Chapter 4: An Enemy of the People

Before getting into the substance of Sullivan’s disclosures, it is at this juncture necessary to insert some final pieces of America’s buried history that have long been missing from mainstream education. On numerous levels, this will give clearer context not only to what Sullivan disclosed, but to the factors motivating his personal journey and decision to support Gary’s investigation.

For in a way, the real story of America’s 1960s domestic political assassinations has its genesis in spring of 1954. In reminder, that’s when E. Howard Hunt made his debut as the CIA’s rising star as a covert operative. He made this debut by launching Voice of Liberation, a Nazi-inspired propaganda campaign which cared little for human liberties after all in that its aim was to topple a duly-elected democratic president, Jacobo Arbenz, and this, because he had committed the “crime” of redeeming Guatemala’s land for the oppressed indigenous people at the expense of United Fruit’s imperial stakeholders.

Eerily, Hunt launched Voice of Liberation on May 1, 1954. 

As if a cosmic chess match was begun between two unseen powers on the game board of world history, another milestone event that would end up connecting to Hunt’s distant future as a black ops specialist was set in motion on that same day in Montgomery, Alabama. There, a 25 year old seminary grad was finding his voice and message of liberation. His name, Martin Luther King Jr., reflected a family appreciation for the 16th century reformer whose independent thinking reshaped the theological and cultural course of western civilization, and the message on his mind was in preparation for delivery the next day. It was to be the first sermon of his career as the newly hired pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. 

“It is a significant fact,” he would tell them, “that I come to you at a most crucial hour of our world’s history, at a time when the flame of war might arise at any time to redden the skies of our dreary world.”

Ironically, the message which followed this opening statement was not one of “doom and gloom” typical to end-time theology. Rather, it was an encouragement for the Church at large that true representation must be given to the words, “He hath anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and to set at liberty those who are bruised.” God’s kingdom if properly understood, he indicated, offered peaceful and more witty solutions to social ills than the emerging “rise of militarism.”  

So formative was this sermon to King’s sense of prophetic destiny that he would commemorate it as such many years later in Beyond Vietnam—the 1967 sermon in which he declares the war “fraudulent,” claiming that everything gleaned from his civil rights journey prepared him for this hour of confrontation with the military industrial complex. (The rather unique sense in which his preparedness for this was true and relevant to plans for his assassination remains ahead in Sullivan’s disclosures). Meanwhile, another voice destined to buffer this “rise of militarism” was being introduced on the world stage that spring of 1954.

That April the Democratic Party’s rising star—a 36 year old first-term senator from Massachusetts with reddish hair—stepped to the senate floor with concerns about the Eisenhower administration’s embroilment in Vietnam. “I am frankly of the belief,” warned Jack Kennedy, “that no amount of American military assistance in Indochina can conquer an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere, ‘an enemy of the people’ which has the sympathy and covert support of the people.”  

With time, this elusive “enemy of the people” in the senator’s mind would prove to encompass not just Soviet imperialism, but the western kind as well. Whether or not he knew it in 1954, Kennedy’s anti-imperial criticisms were not so much aimed at President Eisenhower, but at the brothers John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, whose respective titles as Secretary of State and Director of Central Intelligence had given them unbridled reign over foreign policy. And in their hands, a disturbing pattern was beginning to show. Whereas the rumblings of the Guatemala coup were then underway, these brothers had also orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953. What “crime” did he committ to deserve such a thing?

Put simply, Iran’s prime minister had grown weary of western interference in his country’s internal affairs and made steps toward nationalizing their Big Oil industries.  Aspects of its industrial nexus had been directly brokered by the Dulles brothers years earlier in Tehran as lawyers with the elite international firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. They did the brokering with Iran’s previous head of state, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi—the shah whose wife infamously bathed in milk as Iran’s people starved. In 1949, the Dulles brothers held a special dinner party at the Council of Foreign Relations for the shah, where he delighted his hosts with a toast that Iran had no plans of nationalizing its western industries. Of course, the shah made this assurance assuming he would be seated on the Peacock Throne forever, never imagining that Iran’s democratic uprising would force his escape to Rome—until, that is, the CIA came to the potentate’s rescue, ousting Mossadegh and restoring him to his corporate-friendly former glory.

