West’s Support for Extremism “Blows Back” in New York Shooting
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The tragic mass shooting in Buffalo, New York was carried out by an extremist with an ideology stemming from modern-day |\|AZlSM practices most openly in Ukraine. Just as Western support for extremists in Syria blew back in the form of global terrorism, its support for |\|AZlS in Ukraine is emboldening and encouraging their toxic ideology worldwide.
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Addendum
By TGP editors
(Below material from a local news source in the Buffalo area)
In an alleged 180-page manifesto, the Tops Markets shooter claimed his name was Payton Gendron and attended Broome CC.
However, photos in the document (below) are of sketch comedian Sam Hyde, and Broome CC public safety said they had no record of a Payton Gendron. @news4buffalo pic.twitter.com/fbgSGwVP1H
— adam duke (@duke_university) May 14, 2022
One of the victims in the attack was identified as Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo Police officer who was working as a security guard at Tops. Officials said Salter attempted to stop the attack and shot Gendron in the chest, but he was unharmed because he was wearing tactical body armor.
The alleged manifesto carries on for numerous pages about the type of gear that was chosen specifically for the attack, from his helmet and weapon all the way down to his underwear. It plots his breakfast, arrival time, live stream and getaway.
The writer says he will plead guilty in trial if he survives the rampage.
Gendron said only four words in court Saturday before being taken away: “I understand my charges.”
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EXPOSING CAPITALISM'S MULTITUDE OF VICES AND INCURABLE PROBLEMS
Apr 30, 2022
On the heels of the Biden administration’s announcement of a “Ministry of Truth”-esque “Disinformation Governance Board” in the Homeland Security Department, Florida’s GOP Governor Ron Desantis responded by insisting that he will do everything in his power to protect liberty and not let the federal government stifle free speech under the guise of exposing propaganda and misinformation by foreign governments. Jimmy and The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal discuss how the Democrats are becoming authoritarian and ceding the freedom-defending zone to right-wingers like Ron Desantis.
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Kutner built up his reputation as a human rights lawyer during the late 1940s. Gaining a reputation among the convicted as “the Springman,”1 Kutner was noted for his ability to get people out of prison. By the end of his career, he would be credited with gaining the release of over 1,000 people. Some were wrongfully convicted, others were being held without charge.
One prisoner whom Kutner freed was an African-American man named James Montgomery.2 Kutner effected his release in 1949. Montgomery had spent nearly two-and-a-half decades in prison, having been framed for rape. The appeals court judge called the original trial a “sham” and found that the prosecutor threatened Montgomery and his defense lawyer with violent retaliation by the Ku Klux Klan if a guilty plea was not entered.
Three years before Rosa Parks would make her famous refusal to move to the back of the bus, Kutner filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Black passenger against Illinois Greyhound Lines.3 Upon entering Jim Crow Tennessee on a trip from Chicago to Mississippi, the bus driver had forced the passenger to the back of the bus where no seating was available. The passenger was forced to stand for a trip of approximately 150 miles.
In 1949, Kutner organized what is thought to be the first federal lawsuit against a prison warden by inmates. The suit charged the warden with stealing from prisoners, using prison labor for the personal benefit of prison staff, and a regime of brutality run by the prison guards.4
In 1966, Kutner was instrumental in getting an injunction against George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party.5 The judgment prevented the Nazis from holding a demonstration in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. Rockwell hoped to intimidate the area’s Jewish residents into ceasing their support for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to integrate areas of the city.
Kunter’s reputation began to grow—especially as he began to take on more international cases. These cases tended to (though not always) deal with prisoners held in the Eastern Bloc or in the newly independent countries of the non-aligned world. Such cases, for obvious reasons, were most attractive to the U.S. press.
Kutner worked on the case of József Cardinal Mindszenty, a Hungarian priest whose story became a centerpiece of anti-communist propaganda in the west. Mindszenty’s “glazed over” look at his trial would become the CIA’s excuse to embark on MK/ULTRA experimentation.6
In 1958, he helped free the fascist poet Ezra Pound. Kutner claimed that, upon release, Pound asked him if he was Jewish and then spat in his face.7
He is listed in several obituaries, including in the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, as “co-founder of Amnesty International.”8 This is almost certainly an exaggeration. His papers from the period do show a close correspondence with Peter Benenson,9 Amnesty’s “other” co-founder. These letters date from the early days of the organization (then called “Appeal for Amnesty”). But they also seem to indicate that he and Benenson met only after its creation. Kutner did, though, serve on the National Advisory Council of the organization’s U.S. branch.
Some of his other famous cases include seeking the freedom of Moise Tshombe, a Belgian-backed Congolese secessionist leader, and that of hundreds of prisoners in Northern Ireland—held without being charged by the British government—in Long Kesh prison.
Kutner also built his reputation by devising some important legal concepts. One of them was a legal device that Kutner called “World Habeas Corpus,” which he hoped would extend the right to people across the globe. Kutner attempted for years to create a non-governmental organization around this idea. In the style of Amnesty International, it would maintain offices across the world. The method by which Kutner aimed to fund his dream, declassified documents show, were considerably less worthy than the concept.
An examination of declassified government documents only adds to the controversy. They reveal Luis Kutner’s many hidden interactions with the FBI, the CIA, and the mafia underworld.10 The record of his association with various far-right figures is also included. They even reveal the violent efforts of a terrorist group he defended under the guise of “human rights.”
Committing Conscientious Objectors
Kutner’s earliest documented attempt to collude with the FBI came in 1944. He had been called upon to defend indigent draft resisters in federal court. Unfortunately, he seemed to place what he perceived to be the needs of the U.S. war effort above the interests of his clients.
During the course of a trial, Kutner approached the judge with a somewhat “novel” idea. He proposed that the judge place his client, one of the numerous Black Muslims who was refusing the draft for religious reasons, into a mental hospital.11 Kutner reasoned that being committed rather than being incarcerated would prevent the man from being seen as “martyr.” Kutner said:
These so-called “Mohammedans” are seeking martyrdom. Many have been sent to prison, and that pleases them. They consider themselves martyrs. They should be examined for sanity. The prestige of their movement would be destroyed if they went to asylums instead of prisons.
The judge took Kutner’s advice and the case made the newspapers.
Apparently pleased with his formulation for dealing with religious objectors, Kutner advised the same method for dealing with another client of his, this one a Jehovah’s Witness.12 Kutner typed a letter to J. Edgar Hoover which discussed this approach to objectors—and then alerted the FBI boss of the supposed dangers the Jehovah’s Witnesses presented to the U.S. war effort. Kutner received an appreciative, if somewhat dismissive, letter back from Hoover.13
Apart from what looks like a lawyer working against the wishes of his clients, Kutner was also working against a liberalizing shift in conscientious objector laws which had taken place as the Second World War approached. Recalling the horrific abuse meted out to anyone who refused service during World War One, organizations emerged to press the U.S. government for new protections for religious objectors.
One such organization is the Center on Conscience and War. It formed in 1940 and still works to protect conscientious objectors today. Maria Santelli, the Executive Director of the Center, judged Kutner’s actions this way:
[Kutner] is bringing in his own personal bias in his representation… [the defendants were] ready to go to jail as thousands of others had. That was their witness. So that was their act of conscience as they saw it. He circumvented that. The lawyer circumvented that witness.14
This may have been the first time Luis Kutner prioritized his political views over human rights, but as we’ll see later, it would not be the last.
“On the Fringes of the Chicago Mob”
According to the Chicago Historical Society who keeps part of his papers, Kutner was “on the fringes of the Chicago mob” in his youth.15 This brought Kutner into contact with one “Sparky” Rubenstein16 — more familiarly known to history as Jack Ruby. Rubenstein was just three years Kutner’s junior and also a hanger-on of Chicago’s West Side gangs.
Both remained tied to the mob in one way or another in the following years. Ruby moved to Dallas to help the Chicago mob expand its rackets in the city. Kutner stayed in Chicago to practice law, counting mob figures among his clients. And during this period, they apparently did not lose touch.
In the early 1950s, a Senate committee known as the Kefauver Committee was investigating the power of organized crime in the United States. Kutner made national news for his representation of two men in front of the committee: Harry Russell, a Chicago bookie who worked for the Capone gang, and William Drury, a former police officer. Drury was called to testify17 against a corrupt Republican candidate for Sheriff—but he was murdered before he could testify.
But one important event didn’t make the news at the time—it would rather become famous in the wake of the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Kutner had acted as an intermediary between his old acquaintance, Jack Ruby, and the Senate committee.
According to Kutner, he connected Ruby with the committee’s Chief Counsel, Rudolph Halley. Kutner described Ruby’s goal as becoming the mafia’s “pipeline” into the commission.18 Ruby’s apparent goal was to steer the committee away from taking its investigation to Dallas.19
Though there’s no evidence that Jack Ruby’s influence had any effect, Kefauver did not end up taking his investigatory road show to Dallas. Kefauver actually complimented20 a police representative for the Texas city “for catching [organized crime] before it got started down in Dallas.”
The facts in Dallas were a little bit different — the city had a steadily growing underworld and burgeoning drugs trade. Within a few years, another Senate investigation would put Dallas in the top tier21 of U.S. cities for narcotics trafficking.
It is perhaps important to note that Kutner wasn’t just representing others in front of the Kefauver Committee—he was also called upon to defend himself from serious accusations. Specifically, he was forced to deny reports that he had “obtained $60,000 from racketeers by falsely claiming he could ‘fix’ the Senate Committee.”22
At some point in the ensuing years, Kutner became an FBI informant. Listed by the Bureau as symbol informant CG 5973-C,23 Kutner reported on the activities24 of Chicago mob “fixer” Gus Alex and his lawyer, Sidney Korshak. Korshak would later famously become a focus of a New York Times investigation lead by Seymour Hersh.25
CIA, the Mafia, and the Plots to Kill Castro
Kutner first became involved in international intrigues26 in 1960 when he acted as an emissary for two major mafia figures to the FBI. Kutner carried an offer to eliminate Cuban leader Fidel Castro to the FBI.
The two mob bosses were Norman Rothman and Sam Mannarino. Mannarino ran the rackets in Pittsburg, and Rothman had run mafia casinos in Batista’s Cuba. Kutner was Rothman’s attorney while the two gangsters were out on bond, awaiting sentencing for a recent federal conviction. A jury had found them guilty on two important counts: a 1958 theft of weapons27 from an Ohio National Guard Armory, and neutrality act violations for attempting to get the stolen weapons to Cuba.
