Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Edward Lansdale - Wikipedia

After successfully ending the left-wing Huk insurgency in the Philippines and building support for Magsaysay's presidency, CIA director Allen Dulles instructed Lansdale to "do what you did in the Philippines [in Vietnam]."[6] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_La…

Lansdale had previously been a member of General John W. O'Daniel's mission to Indo-China in 1953, acting as an advisor to French forces on special counter-guerrilla operations against the Viet Minh.

Much of this work was under the aegis of "Operation Mongoose", which was

the operational name for the CIA plan to topple Castro's government. According to Daniel Ellsberg, who was at one time a subordinate to Lansdale, Lansdale claimed that he was fired by President Kennedy's Defense Secretary Robert McNamara after he declined Kennedy's offer to play

He grew up in Detroit and attended the Cranbrook School in nearby Bloomfield Hills.

In 1961, Lansdale recruited John M. Deutch to his first job in government, working as one of Robert McNamara's "Whiz Kids". Deutch would go on to become the Director of Central Intelligence for the CIA.

Lansdale was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 6, 1908 and later raised in Los Angeles.[1] He was the second of four sons of Sarah Frances Philips and Henry Lansdale. Lansdale attended school in Michigan, New York and California before attending UCLA where he earned his way

largely by writing for newspapers and magazines.

Lansdale retired from the Air Force on November 1, 1963.

the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963,

JMWAVE or JM/WAVE or JM WAVE was the codename for a major secret United States covert operations and intelligence gathering station operated by the CIA from 1961 until 1968. It was headquartered in Building 25[1] at the former Richmond Naval Air Station, an airship base about 12

miles south of the main campus of the University of Miami (on what is today the school's South Campus) in Miami, Florida. The intelligence facility was also referred to as the CIA's "Miami Station" or "Wave Station".

JMWAVE underwent its first major development when it was established as the operations center for Task Force W, the CIA's unit dedicated to "Operation Mongoose"[3][7][8] - a US effort to overthrow President Fidel Castro's Communist government in Cuba. JMWAVE was also active in

some form during the failed US-sponsored "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba in April 1961.[9] The JMWAVE operation grew out of an earlier fledgling CIA office in Coral Gables.[2] The station's activities reached their peak in late 1962 and early 1963 - the period of the Cuban Missile

Crisis. Under Ted Shackley's leadership from 1962 to 1965, JMWAVE grew to be the largest CIA station in the world outside of the organization's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, with 300 to 400 professional operatives (possibly including about 100 based in Cuba) as well as an

estimated 15,000 anti-Castro Cuban exiles on its payroll. The CIA was one of Miami's largest employers during this period. Exiles were trained in commando tactics, espionage and seamanship and the station supported numerous exile raids on Cuba.[

The main front company for JMWAVE was "Zenith Technical Enterprises, Inc." In addition, about 300 to 400 other front companies were created throughout South Florida with a large range of "safe houses", cover businesses and other properties.

In the early 1960s, Shackley's work included being station chief in Miami, during the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis, as well as the Cuban Project (also known as Operation Mongoose), which he directed. He was also said to be the director of the "Phoenix Program" during the

Vietnam War, as well as the CIA station chief in Laos between 1966–1968, and Saigon station chief from 1968 through February 1972. In 1976, he was appointed Associate Deputy Director for Operations, second in charge of CIA covert operations.

During the period (1962–1965), Shackley was station chief in Miami, Florida. While heading the CIA office (known as "JMWAVE") shortly after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, Shackley dealt with operations in Cuba (alongside Edward Lansdale). JMWAVE employed more than 200 CIA

officers, who handled approximately 2,000 Cuban agents. These included the famous "Operation Mongoose" (aka "The Cuban Project"). The aim of this was to "help Cubans (exiles) overthrow the Communist regime" (of Fidel Castro Ruz). During this period as Miami Station Chief,

Shackley was in charge of about 400 agents and general operatives (as well as a huge flotilla of boats), and his tenure there encompassed the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962.

It was at this time that he was recruited by the CIA, and in 1953 he was assigned to work under William King Harvey at the CIA's Berlin Base. In 1961, Shackley married Hazel Tindol Shackley of Bethesda.

The Henry A. Kissinger Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Berlin for exceptional contributions to transatlantic relations. It was established in 2007 and named after U.S. politician Henry Kissinger, one of the American Academy's founding chairmen.

