TBR News July 2, 2018

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Isaiah 40:3-8

Washington, D.C. July 2, 2018:” For some time, B.A.E. Systems has been running a series of classified, intelligence system for various American agencies, such as the CIA. BAE is a British company based at Farnborough, UK, which has extensive worldwide interests, particularly in North America through its subsidiary BAE Systems Inc. BAE was formed on 30th November 1999 with the merger of British Aerospace (BAe) and Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), the defence arm of The General Electric Company (GEC). The run a so-called “Covert Communications” network that is a highly classified blog that acts as a forum for agencies and individual employees to communicate and share information. Since 2005, over a thousand of such blogs have been instituted.

B.A.E. Systems, which runs the CIA’s blog that is hosted  on IntelLINK. This has an information technology contract with the C.I.A. The IntelLINK intelligence network links information in the various classified databases of the US intelligence agencies (e.g. FBI, CIA, DEA, NSA, USSS, NRO) to facilitate communication and the sharing of documents and other resources.

There is also the ncr.disa.mil system.  The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) was established in Washington, D.C., as the Defense Communications Agency (DCA) with 450 employees on May 12, 1960, by Secretary of Defense Thomas B. Gates. Its mission was to manage the Defense Communications System (DCS), a consolidation of the independent long-haul communications functions of the Army, Navy, and Air Force.

Unfortunately for the security of this massive intrusion program, the United States has made the colossal error of informing their opposite intelligence numbers in Israel with the result that while we were sharing requested information with Israeli Intelligence, they, in turn were initiating their very own program directed against the United States. The following American financial institutions have been the subject of on-going Israeli surveillance:

CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System

100 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004 (212) 613-0188

http://www.chips.org/home.php

CHIPS: Clearing House Interbank Payments System. An interbank payment system related to international trade, CHIPS is used for the transfer of international trade dollars. CHIPS is used by both Fedwire and S.W.I.F.T.

FEDWIRE: Operated by the Federal Reserve Board of the USA

http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fedwire/

ACH: Automated Clearing House of the Federal Reserve Bank of NY

http://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed31.html

The DHS has stations located in various cities in the United States who are responsible for specific areas of financial interest and they worked, and have worked, closely with the Department of State who have been called upon to apply “extreme diplomatic pressure” to countries whose banking systems are reluctant to cooperate with this program. In addition to the S.W.I.F.T people:

SWIFT: Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication

Avenue Adèle 1, B-1310 La Hulpe, Belgium Tel: 01132-2655-31-11

http://www.swift.com/

List of Offices: http://www.swift.com/index.cfm?item_id=320”

 

 

The Table of Contents

• The Threat of International Adoption for Migrant Children Separated From Their Families
• Michael Cohen hints at flipping and says ‘first loyalty’ is to family – not Trump

• Trump Timeline
• Exclusive: Largest U.S. business group attacks Trump on tariffs
• EU says US risks $294 billion hit over auto tariffs
• Afghanistan Wars: Drugs for Fun and Profit
• Trujillo Assassination  
• A Study of Assassination Methodology : A CIA study

 

 

The Threat of International Adoption for Migrant Children Separated From Their Families

July 1 2018

by Kathryn Joyce

The Intercept

What policies and laws might apply to the children was so unclear that even many child welfare experts and former officials weren’t sure how to think about the threat. When migrant parents were taken into ICE custody at the border, their children became wards of Health and Human Services, specifically its Office of Refugee Resettlement, which facilitates the care of “unaccompanied alien children.” Although they’d arrived with parents, upon separation, the children had been officially transformed into unaccompanied minors with immigration cases distinct from the adults they’d arrived with. And it was already becoming clear that, despite its protestations to the contrary, the government had no real plan for bringing them back together.

Children, including infants, began arriving at care facilities around the country, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes without being told where they were going, sometimes without paperwork noting their parents’ detention locations or even their names.

“Thus far, we’ve seen no evidence that any system has been put in place by the government to ensure these families are communicating or connecting,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, on a recent media call. “Some of us have been trying to reconnect the children, but it’s incredibly hard.” Young added, “It feels like our legal aid staff have become private investigators, working from what you have — a name, a birthday, an ‘A’ number” — an alien registration number.

Sometimes authorities claim they don’t have any information either: On a form filled out by a detained parent requesting a phone number to reach her daughter, an ICE official responded tersely, “I do not have this information.”

It was a system that Suzan Song, head of George Washington University’s child and family psychiatry division and a former humanitarian protection adviser for youth and families of forced migration with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said was more poorly organized than the process for reuniting refugee children who’d fled Syria. “With this policy, the focus is really on the separation part,” said Song, “and it seems there’s very little planning or foresight about the complex processes for family tracing and reunification that has to happen.”

When news reports first began to emerge that 81 of the migrant children recently separated from their parents had been sent into the care of one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, the response was swift alarm. Was the government planning on creating “social orphans” out of the children, then offering them up for adoption?

Horrified observers had already drawn parallels between the separation crisis and the blatantly assimilationist treatment of Native American children, starting with their mass removal to boarding schools in the late 19th Century and continuing through the Indian Adoption Project, which from the late 1950s to early 1970s removed 25 to 35 percent of all Native American children from their families. Or how U.S. slavery systematically broke apart families, selling children away from their parents. A number pointed out that the forcible transfer of children from one group of people to another fits the United Nations definition of genocide.

To adoption reform advocates, who monitor unethical and abusive practices in child welfare, it looked like any number of adoption crises in the past, like the airlifts out of Haiti in the wake of its cataclysmic 2010 earthquake. Then, masses of unaccompanied children were suddenly labeled orphans and became the focus of a deafening campaign in the U.S. to rescue them through inter-country adoption, even as Haitian adults were being warned not to try to come themselves.

Fears of a new adoption rush in today’s border crisis weren’t groundless. There was reason to be concerned. The former head of U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Barack Obama warned that some of the children who’d recently been separated would remain separated “permanently” and potentially be adopted. Reports surfaced of mothers who were told that their children would be adopted as an incentive to “behave.” On Tuesday night, the Daily Beast reported that the threat of adoption has become weaponized, as a Guatemalan mother detained by Customs and Border Protection earlier this month was allegedly presented with the ultimatum that if she didn’t abandon her asylum appeal, she would be jailed for a year and her daughter put up for adoption. And conservative figures deeply hostile to immigrant families, like Fox News provocateur Laura Ingraham, herself an adoptive mother, toggled between mocking the detention of children as akin to “summer camp” and calling to “make adoption easier for American couples who want to adopt these kids.”

Part of the context for the advocates’ alarm over adoption is that international adoption as an industry has been in free fall for the last decade. Country after country has suspended or shrunk its adoption program, leaving a greatly reduced supply to meet a U.S. demand for adoptable children that hasn’t waned. At its peak in 2004, some 23,000 children were sent from abroad to the U.S. to be adopted, including thousands from Guatemala, the home country of many of today’s detained migrants.

International adoptions finally slowed down amid a pattern that replicated itself, country by country, of adoption booms, followed by ethical scandals, then the closure of that nation’s international adoption program. The scandals were as diverse as the countries supplying the children: coercion or baby buying in Vietnam; recruitment from poor, rural families in Ethiopia; even cases of outright kidnapping in Guatemala. The adoption programs of several frequent source countries were suspended over ethical concerns, in addition to other factors like the solidifying middle class in China, which provided stability and its own domestic adoption market, and political retaliation from Russia, which ended international adoptions to America after the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012. International adoptions today are down nearly 80 percent since 2004. Some adoption agencies went out of business, and one adoption lobbying group closed shop as well.

As the family separation crisis unfolded on the border, adoption reform advocates noticed that the agency facilitating the foster care of some immigrant children in Michigan, Bethany Christian Services, announced a waiver of its $550 international adoption application fee for the month of June in a since-deleted Facebook post. The dissonance struck the anxious reformers as absurd on its face.

“Why in hell would they be lining people up for international adoption right now?” asked Karen Smith Rotabi, author of “From Intercountry Adoption to Global Surrogacy: A Human Rights History and New Fertility Frontiers” and a professor of social work at United Arab Emirates University. “There’s no way that lining people up for international adoption is ethical, because there simply isn’t the flow of children.” (Bethany Christian Services declined to comment for this story, but has stated that the children will not be offered for adoption and that it will continue to try to reunite children with their families.)

Bethany, which is caring for some of the separated children under a grant with the Office of Refugee Resettlement to offer transitional foster care for unaccompanied minors, has repeatedly said that they oppose the family separation policy and are involved because they believe that the children will suffer less in a family setting than in an institution. In a statement on its website, Bethany argued, “Nobody benefits from creating more orphans.” But reform advocates familiar with numerous allegations regarding Bethany’s domestic adoption program, relating to coercive and misleading practices with birth parents — some of which I wrote about in my 2013 book, “The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking and the New Gospel of Adoption” — worried that the agency was finding in the separated children a new adoption supply.