An FBI memo28 describes the events of May 9th, 1960. Seeking a lighter sentence for his client, Kutner walked into the office of the Assistant U.S. Attorney and advised officials there of the following:
[Rothman] has been a close personal friend of Fulgencio Batista, and is one of the few persons trusted by Batista… in fact he, Rothman, during the time Batista was in power, was in charge of all gambling in Cuba. Having known Batista as well as he claims and being aware of his current activities and also revolutionary activities he is in a position to know what may happen in Cuba in the future. As a matter of fact, he claims to be able to “deliver Castro to the United States cause or cause Castro to be wiped out”. Rothman likewise claims an acquaintanceship with Castro. (Emphasis added)
The response of the FBI was to ask Kutner’s cooperation to “determine specifically what information Norman Rothman might have, which might be of interest to the Bureau or any other Government agency.” (Emphasis added)
In 1975, when the Church Committee made the first official exposures of combined CIA/mafia efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro,29 they pinpointed the first plotting as starting in August of 1960—just a few months following Rothman’s offer.
But while the Church Committee’s story begins with the relationship between the CIA, Howard Hughes, attorney Robert Maheu, and Las Vegas gangster Johnny Roselli, a 1975 New York News investigation30starts somewhat earlier. It appears to fill in the intervening months and places Rothman at the center of the early plotting.
“Rothman was in touch with several CIA agents,” a former agent said. “They had many meetings concerning assassination plots against Castro.”
Rothman in turn discussed the matter with his peers… among those who took part in these parleys, reliable sources said, were Santo Trafficante of Tampa, and Sam Mannarino of Pittsburgh… the mob and CIA finally gave [the contract] to [Johnny] Roselli, reputed boss of Las Vegas, federal sources said. And Roselli agreed to recruit a death squad to hunt Castro.
From the timeline, it appears that the offer Kutner carried was accepted.
It is worth noting that Jack Ruby’s reported Cuban gun-running also coincides with the same period as Rothman and Mannarino’s. Further, Ruby’s friend, Lewis McWillie,31 managed one of Rothman’s Havana casinos.32
Rothman’s attempts to intervene in international politics didn’t end in 1960—and as we’ll soon see, neither did Kutner’s. FBI files implicate Rothman as a partner in a plan to overthrow the Guatemalan government in 1965.33 Weapons for the effort were provided by CIA agent and anti-Castro Cuban fighter Luis Posada Carriles. Posada would later become infamous for his role in the terror bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which killed all 73 people on board.
Through 1961, Kutner continued his role as an FBI criminal informant, but was dropped by the FBI for providing dubious information on the mafia’s pilferage along the New York waterfront. The FBI determined that Kutner’s information was substantiated “only by Kutner’s own opinion and belief.”34
Sometime in the early 1960s, Kutner became Guatemala’s Consul General for the city of Chicago. Why Guatemala would give him this honor is unclear, but the country did play an important role in the war against Cuba. Since before the Bay of Pigs operation, it was a key base35 for CIA, mafia, and Cuban exile attacks on Cuba. Additionally, a 1966 FBI memo36 indicated that Chicago mobster Sam Giancana had a home in Guatemala. While acting as a consular official for the Guatemalan military government in the United States, Kutner would have been able to provide important services for travelers between the countries.
Whether Kutner continued his mediation between his mafia clients and the CIA during the period is unknown. But by 1963, Kutner felt self-assured enough to approach the Central Intelligence Agency for clandestine funding.
A CIA Staffed Newspaper
In 1963, Kutner embarked on a publishing venture—a newspaper called the Yugoslav Herald. The paper would be aimed at the Midwest’s large Southern Slav population.
A memo between the CIA and their liaison with the FBI37 notes a remarkable fact: Kutner had requested CIA financial support for the paper. In return, Kutner offered the CIA a hand in choosing the newspaper’s managing editor.
Mr. Kutner stated that the post of managing editor would be held open and that he was confident a candidate could be found for this job in consultation with this agency.
The CIA told the FBI that they “planned no contact” with Kutner, and intended no “follow up action” on the matter. It stated that it was relaying this information solely because of the FBI’s interest in both Kutner and the editor of Kutner’s new paper, one Andrew Kondich.
Kondich was a vocal anti-fascist and the editor of a second paper, the Abendpost, which was targeted at Germans in the Chicago area. Kutner seemed especially interested in Kondich’s knowledge of (and opposition to) the fascist European exile movements. Interestingly, Kutner thought the CIA might be as well—but to what end is hard to gather.
It was just a few months prior that Kutner had become publicly involved with a group called the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN). The ABN was created during the Second World War by ultra-nationalist Ukrainians who had collaborated with the Nazis. There was a substantial crossover between the group which had started the ABN and groups that had committed war crimes and participated in the Nazi’s genocidal military campaign inside the USSR. The ABN became associated with U.S. intelligence in 1945 when General Reinhard Gehlen delivered the Nazi’s Eastern Front intelligence apparatus to the U.S. Army.
Kutner had met with the ABN’s President,38 Yaroslav Stetsko, in March of 1963. That summer, he was a prominent speaker39 at one of the ABN’s “Captive Nations Week” events.
Likely the ABN leadership felt that Kutner provided them with the liberal cover of a “Nobel Prize nominee” and the ability to deflect charges of anti-semitism. Kutner seemed to move with ease between groups founded by Nazi-aligned war criminals to groups that were dedicated, in part, to the extradition of Nazi war criminals.40
The nature of Kutner’s Yugoslav Herald is as difficult to decipher as Kutner himself. It billed its politics as “neutral,” had a decidedly anti-fascist editor, but according to an FBI informant41 it was printed in the same location as a far-right Serbian language paper called Serbian Struggle. The publisher of Serbian Struggle, a member of the John Birch Society named Slobodan M. Draskovich,42 would be interviewed by the FBI in 1964 for spreading the rumor that “Oswald had studied sharpshooting43 in Kiev.” Kondich’s take on the Kennedy Assassination, on the other hand, was the polar opposite. An FBI memo notes his opinion that the murder was carried out by “Birchites and Nazis.”44
Perhaps the Yugoslav Herald collapsed under the weight of its numerous contradictions—it printed only one issue before folding. According to an FBI informant, Kunter received a call45 from “a representative of a U.S. government agency” which precipitated a violent falling out46 between Kondich and Kutner. What followed an FBI investigation during which Kondich was fired from his job at Abendpost. The FBI then began looking into Kondich’s alleged attempts to infiltrate and disrupt47 Chicago’s Eastern European far-right community.
Old Associates—Jack Ruby and Luis Kutner
After Jack Ruby murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in the presence of over 70 Dallas police officers, the U.S. press turned to Kutner for information on his old associate. Kutner’s statements appeared in several newspaper articles. For the most part, his statements centered around his interactions with Ruby and the Kefauver commission as discussed above, but he also filled in some blanks on Ruby’s ties with the Chicago mob. This included, according to Kutner, links to the lieutenants of Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.
S I D E B A R
All of Kutner’s information would be largely ignored by the Warren Commission who told the country, without irony, that Jack Ruby was just a second “lone nut,” Kutner’s picture of Ruby would come much closer to the revisions that the House Select Committee on Assassinations made to the historical record in the late 1970s.
In a 1978 interview48 on a Canadian television show, Kutner pointed to a conspiracy by giving his opinion that Ruby would not have killed Oswald without being pressed into it:
I say it again and I say this with positive conviction that Jack Ruby, or Sparky Rubenstein, was totally incapable of that kind of an aggressive decision and doing it so openly and so deliberately.
Q: YOU KNEW JACK RUBY. WHY DID HE KILL OSWALD?
I would say enormous pressure, had to be enormous pressure. But if he did this job they would stand by him and get him out of this mess. That is a reasonable considered and informed conclusion, I could be in many schools of thought but he was not the man to do it on his own initiative.
Authors Peter Dale Scott and William W. Turner have both touched on the fact that Kutner made an appearance at an Information Council of the America’s (INCA) “National Citizen’s Congress” event in 1969. INCA was a far-right anti-communist group that could count among its supporters’ Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza49 and Guatemalan general and one of the plotters of the 1954 coup, General Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes.50 INCA was founded by Ed Butler—the man who famously participated in a radio debate with the Lee Harvey Oswald just months before the assassination in Dallas.
These far-right activists billed Kutner as a “moderate” and put up to debate radical New Left lawyer William Kunstler. INCA’s National Producer at that time was one Lee Edwards, a far-right promoter who Kutner would work with closely within the coming years.
“The Worst African Ever Born”
In 1967, saving the life of an African leader, [and notorious imperialist collaborator] Moise Tshombe, became a cause among America’s far-right51—and Kutner was at the center of the efforts. Here, he would find himself in alliance with high-powered politicians, like Senators Strom Thurmond and Thomas Dodd, as well as with conservative activists like Marvin Liebman and William F. Buckley.
Tshombe came to international prominence in 1960 during the “Congo crisis.” Almost immediately following the country’s independence from Belgium, Tshombe—backed by Belgian paratroopers and millions of dollars from Belgian mining companies—split the Katanga province from the rest of the country. The area was, by far, the most resource-rich in the country and was the home to the mining companies which were backing the succession. Within six months, Congo’s independence leader Patrice Lumumba—a symbol of rising African nationalism—would be sent to Tshombe’s pseudo-statelet and murdered.
Tshombe became a reviled figure in many parts of the world. In the Shona language of Zimbabwe, a derivative his name took on the same connotations52 that Norwegian traitor Vidkun Quisling’s surname had taken during the Second World War. In a 1965 Harlem speech,53 Malcolm X called Tshombe “the worst African ever born” and “a cold-blooded murderer.”
Tshombe faced a United Nations effort to oust him and rebuild the country. It was an episode during which UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld lost his life in a still controversial54 airplane crash. Tshombe was eventually ejected from Katanga—and sent off to exile in fascist Spain.
Reliably anti-communist and pro-western, Tshombe was recalled back to Congo in 1964. He was installed as Prime Minister of the country he had attempted to wreck just a few years before. With the help of the United States and its anti-Castro Cuban mercenaries, Tshombe waged a brutal civil war against Lumumbist and other Congolese rebels. He was finally toppled from within by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. Fleeing again to Spain, Tshombe was sentenced to death as a traitor by the coup government.
Things were about to get much worse for Tshombe. In an event whose authorship is still a mystery, Tshombe was kidnapped55 during a flight that was diverted to Algeria. It landed, and Tshombe was thrown into prison. The Algerian government assured the Congo that he would be extradited to face his sentence.
Though the Johnson administration seemed happy to stick with Mobutu, the American right sprang into action to “save” Tshombe. Op-eds flowed into newsprint and onto television. Speeches were made on the Senate floor.56 Luis Kutner became Mrs. Tshombe’s lawyer, who was traveling the world seeking support for her husband. Kutner took this as another chance to apply his World Habeas Corpus concept and convince the United Nations to act to spare Tshombe’s life.
Kutner made the media rounds, defending Tshombe’s record:
…Tshombe at all times has been a friend of human rights (sic), and he has always made an attempt to preserve the integrity of all persons in preaching the human dignity which the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seems to provide for.57
Tshombe’s record was considerably less perfect than Kutner described. As noted before, Lumumba’s torture and murder—along with those of his aides, Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito—was carried out in Tshombe’s puppet state.58 To lead his army, Tshombe turned to French Colonel Roger Trinquier, a veteran of France’s brutal Algerian counter-insurgency war and “a ruthless enthusiast of torture.”59Tshombe’s white mercenaries habitually shot their prisoners.60 Some of these mercenaries summed up their attitudes towards the Africans in a 1965 ABC television interview:61
Moloney: Well, one last night told me that he had burned two villages because two of his men had been killed in an attack. How would you defend this?
