JFK & the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters (137 page)

[
870
]. Ibid.

[
871
]. Ibid.

[
872
]. Working with Matthew Smith in 1993, Wayne January used his aircraft expertise to trace the DC-3 he and the pilot had worked on, whose FAA registration number he remembered. He had personally flown the plane over four thousand hours and readily recalled its number. January was dumbfounded when the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) reported back to him that there was no such plane. He insisted that AOPA archivists double-check their files. They finally discovered that after the DC-3 had been bought at Red Bird Air Field, “the number had been changed and the original number given to a small aircraft.” Faxed letter from Wayne January to Matthew Smith, February 3, 1993. Also Matthew Smith,
Say Goodbye to America: The Sensational and Untold Story behind the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
(Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2001), p. 167.

When Smith queried retired Air Force colonel Fletcher Prouty, former liaison between the Air Force and the CIA, on this development, Prouty said that aircraft numbers were never changed, except by the CIA. The CIA had apparently bought the plane.

January’s partner had sold the plane to the Houston Air Center, which did not register the plane until 1965 when it was about to resell it. A Houston investigator, who had once worked for the CIA, identified the Houston Air Center as a CIA front, confirming Fletcher Prouty’s analysis that the DC-3 had become a CIA aircraft upon its purchase at Red Bird Air Field. When the DC-3 flew out of Dallas the afternoon of November 22, 1963, with an undisclosed number of passengers, it was a CIA plane being flown by a CIA pilot. Ibid.

[
873
]. Research on the plane sold by Wayne January to the Houston Air Center was done by Larry Hancock and reported in his book
Someone Would Have Talked
(Southlake, Tex.: JFK Lancer, 2006), p. 256.

[
874
]. January to Smith, December 27, 1992.

[
875
]. Smith,
Vendetta
, p. 120.

[
876
]. Smith,
Say Goodbye
, p. 165.

[
877
]. Smith,
Vendetta
, p. 121.

[
878
]. Ibid.

[
879
]. Wayne January apparently made two exceptions to his otherwise total silence on the CIA pilot before he faxed the information to Matthew Smith in December 1992. He told Smith that on the day after JFK’s assassination he briefly mentioned the incident to his business partner. January to Smith, December 27, 1992. He also revealed it to his wife, Sylvia January, as confirmed by her to both Smith and myself. See below.

[
880
]. January to Smith, February 3, 1993.

[
881
]. Smith,
Say Goodbye
, p. 166.

[
882
].
Vendetta
, pp. 117-25;
Say Goodbye
, pp. 162-69.

[
883
]. Wayne January died from heart failure on November 29, 2002. In a phone conversation, his widow, Sylvia January, confirmed to me that her husband was in fact the same person whose story was told under the pseudonym “Hank Gordon” by Matthew Smith. Author’s phone conversation with Sylvia January, October 1, 2006.

[
884
]. Matthew Smith presentation at JFK Lancer’s 2003 “November in Dallas” conference. Matthew Smith,
Conspiracy—The Plot to Stop the Kennedys
(New York: Citadel Press, 2005), pp. 137-45.

[
885
]. Matthew Smith has suggested another reason beyond the working rapport between Wayne January and the CIA pilot for the latter’s revelations. As noted in January’s December 27, 1992, faxed letter to Smith, January and several friends ran a corporation from 1961 to 1963 comprised of a small fleet of planes filled with electronic equipment. The planes did top-secret radar mapping for the Defense Department. When the corporation was dismantled, the last plane sold was the DC-3 bought by “Houston Air Center.” Because of January’s top-secret clearance from his Defense Department work, he was on a list of approved CIA working contacts. For that reason, Smith thought, the CIA pilot may have felt a little freer to bond with January. Author’s interview of Matthew Smith, January 3, 2007.

[
886
]. Guthman and Shulman,
Robert Kennedy in His Own Words
, p. 17.

[
887
]. Ibid., pp. 402-3.

[
888
]. Wicker,
JFK and LBJ,
p. 183. On his way back to Washington from his diplomatic post in Saigon, Lodge had stopped in Honolulu for a conference on the Vietnam War at CINCPAC (Commander in Chief Pacific) Headquarters, Camp Smith. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara also attended the meeting.

[
889
]. Manchester,
Death of a President
, p. 33.

[
890
]. George W. Ball,
The Past Has Another Pattern: Memoirs
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), p. 366.

[
891
]. Ibid.