Writing at Medium, Kimberly McKee, an Ohio State University professor and assistant director of the Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network, predicted, “Bethany Christian Services is laying the groundwork to turn these children into adoptable objects — transformed into disciplined bodies acceptable to white America.”

On June 20, protesters stood outside Bethany’s office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, holding signs that read, “No profit for kidnappers” and “End the contract,” a reference to their agreement with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Bethany’s director of refugee and foster care programs, Dona Abbott, responded by telling Fox17 West Michigan that “it would be hard to say we’re profiting off of them for adoption when we’ve not placed any of these children for adoption. And it’s so early on to say whether these children will be available for adoption at all.”

“If the kids aren’t reunified, what would the adoption process even look like?” asked Linh Song, a lecturer at the University of Michigan School of Social Work who described avid interest on adoptive parent listservs to take in the children. “Would it be international adoption? Would they have to petition for an orphan visa while being fostered in West Michigan?”

Given that the status of the children was so ambiguous, it remains unclear what policies would apply. Many worried that children being placed in foster care — not just with Bethany, but also other Office of Refugee Resettlement grantees around the country — could end up staying there so long that they would trigger a mechanism within the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act that was intended to keep children from languishing in foster care for years. The law provides that if a child has been in foster care for 15 out of 22 consecutive months, except in cases of relative foster care, child welfare agencies must stop working toward the goal of reunifying the child with their parents and instead, move to terminate parental rights and make the child available for adoption.

That law has become such a pivotal point in the child welfare process that parents whose children are taken into state custody are sometimes shown a video titled “The Clock Is Ticking,” emphasizing how quickly they could lose their parental rights if they don’t meet the requirements of their child protective services case plan. While in practice, many, many children do still remain in foster care for years — without either reunification or adoption — the law has also meant that parents who receive even short prison sentences for drug offenses may be left with far too little time to meet case plan objectives, such as making court or visitation appointments, and finding employment or housing.

The same principles could apply to the children separated at the border, legal analyst Danny Cevallos speculated last week on MSNBC. “The initial goal is always reunification and state law usually requires that,” said Cevallos. “But the parents can’t meet any of the requirements such as visitation if they are detained or removed from the country.” He added that, in cases in which foster parents develop an attachment to the child they’re caring for and seek to adopt, they often have a leg up on parents who have been separated from their children. Whereas foster parents are in the area and have access to the court system, he said, separated parents “may not even know anything about the process. And by the time they find out, it’s possible that parental rights have already been terminated by a court.” If court battles do ensue, he continued, the attachment that may have developed between foster parents and their wards could be taken into account by judges who are tasked with making decisions in the “best interest” of a child.

While there does exist an ICE directive that provides detained parents the right to be notified of any custody proceedings regarding their children, ICE isn’t required to notify a state child protective agency of a detained parent’s location so they could actually be informed. Nor does ICE have to transport parents to custody-related court hearings. Advocates worry that judges or caseworkers may wonder why parents went AWOL and aren’t showing up to fight for their child, and may eventually terminate their rights.

JaeRan Kim, a University of Washington professor who researches issues around child welfare and an adoptee herself, recalled that several years ago, as reports began to arise about family separations at the border, some adoption scholars began to worry about exactly this scenario. “At a conference I was at several years ago, someone said we shouldn’t be surprised to see this as another avenue for adoption.”

Amid massive public outrage, President Donald Trump backtracked on the family separation plan on June 20, indicating that he’ll instead seek to detain families together and ultimately overturn the federal settlement, known as “Flores,” that mandates that children not be held in detention facilities longer than 20 days. After initial wavering from the administration about whether the at least 2,300 already separated children would be “grandfathered in” to the order came news that either 522 or “several hundred” children had been reunited with their parents. Simultaneously, a New York Times report cited the Department of Homeland Security in explaining that “some children will remain separated from the adults they were traveling with if a family relationship cannot be established or if there are concerns about the children’s safety with those adults.” And on Wednesday, a week after Trump issued his executive order, the New Yorker reported that migrant families who have arrived at the border since the policy change are still being threatened with separation as a deterrent to applying for asylum, including through being shown videos of crying children being taken away from their parents and of adults dying in immigration detention facilities.

“What’s the legal status of the kids down the road?” asked Linh Song. “The longer they stay, will there be foster parents who will contest for custody and adopt? It would be one thing if the kids are going as unaccompanied minors or teens. But if you have an infant with you, I bet there are parents who won’t want to give that child up.” She said, “What’s the likelihood of an indigenous Guatemalan mom fighting a family in western Michigan with access to law firms and large, conservative Christian megachurches? It’s really daunting.”

At present, any potential efforts to adopt these children don’t have the support of some of the most influential voices in the adoption world. Jedd Medefind, president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans — an umbrella group that once led a movement of evangelicals advocating widespread international adoption as a religious calling, but now focuses more of its efforts on other child welfare issues — said that within his community, there was “concerned speculation” about the implications of the family separation crisis. “Because clearly if a child’s temporary separation from their family became permanent, that is a profound tragedy for all involved.”

Chuck Johnson, president and CEO of the National Coalition for Adoption, an adoption industry interest group, was even more forceful. “Not only do we not believe these children are candidates for adoption, but as we understand the policies, they would never be considered for adoption.” The coalition just wrapped up its annual conference in Washington, D.C., he said, and among the hundreds of child welfare professionals in attendance — including from groups that have contracts or grants with Health and Human Services — “I didn’t hear of anyone who said that they’d be willing to work with any family toward completing adoption processes for these children.”

“These children — the reason they’ve come here, the purpose, what’s happened to them — I think it would send the world a terrible signal for them to be adopted,” Johnson said.

Several former officials with Obama’s Health and Human Services Department said they believed that the threat of adoption doesn’t track with how they understand federal law to apply. At least as the Office of Refugee Resettlement functioned under Obama, they said, there was no provision for adoption for children in Health and Human Services custody. The forms of foster care offered by the Office of Refugee Resettlement — typically short-term care for young and special needs children, and longer-term care for teenagers who lack U.S. sponsors — are both distinct processes from state foster care and lack a mechanism for adoption. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, they believe, doesn’t apply.

State foster care is a child welfare program, which is fundamentally different from the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s mission to care for and reunite unaccompanied minors, according to Maria Cancian, the former deputy assistant secretary for policy at Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the refugee resettlement bureau. While the latter uses some foster home placements, in addition to a lot of congregate care, such as group homes, Cancian explained, “The mandate is different, the rules are different, the funding is different. It’s a really different program.”

“In [regular] foster care, the kids are typically in state custody because the state has determined that parents are doing an inadequate job keeping the kids safe,” said Cancian. “The mission of ORR is principally to reunite children with their parents, where the presumption is that parents are appropriate and adequate parents to provide for their children. It’s the circumstances that separated the kids, so it’s not like the parents have something to prove in the way that they usually do in a child welfare setting.”

On a practical level, Cancian added, state foster care systems are unlikely to want to take in this population, given that they’re chronically overburdened already, with many states already lacking enough foster care homes to accommodate the U.S. kids in their care.

Under the Obama administration, the former officials said, the Office of Refugee Resettlement focused on moving children quickly out of government custody into a ranked list of possible guardians: close relatives, who received the vast majority of children; followed by more distant relatives; then family friends. Longer-term stays in foster care were reserved typically for youth who didn’t have U.S. guardians to sponsor them. One former official, Marrianne McMullen, the former deputy assistant secretary for policy and external affairs at the Administration for Children and Families, said that although she didn’t have a complete overview of the agency’s work, she could only recall one adoption that had taken place out of Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, under unusual circumstances.

She said she couldn’t imagine these children being offered for adoption, “but a lot of things are happening that I couldn’t have imagined. Could things change? Could the Trump administration overstep? Well, they already have. They’re moving out of the realm of child welfare in compromising the welfare of children in order to enforce immigration law. The question is how far will they go in harming children for the sake of enforcing immigration law? It’s not alarmist at this point.” Given that the Office of Refugee Resettlement’s mission has now been further compromised by the demand that they share potential sponsors’ personal information and location with ICE — as a recent open letter from one resettlement office counselor details — McMullen added, “It could become such an anti-immigrant police state that [potential guardians] might not claim their own children. It’s worth playing out how bad this could be if it’s not stopped right now.”

“This administration is doing pretty horrific things,” said another former official, whose current employer doesn’t allow her to speak on the record. “So I can’t say that that’s not something they’ll consider going forward — especially considering they’re seemingly paternalistic, with Scott Lloyd’s [position] that he’s the dad figure and can tell a teenage girl she can’t have an abortion” — a reference to the Office of Refugee Resettlement director’s maneuvering to prevent minors in custody from terminating pregnancies. “It makes sense that they might think that it makes more sense for kids to be adopted by good Christian families in the U.S., instead of deported parents.”

The official added, “I want to be careful to say that could happen.”