Major Hoare: Yes. Well, now it’s a question of how we define atrocities…. The burning of villages, this is punishment, and I’m entirely in favor, when it is required of punishing the rebels in this manner….
ABC’s Peters: Wally, how do you feel when you’re out there fighting? How do you feel about killing anyone?
Harper (a South African mercenary): The first time I felt a bit squeamish, but after that it was like, well I’d done a lot of cattle farming you know, and killing a lot of beasts, it’s just like, you know, cattle farming, and just seeing dead beasts all over the place. It didn’t worry me at all.”
Maybe it was Kutner’s involvement with Tshombe that warmed him to hired killers. Professor Kyle Burke, author of Revolutionaries for the Right, found some 1976 correspondence showing that Kutner planned to form a nonprofit with far-right mercenary and Soldier of Fortune magazine founder Robert K. Brown. The so-called “World Veterans for Human Rights” mission would be to “take the sting out of the connotation of ‘mercenaries’.”62
While Kutner was playing the human rights lawyer in public, he became involved in a bizarre plot, in private, to spring Tshombe from prison. The plot would come to light because it ultimately lead to the murder of a wealthy California socialite.
Between Kutner’s 1970 description63 of events and those of the prosecutor in the murder case, the story goes like this: Kutner was approached in July of 1967 in New York City by two strangers who made him a simple offer. For a $40,000 down and $1 million more on “delivery,” the men could free Tshombe. Kutner claimed he considered them “cranks,” but nonetheless he continued to take their calls—one of the men using the codename “the Fox.”
By August, the plot was apparently in full swing. “The Fox”—still in contact with Kutner—was in Algiers, working with an American mercenary to bribe the Algerian police guarding Tshombe. For whatever reason, the plan failed—but “the Fox” was not deterred. He approached another man, one Robert Forget, and offered him $25,000 which would come from “Tshombe’s sympathizers” if he would join him in his efforts to free the former African leader. It is worth noting perhaps that those amounts were very close to the amounts eventually demanded from Kutner (though Burke, who examined Kutner’s papers on this topic, found no evidence that any cash was delivered).64
Amid such intrigue, declassified documents show that Kutner once again reached out to the Central Intelligence Agency. He was seeking support for his World Habeas Corpus concept (more on this shortly). During the course of the call, Kutner intimated to a CIA officer of an ongoing plan to re-“kidnap” Tshombe.65
Probably needless to say, the wild scheme involving a Chicago lawyer and someone who called themselves “the Fox” never did free Tshombe. In 1969, the former Congolese leader fell dead of a heart attack in his Algerian prison. As for “The Fox,” he had apparently moved on to other plots—he told Forget that the plan to free Tshombe was now the “phase two” of a larger plan. “Phase one” was to be the murder of wealthy Los Angeles resident, Norma Carty Wilson.
“The Fox” turned out to be a young California financial advisor named Thomas Devins. He had swindled Wilson for some $1.5 million. In an effort to cover up his theft, he lured the woman to Switzerland, murdered her, and disposed of her body.
“The Fox” was convicted of her murder in late 1970. Wilson's jawbone and teeth were finally found in the Swiss hills in 1973.
A World-wide Human Rights Organization—Funded by CIA
As mentioned above, Kutner made another pass at Agency sponsorship in the middle of the Tshombe affair. He contacted two CIA officers about turning World Habeas Corpus into something considerably more solid than a legal concept. The two officials were a Domestic Contact Division officer named R.K. Oakley and the CIA’s General Counsel, Lawrence Houston.
CIA was interested enough in Kutner that the CIA’s top lawyer agreed to a lunch meeting. For some reason, before the lunch took place, Kutner called Oakley. According to CIA documents, Kutner asked the agency to fund his “World Habeas Corpus Centers,”66 which he hoped, with CIA backing, could be established around the world.
Kutner attempted to entice the CIA with a proposal that celebrated the tough stand on human rights in communist countries taken by a “human rights” conference held in the capital of one of the most repressive cold war torture states—the U.S.-backed Shah’s Iran. It is an irony surpassed only by, perhaps, the idea of a worldwide archipelago of CIA-backed “human rights” centers.
The CIA saw the propaganda value in such an organization, but Oakley told Kutner that the organization would probably harm the project more than help it.
[Domestic Contact Division] Oakley did not absolutely rule out contact because it appears Kutner might have something worthwhile if he will somehow eliminate his conspiratorial urge…
Kutner, for his part, repeated that CIA-backing would be “very helpful.”
CIA, though, had a little more experience with this sort of problem. It was during the previous year that news of CIA infiltration of NGOs was broken when Ramparts Magazine exposed the Agency’s use of the National Student Association as a CIA front.67
But Kutner played things without much finesse. Kutner was found to be telling acquaintances68 that “World Habeas Corpus… is financed by the CIA.” One of Kutner’s acquaintances alerted R.K. Oakley to this fact. It was behavior that, had the CIA been funding him, represented a major security breach. If Kutner was making things up, it represented a serious lack of judgment on his part—as well as a potential public relations problem for the CIA.
For this strange name dropping of the CIA, his lunch with the CIA’s top lawyer was canceled. With a gentle warning about his “indiscretions,” his request for funding was finally—though politely—brushed off.69
The “Ranting and Raving” of Fred Hampton
In December of 1969, Luis Kutner sought out a talk70 of Black Panther Leader Fred Hampton. Hampton was speaking alongside Reverend George Riddick71 of the Southern Christian Leadership Council before a small audience of mostly elderly peace activists. Kutner reported the content of Hampton’s address—and seemingly the names of as many attendees as he could—to the FBI.
Kutner reported that Hampton had stated that the Panthers were armed, and quoted the Black Panther leader’s statement that their weapons were for self-defense. Kutner also reported that Hampton stated several times that “Nixon must die.” Kutner, to his credit, made it clear that the statements were “meant to accentuate HAMPTON’s statement that the BPP was a revolutionary party” and in no way did Hampton link his statement to the BPP’s armed status.
The document shows that Kutner advised the FBI that he…
…has taken a personal interest in the BPP because of its “ranting and raving” and this personal interest on the part of KUTNER has reached the point where he would like to take legal action to silence the BPP…
KUTNER included [sic] by stating that he believed speakers like HAMPTON were psychotic, and it is only when they are faced with court action that they stop their “ranting and raving.”
Just four days after Kutner made his report, Hampton would be murdered72 by the Chicago Police Department in a raid on his home. A blue-ribbon commission73 found that Hampton had been given a near-lethal dose of secobarbital—most certainly by one of the many informants the FBI had placed inside the organization.
Chicago Police officers fired nearly 100 bullets into Hampton’s apartment. All of the shots missed the young activist aside from two—one entered his shoulder, and another grazed his leg. Despite these wounds, the amount of the drug given to Hampton was such that he remained unconscious on his bed. Hampton’s death was caused, two autopsies showed, by two closely placed shots to the head. The angles of the shots were consistent with the police approaching the incapacitated Hampton and murdering him execution-style.74
The assassination, which the FBI helped to plan,75 also took the life of BPP member Mark Clark. Seven more Panthers, none of whom fired a shot according to a federal grand jury76 (and many themselves wounded), were arrested and charged with “attempted murder, armed violence, and a variety of weapons charges.”
Kutner’s taking exception to the rhetorical “Nixon must die” comments is especially interesting. As we’ll soon see, he himself worked with groups which both preached violence and carried it out—including the attempted assassination of at least one world leader.
Human Rights, Terrorism, and Assassination
As Nixon planned to cement a relationship with the People’s Republic of China and the PRC moved closer to securing its seat at the United Nations, relations between the U.S.A and its old allies in Taiwan began to strain. It was a relationship that had appeared to have little to recommend it outside of the shared U.S./ROC opposition to revolutionary China. The CIA supported at least one coup plot77 against the country’s leader, Chiang Kai-shek.
The resentment of native Taiwanese was also growing. The island’s pre-1949 inhabitants made up the vast majority of the population and had now been living under twenty years of martial law imposed by mainland exiles. A necessarily secret opposition to one-party Kuomintang rule developed. Governments on both sides78 of the Taiwan strait suspected that the United States was encouraging such groups. It may well have been true—exchanging the elderly Chiang and his small group of mainlanders for a new government with broad support appealed to many in and out of the U.S. government. Just so long as the new government was staunchly anti-communist.
On the island itself, the Taiwan Independence Movement became the central organization for native Taiwanese activism.79 The FBI described the group as “dedicated to the overthrow of the present Chinat [Chinese Nationalist] government”80 on the island.
A global movement for Taiwanese (Formosan) independence also developed—especially in the United States. The main grouping in the U.S. was known as United Formosans in America for Independence (UFAI). By 1970, all of the Taiwanese independence groups around the world had formed an umbrella organization. That group called itself World United Formosans for Independence (WUF).
On April 24, 1970, a black limousine carrying the Vice Premiere of Taiwan pulled up to New York City’s luxurious Plaza Hotel. Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, had come to New York on the second stop of an official visit to the United States. His visit to the city was especially contentious because New York had become the heart of the overseas Formosan student movement.
In front of the hotel, the WUF demonstrated against the younger Chiang’s visit. As the Vice Premier exited his car in front of the hotel, one of the demonstrators rushed towards him and fired a pistol. The assassin’s shot missed, and he was quickly wrestled to the ground by New York City police and Chiang’s bodyguards. In the scuffle that ensued, another member of the group leaped into the scuffle and both were arrested.
An FBI report confirmed both men’s membership in the WUF. The information came from a leader of the group, one Chen Lung Chu.81 A close correspondent with Kutner, he had gone into the FBI office in New Haven, Connecticut and identified both of the would-be assassins as members of the WUF. He did so, though, in order to stress to the FBI that the assassination attempt “was in no way associated with the work of the organization.”
It seems that the group was enough associated with the assassination that their lawyer Kutner would be called on to defend the attackers82 in court.
Was this simply a case of Kutner, a lawyer for an otherwise peaceful group, taking on the defense of two out-of-control members who had engaged in a terrorist act? Two declassified documents, one withheld from release83 for decades by the Defense Intelligence Agency, add considerably more to the story.84
A Defense Intelligence Agency specialist, Richard Hennighausen, received a letter filled with violent rhetoric from an acquaintance of his, one Eric Lin. Importantly, Lin (in one of his numerous letters printed in the Chicago Tribune85) identified himself in 197386 as the Public Information officer of the WUF.
The admissions in the letter apparently spooked the DIA employee sufficiently that he went to his superiors to tell them what he knew, presumably to avoid getting implicated in any sort of crime himself.
