The Unites States Navy most decorated ship (in a single action) by Miko Peled

The Unites States Navy most decorated ship (in a single action)

Part 1: The attack on the USS Liberty, forty-eight years later

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I asked my daughter Tali if she would like to spend Memorial Day this year doing something significant. She is thirteen and even though there are two more weeks of school, Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer. So the weekend is always spent doing fun things, being outdoors with friends, and rarely if ever doing anything that signifies what Memorial Day is about.

“What kind of thing? Are you giving a lecture somewhere?”

“Yes and no,” I replied, “come read this.”

I let her read a message I received from Ronald Kukal, who was the first class petty officer on the USS Liberty, a US navy ship that was attacked and destroyed by the Israeli military on June 8, 1967. Ron is one of the Liberty survivors.

Tali read the message carefully, then looked at me and said:

“Dad, we have to go to this!”

“This” was a Memorial Day in event Maricopa, Arizona in the heart of the Arizona desert, commemorating the USS Liberty.

The USS Liberty is the most decorated ship in the US Navy for a single action, though it was not engaged in battle, in fact being an intelligence gathering ship, it had no battle capabilities and was only armed with 4 fifty caliber machine guns to ward off unwanted boarders. The crew were awarded, collectively, one Medal of Honor, two Navy Crosses, eleven Silver Stars, twenty Bronze Stars (with “V” on it for valor), nine Navy Commendation Medals, and two hundred and four Purple Hearts. The ship was also awarded the Presidential Unit Citation. But all the survivors were ordered never to speak of what they had experienced. It took many years and a great deal of suffering before the survivors reached the point where they felt they could no longer keep in inside and had to speak up.

On the morning of June 8, 1967, in the midst of a war that Israel had initiated just a few days earlier - and was clearly winning - against Egypt, Syria and Jordan - the USS Liberty was about 17 miles off the Gaza coast, in international waters. For several hours throughout that day Israeli air force reconnaissance planes had been flying over the Liberty, in what seemed like attempts to identify it. The crew felt no threat – quite the opposite, Israel was a US ally. During one recorded debriefing a naval observer from the reconnaissance flight arrived at Israeli air force HQ and sat down with the air-naval liaison officer there. The two officers consulted Janes’ Fighting Ships and learned that the ship they saw earlier in the day was the USS Liberty, a United States Navy technical research ship. [1]

Then, at 1400 hours, (2:00 PM local time) without any warning, Israeli fighter jets launched an attack on USS Liberty. The aircraft made repeated firing passes, attacking with rockets and internal cannons. After the first group of fighter jets had exhausted their ammunition, subsequent flights of Israeli fighter jets continued to attack with rockets, cannon fire, and even napalm. The use of napalm is significant because it is made of a toxic, flammable combination of gel and petroleum that sticks to the skin and causes severe burns. Eight men died as a result of the air attack and the shrapnel and shock of exploding rockets had wounded 75 men.

After the Israeli jets completed their attacks, Israeli torpedo boats began firing torpedoes, killing 26 more men. Survivors reported that the Israeli torpedo boat crews swept the decks of USS Liberty with continuous machine gun fire, targeting communications equipment and any crewmembers that ventured above decks. Survivor Glen Oliphant said, “I personally recall very clearly from my position outside the wardroom -- that the torpedo boats then circled the ship for a long time firing at close range at anything that moved. Men trying to aid their wounded shipmates on deck were fired upon. Men fighting fires were fired upon and I recall seeing their fire hoses punctured by machinegun fire. This went on for several minutes. At one point the boatmen concentrated their fire near the waterline amidships, presumably hoping to blow up the boilers to hasten our demise.” 
Although communication systems were severely damaged the crew somehow managed to get a distress signal to the Sixth Fleet command which then sent out aircraft to defend the Liberty. Shortly after the Sixth Fleet command transmitted an authorization for the rescue aircraft to destroy the attackers, the Israeli torpedo boats halted their attack. At the same time, the Israeli military notified the US Naval Attaché in Tel Aviv that Israeli forces had mistakenly attacked a United States Navy ship, and apologized. The commander of the Sixth Fleet received an order from Washington, DC to turn the rescue planes around. According to several sources the commander questioned the order which was then reiterated to him by President Johnson himself.

Israeli sources claim that Israeli helicopters flew over the Liberty after the attack and offered assistance but their offer was turned down. Several of the survivors mentioned that at one point after the attack an Israeli combat helicopter flew over with civilians which included the US Naval Attaché. A bag with a message for the captain was dropped from the hovering helicopter, which read: “Do you have any casualties?” At this point the ship was barely afloat, bullet ridden, with gaping holes as a result of the torpedo attacks and the blood and body parts of the dead and the wounded were everywhere. Two thirds of the crew had become casualties. According to the survivors, the Captain looked up at the chopper and gave them the finger. The ship and survivors were left to float in the Mediterranean, miraculously not capsizing, for 17 long hours before help arrived to rescue the survivors and take care of the wounded.

Ronald Kukal was first class Petty Officer on the Liberty, this is how he described to me the very moments after the torpedo attack, “I could hear shrapnel flying over my head, and little did I know that shrapnel was killing almost all my men down there.” Ron was also put in charge of body recovery and identification. This took place several days after the attack, which meant that the bodies, many of them in pieces, had been in the water for days. His very words to me were, “I went about the dismal job of picking up the pieces of a very complicated jigsaw puzzle. Can't put it any other way. Most of my shipmates couldn't stand the smell. I smelled nothing.” For many years the survivors were forced to remain silent and the US government and the press said little about the attack.

In his message to me, a message that convinced my daughter to join me on this long road trip from San Diego to Maricopa, rather than stay in town and spend the weekend with friends, he writes:

“The men who survived the Liberty are slowly making their way out of this world, so to speak. This meeting in Maricopa is sort of a last effort on our part to keep the memory of the ship alive […] what our government is hoping for and always has, is the death of all of us, and then the matter will be over […] I don’t know how we have held together but we have. There is no hatred in this group, and really there never has been, we have only wanted justice. I doubt if we will get it.”

