Days of Infamy

The Future Is Calling (Part Three)
G. Edward Griffin

COLONEL HOUSE

As we re-activate our time machine, we find ourselves in the presence of one of the most colorful and mysterious figures of history. His name is Colonel Edward Mandell House. House was never in the military. The title of Colonel was honorary, granted by the Governor of Texas in appreciation for political services. He was one of the most powerful men in American politics and, yet, virtually unknown to most Americans today. He was the personal advisor to Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt. He was close to the Morgan banking dynasty and also to the powerful banking families of Europe. He attended school in England and surrounded himself with Fabians. His father, Thomas, was an exporter in the Southern states and also a lending agent for London banks, which preferred to remain anonymous. It was widely believed that he represented the Rothschild consortium. Thomas House was one of the few in the South who emerged from the War Between the States with a great fortune. Colonel House was what they called a “king maker” in Texas politics. He personally chose Woodrow Wilson, the most unlikely of all political candidates, and secured his nomination for President on the Democratic ticket in 1912. It was House who convinced the Morgan group, and others with power in politics and media, to throw their support to Wilson, which is what enabled him to win the election and become the 28th President of the United States. House was certainly a member of the Round Table and possibly a member of its inner circle. He was a founder of the CFR.

In 1912 he wrote a novel, entitled Philip Dru Administrator. It was intended to popularize the Fabian blueprint for converting America to collectivism using the Fabian strategy of working slowly as a turtle and secretly as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The hero of his story is Philip Dru, who is a fictionalized version the author, himself: a quiet, unassuming intellectual, working behind the scenes advising and controlling politicians who are easily purchased and just as easily discarded. Speaking through Dru, House describes his political ideal as: “socialism as dreamed of by Karl Marx.”[1] Dru’s socialism, of course, was the Fabian version. It was to have gentle and humane qualities to soften its impact and set it apart from the Leninist version called Communism.

Like all collectivists, House spoke eloquently about defending the poor and the downtrodden, but in reality, he had great disdain for the masses. In his view, they are too stupid and lazy to take an interest in their own government, so it’s up to the professionals to do that for them. Speaking through the fictional character of Senator Selwyn, House says:
The average American citizen refuses to pay attention to civic affairs, contenting himself with a general growl at the tax rate, and the character and inefficiency of public officials. He seldom takes the trouble necessary to form the Government to suit his views. The truth is he has no cohesive or well-digested views, it being too much trouble to form them; therefore, some such organization as ours is essential.[2]

Philip Dru foments civil war, leads an uprising against the old order, captures control of the government, becomes a dictator with the grateful support of the people, is given the title Administrator of the Republic, scraps all constitutional restrictions against government power, establishes a progressive income tax, creates a national banking cartel, [3] annexes Canada, conquers Mexico, invites European nations to participate in world government, and ushers in a glorious new age of collectivism. This was not just a fictional story for entertainment. House described this book as an expression of his own “ethical and political faith.”[4]

The reason this is important is that the ethical and political faith of Col. House now is the ethical and political faith of American leadership – and it started with Woodrow Wilson. In his memoirs, President Wilson said: “Mr. House is my second personality. He is my independent self. His thoughts and mine are one.”[5]

George Viereck was an admiring biographer of Colonel House and approved of almost everything his did. This is what Viereck said:
For seven long years, Colonel House was Woodrow Wilson’s other self. For six long years he shared with him everything but the title of Chief Magistracy of the Republic. For six years, two rooms were at his disposal in the north wing of the White House. It was House who made the slate for the Cabinet, formulated the first policies of the Administration, and practically directed the foreign affairs of the United States. We had, indeed, two presidents for one! … He was the pilot who guided the ship.[6]

THE WAR TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY

As we contemplate a member of the Rhodes secret society, occupying two rooms in the White House, virtually in control of American foreign policy, our time machine finally brings us to World War I. Since our main topic today is war, we must prepare now to comprehend the events we are about to see in terms of the strategy for using war to smash the world to bits and then remold it closer to the hearts desire.

The sinking of the Lusitania was the event that, more than any other, motivated the American people to accept the necessity and the morality of getting into World War I. Prior to that time, there was great reluctance to participate in a war that had little to do with American interests. However, when the Lusitania left New York Harbor on May 1, 1915, with 196 Americans on board and was sunk six days later off the coast of Ireland, it became the cause celebre that moved the American consciousness into a war mood against Germany. Americans were outraged at a nation that could viciously and cold-heartedly attack a peaceful passenger ship.

What is not well known about that piece of history is the role played by J.P. Morgan. As you recall, the CFR was described by Professor Quigley as a front for J.P. Morgan and Company. We must remember that Morgan was, not only a founding member of the CFR, he was also a member of the Round Table, the inner group directing it, so how does Morgan fit into this?

During World War I, the Morgan Bank was the subscription agent for war loans to England and France. These countries had exhausted their financial resources to continue the war against Germany. So they came to the United States and asked J.P. Morgan – who was culturally closer to Britain than to America – to be their agent for selling war bonds. The House of Morgan was happy to do that, and it floated approximately $1.5 billion in war bonds on behalf of England and, to a lesser extent, for France.

Morgan was also the contract agent for these countries when they purchased materials and supplies from American firms. That means he had a wonderfully profitable revolving door in which he received a piece of the action as the money went out of the country as loans and again, when it came back into the country, for the purchase of materials.

As the war progressed, Britain and France were facing the increasing possibility of defeat. The Germans had unleashed a surprise weapon – the submarine – that was new to warfare in those days, and they were sinking the ships that carried food and other necessities to the British Isles. The Germans were literally starving the British into submission who, by their own estimate, at one point said they had only about seven weeks of food left.