The FBI saw Lin’s letter as an apparent attempt to recruit Hennighausen87 to the WUF and the Taiwan Independence Movement. In his letter, Lin stated that he had stalked Chiang Ching-Kuo in Washington D.C. alongside the assassins who later made their attempt in front of the Plaza Hotel.
Lin then invited Hennighausen to Chicago to “assist the Formosan group and that they might discuss the secret plans of the Formosan group.” Included in the letter were Xerox copies of news releases from World United Formosans on which Kutner’s name and Chicago address were printed.
A CIA memo from August 197088 makes clear Kutner’s involvement in clandestine plans in support of Taiwanese independence.
The memo contains a letter, which describes how Kutner approached one Robert Fleming. Fleming was the Vice President of a company called the Mid-America International Development Association (MIDA). It is important to note that the Chicago-based MIDA was undoubtedly associated with the Central Intelligence Agency. Founded by Thomas H. Miner, MIDA worked under U.S.AID contracts in Africa. U.S.AID is a government agency which has been well-known for its utility as a CIA front. Another of Miner’s companies was listed in Philip Agee’s explosive Inside the Company: CIA Diary as having been used for CIA cover, and Miner himself was called “The CIA’s Chicago Front Man”89 in a fascinating 1979 article by Thomas J. Dolan of the Chicago Reader.90
This was the milieu to whom Kutner approached with his remarkable offer: the overthrow of Taiwan’s Kuomintang government.
[Kutner] indicated he represented a group willing to [illegible] a handsome return to anyone investing $20,000,000 which they require to overthrow the Taiwan government.
Fleming “hastily declined” the offer, though he did engage Kutner for further information on another of Kutner’s “projects” in Africa. Though the memo is unfortunately partially illegible, Kutner’s other offer in some way involved the Ghanaian government of Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia. Busia (who would himself be overthrown) had been an official in the military coup government which had overthrown Ghana’s socialist leader, Kwame Nkrumah.
Though, in August, Kutner covertly approached a CIA-linked company for regime change cash, by October he was again the human rights crusader. Kutner once again made the papers, this time as the counsel for Peng Ming-min,91 the leader of the Taiwan Independence Movement.92
Clearly, Luis Kutner had no problems being associated with groups engaged in violence—whether that meant an assassination on the streets of New York or the CIA-sponsored overthrow of a government on the other side of the globe.
At the end of 1970—just one year after reporting Fred Hampton to the FBI—Kutner found himself the subject of Bureau surveillance.93 FBI informants reported an event where Kutner took the stage with Meir Kahane, the leader of the militant Jewish Defense League. The group, though only recently formed, had already been responsible for at least one bombing and had attempted to hijack an international flight. But this did not stop Kutner from, according to an informant, publicly “pledging his support for the JDL.”
With Kutner looking on, Kahane reportedly stated: “if it takes a bombing of the Soviet Embassy in New York to be put on page 1—fine.”
There’s no evidence that Kutner reported Kahane’s ranting and raving to the FBI.
“Friends of the FBI”—Covering for COINTELPRO
On March 24, 1971, an example of what one might call the 20th Century version of “hacktivism” occurred. A group called “The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI” burgled an FBI office [in Media, PA], stole a cache of documents, and released them to the press. The documents proved that the FBI was engaging in police state tactics against dissidents in the United States. Included in the FBI documents were floor plans of Fred Hampton’s apartment with a large “X” over Hampton’s bed.
The repression that had been considered conspiracy theorizing by the left had now hit the newsstands in black and white. A few years later, Senator Philip Hart of Michigan would state succinctly the dose of reality that such news brought:
As I’m sure others have, I have been told for years by, among others, some of my own family, that this is exactly what the Bureau was doing all of the time, and in my great wisdom and high office, I assured them that they were — it just wasn’t true. It couldn’t happen. They wouldn’t do it.94
J. Edgar Hoover began to receive sustained criticism in the press. LIFE Magazine’s April 9th, 1971 cover depicted a marble bust of FBI’s director—now in his post for 47 years—with the caption “Emperor of the FBI.”95
But while the media was at long last giving the nation the undeniable truth about J. Edgar Hoover’s methods, Kutner was at a table with two far-right promoters devising a way to protect the reputation of the director and his Bureau.
First known as “The Friends of Hoover” and (when that became untenable) as “The Friends of the FBI,” the “Friends” ironically billed itself as an “impartial” organization designed to study the FBI. They would accept tax-exempt donations by tying the group, to another of Kutner’s human rights non-profits, the Commission for International Due Process of Law. An actor named Efraim Zimbalist, Jr., famous for his lead role in a television show called The FBI, would provide the star power for the group.
Kutner’s partners in the potentially lucrative propaganda scheme were Lee Edwards and Patrick J. Gorman—two men deeply immersed in America’s far-right.
Lee Edwards ran a variety of conservative organizations. He was the National Producer96 of the Information Council of the Americas (INCA), a group of far-right anti-communists with ties to anti-Castro groups and Latin American dictators. He apparently felt that the Nixon Administration wasn’t far enough to the right97—he ran one group which was against Nixon’s China policy, and another—”Americans for Agnew”—which tried to pressure Nixon into standing by his corrupt and disgraced Vice-President.
Patrick Gorman was a fundraiser for a variety of right-wing causes: a “Draft Goldwater” campaign, “Schlafly for Congress,” and The American Enterprise Institute—just to name a few.98
A fundraising letter99 soon hit tens of thousands of mailboxes. It was filled with hyperbolic pro-Hoover rhetoric and was signed with Zimbalist’s famous name.
The F.B.I. and J. Edgar Hoover are being subjected to the degradation of an attack by self-serving politicians, their supporting media and certain radical elements that ultimately seek the destruction of all law and order in the United States…
We, the Friends of the F.B.I., are determined to counter the campaign against the F.B.I. and Mr. Hover, which threatens to undermine the whole structure of law and order in the United States.
It also asked for “generous” and “tax-deductible” gifts.
And the money began to pour in: “a Niagara of dollars,”100 as one called it. But not everyone was impressed with the effort.
Newspapers started to dig.101 Kutner had claimed several big names on the board of the “Friends.” But of those big names, one claimed not to know he was on the board, another said that he had never heard of the group, a third stated “I have never heard of the ‘Friends of the FBI’ and I repudiate it.”
Liberal supporters of Kutner’s Commission for International Due Process of Law were dumb-founded by his use of its good name (and theirs) to defend J. Edgar Hoover. Democratic Congressman Abner Mikva of Illinois summed up the hypocrisy to Kutner this way:
You can imagine my dismay when I read most recently that you had “lent” [The Commission] to Ephraim Zimbalist, Jr., for a promotion called Friends of the FBI. I noted with further dismay that Mr. Zimbalist proceeded to attack anyone who has ever criticized the FBI or its director, as people desiring to undermine the whole structure of law and order in the United States…
Wholly apart from the fact that Mr. Hoover has not always shown the great enthusiasm for due process that some of us might hope (to wit, his stands on wire-tapping, his attacks on Dr. King and his former superiors, his attitude about arrest and raids, etc.) it grieves me to see such a worthy organization… being used to enhance the money-making propensities of Mr. Zimbalist… That you should have permitted such a use and the Commission for International Due Process of Law to be so prostituted is indefensible.102
The Congressman then requested that he be disassociated with Kutner’s organization “since I am so out of sympathy for what you are doing.”
Kutner penned a fiery response to Mikva, denouncing among other things the “anarchy,” “assassinations,” and “sexual licentiousness” haunting America. He assured the Congressman that (apparently despite the name) the “Friends” of the FBI was “not in predetermined preference to the FBI.”
As for Hoover and the FBI, they had never liked the idea of such a group (though it found Kutner “pro-FBI and sincere”). The FBI was informed of the effort early on103 and advised Kutner not to use the name of the FBI or of Hoover. This advice was obviously ignored. Once the fund-raising started, the FBI had to repeatedly make statements that it was not associated with its “friends.”
Kutner might ignore the FBI, but the Internal Revenue Service could be more convincing. It opened an investigation and began to visit Kutner’s office.104 The Post Office also started to look into the matter.
By mid-1972, the group had split—mutual recriminations and accusations were pointed in all directions. Zimbalist felt he had been used. Kutner was scared off and pulled his group’s support away. Edwards and Gorman managed to limp along under a slightly changed name.
While the original group held together, though, it was quite lucrative. Some $400,000 (nearly $2.5 million in today’s dollars) had been raised in donations. Of that $400,000, Kutner took in $47,000 for his efforts. Edwards earned $27,000 and Gorman gained an enormous $155,000. $20,000 more went to the group’s lawyers.105
The scheme haunted the partners for years. In 1976, Kutner sued author Harvey Katz106 and his publisher. Kutner wanted $7 million in damages for his inclusion in a book entitled Give! Who Gets Your Charity Dollar. He lost.
In 1977, the state of Illinois would win a lawsuit against Patrick Gorman107. The suit would cause Gorman to be forbidden to fundraise in the state. Among his other frauds: “Allegedly helping widows and orphans of slain policemen, Gorman raised $300,000, but kept over 99.8 percent of it as his fundraising overhead.” The suit also noted his work with the “Friends of the FBI”.
When all was done, as author Harvey Katz noted, Kutner seemed to have created “a rather novel definition of friendship as well as of charity.”
A January 31st, 1973 CIA memo documents another astonishing offer.108
Kutner claimed a “close” relationship with the U.S.-toppled neutralist King of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk. Sihanouk was then in exile in the People’s Republic of China. Apparently, through the King, Kutner claimed that he was going to be allowed to open an office of World Habeas Corpus in the Chinese capital. Apparently, Kutner was still attempting to realize the scheme he had approached the CIA about in 1968.
Kutner’s offer, as stated by the CIA, was simple enough:
…the [Beijing] office could be set up for $250,000. If we wish to furnish that sum, [Kutner] would open the office for us and allow us to staff it completely with our own people (Emphasis added).
The CIA officer ends his memo by requesting advice from the Chiefs of both Vietnam and China Operations as to whether they have any interest in following up on the offer. Unfortunately the response, if any, isn’t in the available record. There is no evidence that the CIA took Kutner up on his offer or that such a center was ever built in China (or anywhere else for that matter).
In any case, Kutner’s constant reaching and endless schemes seem to have worn out his welcome with the intelligence agencies. The document notes that the FBI “do not regard [Kutner] highly.”
Amnesty International, the CIA, and Chile
Though Kutner may have been a pretty poor self-styled secret agent, his case does raise important questions about the conflicting covert and overt behavior of those who have been given the unimpugnable moniker of “human rights defender”.
The question becomes more important when considering large organizations with a worldwide presence like Amnesty International. There is no doubt that such groups can do vital, politically unbiased work on issues of human rights. But there is plenty of space for manipulation and misinformation to make its way into their narratives as well—whether it comes from inside or outside the group.
