Conversations With the Crow Read online

  GD: That would be interesting. You should have the box in a week or so and then we can discuss other matters. What about Nixon?

  RTC: The Company brought Nixon down but of course he made it easy to do.

  GD: Watergate

  RTC: And other matters. Yes, Watergate. Shall I continue?

  GD: Go right ahead.

  RTC: Nixon’s problem is that he was a jealous outsider and never fit into the political or intelligence community. But a smart man, Gregory, very smart, and very ambitious.

  GD: I met him once. My step-mother, who had big money, was a strong supporter of Nixon and when he was running for Governor of California, she dragged me to a rubber chicken affair and I got to talk with him.

  RTC: What did you think of him?

  GD: He had come across badly on the idiot box but in person, he was taller than I thought and very sharp. I liked him as a person because he knew I was nobody but had no problem having a very good conversation with me.

  RTC: No doubt your step-mother’s money helped.

  GD: True, but you can tell when someone is being pleasant to you for politic reasons and when he is being genuinely communicative. He had the left wing press after him and he hated them, believe me.

  RTC: That’s one of the factors that brought him down. Nixon’s downfall started in early ’72 when he went to China. It was a bold move and it had an effect everywhere. It also had an effect in Taiwan. Old Chaing Kai-shek had a bloody fit when he saw this. I mean a bloody fit. He saw this as the beginning of the end of U.S. support for him and he wanted desperately to stop the slide. His intelligence chief and a couple of bigwigs came to see our DCI and wept in his office. If Nixon normalized relations with the PRC, it would spell the end of a mutual special relationship, just like our special relationship with Israel. The long and the short of it, Gregory, is that they wanted Nixon out of power before he went any further. And, the pleasant part of this is that they were more than willing to pay us very, very well for accommodating them.

  GD: They wanted you to kill him?

  RTC: No, just removed so he couldn’t do them any more damage. We later did discuss killing him but two dead presidents in ten years was a bit much, so we hit on another ploy. We would discredit him. Our main man in all of this was Howard Hunt, who had wonderful ideas of his importance and, besides writing bad books, he had been very helpful in the Kennedy business in ’63. He was our station chief in Mexico between August and September of that year and set up the fake ‘Oswald’ visit to Mexico City.

  GD: Wasn’t Oswald there? Getting a visa for Cuba?

  RTC: No, that was bullshit. Anyway, Howard arranged for faked pictures, testimony that Oswald had been there at the Russian embassy, and so on. Useful. Now let’s move ahead a few years. Nixon had won his last election in a landslide and you know he was never too well wrapped. He had a huge inferiority complex and the press did not like him. Herblock the cartoonist with the Post really made some ugly cartoons of him and Nixon was overly sensitive about that sort of thing. So with his victory at the polls, he got a swelled head and began to get even with his opponents by turning the FBI and the IRS loose on them. Things like that. Remember the enemies list? Fine. So Hunt was connected with the Nixon people as a trouble-shooter and got involved with going after Nixon’s perceived enemies. He planted the idea that McGovern, a raging liberal twit, was in contact with Castro and getting Cuban money. The next thing was to suggest that they bug the DNC offices to get proof of this and ruin McGovern. A break-in, and they had been breaking into offices and homes for some time, a break-in was planned but it was planned to fail. They taped a self-locking door open, someone tipped off Watergate security and you know the rest.

  GD: But there was no guarantee that Nixon would do what he did. I mean the stonewalling.

  RTC: We could read Tricky Dick like a dime novel. True to form, he believed he was an imperial figure and acted that way right up to the end. Hunt played his part and I’m sure you watched the thing unfold, right on the five o’clock news every night. For a smart man, Nixon was very stupid and played right into our hands.

  GD: But Hunt was destined for the big house…

  RTC: Of course. He had to fall on his sword but Howard didn’t like the idea and he began to whine about this. We had to show him the light and after that, he went right along with the schedule.

  GD: A serious talk?

  RTC: No, we had to kill his wife as a serious warning to follow the game plan.

  GD: More killing. Someone shoot her from an office building?