For the British, there was only one salvation, and that was to have the Americans come into the war to help them. But on the American side, there was a different agenda. What would happen to that $1.5 billion in war loans if Britain and France lost the war? The only time war loans are repaid is when the nation borrowing the money wins the war. Losers don’t pay off their bonds. So Morgan was in a terrible fix. Not only were his friends in England in dire danger, he and all his investors were about to lose $1.5 billion! A very serious situation, indeed.

The U.S. Ambassador to England at that time was Walter Page. Page was more than just an ambassador. Among other things, he was a trustee to Rockefeller’s General Education Board. It was in that capacity that he played a role in shaping educational policies to promote collectivism in America. Page sent a telegram to the State Department, and this is what he said,
The pressure of this approaching crisis, I am certain, has gone beyond the ability of the Morgan financial agency for the British and French Governments…. The only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany.[7]

Money was not the only motivator for bringing the United States into war. We must not forget that the Ameican players in this drama dreamed of world government based on the model of collectivism, and they saw war as a great motivator to move society in that direction. They looked forward to the creation of the League of Nations when the fighting was over and knew that the only way for the United States to play a dominant role in shaping that world body was to be a combatant. The only ones who divide the spoils of war are the victors who fight the war, and it was that reality that fired the imaginations of House, Wilson, and even J.P. Morgan.

THE STRATEGY TO GET THE U.S. INTO WAR

And so, there were different motivations and different agendas for pushing the United States into war. Colonel House became the coordinator for all of them. He went back and forth across the Atlantic and consulted with the Round Tables in both England and America. He arranged a secret treaty on behalf of President Wilson to bring the United States into the War. The reason for secrecy was that the Senate would never have approved it. There was still strong public opposition to war and, had it been revealed that Wilson was engaging in a secret – and unconstitutional – treaty to get the U.S. into war, it would have been politically disastrous to his Administration.

George Viereck, in his book, The Strangest Friendship in History – Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House, said this:
Ten months before the election, which returned Wilson to the White House because he ‘kept us out of war,’ Colonel House negotiated a secret agreement with England and France on behalf of Wilson, which pledged the United States to intervene on behalf of the Allies. If an inkling of the conversation between Colonel House and the leaders of England and France had reached the American people before the election, it might have caused incalculable reverberations in public opinion.[8]

How did they do it? How did these wolves in sheep’s clothing maneuver the United States into war? It was not easy, and it came about only after extensive planning. The first plan was to offer the United State as a negotiator between both sides of the conflict. They would position the U.S. as the great peacemaker. But the goal was just the opposite of peace. They would make an offer to both sides that they knew would not be acceptable to Germany. Then, when the Germans rejected the offer, they would be portrayed in the press as the bad guys, the ones who wanted to continue the war. This is how the plan was described by Ambassador Page in his memoirs. He said:
Colonel House arrived … full of the idea of American intervention. First his plan was that he and I and a group of the British cabinet … should at once work out a minimum programme of peace—the least that the Allies would accept, which he assumed would be unacceptable to the Germans; and that the President would take this programme and present it to both sides; the side that declined would be responsible for continuing the war…. Of course the fatal moral weakness of the foregoing scheme is that we should plunge into the War, not on the merits of the cause, but by a carefully sprung trick.[9]

AGGRAVATE, INSULATE, FACILITATE

The trick eventually evolved into something far more dramatic than peace negotiations. It called for three strategies in one. They were: aggravate, insulate, and facilitate.

The first stage was to aggravate the Germans into an attack, literally to goad them until they had no choice but to strike back. Much of this was implemented from the British side. Churchill established the policy of ramming German submarines. Prior to that, there was a code of naval warfare called the Cruiser Rules requiring that, when a warship challenged an unarmed merchant ship, it would fire a shot across its bow. The merchant ship would be expected to stop its engines and it would be given time for the crew to get into lifeboats before the ship was sunk. It was a small humanitarian gesture in the middle of warfare. That is the way it was done until Churchill, as Lord of the Admiralty, ordered all merchant ships, regardless of circumstances, to steam full speed directly toward German submarines in an attempt to ram and sink them. This eliminated the distinction between merchant ships and war ships. From then on, all merchant ships had to be considered as war ships, and Germany abandoned the policy of firing warning shots.

When that happened, those seeking to bring the United States in the war had a heyday. Editorializing through the British and American press, they said: “See how evil these Germans are? They sink unarmed ships and don’t even give the crews a chance to get off! It is our moral duty to fight against such evil.”

Churchill ordered British ships to remove their names from the hulls and to fly the flags of neutral nations, especially the American flag, so the submarine captains couldn’t tell what nationality the ships really were. He wanted Germans to torpedo American ships by accident. It was his strategy to do whatever possible to bring the United States into war, and the sinking of an American ship would be an excellent way of doing so.[10]

There was plenty of goading from the America side as well. The United States government consistently violated its own neutrality laws by allowing war materials to be sent to Britain and France. Munitions and all kinds of military-related supplies were blatantly shipped on a regular basis. In fact, the Lusitania, on the day it was sunk, was loaded with military arsenal. The Germans knew all along that this was going on. The people in Washington knew it as well. By openly violating their own neutrality laws, they were doing everything possible to aggravate Germany into an attack.

The second prong of the strategy was to insulate. That means to insulate the victims from information that would have allowed them to protect themselves. You can’t have a surprise attack if you warn the victims in advance. It was important not to let any of the Lusitania passengers know that the ship was carrying war materials and was likely to be sunk. They could not be allowed to know that several of its decks, normally assigned to passenger quarters, had been cleared out and loaded with military-related supplies, including ammunition and explosive primers. They could not be informed that they would be riding on a floating ammunition depot.