Endnote 

1. http://www.ussliberty.org/report/report.htm

 USS Liberty

WRITER

MIKO PELED

Miko Peled is an Israeli writer and activist living in the US. He was born and raised in Jerusalem. His father was the late Israeli General Matti Peled. Driven by a personal family tragedy to explore Palestine, its people and their narrative. He has written a book about his journey from the sphere of the privileged Israeli to that of the oppressed Palestinians. His book is titled “The General’s Son, Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.” Peled speaks nationally and internationally on the issue of Palestine. Peled supports the creation of a single democratic state in all of Palestine, he is also a firm supporter of BDS.

SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Obama and Clinton push entangling alliances as keystones of U.S. foreign policy By Wayne Madsen Report
George Washington warned America against them. Thomas Jefferson was not keen on them. However, Barack Obama, in the last commencement speech he gave under his lackluster eight-year term as president, urged the graduating class of the Air Force Academy to support all the foreign treaties and alliance of the United States. And in a campaign speech in San Diego, Hillary Clinton, who hopes to succeed Obama in office, echoed him by stressing that America's foreign alliances have kept the country "safe."

Obama's hailing of America's foreign alliances, which Washington warned were "entangling," came a week after he spoke in Hiroshima, Japan of the value of America's alliance with Japan. Obama's words were clearly directed against China. Although the Cold War-era Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the alliance that helped plunge America into the Indochina War quagmire, no longer exists, Obama is trying to recreate it with his military "pivot to Asia." Obama is beefing up U.S. military ties with Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, India, and Vietnam. In essence, Obama is clearing the path for Hillary Clinton to pursue a military confrontation with China.

Although the "punditocracy" claims that Obama and Clinton were responding to Donald Trump's isolationist signals, their message was more deep-seated. The Clinton Doctrine will be the Obama Doctrine on steroids. Trump is no panacea either. The real estate mogul has criticized Obama for reneging on America's "alliance" with Israel. That comment came after uber-Zionist casino mogul Sheldon Adelson dangled a $100 million campaign contribution in front of Trump in exchange for the presumptive GOP candidate's everlasting commitment to Israel, the only nation that Adelson cares about.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the only U.S.-led Cold War military alliance that continues to entangle the United States, received a shot in the arm from both Obama and Clinton. They see NATO has the spearhead for a U.S. military confrontation with Russia during a Clinton administration. NATO just welcomed Montenegro, a one-time loyal Slavic ally of Russia, into NATO. In addition, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the pathetic neoconservative ex-Danish prime minister who committed Danish troops to the Bush-Cheney disaster in Iraq, just signed on as a foreign policy adviser to the corrupt American-installed Ukrainian President, Petro Poroshenko. Rasmussen joins the wanted fugitive ex-President of Georgia, the George Soros acolyte Mikheil Saakashvili, as a member of the joint neo-Nazi/Zionist government of Ukraine.

Obama, in his zeal to support for the new right-wing governments of Argentina and Brazil, installed with the help of Soros and the CIA, has propped up the old Organization of American States (OAS), another Cold War relic that was used to justify the economic blockade of Cuba and U.S. military invasions of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Panama. 

With Venezuela in the  of Obama and his old CIA pals, the U.S. saw to it that another Soros acolyte, Luis Almagro of Uruguay, was installed as the Secretary General of the OAS. Almagro is the U.S.-designated Latino puppet who has been organizing opposition -- especially from the right-wing fascist governments of Argentina and Brazil -- to Venezuela's beleaguered socialist government. Almagro was silent when Brazil's President, Dilma Rousseff, was ousted in a right-wing "constitutional" coup. Almagro now hopes to see the same action take place in Venezuela with a right-wing National Assembly-sponsored recall vote of President Nicolas Maduro. 


OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro not only takes his orders from the CIA and Soros.

Meanwhile, Soros has been rubbing his hands and licking his fangs over the prospect of extending, for the first time, International Criminal Court indictments into Latin America by targeting the Venezuelan leadership after it is forced from office. For Soros, these phony "war crimes" indictments have been used to imprison or threaten to imprison CIA and Rothschild banking family foes in Serbia, the Srpska Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Syria, and Chad.

As president, Clinton will surely continue NATO's "drang nach osten" -- the "long march east" coined by Adolf Hitler -- until Ukraine, Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia, Sweden, Kazakhstan (where Hillary's despicably crooked and perverted husband* has brokered lucrative uranium export deals with the county's dictator), Finland, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia become full-fledged members of the "North Atlantic" Treaty Organization. The "North Atlantic" euphamism is now a joke, NATO only exists to protect the interests of U.S. war contractors (the term "defense industry" is also a joke) and the House of Rothschild and its front man Soros. The Rothschilds, through their influential puppet Soros, invested millions in Obama and Mrs. Clinton in order to carry out what a one-time recipient of Rothschild donations -- the short former Austrian corporal in the German Army with the short mustache -- could not do, namely conquer the Eurasian land mass and join it to European and North American overseers.

There is a reason why such neocons as Robert Kagan (married to Mrs. Clinton's war-mongering Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland who crafted the Ukrainian coup), Max Boot, and John Podhoretz are supporting Hillary over The Donald. Mrs. Clinton will plunge America into a major world war much sooner than Trump can be blackmailed into one.


---------------
Bill Clinton does not have a monopoly on sexual perversion. WMR has been informed by a very good source in Manhattan that Trump, while sitting next to his underage daughter Ivanka at the Trump Grill in Manhattan's Trump Tower, was witnessed by waiters on a number of occasions with his hand under her dress and fondling her genitalia. Some of these waiters have stated they would swear out affidavits about what they saw. After Ivanka became of age, Trump told Playboy magazine, ". . .if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her." Eventually Ivanka married Jared Kushner of the very wealthy Orthodox Jewish and ultra-Zionist Kushner real estate family of New York. 


This photo of Trump with his 15-year old daughter was taken while sitting on a statute of two copulating parrots at Trump's Mar Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida. Mr. Trump's hand appears to be starting a journey that some waiters witnessed it complete during numerous table interludes at the Trump Grill in New York.

