Why would a man break a habit of many years standing just hours before the most intense moment of his life? Many people might say that the question is unimportant. But the CIA didn't think so. Burger-D-Lite filed tax forms with the IRS on April 3, 1964, and submitted receipts documenting purchasing orders for fiscal year 1963, including, we may assume, the meat they bought which eventually found its way into Oswald's steak sandwich. By Texas state law, meat supplied to restaurants must be consumed within three days of the purchase date; thus, if Oswald ate a steak sandwich in Burger-D-Lite on November 22, 1963, that meat must have come into the restaurant sometime between November 19 and November 22, 1963. Now here's where it gets heavy. The receipts filed with the IRS, showing meat purchases from Texas/Western Amalgamated Meat Packers, are somehow missing --- for those exact three days! IRS file records, updated yearly, list a complete set of receipts right up until the present time. But the documents are clearly not there. And the only people who had access to them were --- must have been --- NSC. That's the Standard Access Protocol, according to the Secret Service Register of Hierarchical Clearance.
Why was the National Security Council interested in what Oswald ordered for lunch on that fateful day? For the answer, it might be worthwhile to run a quick check on the corporate owners of Texas/Western. The company is privately held, and in 1963, most of its stock was controlled by its parent organization, ONAN, a meat packing/children's accessories/personal fragrances conglomerate. Taking a look at its board of directors, we find that many of them were the rising elite of Texas business --- including a young man whose primary holdings were in oil, George Herbert Walker Bush.
Bush had only been on the board for a few years, but it's interesting to note that ONAN --- through discreet channels --- had directed the requisitioning of virtually all the MULCH 27 supplied to the Cuban rebel troops who took part in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. Bush had joined the board just a few months before that. It's notable that one of the reasons given for the collapse of the military effort was lack of discipline on the part of the Cuban recruits. Before we can explain the significance of this conclusion, a short word on background is necessary. You have to look at the thing in the context of the times. Kennedy was already beginning to suspect that large-scale US military involvement in faraway places like Vietnam would eventually lead to overextension and failure. But, for political reasons (see appendix M, section III --- Kennedy campaign contributors) the military industrial complex had to be supplied with contracts, and the fight against Communism was by far the best way to keep doing that. The focus was already beginning to shift to smaller, surrogate forces trained and supplied by US agents and the US arms industry.
We note, here, that throughout the entire time that Congress was debating Kennedy's defense budget proposal for 1962, there is no record of anyone having seen Robert Kennedy. Furthemore, his official appointment log says that he was undergoing treatment for a mild case of the flu. None of the White House medical staff recall treating Robert Kennedy for anything at that time, but a check of the admittance records at Walter Reed military hospital shows that a Kennell Robertson, fitting Robert Kennedy's physical description exactly, was processed in just as the Congressional hearings began. But --- and this is important --- there is no record whatsoever of the treatment he received! Such a record would have been absolutely standard procedure. We do know that a passing hobo, scavenging in the food service dumpster behind the hospital, remarked to a friend that he had just seen Robert Kennedy coming out of the back door of the hospital. However, the man was a notorious liar, and the friend didn't believe him. Nevertheless both men were arrested that very day and detained under a Virginia vagrancy bylaw that had not been enforced since before the Civil War. Nobody ever saw the "liar" again; his friend reappeared after two days, unable to speak coherently. The police claim that he threw himself down a steep flight of stairs in a suicide attempt. Doctors working for the Committee for Freedom Of All Rights, who have examined photographs of his head bruises, all insist that they look exactly like the characteristic patterns left by partial lobotomy surgery.
Where was the Attorney General of the United States of America during the Congressional debate over some of his brother's most important proposed legislation, when he supposedly had the flu? Interestingly, a small bar in Queens, New York, was closed during the entire three-day period. The Caf Amore, in fact, was not only closed, but boarded up tight. Armed guards were posted on the corner of Hillside and Third Avenue. Now, everyone knew that the place was run by the mob; but it was also a good front, a functioning caf, and no one in the neighborhood could recall that it had ever been closed since it opened in 1907.