A shocking example of such disinformation came during the lead up to the 1991 Gulf War. In a story which belongs in the annals of infamy alongside “the huns are cutting off the hands of Belgian babies,” Amnesty International set off a firestorm of jingoistic anger when it “confirmed” the murder of hundreds of Kuwaiti incubator babies109 by Iraqi troops. But Amnesty soon had to drop its supposed verification:110 the “incubator babies” story was shown to be a complete fabrication—a public relations ploy to sell a war. Amnesty may have reversed course, but the U.S. military would not.
In the more recent case of 2011 Libya, Amnesty loudly demanded an investigation111 into the claims that Gaddafi’s troops had been given Viagra and condoms and urged to use rape as a weapon.112
Unfortunately for the people of Libya, NATO’s bombers would not pause for while the facts were pinned down. The results of the investigation would come out three months later—at a considerably lower volume than those of the salacious atrocities. There was no evidence113 for the reported mass rapes or specific other war crimes which Western media had turned into the bloody shirt of Libya intervention. All the stories about the rapes were found to have largely come from the testimony of a single Libya doctor.
Amnesty International may have found the testimony to be unreliable on several occasions, but that hasn’t slowed their efforts. During Syria’s destructive war, Amnesty found a new way of drawing attention to reports of abuse when testimony was the only evidence available: flashy 3D animations114 which claimed to recreate the insides of a “Syrian torture-prison.” These computer graphics were shown in major media across the United States and Europe. All just in time for Trump administration to take over—its devotion to his predecessor’s policies towards Damascus in question.
Though the examples above all fulfilled U.S. policy objectives, there’s no direct evidence of pressure being put on the human rights organization by governments or intelligence agencies. But declassified documents from 1974 do show a CIA attempt to involve Amnesty International in a scheme to make Chile’s fascist Pinochet regime more palatable to world opinion.
In late-1974,115 with criticism of the Pinochet Regime and the CIA at “dramatic proportions,” the CIA sought to exploit an offer made by General Pinochet for a Soviet-Chilean prisoner swap.
[The prisoner swap] is opportunity to blunt hostile propaganda. If the USSR and Chile can be lumped together in popular mind as each having political prisoners, the situation can be exploited to divert some of attention from junta’s supposed misdeeds…
It is worth noting here that the “supposed misdeeds”116 of the Pinochet regime have since been found to include, according to Chile’s truth and reconciliation commission, the imprisonment, and torture of some 40,000 people (including the rape of thousands of women), and the murder of more than 3,000 more. All this stemming from a coup—a coup the CIA had helped to launch.117
Suggest [redacted] approach DEFLOWER118 to see whether he can get his group interested in taking practical steps to get prisoners released from Chilean junta on exchange basis. Perhaps if he can picture himself as saving the prisoners (communist and socialist leaders in Chile and important intellectuals in the USSR) from a fascist regime on one hand and from a Stalinist country on the other he can become sufficiently interested in the exchange.119
As worthy as a release of prisoners might be to those with liberal sensibilities, the CIA had its own, less altruistic, motives for the plan. A later document,120 also marked “secret,” makes it clear that the real goal of the effort was to shield the CIA and the Pinochet regime from criticism.
Given perishability ref ideas, request your comment on feasibility of approaches to DEFLOWER and Amnesty International as outlined. Welcome any other suggestions on means limit further anti-BKHERALD propaganda in relation to Chile and anti-junta propaganda connected with treatment of political prisoners.
The identity of DE/FLOWER is unknown, but from the context, it appears to be a leader of Amnesty International. The fact that a cryptonym was given at all is in itself interesting. It generally indicates a higher level of interest in a person or group by the CIA—or even an asset. According to Dr. John Newman, an author and a former military intelligence officer who studies the CIA:
…it does not necessarily mean they were assets. In the majority of instances, they probably were assets. But, even then, that doesn’t tell us whether the “asset” was witting or unwitting. On many occasions, crypts were assigned to persons of interest simply because they were associated with assets or otherwise peripherally involved in Agency operations.121
Another heavily redacted document122 shows that the CIA was keeping a close watch on the composition of the leadership of Amnesty International. The CIA felt that a recent change in leadership might make the group more inclined to put “pressure on the Soviets.”
Though there are no documents showing anything more than CIA discussing such an approach, at least two such Chile-USSR prisoner swaps did occur123 in the following years. And Amnesty International negotiated the terms.
Later Years
And here the trail on Luis Kutner largely ends, though probably only because few documents in the tranche released through the JFK Act go past the 1970s. A FOIA request made to the FBI did reveal another interesting (but apparently unconsummated) offer: a 1983 attempt to trade access to a court case against the government of India for CIA or FBI funding.124
After the mid-‘70s, Kutner appeared in the news and in the Congressional Record occasionally. He called Carter’s Panama Canal treaty a “potential diplomatic Pearl Harbor”125—another stand for which he would be praised by Senator Strom Thurmond. The year 1981 saw an apparent reversal of his commitment to habeas corpus when he advised the Swedish government to detain the crew of a Soviet submarine126until the USSR released information on the 1945 disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg.
In 1989, Kutner gave his legal okay for using military force to bring Panamanian General Manuel Noriega to trial in a U.S. court. “No problem at all,” Kutner advised the New York Times.127 “The law is pretty much settled. The manner used to get a defendant before a court is not relevant to his being tried for a crime.”
Not included in the article was any statement Kutner might have made about the human rights of the thousands of Panamanians injured and killed so that the U.S. government could “bring to justice” a former ally whose crimes they had studiously overlooked for over a decade.128 Maybe worth noting that another lawyer interviewed for the article did at least mention “human rights.”
Conclusion
Kutner’s career is nothing if not contradictory. He worked with the mafia and with the FBI. He deplored groups who used violent rhetoric, but supported groups engaged in violent actions. He was deeply and publicly enmeshed in the far-right, but was regarded by many as a liberal.
The informant work he did for the FBI did ingratiate him to the Bureau, but he wrecked that relationship not once, but twice: once with misinformation in the early 1960s, and then again in the early 70s with his “Friends of the FBI” debacle.
Throwing around the name of the Central Intelligence Agency showed astonishingly poor judgment—it alarmed the very agency he hoped to engage. It is certainly strange to imagine that the CIA would need a Chicago lawyer to help them kick off a coup or link up with militants. As the CIA put it, Kutner seemed to have many “conspiratorial urges,” but he rarely seemed able to satisfy them. Indeed for the most part, his covert actions were largely self-destructive. His approach to the Mid-America International Development Association, for instance, earned him the label of “some kind of nut.”129
Professor Kyle Burke, who studied the far-right networks which Kutner worked among in his book Revolutionaries for the Right, summed up his career this way:
He was certainly an anti-communist, though I sense not as fervent as others in the American right with whom he worked…. He believed in human rights, but, like many on the right, he tended to think that it was only leftist governments that violated them…. I also sense that he was motivated by financial concerns as much—if not more than—political and ideological concerns. That, of course, is not uncommon for lawyers working in any field.130
Though, undoubtedly, his overt work—freeing prisoners and giving liberal cover to right-wing groups—often proved effective, in his grander schemes and his covert efforts, Kutner seems mostly lonely and feckless.
Kutner passed away in 1993. His New York Times obituary was simply titled “Luis Kutner, Lawyer Who Fought For Human Rights.”131
Notes
James Litke. “The Springman Begs for Justice.” The Honolulu Advertiser. 04 Sep 1983. Newspaper. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27138214/kutner_career/ ↩
Associated Press. “Freed After Serving 24 Years for a Crime that Never Happened.” Hattiesburg American. 10 Aug 1949. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26234054/kutner_montgomery_rape/ ↩
“Lyons v. Illinois Greyhound Lines, Inc, 192 F.2d 533 (7th Cir. 1951) Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.” https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/228138/lyons-v-illinois-greyhound-lines-inc/ ↩
“Siegel et al. v. Ragen et al, 180 F.2d 785 (7th Cir. 1950).” https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/180/785/389103/ ↩
Ronald G. Berquist. “Chicago Nazis Curbed During Jewish Holiday.” The Los Angeles Times. 15 Sep 1966. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26235128/kutner_american_nazi_party/ ↩
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=history_capstones#page=5 ↩
Independent Press Service. “Mr. Habeas Corpus: Seeking to Agitate World’s Conscience.” The Daily Oklahoman. 03 Jan 1984. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26577509/kutner_history/ ↩
Saxon, Wolfgang. “Luis Kutner, Lawyer Who Fought For Human Rights, Is Dead at 84.” The New York Times. 04 Mar 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/04/us/luis-kutner-lawyer-who-fought-for-human-rights-is-dead-at-84.html ↩
Correspondence between Peter Benenson and Luis Kutner. Luis Kutner papers. Box 47, Folder 11 “Amnesty International, 1962-1967”. Hoover Institution Archives. ↩
Documents relating to Luis Kutner are included in the JFK Act releases because of his association with Jack Ruby during the 1950s. Due to the broad interpretation of what constituted an “assassination record” under the JFK Act, the files encompass the whole record of Kutner’s interaction with the FBI and the CIA (at least through the mid-1970s) and are not limited to issues related to the assassination of President Kennedy. ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140300#relPageId=2&tab=page ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140297&search=Kutner#relPageId=3&tab=page ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140296&search=Kutner#relPageId=2&tab=page ↩
↩
Chicago Historical Society. “Luis Kutner papers, 1916-1981, bulk 1950-1980. Biographical/historical note.” http://chsmedia.org/media/fa/fa/M-K/KutnerL-inv.htm ↩
Freeman, Joe. “Possible Assassination Records Within the Jurisdiction of the Senate Commerce Committee (Kefauver Committee Files).” Internal memorandum. 30 Sep 1996. ↩
Goldenstein, Robert. “Probe of Chicago Gang-Style Slaying Ordered.” Messenger-Inquirer (Owensboro, Kentucky). 27 Sep 1950. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26234545/kutner_kefauver_drury/ ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=54893&search=kutner#relPageId=422 ↩
Freeman, Joe. “Possible Assassination Records Within the Jurisdiction of the Senate Commerce Committee (Kefauver Committee Files).” ↩
Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. 1993. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ↩
United Press. “Daniel Terms Dallas as Top Narcotics City.” The Monitor (McAllen, Texas). 20 Oct 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26975203/dallas_narcotics/ ↩
Kantor, Seth. The Ruby Cover-up. 1992. Kensington Publishing Corporation. A contemporary example of the information cited by Kantor can be found in: Link, Theodore C. “Tie-In of Capone Ring With Other Crime Syndicates Shown in Inquiry.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 08 Oct 1951. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26972294/kutner_kefauver/ ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140366&relPageId=3&search=5973_kutner ↩
NARA Document Id: 32289230. archives.gov. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32289230.pdf#page=3 ↩