The German embassy tried to warn American civilians not to book passage on that ship. They placed an advertisement in fifty newspapers, mostly along the eastern seaboard, warning that the Lusitania would be in danger, that it was heading into hostile waters, and that Americans should not be on board. The U.S. State Department contacted all fifty of those newspapers and ordered them not to publish the ad. They threatened the publishers that they would be in dire trouble with the government if they did. There was only one newspaper, in Des Moines Iowa, that had the guts to go ahead and run the ad anyway – which is why we know about it today. Unfortunately, an ad in Des Moines was of small value to the people in New York who were actually boarding the ship.

SINK THE LUSITANIA!

The third prong of the strategy was to facilitate. That means to make it easy for the enemy to strike and be successful. On the morning of the sinking of the Lusitania, Colonel House was in Britain and recorded in his diaries that he spoke with Sr. Edward Gray and King George. They calmly discussed what they thought the reaction of the American people would be if the Lusitania were to be “accidentally” sunk. This is what Colonel House wrote: “I told Sir Gray if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep America which would in itself carry us into the war.”

Four hours after that conversation, the Lusitania entered the war zone where German submarines were known to be active. Designed and built by the British to be converted into a ship of war, if necessary, she had four boilers, was very fast, and could outrun a submarine. That means she was vulnerable only to subs that were ahead of her path, not those to the side or behind. This greatly improved her chances for survival, especially with a military escort running ahead. However, this was not to be her destiny. On this voyage she had been ordered to turn off one of her boilers. She was running on three turbines instead of four. At only 75% speed, she was now vulnerable to attack from all sides.

The Juno was a British destroyer that had been assigned to escort her through those dangerous waters. At the last minute, the Juno was called back by the British Admiralty and never made its rendezvous.

Inevitably, the Lusitania, running at reduced speed, and without protection, pulled into the periscope view of the U-20 German submarine. One torpedo was fired directly mid center. There was a mighty explosion. As the Germans were preparing for the second torpedo, much to their surprise, there was a second explosion, and the whole bottom of the ship blew out. Exploration of the wreckage in later years shows that it was an outward explosion. Something inside blew up with a tremendous force, and the great ship sank in less than eighteen minutes.

The strategists finally had their cause. This was the dastardly deed of those warmongering Germans who were sinking passenger ships with innocent civilians on board.

The flame of indignation was ignited and eventually it did sweep America into war on April 16, 1917. Eight days later, Congress authorized $1 billion of taxpayer money to be sent to Britain and France to assist in the war effort. The next day, the first $200 million was sent to Britain and immediately applied to the Morgan debt. A few days later, $100 million was sent to France, and the same thing happened. It was applied to the Morgan debt. By the end of the war, $9.5 billion had been sent to the Allies and applied to the Morgan Debt. We must add to that the infinitely higher cost of American blood sacrificed on the alter of collectivism in a war supposedly to make the world “safe for democracy.”

It’s a twist of irony that the world really was made safe for democracy – when one realizes that the word democracy is a synonym for one of the pillars of collectivism. It is the embodiment of the concept that the group is more important than the individual, and it is that rationale that allowed Round Table members on both sides of the Atlantic to plot the death of innocent civilians as a small price to pay for the greater good of the greater number.

WORLD WAR II

We are back in our time machine now and find ourselves at the beginning of World War II. The parallels to World War I are striking. Britain, again, was losing the war with Germany. The president of the United States, again, was a collectivist surrounded by Fabians and Leninists. The primary difference was that the center of gravity in the CFR was swinging away from the Morgan group and toward the Rockefeller group. Other than that, things were pretty much the same. Colonel House was still a presidential advisor, but his rooms at the White House now were occupied by Harry Hopkins. Hopkins was not a collectivist agent of the Fabians; he was a collectivist agent of the Soviets. The American people were still opposed to war; and, once again, there were secret arrangements at the highest levels of government to maneuver the United States into war without the voters suspecting it. The strategy was to get the Axis powers to strike first, all the while convincing the American people that their leaders were opposed to war. It was almost an exact repeat of the ploy used in World War I.

On October 30, 1941, in a campaign speech in Boston, FDR made this amazing statement: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I will give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” FDR repeated that pledge many times, all the while working behind the scenes to get the United States into war.

The President’s speechwriter at that time was Robert Sherwood, who later became a famous author and playwright. On this topic, Sherwood said: “Unfortunately for my own conscience, I happened at the time to be one of those who urged him to go the limit on this, feeling as I did, that any risk of future embarrassment was negligible as compared to the risk of losing the election.” Sherwood said that, while they were discussing the contradiction between the President’s words and his deeds, Roosevelt replied: “Of course, we’ll fight if we’re attacked. If someone attacks us, then it isn’t a foreign war, is it?”[11]

As FDR was delivering this calculated deception to the voters, the American and British military staffs were meeting secretly in Washington D.C., working out the details of a joint strategy. They planned, not only how to get the United States into the war, but how to conduct the war afterward. The resulting agreement was called the ABC-1. It was incorporated into a Navy war plan and given the code name Rainbow Number Five. We now have a great deal of information on this plan although, at the time, it was highly secret. The key for getting into the war was to maneuver the Axis powers to strike first to make it look like the U.S. was an innocent victim. Their first hope was that Germany would attack. If that didn’t work, the fallback plan was to provoke Japan.