And few people in the neighborhood knew who its real owner was: Salvatore "The Fish" Pescatore, one of the most brutal, and the most successful, of the New York Mafia dons. Just before the war, Pescatore had bought a small arms business called DyKraft. During the war, and the Cold War that followed, DyKraft had grown tremendously, taking over just about all its competitors and all of its supply operations. Amazingly, whenever it seemed that DyKraft was sure to run into trouble with the Antitrust Act, Congress would quietly pass a law exempting its operations from that legislation, in the interests of "National Security".
Nobody saw Pescatore for the whole three days that Kennedy was missing. There's no "smoking gun", and there probably never will be --- all the parties involved had plenty of time to destroy the pertinent records. But we can feel reasonably confident that Robert Kennedy and Salvatore Pescatore were conducting secret talks. What were they talking about?
Remember, absolutely no one had expected that the Bay of Pigs gambit was going to fail. It was a humiliating black eye for the world's foremost military power. In a secret protocol to Executive Order #3297, which authorized the action, Kennedy had allotted clandestine funds for supplying a massive US army of occupation to be stationed in Cuba. But when the assault failed, this contract was canceled. Who was hurt? Why, DyKraft, of course. They stood to lose $11.2 billion dollars if the occupation never came off --- and we're talking 1961 dollars. It was a done deal. You don't back out on the mob.
Kennedy had managed to temporarily appease Pescatore, but just barely. He had to promise him some more action in the near future. Just about this time, too, he broke off his affair with Marilyn Monroe. To Bobby, he confided that he was bored with her --- and besides, she'd gotten a gig at Aldo's in Reno, and was too busy to commute. Aldo's was owned by a straw man who reported to Pescatore, which gave Pescatore a reason to come to Reno often. Call it a sweetener.
We can logically conclude that the conversation between Bobby and Pescatore during those long three days in the Caf Amore, in May of 1962, went something like this: What will you do for me ... soon?
In fact, the President and his staff had been wracking their brains over that very question right from the moment of the failure of the Bay of Pigs, although, of course, only JFK (and the younger brother he trusted, literally, with his life) knew that America's defense and foreign policy was being held hostage to the President's promises to the military Industrial Complex; more accurately, to the mob. But in all fairness, Kennedy did sincerely want to improve the nation's ability to conduct clandestine warfare and "deniable" occupation. He was looking for a way to improve Americals surrogate strength, as well as to save his own skin.
Here's where the discipline issue comes in. Reports from the field compiled by American trainers described a great disgust for the willfulness of the Cuban recruits. Couldn't follow orders. Couldn't drill properly. Couldn't tell time (and considering the incredibly complex battle plan drawn up by the Pentagon, running to some several hundred intricately coded pages, this last was an important failing). The final comments of a Lieut. Col. Sanders were particularly revealing. Col. Sanders wrote in his report three days after the rout: "The only Spic (sic) who can operate efficiently in a Theater of War is a zombie Spic".
A zombie Spic. Those words were to seriously impact on a military program that had been taking place, in the most profound secrecy, since 1951. Originally conceived as a weapon in the Korean War, Operation StunNumb had drawn inspiration from the enemy. North Korean troops were said to have an almost inhuman degree of fanaticism, of dedication to their cause that went beyond all rational limits of patriotism. This, in fact, was what the UN troops in Korea used to call "Kim Il-Sung's 'Secret Weapon"'. John Foster Dulles had issued orders to American doctors in Korea to conduct experiments to determine whether this fanaticism could be chemically synthesized. This experiment was originally known as Code 7, and it was funded through a bank in South Korea, Won Ton No Ho Bank of Commerce. In 1987, under the intense public scrutiny that resulted from the Iran/Contra affair, the CIA was forced to publicly admit that this bank had been one of their front operations.