What such a potential change in policy would require is unclear, the officials agreed. “This was never something that was considered,” said the former official. “It goes against the best interests of a kid if the parents did nothing wrong other than being separated.” But the 2012 case of Encarnacion Bail Romero, a Guatemalan mother who was arrested on immigration charges while working at a Missouri chicken processing plant, demonstrates that it can happen, as a Missouri judge ruled that the very fact of Bail Romero’s illegal immigration made her unfit, since “illegally smuggling herself into the country is not a lifestyle that can provide any stability for the child.”

However, Bail Romero’s case was also distinct in an important way: She was already living in the U.S. when she was taken into ICE custody and her child ultimately adopted. And that, said Cancian, is likely the more immediate threat when it comes to migrants’ children being unethically adopted.

“I have concerns about everything about this program right now, because of the pressure it’s under,” said Cancian. When it comes to fears of separated children being adopted, she said, “I would worry about children whose parents have been deported who are in many cases U.S. citizen children.” In those cases — where a U.S. citizen child has been living here with her undocumented parents — deportation can very well mean the transfer of the child to state foster care, thereby triggering the Adoption and Safe Families Act timer for how long a parent has to regain custody before their rights are terminated. As the Associated Press noted, a 2017 paper found that, partly due to immigration enforcement, the percentage of Hispanic children in state foster care systems rose by 15 to 21 percent between 2001 and 2015.

Late Tuesday, in response to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal court in California issued a nationwide injunction to stop the Trump administration from separating families and ordered that all children be reunited with their parents within 30 days. Children younger than 5, the judge ruled, had to be reunited within 14 days. One of the two cases the ACLU brought was on behalf of the Brazilian mother who’d been threatened with adoption if she didn’t behave. Whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeals the decision, sparking a prolonged court battle, or how the order would be enforced, remain significant unanswered questions, especially as the administration has already conceded that it will have trouble meeting the judge’s deadlines. But even if the more than 2,000 currently separated children are returned to their parents within a month, for undocumented parents with U.S. citizen children, that threat — or, in some cases, anxious choice — remains.

“If a parent wanted their child back and couldn’t find them, and the kid is put in an adoption, that’s clearly an inappropriate adoption,” said Cancian. “The parent and child want to be together and because we failed to put them in contact, they’re not together. That’s an easy one. But what happens if a parent is deported to El Salvador and thinks their kid is going to be killed in gang violence and decides it’s better for the child to stay in the U.S., and that child is adopted by an American family? How do we think about that?”

“If I were a mother in El Salvador and I had to make that choice, it would really break my heart,” she said.

Lauren Heidbrink, an anthropologist at California State University Long Beach and author of “Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State: Care and Contested Interests,” is one of the few scholars who has tracked the long-term trajectories of young people who have been in Office of Refugee Resettlement custody, conducting research within the office’s facilities from 2006 to 2010. For the last five years, she followed 50 young people who were deported to Mexico or Guatemala after being detained in the U.S. Heidbrink says that adoptions of unaccompanied minors do sometimes take place — not directly from Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities, but rather after they’ve been reclassified as an unaccompanied refugee minor, rather than an unaccompanied alien minor. (The office of Refugee Resettlement did not respond to a request for comment.) In order for that to happen, migrant children must receive legal status of some sort: asylum, a visa for victims of crime or trafficking, or being recognized as a special immigrant juvenile  if they’re found to have been abused, neglected, or abandoned.

Cases where children receive the special status deserve particular attention, Heidbrink added, because, unlike asylum applications, crime, or trafficking visas, special immigrant juvenile status is determined by a probate or family court judge seeking to determine the best interests of the child. In those court proceedings, Heidbrink said, “what’s presented as abuse, abandonment, or neglect can instead be a parent who was deported or detained.”

While Heidbrink does believe that the federal government has the information necessary to reunite children and parents, she said a mechanism for communication between Health and Human Services’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, and the Department of Homeland Security, which detains the adults, is often lacking. “If it doesn’t happen, and they’re mired in bureaucracy and lack of communication, what I’ve seen is the parents are deported, they try to find their child in the U.S. foster care system, whether federal or domestic, and it’s really difficult to meaningfully participate in those custody proceedings,” Heidbrink said. “ORR may say we don’t have unaccompanied children being adopted from ORR facilities and that the forced separations we’ve been seeing at the border won’t lead to adoption. But when you follow young children for much longer, you see the different trajectories they follow, some of which end in adoption.”

Even in these instances or potential cases in which immigrant children and their parents might want them to be adopted — as a means of securing U.S. citizenship or keeping the child safe — the National Council for Adoption’s Chuck Johnson notes that the laws governing adoptees’ citizenship have been so restrictively written that they apply only to children who have entered the country for the express purpose of international adoption. It would be unlikely in these cases, he said, that citizenship would then attach to those children.

That recalls a key fight around the time of the Haiti adoption airlifts, when Americans clamored to adopt Haitian children by the thousands, even as Haitian adults were being told — at the U.S. Embassy, through a U.S. Air Force plane broadcasting messages in Creole, and in the form of a fleet of Coast Guard ships patrolling the waters outside Port-au-Prince — not to attempt to flee themselves. To facilitate those adoptions, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb., sponsored the Help HAITI Act, a bill that would have ensured that evacuated Haitian children who were adopted by Americans receive U.S. citizenship — something that, as many adult adoptees at risk of deportation know, is not guaranteed. The bill almost didn’t pass when rumors flew that Democrats were considering tying it to Obama’s DREAM Act, thereby also creating a path to legal residency for undocumented children whose biological parents had brought them into the country. At the time, the website Rightwing News responded with outrage: “Think of it … if Republicans vote against the DREAM Act,” a post on the site said, “they would also be voting AGAINST the orphans.”

Then, as now, it was a potent illustration of the duality at the heart of discussions of immigration and adoption: of which sorts of people — adults or children — and even which sorts of children — infants or teenagers, those who are brought across the border by white adoptive parents or their brown biological ones — are viewed as worthy of help.

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.

 

Michael Cohen hints at flipping and says ‘first loyalty’ is to family – not Trump

Fixer who once said he would ‘take a bullet’ for Trump says: ‘I will not be a punching bag as part of anyone’s defense strategy’

July 2, 2018

by Martin Pengelly in New York

The Guardian

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, will put “family and country first” as investigations continue into his work for the president, including a payment to an adult film star who claims to have had an affair with Trump.

Cohen’s remarks, in an off-camera interview with ABC’s Good Morning America, will intensify speculation that he may be prepared to “flip” and co-operate with both prosecutors in New York and investigators looking into Russian election interference and alleged collusion between Trump aides and Moscow.

Cohen has frequently been aggressive towards reporters working on stories about Trump. He said last September he was “the guy who would take a bullet for the president” and would “never walk away”

But speaking to George Stephanopoulos in the ABC interview, which was conducted on Saturday at a hotel in New York City, he said: “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.”

In answer to the question of whether he expected Trump to turn on him, Cohen said: “I will not be a punching bag as part of anyone’s defense strategy. I am not a villain of this story, and I will not allow others to try to depict me that way.”

Cohen’s home and offices were raided by FBI agents in April, after a referral from Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating matters related to Russia.

Cohen has not been charged with any crime. He told ABC: “Once I understand what charges might be filed against me, if any at all, I will defer to my new counsel, Guy Petrillo, for guidance.”

Petrillo is a former federal prosecutor who was once head of the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan.

In April, Trump tweeted that though “most people will flip if the government lets them out of trouble, even if it means lying or making up stories”, he did not “see Michael doing that”. He also called Cohen a “fine person with a wonderful family”.

Trump denies collusion with Russia. He has denied Stormy Daniels’ claims of an affair. But in May his current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, admitted that Trump reimbursed Cohen for a payment of $130,000 which Daniels claims was made shortly before the 2016 election in order to keep her quiet. Filings by Trump showed payments of $250,000 to Cohen in 2017.

Cohen did not discuss the Daniels payment with ABC. “I want to answer,” he said. “One day I will answer. But for now, I can’t comment further on advice of my counsel.”

Of his work for Trump, he said: “As an attorney and as an employee, I tried to make good faith judgments in the past. I also acknowledge that I am not perfect. I would prefer not to be in this situation at all, obviously.

“I want to regain my name and my reputation and my life back.”

Regarding Trump’s repeated claim that the Mueller investigation is a “witch-hunt”, Cohen said: “I don’t like the term witch hunt. As an American, I repudiate Russia’s or any other foreign government’s attempt to interfere or meddle in our democratic process, and I would call on all Americans to do the same.”

Trump last week tweeted that Russia “continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” He will meet Vladimir Putin in Helsinki later this month. He told reporters on Friday he would press the Russian president about election interference.

Cohen said he respected the “unanimous conclusions” of “our nation’s intelligence agencies” that Russia did interfere and added: “Simply accepting the denial of Mr Putin is unsustainable.”

Cohen told ABC he thought Mueller would not find evidence he colluded with Russians himself.

An infamous meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, then campaign chair Paul Manafort and a group of Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton was, he said, “a mistake” and “an example of poor judgment”.

Asked if he thought Donald Trump had known of that meeting in advance, Cohen said he could not comment, under the advice of his counsel.