What lurid secrets were rampant under the table cloths at the Trump Grill?
It is now well known that Bill Clinton feared that the Mossad possessed tapes of his salacious phone calls with Monica Lewinsky. Mossad was in a commanding position to blackmail Clinton. One can only wonder what evidence Mossad currently possesses of Donald Trump's incestuous pederasty with his 15-year old daughter. George Washington could have never dreamed of such "entanglements" when he warned about "entangling" foreign alliances.

9/11's conspiracy trio falling apart by Wayne Madsen Report

 

9/11's conspiracy trio falling apart by Wayne Madsen Report
The three conspirators -- American neocons, Saudi Arabia, and Israel -- that successfully pulled off the crime of the 21st century, namely the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, are infighting to the point that the layers of secrecy surrounding the 9/11 attacks are beginning to wither away. 

The weakest link in the troika of conspirators is Saudi Arabia, the country that provided the manpower, finances, and hijacker personnel for the cover story -- "Al Qaeda did it" -- for 9/11. Stung by U.S. congressional moves to allow families of 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia and calls for the Obama administration to release 28 classified pages in the joint Congressional Inquiry on 9/11 intelligence failures to the public, the Saudi government is now pushing the story that the U.S. government was responsible for carrying out the 9/11 attack. A Saudi legal scholar, Katib al Shammari, writing in the London-based "Al Hayat" newspaper and believed to be representing the view of the Saudi government, stated:

"September 11 is one of winning cards in the American archives, because all the wise people in the world who are experts on American policy and who analyze the images and the videos agree unanimously that what happened in the Towers was a purely American action, planned and carried out within the U.S. Proof of this is the sequence of continuous explosions that dramatically ripped through both buildings... Expert structural engineers demolished them with explosives, while the planes crashing only gave the green light for the detonation – they were not the reason for the collapse. But the U.S. still spreads blame in all directions. This can be dubbed 'victory by means of archives.'"



Alarmed by the willingness of its regional ally Saudi Arabia to question the official version of 9/11, Israel weighed in with New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer to place a "poison pill" in the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism (JASTA) bill that cleared the Senate in a unanimous vote. The bill would allow the families of the victims of foreign government-sponsored terrorism to sue the governments involved for damages. The law, which President Obama indicated he would veto, would lift"sovereign immunity" on countries like Saudi Arabia, thus making them liable for civil law suits. Schumer placed an amendment inside the JASTA bill that would allow Saudi Arabia to avoid law suits so long as the U.S. State and Justice Departments certified to the trial judge hearing any JASTA case that the two departments were making good faith efforts with the defendant country to resolve any issues bilaterally. Schumer's amendment -- the Stay of Actions Pending State Negotiations -- would also allow the State and Justice Departments to seek from the court continual 180-day stays, thus killing any lawsuits indefinitely.

Israel is also concerned that it, too, could face lawsuits under the provisions of JASTA. WMR has previously reported that some of the footnotes in the classified 28 pages provide links that lead to Israeli involvement in 9/11. It is noteworthy that the Saudis are blaming the George W. Bush administration for carrying out 9/11 and are leaving Israel out of the equation. Schumer's actions on behalf of the Saudis are a clear indication that the Saudi-Israeli alliance remains intact.

Coupled with House Speaker Paul Ryan's decision, after his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, to not allow JASTA to come before a full House vote and Obama's promise to veto the bill, it is all but dead. Meanwhile, Congress has been inundated with Saudi lobbyists who now appear to have been successful in killing off JASTA. However, the damage to the troika of conspirators may have already been done. 

A Saudi government-linked legal scholar is now on record that 9/11 was an "inside job." Schumer, a virtual agent for the government of Israel, has killed JASTA to protect two of the conspirators -- Israel and Saudi Arabia. That leaves only the U.S. neoconservatives who were involved in facilitating 9/11 without protecti0on. And with Donald Trump already giving muted signals that 9/11 was an inside job, the neocons have only Hillary Clinton to provide them protection. If Trump wins the White House, the neocons will be left as the exposed third leg of the 9/11 troika.

After Obama in Hiroshima: Israel’s Gigantic Nuclear Elephant

By contributors | May. 29, 2016 |

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The criminalization of truth when it comes to Israel’s nuclear capabilities means that its arsenal has been converted into a gigantic elephant in the room.

The online version of a recent Economist magazine article comes equipped with the tantalizing headline “Israel’s atomic angst: A textile factory with a difference.” The summary reads: “One of the world’s oldest nuclear plants helped build the Jewish state’s secret nuclear arsenal.”

The textile reference is to a spontaneous alibi deployed in 1960 by an Israeli official accompanying then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid on a flyover of the Negev Desert. An intensive construction operation near the town of Dimona, site of the now-aging nuclear plant, caught the inquisitive ambassador’s eye — and “textile factory” was apparently the first thing that came to the official’s mind.

The magazine offers a photograph of the Dimona reactor and cupola, complete with the caption: “Tough times in the garment trade.”

And you thought The Economist couldn’t do sarcasm.

The article notes that at a conference in April, representatives of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission reported “1,537 small defects and cracks” in the reactor’s aluminum core. While the typical lifespan of such reactors is said to be 40 years, Dimona has kept on ticking for 53.

Despite having ostensibly done its time on earth, however, there doesn’t seem to be a funeral in sight for Dimona. The Israeli newspaper Haaretzexplains that, “for political, scientific and economic reasons, Israel has no capability or desire to replace the core, an operation that would mean building a new reactor.”

As for related items that might also be conceived of in terms of ticking,The Economist cites the common estimate that Israel possesses between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads. Of course, self-imposed immunity from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty has not prevented the Jewish state from throwing a permanent hissy fit over Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions.

Meanwhile, the essential criminalization of truth when it comes to discussing Israel’s own nuclear capabilities means that its arsenal has been converted into a gigantic elephant in the room—and a very dangerous one at that.

For what happens to insiders who dare draw attention to the beast, one need look no further than the case of former Israeli nuclear technicianMordechai Vanunu, kidnapped by the Mossad in 1986 and imprisoned for 18 years, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

Blocked from leaving the country (and recently hit with new charges), Vanunu is still seen by the state as a “security threat”—a far greater threat, no doubt, than stockpiles of weapons capable of eliminating vast swathes of humanity, or nuclear reactor cores containing 1,537 flaws.