Some initial experiments were conducted, but with the end of the war in 1953, funding for the project was drastically cut, although it did continue at low levels. But in 1962, Kennedy was almost desperately looking for programs that would both enhance the performance of Third World rag-tag armies and, simultaneously, cost a lot of money, thereby appeasing the MIC and Pescatore. On June 2 of that year an executive order was signed in the oval office. No copies were made; it was never published. The President's office log lists it only as a "memorandum". Two days later, the Code 7 project --- rechristened Operation StunNumb received a Priority Alpha expense account. That meant that only the President, the Secretary of State, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could question any of the project's requisitions. In practice, the Secretary and the Chairman were out of the loop. Aside from the actual doctors participating in the experiment, only the President and a small group of his staffers even knew about the project.
Most of the work on the project took place on a small island far out in the Pacific, known only.as Naval Station #27. Basically, the project entailed chemical experimentation (LSD was just one of the drugs in the vast Pharmacopoeia the CIA was working with) and psychological "conditioning". The agency's star student, Lee Harvey Oswald, had been recruited back in 1960, after he had been kidnapped off the streets of New Orleans following his attempt to hand out "Fair Play For Cuba" fliers. He was regarded as a challenge. The doctors at operation StunNumb tested their techniques by implanting two different "operational programs" in Oswald's consciousness: A hardcore conservative Goldwater (on a bad day it was a Birch) Republican program, and a radical Maoist/Leninist Communist program. With sadistic glee, they would run the programs alternate days on Oswald, measuring success by the length of the time of disorientation produced between political attitudes --- the shorter the better. In fact, secret tapes made of these experiments still exist in the hardened government archives at Iron Mountain. On one of these tapes, Oswald has been hypnotized into believing that he is giving a speech on a college campus. "We must drive the enemy from our midst!", he is declaiming. "The worldwide Communist conspiracy has disenfranchised the workers; International Bankers of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your bourgeois sense of privacy ... A New Man will appear on the stage of human history when education is truly Socialist, and when those who do the real work of the world understand the beauty of that American way of Life for which God has blessed us with private ownership of the means of production --- to the barricades!" It's a little disconcerting.
As a test of his reliability, Oswald was made to defect to the Soviet Union. In Communist mode, with no residual interference, he functioned perfectly; no one suspected a thing. There was one problem, however. In order to stay with the program, Oswald had to take the mind control drug every forty-eight hours. During his time in the Soviet Union, he was supplied by special courier under deep cover, who would appear to him disguised as a magazine vendor on Leningradsky Prospekt in Moscow. Every few days Oswald would sidle up to him and ask, in fluent Russian, if the Bear was ill. "Not yet", the man would reply with a leer, and hand Oswald a copy of Komsomolskaya Pravda. Folded inside would be four little pellets. This whole procedure, too, was part of Oswald's program. Oswald would thank the man, buy a tiny Lenin souvenir, and be on his way.
Not everything from this period of Oswald's life is clear, but recent scholarship on the part of the international research community suggests that the vendor, although thoroughly vetted by the agency, was in fact Pescatore's man, keeping an eye on things. The plane that flew him into Moscow every few weeks (the drug had a short shelf life) was owned by Aeroflot, looked like an Aeroflot plane and, in all exterior ways, was an Aeroflot plane. But central engineering records in Soviet archives show that Aircraft Number IL-24687 was built in Kalinovskygrad. The main Aeroflot works, where all long-haul Soviet aircraft were built, was in Novosibirsk. What was in Kalinovskygrad was the Yuri Petrofsky Heavy Industries model Plant. Here we have to back up a bit.
