Chapter 3

"Pluto" and Furiati's Sources

Furiati's Chapter 3 is titled, "From Pluto to Mongoose (pages 12-38). She never does tell her reader what these "operations" were. She implies that Pluto was what was never known as Pluto and was only too well know as The Bay of Pigs. Her explanation of what Operation Mongoose was is that it was "a new U. S. political strategy against Cuba" (page 41)· Neither was an "operation" to assassinate Castro. Mongoose was for United States invasion of Cuba but only if there had been an anti-Castro uprising that could have succeeded and needed help. As there was not and was not expected.

(When the consequences are considered there is an unintended appropriateness in referring to United States anti-Cuba operations as "Pluto." The Random House unabridged dictionary says this about Pluto: "Class. Myth. A name given to Hades, under which he is identified by the Romans with Orcus." Orcus is the Roman equivalent of the Greek Pluto. Pluto is also a planet but there is no reason to believe the CIA had it in mind.)

Here is how she begins this chapter:

The end of the 1950s. U.S. investment in Cuba amounted to a billion dollars, one eighth of the total invested by the United States in Latin America and Europe. It flowed from two principal directions: the massive capital of the powerful trusts and corporations such as United Fruit and Anaconda, that dominated the economy of the country; and the resources of the North American Mafia that sought to turn the island into the great tourist Mecca of the Caribbean, a master plan springing from the famous secret meeting of Mafia leaders held in the Appalachian Mountains in 1954 (page 12).

That United States investment in Cuba "amounted to . . . one eighth of the total invested by the United states in Latin America and Europe" seems impossible.

Whether or not at that meeting their "master plan" was formulated or even, discussed, as usual, Furiati has no source for any of this. That meeting, if it had been "held in the Appalachian Mountains," could have been anywhere in about a thousand miles along the east coast of the United States, which is where those mountains range. It was, in fact, is a little-known small place in the State of New York, Appalachia.

Soon Furiati does have a source and she identifies that rare source. Rare for her and rare is what that source is:

Meanwhile, in January 1959, the revolution closed in and took power. The first measures taken by the new Cuban government to bring about the recovery of the national heritage -- expropriation of land, public services and natural resources -- and the executions (revolutionary justice) conflicted with U.S. interests. Those deposed searched for a formula to retake control of the island. In a meeting held in May that year, Vice-President Richard Nixon, and the directors of Pepsi Cola International, Standard Oil, Ford Motor Co., the United Fruit Company and representatives of the Mafia made a deal: Nixon promised to overthrow the Cuban government in exchange for supporting his candidacy for president of the United States5 (pages 13-14).

That footnote reads, in full:

5The article "The Kennedy Assassination – The Nixon-Bush Connection?" by Paul Kangas, a Californian private investigator, was published in The Realist magazine. This article attributes to Richard Nixon direct responsibility for the CIA invasion plans, in order to gain more financial contributions for his presidential campaign. Nixon promised the transnational corporations whose interests had been harmed after the triumph of the Cuban revolution -- Pepsi Cola, Ford Motor Co., Standard Oil and others -- and the Mafia, that he would help them remove Castro from power and that he would confirm the authorization for the invasion of Cuba as soon as he was elected.

That magazine was known for the spoofs it published.

In a field is which assassination craziness runs rampant, beating Kangas is not easy from the file I have of what outraged and offended people sent me. He lies as though his life depended on it and he attributes the wildest imaginings as fact.

He claims, in a flyer he printed to draw attention to a radio show he was to host in San Francisco that he is a Private Investigator And Former Guard For JFK" (capitalization by Kangas.) He gives the station, KPOO, 89.5 on FM, and the time of day, "Tue. 7:30 AM" and Thur. 10 AM" but does not say if that is every Tuesday and Thursday and if not, which it would be.

He has what he titles a "Special Report." The cover claims, "JFK Assassination Solved!"

He names the assassins those Furiati has an interest in. The headline is "Rockefeller-Nixon Behind The JFK Assassination." Under those two names he (had whose C.I.A. "Operation missing text?) 40 was "Behind the JFK Assassination."

Typed across the top of this page, which may have been published by someone else, he has "PHOTO-OVERLAYS ARE POSITIVEPROOF E. HOWARD HUNT & FRANK FIORINI-STURGIS were the CIA TRIGGERMAN IN THE JFK Assassination. These trained assassins worked under," and then follows the Heading upper deck, ROCKEFELLER-NIXON."

He has flyers with pictures of Hunt and Sturgis and says and says they are two men in the Dallas "tramp" pictures, poor copies of which he uses. Clearly the two he says are Hunt and Sturgis are not and, with the disclosure of the police files, certainly they are not. Those arrest records identified those men. Two are still alive and have been interviewed in the media.

Furiati's prime source!

On a sheet in which he quotes what many people did not say, he has this about himself:

PaulKangas, private investigator, fmr Body Guard for Pres. Kennedy will detail the role of CIA agent George HW Bush, LBJ, & Richard Nixon in the assassinations.