[
892
]. Wicker,
JFK and LBJ
, p. 185.

[
893
]. Ibid.

[
894
]. Ibid., p. 205.

[
895
]. Stanley Karnow,
Vietnam: A History
(New York: Viking Press, 1983), p. 326.

[
896
]. Gerard Colby with Charlotte Dennett,
Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 364, 369.

[
897
]. Schlesinger,
Thousand Days
, p. 573.

[
898
]. Ibid.

[
899
].
FRUS, 1961-1963,
vol. XXIII, p. 694. U.S. ambassador Howard Jones, citing President Sukarno, in telegram to the Department of State, November 4, 1963.

[
900
]. See, for example, the analysis of Kennedy’s third world policies, as viewed in conflict with those of New York governor Nelson Rockefeller and his allies, in Colby and Dennett,
Thy
Will Be Done
, pp. 391-92, 396-417, 665-66. Six days before JFK’s assassination, Rockefeller gave a speech featured in the
New York Times
in which he expressed “deep concern” that President Kennedy “was undermining the nation’s security and world peace.” Donald Janson, “Rockefeller Says Kennedy’s Policy Imperils Peace,”
New York Times
(November 17, 1963), p. 1. Rockefeller’s first example of Kennedy’s undermining security was the president’s support of Sukarno in Indonesia’s conflict with its former colonial master, the Netherlands: “In New Guinea we sacrificed an old and valued ally, the Netherlands, to Indonesian aggression.” “Excerpts from Rockefeller’s Statement Attacking President on Foreign Policy,”
Thy Will Be Done,
p. 43.

Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s support of neutralist policies in third world countries as a virtual surrender to Communism: “In Laos the Administration sacrificed a pro-Western government to one of those illusory coalitions which almost invariably have been a prelude to Communist takeover . . .

“Blinded by the illusion that a change of tone indicates a change of policy, the Administration has vacillated in the face of alternating Soviet aggressiveness and Soviet peace offensives. The result is that the West is bewildered and in many allied countries leftist tendencies with neutralist overtones are gaining ground.” Ibid.

[
901
]. Hilsman,
To Move a Nation
, p. 407.

[
902
]. Ibid.

[
903
]. Ibid., p. 409.

[
904
]. Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967,” p. 7 of 19 at namebase.org/scott.html. Scott’s article was originally published in
Pacific Affairs
58 (Summer 1985), pp. 239-64.

[
905
]. Hilsman,
To Move a Nation
, p. 409.

[
906
]. Scott, “United States and the Overthrow,” p. 7. In July 1965, the United States delivered two hundred Aero-Commander aircraft to its Indonesian Army allies. It also funded the completion of an army communications system. The additional light aircraft and improved communications aided Suharto on October 1, 1965, in implementing his swift purge of Sukarno loyalists and leftists.

[
907
]. Ibid., p. 9.

[
908
]. Ralph W. McGehee,
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA
(New York: Sheridan Square Publications, 1983), p. 57. One sentence cited from article by Ralph W. McGehee, “Foreign Policy By Forgery: The C.I.A. and the White Paper on El Salvador,”
The Nation
(April 11, 1981), pp. 423-34 (with deletions by the CIA). McGehee also noted in his
Nation
article, as then cited in his book on pp. 57-58:

“Initially, the Indonesian Army left the P.K.I. [Communist Party of Indonesia] alone, since it had not been involved in the coup attempt. [Eight sentences deleted here by the CIA.] Subsequently, however, Indonesian military leaders [seven words deleted by the CIA] began a bloody extermination campaign. In mid-November 1965, General Suharto formally authorized the ‘cleaning out’ of the Indonesian Communist Party and established special teams to supervise the mass killings. Media fabrications played a key role in stirring up popular resentment against the P.K.I. Photographs of the bodies of the dead generals [who had been killed in the failed coup]—badly decomposed—were featured in all the newspapers and on television. Stories accompanying the pictures falsely claimed that the generals had been castrated and their eyes gouged out by Communist women. This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the Communists and set the stage for a massacre . . . To conceal its role in the massacre of those innocent people the C.I.A., in 1968, concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book,
Indonesia—1965: The Coup that Backfired
) . . . At the same time that the Agency wrote the book, it also composed a secret study of what really happened. [One sentence deleted by the CIA.] The Agency was extremely proud of its successful [one word deleted by the CIA] and recommended it as a model for future operations [one-half sentence deleted by the CIA].”