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Labels: Lou Reed

Instead of starting out a recent article with a story about how his grandmother warned against saying anything but nice things about people, maybe veteran CIA analyst and vociferous Bush administration critic Ray McGovern should have quoted Washington icon Alice Roosevelt Longworth.

“If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody,” Teddy's daughter once remarked, “sit next to me.”

That's because McGovern, perhaps best known for calling former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld a liar on TV last year, had precious few “nice” things to say about Bush, “thugs like Vice President Cheney and [Rumsfeld],” or former CIA Chief George Tenet, who was the subject of the article for truthout.org.

After dispensing with a few pleasantries, McGovern ripped into Tenet, who at the time had just published a book on his role in the run-up to war, “In the Center of the Storm.” While Tenet was making the TV news rounds plugging his book, McGovern was publicly railing against the country's former top spy for disgracing himself and the agency by helping the administration initiate an unjustifiable and unforgivable war.

But while the war in the minds of McGovern and a majority of Americans can no longer be justified or tolerated, what gets his Irish blood boiling most is both the use of torture by the administration and Tenet's own Nazi-esque denials of employing tactics that ultimately prompted McGovern to return the Intelligence Commendation Award that he was presented with by Bush's father.

“Hewing to the George W. Bush dictum of ‘catapulting the propaganda' by endlessly repeating the same claim (the formula used so successfully by Joseph Goebbels), Tenet manages to tell ‘60 Minutes' five times in five consecutive sentences: ‘We don't torture people.' Like President Bush, however, he then goes on to show why it has been absolutely necessary to torture people. What do they take us for, fools? And Tenet's claims of success in extracting information via torture are no more worthy of credulity than the rest of what he says,” wrote McGovern, who along with other former CIA employees founded the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, VIPS, a group dedicated to exposing the mishandling of war-related intelligence.

“His own credibility aside,” continued the 68-year-old McGovern, who worked under seven presidents during 27 years of service, “Tenet has succeeded in destroying the asset without which an intelligence community cannot be effective. And that is serious. He seems blissfully oblivious to the damage he has done — aware only of the damage others have done to his ‘personal honor.'"

A separate letter to Tenet penned by McGovern and former CIA agents Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael is even more damning.

“Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States,” the agents wrote. “Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3,300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.”

But McGovern's concerns don't stop with Tenet. He believes the US government under Bush is the real terrorist organization, and may even be preparing to declare martial law – the end of democratic rule – in the wake of another terrorist attack.

We caught up with McGovern by phone Tuesday morning, a few hours before he was set to speak to a meeting of South Pasadena Neighbors for Peace and Justice at Burger Continental Restaurant on South Lake Avenue.

— Kevin Uhrich

Pasadena Weekly: You raise images of Nazis when you refer to the administration. Are these people really that sinister?

Ray McGovern: I think that the main charge against the Nazis at Nuremburg was perpetrating what the Nuremburg tribunal called a war of aggression and a war of aggression is to perpetrate the worst international crime, differing from other war crimes only in so far as the war of aggression contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. As you compare the two, one would be World War II and next would be the attack on Iraq.

Both were very equally wars of aggression. And the people were equally seduced by a propaganda machine, in the first case led by Joseph Goebbels, and in the second case George Tenet and several others. So yes, it is an apt comparison. … I would just point out, as we talked about the accumulated evil of the whole … we have torture, we have kidnapping, we have keeping people in black holes without even telling their wives and children. We have illegal wiretapping. We don't have time to list them all. So the accumulated evil is part and parcel of war of aggression. The definition applies to both.

You've been very outspoken about your views on the war and the administration. If not for their stated purposes, why do you believe Bush and company invaded Iraq?

I've been saying it for three years now, using the acronym OIL. It's probably too cute, but the O stands for oil. I don't think there are many people who would disagree that if there were no oil under the sands of Iraq we would be anywhere near Iraq. So O is oil. I is for Israel. The people running our foreign policy at the time, the neo-cons, many of them have actually worked for the Israeli government, think tanks and so forth. They have great difficulty separating the strategic interests of Israel and the strategic interests of the United States. …Far from making Israel secure, the entire invasion and occupation of Iraq has led to a situation in which there are thousands of terrorists, most of them hating Israel as much as they hate us, and being trained to perpetrate terrorist acts. Before we invaded, there were very, very few terrorists in Iraq. Now it's teeming with terrorists. And so is Lebanon. And the L is for logistics. We really mean to create permanent military bases … with which to dominate that part of the world and have something to say about the oil. We are not allowed to say permanent military bases anymore. The Pentagon has changed the adjective. It's not permanent; it's enduring. The interesting thing is the president is now mentioning Korea, as many of his chief aides are. Of course, there is no comparison, there is no real analogy with Iraq, save one, and that is the impression this administration wants to create, and that is it's OK to have permanent military bases for 50, 60 years. It's OK because, look, we did it in Korea. It's inept and deceitful, and besides that, it will never work.

You often refer to members of the administration as terrorists. Do you believe they were responsible in some way for orchestrating 9/11? Do you believe such a thing is possible?

You asked me if I believe that. I can't answer that because I don't do faith-based [analysis]. If you asked me if I believe, Cheney, for example, the author of the torture [policy], would he capable of allowing something like to happen, I would have to say yes. But I don't base my judgments on belief. I base my judgments on fact. For every theory that explains 9/11 in a sinister way, there are five more questions that arise. So I have to keep my feelings about what Dick Cheney is capable of doing hermetically sealed off from the facts.

The bottom line for me is there has to be an independent investigation because the 9/11 Commission report is flagrantly a cover up. The question is: What is being covered up?

How do you believe we will begin hostilities with Iran?

My colleagues at VIPS have been saying for over a year now that there is a 50-50 chance that Bush will strike Iran from the air ... before he leaves office. But that is really atrocious when you look at it, because that would be World War IV, easy and simple. The government is very much divided. The big question was: Should we talk to Iran? … For the longest time we did not talk to Iran, for all kinds of reasons. But what happened two months ago? Cheney goes to Australia, [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice goes into the Oval Office and persuades the president that it is untenable policy not to talk to Iran. So she calls Henry [Kissinger] in New York. And he goes [at this point McGovern breaks into a pretty good Kissinger] “Mr. President, it may have been good policy until now, but everybody, even your colleagues in Congress, believe we need to talk to Iran.” And they are the last people to talk to Bush on any given afternoon, and he does what he always does; he's persuaded by the last people he talks to. And he says, ‘sounds like a good idea to me,' and the next thing you know, we have a major change in our foreign policy and we are going to talk to Iran. Well, what does Dick Cheney do? He 's out of town and the first thing he does is make a big menacing gesture to Iran right over his back there, in the Persian Gulf, and now he's home. Now, will we keep talking to Iran? That's 50-50, because if Cheney prevails, as I suspect he will, we'll stop talking to Iran. It's hard to bomb guys you are talking to.

Do you foresee a situation in which martial law could be declared?

I've been worried about this for a long time. I have been worried about the resilience of our democracy and whether there are enough principled people in Congress and the judiciary and the armed services to prevent that, because all three swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the president of the United States. Gosh, it gives me chills on the back of my neck to think that the president, if push came to shove, would act in such a reckless way. … It scares me to no end to think that the president may be preparing to do this kind of thing. Of course, we had that recent executive order that gives him ostensibly full power in the event of a major terrorist attack. And who describes it as a terrorist attack? The president himself. So, yes, I think there is a real danger here.

Labels: Bush, Cheney, CIA, Iran Iraq, McGovern, politics, Tenet

"The first street theater tricksters – the forefathers of today's culture jammers such as The Yes Men and Billionaires For Bush – appeared on the political stage in the 1960s. At the time, the possibility that activists could spread subversive messages through the mainstream media was a counter-intuitive, even revolutionary notion. But with the right mix of TV-savvy images and provocative sound bites, delivered with humor and no small dose of irony, the anti-war, flower power message of the political vanguard was able to reach the living rooms of unsuspecting, disaffected youth across the country, helping to ignite the radical activism that transformed America during that tumultuous decade.

No one was better at genius pranks than Abbie Hoffman. He's appreciated for stunts like bringing the New York Stock Exchange to a halt when he led a band of hippies onto the balcony there, where they rained dollar bills down upon the floor of amazed Wall Street suits, who famously knocked one another to the ground as they dived rapaciously for the free cash. Others may remember Abbie for the levitation of the Pentagon during a 1967 march against the Vietnam War (witnesses insist that it really did happen). But the event that made Hoffman a household name was the Chicago 8 trial, the subject of the forthcoming documentary "Chicago 10." For months the news was filled with his brilliant, often hilarious, defense maneuvers against government charges that he and his co-defendants conspired to disrupt the 1968 Democratic national convention. Abbie transformed the trial into a true theatrical event, a platform for broadcasting the alternative values and politics of the counterculture onto every TV screen in America. In the process, while never wavering from his radical beliefs, Hoffman became one of the country's most famous celebrities.

As this interview shows, he was also a sober, serious strategist who grounded his antics in theory. Few appreciated the subtle ties between cultural gesture and political action as deeply as Hoffman. This conversation took place in New York City a few months before his untimely death in 1989. It appeared earlier this year in the Australian journal Into-Gal."

The first big event that put you on the map, so to speak, was when you and a handful of hippies showered dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Can you tell me a little about what happened?

It was the summer of '67. That was when Jerry Rubin and I kind of met, and then we did the levitation of the Pentagon that October. Well, that whole summer, as the year before, it was nothing to wake up at St Mark's Place on the Lower East Side and say we were going to do some stunt.

Like what?

For instance, we would go into a bank, get two rolls of quarters, and start throwing them on the floor. We planted a tree in the middle of St Mark's Place to get rid of all the cars. Rock bands played in the streets, played in Tompkins Square Park. Every thirty minutes you'd have a new poem, you'd rush out and hand them away on St Mark's Place. And all the anti-war demonstrations, regularly.

Who was writing these poems?

Me, Jim Fouratt, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman. It was called the Communications Company. Jim Fouratt had a duplicating machine. We didn't have xerox then, and we reeled off these poems on multi-colored paper. I got married in Central Park, and we did the invitation on a leaflet. Anybody who has a full collection of these leaflets, it would be worth a half-million dollars today! They were great! And it was garbage art really. You just read the poem, threw it away, had a good time. The influences came from people like Allan Kaprow. They were doing Happenings, but they didn't have any political content, see? They were strictly apolitical, so, of course, the rich loved it.

Did you go to any of the Happenings?

No, but I read about them, I was aware of them, in the papers and the media. I went to Pop Art exhibits. I went to a big Pop Art show in the Armory, I guess the year before, which had some indoor Happenings. And then there was the Living Theatre, and there was another theater, Richard Schechner's Performing Garage. All this stuff was going on... I think at one point Richard said we were influencing each other. You know, life and art were imitating each other. I mean, walk down St Mark's Place between Third and Second Avenue, and it was like walking through a circus. You'd see every kind of costume in the world, every sight possible. People barefoot, it was nothing to walk around barefoot. We thought of this stuff very fast. People were handing out flags at the Statue of Liberty saying "End the war." There were a lot of demonstrations down at Whitehall, the draft induction center.

Everything you did seems to have been inspired by a spirit of fun and a sense of humor.

And a sense of communicating ideas through the mass media by manipulating famous symbols. We were doing it, actually, before this theory had come around. It was instinctive. I'll tell you one of the more famous ones. On Valentine's Day in '67, we mailed 3,000 joints of marijuana to people all over New York, picked out of the phone book, with a letter explaining, you've read a lot about it, now if you want to try it, here it is. But, P.S., by the way, just holding this can get you five years in prison. We sent it to some in the media. Bill Jorgensen, the local news anchorman, almost got arrested on the air for showing it on TV. The cops came right on the set and it was quite hysterical. Half the people on the Lower East Side knew who did it!

And you had no problems with the cops, they never traced it to you?

No, no. To come up with the list we'd get stoned, yellow pages and stoned, that's it. There were different rolling teams and all that. Jimi Hendrix gave me the money for it. Ultimately it changed the laws in this state, got the penalties reduced. We used to have a lot of campaigns against pay toilets. We'd go up there, photograph people sneaking in underneath, and put pictures in the underground newspapers with captions: how to get into a pay toilet. So we'd show people who would sneak in under, or taping the lock shut. All these were in Fuck the System, later in Steal This Book, etc. in that spirit. But the Stock Exchange probably was one of the best of these kinds of acts.