This policy was summarized in a memorandum to FDR by Admiral Stark, Chief of Naval Operations. He said:
It would be very desirable to enter the war under circumstances in which Germany were the aggressor and in which case Japan might then be able to remain neutral. However, on the whole, it is my opinion that the United States should enter the war against Germany as soon as possible, even if hostilities with Japan must be accepted…. The sooner we get in the better.[12]

In an effort to provoke an attack from Germany, FDR sent U.S. Naval ships to escort British convoys carrying war supplies, knowing that they would be targets for German submarine attack. When Germany refused to take the bait, he ordered U.S. ships to actually get into the middle of sea battles between British and German war ships. The strategy was simple. If you walk into the middle of a barroom brawl, the chances of getting slugged are pretty good.[13]

On October 17, 1941, an American destroyer, the USS Kearny, rushed to assist a British convoy near Iceland that was under attack by German submarines. It took a torpedo hit and was badly damaged. Ten days later, FDR delivered his annual Navy Day speech in Washington and said:

We have wished to avoid shooting, but the shooting has started, and history has recorded who has fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot. America has been attacked. The U.S.S. Kearny is not just a Navy ship. She belongs to every man, woman, and child in this nation…. Hitler’s torpedo was directed at every American.[14]

When it became known that the Kearny had aggressively sought combat, the public lost interest, and FDR dropped the rhetoric. It was time to involve Japan, and it was clear that the drama had to involve more than one ship.

MANEUVERING THE JAPANESE INTO FIRING THE FIRST SHOT

The Secretary of War at that time was Henry Stimson, a member of the CFR. In his diaries he said:
In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that, in order to have the full support of the American people, it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors…. The question was, how 9 we should maneuver them into firing the first shot without allowing too much damage to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition. [15]

How was it done? It was accomplished exactly as in World War I: aggravate, facilitate, insulate. Aggravate the enemy into an attack. Facilitate his attack to make it easy with no opposition. Insulate the victims from any knowledge that would allow them to escape their fate.

For many years, the government denied any knowledge of the impending Japanese attack. But, gradually, the pieces of the puzzle began to bubble up out of the mire of secrecy and, one by one, they have been assembled into a clear picture of the most monstrous coverup one can possibly imagine. The smoking gun was discovered in 1995. Author Robert Stinnett found a memo in the Navy Archives written by Lt. Commander Arthur McCollum, who was assigned to Naval Intelligence. The memo was dated October 7, 1940. It was directed to two of FDR’s top naval advisors: Captain Dudley Knox and Capt. Walter Anderson, who was head of Naval Intelligence. This memo was approved by both men and forwarded to FDR for action. The full text is now public information, and a photo of it appears in Stinnett’s book, Day of Deceit; The Truth about FDR and Peal Harbor.[16]

The McCollum memorandum contained an eight-point plan of action to implement a two-point strategy. The two points were: (1) Aggravate Japan into a military strike as a matter of economic necessity and national honor on her part; and (2) Facilitate the attack by not interfering with Japan’s preparations and by making the target as vulnerable as possible. At the conclusion of the last point of strategy, the memorandum said: “If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.”[17]

The necessity to insulate the victims from any foreknowledge of the attack was not mentioned in the memorandum, but it was not necessary to do so. Obviously, this plan could not succeed if the targeted victims were warned in advance. So, once again, there was the familiar strategy: aggravate, facilitate, and insulate.

Was Japan aggravated into an attack? Consider these facts. The sale of critical goods from the United States to Japan was suddenly embargoed; commerce was brought to a standstill; Japan’s access to oil from the Dutch East Indies was crippled by U.S. diplomatic pressure on the Dutch government; the U.S. closed off the Panama Canal to Japanese ships; and Japan’s major assets in the United States were seized by the government. In other words, the strategy advanced by Lt. Commander McCollum was followed in every detail. There was a deliberate assault against Japan’s economy and an insult to her national honor. A military response was predictable. The only question was when.

This is not to suggest that the Japanese imperial government was blameless in this matter or that it was an innocent victim of circumstances. It was, after all, in Asia and the Pacific it was engaged in a massive, regional war of aggression and territorial expansion.

This was the logical consequence of its ideology of barbarism in which might makes right. However, we must not lose sight of the role played by American leaders embracing the ideology of collectivism. It was a case of one totalitarian ideology goading another totalitarian ideology into a war that supposedly would lead to the greater good of the greater number.

MAKING PEARL HARBOR AN EASY TARGET

Was Japan facilitated in the attack? There is massive evidence to support that conclusion, but we have time here for only a few examples. A Japanese spy by the name of Tadashi Morimura was sent to Pearl Harbor under the cover of a phony political assignment at the Japanese embassy. The FBI knew that his real name was Takeo Yoshikawa and that he had been trained as a military officer. He had no political experience, so they knew his assignment to a political post was a cover. They photographed him as he came off the ship. They tracked him everywhere he went. They bugged his telephone. They knew what he was doing every minute of the day. Often he would take a car to the top of a hill overlooking the harbor and photograph the location of ships. Then he would use a clandestine radio to send coded messages to Japan giving the exact grid locations for all the ships, the times of their movements, how many soldiers and sailors were on duty, what time they reported, and what time they left the base. All of this information was clearly of military importance and pointed to the possibility of a surprise attack. The FBI wanted to arrest Yoshikawa and send him home, but the Office of Naval Intelligence intervened, with White House approval, saying: Leave this guy alone. He is our responsibility. We’ll handle it. J. Edgar Hoover, who was head of the FBI at that time, objected strongly, and it almost erupted into a contest of inter-agency authority between the FBI and Naval Intelligence. In the end, Naval Intelligence had its way, and Yoshikawa was allowed to continue his mission without even knowing he was being watched.[18]