  RTC: No, we arranged for an accident when she was flying west. Dorothy was helping Howard with some little project he thought would help him so we sabotaged her plane in DC.

  GD: Put a bomb on it?

  RTC: No tampered with the equipment. Plane came in for a stopover at Midway, suddenly lost altitude and smashed into some local houses. Midway is a terrible field, believe me. Right in the middle of an urban area and the runways are far too short. Anyway, down it came on top of people and the wife was dead. The local authorities found ten thousand in cash in her purse by the way. But it had an effect on Howard…..

  GD: I can imagine. How many people died?

  RTC: A few on the ground and forty or so in the plane. But the point is, Howard kept to his end of things or he would have been next or perhaps a close relative. He knew the score, Howard did.

  GD: And Nixon left office in disgrace.

  RTC: Well, yes, he did. Remember Al Haig? The General? Yes. Well we were afraid that Nixon wouldn’t leave peacefully and might turn to the military for help so we put Al in to keep Nixon on the straight and narrow and limit his actions in that area. Worked out fine. And the chinks were happy as a clam with the results.

  GD: Forty people, probably innocent at that, is a bit much, don’t you think?

  RTC: Well, Lenin said you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs first. And Gregory, you surely can’t believe that there any really innocent people in this world? We are born in original sin as you know.

  GD: That’s the Catholic view. Well, I suppose that’s water under the bridge now.

  RTC: I think Teddy Kennedy said that after Chappaquiddick.

  GD: Is it possible I could write about this?

  RTC: Actually, I would rather you didn’t. Hunt is still alive and there’s no point pushing him. He’s fallen from grace and is in decline so he might not be too receptive to having all of this aired.

  GD: No problem. Anyway, who would publish it? It’s bad enough that I am writing about the CIA hiring the head of the Gestapo without adding insult to injury. Does Nixon know about this?

  RTC: I don’t really know and I don’t really care. He knows enough to keep quiet and count his money. I don’t think he wants his twilight years terminated with prejudice. He might be paranoid but he is a pragmatist in the end. That ought to hold you until we move on to other presidential removals.

  GD: It sounds like a Mayflower moving van ad.

  RTC: If it works, don’t knock it.

  GD: Well, the chinks are not that happy. Look at all the money they spent and look at our relations with the PRC.

  RTC: Some things are destined to happen and all they did was to prolong the final act. Jerry Ford was no threat. A wonderfully cooperative man, Jerry was. During the Warren Commission, he called up old Hoover every night with the latest confidential dirt. No, Jerry was no problem. And the peanut farmer was too self-righteous to bother with and harmless. Actually, Nixon was lucky. If the Watergate thing hadn’t worked, we would have found something a little more permanent.

  GD: Nixon didn’t know anything about the Kennedy business, did he?

  RTC: No. Nixon was a Quaker and God knows what he would have thought about that. Nixon wasn’t into what our Russian friends call wet actions.

  GD: I’m not fishing here but did you people have anything to with Bobby’s ascension to heaven?

  RTC: No, that was Hoover. The Colonel [10] hated Bobby for calling
him an old faggot and harassing him. And King too. He hated King because he was having an affair with a white woman and, on top of this, had gone to the Lenin school in Russia. Bobby was a quid pro quo for his brother in our eyes.

  GD: It sounds like the Borgias.

  RTC: Gregory, these are matters of state, not an exercise in morality. We have to do unpleasant things from time to time…I recall our man driving around in Africa with the rotting body of Lumumba stuffed into his trunk back in ’61 after we killed him. People go off fast in that climate. He said he was sick for days trying to get the stench out of his nose. Feel sorry for the poor man, why not? That sort of work is never easy. There are often sleepless nights.

  GD: Speaking of that, let me leave you now and I’ll call up my construction expert and see how the blessed Swiss bell ringing box is coming along.

  RTC: You just do that, Gregory, and I will be very, very happy if and when.

