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Posts Tagged ‘NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV’

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JFK: FIFTY YEARS AFTER DALLAS: PART TWO (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on August 16, 2013 at 1:00 am

During the 1960 Presidential campaign, then-Senator John F. Kennedy promised to build a Peace Corps to train people in underdeveloped nations to help themselves.

In March, 1961, the program went into effect, with the President’s brother-in-law, Sergent Shriver, as director.

Starvation, illiteracy and disease were the three enemies of the Corps.  Any nation wanting aid could request it.  The first group of volunteers went to the Philippines, the second to Equador and the third to Tanganika.

The problems of the underdeveloped world were too great for any single organization to solve.  But the Corps lifted the spirits of many living in those countries.  And it captured the imagination of millions of Americans–especially those of the tens of thousands of idealistic youths who entered its ranks.

To combat the growing Communist threat to Latin America, Kennedy established the Alliance for Progress.  He defined the Alliance’s goal as providing “revolutionary progress through powerful, democratic means.”

Within two years he could report:

“Some 140,000 housing units have been constructed.  Slum clearance projects have begun, and 3,000 classrooms have been built.  More than 4,000,000 school books have been distributed.

“The Alliance has fired the imagination and kindled the hopes of millions of our good neighbors.  Their drive toward modernization is gaining momentum as it unleashes the energies of these millions.

“The United States is becoming increasingly identified in the minds of the people with the goal they move toward: a better life with freedom,” said Kennedy.

Critics of the program, however, charged that the President was trying to “dress up the old policies” of Franklin D. Roosevelt in new rhetoric.  Since FDR’s time, the United States has believed in giving economic aid to Latin America.

Much–if not most–of these billions of dollars has wound up in the pockets of various right-wing dictators, such as Fulgencio Batista, Anastasio Somoza and Rafael Trujillo.

Meanwhile, Kennedy was urging action on another front–that of outer space.

“This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space,” declared the President.  He committed the United States to putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

As indeed it happened less than six years after his death–on July 20, 1969.

Kennedy’s idealistic rhetoric masked his real reason for going to the moon: To score a propaganda victory over the Soviet Union.

But the President hadn’t forgotten Cuba–and his intention to remove Fidel Castro from power at almost any cost.

Immediately after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy appointed his brother, Robert–who was then the Attorney General–to oversee a CIA program to overthrow Castro.

The CIA and the Mafia entered into an unholy alliance to assassinate Castro–each for its own benefit:

  • The CIA wanted to please Kennedy by overthrowing the Communist leader who had nationalized American corporate holdings.
  • The Mafia wanted to regain its lucrative casino and brothel holdings that had made Cuba the playground of the rich in pre-Castro times.

The mobsters were authorized to offer $150,000 to anyone who would kill Castro and were promised any support the Agency could yield.

“We were hysterical about Castro at about the time of the Bay of Pigs and thereafter,” then-former  Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara testified before Congress about these efforts. “And there was pressure from JFK and RFK to do something about Castro.”

Nor was everyone in the CIA enthusiastic about the “get Castro” effort.

“Everyone at CIA was surprised at Kennedy’s obsession with Fidel,” recalled Sam Halpern, who was assigned to the Cuba Project. “They thought it was a waste of time. We all knew [Fidel] couldn’t hurt us. Most of us at CIA initially liked Kennedy, but why go after this little guy?

“One thing is for sure: Kennedy wasn’t doing it out of national security concerns. It was a personal thing. The Kennedy family felt personally burnt by the Bay of Pigs and sought revenge.”

It was all-out war. Among the tactics used:

  • Hiring Cuban gangsters to murder Cuban police officials and Soviet technicians.
  • Sabotaging mines.
  • Paying up to $100,000 per “hit” for the murder or kidnapping of Cuban officials.
  • Using biological and chemical warfare against the Cuban sugar industry.
  • Planting colorful seashells rigged to explode at a site where Castro liked to go skindiving.
  • Trying to arrange for his being presented with a wetsuit impregnated with noxious bacteria and mold spores, or with lethal chemical agents.
  • Attempting to infect Castro’s scuba regulator with tuberculous bacilli.
  • Trying to douse his handkerchiefs, cigars, tea and coffee with other lethal bacteria.

But all of these efforts failed to assassinate Castro–or overthrow the Cuban Revolution he was heading.

“Bobby (Kennedy) wanted boom and bang all over the island,” recalled Halpern. “It was stupid. The pressure from the White House was very great.”

Americans would rightly label such methods as ”terrorist” if another power used them against the United States today. And the Cuban government saw the situation exactly the same way.

