Photo, above: President John F. Kennedy (right) walked with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara towards a pier to board the Kennedy family cruiser at Hyannis Port. (John Rous/ Associated Press/ File)

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Hour One

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block A:   The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA by Scott C. Johnson (1 of 4)     What happens when a father asks his son to lie for the greater good? Growing up, Scott C. Johnson always suspected that his father was different. Only as a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA’s most trusted officers. At first the secret was thrilling. But over time Scott began to have doubts. How could a man so rigorously trained to deceive and manipulate simply turn off those skills at home? His father had been living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to separate from the truth. When Scott embarked on a career as a foreign correspondent, he found . . .

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block B: The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA by Scott C. Johnson (2 of 4)   . . . When Scott embarked on a career as a foreign correspondent, he found himself returning to many of the troubled countries of his youth. In the dusty streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan, amid the cold urbanity of Yugoslavia, and down the mysterious alleys of Mexico City, he came face to face with his father’s murky past—and his own complicity in it. Scott learned that his chosen profession was not so different from his father’s: they both worked to gain people’s trust and to uncover their secrets. The only difference was what they did with that information.  . . .

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block C: The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA by Scott C. Johnson (3 of 4) . . . In the aftermath of 9/11, father and son found themselves on assignment in Afghanistan and the Middle East, one as a CIA contractor, the other as a reporter for Newsweek. Suddenly, an unsettled Scott was forced to keep his father’s secret all over again. As their professional lives collided, Scott and his father inched toward a personal reckoning, struggling to overcome a lifetime of suspicion and deception. . . .

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 1, Block D: The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA by Scott C. Johnson (4 of 4)   . . . The Wolf and the Watchman is a provocative, meditative account of truth and duplicity, of manipulation and loyalty. It is also a moving, intensely personal portrait of a bond between father and son that endured in the shadow of one of the world’s most secretive and unforgiving institutions.    *See also, below, for a conspiratologist text

Hour Two

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block A: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (1 of 4)     . . . Beginning a half-century ago . . . — on Aug. 7, 1963 — Clarke patiently walks the reader through the 100 days leading to the terrible end of the story in Dallas. Relying primarily (though not exclusively) on secondary sources, Clarke does an interesting and in many ways persuasive job of what he proposes at the beginning: “to view John F. Kennedy through every prism and search through all his compartments during the crucial last hundred days of his life — days that saw him finally beginning to realize his potential as a man and a president — in order to solve the most tantalizing mystery of all: not who killed him, but who he was when he was killed, and where he would have led us.”  -- Washington Post

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block B: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (2 of 4)

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block C: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (3 of 4)

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 2, Block D: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President by Thurston Clarke (4 of 4)

Hour Three

Photo, below: Guevara (right) with Alberto Granado (left) aboard their "Mambo-Tango" wooden raft on the Amazon River in June 1952. The raft was a gift from the lepers whom they had treated.

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block A: Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer  (1 of 4)   The duo behind 2012’s No Way Out: A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan team up again to recount the capture and execution of America’s primary Cold War-era bête noire and the world’s most recognizable rebel: Che Guevara. Along with Fidel Castro, Che helped orchestrate the Cuban Revolution and the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. His efforts would make him an idol for 1960s left-wing youth. But when Che and his guerillas turned their attention in the mid-’60s to bringing communism to U.S.-backed Bolivia, the United States decided enough was enough. A U.S. military Special Forces team was sent south to guide a battalion of Bolivian soldiers through a four-month-long crash course in fighting the insurrection. Weiss (a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist) and Maurer (coauthor of No Easy Day) focus primarily on the American operation to take down Che, detailing the tactics and personnel involved, as well as the dramatic play-by-play leading up to the rebel’s execution. The authors are palpably unsympathetic to Che and his cause, and they take a novelist’s license in recreating dialogue and inner thoughts. Fans of by-the-book nonfiction will be skeptical of the docudrama prose, but for more tolerant readers, this offers an entertaining new perspective.  –Publishers Weekly

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block B: Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer  (2 of 4)

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block C: Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer  (3 of 4)

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 3, Block D: Hunting Che: How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary by Mitch Weiss and Kevin Maurer  (4 of 4)

Hour Four

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block A: The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Secret White House Tapes by David G. Coleman (1 of 4)    A fly-on-the-wall narrative of the Oval Office in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, using JFK’s secret White House tapes.  On October 28, 1962, the Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev, agreed to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba. Popular history has marked that day as the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a seminal moment in American history. As President Kennedy’s secretly recorded White House tapes now reveal, . . .