The American Academy in Berlin was founded in September 1994 by a group of prominent Americans and Germans, among them Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Richard von Weizsäcker, Fritz Stern, and Thomas Farmer [de]. Dubbed in 2008 “the world's most important center for American

intellectual life outside the US” by the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel,[1] the American Academy in Berlin is funded entirely by private donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations on both sides of the Atlantic—most prominently the Arnhold-Kellen family, the

keystone of the Academy's history and funding.

He is standing across the room staring almost rudely at what seems to be a very nondescript, middle‐aged Jewish man with eyeglasses and wavy hair, named Henry Kissinger. Kissinger is deep in conversation with this astonishingly

beautiful girl, and the girl is looking at him transfixed. “How can this be?” wonders Silver. How does this Kissinger do it?

Completely bewildered and a little bit jealous of whatever it is this Kissinger has, Silver defies all sorts of good breeding and taste to ask the girl,

gets down to the point. “‘I am just an immigrant Harvard professor,’ he says. ‘Yet here I find myself in this grand home, among these grand people, talking to a very beautiful girl. I know it is not me; it is my job at the White House. If it were not for the fact that I am the

President's closest adviser, I would not be in this grand place with these grand people. No . . . [a long, thoughtful, sad pause] . . . I would be just a professor of history, dining by myself, in some lonely hotel room.’”

“My job in this office,” he says, “is not to be chief formulator of policy. My job is to make sure that the proper range of choices is available to the President. . . .
“Of course he asks my opinion and those of you who know me know that excessive reticence is not one of my

difficulties. I can't do anything unless both of the departments” —he means State and Defense—“and the President are confident that I am not loading the presentation in order to produce a particular result. Therefore, I go to considerable lengths to make sure that every point of

view that exists within the bureaucracy gets a fair hearing from the President. Then I may add my own point of view.”

Men who can't put up with that kind of character quit him and describe him as a petty tyrant; men who think he is a natural historical phenomenon—and there are

a good many of those—learn tab live with his ways. One of his former staff members adds: “Dr. Kissinger drives you to the point where you get things out of yourself that you absolutely knew were impossible.”All of this, of course, merely gives us a few clues about whether

Kissinger is, as he sometimes gets called in the headlines, “the second most powerful man in the world.” Most theories about Dr. Kissinger's great power derive from the widely held conviction that the last man to talk to the boss gets things his way.

Henry's first book, “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” a serious and scholarly collection of thoughts about what was then the unthinkable: the strategies the United States must adopt to make the best use of the terrifying power of the bomb.

At one party, Gloria Steinem, the writer‐princess of the Women's Liberation movement, was photographed with Senator George McGovern and Dr. Kissinger.

Henry Kissinger lives alone in an elegant, rented townhouse in Washington's embassy section, not far from Rock Creek Park.

Henry Kissinger chuckled an amused chuckle—delighted in the acknowledgment that he, Dr. Henry Kissinger, who every intelligent man knows is a towering mind, may also be a gifted lover.
“I will tell you,” he said, and here it is well to imagine the German accent that sometimes

turns w's into soft v's and gargles a few is and softens his u's and o's.
“I work up to 18 hours a day here. When I go out I want to go out to enjoy myself. When I am out on the Coast at the White House in San Clemente, I have more free time. enjoy the company of these girls.

They are beautiful and I find some of them interesting. There isn't any more to it than that. It is not an emotional thing. They aren't going to want to marry me.”

Henry has a very old, dear friend, Dr. Fritz Kraemer, who has known him for almost 30 years. They met in 1943 when Henry was a 19‐year‐old relationship. And they are dazzled by the charm and the intelligence of the children.
David Halperin, who worked in the White House for

Dr. Kissinger

A gifted talent scout and teacher, in 1944 he discovered young Henry Kissinger, whom Kraemer had recruited into Army division. In 1961 Kraemer also discovered Alexander Haig, and in 1969 Kraemer recommended Haig as the Military Assistant to then National Security

Advisor Kissinger. Sven Kraemer, Fritz G. A. Kraemer's son, also served in the Nixon-Kissinger National Security Council.
From the early 1950s until 1978, when Kraemer retired from civil service, he served as Senior Civilian Advisor to the U.S. Army Chief of Staff in the Pentagon

and influenced the Department of Defense during the Cold War. During his time at the Pentagon, he also influenced Secretaries of Defense James R. Schlesinger and Donald Rumsfeld.