Just four days before the attack, U.S. Navy Intelligence intercepted this message from Yoshikawa: “NO CHANGE OBSERVED BY AFTERNOON OF 2 DECEMBER. SO FAR THEY DO NOT SEEM TO HAVE BEEN ALERTED. SHORE LEAVE AS USUAL.” On December 6, just one day before the attack, this message was intercepted: “THERE ARE NO BARRAGE BALLOONS AT THESE PLACES – AND CONSIDERABLE OPPORTUNITY IS LEFT FOR A SURPRISE ATTACK.”[19]

It was bizarre. Here was an enemy agent gathering strategic information in preparation for a surprise attack on American forces, and people at the highest levels of the United States government were protecting him. They deliberately allowed the flow of information to continue so the Japanese would be successful in their mission.

VACANT SEAS POLICY

Another example of facilitating the attack on Pearl Harbor is what was called the Vacant Seas Policy. For many months, the Navy had known from what direction the Japanese were likely to approach, what sea corridor they would use to launch their attack. They even had conducted maneuvers simulating it themselves. One was called Exercise 191 and the other OPORD1. Because of weather patterns, sea currents, location of commercial ship lanes, demand on fuel supplies, and other factors, they knew that the Japanese would approach from the North Pacific Ocean in an operational area between 157 and 158 degrees west longitude.[20]

This presented a special challenge. If the crew of any ship had seen a Japanese armada steaming toward Hawaii, they undoubtedly would have used the radio to send word ahead. They would have said: “Hey, there’s something going on here. There’s a fleet of aircraft carriers and destroyers heading your way.” That, of course, would have spoiled everything. Also, if the Japanese knew that their approach had been detected, they would have lost the advantage of surprise and might have aborted their plan.

American intelligence was well aware of every stage of Japanese preparations. It was already known that Admiral Nagumo was outfitting his carrier strike force at Hitokappu Bay on the Japanese island of Etorofu. His progress was monitored closely, and daily reports were sent to Washington. His ships departed from Japan and headed for Pearl Harbor on November 25.[21]

Within hours, Navy headquarters in Washington initiated the Vacant Seas directive that all military and commercial ships must now stay out of the North Pacific corridor. They were diverted hundreds of miles on a trans-Pacific route through the Torres Straits so there would be no encounter that might alert the intended victims or cause the Japanese to abort their mission.[22]

The next stage in the strategy was to bring the ships of the 7th Fleet home from sea duty and bottle them up inside Pearl Harbor. That would make them easy targets because they couldn’t maneuver. To accomplish this over the strong objection of Admiral Kimmel, who was in charge of the Fleet, his superiors in Washington cut back on deliveries of fuel. Without fuel, Kimmel had no choice. He had to curtail training exercises at sea and bring his ships back into port. In his memoirs, published in 1955, he said:
Shortly after I organized the Fleet in three major task forces, I attempted to keep two of the three forces at sea and only one at Peal Harbor. I quickly found that fuel deliveries were falling behind consumption. The reserves were being depleted at a time when it was imperative to increase them. It was this fact, and this alone, which made it necessary to have two task forces simultaneously in Pearl Harbor.[23]

A Congressional investigation in 1946 revealed that, just a few days before the attack, Navy headquarters in Washington ordered twenty-one of the most modern ships in the 7th Fleet to leave Pearl Harbor and deploy at Wake and Midway Islands. The aircraft carriers, Lexington and Enterprise were among those ships. This not only left the remaining Fleet with drastically reduced protection, it also meant that the ships anchored in the harbor were primarily old relics from World War I, many of which were already slated to be scrapped. As Secretary of War Stimson had stated in his diaries: “The question was, how we should maneuver them into firing the first shot without allowing too much damage to ourselves.” Sacrificing only the old and marginally useful ships was the solution to that problem.[24]

INTERCEPTED CODED MESSAGES

Were the victims at Pear Harbor insulated from information that might have allowed them to protect themselves? Could those thousands of Americans who lost their lives been alerted in time to take defensive action? Or were they deliberately sacrificed because their deaths were needed to create the emotional drama to justify going to war? The answer to that question is not a pleasant one.

Throughout this time, the Japanese were using a combination of military and diplomatic codes. U.S. intelligence agencies had cracked all of them.[25]According to Homer Kisner, who was Chief of the Pacific Fleet’s Radio-Intercept team, his men intercepted and decoded more than a million of those messages.[26] For three months prior to the allegedly surprise attack, Navy Intelligence knew everything in minute detail. Yet, not one of those messages was ever sent to the commanders at Pearl Harbor.[27] In his memoirs, Admiral Kimmel said:
At Pearl Harbor, General Short and I knew only a small part of the political story behind the Japanese attack. Care was taken not to send us the intercepted Japanese messages, which told in great detail each step in the Japanese program…. For three months prior to the attack on the fleet a wealth of vital information received in Washington was withheld from the commanders in Hawaii. The information received during the ten days preceding the attack clearly pointed to the fleet at Pearl Harbor as the Japanese objective, yet not one word of warning and none of this information was given to the Hawaii commanders.[28]

The most important intercept of the Japanese coded messages was obtained on the night before the attack. That message made clear even the exact hour that the strike would come. It was to be 1:00 PM Washington time. The intercept was decoded 61⁄2 hours before that. It was rushed to President Roosevelt and his top military advisors for immediate action. Their response was to do absolutely nothing. They sat on it and deliberately let the clock run out.[29]