The United States, for its part, never really bought into the whole “textile” factory scenario, and the American intelligence community suspected almost from the start what the Israelis were up to. But aside from some pressure from John F. Kennedy — who, as Avner Cohen and William Burr detail at the National Security Archive, pushed for international inspections of Israeli nuclear facilities — the U.S. has pretty much been wholeheartedly strung along by ambiguous Israeli explanations of its supposedly peaceful activities at Dimona.

In their book “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars,” American journalist Dan Raviv and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman document a political convergence in 1969 that proved most auspicious for Israel’s nuclear industry: the respective ascents to power of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, U.S. President Richard Nixon, and Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger.

“The trio,” Raviv and Melman write, “agreed that no more inspections of Dimona would be required …  Moreover, the new White House team had apparently concluded that an unquestionably strong Israel would be good for American interests: pushing the Arab countries to negotiate peace by dispelling their dreams that they could, with Soviet assistance, wipe out the Jewish state.”

The special relationship has proved enduring, with American weaponslending a hand as Israel regularly wipes out portions of area Arab populations. American companies were also among the entities that previously supplied Israel with key materials for nuclear weapons. Never mind that nukes are a pretty good way to increase one’s own chances of self-destruction.

Meanwhile, should The Economist be seeking to augment its arsenal of sarcasm, “Spies Against Armageddon” provides plenty of robust material. Consider the section on how, while shopping for their nuclear program in the 1960s, the Israelis relied on none other than former Nazis in West Germany.

One character, a Luftwaffe officer-turned-businessman who Raviv and Melman note was “still convalescing from his wartime injuries,” paid a personal visit to Israel to make the acquaintance of Israeli defense officials: “The Israelis referred to him as ‘the Nazi pilot,’ and they went out drinking together in Tel Aviv.”

Shipments destined for Dimona were also procured from Degussa, a German company that “had profiteered during the war from gold teeth and other metal items stolen from murdered Jews.”

Half a century later, as the old reactor plugs away into eternity, one can think of at least 1,537 reasons it shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Belén Fernández is the author of “The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work,” published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

RT: “‘Israel may have one of biggest nuclear stockpiles in the world’ – whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg”

Posted in Israel/ Palestine,Nuclear weapons,War | 2 Responses | Print |

Trump won because small town America is dying By Wayne Madsen Report

Trump won because small town America is dying
By Wayne Madsen Report
The well-paid political pundits who live in uber-wealthy Potomac, Maryland and Great Falls, Virginia call it "fly over" country. It is the transcontinental swath of land that extends from rural Virginia, a two-hour drive from Washington, DC, to the small towns of eastern Washington and the decrepit border towns of southwest Texas. Fly-over land also includes all-but-vacant town centers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Georgia.

These blighted places on the map are where Donald Trump scored huge victories against the establishment Republican candidates who talk a lot but never deliver. These Republicans, the ones with the last names of Bush, Romney, McCain, Kasich, Fiorina, Rubio, and Cruz sold out middle America a long time ago to domestic and foreign special interests. These Republicans take their orders from Wall Street even as they made pitches for votes on Main Street.

Trump "trumped" his opponents because under the stewardship of the elitist Republicans, Main Street died. And if one doesn't believe Main Street, USA is dead, just take a drive to some of the blighted small towns and even larger cities across "fly over" country.

WMR recently spent some time in towns where contrivances like Wal-Mart (on whose board Hillary Clinton once proudly sat), Costco, and Amazon (whose owner also owns The elitist newspaper The Washington Post) have driven everything and everyone out of business.

  
Abandoned store fronts in Summerton, SC. The GOP and Democratic Party elitists and their Wall Street and globalist pals turned small town America into Junk Shop, USA.

Things are especially grim in the South, where the centers of small towns look like the movie sets of post-apocalyptic movies. Towns like Skippers, Virginia; Wilson, North Carolina; Manning, South Carolina; and others throughout the South were never even a thought among the Washington political class and the Wall Street investors when America's textile, tobacco, and manufacturing jobs were eliminated. These once booming towns are now decrepit monuments to America's industrial and agricultural zenith.

   
Left: Abandoned gas station in Gresham, South Carolina; right: Abandoned motel in Manning, South Carolina.

The people who live in these emaciated American towns, places like Summerton, South Carolina; Marion, Indiana; El Paso, Texas; and Callahan, Florida cast their votes for Trump because he offers something the candidates of the elite class could never offer: hope. When Trump talks about sanctioning American companies that move plants to Mexico and China, he receives an instant positive reaction from what the globalist politicians and bankers created: "Junk Shop, USA." Junk Shop is where people eke out a living on the gray economy, bartering for goods and services due to lack of cash. Junk Shop, USA is where antique shops and flea markets are the only real businesses left. As Trump would say, "It's disgusting!"


The Republicans and Democrats, owned and operated by Wall Street and the global bankers, turned middle America into a vast "Junk Shop" of antique stores, flea markets, people on food stamps, and meth addicts. Trump won in middle America because he convinced voters he will improve their status in life. Now, Trump must deliver.

The elitist court jesters like Jon Stewart and Greg Guttfeld can make all the fun they want of those "country rubes" who have voted and will vote for Trump in November. The last laugh, however, may go to Trump and his supporters when the population of "fly-over" country delivers its electoral votes to Trump in November. Expect some pundits to contemplate suicide as small town and rural America deliver to Trump the electoral votes of Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, Washington state, and Pennsylvania. And while the political elites of Potomac, Maryland and The Hamptons cry themselves to sleep on election night, the citizens of "fly-over" country will be having the ultimate laugh.

Solid links found between Rafael Cruz's employer and plot to kill JFK by Wayne Madsen Report

 May 1, 2016 -- SPECIAL REPORT -- McLean, Virginia (WMR)-- Solid links found between Rafael Cruz's employer and plot to kill JFK

by Wayne Madsen Report
A long-since forgotten dossier maintained by the Central Intelligence Agency on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of the links between Lee Harvey Oswald, expatriate Cubans in New Orleans, and the CIA points to solid links between Rafael Cruz's ultimate oil industry employer, Schlumberger of France and the Netherlands Antilles, and the plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

Cruz's relationship with Schlumberger eventually led to the purchase by the company of Rafael B. Cruz & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm that employed both Rafael, the father of presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Eleanor Darragh Wilson Cruz, Senator Cruz's mother.