As far back as the 1930's, Stalinist planners were privately aware that the nascent Soviet heavy industries could not and would not be able to compete with the West. Even at that time of direct conflict with the "Capitalist regimes", there was a clandestine program to entice western technology and joint ventures into setting up in the Soviet Union --- under intense secrecy, of course. To all outside eyes, these businesses would be State-owned and follow central planning directives. But in reality their products would be sold on the internal black market and, through middlemen, in the West. They made such a profit that they could generate revenue for the central budget while also paying off handsomely for the Western investors --- after all, there was no effective local competition. One of the first such "arrangements" was the one in Kalinovskygrad, set up by a mysterious traveler who spent some time in consultation with Gosplan. This man called himself George Maples, but on his departure from the Soviet Union it turned out that he had left his driver's license behind. A Soviet clerk, in all innocence, turned it in to the U.S. embassy, where it was for years regarded as a hoax or a joke. Because how could Howard Hughes really have been in the USSR?
The Petrofsky Heavy Industries plant was Hughes' foothold in the Communist world, not to mention a great tax shelter. It was a Hughes company that built the plane that brought Pescatore's man to Moscow to keep an eye on the boy the U.S. government had brainwashed and was training to be a living secret weapon in future clandestine wars being planned so that the military budget would go up in order to appease the mob. But that may be an oversimplification. Remember that many people have had years to put investigators off the track on this one; the whole story is yet to emerge. But we do know the bare outline.
It's questionable, however, whether the U.S. government knew the full extent of Hughes' secret relationship with the Soviets. Checking tax records of the Hughes corporation and its associated conglomerates, there is nowhere to be found a full and fair accounting of the kind of revenue Hughes was taking out of the USSR. But what was Hughes International doing in bed with the mob?
This was something of an insurance policy. After almost three decades of clandestine operations within the USSR, Hughes International was a major asset to that state, both for the public economy (weapons technologies, profits and back-door access to Western markets) and for private gain (baksheesh). Hughes therefore had some influence on Soviet policy, which was a major factor in the continuing cold war --- by playing their cards right, Hughes and his small circle of advisors could assure themselves of two enormous markets. But Hughes International could not afford to be exposed, and also could not afford to have to worry about a less internationally assertive America. H.I. had a long-standing working relationship with DyKraft as an independent sub-contractor, and in the wake of the Bay of Pigs, Hughes and Pescatore had not taken long before realizing that their interests coincided to a remarkable degree. Their co-operation was, of course, unknown to the Defense Department, or to any other government agency. Yet they dictated the direction operation StunNumb began to take around January-May 1962.
By that time both Pescatore and Hughes were seriously worried. Kennedy's attempts to build up anti-Vietnam rhetoric rang false to them; they just did not believe that Ho Chi Minh could be successfully built up into a true Communist menace; he didn't look imposing enough. And if not Vietnam, then where and what? The USSR as a threat to the United States had reached the point of propagandistic saturation, no major new arms contracts were going to be won from fear of the Russians, just as the USSR was not going to lay out lots more money on its side of the cold war.
On February 4, 1962 the airport at Galveston, Texas, was closed for the whole day. In official news there had been a power failure which rendered navigation systems useless, forcing all planes to be diverted up to Dallas. Ironically enough, in the photograph of the control tower that the Galveston Herald ran in its morning edition with the story about the closed airport there can be seen, if one looks very carefully, a tiny aircraft coming in for a landing behind the tower. Don't look for this aircraft in the afternoon editions; oh, the photograph's there, all right, but the plane has been airbrushed out. The Galveston Herald is a Knight-Ridder newspaper. Knight-Ridder's principal shareholder is the Lombard group. Lombard is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hughes Aerospace.
That plane was taking Hughes to a secret meeting with Pescatore, whose yacht was waiting just off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a really secret meeting, and important enough to bring Hughes out of his famous seclusion. Hughes himself was at the controls of the plane, and was accompanied only by his personal physician and bodyguards. But he needn't have worried; after all those years out of sight, no one recognized him any more. But his "FBI - all access" card opened airport gates for him.