So Castro appealed to Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, for assistance.

Khrushchev was quick to comply: “We must not allow the communist infant to be strangled in its crib,” he told members of his inncer circle.

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JFK: FIFTY YEARS AFTER DALLAS: PART ONE (OF TEN)

In Bureaucracy, History, Politics, Social commentary on August 15, 2013 at 11:16 am

November 22, 2013, will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

It’s one of those infamous dates that its eyewitnesses will never forget–in a class with

  • December 7, 1941 (Pearl Harbor),
  • April 12, 1945 (the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and
  • September 11, 2001 (Al Qaeda’s attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center).

Some have called the Kennedy adminsitration a golden era in American history.

A time when touch football, lively White House parties, stimulus to the arts and the antics of the President’s children became national obsessions.

Others have called the Kennedy Presidency a monument to the unchecked power of wealth and ambition.  An administration staffed by young novices playing at statesmen, riddled with nepotism, and whose legacy includes the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam war and the world’s first nuclear confrontation.

While Americans continue to disagree about the legacy of JFK, there is no disagreement that his Presidency came to a sudden and shocking end just two years, ten months and two days after it had all begun.

The opening days of the Kennedy Presidency raised hopes for a dramatic change in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But detente was not possible then.  The Russians had not yet experienced their coming agricultural problems and the setback in Cuba during the Missile Crisis.  And the United States had not suffered reversals in Vietnam.

Kennedy’s first brush with international Communism came on April 17, 1961, with the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  This operation had been planned and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency during the final months of the Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower.

About 1,400 Cuban exiles were to be landed on the island to overthrow the Communist government of Fidel Castro. They were supposed to head into the mountains–as Castro himself had done against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1956–and raise the cry of revolution.

The U.S. Navy would supply transport after an American air strike had knocked out the Cuban air force.  But the airstrike failed and Kennedy, under the pressure of world opinion, called off a second try.

Even so, the invasion went ahead.  When the invaders surged onto the beaches, they found Castro’s army waiting for them.  Many of the invaders were killed on the spot.  Others were captured–to be ransomed by the United States in December, 1962, in return for medical supplies.

It was a major public relations setback for the newly-installed Kennedy administration, which has raised hopes for a change in American-Soviet relations.

Kennedy, trying to abort widespread criticism, publicly took the blame for the setback:  “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.  Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I’m the responsible officer of the Government.”

The Bay of Pigs convinced Kennedy that he had been misled by the CIA and the Joint Chieifs of Staff.  Out of this came his decision that, from now on, he would rely more heavily on the counsel of his brother, Robert, whom he had installed as Attorney General.

Another consequence of the failed Cuban invasion: It convinced Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev that Kennedy was weak.

Khrushchev told an associate that he could understand if Kennedy had not decided to invade Cuba.  But once he did, Kennedy should have gone all the way and wiped out Castro.

Khrushchev attributed this to Kennedy’s youth, inexperience and timidity–and believed he could bully the President.

On June 4, 1961, Kennedy met with Khrushchev in Vienna to discuss world tensions.  Khrushchev threatened to go to nuclear war over the American presence in West Berlin–the dividing line between Western Europe, protected by the United States, and Eastern Europe, controlled by the Soviet Union.

Kennedy, who prized rationality above all else, was shaken by Knhrushchev’s unexpected rage.  Emerging from the conference, he told an associate: “It’s going to be a cold winter.”

Meanwhile, East Berliners felt the door was about to slam on their access to West Berlin, and a flood of 3,000 refugees daily poured into West Germany.

Khrushchev was clearly embarrassed at this clear showing of the unpopularity of the Communist regime. In August, he orderd that a concrete wall–backed up by barbed wire, searchlights and armed guards–be erected to seal off East Berlin.

That same year, when tensions mounted and a Soviet invasion of West Berlin seemed likely, Kennedy sent additional troops to the city in a massive demonstration of American will.

Two years later, in June, 1963, during a 10-day tour of Europe, Kennedy visited Berlin to deliver his “I am a Berlinner” speech to a frenzied crowd of thousands.

JFK adddresses crowds at the Berlin Wall

Standing within gunshot of the Berlin wall, he lashed out at the Soviet Union and praised the citizens of West Berlin for being “on the front lines of freedom” for more than 20 years.

“All free men, wherever they may live,” said Kennedy, “are citizens of Berlin.  And therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, ‘Ich ben ein Berlinner.'”

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WHEN THE KGB COMES CALLING

In Bureaucracy, History, Humor, Law Enforcement, Social commentary on April 24, 2013 at 12:00 am

A day after bombs ravaged the Boston Marathon, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered his country’s assistance in investigating this latest Islamic outrage.