Another former Trump confidante, former White House strategist Steve Bannon, famously called the Trump Tower meeting “treasonous” and said there was “zero” chance Donald Trump Jr would not have introduced the Russians involved to his father.

Trump’s knowledge of the meeting and role in drafting a misleading statement about the meeting is one instance under investigation by Mueller as he seeks to determine if the president sought to obstruct justice.

Manafort is one of four former Trump aides to have been indicted by Mueller. He denies financial charges against him and is currently in jail, over alleged witness tampering, while awaiting trial. Manafort’s deputy Rick Gates, former foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos and former national security adviser Michael Flynn are all co-operating with investigators.

In his ABC interview, Cohen concluded: “I want to regain my name and my reputation and my life back.”

 

Trump Timeline

July 2, 2018

By Christian Jürs

• President Trump was jobbed into his office with the full cooperation of Russian intelligence.
• They own Wikileaks entirely and released the damning, and authentic, “Podesta papers” concurrent with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This did damage to her campaign and was a major contributory factor to her narrow defeat and Trump’s election.
• Trump is not an honest man by any stretch of imagination.
• Trump has constantly engaged in bribing and manipulations and does this through second parties such as Cohen his former lawyer or Manafort, his campaign manager during the election.
• Trump and his entourage have made a number of trips to Russia (I have a listing of all of these along with Russian personages he was in contact with), seeking financing and permission to build luxury hotels in that country
• Trump’s actions, as President, are deliberate efforts to alienate both the putative allies of the US such as Germany, France, Canada and, to a lesser degree, Mexico.
• Trump has deliberately launched pointless, and destructive, attacks against Mexican and Muslim immigrants, as well as Canadian and German imports. All this has done is to create a highly negative image of his persona primarily and secondarily, the global image of the United States.
• Trump’s tariffs, and threats of tariffs, have engendered counter-tariffs that will, when implemented, create serious economic problems for American businessmen and, eventually, the public.
• Trump’s foolish support of the Israeli far right has done, and is doing, serious damage to the US image in the Middle East. It should be noted that Russian influence in the Shiite areas of the Middle East, is growing. Also note that Iran, and parts of Iraq, both Shiite, have extensive oil reserves and that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni state, once America’s primary source of badly-need oil, is running dry.
• Ergo, the Middle East areas where Russia is having growing influence have oil and if Russia sets itself up as major oil merchandizing source, this will give them tremendous economic leverage vis a vis the United States which is the world’s largest consumer of oil and its by products.
• By alienating America’s allies and disrupting that country’s social structure, Trump benefits only Russia and its interests.
• The concept of Trump taking bribes from the Russians (or the PRC) is completely understandable if one applies the concept of Occam’s Razor to the tumult and disruption he is deliberately causing both domestically and in foreign areas.
• If he is caught at this, and I understand the FBI was deeply interested in his Russian connections long before he ran for President, either we will have to deal with another Dallas or Trump will suffer a fatal heart attack.Vice-President  Pence, a lunatic Christian fanatic, would then have to be told to mind his manners or suffer similar terminal problems.
• Trump is aware of the FBI investigation, aware of what they can find, and probably have already uncovered, so he fired the head of the FBI and even now, according to a very reliable source, is determined to replace the FBI with the cooperative CIA (their former head, Pompeo, is now Secretary of State) as the sole  foreign and domestic  intelligence agency. He, and his handlers, want to nip any FBI revelations in the bud so that Trump can continue on his course of castrating the United States as a global power
• I note in passing that the US is withdrawing its over 20,000 troops from South Korea. Que bono? In the end, Russia and China.

 

Donald Trump has pursued business deals in Russia since 1987, and has sometimes traveled there to explore potential business opportunities. In 1996, Trump trademark applications were submitted for potential Russian real estate development deals. Mr.Trump’s partners and children have repeatedly visited Moscow, connecting with developers and government officials to explore joint venture opportunities. Mr.Trump was never able to successfully conclude any real estate deals in Russia. However, individual Russians have invested heavily in Trump properties, and following Mr.Trump’s bankruptcies in the 1990s he borrowed money from Russian sources. In 2008 his son Donald Trump Jr. said that Russia was an important source of money for the Trump businesses.

In 1996 Mr.Trump partnered with Liggett-Ducat, a small company, and planned to build an upscale residential development on a Liggett-Ducat property in Moscow. Trump commissioned New York architect Ted Liebman, who did the sketches.

In 1987 Mr.Trump visited Russia to investigate developing a hotel

In Russia, Mr.Trump promoted the proposal and acclaimed the Russian economic market. At a news conference reported by The Moscow Times, Mr.Trump said he hadn’t been “as impressed with the potential of a city as I have been with Moscow” in contrast to other cities had visited “all over the world.

By this time, Mr.Trump made known his desire to build in Moscow to government officials for almost ten years ranging from the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev (they first met in Washington in 1987) to the military figure Alexander Lebed.

Moscow’s mayor, Yuri M. Luzhkov, showed Trump plans for a very large shopping mall to be located underground in the vicinity of the Kremlin. The mayor complimented Mr.Trump’s suggestion that this mall should have access to the Moscow Metro, and it was eventually connected to the Okhotny Ryad station. Although the 1996 residential development did not happen, Mr.Trump was by this time well known in Russia.

Between 2000–2010, Mr.Trump entered into a partnership with a development company headquartered in New York represented by a Russian immigrant, Felix Sater. During this period, they partnered for an assortment of deals that included building Trump towers internationally and Russia was included. For example, in 2005 Slater acted as an agent for building a Trump tower alongside Moscow River with letters of intent in hand and “square footage was being analyzed.”

In 2006, Mr.Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka stayed in the Hotel National, Moscow for several days, across from the Kremlin, to interview prospective partners, with the intention of formulating real estate development projects.

Sater had also traveled to Moscow with Mr. Trump, his wife Ivanka and son Donald Jr.

Mr. Trump was associated with Tevfik Arif, formerly a Soviet commerce official and founder of a development company called the Bayrock Group, of which Sater was also a partner.

Bayrock searched for deals in Russia while Trump Towers company were attempting to further expand in the United States. Mr. Sater said, “We looked at some very, very large properties in Russia,” on the scale of “…a large Vegas high-rise.”

In 2007, Bayrock organized a potential deal in Moscow between Trump International Hotel and Russian investors

During 2006–2008 Mr.Trump’s company applied for a number of trademarks in Russia with the goal of real estate developments. These trademark applications include: Trump, Trump Tower, Trump International Hotel and Tower, and Trump Home.

In 2008, Mr. Trump spoke at a Manhattan real estate conference, stating that he he really prefered Moscow over all cities in the world and that within 18 months he had been in Russia a half-dozen times.

Mr.Trump had received large and undisclosed payments over 10 years from Russians for hotel rooms, rounds of golf, or Trump-licensed products such as wine, ties, or mattresses, which would not have been identified as coming from Russian sources in the tax returns

A secret KGB memo under date of February 1, 1984 concerned the necessity of making an expanded use of the facilities of cooperating foreign intelligence services—for example, Czechoslovakian or East German intelligence networks.

The most revealing section concerned kompromat.

The document specifically requested any compromising information about Donald Trump, including illegal acts in financial and commercial affairs, intrigues, speculation, bribes, graft … and exploitation of his position to enrich himself. Plus any other information that would compromise the subject (Trump) to his country’s authorities and the general public. Naturally the information could be used to cause him serious problems in his country if exposed.

Finally, the report mentioned that his attitude towards women was also of interest. The point of interest would be if he was the habit of having affairs with women.

Mr. Trumps’ first trip to Moscow came after he found himself seated next to the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin in 1986. His original position was Soviet ambassador to the U.N. Dubinin’s mission as ambassador was to make contact with America’s business elite.

There was a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder. Mr. Trump was invited to meet the Ambassador. Ambassador Dubinin spoke fluent English and during the course of the luncheon Trump spoke at length with the Ambassador who proposed that Trump build a large luxury hotel, directly across from the Kremlin, in association with the Soviet government.

Mr.Trump at once became interested in the project and expressed his willingness to cooperate on such a project.

By January 1987, Mr.Trump had become a “prominent person” status and therefore Ambassador Dubinin deemed Mr.Trump interesting enough to arrange his trip to Moscow. U.S.-based Soviet diplomat, Vitaly Churkin—the future U.N. ambassador—was of assistance in this project.

Mr. Trump first visited the Soviet Union on July 4, 1987.

Mr. Trump flew to Moscow for the first time, together with his wife Ivana and Lisa Calandra, Ivana’s Italian-American assistant. Ambassador Dubinin’s invitation to Trump to visit Moscow was a standard operation exercise by the KGB.

The Trump trip was orchestrated by the Intourist Agency which was under the control of the KGB. Its duty was to investigate and monitor all foreigners coming into the Soviet Union.

The Trumps were treated with great courtesy by Soviet officials and they were housed in Lenin’s suite at the National Hotel, at the bottom of Tverskaya Street, near Red Square.