  (Concluded at 9:21 AM CST)

  *Conversation No. 10

  Date: Monday, April 22, 1996

  Commenced: 11:17 AM CST

  Concluded: 11:59 AM CST

  GD: Good morning, Robert. I wanted to let you know the box is finished and I have checked it out. The neighbor’s cat started screeching like a maniac and kept it up for the ten minutes I left the thing plugged in.

  RTC: Wonderful news, Gregory. I am so looking forward to receiving it. Send it to the drop address I gave you and use the name we decided on.

  GD: No problem at all, Robert. It uses regular household current and on one side you will find a dial and a toggle switch. The switch turns it on and off and the dial adjusts the level of noise. I mean you won’t hear any noise but that’s as good a term as anything else. If you have pets, be careful to aim the box towards the embassy, better up against the window, which I would keep open during operational times. I suggest you turn it on and off about three or four times during the day but never leave it on for more than ten minutes. You want general malaise but not protracted agony.

  RTC: And if their windows are closed?

  GD: Even better. The glass acts as a sounding board. If the curtains or drapes are open, get a pair of glasses and stand back from the window and watch for reactions. If not, just turn it on and off from time to time. You won’t get people with exploding heads but eventually you’ll hear about it.

  RTC: I suppose exploding Swiss diplomats would cause a stir.

  GD: I would think so. Now, I’ll send this out today before five and then let you know. I won’t send it registered because then your Mr. Fake Name would have to sign for it.

  RTC: Understood. You’ll be in my debt for this, Gregory.

  GD: My pleasure.

  RTC: And I’ve been digging out Kennedy material for you.

  GD: Wonderful, Robert. Now that that’s taken care of, I would like to ask you about something I found in Mueller’s journals. I’m translating them and believe me, it’s not the easiest job. His German is short and to the point but not very cultured and I was brought up to speak Hanoverian German. Mueller’s material reads like police reports. Anyway, there was a passage I really want to verify with you. I mean I will read my translation to you in toto and then let me know if you know anything about it, either first or second hand. It’s such a nasty piece of work that Bender won’t want to publish it unless I get some confirmation. It isn’t too long.

  RTC: Read on.

  GD: OK, here we go: Now remember that Mueller moved from DC to Warrenton and lived on a large estate with his wife. He calls her Bunny and that’s who he’s talking about. It starts out

  “Friday, 12. July, 1951

  Such a damned outrage! This is very hard to put down but I really ought to just for reference and also for relieving me of the pressure. I went out for a ride this morning, in spite of the weather. I thought it would be my last before I went on the trip and I do enjoy the rides now. I have gotten used to the horse and he to me. So early this morning, I went out riding and worked my way across the property to the area where the CIA unit was installed.

  I smelt it before I got to it and so did the horse. A very unhappy horse and later, a very unhappy Heini! The stench was terrible as I approached the fenced-in trailers with their antenna stuck up on top of two of the trailers. There was a path leading down the hillside but the horse balked so I had to dismount and lead him down the path. I wanted to see what smelt so bad and I found out very quickly. In a small clearing were two human bodies, very much decayed and bloated. There were two men wearing some kind of blue shirts and pants and badly infested with maggots. They appeared to be black men but given the advanced state of corruption, it was not a certainty.

  I remounted at the top of the path and rode over to the fenced area but no one was in sight. By this time, I was becoming very angry and went back home at a good canter and later a gallop. Phone calls to the CIA people. There are dead human bodies on my land! What is going on there? Silly, placating answers. Not good enough for me. Get rid of these things or I will call the local police and mortician at once! No, no, sir, do not do that! was the response. They would send someone right out to clean it up. I was please not to call anyone. It was (the usual shit) a matter of national security! National security indeed! Two dead blacks and how did they get there?

  I want Bunny to know nothing about this. She came in when I was shouting at the CIA fool so I had to pretend it was something else. Oh yes, they came almost at once in a station wagon and drove in at the gate and then out to the charnel house. Another car came with two smooth-faced young men who wanted to talk to me privately. Into the library and later Bunny said she could hear me shouting one floor up through three closed doors! Angry is not the word to use, believe me.