Although this transfer of power would be spun by the Mockingbird media as a triumph for human progress, it didn’t succeed without overcoming a key challenge along the way: President Eisenhower would never approve a coup out of sympathy for Big Oil imperialism; a better cover story was going to be needed to get the Midwestern statesmen on board. The CIA director did not have to wrack his brain for long to come up with one. Equipped with the necessary talking points, John Foster Dulles strode into the Oval Office with report that a communist revolution was fomenting in Iran under the prime minister’s watch. If swift action wasn’t taken to stabilize the region by restoring the shah, they urged, 60 percent of the world’s oil would fall to Moscow’s control, and the United States military would have to cut back on operations worldwide. 

It wouldn’t be until 1960, during Eisenhower’s last days in office, that the blinders would come off of him. The downing of a U2 spy plane over Russia led to an exposure of certain details that made it clear to Ike that Allen Dulles was a rogue and lying director. Still, the lame duck president felt powerless to act, except to give the monster that had been created under his watch a couple of names, privately coining it a “legacy of ashes” for his successor, and more diplomatically, the “military industrial complex” in his farewell address to the nation. The MIC’s “total influence—economic, political, even spiritual power—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal Government,” observed the departing Commander in Chief. And the only hope of it not subverting the people’s power entirely, he warned, rested forevermore on an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry.”

By then, however, it was going to take a rather special citizen to model this awakening in terms sufficient to make a difference. 

By 1960, the institutions responsible for keeping citizens informed had been part of the MIC problem most of the decade. With the likes of Henry Luce at Time-Life and Arthur Sulzberger at The New York Times still chanting their praises for the Director of Central Intelligence, the Mockingbird pipeline was never stronger. And Dulles had his heart fixed on invading Cuba next. The plan was, Vice President Richard Nixon would be next in line for the White House, and, owing his political rise to the secret help received from Allen Dulles for many years, such plans to be rid of Castro and “reclaim” Cuba for the free world would be supported at the highest office. (United Fruit then might also have its enterprises on the island restored). But on that election night of November 1960, these plans experienced a positive upset. Not only did Nixon lose the election by a slim margin, he lost it to that same Irish-American senator from Massachusetts who gave them grief about Vietnam in 1954.

JFK’s 2nd American Revolution 

His first evening as president-elect, Jack Kennedy was at Hyannis Port’s relaxed setting with his closest aides enjoying cocktails and discussion about what a New Frontier could be like. Those unchartered areas of science and space, of peace and war, of ignorance, poverty, and more would require a fundamental shift—a changing of the guard at the gateways of information control. Perhaps lubricated by the alcohol, the discussion quickly arrived at a root issue about which director should be first to go: Allen Dulles of the CIA, or J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI? Or was it best to find replacements for both immediately?

Although the latter had its appeal, the president-elect understood in the end that uprooting these sacred pillars first thing would cause a storm no brand new administration could handle. Especially on such a narrow victory. That next morning, a press announcement was made that both Dulles and Hoover would be reappointed to their long-held positions—a prudent, no-win decision that would haunt the new frontiersman the remainder of his days. 

From Dulles’s point of view, Kennedy’s victory did not equal the end of the world. At the CIA and Pentagon there was already plenty of momentum behind plans for Cuba that Dulles believed the new president’s only realistic choice would be to support them. This was nearly correct. Howard Hunt had been working hard that last year on Operation Mongoose in his reprised role of training Cuban revolutionaries in combat and psychological warfare. The new administration had no qualms there. In fact, empowering Cuban nationals to fight their own revolution against a dictator seemed appropriate, but, President Kennedy insisted, there be no overt invasion of the island by American forces.

But then at the Bay of Pigs the trained Cubans failed in their attempted revolution. And as the president probed the matter, it became clear that the CIA director had plainly lied to him about the Cubans’ chance of success. It became clear that Dulles designed the operation to fail thinking this would place overwhelming pressure on the new Commander in Chief to send in U.S. Marines to the rescue, warranting all-out invasion and occupation. Much to his fury, the director was awfully mistaken.  