Tell me something about the Wall Street event. How did it come about?

Well, I called up the New York Stock Exchange and booked a tour. I said we're bringing a tour group, about eighteen of us. I gave them the name George Metesky, who was the mad bomber of New York, about fifteen years previous to this.

The mad bomber of New York?

Yeah, he was just a cultural hero. He was a media freak. When they arrested him he had a big headline in the Daily News: "Mad Bomber of New York Captured!" He was living with his mother and his aunt, you know, a meek sort of mild-mannered guy. He just had a thing about Con Ed because Con Ed fired him. So he left little pipe bombs all over the place, like Grand Central Station, and he had the city terrorized! Of course the guy who answered the phone wouldn't remember the name, but I would, as would other people who know the history of New York. I had about three hundred dollars, and I changed it all into singles. It was either my money or money I raised. Three hundred dollars——that's not much money. You got a bang for your movement buck, let's face it! I could run the country cheap!

Where did the idea come from?

Well, I don't want to get arrogant, but the theme of Christ chasing the money changers from the Temple, obviously that idea was there. But maybe I thought about that later, writing about it in Revolution for the Hell of It, or something. But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and we had the resources and the capabilities——and we could go to central casting right at Gem Spa, the newsstand at Second Avenue and St Mark's Place, and get as many people as we wanted right away. People were ready to volunteer for anything, and they were doing their own things. When we got to the Stock Exchange, we got in line with all the other tourists. Pretty soon as we waited in the line to go visit the Stock Exchange, just on the regular tour, somebody must've noticed something freaky, because we were dressed like hippies. We were not dressed like tourists from Iowa, you know, or Indiana. Hippies were still a little bizarre-looking to the general public, there were two cultures. So within a matter of minutes the press was swarming all over us.

You didn't call the press in advance?

No, but this is New York City. They get tips. The police, the guards at the Stock Exchange will tell them, there's eighteen hippies down here, they're going to do something. People were giggling, smoking grass probably, you know. You wander above Fourteenth Street looking the way we did, already people are staring at you. You stand in an airport, they stare at you because you look like a runaway from the local circus.

So you thought of your appearance down on Wall Street as a kind of confrontation?

Sure. Your very dress, your being was a confrontation. A deliberate confrontation. And an affirmation of a spirit, of an art, of a more humane kind of existence. Cooperation versus competition. We didn't have to spell out our ideology because it was pretty clear if you followed our acts, and if you tried to make all the intellectual connections, you'd find plenty of theory. We had utopian visions, like "abolish money" was big. And "abolish work." We were anti-work, anti-money. So the throwing out of money at Wall Street would fit into that. You could say that we were anti-capitalists, which we were, but we didn't have an "ism.' We had the idea of "free.' We kept putting across the idea that it all should be free, since our society's so rich. We had free stores, and you could just go in and take all the clothes you wanted. Free food in the park. Free poems and free rock concerts. The idea was that we were living in "post-scarcity.' We had great affluence in that period, as a society. So we should be working towards full unemployment, we should be working towards a society with more quality time. Why work for full-employment? It's boring. Well, of course, because people need money. Well, we're so rich we're just going to divide up the wealth. People have a right to medical care, free medical care, which we all provided on the Lower East Side. We had various institutions that acted as models for a while, as long as we could sustain them. When you'd see a store that says "free store,' you could come on in and have anything you want with your good looks. No shoplifting allowed. And people would come in and dump all their junk, and we'd have other people sorting it out. We were building a community of maybe forty or fifty thousand, in New York, on the Lower East Side.

So when you go to the Stock Exchange dressed like that...

...they know something's up. It doesn't take long for a guard, say, for fifty dollars, to call the Daily News or Associated Press. And they swarm. You can have a big fire in New York, and you'll have the press there before the fire department arrives.

Did you stage the whole thing for the press?

No, I never did anything for the press. Well, we didn't know if we would be arrested. I knew there would be some kind of confrontation, because at some point, the guard's going to come up and say, "No." If we were arrested then the press is there and everything. I mean the story is going to get out one way or another. We didn't know it would be big. The guards tried to keep us out almost simultaneously when the press came, it was all one big commotion. There were a lot of guards, these were guards, not cops, guards from the Stock Exchange. And they said we weren't allowed in and had no right to do this, blah blah blah. And we said, hey you know, what do you mean? We're Americans! Free tour. What the hell, we want to see what it looks like. So finally, we negotiated.

You did the negotiating?

Of course. I'm very good at negotiating. It was already my seventh year as a political organizer in various ways. I negotiated with the Klan to let them give me back my life in Mississippi, so...! You get them in a situation where it's going to be an embarrassment for them to keep you out. They said, "Hippies are not allowed in." So I said, "Well, look, we're Jewish. You don't let Jews into the Stock Exchange?" The press was there. So I turned around to the press and I said, "They won't let Jews in the Stock Exchange!" "Oh no no no. That isn't what we said. Now wait a minute..." They got red-faced. So you can get in. Once they decided to let us in, though, they said that press are not allowed in the gallery, so the press had to back off and wait on the street. They already sensed what we were going to do. People were flashing money, they were starting to eat it and everything. They were clowning around.

Making a show for the press?

No. For each other. I relate to media that way. We're just going to create a little story and a lot of people are going to be hearing about it. Now if somebody brings a camera or something, well, that makes the job easier, but I'm not doing it for them. It's an important distinction. We had no concept of a "media event." The idea of manipulating the media was ridiculous. The people who own the media manipulate it, we just had some tricks up our sleeves. We knew that we were talking to a society that was post-literate. Either post or pre. It was now in a phase where it wanted to watch and listen, it didn't want to read. So for watching or listening, you've got to paint some pictures. You've got to have some images.

Can you remember any of the things that influenced you in this direction?

McLuhan, I was influenced by his writings. Andy Warhol, he was an influence. But all of us were thinking about this. Every person that left their community and came to the Lower East Side, who resisted the draft, who went for an alternative lifestyle, they had to do some thinking about it. It's called getting an education. You had to rebel, because it was not going to be handed to you right there in school, in the local church, or the local draft board center. The local newspaper wasn't going to tell you that this is a good thing to do. Of course, everyone gave some thought to it. I was just a leader among people who gave thought to it, that's all.

Getting back to the story, what happened after they let you into the Stock Exchange?

The press was not allowed to continue in the snake line, but they let us into the gallery. So we sat there with all the other tourists. We hugged and kissed a lot and everything. We were hippies. We were clowning, funnin'. Of course, we were all stoned. Sure, we were having a good time. Also, for part of the tour they tell you how the Stock Exchange was started. No one in the group had been on the tour before. Like many people who live in New York, they don't go to see the symbols, the tourist sights. So, you know, Carnegie made money, Ford made money, and everyone made money down there. It's like the lottery on a big scale. And they explain what the ticker-tape is all about. Everyone asked some silly questions, or some meaningful ones. Some just got interested, like real tourists. You can be a tourist and a hippie too. But once we got into the gallery and we were all spread out, I passed out the money, and people had their own money they kicked in. You know, it was communal money. And at one moment, when they were all busy down there in the pit, ticker-tape going like crazy, we gave the signal, and ran to the railing. Even though there were a couple of guards positioned on the gallery, there was no way to stop eighteen of us coming from different directions, all with money, handfuls of money, going "Take the money! Here's the real shit!" throwing it over the railing, and screaming and yelling while we're doing it! So, imagine... they looked up, I mean all these brokers, and they start booing, cheering. A lot more boos than cheers. And the ticker-tape had stopped. I read that the ticker-tape had stopped six minutes. I couldn't tell that at the time, but the normal hubbub of buying and selling stopped. They didn't know what to do. Then pandemonium broke out, and they started yelling "Money, money!' And they start running, they were all over on their hands and knees, gobbling... After we threw the money, the guards were stunned. They didn't know what to do, we had them outnumbered. They had to send for reinforcements. The guards were saying things like, "You can't do that, you're not allowed to do that. That's illegal, we're going to get the police." "What do you mean? People throw away money all the time here! This is the way you do it, isn't it?'"I mean, it's just a panic having to argue with me in real life. In a situation like that... because I'm fearless. I don't care if they pick me up and throw me in the Stock Exchange. Throw me in the pit. I'll be alright. I'm ready!

Did the guards actually manhandle you?

Sure, the guards shoved us around and everything. We pushed back. We were kind of pacifist then, so we weren't ready to punch out a guard. We already made our point. The money was out there, gone. The ticker-tape had stopped. They all were groveling around on their knees, tracing down these real bills. We were there a few more minutes, and we just left. They said get the hell out, we got out. So everyone's out, everybody's jumping up and down, laughing, giggling, hugging, big fun, and we're out on the sidewalk and then there was a press conference. There were reporters all over the place, blocking the streets. Because they had waited, they couldn't come in and see it. So there's no photos of what I'm telling you. That's what makes it a great myth, because every newspaper account was different. And interviewing me was like interviewing a hurricane. "Hi, I'm Cardinal Spellman"' "Where'd you get your money?" "I said I'm Cardinal Spellman! You don't ask Cardinal Spellman where he gets his money!" "What kind of talk is that?" "How much money was it?" "I don't know. Thousands! We threw away all the money we had!" So accounts of it had to vary a great deal.

It was a spontaneous scene with the press?

Very. We burned money in front of the press. That was illegal then, by the way, to burn money. I hadn't done that before, but I had gone into a bank and just thrown money out. Or I'd sit there and play a flute, in the corner of the bank, dress up like an electronic Indian or something.

Had you ever dealt with the press like that before?

Of course I'd dealt with the press as an organizer. We'd already been on The David Susskind Show, which had been kind of wild drama. "How do you eat?" We opened a box of food and started feeding the whole audience. "What's a hippie?" We opened a box and a duck flew out with the word hippie around its neck. And Susskind went crazy! You see, we were trying to destroy the whole Q & A, intellectual TV kind of Q & A. All of a sudden: what's a hippie? Well, here's one. It's a duck with the word hippie on it flying in the audience. You want to get under their skin, these cruel, level-headed intellectuals with make-up on, being very liberal, analytical and everything. You want to bust through that. In other words, more show, give people something more to hear and watch. It isn't a very big story to say that these people were on TV and said this. So what? It's what they did. We thought of these acts as public happenings that jolted the kind of collective fantasy world that we live in through TV, essentially. The national fantasy world. So it would be natural that later there would be hippie invasions of Disney World, and other sacred tombs. Surrounding the Pentagon with witches so that it would rise into the air. Also, we wanted to get people to do what they were saying. That was kind of a problem with liberalism at the time, because it was saying things, but it wasn't doing anything. We were very action-oriented. We were called "action freaks."

Who called you action freaks?

We called ourselves action freaks, and we'd say that was a compliment, because you acted on your ideas. In fact, Dwight McDonald, who was a friend of mine, an older man, intellectual, a critic of American foreign policy, once remarked to me a few years later, "Whatever gave you people the idea that you had to act on your ideas? That's anti-intellectual. It's against the whole tradition of Western intellectual thought." Of course, that's not true. The abolitionists were acting on their ideas. And Thoreau. We lived by the ideology of the deed.

So what you were doing also had political significance?

Of course. It's a lot different than giving your money to Santa Claus standing on the corner. That's a political act, too, by the way. I think they're all political acts. There's no such thing as interacting in society without it being a political act, the most fearsome of which is war. But all other acts are political, too. Even if you say, "I don't believe in politics," you've just acted. You've acted for the status quo. How many times have you heard people say, "I don't get involved in politics?" Well, the rulers of the society, the Powers That Be, that's exactly what they want the populace to say, because that gives them three more votes. In a sense, one of the things we were saying at the Stock Exchange was that the people down on the floor weren't really engaged in capitalism, because they had it all rigged. I mean, they were all making money, they all represented people who are making money. It's the poor that feel the effects of capitalism. They've got to go out and work hard, protect their bicycles from being stolen, kill or be killed. I mean, they're in the dog race of capitalism as we know it. But the rich, they have socialism.

But when you were dealing with the press...

A put-on. I think they call it a put-on.