The April 27, 1967 issue of the New Orleans States-Item featured a story written jointly by the States-Item and the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News that points to CIA undercover agent Gordon Novel as having played a part in the CIA's false flag "Fair Play for Cuba" operations in New Orleans that also employed Oswald and, as WMR previously reported, Rafael Cruz. While flying the "pro-Fidel Castro" flag, Fair Play for Cuba, which was headquartered in the same building and office space that also housed former FBI agent and JFK assassination co-conspirator Guy Banister, was a front for anti-Castro activities in the New Orleans area beginning as early as 1961.

Garrison issued arrest warrants for Novel and Oswald and Banister associate Sergio Arcacha Smith, the leader of a militant anti-Castro organization also working out of Banister's Newman Building office of Guy Banister Associates, a detective agency in downtown New Orleans.

By the CIA's own admission, Arcacha Smith was paid by the CIA indirectly. Arcacha Smith's Frente Revolucionario Democratico (FRD) office in New Orleans received funds from the FRD headquarters in Miami. The FRD was created by the CIA's anti-Castro Miami operation JMWAVE. FRD leader Dr. Jose Miro Cardona directed CIA funds to Aracacha Smith and Novel, according to the CIA's own records.

On April 1, 1967, Novel was arrested in Gahanna, Ohio, outside of Columbus on a warrant issued by Garrison that stated Novel and Archacha Smith burglarized an oil services firm's munitions bunker in Houma, Terrebonne Parish, near New Orleans, in 1961. Novel and Arachaca Smith were arrested and charged with burglarizing the Houma bunker by Terrebonne Parish District Attorney Wilmore Broussard. The records of the case were later stolen from the custody of the Houma Police Department. A declassified CIA document revealed a third person was involved in the "theft" of munitions from the Schlumberger warehouse. Like Oswald, the third man, Layton Patrick Maartens, was an ex-U.S. Marine.

Upon his arrest, Novel began "graymailing" the CIA by telling all about his role with covert CIA activities in Louisiana prior to the assassination of Kennedy. Novel said that he was a New Orleans French Quarter bar owner who also served as an electronics expert for the CIA. Novel operated a CIA front in New Orleans called the Evergreen Advertising Agency. Through the company, Novel prepared special Christmas tree radio commercials aired in late 1960 and early 1961 by 300 stations in the United States and Canada that contained code phrases designed to alert CIA agents to the date of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. The key code phrases were "Star Christmas Trees" and "Holiday Trees." A formerly SECRET EYES ONLY dated May 31, 1967, confirmed that the coded radio messages were part of a CIA operation code named JMHOPE.

Novel's statements were determined to be factual by a psychiatrist and polygraph examiners. Novel also told the Dayton Daily News, "I think Garrison will expose some CIA operations in Louisiana."

The Washington Daily News of March 27, 1967 reported that Novel was in McLean, Virginia during the weekend of March 25-26, 1967. In McLean, Novel was administered a polygraph by the Washington, DC firm REDEX, operated by private detectives Lloyd Furr and Richard L. Bast. The CIA later accused REDEX, Furr, and Bast of being "unscrupulous and untrustworthy." Novel was determined to be telling the truth by the REDEX polygraph examiners.

On March 29, 1967, Novel called the FBI New Orleans office from an unknown location and reported that he had "not furnished Garrison with any information about "Double Check" of Miami. Operation Double Check was a CIA "cover and funding" mechanism for recruiting and paying American pilots participating in the Bay of Pigs operation.

Novel again called the FBI office on March 29 to report that Walter Sheridan, a former FBI and National Security Agency operative who joined NBC News to shred Garrison's investigation of the Kennedy assassination and trial of Clay Shaw, was present during the polygraph of Novel in McLean. McLean is adjacent to Langley, Virginia, the home of the CIA's headquarters.


Rafael B. Cruz, third from left, carrying pro-Castro poster at demonstration at University of Texas in January 1959. Other pro-Castro CIA agents in 1958 included David Ferrie and Donald Norton. Norton hid out in Calgary, a CIA safe city for JFK assassination conspirators.

On May 22, 1967, Novel and a friend Gary Edwards were sitting in a WKDA-AM radio truck in downtown Nashville, Tennessee while preparing to do an interview that "would blow the New Orleans investigation wide open." A sniper opened fire on the truck and Novel and Edwards were injured by flying glass. Edwards immediately returned to Washington, DC and it was determined his real name was Gerald Mundy. Novel returned to Columbus. Nashville police discovered five bullet indentations on the truck's right side.

What Novel revealed to the press was that the CIA unit in New Orleans transferred munitions from the oil services company's bunker, leased by Schlumberger Well Services Company of Houston, to three destinations in New Orleans: Novel's Evergreen Advertising Agency building, the home of CIA contract pilot David Ferrie, and the office of Guy Banister in the Newman Building on Lafayette Street. In early 1961, an associate of Banister revealed that he saw as many as 100 boxes of munitions in Banister's storeroom. They were all marked "Schlumberger," the same firm with which Rafael Cruz had a contractual relationship. Inside the boxes were rifle grenades, land mines, and small missiles. The munitions from Schlumberger were eventually transported by boat to Cuba.


CIA's use of highly-restricted EYES ONLY caveat in document on Schlumberger's Bay of Pigs weapons smuggler Gordon Novel.

Garrison charged that the director of the New Orleans International Trade Mart, Clay Shaw, who Garrison also indicted for conspiring to kill President Kennedy, was ultimately in charge of the weapons movement from Schlumberger to Cuba. Shaw was also the director of a CIA front company called World Trade Center Corporation, which moved its headquarters from Switzerland to Rome and then to Johannesburg, South Africa, after Kennedy's assassination. The World Trade Center Corporation and George H. W. Bush's Zapata Corporation, whose ships moved weapons to Cuba for the Bay of Pigs invasion, were under the control of a CIA foreign commercial operations program code-named WUBRINY/LPDICTUM.