Paul is the host of weekly radio & TV shows, 89.5 FM, Tue. 7:30 AM

At the top, under what is identified as a picture of Kangas, is what the eyewitness quoted never said but helps promote the Kangas myth about Hunt, Sturgis and the CIA:

Jean Hill, teacher, eyewitness to the assassination, who actually saw the CIA assassins E. Howard Hunt & Frank Sturgis shoot President John Kennedy. Jean Hill pointed them out, & yelled, "There they are! Let's get them!" With that she lead a charge of 15 eyewitnesses up the Grassy Knoll & helped capture Hunt & Sturgis for the murder!

Hernewbook, The Last Disenting Witness, with a forward by Oliver Stone, details her 28 years of hiding from the FBI to save her own life, while other witnesses were being murdered daily.

There was no such "charge" and there was no "capture" of "Hunt & Sturgis." Those tramps were guzzling wine in an empty railroad boxcar that was not attached to a train but was parked behind the Central Annex Post Office. That was a block to the west of the scene of the crime and more than two blocks south of it. Those men had their drinking interrupted and they were walked out, past the Texas School Book Depository Building about an hour and a half after the assassination.

Not many people seeing Furiati's book have any way of knowing that not a word from Kangas can be believed without abundant confirmation, as none of this has or can have.

Which, of course, is no less true of Furiati, as when she says on this same page of that 40 committee,

The group was sometimes called "Committee 5412," the number of the room in the White House where they met (foot note, page 14).

There is no such room in the White House and no White House rooms are identified in this manner.

And this is Furiati at her best – when she has and gives sources!

Other than Kangas, there is no source for what was simply made up, that Nixon sought support for his candidacy by promising to overthrow the Cuban government, which meant at the least by promising a war that could have been World War III.

And required all those important people in all those important corporations to keep silent – each and every one of them, forever – else with word of it getting out Nixon would be ruined forever, among the many consequences.

Furiati at her best! She sure picks them! And knows how to!

Why Furiati limited this to Nixon is not clear because her source, Kangas, has Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller both "behind the assassination" that Kangas claims to have solved.

If Furiati got this awful stuff from Cuban intelligence and if it actually believed it, that says much about anything she got from it.

And if Cuban intelligence did not believe it, that says much about how it felt about Furiati, dumping such a load of crap on her for her use and ruin her name with.

Furiati is not finished with her prime source, Kangas. This is on the next page as she gives her account of the organization and function and personnel of Operation 40. She gets to Hunt and David Atlee Philips:

. . . Howard Hunt ("William" or "Eduardo"), author of espionage novels, himself the caricature of a spy and nicknamed "Uncle Sam" by the Cuban anti-Castro exiles because of the voluminous resources at his disposal at anytime of day or night. It was Hunt's job to coordinate the Frente Revolucionario Democratico (FRD, Revolutionary Democratic Front), a coalition of Cuban exile groups that would serve as the political base for the invasion. David Atlee Philips, named head of propaganda and communications for the Cuban operation, was a specialist in psychological warfare . . . (15-6).

Furiati knew nothing of the preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion that became the Bay of Pigs fiasco and by the time she finished this book she had not learned much about it. Otherwise she would not have had "Hunt's job to coordinate the Frente . . ." As Arthur Schlesinger, who was part of it wrote, the administration forced several Cuban groups, of which the Frente was one, to consolidate into what was known as the Cuban Revolutionary Council.· Hunt found one of those groups too liberal for his political beliefs of the far-distant right so he quit the project, as he wrote in his autobiographical Give Us This Day (Arlington House, 1973). There Hunt says that after the fiasco, when he was asked by that same Bissell, who was on his way out, to take "the Miami end of the operation" over, "I declined on the grounds that because CIA denied supply overflights, it was obvious there was no serious interest in overthrowing Castro . . . (pages 219-20). This has always been the CIA's fig leaf.

It happens that I wrote this the day after the long-withheld CIA report on that fiasco of its was finally disclosed. In it the CIA took all and fullest responsibility for that failure, in every aspect of it, including the beginning, the planning for it and the execution of it. The CIA also confessed that militarily that project was too much for it. But Hunt, being Hunt, like Furiati is Furiati, he was not about to admit the obvious truth.

Furiati has two footnotes for part of what is quoted above. The first, among other things, has the name of former President George Bush's father wrong:

The article by Paul Kangas signalled [sic] that the Texan link of the CIA was based on the oil business. Through the machinations of Nixon, Texas millionaire George Bush provided support for setting up the operation, along with Jack Crichton, another oil impresario. Two future members of the Bush administration also participated: Robert Mosbacher and James baker. (Source: Common Cause magazine, March-April, 1990). According to a biography of Nixon, his personal and political relations with George Bush's family date back to 1946, when Nixon became an important part of his father Preston Bush's group, responsible for the creation of the Eisenhower-Nixon duo in thepresidential election campaign of 1952 (Sources: Freedom magazine, 1986, L. F. Prouty and George Bush, F. Green, Hipocrene, 1988).