Wishing to avoid a third world war, the president refused to send in American forces in plain view of a watching world, and the fury was mutual. From that day on,  Allen Dulles was denied any more visits to the Oval Office for in-person briefings. Kennedy quipped that the director never told him anything he couldn’t read in the newspapers, which he knew to be CIA-manipulated. “I wouldn’t be surprised if information wasn’t poured into you from interested agencies,” Kennedy sarcastically told reporters in his first news conference after the Bay of Pigs. Dulles, meanwhile, was busy doing just that, feeding his friends in the media Kennedy’s “lack of determination to succeed” in Cuba, and other such talking points.

Besides his pipeline to the Mockingbird media, Dulles’s handle on the narrative was also bolstered by arrangements made for the CIA’s long-term cultural engineering—a task largely delegated to his prime confidante, James Jesus Angleton. Legendized as the agency’s “Gray Ghost,” Angleton was an undergrad in Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity when he launched Furioso, a trendy literary magazine which gave him the experience and network to later mold the Congress for Cultural Freedom—a lushly funded CIA front for sponsoring publishing start-ups, magazines, artists, concert tours, and more. Grants and awards went to those whose art reflected an anti-Soviet bloc worldview, keeping alive the Cold War tensions on which covert ops tended to thrive. 

Pleased with the Gray Ghost’s cunning and complex ways, Dulles moved him up the ladder to the agency’s most sensitive post, chief of Counterintelligence. Named to this position that curious year of 1954, Angleton would occupy it the rest of his long career as the director’s right-hand man, helping to create a “CIA within the CIA” even unto brokering their relationship with the “Mob’s Accountant,” Meyer Lansky. What’s more, Angleton was a pioneering figure in the agency’s psychological warfare programs, upgrading them with a recruitment of Nazi war criminals he had helped to escape justice. It was for the “greater good” of acquiring their craft at anti-Soviet propaganda.

Aware of the problem’s size, President Kennedy was not inclined to be another pawn in the game.

Vowing privately to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds,” he made the first steps to this long term process by firing those responsible for the Bay of Pigs: namely, Dulles himself, and deputy directors Charles Cabell and Richard Bissell Jr. The resulting shockwaves throughout the intel community were arguably as bad as if Dulles had never been reappointed. And so began President Kennedy’s second American Revolution—a silent and unacknowledged one seeded into existence on the battle field of information warfare, fated to get bloody for the George Washington of his day who planted it.

Contrary to textbook history, the humiliated ex-director did not submissively disappear into retirement. According to David Talbot’s meticulous re-examination of his life and legacy, The Devil’s Chessboard, Dulles became fondly revered throughout the agency as “the Old Man,” remaining well equipped to continue leading the “CIA within the CIA” after being stripped of his title. It was as if the agency he had been cultivating since its birth was built for this end precisely. 

Within the walled-in terrace of his redbrick estate in Georgetown, the 68 year old shadow director continued meeting with his closest men, James Angleton and the head of covert operations, Cord Meyer. Although Howard Hunt did not share their level of status at the CIA proper, the black ops legend shared a deep bond with Dulles ever since the Guatemala Coup. Outraged at the Old Man’s firing, Hunt was also known to be visiting the Georgetown home. 

By fall of 1963, however, President Kennedy’s list of enemies had expanded well beyond the CIA. Intending to extract the whole of a “deep state” by its interlocking roots, Kennedy by this point had taken steps to weaken the Federal Reserve’s grip on the economy, to deplete Big Oil allowance, and to withdraw the United States from Vietnam. Furthermore, he had publicly warned about the nature of covert programs, suggesting they embodied equal potential for abuse and foreign infiltration as they did for national security. And not unrelated to this, were rumors of Hoover being on the chopping block next.

Thus, if Dulles happened to prompt ideas for JFK’s assassination, it was not going to be a tough sell. What we do know is on that fateful November day in 1963, the Old Man wasn’t at his Georgetown lair as usual. He was bunkered at the CIA’s rural Virginia facility known as “The Farm,” where long after being fired he kept an office supplied with files, state-of-the-art communication gear, and everything else one would need if running a covert operation.

In any case, we will have a much better framework now to appreciate what Gary discovered through the files Sullivan gave him and through their dialogue at the pub.