Rafael Cruz's eventual employer Schlumberger has always been a virtual CIA front in its own right. As late as 1986, the CIA's proprietary airline charter company Stern Air of Dallas, flew explosives for Schlumberger to such locations as Pakistan and Qatar. Stern Air also flew CIA missions to such countries as Chile, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Scotland, Ireland, Turkey, Israel, Iran, Afghanistan, South Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Somalia, Angola, Rhodesia, South Africa, Libya, and Zaire.


Schlumberger used CIA proprietary airline Stern Air to ship explosives around the world. Rafael Cruz sold his consulting firm to Schlumberger subsidiary.

One of Schlumberger's major stockholders was William Casey, who served as Reagan's CIA director. The husband of the heiress to the Schlumberger fortune, Jean de Menil, was a board member of one of Clay Shaw's other CIA front companies, Permindex Corporation of Montreal. De Menil's wife, Dominique Schlumberger de Menil, a member of Houston's oil elite, was tied to French Secret Army Organization (OAS) plots to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle in the early 1960s.

Garrison's investigation of the CIA's New Orleans links to the Kennedy assassination were stymied by the fact that several witnesses sought by Garrison fled Louisiana to other states and countries, one of which was Canada. Rafael Cruz left New Orleans for Calgary, Alberta in 1967, the same year Garrison indicted Clay Shaw. Cruz was not the only New Orleans resident tied to the Kennedy assassination to flee to Calgary. CIA agent Donald P. Norton, who claimed he delivered an attaché case containing $50,000 in cash to Oswald in Monterrey, Mexico in exchange for documents handed over by Oswald. Norton, a musician, said he was instructed by the CIA to proceed to Calgary where he played the piano in a well-known Calgary restaurant. The Vancouver Sun and The Albertanconfirmed Norton's activities on behalf of the CIA. Norton also took on a public persona and even appeared on CHCT-TV in Calgary. Norton also worked for the Alberta Piano Company, Ltd., where he gave piano lessons. Norton claimed his CIA contact was a well-known oil company employee in Calgary.

Norton, who had owned a record production company in Athens, Georgia, said he worked for Ferrie in 1958 and was ordered to deliver $150,000 to pro-Castro revolutionaries in Havana. Rafael Cruz also claims to have supported the Castro revolution before he left Cuba in 1957 and later, while attending the University of Texas in Austin in 1959. Oswald, Ferrie, Shaw, and a photographed man said by imagery experts to be Rafael Cruz, were all involved with the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba operation in New Orleans in 1963. Norton said Ferrie used the alias Hugh Pharris. Norton said he met with Shaw in Alabama in 1962 before traveling to Monterrey to meet one "Harvey Lee," a CIA alias used by Oswald. Norton was questioned by Garrison's investigators and they concluded that his information largely matched up with their investigation's results. Norton said he moved to Calgary and ultimately to Vancouver for peace of mind. He said the CIA fired him in 1968.

The CIA documents shine a light on CIA activities related to the Kennedy assassination in New Orleans and Calgary. As much as the Cruz campaign denies any connections between Rafael Cruz and the Cuban-CIA conspirators in New Orleans, the document trail linking the elder Cruz to the presidential assassination plotters grows longer.

SPECIAL REPORT. Mysterious "Mr. X" in photo with Lee Harvey Oswald -- FBI couldn't identify him By Wayne Madsen Report

SPECIAL REPORT. Mysterious "Mr. X" in photo with Lee Harvey Oswald -- FBI couldn't identify him By Wayne Madsen Report
Significant questions have surfaced about not only the father of Texas Republican senator and presidential contender Ted Cruz, Rafael B. Cruz, Sr., but now also the senator's Cuban grandparents, Rafael and Emilia Cruz.

WMR has been at the forefront of asking questions about the Cruz family from Cuba and our recent report about a male bearing a striking resemblance to Rafael Cruz, Sr. appearing handing out "Fair Play for Cuba" pamphlets at the International Trade Mart in New Orleans in August 16, 1963, has generated a firestorm of comments on the web.

In 1957, Rafael Bienvenidos Cruz, the son of an employee of the U.S. intelligence-linked RCA Corporation with the same name, Rafael Bienvenidos Cruz, left Cuba for the United States. Cruz claims he fought with Castro against the fascist government of Fulgencio Batista but soured on the revolution. However, Cruz left Cuba two years before the Castro revolution and there is no solid evidence that Cruz fought with Castro's forces. However, in from the early days of the Cuban revolution in the early 1950s to the time before Castro took power, some in the CIA supported Castro against Batista while the United States officially backed the Batista regime. One of these was Bob Chapman, the CIA station chief in Santiago in eastern Cuba where the Castro forces were strongest. He and his predecessor, Bill Patterson, allegedly steered covert U.S. aid to Castro against the wishes and without the knowledge of Earl Smith, the pro-Batista U.S. ambassador in Havana. In any event, Ted Cruz's father's story about supporting Castro against Batista could have been told by any CIA agent operating in eastern Cuba at the time.

RCA, which employed Rafael B. Cruz, Sr.'s father, was a major player in CIA operations throughout the world, and especially in Latin America, where it helped install CIA clandestine radio stations and operated signals intelligence bases for the U.S. National Security Agency. RCA's chairman and CEO, General David Sarnoff, was involved in a number of anti-Communist fronts linked to the CIA. Sarnoff also directed his NBC network to help train CIA agents in developing anti-Communist propaganda. The grandfather Cruz's links to RCA may have helped him and his wife obtain visas to enter the United States in 1966. Sarnoff supported supplying anti-Communist guerrilla forces behind the lines in the Baltic States, China, Poland, Hungary, Albania and "other areas" with clandestine radios and other equipment.

Cruz arrived in Austin where he enrolled in the University of Texas. This is a strange story since he claimed he left Cuba with only $100, which he said was sewn into his underwear. Cruz eventually gained U.S. permanent residency and a degree in mathematics from the University of Texas. In 1959, Cruz married Julia Ann Garza on January 1, 1959, and, after Cruz graduated from the University of Texas in 1961, the couple moved to New Orleans from Dallas after the birth of their second daughter on November 18, 1962.