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block B: The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Secret White House Tapes by David G. Coleman (2 of 4) . . . tapes now reveal, the reality was not so simple. Nuclear missiles were still in Cuba, as were nuclear bombers, short-range missiles, and thousands of Soviet troops. From October 29, Kennedy had to walk a very fine line—push hard enough to get as much nuclear weaponry out of Cuba as possible, yet avoid forcing the volatile Khrushchev into a combative stance. . . .

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block C: The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Secret White House Tapes by David G. Coleman (3 of 4)  . . . On the domestic front, an election loomed and the press was bristling at White House “news management.” Using new material from the tapes, the historian David G. Coleman puts readers in the Oval Office during one of the most highly charged, and in the end most highly regarded, moments in American history.

Saturday 5 October 2013 / Hour 4, Block D: The Fourteenth Day: JFK and the Aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis: The Secret White House Tapes by David G. Coleman (4 of 4)

..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..  

* From a distinctively non-mainstream site; merely fyi, auld text.  

Sloppy Tradecraft Exposes CIA Plane  Oct 08, 2007   by Daniel Hopsicker

Seventeen months after an American-registered DC9 airliner was busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, a major international scandal is brewing over a second drug trafficking incident in Mexico's Yucataninvolving an American-registered jet owned by a  dummy front company of the kind usually associated with the CIA.  A weekend visit to “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” of Coconut Beach FL.,  the company which FAA records show owned the Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) which crash-landedwith 3.7 tons of cocaine aboard in Mexico’s Yucatan two weeks ago, has revealed that the company’s listed address is an empty office suite with a blank sign out front.

There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at the Florida Dept. of Corporations, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 inCoconut Beach FL.  However, there were, oddly enough, a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.  Phone calls to Butters Development, the industrial park's leasing agent, went unreturned. Moreover, the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page, apparently designed to “flesh out the ghost a little,”  is such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeats the purpose of helping aid the construction of a plausible “legend,” or cover, and ends up doing  more harm than good...  For example, the website features a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer. Unfortunately his name is  “John Doe.” And the listed phone number is right out of the movies: 415.555-5555.   It's known in the trade as "sloppy tradecraft."

"It's My Party and I'll Bust Who I Want To  "The biggest clue to date to the true identity of the individuals or organization operating behind the dummy front of Donna Blue Aircraft may lie in its initials, "DBA," for "doing business as."  It is the kind of cute nomenclature for which "the boys" are known to be fond.

For the Bush Administration, which recently launched a PR offensive announcing major gains in the multibillion-dollar anti-drug effort in preparation for asking Congress for a $1 billion Plan Colombia-type aid package to help Mexico fight drug traffickers, the controversy could not have come at a worse time.   The billion dollars in proposed U.S. aid, Mexican newspapers pointed out, will only be used to target drug traffickers with no obvious ties to American intelligence. Leading to this extraordinary skepticism is the fact that recent investigations into downed drug planes have suffered, on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border, from a certain murkiness.

New Scientific Discovery Links Drug Planes to Quarks The more influential the listed owner of the plane is, the more uncertain the identification becomes.  The whole business, suggested a story which ran on the Associated Press, quickly moves beyond the realm of human ken…  “How the U.S.-registered Gulfstream ended up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers remains a mystery,” reported the Associated Press.  How indeed? Let’s take a look.

When the company’s principals, Joao Luiz Malago and Eduardo Dias Guimaraes, both Brazilian, forcefully denied that they still owned the plane, claiming it had been sold several weeks earlier to two American pilots in Florida, officials at the DEA (which sent a six-man team to the Yucatan crash site) the FBI, and the FAA were all conspicuous by their silence. Since then, there has been a growing perception expressed in the Mexican press that the owners of both of the American-registered drug plane’s seem to enjoy an apparent immunity from prosecution.