The hotel was connected to the Intourist complex next door and was under KGB control.

The Lenin suite had been fixed for electronic surveillance.

In November of 2013, the Miss Universe pageant was held iin Moscow

It was there that  Mr. Trump — then the pageant’s owner — spent several days socializing with Russia’s business and political elite and becoming acquainted with a wealthy developer whose connections his son would later seek to capitalize on. The developer, Aras Agalarov, offered to pass on information about potential rival Mrs. Clinton from Russia’s top prosecutor to help a projected Trump presidential campaign.

The contest was held at Crocus City Hall, a venue owned by Agalarov. The event would be a family affair: Agalarov’s son, a pop singer named Emin, performed on stage and his wife was a judge.

Mr.Trump remained on good and productive terms with the Agalarov family, at one point, appearing in a music video with Emin and sending him a videotaped greeting on his 35th birthday.

During his trip to Moscow on November 9-11, 2013 for the Miss Universe pageant, Mr.Trump surrounded himself with business people and those necessary to sign a deal which would bring a Trump Tower project to Moscow. These were: Aras Agalarov, Emin Agalarov,Yulya (Yulia) Alferova,Herman Gref, Artem Klyushin, Vladimir Kozhin, Chuck LaBella, Rotem Rosen, Phil Ruffin, Alex Sapir, Keith Schiller, Roustam Tariko and Bob Van Ronkel.

At first, President Putin, who had planned on meeting Mr.Trump at the pageant, sent numerous individuals tied to the Russian construction sector to the event to discuss potential lucrative building plans and to ascertain Mr. Trump’s attitudes.

President Putin to establish a distance, stated he was unable to attend the pagent because of a last-minute visit from the King of the Netherlands.

Previous to this meeting, there had been no positive positions on the possibility that Mr. Trump, with Russian assistance and financing, might construct a luxury hotel in Moscow. Trump made several tweets thanking individuals in Moscow and bragging about his future plans. Then on November 12th, 2013 Trump posted a link to the Moscow Times, remarking that his organization was working on building a luxury hotel in Moscow “@AgalarovAras I had a great weekend with you and your family. You have done a FANTASTIC job. TRUMP TOWER-MOSCOW is next. EMIN was WOW!”

This hotel deal was finalized during Trump’s weekend stay in Moscow for his Miss Universe pageant. At the Four Seasons Hotel at Ulitsa Okhotnyy Ryad, 2, a private meeting was held between Mr. Trump and President Putin. As the President is fluent in English, no other person was present. President Putin praised the business abilities of Mr. Trump and said that he would be a “refreshing person” as President of the United States. President Putin said that his people would be pleased to support Mr. Trump and that if this support was deemed material in achieving a victory, President Putin had one request to make of Mr. Trump. President Putin said his best wish was to establish “friendly and cooperative attitudes” by both parties, firmer business contacts and an abandonment of the policy of threats to the Russian Republic. President Putin stressed that certain very right-wing groups in America had been constantly agitating against him and against the Russian Republic and he hoped that Mr. Trump, if elected, could ignore these few people and work with, not against the Russian Republic. Mr. Trump repeatedly assured the President that he would be most eager to do just that and he agreed to work with various people in the United States who were friendly towards, and had connections with, the Russian Republic.

This most important conversation was recorded as a form of kompromat. And it is certain that a direct quid pro quo took place in November of 2013 between President Putin and Mr. Trump.

On June 16, 2015, Mr. Trump announced his candidacy for President

 

Exclusive: Largest U.S. business group attacks Trump on tariffs

July 2, 2018

by Ginger Gibson

Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s largest business group and customarily a close ally of President Donald Trump’s Republican Party, is launching a campaign on Monday to oppose Trump’s trade tariff policies.

With some of America’s tightest trading partners imposing retaliatory measures, Trump’s approach to tariffs has unsettled financial markets and strained relations between the White House and the Chamber.

The new campaign, detailed first to Reuters, is an aggressive effort by the business lobbying giant. Using a state-by-state analysis, it argues that Trump is risking a global trade war that will hit the wallets of U.S. consumers.

“The administration is threatening to undermine the economic progress it worked so hard to achieve,” said Chamber President Tom Donohue in a statement to Reuters. “We should seek free and fair trade, but this is just not the way to do it.”

The Chamber, which has 3 million members, historically has worked closely with Republican presidents and praised Trump for signing business tax cuts in December. But mounting trade tensions have opened a rift with the president.

Trump has implemented billions of dollars in tariffs targeted at China, Canada, Mexico and the European Union, saying such moves are needed to offset trade imbalances.

Nations have begun retaliating. On Friday, Canada struck back at U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs, vowing to impose punitive measures on $12.6 billion worth of American goods until Washington relents.

China is expected to impose a new 25-percent tax on soybeans in July. Mexico is adding duties to pork imports. The EU has targeted $3.2 billion in American goods exported to the 28-member bloc, including bourbon and Harley Davidson (HOG.N) motorcycles.

Pushing back on Trump, the Chamber based a state-by-state analysis on data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and government agencies in China, the EU, Mexico, and Canada.

Trump has previously been persuaded to back off of trade threats with the argument that states that backed him in the 2016 presidential campaign will be hard-hit.

For example, the Chamber said Texas could see $3.9 billion worth of exports targeted by retaliatory tariffs; Tennessee, $1.4 billion; and South Carolina, $3 billion.

Reporting by Ginger Gibson; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and David Gregorio

 

EU says US risks $294 billion hit over auto tariffs

The trade conflict between the US and the EU escalates: After Trump’s threat to slap higher duties on auto imports from the bloc, the EU warns it could sanction US exports worth billions.

July 2, 2018

by Benjamin Bathke (with Reuters)

DW

The European Union warned on Monday that up to $294 billion (€252 billion) worth of US exports could become the target of countermeasures if President Donald Trump remained serious about his threat to impose a 20-percent tariff on cars imported from the EU.

In a letter to US authorities, the European Commission, which handles trade policy for the bloc’s 28 members, said “up to $294 billion of US exports … could be subject to countermeasures across sectors of the US economy.”

This was the equivalent to 19 percent of US total exports in 2017, it added.

The EU executive underlined that European car companies were important contributors to the US economy and “well established” there. “In 2017, US-based EU companies produced close to 2.9 million automobiles, which accounted for 26 percent of total US production,” it said.

Pointing to sites in South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee — southern US states known for their unwavering support for Trump — the EU said its companies supported 120,000 direct and indirect US jobs in plants across the country.

Trump’s threat was the latest salvo in an escalating trade spat that saw the European Union slap duties on US-made jeans and Harley Davidson motorcycles in a tit-for-tat response to US tariffs on European steel and aluminium exports. The US president has also singled out the Europeans as a problem as great to the US on trade as China. Auto imports are a particular thorn in his side.

Slovakia to feel most pain

The specter of US tariffs that sent shares in Fiat Chrysler, Daimler and BMW tumbling on European stock exchanges also spooked Slovakia’s automotive sector. As the world’s largest per capita car producer, Slovakia stands to be hit hardest if US President Donald Trump makes good on his threat, analysts say.

It boasts Germany’s Volkswagen — which is Slovakia’s biggest private-sector employer — France’s PSA and South Korean Kia along with more than 300 automotive supply companies. All told, they generate over 300,000 jobs in the eurozone country of 5.4 million inhabitants.

As the only Slovakia-based carmaker that exports directly to the US, Volkswagen — and its many local suppliers — will suffer the most should US tariffs be slapped on the high-end Touareg, Audi Q7 and Porsche Cayenne models produced at its Bratislava plant.

BMW appeals against car tariffs

In a letter to US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, German car manufacturer BMW has urged the US not to introduce tariffs on foreign cars.

“The domestic manufacture of automobiles has no apparent correlation with US national security,” the company wrote in a statement, submitted as part of an US Department of Commerce investigation into whether car imports pose a threat to the country’s security.

Ross claimed that Trump had far-reaching, “unilateral” power to impose and adjust tariffs and quotas by invoking a rarely used 1962 law authorizing presidential action against imports that undermine national security.

BMW said it “appears that the purpose of threatening to impose these duties is to achieve certain economic objectives, under the theory that enhancing US economic competitiveness will enhance US national security.”

BMW’s largest manufacturing base in the world is in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where SUVs from the company’s X line are built. With production capacity currently being expanded to 450,000 cars, the Spartanburg factory is responsible for around 36,000 jobs, including subcontractors.

The manufacturer says that in 2017 it exported 272,000 cars from the US and imported around 248,000 cars.

Juncker to ‘dedramatize relations’

Last week, the European Commission announced that its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, would travel to Washington at the end of July to discuss EU-US trade tensions with US President Donald Trump.

Speaking after a two-day EU summit, Juncker said “we should dedramatize these relations. We need these relations, the US needs these relations. I’m not sure that we will find an agreement between the US and the EU, but we’ll try.”

Among other things, the aim of the meeting was to discuss tariffs on the automotive sector, a spokesperson said, with Trump mulling higher tariffs on EU vehicle imports.