Cruz, Sr. maintains that he moved to New Orleans from Dallas after his divorce from Julia. However, a 1967 New Orleans phone book listing for Cruz, Sr. lists him and Julia living in the same residence in New Orleans. Cruz is listed with the profession of "geophysical computer" technician and residence of H201 French Street. It is but one of several anomalies in the official Cruz biography.



The FBI analyzed the news footage of accused John F. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald passing out pro-Castro pamphlets on August 16, 1963. The photo of a group of supposed pro-Castro activists was taken on August 16, 1963 in front of Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart in New Orleans. An FBI New Orleans memo dated November 26, 1963, states that WDSU photographer Johann Rush did identify Oswald and spoke to him. Rush said he could not identify "Mr. X," the man standing behind Oswald to his left as one Barry Baguglia.
The Baguglia name arose with U.S. Secret Service agent John Rice who sauid WDSU TV news people told him that Mr. X might be one Barry Baguglia. Rush denied he mentioned Baguglia and that he never heard of him. WDSU's John Corporon, Jim Mitchie, Bill Slatter, and Mike Lala told the FBI they never heard of a Barry Baguglia. It turns out that the Secret Service's Special Agent Garretts was the one who passed on the name Baguglia. Garretts claimed he received the Baguglia name from Herman Kohlman, Assistant District Attorney for Orleans parish. Kohlman later told the FBI that he never mentioned the name Baguglia to Garretts. What Kohlman told Garretts was that his Orleans detectives had arrested Alvin Roland Beauboeuf at David Ferrie's apartment and that Garretts may have confused the name Beauboeuf with Baguglia. The FBI concluded that the man present with Oswald wearing a white shirt and narrow tie was not Baguglia: ". . . it does not appear that there is any basis for the comment made by RICE that one of the five or six people handing out literature in front of the International Trade Mart was a person who might be BARRY BAGUGLIA."



The individual who bears a resemblance to Rafael B. Cruz, Sr. was never identified by the FBI or the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations. This "Mr. X" -- who resembles Rafael B. Cruz, Sr. -- remains an enigma. However, all those appearing in the photo at the trade mart, including Oswald's Cuban assistants, were identified by Chauncey Holt, the man on the far right, as being members of the CIA's Mongoose operation to overthrow Fidel Castro's government. On August 17, 1963, the day after the pamphleteering at the trade mart, Oswald appeared on an interview program at WDSU-AM radio called "Latin Listening Post" with host William Stuckey.

On August 21, 1963, Oswald appeared with Stuckey and WDSU-TV's Bill Stuckey on an interview program, Conversation Carte Blanche, that also included Ed Butler, the Executive Vice-President of the Information Council of the Americas (INCA), headquartered in New Orleans and involved in distributing anti-communist educational materials throughout Latin America, and Carlos Bringuier, Cuban refugee and New Orleans Delegate of the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE), one of the more active of the anti-Castro refugee organizations. Bringuier had gotten into a physical altercation with Oswald on August 9, 1963, during a Fair Play for Cuba pamphleteering operation in downtown New Orleans. But Oswald and Bringuier actually worked in the same ground floor offices of the infamous Newman Building, where Guy Banister Associates was located 5312 Lafayette Street while Oswald's "pro-Castro" Fair Play for Cuba Committee was located around the corner but within the ground floor office, but with an address of 544 Camp Street. Between September 6 and 9, 1963, Oswald was seen in the company of Clay Shaw, according to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.


Photo from WDSU-TV New Orleans footage of the August 16, 1963 pro-Castro demonstration in front of the International Trade Mart. Man in sun glasses at far right is Chauncey Holt, said to have been the accountant for mobster Meyer Lansky. Mr. X [the man in the white shirt and necktie to Oswald's left rear], according to an FBI New Orleans memo dated November 25, 1963, never handed out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets but was merely holding them.  The annotations on the identities of two of the men -- Bud Belcher and Leroy Young, both CIA agents involved with MONGOOSE -- came from Holt.


Left-to-right: Comparison photographs of Rafael B. Cruz, Sr. taken sometime in the late 1950s; "Mr. X" seen with Oswald in New Orleans on August 16, 1963; and Cruz now.

Oswald, earlier during the day of August 16, 1963, is said to have walked into the state employment office and offered to pay anyone who would help him hand out pamphlets during the noon lunch hour at the trade mart. One was Charles Hall Steele, Jr., who told the Warren Commission that Oswald paid him $2 to hand out pamphlets at the trade mart for 15 to 20 minutes. Steele, after dropping off his girlfriend, met Oswald and Mr. X on Canal Street. According to Steele's testimony, Mr. X was already with Oswald and would have likely been one of the Cuban MONGOOSE agents that was coordinating Oswald's pro-Castro street activities. The fact that the FBI memo states that Mr. X never handed out pamphlets, as did Oswald, indicates that the individual was serving as a coordinator of the activity at the trade mart. It is known that MONGOOSE involved CIA assets in Louisiana and Houston, Texas, places where Rafael B. Cruz, Sr. had resided.

The height of Rafael Cruz, Sr. listed on his draft registration form from 1967 is also curious. He claimed he was 6 foot. In recent photographs of him standing next to his son, Ted, the elder Cruz is shorter than Ted, who is 5' 7". Individuals do grow shorter with age but not by six inches. The elder Cruz's Selective Service form does show signs of the height entry being altered. The 1967 form also lists Cruz's address as 2246 Carondelet Street in Apartment 2-B, not the French Street address listed in the phone directory listing Cruz along with his wife, who he was reported to have divorced prior to leaving Dallas.