The military Chief of Staff at that time was General George Marshall, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Marshall claimed that he was on horseback that morning, riding in the park. The reason he did not take immediate action, he said, was that he didn’t know about the intercept until he arrived at his office at 11:25 A.M. However, even then he still had 11⁄2 hours before the attack. He could have picked up the telephone and spoken to the Hawaii commanders directly. He could have used any one of several military radio systems designed for exactly such kinds of urgent communications, but he did none of those things. According to witnesses, he read and re-read the intercept and shuffled the paper from one side of his desk to the other while another half hour ticked away. Then, at 11:52, he finally sent a warning to the commanders at Pearl Harbor. The method? It was a commercial telegram sent through Western Union! It arrived six hours after the attack![30]

AN ACT OF STATESMANSHIP

For many years after World War II, Roosevelt’s admirers denied that neither he nor anyone in his administration had prior knowledge; but the evidence now is so clear that he even facilitated the attack, no one tries to deny it anymore. The new line of defense is that he was justified in doing so. It was an act of great statesmanship, you see, because, otherwise, Europe would have been overrun by Hitler and, eventually, even the United States might have been attacked. Furthermore, we had a moral obligation to come to the aid of our British and French brethren.[31] It took great courage and wisdom, they say, for Roosevelt to foresee this and confront totalitarianism before it became stronger. The American people were too stupid to realize how important it was. They were too ignorant to understand. They were too isolationist in their thinking to realize they must accept a leadership role in the affairs of the world. So, what is a collectivist to do? You can’t leave it to the ignorant voters to decide such important matters. There was no choice but to lie, to deceive the American people, and ruin the careers of loyal military officers by making them scapegoats. We had to violate our Constitution and our laws.[32] It was statesmanship to kill thousands of Americans in order to bring the stupid voters to the correct point of view. Don’t you see? The only way to stop totalitarianism in Europe was to establish totalitarianism in America.

Even Robert Stinnett, the man who found the McCollum memorandum, succumbed to this insane argument. In the preface of his book, he wrote: “As a veteran of the Pacific War, I felt a sense of outrage as I uncovered secrets that had been hidden from Americans for more than fifty years. But I understood the agonizing dilemma faced by President Roosevelt. He was forced to find circuitous means to persuade an isolationist America to join in a fight for freedom.”[33]

One of the men who made sure that Admiral Kimmel and General Short never knew about the decoded Japanese messages was Lieutenant Commander Joseph Rochefort, head of the Navy’s Mid-Pacific Radio Intelligence Network. Rochefort got right to the point. He said: “It was a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country.”[34]

Listen well, Ladies and Gentlemen. That is the voice of collectivism: 2,388 people killed, another 1,178 wounded[35]– mostly Americans –and it’s a pretty cheap price to pay for unifying the country. Anything can be justified merely by claiming that it is the greater good for the greater number.[36]

As it was in WWI, the American leaders in World War II also were focused far beyond the war itself. Even before Pearl Harbor, Fabians and Leninists were drafting the structure for a world government. It was to be called the United Nations; and, at the end of the conflict, it would be offered to a war-weary world as “our last best hope for peace.” Most of this work was done in the State Department Post-War Foreign Policy Planning Division, under the direction of Alger Hiss, who actually was in both camps at the same time. Not only was he an advisor to FDR and a former President of the Carnegie Endowment Fund (which puts him squarely in the Fabian camp), he also was an undercover agent for the Soviets. Hiss was the man who personally delivered the newly drafted UN Charter to the founding meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco, and he became the first Secretary General of that organization. If you are wondering about the significance of these facts, it is this: After smashing the world to bits in world war for the second time, the UN became the collectivist blueprint for remolding it to the heart’s desire.

OPERATION MONGOOSE

In a moment, our time machine will deliver us to the year 2002 and the War on Terrorism; but along the way, we must make a short stop at the year 1962. The exact date is August 8. It is sixteen months after the Kennedy Administration had been embarrassed by a botched invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. We find ourselves now at the Pentagon, in the offices of General Lyman Lemnitzer who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. We are watching as the general signs a top-secret document destined for the Secretary of Defense who, at this time is Robert McNamara, a member of the CFR. The most important part of this document is contained in the Appendix to Enclosure A, and the subject line of that section reads: Justification for US Military Intervention in Cuba.

In the eight pages that follow, there is a detailed proposal for a covert military action called “Operation Mongoose.” Its purpose is to create an acceptable justification for the United States to invade Cuba. The preferred scenario is to convince the Cuban government that it is about to be attacked and, thereby, goad it into some kind of military action, which then could be pointed to as aggression against the U.S. It is the old, familiar strategy to AGGRAVATE an opponent into a first strike. If that should fail, the secondary scenario is to stage phony attacks against the American base in Guantanamo and against civilian commercial aircraft, making it look like the work of the Cuban military. The strategy also calls for a U.S. fighter pilot to fake being attacked by Cuban MIGs and to radio that he has been hit and is going down. Then he is to fly to a secret installation where the tail number of his plane will be changed so the plane genuinely will be missing from the roster. Meanwhile, a U.S. submarine is to disperse aircraft parts and a parachute into the waters near Cuba where they will eventually be found by search and rescue teams.

In addition to these phony attacks, covert agents are to launch real terrorist attacks against civilians in Miami and Washington DC – with genuine casualties. The plan is to make the U.S. appear to be a victim of unprovoked attacks by a ruthless enemy, and this will prepare world opinion to accept an all-out invasion of Cuba as justified retaliation.