There is a lengendary Harvard government professor named William Yandell Elliott, who is now 75 years old and retired to a farm in Virginia. He has been called Henry Kissinger's mentor, but Elliott denies that in a curmudgeonly bellow.
“Henry Kissinger is responsible for

himself!” W. Y. Elliott screamed. “I don't feel responsible for him.”

under his wing and he used every trick he knew to get Henry made an interpreter in case the 84th Division should be sent to Germany. And it was. Thanks to Kraemer, Henry became the interpreter for the general

When the division took the city of Krefeld, it found the city government had vanished along with the fleeing Nazi troops. Something had to be set up urgently to provide for the city's nearly 200,000 people. Kraemer suggested, in his matchlessly persuasive way, that since this

that since this young Kissinger spoke German, and had an extraordinary intelligence besides, he should be put in charge of reorganizing Krefeld's government.
“I could only marvel,” Kraemer recalls, “at the way this 19‐ or 20‐year‐old did the job. In just two or three days, the

government was again working in a splendid fashion. Henry had planned things wonderfully. This was a prodigy. He had a fabulous innate sense of finding his way out of the most difficult situations. Here this little Kissinger had set up in three days a working municipal

government in a large city where everything had been run by the Nazis just two days before.”By then young Kissinger had a sergeant's stripes, and Kraemer (at that point a lieutenant) managed to get him on the faculty of the European Command Intelligence School, where they were

teaching officers how to root out Nazis who had gone underground. Sergeant Kissinger was teaching colonels and higher ranks, and he was so good that when the war ended the Army hired him as a civilian teacher at the school at a salary of $10,000 a year. This amounted to a

relative fortune in those days, certainly so for a young man with only a high‐school diploma and just a uniform removed from the shaving‐brush factory. “But to its credit,” recalls Dr. Kissinger, “Harvard agreed to take me even though its enrollment was closed, too. That is

how I got to Harvard.”
At Harvard young Henry came to the attention of Professor Elliott, who also took him under his wing. “You have the makings of a great philosopher,” the professor once told him. Stern old Elliott was never known to toss words like “great” around lightly.

managing editorship of Foreign Affairs, opened up, Dr. Kissinger was recommended wholeheartedly for the job by three men who seldom ever agreed on anything else: McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger and Professor Elliott. “I was tremendously impressed by recommendations from such

diverse people,” says George Franklin, who was running Foreign Affairs then. “Often, we get glowing recommendations about some young man because he is some professor's disciple. But in Henry's case it was perfectly clear that this was an extraordinary man.”

He also went to work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is a kind of petty‐cash Rockefeller Foundation, with only $90‐million or so. It finances projects of special personal interest to the Rockefeller brothers. In an interview with Henry, the Governor was favorably

impressed and so was Henry. They agreed that Henry would advise the Governor on foreign‐policy matters on a consulting basis while he remained to teach at Harvard.

“We have become good friends,” Dr. Kissinger says, “I admire Rockefeller very much.”
“What kind of mind does Rockefeller have?” I asked.
“He has a second‐rate mind,” Dr. Kissinger said, “but a first‐rate intuition about people.”
“And what kind of mind do you have?” I asked.

“I have a first‐rate mind,” he said without a trace of modesty, “but a third‐rate intuition about people.”
Then he smiled the melancholy smile of a man who wants to look completely defenseless, and said with a confidential kind of guile: “I seem to trust people I shouldn't

trust. . . I hope I can trust you.”

What Henry says in these press briefings, and how he says it, seems always to make unvarnished good sense. Journalists like Dan Rather, the White House correspondent for C.D.S., says Kissinger is “the best briefer in Washington.” Kissinger

also has the reputation that he never lies. As one newsman said: “Henry will always tell you if something is secret and that he can't talk about it. He'll never just out and out lie like other bureaucrats might.”

There are also a tot of people who will tell you that Henry Kissinger once said the most personally insulting things about Richard Nixon after Rockefeller was defeated in Miami for the Republican nomination. (When Rockefeller had lost for sure, Henry was seen weeping.)

The attacks from the right began only after it was disclosed last summer that Kissinger had made a secret trip to Peking to seal the necessary understanding before President Nixon announced his visit to the Peoples Republic of China.

Dr. Kissinger has also said, in so many words, that the policy of phased withdrawal is designed to protect the threatened freedom of those on the left who are most profoundly opposed to the policy. Altogether, it is as elegant and slippery a bit of political reasoning as you are

likely to come across in this day and

Does he want to be known as the most significant German‐Jewish immigrant to America since Einstein? Does he want a share of one of those symbiotic relationships of history—to be remembered as Nixon's Kissinger? Does Henry truly have an

epic vision of history?