Did you give your name to the press?

No. That was just a thing of the times. Lots of those leaflets, even Revolution for the Hell of It, I signed "Free," even though people knew who it was, ultimately. Part of the purity of this moment was that people were doing acts without the ego gratification of seeing your name in lights. But after a while it became pointless. It didn't matter if I said I was Robin Hood, they printed Abbie Hoffman.

So what was the press coverage like after the Wall Street invasion?

It was hysterical. "Hippies went to the Stock Exchange, showered thousands of dollars onto the floor of the Exchange. The ticker-tape stopped. The Chairman of the Board of the Stock Exchange says it will never happen again. We'll take measures to prevent this from ever happening." Blah blah blah. They get very serious and straight-faced. The broadcasters are giggling a little, and they're showing footage of the press conference on the street, so people can make those bridges in myth-making.

Were you influenced by pop-culture phenomena, like the Beatles' press conferences, things like that?

Of course. And Dylan. Dylan had a way of mocking the press as he was talking to the press. And the Beatles, of course, were great at it. Oh yes, the Beatles were an enormous influence, as they later told us, we were on them.

What other ways did the Beatles influence you?

The Beatles were the complete artist, complete vision, designed the whole package. The songs, the words, sang it, lived it. And there were four of them, and they were all very different, so it was a collective experience, communal art. That was important, and their playful attitude about whatever they did. We liked the idea of collapsing dichotomies between work and play, between what the straight Left would call serious struggle for social change, and play. If you're fighting for liberation, why shouldn't you enjoy it? If you crack some barriers made by the imprinting system of the acculturation process, it's sort of like removing the shades of bullshit that have been layered over your head. And it's a good feeling. So, in a way, the Beatles were messengers of a kind of truth. A new truth. A new way that we could all relate together.

Would you say that they embodied the counterculture?

Definitely. Oh, yes. It was such a truism that Sgt. Pepper had an amazing impact on us, and on people all over the world, really, except for the Chinese, they were kind of shut off. When it first came out, it was like walking in and being one of the first people to see the Sistine Chapel, or seeing Shakespeare live, see him stand up and explain what he's going to do with his play, Twelfth Night. It was just incredible. Because up till then, and this is important in understanding the counterculture, long-haired music meant opera, it meant classical music, and it was meant for a very rich, elite, highly educated bunch of people. That was called long-haired music. Symphony music. Classical music.

Why was it called long-hair music?

Just because long hair through the '30s, '40s and '50s had become identified with the professorial, elite, irrelevant academic kind of rich type. So that was long-hair music. But because of the Beatles and the whole movement, long hair was popular. You could get the Sgt. Pepper album literally in Woolworths. So you had one of those rare moments in history where the best and the most popular were the same. That's called a Renaissance. That was a Renaissance aspect to a decade which was Civil War. A decade that marked a whole century. No doubt in my mind it marked the century. No doubt who won.

You?

We. Someone gotta win someone gotta lose. I know we won because, see, I can sit here with you in this deli and I've got long hair and I'm talking to you. Before then the cops could have come right in and taken me out–suspicion. Now it's illegal. We had to fight for it. And that's one of the things. And we abolished legal segregation. Whatever president comes, we can't go back. We can't go back to slavery because of the Civil War the century before. We can't go back living under King George because of the Civil War the century before that. So every century has like a war that marks it, and no matter what happens after that, you can't go back. Obviously, they weren't complete revolutions, or we wouldn't have homeless people, we wouldn't have poor people. We've got one more Civil War to go in this country. One more to go. We've got a big class struggle, it's about economics. We didn't touch that in the '60s. I mean, we touched it the way that we did, by throwing out money at the Stock Exchange. You see, I couldn't do that act today, because it would be an insult to people that are poor and homeless. But then it was affluence. There was a general ethos and perception in the country that we were all doing well, that we were living on easy street, more or less.

But in the '60s, many of the hippie kids associated with flower power and Timothy Leary weren't thinking so much about politics.

This act was a crossover between the hippies and the more political people. I would be the link between that kind of consciousness and Dave Dellinger or A.J. Muste, Cora Weiss. Primary in my mind going to the Stock Exchange——or even the first guerrilla communications act that we did, when we surrounded Con Edison's office with big signs saying "Breathing is hazardous to your health..."

Tell me about this.

We ran and put soot bombs inside the offices, the elevators and everything. We all dressed up in black and looked sooty, which looked wild on TV, it was amazing. But let me say that, about all these actions, foremost in my mind was stopping the war in Vietnam. We tried to invent different ways which would break people away from the mainstream kind of thinking which got them to salute without thinking, my country right or wrong, what ever it says. If it says "go kill," then go kill. If it says "study," then study. If it says, "pay your bill," then pay your bill. People would hear about us or see excerpts on television, read about it in the papers. They would identify with it, get ideas of their own, and start doing it all over the place. "Ideology of the deed" implies that the act is going to be reproduced in various forms in various ways by others in a kind of spontaneous generation. That doesn't mean that we didn't have any structure of communications of our own, or leadership. We had all that too. It was just that these kinds of events were moving faster along the communication belt than a leaflet.

You were always thinking about the way things would look when they were photographed.

Always. When I got up and dressed. I mean, that's the point. If I made a leaflet or a button I was aware of how it was going to communicate. Television was a little more tricky, as was the press, because you don't have the final say, so it's all distorted and everything. But ultimately I learned that that was okay, it didn't matter.

Why was that?

Because mythology is always distorting everything. The basic idea to get across is that someone went somewhere and tried to disrupt something. They tried to disrupt Con Edison, say. It doesn't matter what the media says about it, because some kind of emotional time bomb is stuck in the place.

And how did that make it mythology?

It was mythology the way I am a myth. The way people come up to me and say, weren't you a leader of the Klan in the '60s? Aren't you a woman? You're taller. Are you still on Wall Street? Didn't you play with the Grateful Dead? One of my favorites is that I invented long hair. I told him it wasn't true. He said, oh no, you made it legal in America. I said, now you're right! At the trial in Chicago, outside the court house on the opening day I did a front flip, full in the air, and landed on my feet. It was great that I could do it, it was about fifty-fifty at that age. But later, as that story got told, I heard I did it right in front of the judge, seventeen stories up. "Wow, he did a somersault right in front of the judge.' So myth brings closure. For example, people said we were banging on the walls of the Democratic convention in 1968, but we didn't get within seven miles of the building. We couldn't get out of Lincoln Park. So the numbers increase, the closeness of the symbols increases. That's myth.

Myth was a way to communicate critical messages through the media.

But there were lots of positive things, too. We were giving out free food and had free concerts. One day a bunch of us said we were going to clean a street all across New York. It was 7th Street, and we said we were going to clean the street from river to river. We put out leaflets and we got thousands of people. Certain things done around Liberty Week, or Hands Across America, most definitely, were bastardizations of a kind of public art that we brought to the modern era. Let's say we brought it with a political edge, and they took the political edge away.

Your approach to the media was a lot different than the Old Left or the SDS.

Oh sure, because the Old Left and SDS were drawing from the academic tradition and the religious tradition. They're not even that interested in winning.

What do you mean by that?

The academic tradition teaches you how to present a problem, and the religious tradition shows you how to be on the right side of the angels, and maybe even go down in martyrdom. But it's not exactly like the Super Bowl, where you've got another team to beat. It's a game, but hell you're playing the game as hard as you can. I play those games as hard as I can. That's why when they say, oh, you're just acting and everything, I say yeah: well, three dislocated vertebrae, four broken noses. It's real blood. It is a little shocking, but this is, after all, real life that we're talking about. We're taking real risks.

You were very involved with the new culture, the poetry, the rock music...

The whole idea was to try and hyphenate the two political cultures. But, you know, now when I talk to people about reprinting my early books, they say, "Don't tell them they're political books, just say "culture" and the publishers will say okay. Maybe we can get them through as art, but not as politics.' Unfortunately, as the story gets told, you pick up a new book on the '60s, it is written by a college professor, so it's analytical, academic, and it slightly misses the point, the flavor of it all. Go and look at the underground newspapers of the time. The prettiest one was the San Francisco Oracle, they had twelve issues, and some small press is putting it out now as a limited edition. It'll go right away. Like I say, if I had all those poems, even if I had manuscripts, early things that I wrote, they're worth much more than stuff I could write today.

That's for collectors.

Universities. But I don't have anything, I don't collect it. It's all out there in the gutter. A lot of the films, too. We had alternative newsreels. We had people with early video equipment, early cameras, filming all these events. But a lot of it is simply rotting away. The videotape then simply wasn't the quality it is today, so it's rotting away. Very hard to find a lot of good footage of me, for example.

That's funny. I'm surprised.

Well, maybe after I'm dead they'll dredge it up, but I haven't seen stuff that I thought was particularly good. One good shot of one good speech in May, 1970, but the rest of the stuff is, you know, minor. And people like it, too, when they see it. But I'm telling you, the best stuff's lost. That's the thing about all this. You had to have been there. I'm telling you we surrounded a five-sided figure which symbolizes evil in many religions with a circle to demystify it, and the building rose–the Pentagon rose in the air. But you had to be there to see it! You ask anyone who was there, and they'll tell you, yeah, sure it turned orange and it rose, it went right up!

In Revolution for the Hell of It, you said "Understanding is the first step to control, and control is the secret to our extinction."

Right. As I said at one point, chaos is mightier than the sword. Of course, I wouldn't be alive if this wasn't true. I can't tell you how many times I've been... four times attacked by mobs of five hundred to a thousand people, or more, or small groups. And they never laid a glove on me.

Quick reflexes?

Peripheral vision. What looks like a rioting mob with a lot of movement seems to slow down. It's the same with athletes. If you talk to them, they'll tell you that even though the game might look very fast, it doesn't seem that way to them. They've trained themselves to slow it down. It has something to do with the way you stay calm. When people are rioting they are out of control, they are not aiming. It's not like a cop. If three cops are coming after you, they've had a lot of practice. But a riot of a thousand people, they're just angry. They throw their babies at you, they throw their jewelry at you, they start punching their friends. You know, they're a frenzied mob. As long as they don't have a rope, you know... Also I've had situations where at least one hundred police have pulled guns on me, maybe three or four times that's happened. I got scared in Mississippi... I've always felt that dying for what you believe in is an honor, so that brings a certain madness to the situation, a certain confusion, and in the cop's mind, he doesn't know how to deal with this. This is something new. They haven't seen this. Of course, if I pull out a gun, they're used to that. If you pull out a gun they all know what to do. Mostly I would just try to use the fact that I had some presence. "You're sure you want to do this? You know who I am? You know who my uncle is? You'll be pounding the beat in Staten Island." Every police force has a place where cops get punished without getting kicked off the force. So you know that, you know cop talk. And they know you know their cop talk, and the only way you'd know that they don't want to pound the beat in Staten Island is if you have some pull. They think you know the inner ways of the power structure, so they back off. They get nervous about that. It's something that they haven't seen with your standard, run-of-the-mill suspect.

Another quote from Revolution for the Hell of It: "Theater is involving for those who are ready for it, while it's dismissed as non-threatening by those who could potentially wreck the stage."

Those who would get it, would get it, and those that won't, they won't. It took a strange person to get it and be very threatened by it. There were some people who thought we were too sneaky and very dangerous, and when they understood that, then we were in deep shit. So we took risks. People risked a lot more than their career and marriage plans. I mean, it's tough. I'll go to a group now that wants to fight a toxic waste dump or a nuclear power plant, and someone will say "Well, my lawyer says I can get sued." Sued? I'm coming from where you could get hung! See, by '68 they were passing hordes of laws so that we couldn't even move across state lines, we were banned from speaking in certain states. The Interstate Riot Act. You couldn't wear a shirt that looked like the flag. They were going after hippie garb, etc. That was the period when the very strict marijuana-possession laws came in. They were catching on that the cultural thing mattered. Anyone looking at Freedom of Information Act files could see that. It was around this period they hired a psychologist to analyze me, and Jerry Rubin too. I met the person later. They couldn't figure out the chaos, the confusion, they couldn't figure the motive. Why would they throw their money out at the Stock Exchange? These are white, smart kids. They could go work for IBM and everything. Why are they running around in slums getting their heads cracked by cops. You see, they couldn't figure it out. So as long as they couldn't figure it out, you were winning. Later on they did. It was the mid-'70s when you get the rise of the Right. They figured out how TV is used, the use of modern technology, especially computers. And you see anti-abortion people out there doing civil disobedience, saying this is the civil-rights movement of the '80s. The way they mix up culture and religion. When I went to Pat Robertson's 700 Club as a fugitive in 1976, I covered it as an underground writer–I was really underground!–I was saying, hey, I'm watching the counter-revolution to the '60s, right here. They're using the same techniques, plus they've got plenty of money, and they're wrapped in the flag, and in the Bible. My God, it's going to be no contest. Organizers on the Right would tell you that they picked our methods apart. They didn't like our goals, but they liked our methods. They studied our methods and gave it back to us. Wouldn't you? Somebody had to study this. I mean, the U.S. didn't get away with a war against a little country. Something went wrong. Something happened.