 

Afghanistan Wars: Drugs for Fun and Profit

July 2, 2018

by Christian Jürs

It ought to be recognized that part of the so-called Afghan opium pipeline runs through the United Arab Emirates on its way to Kosovo where it is refined into heroin and shipped up into Europe.

Opium crops located in Afghanistan, over 95% of the world’s opium production, is protected by US CIA people and elements of the American military who have made themselves responsible for the bulk of the illegal heroin markets worldwide.

There is a deliberate effort to convince the bulk of the public that opium in Afghanistan  is a Taliban operation but in fact it is not

An ‘Afghanistan Opium Survey’ details the ongoing and steady rise of Afghan opium production. In stated: “In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4800 tons in 2016.”

In 2011 a US MI report had stated, very clearly, that US military convoys operating from Pakistani ports were specifically used to ship both raw opium and refined heroin out of that country and to South American ports.

And then there are the origins, and development of the CIA’s modus operandi.

In what is called the Golden Triangle area, during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos — complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the set-up of nefarious Air America to export the raw gum opium by CIA-owned aircraft, to Columbia where it was, and is, being refined into heroin.

During its involvement with the war in SEA, the CIA used the Hmong groups to counter the activities of the Pathet Lao groups. The Hmongs used the profits from their opium productions to live on. The CIA protected the opium trade and very soon, realizing the profits to be made from it, expanded their control over the opium-growing business.  The Hmong were very important to CIA operations and the CIA was very concerned with their well-being. The CIA began to export raw opium from the north and east of the Plain of Jars to Long Tieng and later, during the height of the Vietnam wars, began to take a great interest in the very large and successful Afghanistani opium fields.

A Pakistani intelligence report based on Pashtun sources, most specifically indicates that the controlling factor in the opium production is not Muslim but American.

According to Pakistani government intelligence, the CIA is heavily involved with al-Quaeda and IS and introduced them into Afghanistan for guerrilla actions so as to be able to convince Washington to increase the number of American troops into that country to protect the highly profitable opium fields.

If one looks at a map showing the locations of the known opium fields in Afghanistan and then looks at another map showing US military units in place, the two are nearly identical.

Russian intelligence is well aware that the US CIA and the Pentagon are secretly supporting the Saudi-raised Sunni IS, a branch of which is now very active in Afghanistan.

It is very well known that a major portion of Afghanistani gum opium is taken over by CIA people and most of it is shipped to Columbia.

A portion of this opium goes to Kosovo where it is also refined and then shipped up through Germany to Russia. This annoys the Russians who have made a strong effort to put a halt to something that killed over 50,000 Russians last year from heroin overdoses.

Here we have an interesting situation.

Russia, with good reason, objects to having heroin smuggled into her country and attempts to put a stop to it.

The United States, a country that, via its agencies, is heavily involved in the international drug trade, objects to this attitude.

Therefore, in addition to all Russia’s oil and gas which America badly needs, the US has an excellent motive for making Russia a handy enemy.

Enemies are necessary to stimulate public support for more profitable (to some at least) small wars.

 

Trujillo Assassination

The assassination of the Dominican Republic’s Rafael L. Trujillo was carried out with assistance from the US Central Intelligence Agency. Arms for the May 30, 1961. slaying of the 69-year-old dictator on a lonely stretch of highway near his capital were smuggled by the CIA into the country at the request of the assassins, according to highly qualified sources I interviewed in Santo Domingo shortly after the collapse of the Trujillo rule.

The arms had to come from the outside, I was told, because of the close scrutiny imposed by Trujillo on the removal of guns from military bases. These controls kept the conspirators from obtaining their own weapons without awakening suspicion, despite the involvement in the plot of the Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, Gen. Jose Rene Roman Fernandez, and other leading military officers.

The CIA began shipping arms to the Dominican Republic in late 1960, following a series of talks between US Consul Henry Dearborn, Chief Political Officer John Barfield of the US Consulate, and Luis Amiama Tio, who had extensive banana and cattle holdings and had been mayor of Santo Domingo. Also involved in the plot was Antonio Imbert who had been Governor of Puerto Plata province. Both Amiama and Imbert are tough guys and ambitious. Both were made four-star generals by the provisional council that took over after Trujillo’s death. However, when leading army officers balked at their elevation to the highest military rank, Amiama and Imbert said the honor bestowed upon them was too great and modestly demoted themselves to brigadier generals.

1960 was a bad year for the Dominican Republic. The economy was in the dumps. The country was in disgrace internationally as a result of Trujillo’s backing of a plot against the life of Venezuelan President Romulo Betancourt. In June, a car full of explosives blew up alongside Betancourt’s automobile during a Caracas Armed Forces Day procession, wounding the President and killing two others. A Venezuelan naval officer later admitted that the elaborate bomb was prepared in the Dominican Republic, presumably as an act of retaliation against Venezuela for having asked the OAS in February 1960, to censure Trujillo for “flagrant violations of human rights.”

In August that same year, the Organization of American States did censure the Dominican Republic, and the US and several Latin American nations thereupon suspended diplomatic relations with the Trujillo regime, though Washington kept a consulate in Ciudad Trujillo to protect its commercial interests.

This was one of the stormiest periods of Trujillo’s 31-year rule. On June 14, 1959, the Dominican Republic’s southern coast had been invaded by Cuba-based Dominican exiles. They were wiped out, but then Trujillo uncovered a plot to kill him, only 24 hours before it was to be carried out on January 21, 1960. Mass purges, arrests and some killings followed. Tensions within the regime mounted rapidly, as did its Byzantine-style ruler’s greed. Assuming the presidency of the Dominican Central Bank, the dictator forced exporters, as part of an “austerity” program, to deposit with the bank half of their dollar earnings, which soon found their way into Trujillo accounts abroad.

During this time, Trujillo was completing an intensive drive, begun in the mid-1950s with the purchase of the Haina complex of sugar mills and lands in the southern part of the Republic, to expand sugar production and appropriate more and more of it to himself. He went so far as to deprive thousands of peasant families of their squatters’ settlements, forcing them to sell their cattle and work as sugar peons. It had been hoped, of course, that the Dominican Republic would get a generous share of the US sugar quota previously allotted to Cuba. An intensive Washington lobbying campaign was carried on to this end, largely through the Dominican Consul-General in Washington, Marco A. Pena. In the late summer of 1960, Congress did raise the Dominican allotment from 27,000 to 250,000 tons, but President Eisenhower slapped a punitive excise tax on it in September, after the OAS ministerial conference voted economic sanctions against the Trujillo regime and a break of diplomatic relations.

As Trujillo’s political and financial problems deepened, talks continued between Dearborn, Barfield and leaders of the anti-Trujillo conspiracy. Toward the end of 1960, contact was established between Amiama and a CIA agent who, according to Arturo R. Espaillat, former head of Trujillo’s Military Intelligence Service, was named Plato Cox. Espaillat made this statement in a press conference in Ottawa in 1962; his word alone cannot, of course, be accepted as conclusive proof. But whatever the name of the agent, the smuggling of firearms into the Republic for the assassination began.

Two American intelligence officers, Lt. Col Bevan G. Cass, Lt Cmdr F. Norris, NSG, asst naval attache to Dominican Republic were responsible for the weaponry used in the assassination according to a report by Lt. Cmdr. Norris USN ret.

The key link between the assassins and the CIA in the arms shipments was a long-time American civilian resident of Ciudad Trujillo, Lorenzo Perry, otherwise known as “Wimpy,” who operated a supermarket in a fashionable neighborhood where Trujillo also lived. “Wimpy” was put under brief arrest after the killing but was later allowed to leave the country.

The weapons were imported in small parts, to be assembled later by the plotters, among the routine grocery shipments for the supermarket arriving regularly in the capital’s port. The gun-parts entered the Republic in specially marked food cans, which were later turned over to the conspirators.

Plans for the intended assassination were worked out during the same period in which the abortive assault on Cuba was being prepared. However, when the CIA-organized April 17, 1961 invasion at the Bay of Pigs failed and world attention was focused on Washington’s complicity in that operation, a postponement of the attempt on Trujillo’s life was ordered because of the embarrassment another such failure might cause the United States. But the order to hold up came too late. According to what I was told in the Dominican Republic, the needed weapons were already in the hands of the conspirators, who refused appeals by Dearborn and Barfield to delay the assassination. They insisted on moving at the first opportunity. This came on May 30, when Trujillo and his chauffeur drove out into the country in an unescorted 1959 Chevrolet for a rendezvous at a San Cristobal estate, La Fundacion, with Trujillo’s 20-year-old mistress, Mona Sanchez.

It was Trujillo’s custom to call on his 94-year-old mother, Julia Molina. before going on to La Fundacion. His departure for San Cristobal from his mother’s home was signaled to the killers by Sen. Modesto Diaz, a neighbor of Julia Molina and brother of Brig.Gen. Juan Tomas Diaz, one of the principal gunmen in the plot. It is said that General Diaz was bitter toward Trujillo because of his forced, premature retirement from the army in 1960 on the dictator’s orders.