George Bush was not a Texan, as his father wasn't, either.· The family was from Connecticut and Bush's father was a Republican senator from Connecticut. His name was not Preston. It was Prescott. With the sources coming from Kangas, there is no need to check them. Or to learn what Furiati means by "Hipocrene, 1998."

In the second footnote she actually has an underling firing Dulles from the directorship of the CIA! Dulles was, as all save Kangas and Furiati know, fired by Kennedy over the failure of Dulles' Bay of Pigs fiasco. King is Colonel J. C. King.

Richard Bissell, a university professor, an Ivy League graduate, and a sympathizer with the Democrats, feared the "hard-line" methods of King. He tried to give the Cuban operation a structure independent from that of the Western Hemisphere department controlled by Colonel King, removing Allen Dulles from the CIA directorship and promoting Barnes to assistant director.

This establishes that Furiati began with overwhelming ignorance of what she was writing about and ended with that ignorance undisturbed if she could actually believe that an underling, not the President, fired Dulles from the CIA! and promoted another who ranked him to be "assistant director."

It is again to wonder what Cuban intelligence knew and believed and what it thought about Furiati and what it gave her.

She writes that "In August 1960, the operation's strategy underwent the first changes," not to expect an internal uprising and to "instead emphasize the external factor for formation of the expeditionary brigade in Guatemala." (She missed something else that happened that month but gets to it later.) Then she (text missing here)

. . . The operation needed reinforcements, and the CIA decided to make a proposal to the Pentagon: prepare U.S. troops for "D Day."

Pause. At this moment code Operation 40 came up from the underground and into the light. It would no longer be a secret police force made up of mercenaries, exiles and other Cubans considered "suspicious" by the CIA in the United States, coordinated by the Cuban Joaquin Sanjenis. It became an "official" CIA operation at this point, incorporated into mainstream CIA activities. In the years that followed, Operation 40 was turned into a vast counterintelligence program aimed at "ideological cleansing." From propaganda to assassination, it based itself on the counterrevolutionary groups and the Mafia, with its contraband and drug trafficking. Among the major players we find David Philips, Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, Diaz Lanz, a handful of Cuban exiles and other North Americans, slowly weaving knots in the intricate spider web of covert operations that we are going to untangle thread by thread (pages 19-20).

Furiati gets in all the names she needs in but she lacks even a Kangas as a source for saying that the CIA used "the Mafia, with its contraband drug trafficking," one presumes for funding – she does not say.

There are no dependable reports of Mafia "contraband and drug trafficking" in Cuba.

She lacks even a Kangas for what follows, and that requires at least a Kangas, nothing of more junior grade:

Kennedy was aware of the intentions of the CIA from July 1960, when Allen Dulles set up a meeting between him and the leaders of the Revolutionary Democratic Front (FRD). During the electoral campaign he found a good irrefutable issue, arguing that Eisenhower was passive on the Cuban question. Given the secret nature of the plans, he knew that Nixon would be prevented from giving any explanation on the planned invasion and his personal involvement (page 21).

Kennedy was never told the CIA's actual "intentions." Kennedy also had no such meeting with Dulles in July 1960. It was not until after the election and before Kennedy was sworn in that Dulles gave him some, less than a full, indication of what was coming. That happened when Kennedy was resting at his father's Palm Beach estate. It simply is a lie that before then Kennedy "knew that Nixon would be prevented from giving any explanation of the planned invasion and his personal involvement" because Kennedy did not know, had not been informed, until that became necessary. That did not become necessary until Kennedy was elected, until he was about to become President, and he then had to know what the CIA was up to before he had to face it.

Furiati does, in a different sense, refer to that Palm Beach meeting, She says it as to "convince" Kennedy of "the importance" of the "project" about which, until then, he had not been informed, as Furiati then admits. First she says that the CIA did not give Kennedy "all the details." Then:

In a meeting on January 28, 1961, six days after moving into the White House, John Kennedy and his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy received the first general instructions on the project from the Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces and the CIA. But the Kennedy team only became fully aware of Operation Pluto at the end of February, when they decided to alert the president. After analyzing the plans approved by Eisenhower's National Security Council, which included the participation of U.S. forces, Kennedy argued that they must be reevaluated by the pentagon; that U.S. forces should not be used, since Trinidad was a very open area and everyone would know that the United States was directing the operation. The President was faced with an invasion planned for the near future, and even if he wanted to, it would be very difficult to cancel it since, in the year following the election, the political administrative structure of the country largely remains in the hands of the previous administration. Meanwhile, concerned with preserving the image of the country in world opinion, especially in Latin America, he made clear his opposition to the overt involvement of U.S. forces (page 21).