So this method of symbolic action had a direct political impact?

You know, within a month they spent twenty thousand dollars building a bulletproof wall around the Stock Exchange gallery. In fact I'm told that if you go on the tour that they will say that this is where the hippies ran up and threw the money off the railing. It's become part of the tour. Symbolic warfare is close to the real thing. Disrupt the fantasy world, memory bank, all these images–you can show that they're so vulnerable and fragile. Their reaction is going to be, well, next week they're not going to be throwing money, they'll be throwing bullets, it'll be violent. In a way the disruptive thing is violent, even though it's very peaceful what we did and everything. To people in power, it makes fun of their precious symbol, Wall Street. It made fools out of them. Just a handful of hippies brought the thing to a stop. Changed the whole world of commerce in an instant. They don't like that. I mean later, just about everybody's going to be giggling about it. Ten, fifteen, twenty years later. But that's one of the neat little tricks. That's how you get away with it. That's why I'm alive, and that's why I'm fifty-two.

Labels: Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, beatles, Bob Dylan, Chicago 8, counterculture, happenings, hippies, Jimi Hendrix, Marshal McLuhan, NY Stock Exchange, the sixties

"We speak with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies." [Listen at Democracy Now!]

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"John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, 'Conscience of an Economic Hit Man.'

Perkins writes, 'The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.'

John Perkins goes on to write: 'I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop.'

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us now in our Firehouse studios."

• John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man." He is the author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

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AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It’s great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Okay, explain this term, “economic hit man,” e.h.m., as you call it.

JOHN PERKINS: Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring -- to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life, through the economic hit men. I was very much a part of that.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you become one? Who did you work for?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation's largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations. The first real economic hit man was back in the early 1950's, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy, who overthrew the government of Iran, a democratically elected government, Mossadegh’s government who was Time's magazine person of the year; and he was so successful at doing this without any bloodshed -- well, there was a little bloodshed, but no military intervention, just spending millions of dollars and replaced Mossadegh with the Shah of Iran. At that point, we understood that this idea of economic hit man was an extremely good one. We didn't have to worry about the threat of war with Russia when we did it this way. The problem with that was that Roosevelt was a C.I.A. agent. He was a government employee. Had he been caught, we would have been in a lot of trouble. It would have been very embarrassing. So, at that point, the decision was made to use organizations like the C.I.A. and the N.S.A. to recruit potential economic hit men like me and then send us to work for private consulting companies, engineering firms, construction companies, so that if we were caught, there would be no connection with the government.

AMY GOODMAN: Okay. Explain the company you worked for.

JOHN PERKINS: Well, the company I worked for was a company named Chas. T. Main in Boston, Massachusetts. We were about 2,000 employees, and I became its chief economist. I ended up having fifty people working for me. But my real job was deal-making. It was giving loans to other countries, huge loans, much bigger than they could possibly repay. One of the conditions of the loan–let's say a $1 billion to a country like Indonesia or Ecuador–and this country would then have to give ninety percent of that loan back to a U.S. company, or U.S. companies, to build the infrastructure–a Halliburton or a Bechtel. These were big ones. Those companies would then go in and build an electrical system or ports or highways, and these would basically serve just a few of the very wealthiest families in those countries. The poor people in those countries would be stuck ultimately with this amazing debt that they couldn’t possibly repay. A country today like Ecuador owes over fifty percent of its national budget just to pay down its debt. And it really can’t do it. So, we literally have them over a barrel. So, when we want more oil, we go to Ecuador and say, “Look, you're not able to repay your debts, therefore give our oil companies your Amazon rain forest, which are filled with oil.” And today we're going in and destroying Amazonian rain forests, forcing Ecuador to give them to us because they’ve accumulated all this debt. So we make this big loan, most of it comes back to the United States, the country is left with the debt plus lots of interest, and they basically become our servants, our slaves. It's an empire. There's no two ways about it. It’s a huge empire. It's been extremely successful.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. You say because of bribes and other reason you didn't write this book for a long time. What do you mean? Who tried to bribe you, or who -- what are the bribes you accepted?

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I accepted a half a million dollar bribe in the nineties not to write the book.

AMY GOODMAN: From?

JOHN PERKINS: From a major construction engineering company.

AMY GOODMAN: Which one?

JOHN PERKINS: Legally speaking, it wasn't -- Stoner-Webster. Legally speaking it wasn't a bribe, it was -- I was being paid as a consultant. This is all very legal. But I essentially did nothing. It was a very understood, as I explained in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, that it was -- I was -- it was understood when I accepted this money as a consultant to them I wouldn't have to do much work, but I mustn't write any books about the subject, which they were aware that I was in the process of writing this book, which at the time I called “Conscience of an Economic Hit Man.” And I have to tell you, Amy, that, you know, it’s an extraordinary story from the standpoint of -- It's almost James Bondish, truly, and I mean--

AMY GOODMAN: Well that's certainly how the book reads.

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, and it was, you know? And when the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over. I come from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly strong moral values. I think I, you know, I’m a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced. And if I hadn't lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I’d have a hard time believing that anybody does these things. And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. In your book, you talk about how you helped to implement a secret scheme that funneled billions of dollars of Saudi Arabian petrol dollars back into the U.S. economy, and that further cemented the intimate relationship between the House of Saud and successive U.S. administrations. Explain.

JOHN PERKINS: Yes, it was a fascinating time. I remember well, you're probably too young to remember, but I remember well in the early seventies how OPEC exercised this power it had, and cut back on oil supplies. We had cars lined up at gas stations. The country was afraid that it was facing another 1929-type of crash–depression; and this was unacceptable. So, they -- the Treasury Department hired me and a few other economic hit men. We went to Saudi Arabia. We --

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men --e.h.m.’s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had -- His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you explain how Torrijos died?

JOHN PERKINS: Omar Torrijos, the President of Panama. Omar Torrijos had signed the Canal Treaty with Carter much -- and, you know, it passed our congress by only one vote. It was a highly contended issue. And Torrijos then also went ahead and negotiated with the Japanese to build a sea-level canal. The Japanese wanted to finance and construct a sea-level canal in Panama. Torrijos talked to them about this which very much upset Bechtel Corporation, whose president was George Schultz and senior council was Casper Weinberger. When Carter was thrown out (and that’s an interesting story–how that actually happened), when he lost the election, and Reagan came in and Schultz came in as Secretary of State from Bechtel, and Weinberger came from Bechtel to be Secretary of Defense, they were extremely angry at Torrijos -- tried to get him to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and not to talk to the Japanese. He adamantly refused. He was a very principled man. He had his problem, but he was a very principled man. He was an amazing man, Torrijos. And so, he died in a fiery airplane crash, which was connected to a tape recorder with explosives in it, which -- I was there. I had been working with him. I knew that we economic hit men had failed. I knew the jackals were closing in on him, and the next thing, his plane exploded with a tape recorder with a bomb in it. There's no question in my mind that it was C.I.A. sanctioned, and most -- many Latin American investigators have come to the same conclusion. Of course, we never heard about that in our country.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where -- when did your change your heart happen?

JOHN PERKINS: I felt guilty throughout the whole time, but I was seduced. The power of these drugs, sex, power, and money, was extremely strong for me. And, of course, I was doing things I was being patted on the back for. I was chief economist. I was doing things that Robert McNamara liked and so on.

AMY GOODMAN: How closely did you work with the World Bank?

JOHN PERKINS: Very, very closely with the World Bank. The World Bank provides most of the money that’s used by economic hit men, it and the I.M.F. But when 9/11 struck, I had a change of heart. I knew the story had to be told because what happened at 9/11 is a direct result of what the economic hit men are doing. And the only way that we're going to feel secure in this country again and that we're going to feel good about ourselves is if we use these systems we’ve put into place to create positive change around the world. I really believe we can do that. I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help -- genuinely help poor people. There are twenty-four thousand people starving to death every day. We can change that.

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, I want to thank you very much for being with us. John Perkins' book is called, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man."

Democracy Now!

Labels: American empire, economics, JohnPerkins, World Bank

Frontpage Interview's guest today is Pierre Rehov, a French filmmaker who has filmed six documentaries on the Palestinian Intifada. His documentary, Suicide Killers, which explores the psychology of suicide killers, has just been released on dvd. To watch the Suicide Killers trailer, click here.

FP: Pierre Rehov, welcome back to Frontpage Interview.

Rehov: Always a pleasure to answer your questions, Jamie.

FP: I would like to discuss some of your new projects with you today, but let's first talk a bit about Suicide Killers. Tell us the general nature of the film and also what reaction there has been to it from various quarters.

Rehov: As you already know, the making of Suicide Killers is a long story. I first wanted to make a film about victims of terror in Israel when I understood that the best homage I could give them would be for people to understand better what had really happened, and to film the perpetrators instead.

Unfortunately, victims of terror attacks have, more or less, in common, the same story. One day, their life changed dramatically, for no reason. In most cases they were not involved in politics, and their only fault was to be either Jewish or Americans and to find themselves at the wrong place, at the wrong time.

The ones that I interviewed in Israel could just not forget the smile they had seen on the face of the suicide bomber, one second before he blew himself up. This "smile" was intriguing to me. I wanted to go beyond it, to understand what make these living bombs tick. From my point of view, they are killers, and as guilty, in a weird way, as serial killers. This is the reason why I called my film "Suicide Killers."

FP: What do suicide killers and serial killers have in common?

Rehov: They have much in common with Norman Bates, the first major serial killer in the history of cinema (Hitchcock's "Psycho"). They are the result of a high level of frustration. In the case of Norman Bates, a nice, shy fellow, who ends up slaughtering every single female unlucky enough to spend the night in his motel, his own mother was responsible for that frustration, and he was doing it for her, being her hand, dressed with her clothes, to keep her alive.

In the case of Suicide Killers, they are the result of an organised frustration, created by their own civilisation, and they kill in the name of their God, being His hand, hoping for a better life in Paradise.

FP: Expand for us a bit on the civilization that spawns these frustrated sick people.

Rehov: The civilization has created these miserable individuals with extremely weak personalities. Their brains have been washed, and washed again, by too much religion and not enough individual freedom. Very often, they were abused by their parents, which is very common in Muslim societies, where violence is part of daily life. Therefore, as soon as I started "building" this film, I understood that the political and the social angles were not going to bring any answer to the question: "why do they do it?"

I know that my film is very controversial, since I chose the religious and sexual approach to try to find an explanation to this phenomenon. But this was brought to me by the terrorists themselves. I didn't make it up.

It is obvious, when you spend enough time with terrorists, whether males or females, that they suffer a lot from accumulated frustration and a high level of death anxiety which leads them to kill themselves while killing others (innocent people) as the only solution to finally feel alive, and to begin what they perceive as the only life, the eternal one. It is a strange paradox. But the human brain is complicated.

FP: So how has your film been accepted?

Rehov: What is very encouraging is that my film has been, first of all, accepted and even welcomed among many Palestinian intellectuals, who are disgusted with suicide bombers. In the U.S., most media, including CNN, were compelled by "Suicide Killers."

Before it was even released, while I was working on the third or fourth version of the film, I had to fly to America at least every other month to appear on TV, and give interviews. After all, my angle is the only one which can apply to why Palestinian terrorists, as well as British Muslims, become terrorists.