Hersh, Seymour. “The Contrasting Lives Of Sidney R. Korshak.” The NEw York Times. 27 Jun 1976. ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90101-10010. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=117206#relPageId=2 ↩
Rodgers, James. “Apalachin Linked to Gun Plot.” The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 05 Feb 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26553423/mannarino_rothman_gunrunning/ ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=117206&relPageId=2 ↩
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (The Church Committee). Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. 1976. Page 74. ↩
Maskil, Paul, New York News. “Strange saga of mob and the CIA.” The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California). 23 Apr 1975. ↩
Shapiro, Howard for the Select Committee on Assassinations. JFK Exhibit F-572. Summary of Deposition of Lewis McWillie, Investigation of the Assassination of President Kennedy: Hearings before the Select Committee on Assassinations of the U.S. House of Representatives, Volume 5. Page 8. 1978. ↩
NARA Document Id: 32267344. Page 27. archives.gov. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32267344.pdf#page=27 ↩
NARA 180-10143-10215. archives.gov. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/180-10143-10215.pdf ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140310&search=Kutner#relPageId=2 ↩
Central Intelligence Agency. Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume 2. Page 79. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB355/bop-vol2-part1.pdf#page=90 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-10198-10132. archives.gov. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/124-10198-10132.pdf#page=2 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140281&relPageId=2&search=Kutner ↩
“ABN President Yaroslav Stetzko in U.S.A.” ABN Correspondence, Bulletin of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations. Vol. XIV No. 3. May-June 1963. Munich, Germany. Page 34. http://diasporiana.org.ua/wp-content/uploads/books/13906/file.pdf#page=108 ↩
“Slave Nations to Mark Day with Speeches.” Chicago Tribune. 14 Jul 1963. Section 1A Page 10. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26234956/kutner_captive_nations_week/ ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140366&search=Kutner#relPageId=9 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140279&relPageId=10 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=95945&relPageId=4 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=95772&search=slobodan#relPageId=5 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140374&relPageId=3 ↩
Ibid. Page 14. ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10124. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140373#relPageId=2 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140279&search=security#relPageId=18 ↩
Fifth Estate. Transcript of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 1978. The Weisberg Collection. Hood College, Frederick, MD, U.S.A. Page 2. https://archive.org/stream/nsia-CanadianBroadcastingCorporation/nsia-CanadianBroadcastingCorporation/Canadian%20Broadcasting%2013#page/n1/mode/2up ↩
DeBenedictis, Frank. “A Short History of INCA (Information Council of the Americas).” cuban-exile.com. https://cuban-exile.com/doc_076-100/doc0078.html ↩
Bird, David. “General Ydigoras of Guatemala, Bay of Pigs Figure, Is Dead at 86.” The New York Times. 8 Oct 1982. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/08/obituaries/general-ydigoras-of-guatemala-bay-of-pigs-figure-is-dead-at-86.html ↩
https://books.google.com/books?id=NgN64EXv8mgC&pg=PA168 ↩
Pekeshe, Munhamu. “Tshombe, Geneva and détente in the village.” The Patriot. Harare, Zimbabwe. 15 Jan 2015. https://www.thepatriot.co.zw/old_posts/tshombe-geneva-and-detente-in-the-village/ and “Shona word chombe in the Shona Dictionary.” vashona.com. 30 Jul 2015. https://vashona.com/en/dictionary/sna/chombe ↩
Herman, David. “Harlem Rally Demands: ‘Hands Off the Congo!’” The Militant. Vol. 28 No. 46. 21 Dec 1964. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/themilitant/1964/v28n46-dec-21-1964-mil.pdf#page=1 ↩
Borger, Julian. “Plane crash that killed UN boss ‘may have been caused by aircraft attack.’” The Guardian. 26 Sep 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/26/plane-crash-which-killed-un-boss-dag-hammarskjold-may-have-been-caused-by-aircraft-attack ↩
United Press International. “Tshombe Reported Kidnapped On Flight.” The Cincinnati Enquirer. 02 Jul 1967. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26927720/tshombe_kidnapping/ ↩
https://books.google.com/books?id=_JhVDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA47 ↩
Public Affairs Staff. “Tshombe’s Attorney Says CIA Was Not Involved.” Transcript. Newscope. WFLD-TV, Chicago. 21 Jul 1967. The Weisberg Collection. Hood College, Frederick, MD, U.S.A. https://archive.org/stream/nsia-TV-RadioTranscriptsFromTrunzoRuss/nsia-TV-RadioTranscriptsFromTrunzoRuss/TV-Radio%20Transcripts%2019#page/n18/mode/1up ↩
Black, Ian. “Belgium accused of killing African hero.” The Guardian. 14 Jan 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/jan/15/ianblack ↩
Othen, Christopher. Katanga 1960-63: Mercenaries, Spies and the African Nation that Waged War on the World. The History Press. Kindle Edition. Kindle Location 1967. ↩
Garrison, Lloyd. “White Mercenaries On a ‘Rabbit Hunt.’” The New York Times. 15 Nov 1964. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/11/15/132732562.html?pageNumber=365 ↩
Stone, IF. “Just a Fine Bunch of Fellows.” Reprint of portion of transcript of ABC-TV show aired on Dec. 9th, 1964. IF Stone’s Weekly. 11 Jan 1965. Page 2. http://www.ifstone.org/weekly/IFStonesWeekly-1965jan11.pdf#page=2 ↩
Burke, Kyle. “Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War.” UNC Press Books. 2018. Page 115. ↩
Cohen, Jerry. “Tshombe Plot Tied to Missing LA Woman.” LA Times. 8 Apr 1970. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26710411/kutner_tshombe_norma_carty_wilson/ ↩
Burke, Kyle. “Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War.” UNC Press Books. 2018. Page 47. ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10105-10082. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=51752 ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10105-10084. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=51753 ↩
https://www.nytimes.com/1967/02/16/archives/ramparts-says-cia-received-student-report-magazine-declares-agency.html ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10105-10082. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=51752 ↩
Ibid. ↩
NARA Document Id 32989646. Page 192. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989646.pdf#page=192 ↩
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/15/obituaries/rev-george-riddick-61-dies-advocate-for-poor-in-chicago.html ↩
“Fred Hampton.” archives.gov. https://www.archives.gov/research/african-americans/individuals/fred-hampton ↩
Johnson, Thomas A. “Report Assails Inquiry on Slaying of Black Panthers.” The New York Times. 17 Mar 1972. Via The Weisberg Collection. Hood College, Frederick, MD, U.S.A. https://archive.org/stream/nsia-BlackPanthersChicagoHampton/nsia-BlackPanthersChicagoHampton/BP%20Chicago%2003#mode/1up ↩
↩
Democracy Now. “The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther.” Interview with Jeffrey Haas. 04 Dec 2009. https://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/the_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how ↩
Gottlieb, Jeff and Jeff Cohen. “Was Fred Hampton Executed?” The Nation Magazine. 25 Dec 1976. https://www.thenation.com/article/was-fred-hampton-executed/ ↩
https://books.google.com/books?id=YoB35f6HD9gC&pg=PA181 ↩
U.S. State Department. “162. Memorandum of Conversation, Beijing, October 21, 1971, 10:30 a.m.–1:45 p.m.” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XVII, China, 1969–1972. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v17/d162 ↩
To some in the U.S., Taiwanese independence will imply the long Nationalist/Communist rift between the mainland and the island. It’s important to note that in this case, Taiwan independence means the replacement of the mainlander Kuomintang government—imposed on the island when Chiang Kai-shek’s army retreated there in 1949—with a government run by the native Taiwanese. ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10125. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140375 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10138. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140286 ↩
Kupcinet, Irv. “Gregory Back In Night Clubs.” Recurring Column. San Francisco Examiner. 12 May 1970. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26871880/kutner_taiwan/ ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10140. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140378 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10140. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=167157 ↩
https://www.newspapers.com/clippings/#query=lin&user=5946199 ↩
Lin, Eric. “Chiang’s Tokenism.” Letter to the Editor. Chicago Tribune. 08 Jan 1973. ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10127. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=197019 ↩
NARA Record Number: 1993.07.30.15:01:11:370034. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=64395 ↩
Dolan, Thomas J. “The CIA’s Chicago Front Man.” The Chicago Reader. 02 Feb 1979. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-cias-chicago-front-man/Content?oid=3343286 ↩
http://altgov2.org/wp-content/uploads/CounterSpy_7-4.pdf#page=14). The later, a public relations firm, would be involved in fundraising for Nicaragua’s Contras (Hamilton, Lee H. and Daniel K. Inouye. Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran/Contra Affair. Page 86. https://books.google.com/books?id=ew_K3auTwEgC&pg=PA86&lpg=PA86 and Associated Press. “Expenses Eat Up Proceeds of Dinner to Aid Nicaraguans.” The Boston Globe. 03 Sep 1985. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26610205/miner_fraser/). ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10125. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140375 ↩
To add a further twist, Kutner also approached the Chiang government, then trying to arrest his client, and, according to a Nationalist Chinese official, “offered his services” to them. ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10129. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140274 ↩
Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate (The Church Committee). Hearings, Volume 6. 1975. Page 41. https://archive.org/stream/ChurchCommittee/Church%20Committee%20Volume%206%20-%20Hearings%20on%20the%20Federal%20Bureau%20of%20Investigation#page/n50/mode/1up ↩
Cover image. Life Magazine. 09 Apr 1971. http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/life/36#i1779 ↩
Butler, Ed. National Citizen’s Congress Fundraising Letter. Information Council of the Americas. New Orleans, LA. Approx. 1971. The Weisberg Collection. Hood College, Frederick, MD, U.S.A. https://archive.org/stream/nsia-InformationalCounciloftheAmericas/nsia-InformationalCounciloftheAmericas/Information%20Council%2022#mode/1up ↩
Magruder, Jeb S. Citizens for the Re-election of the President, Memorandum for the Attorney General. Contested Materials Collection, Box 26 Folder 3. Richard Nixon Presidential Library. 31 Aug 1971. https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/virtuallibrary/documents/contested/contested_box_26/Contested-26-03.pdf#page=31 ↩
https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140347&relPageId=3 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10008. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140260 ↩
Kotz, Nick for the Washington Post. “‘Friends of the FBI’: A high-sounding cause, a Niagara of dollars.” The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey). 24 May 1972. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27011809/friends_of_the_fbi_kutner_edwards/ ↩
Nelson, Jack and Bryce Nelson. “Zimbalist Aids Fund Drive To Defend FBI, Hoover.” Des Moines Register. 15 June 1971. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27012798/kutner_friends_of_the_fbi/ ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10039. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140336 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10018. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140304 ↩
NARA Record Number: 124-90157-10028. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=140319 ↩
Kotz, Nick for the Washington Post. “‘Friends of the FBI’: A high-sounding cause, a Niagara of dollars.” The Record (Hackensack, New Jersey). 24 May 1972. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27011809/friends_of_the_fbi_kutner_edwards/ ↩
https://books.google.com/books?id=WUFn5FMRkY4C&pg=SL109-PA14 ↩