Putin said in a condolences note published on the Kremlin’s website that the international community should unite to fight terrorism.

Vladimir Putin

Putin said Russia “would be ready to provide assistance” to U.S. authorities with the probe into the bombings at the Boston marathon.

Fortunately, the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and Boston police were able, within a week, to identify and kill/arrest the two brothers responsible for killing three people and injuring about 180 more.

But suppose President Obama had taken Putin up on his offer?

Officially, the KGB (“Committee for State Security”) no longer exists.  It was abolished by then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev following the agency’s unsuccessful coup against him in August, 1991.

But its legacy lives on in the renamed FSB (Federal Security Service).

The KGB was formed in 1954, the year after the death of Joseph Stalin, Russia’s 20th century version of Ivan the Terrible.  (Previously, the state secret police had been known, first, as the Cheka–“Extraordinary Commission”– and then as the NKVD.)

Regardless of its name, the agency relentlessly pursued its twin goals: Brutally repressing political oppression at home and spying on its enemies abroad.

Through the reins of Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhniev, Yuri Andropov, Constitin Chernenko and Mikhail Gorbachev, the KGB acted as “the sword and shield of Russia.”  Among its tens of thousands of members was Vladimir Putin.

Even the worst abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI pale in comparison to those of the KGB, which ran its own prisons, routinely tortured and murdered men and women, and conducted espionage abroad.

The agency remained impervious to control except by its Kremlin masters–who were the ones directing its worst atrocities.

So it’s intriguing to imagine how the KGB would have reacted to the bombings at the Boston Marathon.

Perhaps the best way to do this is to see the KGB–oops, FSB–through the eyes of its former victims: The ussians themselves.

Unable to protest the abuses of the all-powerful police, Russians–in secret, and only among their most-trusted friends and family members–struck back with humor of the blackest sort

  • Q. Why do the KGB operate in groups of three? A. One who can read, one who can write and one to keep an eye on the two intellectuals.
  • A KGB officer tells the next-of-kin that her father committed suicide.  Woman: How did he die?  KGB: Skull fracture.  Woman:  How did it happen?  KGB: He wouldn’t drink the poison.
  • A Russian teacher asks her class, “Who wrote ‘The Communist Manifesto’?”  A boy says, “I don’t know, but it wasn’t me.”  The teacher thinks he’s being flippant, so she sends him home.  The boy tells his father, who complains to a friend who’s a KGB agent.  “Don’t worry,” says the KGB man, “I’ll find out who really wrote it.”  The KGB agent drives to the home of the teacher’s apartment.  The teacher asks, “Why have you woken me up?”  The KGB officer says: “It wasn’t the boy.  His father has confessed.” 
  • A man owns a parrot–until one day it disappears.  The owner rushes to the nearest KGB office.  “Why come to us?  It’s none of our affair,” says the KGB official.  “I just wanted you to know,” says the man, “that if it turns up, I don’t happen to share its opinions.”
  • A KGB agent spots an old man reading a book and asks what it’s about. “I’m learning Hebrew,” says the man, “because it’s the language of Heaven.  When I die, I want to talk to God.”  The KGB man says, “But suppose when you die you go to Hell?”  The old man says: “I already know Russian.”
  • The Egyptian government announces that an unidentified mummy has been found, and asks the world’s best archaeologists to help solve the mystery.  In response, the Soviet Union sends its top archaeologist–accompanied by two KGB guards to ensure he doesn’t defect.  The three men enter the tomb and, three days later, emerge.  “It’s Ramses III,” says the archaeologist.  “How did you figure it out?” asks a reporter.  And one of the KGB guards says, “The bastard finally confessed.”
  • A man knocks at the door of his neighbor’s apartment, yelling: “Quick, get up, get dressed!”  From inside he can hear screams of fear.  “Don’t worry,” he says, “it’s nothing serious.  I’m not from the KGB.  I just wanted to tell you your flat is on fire.”
  • A Russian boy asks his father, “Will there still be a KGB when we achieve Full Communism?”  And his father replies: “No, by then people will have learned how to arrest themselves.”
  • A delegation comes to the Kremlin to visit Leonid Brezhniev.  When they leave, Brezhniev can’t find his  cigarette case.  He telephones the head of the KGB and says, “Find out of one of the delegates took my case.”  Later, Brezhniev finds it under a table.  He calls the KGB director and says, “I found my case.  You can let the delegates go.”  “It’s too late for that,” says the KGB director, adding: “Half the delegates admitted they took your case, and the other half died under questioning.”