FP: Your film, From the River to the Sea, which examines the worldwide forces that have empowered Hamas and Hezbollah, received best award in its category at the Liberty film festival. Congrats. Tell us about the film and also why you think it received the award.

Rehov: "From the River to the Sea" is the result of a two year investigation inside Palestinian (so said) refugee camps. We must know, and remember that, those camps, created for most of them in 1948, perpetuate Palestinian misery with a political aim, and with the complicity of the United Nations.

Arab countries, which, by pride, and a tradition of anti-Semitism imported from Nazi Germany, refused the existence of the State of Israel, refused at the same time to re-settle their fellow Arabs who had fled the war zone in the midst of the rebirth of Israel. It is the only case, in the world, of so-said "refugees", transmitting their refugee status from generation to generation. When most Palestinians talk about "occupation," in our mind that defines the West Bank and Gaza. But, in their own words, Tel Aviv, Eilat, Haifa and all of Israel is occupation. Occupation is "from the Jordan river, to the Mediterranean Sea." This is what the title of my film refers to.

FP: What main point did you want to drive home in this film?

Rehov: I wanted to demonstrate that Hamas was not elected by accident, or as the result of Israel's misconduct. Hamas was elected for two reasons: a religious one, implying their relentless will to destroy Israel, and a social one, after years of corruption under Yasser Arafat. But, beyond this simple analysis, I also wanted to define responsibilities. Because terrorism is also the result of a suffering. And those poor fellows, in Palestinian camps, suffer, living in very harsh conditions. Although many times Israel and the West has tried to resettle them, for humanitarian and political reasons, they just could not, because of UNRWA (United Nation Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees ) and the surrounding Arab countries.

The end of the Palestinian refugee problem would be the end of the Palestinian problem. Israel has always been ready to trade territories for peace. But, each time that they try to do so, it is perceived as a victory by Palestinians, and it leads to situations such as the one we face now in Gaza. It will never be possible for those Palestinians to come back to what is now Israel, where only 15% of them come from. But, as long as UNRWA will be in charge of those poor fellows, as long as Arab countries will find interest in keeping them in camps (actually, those camps look like poor suburbs, don't expect to see tents anymore ), the Palestinian problem will survive, and will be the fertile ground for Palestinian terror. This is what my film is about. And I believe that this humanitarian point of view led it to winning an award at the Liberty Film Festival. I am very proud of it.

FP: What are some of your current projects?

Rehov: Actually, I have many. I just finished writing a novel trying to answer, as a fiction, the question: "How could we stop terrorism?" I was a published novelist, well known in France, 15 years ago. But I stopped writing. It was really pure happiness for me to write again. I am preparing another novel, and a scenario for a film. Again, a fiction. After 7 years dedicated to making documentaries, it is like a vacation for me to go back to fiction.

But, in the meantime, I am also preparing another feature documentary, which will be shot in most Arab countries, trying to find the contradiction inside the Muslim world, between Radical Islam and moderate Muslims. We are facing a threat which, to my point of view, is bigger and stronger than even Nazism or Communism. But one must not forget that Germans and Russians were the first victims of these two totalitarian systems. Moderate Muslims are the majority of Islam, but it is a silent one, in deep danger. This is what my film is going to be about. But I cannot say more without risking to put my team and myself in danger.

FP: Are you optimistic or pessimistic in our ability to prevail against Islamic fundamentalism?

Rehov: I am very pessimistic when it comes to radical Islam and its natural growth. The free world, in the past, had to face many threats, or, should I say, many faces of totalitarianism: Facism, Nazism and Communism. The major difference between those totalitarianisms and radical Islam is that radical Islam is the emanation of a religion and, therefore, something completely irrational.

I often described, in the past, Islamic terrorism as the result of a neurosis at the level of an entire civilization. But this is something that most analysts in the West do not see. The post-Marxist approach which has contaminated most intellectuals in the western world is trying to explain most problems from an economical and social point of view. This naive, but very common approach is trying to describe radical Islam not as a result of a civilization unable to re-define its identity in the 21st century, but as a result of our own faults: namely, the economical supremacy of the greedy West.

Therefore, it becomes easy to excuse radical Islam, its violence, its unbearable level of hatred. We are responsible. We have been abusing them for such a long time. The next step would be to say that we deserve what is happening to us. And it is another easy step that - at least in France - many analysts don't hesitate to take.

This incapacity of understanding the real problem is what makes me really pessimistic. The world is not black and white, but it is certainly not grey either. Democracy has been proven to be the best system for human beings, so far. I don't find any excuse for dictatorship, and it would be also too easy to say that victims of dictatorships deserve what they get, because they let it happen.

The first step to cure the problem is to identify and acknowledge it. Only 6 years after September 11, it looks like if many people have forgotten that America was viciously attacked by fanatics. Many people are so anxious to get back to a normal occidental life: we have already so many problems to deal with. But the threat didn't disappear. Since 2001, some 7000 attacks around the world were due to radical Islam. Wherever radical Islam is in contact with a different civilization, whether oriental or occidental, Buddhist or Judeo-Christian, violence is the result.

How could I be optimistic?

FP: Well yes, in many respects, it's hard to be optimistic, that's for sure.

Could you kindly expand a bit on what the free world and free people must do to win our battle against Islamic extremism?

Rehov: Of course, there is no easy answer to this question. I believe that, first of all, it is impossible to fight the enemy unless you can define and locate him. The major problem we have now is that most people, in the Western world, don't acknowledge the dimension of the threat that we are facing. Media, and well thinking people, are afraid to describe the enemy as a religious one, fearing that this would be offensive and politely incorrect.

But the free world could fight the Nazis and, later, make peace with the German people. This is about the same situation that we are facing now, although we are not fighting a nation but a civilization. And the funny thing is that there are more victims of Islamic extremism inside Islam than anywhere else. So, by trying to hide the nature of the threat, we are doing exactly the opposite of a favor to the Muslims that we try not to offend.

Muslims respect strength. They have a very low sense of individual freedom and democracy. They consider our attitude as a proof of our inferiority. Whoever is involved in Jihad fights it with certitude. But we defend ourselves without the same certitude. It is like telling them "you are right, we know it, but we still need to protect our families."

As long as the media will try to find excuses to Islamic terror, as long as politicians will be prompt to condemn American foreign policy, or Israel, we will give winning points to radical Muslims.

And these winning points just give them more capacity to recruit inside the Muslim world.

So, to try to answer your question in a shorter way, I would say, this is a war, we must be ready to fight it and in a war there is no excuse to the enemy.

FP: Pierre Rehov, thank you for sharing your wisdom with us today. Congratulations on all your great work and thank you for joining us.

Rehov: Again, it is always a pleasure to express myself on your site.

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com/

Labels: cinema, film, frontpage magazine, intifada, Pierre Rehov

Jim Garrison's Playboy Interview
Playboy vol. 14 no. 10 - October 1967

Part 1 of 3

PLAYBOY: You have been accused --- by the National Broadcasting Company, Newsweek, the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission and your own former investigative aide William Gurvich --- of attempts to intimidate witnesses, of engaging in criminal conspiracy and of inciting to such felonies as perjury, criminal defamation and public bribery. How do you respond to these charges?

GARRISON: I've stopped beating my wife. All the charges you enumerate have been made with one purpose in mind --- to place our office on the defensive and make us waste valuable time answering allegations that have no basis in fact. Also involved is a psychological by-product valuable to those who don't want the truth about Kennedy's assassination to become known: The very repetition of a charge lends it a certain credibility, since people have a tendency to believe that where there's smoke, there's fire --- although I find it difficult to believe that the public will put much credence in most of the dastardly deeds I've been accused of in the past few months. Just recently, for example, the rumor went around that my staff was peddling marijuana to high school students and that one of our major witnesses had just confessed that his testimony was based on a dream induced by an overdose of LSD. We've also been accused of planning an attack on the local FBI office with guns loaded with red pepper, having stolen money from our own investigative files and having threatened to shoot one witness in the derriere with an exotic gun propelling truth-serum darts. I just hope they never find out about my involvement in the Boston Brinks robbery.

I must admit, however, that I'm beginning to worry about the cumulative effect of this propaganda blitzkrieg on potential jurors for the trial of Clay Shaw. I don't know how long they can withstand the drumbeat obbligato of charges exonerating the defendant and convicting the prosecutor. For months now, the establishment's artillery units have been pounding away at the two themes NBC focused on --- that my office uses "improper methods" with regard to witnesses and that we don't really have a case against Mr. Shaw and he should never be brought to trial. I hope you'll give me the chance to answer each of these charges in detail; but first, let me elaborate a bit on the methods we employ in this or any other investigation.

My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state. My office moved in and prevented police seizure from bookstores of books arbitrarily labeled "obscene." I intervened and managed to persuade the Louisiana legislature to remove a provision from its new code of criminal procedure that would allow judges to reach out from the bench and cite newsmen for contempt if they penned anything embarrassing to the judges. My office has investigated cases where we had already obtained convictions; and on discovering new evidence indicating that the defendant was not guilty, we've obtained a reversal of the verdict. In over five years of office, I have never had a single case reversed because of the use of improper methods --- a record I'll match with any other D. A. in the country.

In this particular case, I've taken unusual steps to protect the rights of the defendant and assure him a fair trial. Before we introduced the testimony of our witnesses, we made them undergo independent verifying tests, including polygraph examination, truth serum and hypnosis. We thought this would be hailed as an unprecedented step in jurisprudence; instead, the press turned around and hinted that we had drugged our witnesses or given them posthypnotic suggestions to testify falsely. After arresting Mr. Shaw, we filed a motion for a preliminary hearing --- a proceeding that essentially operates in the defendant's favor. Such a hearing is generally requested by the defense, and it was virtually unheard of that the motion be filed by the state, which under the law has the right to charge a defendant outright, without any evaluation by a judge of the pending charges. But I felt that because of the enormity of this accusation, we should lean over backward and give the defendant every chance. A three-judge panel heard our evidence against Mr. Shaw and his attorneys' rebuttals and ordered him indicted for conspiracy to assassinate the President.

And I might add here that it's a matter of record that my relationship with the judiciary of our fair city is not a Damon-Pythias camaraderie. Once the judges had handed down their decision, we could have immediately filed a charge against the defendant just by signing it and depositing it with the city clerk --- the customary method of charging a defendant. Nevertheless, out of concern for Mr. Shaw's rights, we voluntarily presented the case to a blue-ribbon grand jury. If this grand jury had failed to indict Mr. Shaw, our case would have been dead as a doornail. But the grand jury, composed of 12 eminent New Orleans citizens, heard our evidence and indicted the defendant for participation in a conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy. In a further effort to protect the rights of the defendant, and in the face of the endlessly reiterated accusation that we have no case against him --- despite the unanimous verdict of the grand jury and the judges at the preliminary hearing --- I have studiously refrained from making any public statement critical of the defendant or prejudging his guilt. Of course, this puts me at a considerable disadvantage when the press claims I have no case against him, because the only way I could convince them of the strength of my case is to throw open our files and let them examine the testimony of all our witnesses. Apart from the injustice such an act would do Mr. Shaw, it could get our whole case thrown out of court on the grounds that we had prejudiced the defendant's rights by pretrial publicity. So I won't fall into that particular trap, whatever the provocation.

I only wish the press would allow our case to stand or fall on its merits in court. It appears that certain elements of the mass media have an active interest in preventing this case from ever coming to trial at all and find it necessary to employ against me every smear device in the book. To read the press accounts of my investigation --- my "circus," I should say --- I'm a cross between Al Capone and Attila the Hun, ruthlessly hounding innocent men, trampling their legal rights, bribing and threatening witnesses and in general violating every canon of legal ethics. My God, anybody who employs the kind of methods that elements of the news media attribute to me should not only not be a district attorney, he should be disbarred. This case has taught me the difference between image and reality, and the power of the mythmakers. But I know I've done everything possible to conduct this investigation with honesty and integrity and with full respect for the civil rights of the defendant. But a blanket denial of charges against me isn't going to convince anyone, so why don't we consider them one by one?

PLAYBOY: All right. The May 15th issue of Newsweek charged that two of your investigators offered David Ferrie's former roommate, Alvin Beauboeuf, $3000 and an airline job if he would help substantiate your charges against Clay Shaw. How do you answer this accusation?