The plan was to finish off Trujillo, seize control, form a provisional government to be recognized by the US, and hold the elections which Trujillo had promised for May 1962. The assassins intended to be candidates.

The scheme, however, was frustrated soon after the murder when the assassins could not locate Gen. Roman Fernandez, who had been ordered to the San Isidro Air Force Base that afternoon by Trujillo and told to stay there until some administrative irregularities were corrected. Since he was thus kept 10 miles outside Ciudad Trujillo until next morning, Roman was not able to carry out the assignment he had been given. General Roman was to have summoned the entire Trujillo clan to La Fortaleza de Ozama in the capital, informed them of Trujillo’s death and had them killed on the spot.

Around 10:30 pm on May 30, two carloads of gunmen fired 27 shots into the dictator’s body and pummelled it mercilessly on the main highway between the capital and the Agricultural Fair Grounds, where Trujillo annually received tributes for his prize cattle. Having dumped the riddled corpse into the trunk of one of the attack cars, the assassins went to the house of Roman, only to learn there he was not in the capital. They then scattered. In succeeding days all the known assassins, including Roman, were rounded up and slain either at once or shortly before the mass departure of the Trujillo family in November 1961. The two surviving exceptions were Imbert and Amiama.

It can be reported on excellent authority that close associates of the slain dictator knew of the US role within a few days following the killing. Almost immediately upon his May 31 return from Paris to assume command of the Dominican armed forces, Lt. Gen. Rafael (Ramfis) Trujillo Jr. was fully briefed.

Dearborn, Barfield and Berry had meanwhile been rushed out of the Dominican Republic by US officials. Subsequently, Dearborn went to Colombia as Consul, and Barfield first to Italy and then to Washington where he was a staff assistant to Edwin Martin, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs. Since the ouster of the Trujillos, Perry (“Wimpy”) has returned to operate his handsomely appointed supermarket in Santo Domingo, greeting customers with calm and courtesy, as if Trujillo had never lived.

 

A Study of Assassination Methodology : A CIA study

by Robert T. Crowley, Deputy Director of Clandestine Operations

________________________________________

DEFINITION

Assassination is a term thought to be derived from “Hashish”, a drug similar to marijuana, said to have been used by Hasan-Dan-Sabah to induce motivation in his followers, who were assigned to carry out political and other murders, usually at the c ost of their lives. It is here used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization.

EMPLOYMENT

Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it will never be ordered or authorized by any U.S. Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service.

This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place.

Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be properly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.

JUSTIFICATION

Murder is not morally justifiable. Self-defense may be argued if the victim has knowledge which may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary.

But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.

CLASSIFICATIONS

The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger, aware but unguarded, or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed “simple”; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed “chase”; those where the victim is guarded will be termed “guarded.”

If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called “lost.” If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be “safe.” It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall alive into enemy hands.

A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called “secret”; if concealment is immaterial, the act will be called “open”; while if the assassination requires publicity to be effective it will be termed “terroristic.”

Following these definitions, the assassination of Julius Caesar was safe, simple, and terroristic, while that of Huey Long was lost, guarded and open. Obviously, successful secret assassinations are not recorded as assassination at all. [Illegible] of Thailand and Augustus Caesar may have been the victims of safe, guarded and secret assassination. Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal organizations.

THE ASSASSIN

In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.

Except in terroristic assassinations, it is desirable that the assassin be transient in the area. He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his instructions should be given orally by one person only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action which may be necessary.

In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong. While the Assassin of Trotsky has never revealed any significant information, it was unsound to depend on this when the act was planned.

PLANNING

When the decision to assassinate has been reached, the tactics of the operation must be planned, based upon an estimate of the situation similar to that used in military operations. The preliminary estimate will reveal gaps in information and possibly indicate a need for special equipment which must be procured or constructed.

When all necessary data has been collected, an effective tactical plan can be prepared. All planning must be mental; no papers should ever contain evidence of the operation.

In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.

TECHNIQUES

The essential point of assassination is the death of the subject. A human being may be killed in many ways but sureness is often overlooked by those who may be emotionally unstrung by the seriousness of this act they intend to commit. The specific technique employed will depend upon a large number of variables, but should be constant in one point: Death must be absolutely certain. The attempt on Hitler’s life failed because the conspiracy did not give this matter proper attention.

Arson can cause accidental death if the subject is drugged and left in a burning building. Reliability is not satisfactory unless the building is isolated and highly combustible.

Techniques may be considered as follows:

1. Manual – It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skillful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local too ls are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.

A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.

In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating de vice if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.

2. Accidents – For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly-cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi o r surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall is discernible after death.

Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.

If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.

Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.

Automobile accidents are a less satisfactory means of assassination. If the subject is deliberately run down, very exact timing is necessary and investigation is likely to be thorough. If the subject’s car is tampered with, reliability is very low. The subject may be stunned or drugged and then placed in the car, but this is only reliable when the car can be run off a high cliff or into deep water without observation.

3. Drugs – In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. If the assassin is trained as a doctor or nurse and the subject is under medical care, this is an easy and rare method. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.

Specific poisons, such as arsenic or strychnine, are effective but their possession or procurement is incriminating, and accurate dosage is problematical. Poison was used unsuccessfully in the assassination of Rasputin and Kolohan, though the latter case is more accurately described as a murder.

4. Edged Weapons: Any locally obtained edge device may be successfully employed. A certain minimum of anatomical knowledge is needed for reliability.

Puncture wounds of the body cavity may not be reliable unless the heart is reached. The heart is protected by the rib cage and is not always easy to locate.

Abdominal wounds were once nearly always mortal, but modern medical treatment has made this no longer true.

Absolute reliability is obtained by severing the spinal cord in the cervical region. This can be done with the point of a knife or a light blow of an axe or hatchet.

Another reliable method is the severing of both jugular and carotid blood vessels on both sides of the windpipe.

If the subject has been rendered unconscious by other wounds or drugs, either of the above methods can be used to insure death.

5. Blunt Weapons: As with edge weapons, blunt weapons require some anatomical knowledge for effective use. Their main advantage is their universal availability. A hammer may be picked up almost anywhere in the world. Baseball and [illeg] bats are very widely distributed. Even a rock or a heavy stick will do, and nothing resembling a weapon need be procured, carried or subsequently disposed of.

Blows should be directed to the temple, the area just below and behind the ear, and the lower, rear portion of the skull. Of course, if the blow is very heavy, any portion of the upper skull will do. The lower frontal portion of the head, from the eyes to the throat, can withstand enormous blows without fatal consequences.

6. Firearms: Firearms are often used in assassination, often very ineffectively. The assassin usually has insufficient technical knowledge of the limitations of weapons, and expects more range, accuracy and killing power than can be provided with reliability. Since certainty of death is the major requirement, firearms should be used which can provide destructive power at least 100% in excess of that thought to be necessary, and ranges should be half that considered practical for the weapon.

Firearms have other drawbacks. Their possession is often incriminating. They may be difficult to obtain. They require a degree of experience from the user. Their successful use is consistently over-rated.

However, there are many cases in which firearms are probably more efficient than any other means. These cases usually involve distance between the assassin and the subject, or comparative physical weakness of the assassin, as with a woman.

(a) The precision rifle. In guarded assassination, a good hunting or target rifle should always be considered as a possibility. Absolute reliability can nearly always be achieved at a distance of one hundred yards. In ideal circumstances, the range may be extended to 250 yards. The rifle should be a well made bolt or falling block action type, handling a powerful long-range cartridge. The .300 F.A.B. Magnum is probably the best cartridge readily available. Other excellent calibers are .375 Magnum, .270 Winchester, .30 – 106 p.s., 8 x 60 MM Magnum, 9.3 x.

62 kk and others of this type. These are preferable to ordinary military calibers, since ammunition available for them is usually of the expanding bullet type, whereas most ammunition for military rifles is full jacketed and hence not sufficiently lethal. Military ammunition should not be altered by filing or drilling bullets, as this will adversely affect accuracy.

The rifle may be of the “bull gun” variety, with extra heavy barrel and set triggers, but in any case should be capable of maximum precision. Ideally, the weapon should be able to group in one inch at one hundred yards, but 21/2″ groups are adequate. The sight should be telescopic, not only for accuracy, but because such a sight is much better in dim light or near darkness. As long as the bare outline of the target is discernible, a telescope sight will work, even if the rifle and shooter are in total darkness.

An expanding, hunting bullet of such calibers as described above will produce extravagant laceration and shock at short or mid-range. If a man is struck just once in the body cavity, his death is almost entirely certain.

Public figures or guarded officials may be killed with great reliability and some safety if a firing point can be established prior to an official occasion. The propaganda value of this system may be very high.

(b) The machine gun – Machine guns may be used in most cases where the precision rifle is applicable. Usually, this will require the subversion of a unit of an official guard at a ceremony, though a skillful and determined team might conceivably dispose o f a loyal gun crew without commotion and take over the gun at the critical time.