Set a Straw Man Up, Set a Straw Man Down  “The proprietary company of the unit, Donna Blue Inc. Aircraft (DBA), is another mystery and probably it is a ghost company,” reported Mexico City’s La Reforma. Indications point to the conclusion that their skepticism is justified. Increasing suspicion even more was the suggestion,  in a report of a committee of the European Parliament, that in addition to having been used in drug trafficking the Gulfstream II had flown CIA rendition flights to Guantanamo. Unnamed authorities quoted in Associated Press accounts dismissed this report, saying there was no evidence the plane flew renditions, but failed to address the fact that  Guantanamo is highly restricted airspace, and any plane landing there can be presumed to be working for the U.S. Government.

What has raised the crash-landing of the Gulfstream II drug plane with U.S. Government connections to the level of real outrage is its extraordinarysimilarity to the DC9 airliner caught a year and a half ago, after which  the planes’ registered owner suffered no ill consequences from having his airplane caught with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard. There are “wonderful similarities,” Mexican newspaper Por Esto reported drolly, “between the Gulfstream which crash-landed in the tiny hamlet of Tixkokob and the DC9 busted in Ciudad del Carmen which help explain why, despite the fact that almost 18 months has passed, the American owner of the DC9 has not been charged with any crime.”

Ghost Fleets of Ghost Planes owned by Ghost Companies  The reference is to information contained in a series of articles in the MadCowMorningNews detailing connections between the DC9 and the national Republican Party, like its unpaid use flying current Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez around the state during his last week blitz  before his election to the Senate in 2004. The DC9’s owner was identified in FAA documents as Royal Sons’ Inc., owned by  Frederic Geffon of St. Petersburg. Yet despite the fact that Geffon back-dated sales documents and then had them faxed to the FAA several days after his DC9 was already in the news for the big bust, no action has been taken against Geffon, or any other owners of the plane. Geffon claimed he had sold the DC9, several weeks before it was caught,  and identified the buyer as an “airplane broker” in California who investigation revealed has no history of selling airplanes. The circumstances of the subsequent “investigations” share many similarities. The governments involved—Mexico, the United States,Venezuela, and Colombia—all appear unable to agree on who owned the planes when they were busted.  In both cases Mexican authorities were quick to arrest individuals who authorities labeled crew members on the drug flights.

The Third Rail, The Big Taboo, & The Big Fix But the plane’s ownership has been made to appear “murky,” although the owners of the planes at the time they were caught are clearly named in FAA documents. And both plane’s American owners appear to be escaping Scot-free.  Could the confusion be deliberate? An aviation executive in Venice thought so. "When it comes to registering airplanes, it’s the Wild West out there," he explained. “An airplane is a mobile, big ticket item. Yet there are no airport police doing ramp checks, or checking N numbers at airports.”  “The FAA system for registering airplanes is little-changed from when it was started back in the good ol boy days of the 1930’s. Each plane has a paper folder, for example, stuffed with all correspondence regarding airworthiness and ownership relating to that plane.” “Its an antiquated system which some feel is kept deliberately in place to encourage a certain ambiguity when a plane is interdicted. When a change of registration is mailed in, the FAA places a plane’s folder in what they call “suspense.” “That’s a tremendous inducement to anyone with a chance of having a plane nabbed to keep floating sales in progress. The CIA, for example, is very adept at keeping files on its planes “in suspense.”  An airplane associated in some way with the U.S. Government, said an aviation source  with a smirk, would have definite advantages for a drug smuggler.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on... The first incident—the DC9 “Cocaine One” saga studiously ignored in the American press, save for an error-filled apologia in the plane’s owners hometown St. Petersburg Times—dropped from sight quickly with no apparent serious ramifications. Two weeks ago in the Yucatan, events took a similar turn. And both incidents now seem headed for similar outcomes.  Today only elements of the “wised-up” Mexican press are crying foul.   After being owned for nearly a decade by ARI, Air Rutter International, the Gulfstream apparently changed hands-- at least two, and by one account, three--times in recent weeks.   However the MadCowMorningNews has learned new details that throw suspicion on the claim that two American pilots in Fort Lauderdale Florida could have paid $2 million cash, as described by Donna Blue execs, for the Gulfstream II business jet... It's a deadly game of musical chairs. What will happen when the music stops?

..  ..  ..

Music

Hour 1:

Hour 2:

Hour 3:

Hour 4: