, Jeffrey Masson, Randy Kehler, Barbara Dane, Max Frankel, Howard Zinn, Gar Alperovitz, Michael Lerner, Paul Krassner, Peter Dale Scott, David McReynolds, Senator Mike Gravel, Tom Schelling, Donna Haraway, and many others. It has been mentioned in several books how Kissinger was so upset by the action of his former Harvard student and protegé, that he pushed Nixon to take actions against Ellsberg. But there are indications that Kissinger was just acting. Had he truly hated Ellsberg so much he would have prevented him from joining the CFR. But now Ellsberg, the man who apparently destroyed the CFR conspirators' plans, is currently a proud member of the CFR. A few months ago Ellsberg's new book, Secrets, was published. It seems, however, that he failed to address the main secret of the Vietnam war: the CFR, the organization who played the key role in planning and conducting the not-for-winning Vietnam war, is barely mentioned in the book. Damage control has always been a priory at the CFR. Having full control of the past guarantees that, not even by mistake, any true secret would be revealed. This explains why most "serious" academic studies about key events like Pearl Harbor and the Cuban missile crisis -- just to mention a few -- have been made by CFR members. No wonder they are just crap. This also explains why CFR members controlled the Kennedy assassination investigation, and why Bush's first candidate to preside over the government's investigation of the 9-11 events was none other than Henry Kissinger. But, suprisingly, even in this country where erything seems to go, Kissinger was too much. Then, after this faux pas, other prestigious citizens were appointed to lead the commission. As expected, most of them were CFR members. By the way, expect a lot of books by CFR-controlled authors "explaining" the September 11 thing. One of them, already printed, is David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor, with a foreword by Richard Falk. The book is a classical example of a limited hangout operation. Blaming the CIA-Pentagon Mirage It is difficult to understand why so-called "progressive", "liberals", and "leftists," who so vehemently opposed the Vietnam War, now belong to the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR is perhaps one of the most rightist, reactionary organizations in the U.S., where they brush elbows with war criminals like Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger and many others who masterminded the Vietnam war. This may explain why these "leftist's" criticism of the U.S. policies seems to focus on the CIA, the Pentagon -- which, for some mysterious reason, they equate with the Republicans -- for the disastrous consequences of the U.S. Government's actions. They are very careful, though, in stopping right there, and not going beyond these organizations to blame the people who actually control them through their control of the U.S. Government. In their efforts to confuse the American people, they are not very different from "conservatives" and "rightists" like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Daniel Flynn, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter and Christopher Ruddy, all of them people who invest an inordinate amount of time convincing their listeners and readers that just by keeping the Democrats out of the White House all problems in this country will be solved. One of the roles of both the CIA and the Pentagon in this dirty game is to act as the fall guys, taking the blame for the CFR's actions. But there is a clear indication that they are aware that this is just a game in which nobody is ever held accountable. No Pentagon general, Secretary of State, White House official, or CIA Director -- perhaps with the exception of Allen Dulles, a mistake for which John Kennedy paid dearly -- has ever been fired, demoted, or forced to resign because of their "mistakes". On the contrary, most of them retire with full pay, and go through a revolving door to join the boards of the big corporations involved in the production of military materiel. Actually, the only general who has been fired as a result of his actions was Douglas MacArthur, and it was not because he lost a war, but because, in violation of orders from above, he decided to win it. Big mistake. Immediately, a furious President Truman, a CFR member, sacked him. It seems that, finally, the CFR's guys have found a true panacea: according to Dick Cheney, the Haliburton guy, this new phantom called the "war against 'terrorism'" will extend for several generations. Not a bad deal! What Should We Do? Frankly, I have no idea. The New World Order conspirators are now in full control of most of the Federal Government, the Congress and the judges, and own the mainstream media as well. They have the money to buy any real opponent, and the power to destroy the ones who resist being bought. The coming presidential election will present us with the extraordinary possibility of leaving in power a Yale graduate, member of the Skull & Bones and the CFR, or replacing him with a Yale graduate, member of the Skull & Bones and the CFR. So, make your pick. Anyway, I still have the bad feeling that none of the above will be the next (elected or appointed) president of the United States. As they say in the South, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!" But I hope I am wrong. I really mean it! ------------------- Servando Gonzalez is a Cuban-born American writer, semiologist and intelligence analyst. He has written books, essays and articles on Latin American history, intelligence, espionage, and semiotics. Servando is the author of Historia herética de la revolución fidelista, The Secret Fidel Castro, The Nuclear Deception and La madre de todas las conspiraciones, all available at Amazon.com. He also hosted the documentaries Treason in America: The Council on Foreign Relations and Partners in Treason: The CFR-CIA-Castro Connection, produced by Xzault Media Group of San Leandro, California. His latest book, Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War gainst the American People just appeared and is available at Amazon.com.