Haught, James A. “How Crooks Prey On Your Charity.” Quad-City Times (Davenport, IA). 15 May 1977. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27010196/patrick_j_gorman_fraud_fundraising/ ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10071-10096. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=53536 ↩
Associated Press. “Standoff in the Gulf: Amnesty Report Says Iraqis Tortured and Killed Hundreds.” The New York Times. 20 Dec 1990. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/20/world/standoff-in-the-gulf-amnesty-report-says-iraqis-tortured-and-killed ↩
MacArthur, John R. “Remember Nayirah, Witness for Kuwait?” The New York Times. 06 Jan 1992. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/06/opinion/remember-nayirah-witness-for-kuwait.html ↩
Flock, Elizabeth. “Gaddafi ordered mass rapes in Libya, ICC prosecutor says.” The Washington Post. 09 Jun 2011. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/gaddafi-ordered-mass-rapes-in-libya-icc-prosecutor-says/2011/06/09/AG1D0TNH_blog.html ↩
Cockburn, Patrick. “Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war.” Independent. 24 Jun 2011. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html ↩
Ibid. ↩
Amnesty International. “Inside a Syrian Torture Prison.” Online multimedia presentation. https://saydnaya.amnesty.org/ ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10225-10027. archives.gov. Page 13. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/104-10225-10027.pdf#page=13 ↩
British Broadcasting Corporation. “Chile recognises 9,800 more victims of Pinochet’s rule.” 18 Aug 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-14584095 ↩
Franklin, Jonathan. “Files show Chilean blood on U.S. hands.” The Guardian. 11 Oct 1999. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/11/pinochet.chile ↩
A quick note on CIA cryptonyms from the period—they are generally two letters followed by a word. The first two letters indicate the broader operation, and the following name applies to an individual or an organization. MK/ULTRA and JM/WAVE, for example, are some more well-known examples of this convention. BK/HERALD, seen below, was the cryptonym for the CIA itself. ↩
NARA Record Number: 104-10225-10027. archives.gov. Page 14. https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2018/104-10225-10027.pdf#page=14 ↩
Ibid. Page 12. ↩
Giglio, David. Email to Dr. John Newman from Russ Baker on behalf of David Giglio. 22 Dec 2018. ↩
Ibid. Page 11. ↩
Wren, Christopher S. for The New York Times. “Dissident for Chilean Red: Russia OKs Prisoner Swap.” Arizona Daily Star (Tucson, AZ). 18 Dec 1976. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27041273/amnesty_international_chile_prisoner/ and Associated Press. “Chile Would Agree To Prisoner Swap?” The Tennessean (Nashville, TN). 27 Apr 1977. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/27041307/amnesty_international_chile_prisoner/ ↩
Kutner, Luis. Letter to Hon. William Webster, U.S. Department of Justice. 26 Aug 1983. Released via Freedom of Information Act Request, FOI/PA# 1308978-0. Page 86. https://archive.org/details/LuisKutner/page/n86 ↩
Kutner, Luis. “The New Panama Canal Treaties: A Potential Diplomatic Pearl Harbor.” Cited by Sen. Strom Thurmond (SC) in Panama Canal Treaties, United States Senate Debate, 3rd and Final Part. 1978. page 4904. https://archive.org/details/treat00unit/page/n1005 ↩
Various News Services. “Swedes Reject Soviet Sub Skipper’s Account.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 03 Nov 1981. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/26577060/kutner_soviet_submarine_sweden/ ↩
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/05/world/noriega-s-surrender-the-case-us-aide-hints-at-a-deal-if-the-general-tells-all.html ↩
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate (Kerry Committee). “Drugs, Law Enforcement, and Foreign Policy.” 1988. Page 97. https://archive.org/stream/KerryCommitteeReport/Kerry%20Committee%20Report#page/n105/mode/2up↩
NARA Record Number: 1993.07.30.15:01:11:370034. Mary Ferrell Foundation. Page 2. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=64395 ↩
Giglio, David. Email from Kyle Burke. 15 Jan 2019. ↩
Saxon, Wolfgang. “Luis Kutner, Lawyer Who Fought For Human Rights, Is Dead at 84.” The New York Times. 04 Mar 1993. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/04/us/luis-kutner-lawyer-who-fought-for-human-rights-is-dead-at-84.html ↩
Written by David Giglio on Sunday April 28, 2019
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The Finnish Bolshevik
“Petrichenko returned to his native village in April 1920 and apparently remained until September or October… The authorities, he later told an American journalist, had arrested him more than once on suspicion of counterrevolutionary activity. He had even tried to join the Whites…” (Avrich, Kronstadt, p. 95)PG
“Mingled with the initial reports was an assortment of bogus rumors which quickly roused the passions of the sailors. It was said, for example, that government troops had fired on the Vasili Island demonstrators and that strike leaders were being shot in the cellars of the Cheka.” (Avrich, p. 71)
“the Petrograd strikes were on the wane… But the rumors of shootings and full-scale rioting had already aroused the sailors, and on March 2, at a time when the disturbances had all but ceased, they were drafting the erroneous announcement (for publication the following day ) that the city was in the throes of a “general insurrection.”” (Avrich, p. 83)
This was the necessary ideological preparation for the mutiny.
“the Bolshevik commissar barely had time to object to the irregular proceedings before being cut off by the “military specialist” in charge of artillery, a former tsarist general named Kozlovsky… “Your time is past,” Kozlovsky declared.” (Avrich, p. 81)
“[T]he chair of the meeting, Petrichenko, quieting down the meeting, announced that ‘The Revolutionary Committee… declares: “All Communists present are to be seized and not to be released until the situation is clarified” (Introduction to Kronstadt Tragedy)“suddenly… a voice from the floor… shouted that 15 truckloads of Communists armed with rifles and machine guns were on their way to break up the meeting. The news had the effect of a bombshell, throwing the delegates into alarm and confusion… it was the bogus report that Communists were preparing to attack the meeting that actually precipitated the formation of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee… Petrichenko himself took up the rumor and announced that a detachment of 2,000 Communists were indeed on their way to disperse the meeting. Once again pandemonium broke loose, and the delegates left the hall in great excitement.” (Avrich, p. 84)
“[T]he Communist Party is removed from power. The Provisional Revolutionary Committee is in charge. We ask that non-[Communist] party comrades take control into their hands” (“To All Posts of Kronstadt,”, reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy.)
“Perepelkin may have been the only reputed anarchist among the rebel leaders, but… he was in a good position to propagate his libertarian views… [however] the sailors, for their part, never called for the complete elimination of the state, a central plank in any anarchist platform.” (Avrich, p. 170)
“The Kronstadt uprising broke out under the pretext of replacing the old Soviet… with a new one… The question of… extending the vote also to the bourgeoisie, was carefully avoided by the orators… They did not want to evoke opposition among the insurgents… They did not speak of the Constituent Assembly, but the assumption was that it could be arrived at gradually…” (Oreshin in Volia Rossii(April-May 1921), quoted in Shchetinov Kronstadt Tragedy)
“The repression carried out by the PRC against those Communists who remained faithful to the communist revolution fully refutes the supposedly peaceful intentions of the rebels. Virtually all the minutes of the PRC sessions indicate that the struggle against the Communists still at large and against those still in prison, remained an unrelenting focus of their attention. At the last phase they even resorted to threats of field courts martial in spite of their declared repeal of the death penalty.” (Agranov, April 1921, quoted in Kronstadt Tragedy)
“Early on the morning of March 18, Shustov set up a machine gun outside the cell, which contained 23 prisoners. He was prevented from slaughtering the Communists only by the advance of the Red Army across the ice.” (Kronstadt 1921: Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution)
“former imperial officers were… [used] as “military specialists” ( voenspetsy ) under the watchful supervision of political commissars. In this way, badly needed command experience and technical knowledge were provided until a new corps of Red Commanders could be trained.” (Avrich, p. 66)
“the Russian Union of Commerce and Industry in Paris declared its intention to send food and other supplies to Kronstadt… an initial sum of two million Finnish marks had already been pledged to aid Kronstadt in “the sacred cause of liberating Russia” (Avrich, p. 116)“the Russian-Asiatic Bank contributed 225,000 francs. Additional funds were donated by other Russian banks, insurance companies, and financial concerns throughout Europe, and by the Russian Red Cross, which funneled all collections to Tseidler, its representative in Finland. By March 16 Kokovtsov was able to inform the Committee of Russian Banks in Paris that deposits for Kronstadt already exceeded 775,000 francs…” (Avrich, p. 117)
“The PRC, seeing that Kronstadt was filling up with agents of a monarchist organization, issued a declaration that it would not enter into negotiations with, nor accept any aid from, any non-socialist parties… But… Petrichenko and the General Staff secretly worked in connection with the monarchists and prepared the ground for an overthrow of the committee…” (Kupolov, “Kronstadt and the Russian Counterrevolutionaries in Finland: From the Notes of a Former Member of the PRC”)
“In Kronstadt, total power is in the hands only of the revolutionary sailors… not of the White Guards headed by some General Kozlovsky, as the slanderous Moscow radio proclaims.” “We have only one general here… commissar of the Baltic Fleet Kuzmin. And he has been arrested.”” (Avrich, p. 99)
“Cut off from the outside world, we could receive no aid from foreign sources even if we had wanted it. We served as agents of no external group: neither capitalists, Mensheviks, nor SR’s.” (Avrich, p. 113)
“And here I saw the former commander or the Sevastopol, Baron Vilken with whom I had earlier sailed. And it is he who is now acknowledged by the PRC to be the representative of the delegation that is offering us aid. I was outraged by this. I… said, so that’s the situation we’re in, that’s who we’re forced to talk to. Petrichenko and the others jumped on me… There was no other way out: they said. I stopped arguing and said I would accept the proposal. And on the second day we received 400 poods of food and cigarettes. Those who agreed to mutual friendship with the White Guard baron yesterday shouted that they were for Soviet power.” (Komarov Report, 25 March 1921)
“Any doubts about Vilken’s motives (his officer background was known to the rebel leaders) were brushed aside, and the Revolutionary Committee accepted his offer.” (Avrich, p. 122)
An editor for the mutineer newspaper Lamanov stated:
“Up until the seizure of Kronstadt by Soviet troops I thought the movement had heen organized by the Left SRs. After I became convinced that the movement was not spontaneous, I no longer sympathized with it… Now I am firmly convinced, that, without a doubt, White Guards, both Russian and foreign, took part in the movement. The escape to Finland convinced me of this. Now I consider my participation in this movement to have heen an unforgivable stupid mistake.” (Minutes of Cheka Interrogation of Anatoly Lamanov)
“In May 1921 Petrichenko and several of his fellow refugees at the Fort Ino camp decided to volunteer their services to General Wrangel… in a new campaign to unseat the Bolsheviks and restore “the gains of the February 1917 Revolution.”” (Avrich, p. 127)
The Petrichenko gang and the Whites forces of Wrangel agreed to “the retention of their slogan “all power to the soviets but not the parties.”… the slogan was to be retained only as a “convenient political maneuver” until the Communists had been overthrown. Once victory was in hand, the slogan would be shelved and a temporary military dictatorship installed…” (Avrich, pp. 127-128)