As we stand here listening to the details of this plan, we would find it impossible to believe that such treachery is actually being contemplated by high-ranking U.S. military officers – were it not for the fact that we are looking at the document with our own eyes. By the way, Operation Mongoose has since been de-classified as a result of the Freedom-of- Information Act and, if you want to read it for yourself, it can be downloaded from the National Archives web site. [37] Here are a few excerpts taken from that document:
This plan … should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States…. The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere….
1. Since it would seem desirable to use legitimate provocation as the basis for US military intervention in Cuba, a cover and deception plan … could be executed as an initial effort to provoke Cuban reactions. Harassment plus deceptive actions to convince the Cubans of imminent invasion would be emphasized….
2. A series of well coordinated incidents will be planned to take place in and around Guantanamo to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.

a. Incidents to establish a credible attack (not in chronological order):
Start rumors (many). Use clandestine radio.
Land friendly Cubans in uniform “over-the-fence” to stage attack on base.
Capture Cuban (friendly) saboteurs inside the base.
Stage riots near the base main gate (friendly Cubans).
Blow up ammunition inside the base; start fires.
Burn aircraft on air base (sabotage).
Lob mortar shells from outside of base into base. Some damage to installation.
Capture assault teams approaching from the sea or vicinity of Guantanamo City.
Capture militia group which storms the base.
Sabotage ship in harbor; large fires – napathalene.
Sink ship near harbor entrance. Conduct funerals for mockvictims….

3. A “Remember the Main” incident could be arranged in several forms:

a. We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

b. We could blow up a drone (unmanned) vessel anywhere in the Cuban waters. … The presence of Cuban planes or ships merely investigating the intent of the vessel could be fairly compelling evidence that the ship was taken under attack…. The US could follow up with an air/sea rescue operation covered by US fighters to “evacuate” remaining members of the non-existent crew. Casualty lists in US newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.

4. We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized….

5. Use of MIG type aircraft by US pilots could provide additional provocation. Harassment of civil air, attacks on surface shipping and destruction of US military drone aircraft by MIG type planes would be useful as complementary actions. An F- 86 properly painted would convince air passengers that they saw a Cuban MIG, especially if the pilot of the transport were to announce such fact….

In action item number eight, Operation Mongoose proposed an incident designed to convince the world that Cuban MIGs had shot down a civilian commercial aircraft as it flew near Cuba on its way from the United States to someplace in South America. It was to be a chartered flight utilizing one of the air services in the Miami area that are secretly operated by the CIA. An aircraft at Elgin Air Force Base was to be painted and numbered as an exact replica of the commercial craft. The duplicate would be substituted for the original and loaded with passengers who were carefully selected government operatives using false names. The original aircraft would be converted to a drone and flown by remote control. Both planes would rendezvous south of Florida. The document continues:
From the rendezvous point the passenger-carrying aircraft will descend to minimum altitude and go directly into an auxiliary field at Elgin AFB where arrangements will have been made to evacuate the passengers and return the aircraft to its original status. The drone aircraft meanwhile will continue to fly the filed flight plan. When over Cuba, the drone will be transmitting on the international distress frequency a “MAY DAY” message stating he is under attack by Cuban MIG aircraft. The transmission will be interrupted by destruction of the aircraft which will be triggered by radio signal. This will allow ICAO radio stations in the Western Hemisphere to tell the US what has happened to the aircraft instead of the US trying to “sell” the incident.

The blueprint for Operation MONGOOSE is much too long to quote in its entirety, but I think this gives you a pretty good idea of its nature. Even though the plan was never put into action, the fact that it was even theorized and sent to the Secretary of Defense with a recommendation for consideration is highly significant. Some will say that plans like this should be of no concern to us. They are just paper war games, and military people are expected to dream up all sorts of scenarios to cover every conceivable event so as to have a prepared response ahead of time no matter what happens. That may be true, but Operation Mongoose is not in that category. It is not a plan to react to an aggressive move by a potential enemy. It is a plan to be the aggressor, and to conceal that fact from the world. It undoubtedly was justified by the argument that Communist Cuba is a threat to the security of the American people, and whatever it takes to eliminate that threat is acceptable. It is a classic example of collectivist morality, a philosophy that declares anything to be ethical so long as it can be said to be for the greater good of the greater number.

Communism in Cuba or anywhere else should be opposed because it is the embodiment of collectivism. However, if we oppose the Cuban brand of collectivism by accepting an American brand of collectivism, we will lose the war for freedom, and we will do it to ourselves. We will not be conquered by enemies from abroad, but we will be enslaved by enemies from within.



1 Philip Dru, Administrator (New York: Angriff Press, 1912) p. 45.

2 Ibid., pp. 199, 200.

3 It must be remembered that Philip Dru was published in 1912. The U.S. income tax and Federal Reserve System were then in the drafting stages and being promoted by House, Wilson, J.P. Morgan, and other collectivists in Washington. The income tax and Federal Reserve were passed into law the following year, 1913.

4“The Historical Significance of the House Diary,” by Arthur Walworth, Yale University Library, http://www.library.yale.edu/un/house/hist_sig.htm.
Also “An Internationalist Primer,” by Wlliam Grigg, The New American, September 16, 1996,
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/1996/vo12no19/vo12no19_cfr.htm.

5 Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (New York: Houghton Miffflin Co., 1926), Vol. 1, p.114.

6 George Sylvester Viereck, The Strangest Friendship in History: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (new York: Liveright Publishers, 1932), p. 4.

7 Burton J. Hendrick, The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), p. 11 (Internet edition), http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/wwi/memoir/Page/Page 14.htm.