The area fire capacity of the machine gun should not be used to search out a concealed subject. This was tried with predictable lack of success on Trotsky. The automatic feature of the machine gun should rather be used to increase reliability by placing a 5 second burst on the subject. Even with full jacket ammunition, this will be absolute lethal is the burst pattern is no larger than a man. This can be accomplished at about 150 yards. In ideal circumstances, a properly padded and targeted ma chine gun c an do it at 850 yards. The major difficulty is placing the first burst exactly on the target, as most machine gunners are trained to spot their fire on target by observation of strike. This will not do in assassination as the subject will not wait.

(c)The Submachine Gun: This weapon, known as the “machine-pistol” by the Russians and Germans and “machine-carbine” by the British, is occasionally useful in assassination. Unlike the rifle and machine gun, this is a short range weapon and since it fires pistol ammunition, much less powerful. To be reliable, it should deliver at least 5 rounds into the subject’s chest, though the .45 caliber U.S. weapons have a much larger margin of killing efficiency than the 9 mm European arms.

The assassination range of the sub-machine gun is point-blank. While accurate single rounds can be delivered by sub-machine gunners at 50 yards or more, this is not certain enough for assassination. Under ordinary circumstances, the 5MG should be used as a fully automatic weapon. In the hands of a capable gunner, a high cyclic rate is a distinct advantage, as speed of execution is most desirable, particularly in the case of multiple subjects.

The sub-machine gun is especially adapted to indoor work when more than one subject is to be assassinated. An effective technique has been devised for the use of a pair of sub-machine gunners, by which a room containing as many as a dozen subjects can be “purifico” in about twenty seconds with little or no risk to the gunners. It is illustrated below.

While the U.S. sub-machine guns fire the most lethal cartridges, the higher cyclic rate of some foreign weapons enable the gunner to cover a target quicker with acceptable pattern density. The Bergmann Model 1934 is particularly good in this way. The Danish Madman? SMG has a moderately good cyclic rate and is admirably compact and concealable. The Russian SHG’s have a good cyclic rate, but are handicapped by a small, light protective which requires more kits for equivalent killing effect.

(d) The Shotgun: A large bore shotgun is a most effective killing instrument as long as the range is kept under ten yards. It should normally be used only on single targets as it cannot sustain fire successfully. The barrel may be “sawed” off for convenience, but this is not a significant factor in its killing performance. Its optimum range is just out of reach of the subject. 00 buckshot is considered the best shot size for a twelve gage gun, but anything from single balls to bird shot will do if the range is right. The assassin should aim for the solar plexus as the shot pattern is small at close range and can easily [illeg] the head.

(e) The Pistol – While the handgun is quite inefficient as a weapon of assassination, it is often used, partly because it is readily available and can be concealed on the person, and partly because its limitations are not widely appreciated. While many well known assassinations have been carried out with pistols (Lincoln, Huey Long, Ghandi), such attempts fail as often as they succeed, (Truman, Roosevelt, Churchill).

If a pistol is used, it should be as powerful as possible and fired from just beyond reach. The pistol and the shotgun are used in similar tactical situations, except that the shotgun is much more lethal and the pistol is much more easily concealed.

In the hands of an expert, a powerful pistol is quite deadly, but such experts are rare and not usually available for assassination missions.

.45 Colt, .44 Special, .455 Kly, .45 A.S. (U.S. Service) and .357 Magnum are all efficient calibers. Less powerful rounds can suffice but are less reliable. Sub-power cartridges such as the .32s and .25s should be avoided.

In all cases, the subject should be hit solidly at least three times for complete reliability.

(f) Silent Firearms – The sound of the explosion of the proponent in a firearm can be effectively silenced by appropriate attachments. However, the sound of the projective passing through the air cannot, since this sound is generated outside the weapon. In cases where the velocity of the bullet greatly exceeds that of sound, the noise so generated is much louder than that of the explosion. Since all powerful rifles have muzzle velocities of over 2000 feet per second, they cannot be silenced.

Pistol bullets, on the other hand, usually travel slower than sound and the sound of their flight is negligible. Therefore, pistols, submachine guns and any sort of improvised carbine or rifle which will take a low velocity cartridge can be silenced. The user should not forget that the sound of the operation of a repeating action is considerable, and that the sound of bullet strike, particularly in bone is quite loud.

Silent firearms are only occasionally useful to the assassin, though they have been widely publicized in this connection. Because permissible velocity is low, effective precision range is held to about 100 yards with rifle or carbine type weapons, while w ith pistols, silent or otherwise, are most efficient just beyond arms length. The silent feature attempts to provide a degree of safety to the assassin, but mere possession of a silent firearm is likely to create enough hazard to counter the advantage of its silence. The silent pistol combines the disadvantages of any pistol with the added one of its obviously clandestine purpose.

A telescopically sighted, closed-action carbine shooting a low velocity bullet of great weight, and built for accuracy, could be very useful to an assassin in certain situations. At the time of writing, no such weapon is known to exist.

7. Explosives: Bombs and demolition charges of various sorts have been used frequently in assassination. Such devices, in terroristic and open assassination, can provide safety and overcome guard barriers, but it is curious that bombs have often been the implement of lost assassinations.

The major factor which affects reliability is the use of explosives for assassination. the charge must be very large and the detonation must be controlled exactly as to time by the assassin who can observe the subject. A small or moderate explosive charge is highly unreliable as a cause of death, and time delay or booby-trap devices are extremely prone to kill the wrong man. In addition to the moral aspects of indiscriminate killing, the death of casual bystanders can often produce public reactions unfavorable to the cause for which the assassination is carried out.

Bombs or grenades should never be thrown at a subject. While this will always cause a commotion and may even result in the subject’s death, it is sloppy, unreliable, and bad propaganda. The charge must be too small and the assassin is never sure of:

(1)re aching his attack position,

(2) placing the charge close enough to the target and

(3) firing the charge at the right time.

Placing the charge surreptitiously in advance permits a charge of proper size to be employed, but requires accurate prediction of the subject’s movements.

Ten pounds of high explosive should normally be regarded as a minimum, and this is explosive of fragmentation material. The latter can consist of any hard, [illeg] material as long as the fragments are large enough. Metal or rock fragments should be walnut-size rather than pen-size. If solid plates are used, to be ruptured by the explosion, cast iron, 1″ thick, gives excellent fragmentation. Military or commercial high explosives are practical for use in assassination. Homemade or improvised explosives should be avoided. While possibly powerful, they tend to be dangerous and unreliable. Anti-personnel explosive missiles are excellent, provided the assassin has sufficient technical knowledge to fuse them properly.

81 or 82 mm mortar shells, or the 120 mm m ortar shell, are particularly good. Anti-personnel shells for 85, 88, 90, 100 and 105 mm guns and howitzers are both large enough to be completely reliable and small enough to be carried by one man.

The charge should be so placed that the subject is not ever six feet from it at the moment of detonation.

A large, shaped charge with the chamber filled with iron fragments (such as 1″ nuts and bolts) will fire a highly lethal shotgun-type effectively to 50 yards. This reaction has not been thoroughly tested, however, and an exact replica of the proposed device should be fired in advance to determine exact range, pattern-size, and penetration of fragments. Fragments should penetrate at least 1″ of seasoned pine or equivalent for minimum reliability.

Any firing device may be used which permits exact control by the assassin. An ordinary commercial or military explorer is efficient, as long as it is rigged for instantaneous action with no time fuse in the system.

The electric target can serve as the triggering device and provide exact timing from as far away as the assassin can reliably hit the target. This will avoid the disadvantages military or commercial high explosives are practical for use in assassination. Homemade or improvised explosives should be avoided. While possibly powerful, they tend to be dangerous and unreliable. Anti-personnel explosive missiles are excellent, provided the assassin has sufficient technical knowledge to fuse them properly. 81 or 82 mm mortar shells, or the 120 mm mortar shell, are particularly good. Anti-personnel shells for 85, 88, 90, 100 and 105 mm guns and howitzers are both large enough to be completely reliable and small enough to be carried by one man.

The charge should be so placed that the subject is not ever six feet from it at the moment of detonation. A large, shaped charge with the chamber filled with iron fragments (such as 1″ nuts and bolts) will fire a highly lethal shotgun-type charge to 50 yards. This reaction has not been thoroughly tested, however, and an exact replica of the proposed device should be fired in advance to determine exact range, pattern-size, and penetration of fragments. Fragments should penetrate at least 1″ of seasoned pine or equivalent for minimum reliability.

Any firing device may be used which permits exact control by the assassin. An ordinary commercial or military explorer is efficient, as long as it is rigged for instantaneous action with no time fuse in the system.

The electric target can serve as the triggering device and provide exact timing from as far away as the assassin can reliably hit the target. This will avid the disadvantages of stringing wire between the proposed positions of the assassin an d the subject, and also permit the assassin to fire the charge from a variety of possible positions.

The radio switch can be utilized to fire, though its reliability is somewhat lower and its procurement may not be easy.