Talk - Jim Douglass - JFK and the Unspeakable

My Dad Helped the CIA Kill JFK: Part I

Truth Jihad

Saint John Hunt, recipient and custodian of father
E. Howard Hunt's confession to participating in
the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated murder of JFK

Kevin  Barrett

Of all the big lies told about the JFK assassination, perhaps the biggest is: "I guess we'll never really know what happened."

Bullshit! We do know.

Some of us know because we have studied the issue. Others, like Saint John Hunt, son of CIA executive and covert action agent E. Howard Hunt, know because they got it straight from the horse's mouth.

In 1979, as a 20-year-old undergraduate, I wrote an article for the Madison, WI Daily Cardinal compiling evidence that the CIA killed JFK. Shortly after the article was submitted to a dozen or so publications, but before it was published,  a woman appeared at my house and very politely announced she was a CIA-operated mind-control slave, brain wired with electrodes, whose job was to target enemies of the CIA for elimination. The next day, I asked my politically-savvy journalism professor, John T. McNelly, what was THAT about. He said, "They're just f**ing with you, kid. They're trying to intimidate you."

Saint John Hunt knows how badly "they" can f** with you.  He helped his CIA-agent father Howard conceal money and documents during the Watergate scandal, and suffered the pain of having his mother, Dorothy Hunt, blown out of the sky under circumstances that are far beyond suspicious.

So Saint John Hunt gets my vote as one America's greatest living heroes, for having the guts to stand up and tell the truth about his father's confession to participating in the LBJ-approved, CIA-orchestrated assassination of John F. Kennedy. His family didn't want him to do it, the lawyers didn't want him to do it, and of course the CIA didn't want him to do it. But Saint John Hunt chose to live up to his arrangement with his dying father, who apparently felt some ambivalent remorse about his participation in "The Big Event" and, at the end of his life, asked his son to help expose the truth. By doing so, Saint John Hunt is not only keeping faith with his father, but also keeping faith with his country and its tortured, slowly dying Constitution. And if you believe, as I do, that one of God's highest names is al-Haqq (truth/reality), Saint John Hunt is keeping faith on that level as well.

11/18/2011 Interview with Saint John Hunt, lightly edited, Part 1 (Listen to the full interview here)

Saint John Hunt
(The JFK assassination) happened 49 years ago this November 22nd. That's basically a generation. And the old generation has published, I don't know, 500 books on the subject, noting all manner of conspiracies from every conceivable source - everything from the CIA to space aliens.

We were well warned by Eisenhower, when he passed the torch to JFK, that we've got a very dangerous situation here with the miltary-industrial-congressional complex - that's what was left out of his speech, the word "congressional." Those were (Eisenhower's) words, and he was correct in that appraisal.

Kevin Barrett
You've laid it on the line in a way that few have. I mean, this is your father that we're talking about! It must be really, really tough, (dealing with) the feeling of betrayal that we all have when we look into issues like this, when (we find) our own government has betrayed us, our own government has slaughtered 3000 people in the World Trade Center and blamed it on their enemies. People in our own government, the people really in charge, kill the President, kill his brother, and so on. We all feel a horrible sense of betrayal. But having it in the family must be worse. It must be like betrayal squared.

Hunt
Yeah, it was a pretty big shock when he called me down to his, we'll say his death bed side in Florida. And of course I had heard and seen...I had even attended a lecture in the mid-1970s by a comedian-turned-activist named Dick Gregory at San Francisco State. He was one of the first, along with Mark Lane and Silvia Meagher. And of course they accused my father of being one of the agents involved. So I was well aware that there were a lot of accusations flying around, and I just wanted to sort of figure things out for myself. But I kind of dropped the issue for ten or twenty years, until I got this phone call from my father. And lo and behold, there was some truth to the accusations and the alleged evil deeds. So that was quite a shock. And the arrangement that I had with him...originally we were going to bring it out together, before he passed away. But there was so much pressure from the inner family circle, and from various lawyers, and of course the CIA itself, that he backed down.

Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past

New York Times

By STEPHEN SCHLESINGE

IN 1954, the American government committed one of the most reprehensible acts in its history when it authorized the C.I.A. to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Guatemala, President Jacobo Arbenz. It did so secretly but later rationalized the coup on the ground that the country was about to fall into communist hands.

Guatemalan society has only recently recovered from the suffering that this intervention caused, including brutal military dictatorships and a genocidal civil war against its Indian population, which led to the deaths of an estimated 200,000 people. Only in the 1980s, when a peace process commenced, did democratic governance resume. But a silence about the Arbenz era continued.

Now, after 25 years of increasingly vibrant democratic rule, Guatemalans feel confident enough to honor the memory of their deposed leader by incorporating his achievements into the national school curriculum, naming a highway after him, and preparing an official biography. America should follow suit by owning up to its own ignoble deed and recognizing Arbenz as the genuine social progressive that he was.

Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism. And the Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among their close friends.

It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his coalition. Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level jobs in his administration. But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.

Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed. A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender. Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country. Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands. For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.

The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow. It permanently stunted political life. And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras — all of which drew the lesson that Washington was more interested in unquestioning allies than democratic ones. It was only after the cold war and a United Nations-negotiated peace deal with leftist guerrillas in 1996 that genuine democracy began to take hold in Guatemala. And even since then, the cycle of violence and lawlessness unleashed by the 1954 coup has continued.

In 1998, an assassin bludgeoned to death the Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi shortly after he issued a damning report blaming the army for widespread massacres. In 2007, Guatemala had the world’s third-highest homicide rate, according to a United Nations-World Bank study. In 2009, more civilians were murdered in Guatemala than were killed in the war zones of Iraq.

Washington took the first step toward making amends when President Bill Clinton visited Guatemala in 1999 and offered a vague apology for America’s support of violent and repressive forces there. This year is an opportunity for Washington to fully own up to its shameful role in destabilizing Guatemala and honor Arbenz for having the courage to lead one of Central America’s first democracies — and send a signal that America has learned to stop placing its ideological concerns and business interests ahead of its ideals.

Stephen Schlesinger, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is a co-author of “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.”