  What have these swine done now? It seems that the CIA is interested in mind control and were “practicing” on “willing” subjects. They wanted to see if some new radio system would have any effect on humans so they obtained several “volunteers” from a Virginia jail and experimented on them. They used radio microwaves in varying degrees of intensity on these poor fellows and literally roasted them alive! The bodies were tossed down the hill and it had been planned to bury them quietly on my farm!

  There was a change of personnel and someone forgot the dead blacks!

  When I asked these two sleek weasels about this, the reply was so awful I could not believe it! It seems that the CIA has no problem roasting people alive as long as they are convicted black criminals! Isn’t that a wonderful attitude? One of the CIA people said, in such an offhanded way as to infuriate me that no one cared about blacks because they were scarcely human!

  It took an enormous amount of self-control on my part to keep me from picking up a poker from the fireplace and doing great damage to these two worms. I threw both of them out and ordered them to not only remove the bodies but their experimental station as well. I told them that if I heard one more word of this insane behavior I would personally take it to the President first and the newspapers second.

  White faces and many apologies. They crawled out and I had a very stiff drink to calm down again. The station wagon left, the driver had a white mask over his face and the other one threw up on the driveway as the car bumped along!

  Fortunately, Bunny saw, smelt or heard nothing and I had to go up and lie terribly to her. I am totally frustrated by this because my first instinct, besides shoving my shoe up their assholes, was to put them under arrest and turn them over to the local police for obvious murder. I can’t do that in my position but I would go to Harry with this if I ever hear about it again.

  Mind control indeed!

  Later: I spoke very sharply with (Walter Bedell, ed.) Smith when I calmed down and he was also furious. Told me that there are elements in the organization that are “completely lunatic” and he will speak with “someone” about this. I told him that if I ever heard of such psychotic nonsense again, the President would be the next on my list of callers and Smith said not to worry about this reoccurrence. No doubt the lun
atics will go somewhere else. If I ever catch these evil swine on the property again, I will turn Arno loose on them and he can certainly earn his pay.

  Apparently, they (the CIA, ed.) are involved in “mind control” work. This consists of drugging people, using electric shock on others, God knows what else! You should see some of the thoroughly lunatic types that scuttle up and down the halls, mumbling to themselves while clutching files to their breasts like a mama monkey with a dead baby. As expected, Wisner is involved in this madness. And him with a well-endowed (from the photos) black lover! When they are not burning people to death or looting the safes of cash, they are encouraging all kinds of strange madness.

  I have no time for my journal now and am getting ready to leave here on the 19th for a working vacation. Will get in touch with Willi (Krichbaum. A former SS colonel who was Müller’s deputy in the Gestapo and later a senior employee of Colonel Critchfield’s CIA-controlled Gehlen organization in Munich, ed.) and then a musical interlude. I cannot see the family because they are still watched but will drop a card to Sophie.

  There will be no mention of the new wife or the forthcoming (I hope) child. No point of putting honey on your ass and squatting on an anthill, is there?”

  RTC: My God, Gregory! He wrote that?

  GD: Yes, he did but in German. Is it true?

  RTC: They did….I mean these mind control idiots did far worse than that. Is that true? I don’t doubt it for a second. Cameron [11] once decided to put a woman into ice water to see if he could break down her resistance and she died of shock. That sort of thing. Loaded one of their own with LSD and when he started screaming, got frightened and tossed him out of a hotel window. Oh, and we mustn’t forget the Goat Boy. That’s the strange Dr. Gottleib.[12] We called him that because he lived in a hovel and kept a bunch of goats around. He used to have sexual affairs with them. Gregory, we have had lots of people like that. Fortunately, for my sanity at least, and my reputation, I was in the intelligence branch and I left the care and feeding of the nut fringe to others with stronger stomachs. Believe it? I have no knowledge of that incident but I believe it. I can see why your Mr. Bender would be queasy about that. You know, if things like this ever become really public, they will burn all of us at the stake. I personally never was involved with such madness and actually, outside of my own areas, I had no real idea what we were up to but I can tell you that we had more than our share of raging nuts on board.