GARRISON: Mr. Beauboeuf was one of the two men who accompanied David Ferrie on a mysterious trip from New Orleans to Texas on the day of the assassination, so naturally we were interested in him from the very start of our investigation. At first he showed every willingness to cooperate with our office; but after Ferrie's death, somebody gave him a free trip to Washington. From that moment on, a change came over Beauboeuf; he refused to cooperate with us any further and he made the charges against my investigators to which you refer.

Fortunately, Beauboeuf had signed an affidavit on April 12th --- well after the alleged bribe offer was supposed to have been made --- affirming that "no representative of the New Orleans Parish district attorney's office has ever asked me to do anything but to tell the truth. Any inference or statement by anyone to the contrary has no basis in fact." As soon as his attorney began broadcasting his charges, we asked the New Orleans police department to thoroughly investigate the matter. And on June 12th, the police department --- which is not, believe me, in the pocket of the district attorney's office --- released a report concluding that exhaustive investigation by the police intelligence branch had cleared my staff of any attempt to bribe or threaten Beauboeuf into giving untrue testimony. There was no mention of this report, predictably enough, in Newsweek.

Let me make one thing clear, though: Like every police department and district attorney's office across the country, we have sums set aside to pay informers for valuable information --- but we would never suborn perjury. This isn't because we're saints --- short cuts like that could be awfully tempting in a frustrating case --- but because we're realistic enough to know that any witness who can be bought by us can also be bought by the other side. So it's rather na --- ve, apart from being ethically objectionable, to assume that our investigators travel around the country with bags of money trying to bribe witnesses to lie on the witness stand. We just don't operate that way.

PLAYBOY: On an NBC television special, "The J.F.K. Conspiracy: The Case of Jim Garrison," a former Turkish-bathhouse operator in New Orleans, Fred Leemans, claimed that one of your aides offered him money to testify that Clay Shaw had frequented his establishment with Lee Harvey Oswald. Do you also deny this charge?

GARRISON: Yes; and it's a perfect illustration of the point I was just making about how easy it is for the other side to buy witnesses and then charge us with its own misconduct. Mr. Leemans came to us in early May, volunteering testimony to the effect that he had often seen a man named Clay Bertrand in his bathhouse, sometimes accompanied by men he described as "Latins." In a sworn affidavit, Leemans said he had also seen a young man called Lee with Bertrand on four or five occasions --- a man who fits the description of Lee Harvey Oswald. Leemans also identified the Clay Bertrand who had frequented his establishment as Clay Shaw. Now, this was important testimony, and initially we were favorably impressed with Mr. Leemans. But then we started receiving calls from him demanding money.

Well, I've told you our policy on this, and the answer was a flat no. He was quiet for a while and then he called and asked if we would approve if he sold his story to a magazine, since he badly needed money. We refused to give him such approval. Apparently, the National Broadcasting Company was able to establish a warmer relationship with Mr. Leemans. In any case, he now says that he didn't really lie to us; he just "told us what he thought we wanted to hear." I'm sure he was equally cooperative with NBC --- although he's beginning to spread his favors around. When a reporter asked him for more information after the broadcast, Leemans refused, explaining that he was saving himself for the Associated Press, "since I want to make something out of this." I would like to make one personal remark about Mr. Leemans. I don't know if he was lying to us initially or not --- though I suspect from other evidence in my possession that his statement as he first gave it was accurate --- but anybody, no matter what his financial straits, who tries to make a fast buck off the assassination of John Kennedy is several rungs below the anthropoid ape on the evolutionary scale.

PLAYBOY: On this same NBC show, newsman Frank McGee claimed that NBC investigators had discovered that your two key witnesses against Clay Shaw --- Perry Russo and Vernon Bundy --- both failed polygraph tests prior to their testimony before the grand jury. In the case of Russo, who claimed to have attended a meeting at David Ferrie's apartment where Shaw, Oswald and Ferrie plotted the assassination, NBC said that "Russo's answers to a series of questions indicate, in the language of the polygraph operator, 'deception criteria.' He was asked if he knew Clay Shaw. He was asked if he knew Lee Harvey Oswald. His 'yes' answer to both of these questions indicated 'deception criteria.'" Did Bundy and Russo fail their lie-detector tests?

GARRISON: No, and NBC's allegations in this area are about as credible as its other charges. The men who administered both polygraph tests flatly deny that Russo and Bundy failed the test. I'll offer right now to make Russo's and Bundy's polygraph tests accessible to any reputable investigator or reporter the day Clay Shaw's trial begins; I can't do it before that, because I'm restrained from releasing material pertaining to Shaw's guilt or innocence. Just for your information, though, the veracity of Bundy and Russo has been affirmed not only through polygraph tests but through hypnosis and the administration of sodium amytal --- truth serum.

I want to make a proposition to the president of NBC: If this charge is true, then I will resign as district attorney of New Orleans. If it's untrue, however, then the president of NBC should resign. Just in case he thinks I'm kidding, I'm ready to meet with him at any time to select a mutually acceptable committee to determine once and for all the truth or falsehood of this charge. In all fairness, however, I must add that the fact Bundy and Russo passed their polygraph tests is not, in and of itself, irrefutable proof that they were telling the truth; that's why we administered the other tests. The lie detector isn't a foolproof technique. A man well rehearsed and in complete control of himself can master those reactions that would register on the polygraph as deception criteria and get away with blatant lies, while someone who is extremely nervous and anxiety-ridden could tell the truth and have it register as a lie. Much also depends on who administers the test, since it can easily be rigged. For example, Jack Ruby took a lie-detector test for the Warren Commission and told lie after outright lie --- even little lies that could be easily checked --- and yet the Warren Commission concluded that he passed the test. So the polygraph is only one weapon in the arsenal we use to verify a witness' testimony, and we have never considered it conclusive; we have abundant documentation to corroborate their stories.

PLAYBOY: Two convicts, Miguel Torres and John Cancler, told NBC that Vernon Bundy admitted having lied in his testimony linking Clay Shaw to Lee Oswald. Do you dismiss this as just another NBC fabrication?

GARRISON: Messrs. Cancler and Torres were both convicted by my office, as were almost half the men in the state penitentiary, and I'm sure the great majority of them have little love for the man who sent them up. I don't know if they fabricated their stories in collusion with NBC or on their own for motives of revenge, but I'm convinced from what I know of Vernon Bundy that his testimony was truthful. NBC manipulated the statements of Cancler and Torres to give the impression to the viewer that he was watching a trial on television --- my trial --- and that these "objective" witnesses were saying exactly what they would say in a court of law. Actually --- and NBC scrupulously avoided revealing this to its audience --- their "testimony" was not under oath, there was no opportunity for cross-examination or the presentation of rebuttal witnesses, and the statements of Cancler, Torres and all the rest of NBC's road company were edited so that the public would hear only those elements of their story that would damage our case. The rules of evidence and adversary procedure, I might add, have been developed over many years precisely to prevent this kind of phony side show.

Of course, these two convicts have been used against my office in variety of respects. Miguel Torres also claims I offered him a full pardon, a vacation in Florida and an ounce of heroin if he would testify that Clay Shaw had made homosexual overtures to him on the street. What on earth that would have established relevant to this case I still don't know, but that's his story. I think it was actually rather cheap of me to offer Torres only an ounce of heroin; that wouldn't have lasted out his vacation. A kilo would be more like it. After all, I'm not stingy. Torres' friend John Cancler, a burglar, has also charged that one of my investigators tried to induce him to burglarize Clay Shaw's house and plant false evidence there, but he refused because he would not have such a heinous sin on his conscience. I suppose that's why Cancler's prison nickname is "John the Baptist." I can assure you, if we ever wanted to burglarize Shaw's home --- which we never did --- John the Baptist would be the last man on earth we'd pick for the job. By the way, Mr. Cancler was called before the grand jury and asked if he had told the truth to NBC. He replied; "I refuse to answer on the grounds that my answer might incriminate me" --- and was promptly sentenced to six months in prison and a $500 fine for contempt of court.

PLAYBOY: The NBC special also claimed to have discovered that "Clay, or Clem, Bertrand does exist. Clem Bertrand is not his real name. It is a pseudonym used by a homosexual in New Orleans. For his protection, we will not disclose the real name of the man known as Clem Bertrand. His real name has been given to the Department of Justice. He is not Clay Shaw." Doesn't this undermine your entire case against Shaw?

GARRISON: Your faith in NBC's veracity is touching and indicates that the Age of Innocence is not yet over. NBC does not have the real Clay Bertrand; the man whose name NBC so melodramatically turned over to the Justice Department is that of Eugene Davis, a New Orleans bar owner, who has firmly denied under oath that he has ever used the name Clay, or Clem, Bertrand. We know from incontrovertible evidence in our possession who the real Clay Bertrand is --- and we will prove it in court.

But to make this whole thing a little clearer, let me tell you the genesis of the whole "Clay Bertrand" story. A New Orleans lawyer, Dean Andrews, told the Warren Commission that a few months before the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of "gay Mexicanos" came to his office and requested Andrews' aid in having Oswald's Marine Corps undesirable discharge changed to an honorable discharge; Oswald subsequently returned alone with other legal problems.

Andrews further testified that the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, he received a call from Clay Bertrand, who asked him to rush to Dallas to represent Oswald. Andrews claims he subsequently saw Bertrand in a New Orleans bar, but Bertrand fled when Andrews approached him. This was intriguing testimony, although the Warren Commission dismissed it out of hand; and in 1964, Mark Lane traveled to New Orleans to speak to Andrews. He found him visibly frightened. "I'll take you to dinner," Andrews told Lane, "but I can't talk about the case. I called Washington and they told me that if I said anything, I might get a bullet in the head." For the same reason, he has refused to cooperate with my office in this investigation. The New York Times reported on February 26th that "Mr. Andrews said he had not talked to Mr. Garrison because such talk might be dangerous, but added that he believed he was being 'tailed.'" Andrews told our grand jury that he could not say Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand and he could not say he wasn't. But the day after NBC's special, Andrews broke his silence and said, yes, Clay Shaw is not Clem Bertrand and identified the real Clay Bertrand as Eugene Davis. The only trouble is, Andrews and Davis have known each other for years and have been seen frequently in each other's company. Andrews has lied so often and about so many aspects of this case that the New Orleans Parish grand jury has indicted him for perjury. I feel sorry for him, since he's afraid of getting a bullet in his head, but he's going to have to go to trial for perjury. [Andrews has since been convicted.]

PLAYBOY: You expressed your reaction to the NBC show in concrete terms on July seventh, when you formally charged Walter Sheridan, the network's special investigator for the broadcast, with attempting to bribe your witness Perry Russo. Do you really have a case against Sheridan, or is this just a form of harassment?

GARRISON: The reason we haven't lost a major case in over five years in office is that we do not charge a man unless we can make it stick in court. And I'm not in the business of harassing anybody. Sheridan was charged because evidence was brought to us indicating that he attempted to bribe Perry Russo by offering him free transportation to California, free lodgings and a job once there, payment of all legal fees in any extradition proceedings and immunity from my office. Mr. Russo has stated that Sheridan asked his help "to wreck the Garrison investigation" and "offered to set me up in California, protect my job and guarantee that Garrison would never get me extradited." According to Russo, Sheridan added that both NBC and the CIA were out to scuttle my case.

I think it's significant that the chief investigator for this ostensibly objective broadcast starts telling people the day he arrives in town that he is going to "destroy Garrison" --- this at the same time he is unctuously assuring me that NBC wanted only the truth and he had an entirely open mind on my case. Let me tell you something about Walter Sheridan's background, and maybe you'll understand his true role in all this. Sheridan was one of the bright, hard young investigators who entered the Justice Department under Bobby Kennedy. He was assigned to nail Jimmy Hoffa. Sheridan employed a wide variety of highly questionable tactics in the Justice Department's relentless drive against Hoffa; he was recently subpoenaed to testify in connection with charges that he wire-tapped the offices of Hoffa's associates and then played back incriminating tapes to them, warning that unless they testified for the Government, they would be destroyed along with Hoffa.