At the meeting they discussed their deepest fears, and found them justified. Action was necessary; they couldn't just sit around and wait for StunNumb to bear fruit, wait for it to be effective in securing the next victory against communism which would require an expensive army of occupation. Pescatore had tried to reason with Kennedy, unsuccessfully. No more invasions of Cuba were in the works. It was decided that Oswald's training had already proved effective; he was to be activated.
Thus it was that a week later, at a local meeting of the Komsomol, where Oswald was in the middle of giving a talk on the innate perversion of all human relations under capitalism, he suddenly remembered the smell of his mother's apple pie baking in the kitchen. He felt a little queasy. Oswald didn't know it, but the last four pellets he had received from his friend the magazine vendor had been placebos. His "communist" program was wearing off; he was reverting to his default program, the "Birch" one. One of the limits of this program was its lack of subtlety, its penchant for simplistic imagery. So Oswald was pulled back to patriotism for his native land by, literally, Mom's apple pie.
Many researchers have noted that although Oswald had defected to the Soviet Union, when he decided to come back to the United States, the U.S. state department gave him no hassles at all. You'd think that, at this stage of the cold war, the U.S. embassy in Moscow would be a little suspicious of someone who had once defected and then changed his mind. But they gave him a U.S. passport right away, and even lent him money to return to the States. There was a double irony in this. In fact, State was acting on Kennedy's direct orders. The President actually was gearing up for more intense involvement in Vietnam, and thought that his secret experiment had been activated by the CIA for this purpose, that he was coming back to the States as a study case in how to build future generations of malleable killers. But in reality, Oswald was being manipulated by gangsters and profiteers in a plot against that very President who was preparing to do what they wanted him to do in the first place.
Be that as it may, Oswald ducked into the U.S. embassy on February 14 --- Pescatore had a sick sense of humor. On February 17 he was stepping off the Pan Am flight from West Germany at New York's Idlewild airport, clutching an American flag and an old baseball glove and looking almost demonically deranged. There was a full military band playing for an elderly colonel who was coming back to the States to retire after a lifetime in the military. Oswald thought they were playing for him, and stood rigidly at attention. In a way they were, although they didn't know it.
Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Kennedy was killed by the mob, a branch of the CIA controlled by the mob, his own military Industrial Complex and the Hughes Corporation. He was killed because they thought he couldn't deliver their contracts; he was killed because he was a potential threat to international free trade on the East/West black market. He was killed because his enemies were ruthless, unscrupulous men, loyal only to the peculiar values of the mafioso and the businessman. Once they got Oswald back in the States, it was just a matter of intensive training with the Mannlicher --- and Oswald, in his zombie state, could learn anything on the first try.
Still, what was he doing in that Burger-D-Lite?
Quite simple, really. His handlers didn't trust his aim or his loyalty without the drugs. Oswald was running some subsidiary software that, without his even knowing it, brought him to one of the CIA feeding stations three hours before his big moment, just so he'd be well lubricated. We've gone into the Bush/Burger-D-Lite connection already. There are those who believe that Bush's rise through the ranks of the anonymous undercover operatives was a reward for work well done. It may have taken him until 1976 to be appointed Director of the CIA, but Patience and Loyalty are the G-man's mantra and rosary all in one. And those who call the shots don't forget.
History works in strange ways. Were it not for that one strange and suspicious off-note, the vegetarian going into the burger joint, the whole tale might never have attracted suspicion, might never have been unraveled. And America might never have known that it was a nation betrayed, a nation caught up, twisting and struggling, in a net wielded by a man known only as "The Fish" --- a high tech net crafted by DyKraft, designed by Hughes, and assembled in the Soviet Union with inspiration from Cuba.
But murky as the story may be, the ultimate lesson is plain. Hidden motives are everywhere, and all official sources of information are suspect. Only a zombie would believe everything he reads in the papers; the truth is buried under several layers of bright, shining lies. Don't be a sap.
* * *