8 Viereck, pp. 106–108. This matter is discussed in The Memoirs of William Jennings Bryan Vol. II. pp. 404–406.

9 Quoted by Viereck, pp. 112–113.

10 Churchill wrote in his memoirs: “The first British countermove, made on my responsibility, … was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged U-boat had to rely increasingly on underwater attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.” Winston Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1949), p. 300. This appears on page 464 of the Barnes & Noble 1993 reprint.

11 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Bantam Books, 1948, 1950), Vol.1, pp. 235, 247.

12 Sherwood, Vol. 1, p. 461.

13T.R. Fehrenbach, F.D.R.’s Undeclared War 1939 to 1941 (New York: David McKay Company, 1967), pp. 252–259.

14 Charles Callan Tansill, Back Door to War (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1952), p. 613

15 Hearings before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack, Congress of the United States, Seventy-Ninth Congress (Washington, D.C., 1946), Part 11. p. 5421, as cited by Prang. The reference is Part 11, p. 5433, as quoted by Kimmel, p. 1. Also quoted by Stinnett but with no reference, p. 179.

16 Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit; The Truth about FDR and Peal Harbor (New York: Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 2000). The McCollum memorandum is on pp. 272–277.

17 Stinnett, p. 275.

18 For the complete story, see Stinnett, pp. 83–118. Also John Toland, Infamy (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982), pp. 59, 60.

19Stinnett, pp. 85, 109. Also Toland, p. 300.

20 Stinnett, p. 146.

21 Stinnett, pp.43–59.

22 Stinnett, pp. 44, 144, 145.

23 Admiral Kimmel’s Story, p. 28.

24 Stinnett, pp. 152, 153. 12

25 John Toland, Infamy (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1982), pp. 57, 58. Also Stinnett, pp. 21–23.

26 Stinnett, p. 58.

27 There was a serious disagreement between Admiral Richard Turner and his staff over this very issue. When Captain Alan Kirk, Chief of Naval Intelligence, objected to withholding the intercepted messages from Kimmel and Short, he was relieved of his command. See Toland, pp. 57–60.

28 Kimmel, pp. 2,3.

29 The man who personally delivered the final message to FDR in the White House was Captain Beardall, the President’s Naval Attaché. According to Beardall, FDR read the intercept and, in spite of the 1 P.M. deadline, showed no alarm. (See Hearings on Pearl Harbor Attack, Part 11, p. 5287 ff. as cited by Stinnett, p. 233.) This was a foretaste of President Bush’s lack of alarm when he received information that the second plane had crashed into the Twin Towers on 9-11.

30 Stinnett, pp. 225–237. Also Toland, pp. 10, 11.

31 That part is true, but it was an individual moral obligation, not a group obligation. In other words, anyone who felt deeply about this was perfectly free to go to Europe and volunteer for the British or French armies or to organize a volunteer American brigade, but no one had the right to use force of law to conscript others into the American armed services and send them into battle for that purpose. It is important to note that none of the master planners of this infamy ever felt a moral obligation to put themselves into combat. That honor was reserved for others.

32 Unfortunately, it is sometimes necessary to ignore laws in time of war, especially in the heat of battle, but the purpose of these deeds was not to win a war, it was to get into a war. The difference is as night unto day.

33 Stinnett, p. xiii. It is undoubtedly because of this message that Stinnett’s book was accepted for publication by Simon and Schuster and given wide distribution. Readers of the author’s book, The Creature from Jekyll Island; A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, will recall a parallel situation in which Simon and Schuster published Secrets of the Temple, by William Greider. Greider did an excellent job of critiquing the Federal Reserve but, when it came to offering a solution, his message basically was to relax and forget about it. The Fed, he said, had made plenty of mistakes in the past, but no sweeping reforms are needed. All we need, he said, are wiser men to run it. It makes no difference if you expose a corrupt monetary system if your solution is to do nothing about it. And it makes no difference if you expose the infamy at Pearl Harbor if your conclusion is that it was an act of statesmanship. Collectivists do not care about how much the public knows if they have no realistic plan of action to bring about change. That is why they offer false leaders (including authors) who will point with alarm at the problems of collectivism but then lead exactly nowhere.

34 The Reminiscences of Captain Joseph J. Rochefort (US Naval Institute Oral History Division, 1970), p. 163, as quoted by Stennett, p. 203.

35 Determining the Facts, Chart 1: December 7, 1941 losses, http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/18arizona/18charts1.htm.

36 A significant portion of the financial support for Nazi industry, including military production, came from Wall Street investment houses controlled by CFR members and others who shared their collectivist mindset. For this part of the history, see the author’s World without Cancer; The Story of Vitamin B17, Part II (available from www.realityzone.com). When it is realized how those collectivists in the United States who were beating the war drums against Hitler were also heavily investing in the Nazi war machine, it becomes even more clear that the war was not about stopping Hitler. It was about smashing the world to bits so it could be remolded to the heart’s desire. It is sad to realize that hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives in this war thinking they were fighting for freedom; but they were betrayed by their leaders. The purpose of the war had nothing to do with freedom. It was a contest to determine which group of collectivists would dominate the world. Soldiers were pawns on the global chessboard. Their patriotism was used against them. They eagerly rushed into battle to defeat Nazism and Fascism, never suspecting they were fighting on the side of Fabianism and Leninism, forces that are essentially the same as those they fought.

37 This document can be downloaded from http://www.archives.gov. Click on “Research Room,” then on “Archival Research Catalog (ARC),” then on the ARC SEARCH button, then type in “Northwoods” in the search box, then click on “Digital Copy” on entry #1. The key information will be found on images 136 through 142.