The draft registration form also lists Cruz's employer on July 26, 1967 as "Geophysics & Computer Service, Inc." This company is the French-based Compagnie Générale de Géophysique(CCG). The date July 26, 1967 is also significant for Cubans. Castro called his revolutionary popular front the "July 26 Movement." CCG is linked to the large Schlumberger oil conglomerate, which, along with Halliburton, is one of the two largest oilfield drilling companies in the world. Schlumberger had been active with the CIA and Zapata Offshore Company, which was owned by George H. W. Bush. Moreover, Jean de Menil, the son-in-law of Schlumberger founder Conrad Schlumberger, was a key figure in Permindex, the New Orleans-based CIA front headed up by Clay Shaw that was a key target of Garrison's investigation of the New Orleans connection to JFK's assassination in Dallas. The year 1967, when Rafael Cruz, Sr. departed New Orleans, allegedly with his second wife (and Ted Cruz's mother) Eleanor Darragh Wilson, was the same year that Garrison's official investigation of the New Orleans connection to Kennedy's assassination commenced with an indictment of Shaw, the same man whose office was located inside the International Trade Mart where Oswald and Mr. X were involved with handing out Fair Play for Cuba pamphlets on August 16, 1963.

Ted Cruz's mother Eleanor also reportedly worked for the Schlumberger affiliate. When the Cruzes left for Calgary in 1967, they worked under the aegis of Rafael B. Cruz & Associates, Ltd., which was owned by Rafael B. Cruz, Sr.

Mystery also surrounds Ted Cruz's mother Eleanor. She was married to Texas native Alan Wilson and lived with him in London from 1960 to 1966. In 1965, their infant son Michael died from crib death. Alan Wilson, who still lives in London, told McClatchy News Service that Michael was not his son. In his autobiography, Senator Ted Cruz not only claims Michael was the son or his mother and Alan but also claims the baby died in 1965. In fact, Michael, according to London vital statistics records, died in 1966 and well after the Wilsons were divorced. Eleanor Cruz, who lives in Houston, has been mum on her marriage to Wilson and her marriage to Cruz, which lasted from 1969 to 1997. Rafael B. Cruz, Sr., a Canadian citizen, became a U.S. citizen in 2005. Ted Cruz did not renounce his Canadian citizenship until 2013.

Enter a small London-based British firm called Strategic Communications Laboratories, Ltd. (SCL). Specializing in mass deception, psychological warfare, influence operations, and behavioral modification, the firm, thought to have ties with British intelligence and the CIA, has been in business since 1993. The firm's U.S. subsidiary, Cambridge Analytics, is now advising the Cruz for President campaign. SCL has proudly admitted that it has influenced elections in Ukraine, Romania, India, Kenya, Thailand, Latvia, Nigeria, and South Africa. 

Allen Dulles threatened Truman and Ike by The Wayne Madsen Report

Allen Dulles threatened Truman and Ike
WMR previously reported on a little-known letter sent by Warren Commission member and former CIA director Allen Dulles to former President Harry Truman in Independence, Missouri. The letter was dated January 7, 1964 and Truman responded to it on January 14, 1964. A copy of the Dulles letter to Truman, in which a certain "subject" was discussed, was not found in the Truman Library archives.

The exchange of correspondence between Dulles and Truman came just a few weeks after Truman published an OP ED in several newspapers lamenting the fact that he had ever created the Central Intelligence Agency. On December 7, 1963, Truman began writing his OP-ED for his national syndicator, the Newspaper Alliance of North America, just a few weeks after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.

According to a researcher of the assassination of Kennedy, Dulles's letter to Truman, in which the nation's former top spook requested a personal meeting with the former president while en route from Washington to Dallas to investigate the November 22, 1963, assassination on behalf of the Warren Commission, was to warn Truman against any further attacks on the CIA and, by insinuation, any suggestion the CIA was somehow involved with the murder of the president.


Truman and Eisenhower gaze on the coffin of Kennedy. Soon, they would both receive a threatening message from Allen Dulles.

The gist of what Dulles told Truman is that the former president had not been in the Oval Office for over a decade and that the CIA had changed its mission since Truman created the agency in 1947. Dulles, according to our source, told Truman that post-Truman Cold War events necessitated CIA operations in Guatemala, Iran, and other countries that Truman criticized in his OP ED.




Truman apparently warned JFK about the CIA's plans to destabilize his administration and possibly harm him.

The JFK assassination researcher told WMR that Dulles also threatened former President Dwight Eisenhower on a visit to his Gettysburg, Pennsylvania ranch. Eisenhower twice, in response to his hearing of Kennedy's assassination, told a television interviewer: "the American people will not be 'stampeded,'" a possible reference to a potential whitewash of those behind the assassination.

There has not yet been any documentation, such as that regarding Dulles's trip to Independence, uncovered about Dulles's trip to Gettysburg. Dulles allegedly told Eisenhower and Truman that he was aware of their conversations with Kennedy between 1962 and his assassination in 1963 warning him to be on guard against plans by the CIA to destabilize his administration and personally harm him.


JFK with former President Hoover.

There is no evidence whether Dulles also threatened former President Herbert Hoover who, in 1963, was ailing at the age of 89 at his residence in New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It is known that Hoover maintained a close friendship with JFK as  both a senator and as president and even served as Kennedy's personal liaison to Richard Nixon after Kennedy defeated him in the 1960 presidential election. Hoover also took ill after hearing about Kennedy's assassination. Hoover remained too ill to travel to Kennedy's funeral in Washington.

The threats made against Truman and Eisenhower by Dulles are relevant to this day and the 2016 presidential election.

Before the United States considers a Ted Cruz presidency, perhaps his Cuban-Canadian father, Rafael Cruz, Sr., should come totally clean about his whereabouts from 1963, the year Kennedy was assassinated, to 1967, the year he departed New Orleans for Calgary, Canada. 1967 is also the year that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his prosecution of New Orleans businessman and CIA asset Clay Shaw, who was connected to Rafael Cruz through corporate interfaces.

Cruz and his second wife Helen Darragh, Ted Cruz's mother, sold their Rafael B. Cruz & Associates oil services firm to the French-based Compagnie Générale de Géophysique (CCG) in 1974. CCG was linked to the large Schlumberger oil conglomerate. Schlumberger had been active with the CIA and Zapata Offshore Company, which was owned by George H. W. Bush. Moreover, Jean de Menil,the son-in-law of Schlumberger founder Conrad Schlumberger, was a key figure in the Permindex, the New Orleans-based CIA front headed up by Clay Shaw that was a key target of Garrison's investigation.