A few years ago, Sheridan left the Justice Department --- officially, at least --- and went to work for NBC. No honest reporter out for a story would have so completely prejudged the situation and been willing to employ such tactics. I think it's likely that in his zeal to destroy my case, he exceeded the authority granted him by NBC's executives in New York. I get the impression that the majority of NBC executives probably thought Sheridan's team came down here in an uncompromising search for the truth. When Sheridan overstepped himself and it became obvious that the broadcast was, to say the least, not objective, NBC realized it was in a touchy position. Cooler heads prevailed and I was allowed to present our case to the American people. For that, at least, I'm singularly grateful to Walter Sheridan.

PLAYBOY: How do you respond to the charge of your critics --- including NBC --- that you launched this probe for political reasons, hoping the attendant publicity would be a springboard to a Senate seat or to the governorship?

GARRISON: I'd have to be a terribly cynical and corrupt man to place another human being on trial for conspiracy to murder the President of the United States just to gratify my political ambition. But I guess there are a lot of people around the country, especially after NBC's attack, who think that's just the kind of man I am. That rather saddens me. I'm no Albert Schweitzer, but I could never do a thing like that. I derive no pleasure from prosecuting a man, even though I know he's guilty; do you think I could sleep at night or look at myself in the mirror in the morning if I hounded an innocent man?

You know, I always received much more satisfaction as a defense attorney in obtaining an acquittal for a client than I ever have as a D.A. in obtaining a conviction. All my interests and sympathies tend to be on the side of the individual as opposed to the state. So this is really the worst charge that anyone could make against me --- that in order to get my name in the paper, or to advance politically, I would destroy another human being. This kind of charge reveals a good deal about the personality of the people who make it; to impute such motives to another man is to imply you're harboring them yourself.

But to look at a different aspect of your question, I'm inclined to challenge the whole premise that launching an investigation like this holds any political advantages for me. A politically ambitious man would hardly be likely to challenge the massed power of the Federal Government and criticize so many honorable figures and distinguished agencies. Actually, this charge is an argument in favor of my investigation: Would such a slimy type, eager to profiteer on the assassination, jeopardize his political ambitions if he didn't have an ironclad case? If I were really the ambitious monster they paint me, why would I climb out on such a limb and then saw it off? Unless he had the facts, it would be the last thing a politically ambitious man would do. I was perfectly aware that I might have signed my political death warrant the moment I launched this case --- but I couldn't care less as long as I can shed some light on John Kennedy's assassination. As a matter of fact, after this last murderous year, I find myself thinking more and more about returning to private life and having time to read again, to get out in the sun and hit a golf ball. But before I do that, I'm going to break this case and let the public know the truth. I won't quit before that day. I wouldn't give the bastards the satisfaction.

PLAYBOY: According to your own former chief investigator, William Gurvich, the truth about the assassination has already been published in the Warren Report. After leaving your staff last June, he announced, "If there is any truth to any of Garrison's charges about there being a conspiracy, I haven't been able to find it." When members of your own staff have no faith in your case, how do you expect the public to be impressed?

GARRISON: First of all, I won't deny for a minute that for at least three months I trusted Bill Gurvich implicitly. He was never my "chief investigator" --- that's his own terminology --- because there was no such position on my staff while he worked for me. But two days before Christmas 1966, Gurvich, who operates a private detective agency, visited my office and told me he'd heard of my investigation and thought I was doing a wonderful job. He presented me with a beautiful color-TV set and asked if he could be of use in any capacity.

Well, right then and there, I should have sat back and asked myself a few searching questions --- like how he had heard of my probe in the first place, since only the people we were questioning and a few of my staff, as far as I knew, were aware of what was going on at that time. We had been under way for only five weeks, remember. And I should also have recalled the old adage about Greeks bearing gifts. But I was desperately understaffed --- I had only six aides available to work on the assassination inquiry full time --- and here comes a trained private investigator offering his services free of charge. It was like a gift from the gods.

So I set Gurvich to work; and for the next couple of months, he did an adequate job of talking to witnesses, taking photographs, etc. But then, around March, I learned that he had been seeing Walter Sheridan of NBC. Well, this didn't bother me at first, because I didn't know then the role Sheridan was playing in this whole affair. But after word got back to me from my witnesses about Sheridan's threats and harassment, I began keeping a closer eye on Bill. I still didn't really think he was any kind of a double agent, but I couldn't help wondering why he was rubbing elbows with people like that.

Now, don't forget that Gurvich claims he became totally disgusted with our investigation at the time of Clay Shaw's arrest --- yet for several months afterward he continued to wax enthusiastic about every aspect of our case, and I have a dozen witnesses who will testify to that effect. I guess this was something that should have tipped me off about Bill: He was always enthusiastic, never doubtful or cautionary, even when I or one of my staff threw out a hypothesis that on reflection we realized was wrong. And I began to notice how he would pick my mind for every scrap of fact pertaining to the case. So I grew suspicious and took him off the sensitive areas of the investigation and relegated him to chauffeuring and routine clerical duties.

This seemed to really bother him, and every day he would come into my office and pump me for information, complaining that he wasn't being told enough about the case. I still had nothing concrete against him and I didn't want to be unjust, but I guess my manner must have cooled perceptibly, because one day about two months before he surfaced in Washington, Bill just vanished from our sight. And with him, I'm sorry to confess, vanished a copy of our master file.

How do you explain such behavior? It's possible that Bill joined us initially for reasons of opportunism, seeing a chance to get in at the beginning of an earth-shaking case, and subsequently chickened out when he saw the implacable determination of some powerful agencies to destroy our investigation and discredit everyone associated with it. But I really don't believe Bill is that much of a coward. It's also possible that those who want to prevent an investigation learned early what we were doing and made a decision to plant somebody on the inside of the investigation. Let me stress that I have no secret documents or monitored telephone calls to support this hypothesis; it just seems to me the most logical explanation for Bill's behavior. Let me put it this way: If you were in charge of the CIA and willing to spend scores of millions of dollars on such relatively penny-ante projects as infiltrating the National Students Association, wouldn't you make an effort to infiltrate an investigation that could seriously damage the prestige of your agency?

PLAYBOY: How could your probe damage the prestige of the CIA and cause them to take countermeasures against you?

GARRISON: For the simple reason that a number of the men who killed the President were former employees of the CIA involved in its anti-Castro underground activities in and around New Orleans. The CIA knows their identity. So do I --- and our investigation has established this without the shadow of a doubt. Let me stress one thing, however: We have no evidence that any official of the CIA was involved with the conspiracy that led to the President's death.

PLAYBOY: Do you lend no credence, then, to the charges of a former CIA agent, J. Garrett Underhill, that there was a conspiracy within the CIA to assassinate Kennedy?

GARRISON: I've become familiar with the case of Gary Underhill, and I've been able to ascertain that he was not the type of man to make wild or unsubstantiated charges. Underhill was an intelligence agent in World War Two and an expert on military affairs whom the Pentagon considered one of the country's top authorities on limited warfare. He was on good personal terms with the top brass in the Defense Department and the ranking officials in the CIA. He wasn't a full-time CIA agent, but he occasionally performed "special assignments" for the Agency. Several days after the President's assassination, Underhill appeared at the home of friends in New Jersey, apparently badly shaken, and charged that Kennedy was killed by a small group within the CIA. He told friends he believed his own life was in danger. We can't learn any more from Underhill, I'm afraid, because shortly afterward, he was found shot to death in his Washington apartment. The coroner ruled suicide, but he had been shot behind the left ear and the pistol was found under his left side --- and Underhill was right-handed.

PLAYBOY: Do you believe Underhill was murdered to silence him?

GARRISON: I don't believe it and I don't disbelieve it. All I know is that witnesses with vital evidence in this case are certainly bad insurance risks. In the absence of further and much more conclusive evidence to the contrary, however, we must assume that the plotters were acting on their own rather than on CIA orders when they killed the President. As far as we have been able to determine, they were not in the pay of the CIA at the time of the assassination --- and this is one of the reasons the President was murdered: I'll explain later what I mean by that. But the CIA could not face up to the American people and admit that its former employees had conspired to assassinate the President; so from the moment Kennedy's heart stopped beating, the Agency attempted to sweep the whole conspiracy under the rug. The CIA has spared neither time nor the taxpayers' money in its efforts to hide the truth about the assassination from the American people. In this respect, it has become an accessory after the fact in the assassination.

PLAYBOY: Do you have any conclusive evidence to support these accusations?

GARRISON: I've never revealed this before, but for at least six months, my office and home telephones --- and those of every member of my staff --- have been monitored. If there is as little substance to this investigation as the press and the Government allege, why would anyone go to all that trouble? I leave it to your judgment if the monitoring of our phones is the work of the Women's Christian Temperance Union or the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce.

PLAYBOY: That's hardly conclusive evidence.

GARRISON: I'd need a book to list all the indications. But let's start with the fact that most of the attorneys for the hostile witnesses and defendants were hired by the CIA --- through one or another of its covers. For example, a New Orleans lawyer representing Alvin Beauboeuf, who has charged me with every kind of unethical practice except child molesting --- I expect that allegation to come shortly before Shaw's trial --- flew with Beauboeuf to Washington immediately after my office subpoenaed him, where Beauboeuf was questioned by a "retired" intelligence officer in the offices of the Justice Department. This trip was paid for, as are the lawyer's legal fees, by the CIA --- in other words, with our tax dollars.

Another lawyer, Stephen Plotkin, who represents Gordon Novel [another of Garrison's key witnesses], has admitted he is paid by the CIA --- and has also admitted his client is a CIA agent; you may have seen that story on page 96 of The New York Times, next to ship departures. Plotkin, incidentally, sued me for $10,000,000 for defaming his client and sued a group of New Orleans businessmen financing my investigation for $50,000,000 --- which meant, in effect, that the CIA was suing us. As if they need the money. But my attorney filed a motion for a deposition to be taken from Novel, which meant that he would have to return to my jurisdiction to file his suit and thus be liable for questioning in the conspiracy case. Rather than come down to New Orleans and face the music, Novel dropped his suit and sacrificed a possible $60,000,000 judgment. Now, there's a man of principle; he knows there are some things more important than money.

PLAYBOY: Do you also believe Clay Shaw's lawyers are being paid by the CIA?

GARRISON: I can't comment directly on that, since it relates to Shaw's trial. But I think the clincher, as far as Washington's obstruction of our probe goes, is the consistent refusal of the Federal Government to make accessible to us any information about the roles of the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the para-military right in the assassination. There is, without doubt, a conspiracy by elements of the Federal Government to keep the facts of this case from ever becoming known --- a conspiracy that is the logical extension of the initial conspiracy by the CIA to conceal vital evidence from the Warren Commission.

PLAYBOY: What "vital evidence" did the CIA withhold from the Warren Commission?

GARRISON: A good example is Commission Exhibit number 237. This is a photograph of a stocky, balding, middle-aged man published without explanation or identification in the 26 volumes of the Warren Report. There's a significant story behind Exhibit number 237. Throughout the late summer and fall of 1963, Lee Oswald was shepherded in Dallas and New Orleans by a CIA "baby sitter" who watched over Oswald's activities and stayed with him. My office knows who he is and what he looks like.

PLAYBOY: Are you implying that Oswald was working for the CIA?

GARRISON: Let me finish and you can decide for yourself. When Oswald went to Mexico City in an effort to obtain a visa for travel to Cuba, this CIA agent accompanied him. Now, at this particular time, Mexico was the only Latin-American nation maintaining diplomatic ties with Cuba, and leftists and Communists from all over the hemisphere traveled to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City for visas to Cuba. The CIA, quite properly, had placed a hidden movie camera in a building across the street from the embassy and filmed everyone coming and going. The Warren Commission, knowing this, had an assistant legal counsel ask the FBI for a picture of Oswald and his companion on the steps of the embassy, and the FBI, in turn, filed an affidavit saying they had obtained the photo in question from the CIA. The only trouble is that the CIA supplied the Warren Commission with a phony photograph. The photograph of an "unidentified man" published in the 26 volumes is not the man who was filmed with Oswald on the steps of the Cuban Embassy, as alleged by the CIA. It's perfectly clear that the actual picture of Oswald and his companion was suppressed and a fake photo substituted because the second man in the picture was working for the CIA in 1963, and his identification as a CIA agent would have opened up a whole can of worms about Oswald's ties with the Agency. To prevent this, the CIA presented the Warren Commission with fraudulent evidence --- a pattern that repeats itself whenever the CIA submits evidence relating to Oswald's possible connection with any U.S. intelligence agency. The CIA lied to the Commission right down the line; and since the Warren Commission had no investigative staff of its own but had to rely on the FBI, the Secret Service and the CIA for its evidence, it's understandable why the Commission concluded that Oswald had no ties with American intelligence agencies.

PLAYBOY: What was the nature of these ties?

GARRISON: That's not altogether clear, at least insofar as his specific assignments are concerned; but we do have proof that Oswald was recruited by the CIA in his Marine Corps days, when he was mysteriously schooled in Russian and allowed to subscribe to Pravda. And shortly before his trip to the Soviet Union, we have learned, Oswald was trained as an intelligence agent at the CIA installation at Japan's Atsugi Air Force Base --- which may explain why no disciplinary action was taken against him when he returned to the U.S. from the Soviet Union, even though he had supposedly defected with top-secret information about our radar networks. The money he used to return to the U.S., incidentally, was advanced to him by the State Department.

PLAYBOY: In an article for Ramparts, ex-FBI agent William Turner indicated that White Russian refugee George De Mohrenschildt may have been Oswald's CIA "baby sitter" in Dallas. Have you found any links between the CIA and De Mohrenschildt?

GARRISON: I can't comment directly on that, but George De Mohrenschildt is certainly an enigmatic and intriguing character. Here you have a wealthy, cultured White Russian émigré who travels in the highest social circles --- he was a personal friend of Mrs. Hugh Auchincloss, Jackie Kennedy's mother --- suddenly developing an intimate relationship with an impoverished ex-Marine like Lee Oswald. What did they discuss --- last year's season at Biarritz, or how to beat the bank at Monte Carlo?

And Mr. De Mohrenschildt has a penchant for popping up in the most interesting places at the most interesting times --- for example, in Haiti just before a joint Cuban exile-CIA venture to topple Duvalier and use the island as a springboard for an invasion of Cuba; and in Guatemala, another CIA training ground, the day before the Bay of Pigs invasion. We have a good deal more information about Oswald's CIA contacts in Dallas and New Orleans --- most of which we discovered by sheer chance --- but there are still whole areas of inquiry blocked from us by the CIA's refusal to cooperate with our investigation.

For public consumption, the CIA claims not to have been concerned with Oswald prior to the assassination. But one thing is certain: Despite these pious protestations, the CIA was very much aware of Oswald's activities well before the President's murder. In a notarized affidavit, State Department officer James D. Crowley states, "The first time I remember learning of Oswald's existence was when I received copies of a telegraphic message from the Central Intelligence Agency dated October 10, 1963, which contained information pertaining to his current activities." It would certainly be interesting to know what the CIA knew about Oswald six weeks before the assassination, but the contents of this particular message never reached the Warren Commission and remain a complete mystery.

There are also 51 CIA documents classified top secret in the National Archives pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. Technically, the members of the Commission had access to them; but in practice, any document the CIA wanted classified was shunted into the Archives without examination by the sleeping beauties on the Commission. Twenty-nine of these files are of particular interest, because their titles alone indicate that the CIA had extensive information on Oswald and Ruby before the assassination. A few of these documents are: CD 347, "Activity of Oswald in Mexico City"; CD 1054, "Information on Jack Ruby and Associates"; CD 692, "Reproduction of Official CIA Dossier on Oswald"; CD 1551, "Conversations Between Cuban President and Ambassador"; CD 698, "Reports of Travel and Activities of Oswald"; CD 943, "Allegations of Pfc. Eugene Dinkin re Assassination Plot"; and CD 971, "Telephone Calls to U.S. Embassy, Canberra, Australia, re Planned Assassination."

The titles of these documents are all we have to go on, but they're certainly intriguing. For example, the public has heard nothing about phone calls to the U.S. Embassy in Canberra, warning in advance of the assassination, nor have we been told anything about a Pfc. Dinkin who claims to have knowledge of an assassination plot. One of the top-secret files that most intrigues me is CD 931, which is entitled "Oswald's Access to Information About the U-2." I have 24 years of military experience behind me, on active duty and in the reserves, and I've never had any access to the U-2; in fact, I've never seen one. But apparently this "self-proclaimed Marxist," Lee Harvey Oswald, who we're assured had no ties to any Government agency, had access to information about the nation's most secret high-altitude reconnaissance plane.

Of course, it may be that none of these CIA files reveals anything sinister about Lee Harvey Oswald or hints in any way that he was employed by our Government. But then, why are the 51 CIA documents classified top secret in the Archives and inaccessible to the public for 75 years? I'm 45, so there's no hope for me, but I'm already training my eight-year-old son to keep himself physically fit so that on one glorious September morn in 2038 he can walk into the National Archives in Washington and find out what the CIA knew about Lee Harvey Oswald.

If there's a further extension of the top-secret classification, this may become a generational affair, with questions passed down from father to son in the manner of the ancient runic bards. But someday, perhaps, we'll find out what Oswald was doing messing around with the U-2.

Of course, there are some CIA documents we'll never see. When the Warren Commission asked to see a secret CIA memo on Oswald's activities in Russia that had been attached to a State Department letter on Oswald's Russian stay, word came back that the Agency was terribly sorry, but the secret memo had been destroyed while being photocopied. This unfortunate accident took place on November 23, 1963, a day on which there must have occurred a great deal of spontaneous combustion around Washington.

PLAYBOY: John A. McCone, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has said of Oswald: "The Agency never contacted him, interviewed him, talked with him or received or solicited any reports or information from him or communicated with him in any manner. Lee Harvey Oswald was never associated or connected directly or indirectly, in any way whatsoever, with the Agency." Why do you refuse to accept McCone's word?

GARRISON: The head of the CIA, it seems to me, would think long and hard before he admitted that former employees of his had been involved in the murder of the President of the United States --- even if they weren't acting on behalf of the Agency when they did it. In any case, the CIA's past record hardly induces faith in the Agency's veracity. CIA officials lied about their role in the overthrow of the Arbenz Guzman regime in Guatemala; they lied about their role in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran; they lied about their role in the abortive military revolt against Sukarno in 1958; they lied about the U-2 incident; and they certainly lied about the Bay of Pigs. If the CIA is ready to lie even about its successes --- as in Guatemala and Iran --- do you seriously believe its director would tell the truth in a case as explosive as this? Of course, CIA officials grow so used to lying, so steeped in deceit, that after a while I think they really become incapable of distinguishing truth and falsehood. Or, in an Orwellian sense, perhaps they come to believe that truth is what contributes to national security, and falsehood is anything detrimental to national security. John McCone would swear he's a Croatian dwarf if he thought it would advance the interests of the CIA --- which he automatically equates with the national interest.

PLAYBOY: Let's get down to the facts of the assassination, as you see them. When --- and why --- did you begin to doubt the conclusions of the Warren Report?

GARRISON: Until as recently as November of 1966, I had complete faith in the Warren Report. As a matter of fact, I viewed its most vocal critics with the same skepticism that much of the press now views me --- which is why I can't condemn the mass media too harshly for their cynical approach, except in the handful of cases where newsmen seem to be in active collusion with Washington to torpedo our investigation. Of course, my faith in the Report was grounded in ignorance, since I had never read it; as Mark Lane says, "The only way you can believe the Report is not to have read it."

But then, in November, I visited New York City with Senator Russell Long; and when the subject of the assassination came up, he expressed grave doubts about the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. Now, this disturbed me, because here was the Majority Whip of the U.S. Senate speaking, not some publicity hound with an ideological ax to grind; and if at this late juncture he still entertained serious reservations about the Commission's determinations, maybe there was more to the assassination than met the eye. So I began reading every book and magazine article on the assassination I could get my hands on --- my tombstone may be inscribed "Curiosity Killed The D.A." --- and I found my own doubts growing. Finally, I put aside all other business and started to wade through the Warren Commission's own 26 volumes of supportive evidence and testimony. That was the clincher. It's impossible for anyone possessed of reasonable objectivity and a fair degree of intelligence to read those 26 volumes and not reach the conclusion that the Warren Commission was wrong in every one of its major conclusions pertaining to the assassination. For me, that was the end of innocence.

PLAYBOY: Do you mean to imply that the Warren Commission deliberately concealed or falsified the facts of the assassination?

GARRISON: No, you don't need any explanation more sinister than incompetence to account for the Warren Report. Though I didn't know it at the time, the Commission simply didn't have all the facts, and many of those they had were fraudulent, as I've pointed out --- thanks to the evidence withheld and manufactured by the CIA. If you add to this the fact that most of the Commission members had already presumed Oswald's guilt and were merely looking for facts to confirm it --- and in the process tranquilize the American public --- you'll realize why the Commission was such a dismal failure. But in the final analysis, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference whether the Commission members were sincere patriots or mountebanks; the question is whether Lee Oswald killed the President alone and unaided; if the evidence doesn't support that conclusion --- and it doesn't --- a thousand honorable men sitting shoulder to shoulder along the banks of the Potomac won't change the facts.

PLAYBOY: So you began your investigation of the President's assassination on nothing stronger than you own doubts and the theories of the Commission's critics?

GARRISON: No, please don't put words in my mouth. The works of the critics --- particularly Edward Epstein, Harold Weisberg and Mark Lane --- sparked my general doubts about the assassination; but more importantly, they led me into specific areas of inquiry. After I realized that something was seriously wrong, I had no alternative but to face the fact that Oswald had arrived in Dallas only a short time before the assassination and that prior to that time he had lived in New Orleans for over six months. I became curious about what this alleged assassin was doing while under my jurisdiction, and my staff began an investigation of Oswald's activities and contacts in the New Orleans area. We interviewed people the Warren Commission had never questioned, and a whole new world began opening up. As I studied Oswald's movements in Dallas, my mind turned back to the aftermath of the assassination in 1963, when my office questioned three men --- David Ferrie, Alvin Beauboeuf and Melvin Coffey --- on suspicion of being involved in the assassination. I began to wonder if we hadn't dismissed these three men too lightly, and we reopened our investigation into their activities.

PLAYBOY: Why did you become interested in Ferrie and his associates in November 1963?

GARRISON: To explain that, I'll have to tell you something about the operation of our office. I believe we have one of the best district attorney's offices in the country. We have no political appointments and, as a result, there's a tremendous amount of esprit among our staff and an enthusiasm for looking into unanswered questions. That's why we got together the day after the assassination and began examining our files and checking out every political extremist, religious fanatic and kook who had ever come to our attention. And one of the names that sprang into prominence was that of David Ferrie. When we checked him out, as we were doing with innumerable other suspicious characters, we discovered that on November 22nd he had traveled to Texas to go "duck hunting" and "ice skating."

Well, naturally, this sparked our interest. We staked out his house and we questioned his friends, and when he came back --- the first thing he did on his return, incidentally, was to contact a lawyer and then hide out for the night at a friend's room in another town --- we pulled him and his two companions in for questioning. The story of Ferrie's activities that emerged was rather curious. He drove nine hours through a furious thunderstorm to Texas, then apparently gave up his plans to go duck hunting and instead went to an ice-skating rink in Houston and stood waiting beside a pay telephone for two hours; he never put the skates on. We felt his movements were suspicious enough to justify his arrest and that of his friends, and we took them into custody. When we alerted the FBI, they expressed interest and asked us to turn the three men over to them for questioning. We did, but Ferrie was released soon afterward and most of its report on him was classified top secret and secreted in the National Archives, where it will remain inaccessible to the public until September 2038 A.D. No one, including me, can see those pages.

PLAYBOY: Why do you believe the FBI report on Ferrie is classified?

GARRISON: For the same reason the President's autopsy X rays and photos and other vital evidence in this case are classified --- because they would indicate the existence of a conspiracy, involving former employees of the CIA, to kill the President.

PLAYBOY: When you resumed your investigation of Ferrie three years later, did you discover any new evidence?

GARRISON: We discovered a whole mare's-nest of underground activity involving the CIA, elements of the paramilitary right and militant anti-Castro exile groups. We discovered links between David Ferrie, Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. We discovered, in short, what I had hoped not to find, despite my doubts about the Warren Commission --- the existence of a well-organized conspiracy to assassinate John Kennedy, a conspiracy that came to fruition in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and in which David Ferrie played a vital role.