“In Petrograd the remnants of the SRs, Mensheviks and various anarchists banded together… [and] collaborated with the newly formed monarchist Petrograd Combat Organization (PCO), as the PCO itself asserted (PCO Report to Helsinki Department of National Center, no earlier than 28 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy). The [monarchist-capitalist] PCO even printed the Mensheviks’ leaflets! On March 14… [they] issued a leaflet in solidarity with Kronstadt that said not one word about socialism or soviets, but instead called for an uprising against “the bloody communist regime” in the name of “all power to the people” (“Appeal to All Citizens, Workers, Red Army Soldiers and Sailors,” 14 March 1921; reprinted in Kronstadt Tragedy).” (Kronstadt 1921: Bolshevism vs. Counterrevolution)
“Savinkov, aide to Kerensky… in his Warsaw newspaper Svoboda, printed on Polish [capitalist] government money, boasts (24th February) “I fight against the Bolsheviks, I fight alongside those who have already struggled with Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel and even Petlioura [Petrichenko], strange as that may seem.” (Radek, The Kronstadt Uprising, 1921)
“The [capitalist]… Milyukov, supplied the Kronstadt counter-revolutionaries with the watchword “Soviets without Communists””(A History of the USSR, volume 3, p. 307)Stalin said: “Soviets without Communists — such was then the watchword of the chief of the Russian counter-revolution, Milyukov…” (J. Stalin, Articles and Speeches, Moscow, 1934, , Russ, ed., p. 217)
“Throughout the Civil War of 1918-1920, the sailors of Kronstadt… More than 40,000… replenished the ranks of the Red Army on every front.” (Avrich, p. 62)“There can be little doubt that during the Civil War years a large turnover had indeed taken place within the Baltic Fleet… old-timers had been replaced by conscripts from the rural districts… By 1921… more than three-quarters of the sailors were of peasant origin, a substantially higher proportion than in 1917, when industrial workers from the Petrograd area made up a sizable part of the fleet.” (Avrich, p. 89)
“Seizing on Trotsky’s wrong-headedness, Zinoviev mobilized his own base in the Petrograd-Kronstadt area against Trotsky… Zinoviev opened the floodgates of the Kronstadt party organization to backward recruits while encouraging a poisonous atmosphere in the inner-party dispute. The rot in the Kronstadt Communist Party organization was a critical factor in allowing the mutiny to proceed” (“Kronstadt 1921…”, Spartacist, Spring 2006 #59,)
“The authority of the party was further undermined by a struggle for political control in the fleet, which pitted Trotsky, the War Commissar, against Zinoviev… As a result of this dispute, the commissars and other party administrators lost much of their hold over the rank and file.” (Avrich, p. 70)
“feelings against the Jews ran high among the [Kronstadt] sailors, many of whom came from the Ukraine and the western borderlands, the classic regions of virulent anti-Semitism in Russia” (Avrich, p. 179)
“Vershinin… [member of the PRC] shouted an appeal for joint action against the Jewish and Communist oppressors…” (Avrich, p. 155)“Jews were a customary scapegoat in times of hardship and distress… In a particularly vicious passage [one sailor] attacks the Bolshevik regime as the “first Jewish Republic”… he labels the Jews a new “privileged class,”… calling the government ultimatum to Kronstadt “the ultimatum of the Jew Trotsky.” These sentiments, he asserts were widely shared by his fellow sailors… Witness the appeal of Vershinin, a member of the Revolutionary Committee… on March 8… “Enough of your ‘hoorahs,’ and join with us to beat the Jews. It’s their cursed domination that we workers and peasants have had to endure.” (Avrich, pp. 179-180)
“This Kronstadt affair in itself is a very petty incident. It no more threatens to break up the Soviet state than the Irish disorders are threatening to break up the British Empire.” (Lenin, On the Kronstadt revolt)
The Menshevik leader Dan admitted in his 1922 book that “the Kronstadt mutiny was not supported by the Petersburg workers in any way” (quoted in ‘The Mensheviks in the Kronstadt Mutiny,” Krasnaill Letopis’, 1931, No.2)
“What the authorities feared, in other words, was not so much the rebellion itself…” (Avrich, p. 134)“Of greater concern to the Bolsheviks was the determination of the [white] emigres to gain access to Kronstadt and use it as a base for a landing on the mainland. This would have meant nothing less than a resumption of the Civil War…” (Avrich, p. 134)
“Zinoviev negotiated with the traitors for seven whole days, thereby giving them time to fortify themselves.” (A History of the USSR, volume 3, p. 307)
“The truth of the matter is that I personally did not participate in the least in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion” (Trotsky, More on the Suppression of Kronstadt)
“What does it mean? It was an attempt to seize political power from the Bolsheviks by a motley crowd or alliance of ill-assorted elements, apparently just to the right of the Bolsheviks, or perhaps even to their “left”—you can’t really tell, so amorphous is the combination of political groupings that has tried to take power in Kronstadt. You all know, undoubtedly, that at the same time whiteguard generals were very active over there. There is ample proof of this. A fortnight before the Kronstadt events., the Paris newspapers reported a mutiny at Kronstadt. It is quite clear that it is the work of SRs and whiteguard émigrés, and at the same time the movement was reduced to a petty-bourgeois counter-revolution and petty-bourgeois anarchism. That is something quite new. This circumstance, in the context of all the crises, must be given careful political consideration and must be very thoroughly analysed… There is evidence here of the activity of petty-bourgeois anarchist elements with their slogans of unrestricted trade and invariable hostility to the dictatorship of the proletariat… they wanted to correct the Bolsheviks in regard to restrictions in trade—and this looks like a small shift, which leaves the same slogans of “Soviet power” with ever so slight a change or correction. Yet, in actual fact the whiteguards only used the non-Party elements as a stepping stone to get in. This is politically inevitable. We saw the petty-bourgeois, anarchist elements in the Russian revolution, and we have been fighting them for decades. We have seen them in action since February 1917, during the great revolution, and their parties’ attempts to prove that their programme differed little from that of the Bolsheviks, but that only their methods in carrying it through were different. We know this not only from the experience of the October Revolution, but also of the outlying regions and various areas within the former Russian Empire where the Soviet power was temporarily replaced by other regimes. Let us recall the Democratic Committee in Samara. They all came in demanding equality, freedom, and a constituent assembly, and every time they proved to be nothing but a conduit for whiteguard rule. Because the Soviet power is being shaken by the economic situation, we must consider all this experience and draw the theoretical conclusions a Marxist cannot escape… We must take a hard look at this petty-bourgeois counter-revolution with its calls for freedom to trade. Unrestricted trade—even if it is not as bound up initially with the whiteguards as Kronstadt was—is still only the thin end of the wedge for the whiteguard element, a victory for capital and its complete restoration. We must, I repeat, have a keen sense of this political danger.”(Lenin, Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.))
“I emphasised the danger of Kronstadt because it lies precisely in the fact that the change demanded was apparently very slight: “The Bolsheviks must go . . . we will correct the regime a little.” That is what the Kronstadt rebels are demanding. But what actually happened was that Savinkov arrived in Revel, the Paris newspapers reported the events a fortnight before they actually occurred, and a whiteguard general appeared on the scene. That is what actually happened.” (Lenin, Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.))
“The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent communist line was perhaps most strikingly shown in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and whiteguards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their readiness to accept the slogans of the Soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the SRs and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the Soviet Government of Russia ostensibly in the interest of the Soviet power. These facts fully prove that the whiteguards strive, and are able, to disguise themselves as Communists, and even as the most Left-wing Communists, solely for the purpose of weakening and destroying the bulwark of the proletarian revolution in Russia.“ (Lenin, Tenth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.))
(Lenin, The Tax in Kind)
“You must have noticed that these extracts from the whiteguard newspapers published abroad appeared side by side with extracts from British and French newspapers. They are one chorus, one orchestra… They have admitted that if the slogan becomes “Soviet power without the Bolsheviks” they will all accept it. Milyukov explains this with particular clarity… He says he is prepared to accept the “Soviet power without the Bolsheviks” slogan. He cannot see from over there in Paris whether this is to be a slight shift to the right or to the left, towards the anarchists. From over there, he cannot see what is going on in Kronstadt, but asks the monarchists not to rush and spoil things by shouting about it. He declares that even if the shift is to be to the left, he is prepared to back the Soviet power against the Bolsheviks…”(Lenin, The All-Russia Congress Of Transport Workers)
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post
The New York Watchmen are a recently formed right-wing militia based in Western New York. They have chapters in Buffalo and Rochester and have reported interest as far away as Westchester County.
The New York section is part of a larger organization headquartered in North Carolina. It is unclear how large the national organization is, but the New York Watchmen are reporting around 200 members with the aim to reach 500 by election day. While they publicly claim to not be a militia, they have been organizing pistol permits and training, and have set up a GoFundMe page to fund the purchase of weapons, equipment and medical supplies.
The Watchmen hold a pro-government and pro-police stance, describing their main missions as supporting the police and protecting property and “innocents.” While Charles Pellien, the founder and director of the group has claimed that they are not partisan, he and other leading members of the group have publicly expressed their support for President Trump on social media.
The leaders of the Watchmen have organized appearances at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. They have also organized marches in support of the police that Republican government officials have attended. New York Assemblyman David DiPietro has attended their rallies, as well as Assistant Director of Health and Human Services Michael Caputo, who worked for the Reagan administration with Oliver North to pursue the interests of US imperialism in Central America.
Caputo is a close friend of Charles Pellien. In a rant posted on Facebook, Caputo called on New Yorkers to stock up on ammunition and to contact his “friend Charlie” and join the Watchmen. He has also given him “words of wisdom from the Roger Stone tree of coaching” according to Pellien.
They worked together in 2014 to organize 12th Man Thunder, a fan group of the Buffalo Bills football team that worked to block Jon Bon Jovi’s attempts to purchase the team. It was revealed in 2017 that Donald Trump was behind the organization as part of his own attempt to buy the Bills.
The extent of the New York Watchmen’s connections to Caputo and Trump are not known. Pellien has stated that Caputo is not a member, but their close relationship and Caputo’s connections to the Trump administration raise questions about what influence the President or his close affiliates may have in such an organization.
What is more clearly understood is the political orientation of the New York Watchmen and its leading members.
Charles Pellien is a former police and corrections officer who formed the New York Watchmen in August of 2020 in response to the wave of protests against police violence that have swept across the country.
By September 10, he claimed that they had organized “80 former Law Enforcement Officers, Corrections Officers, Special ops Veterans, Marines, Martial Arts Black Belts, Body Builders, Bikers, Patriots, and some very tough women all ready to Back the Blue if needed.”
By “Back the Blue” he means intimidate protesters as an auxiliary wing of the police department. On October 9, after the Watchmen organized an appearance at a protest in Tonawanda, a suburb of Buffalo, he stated on his Facebook page that “this was only a dress rehearsal, a dry run, and a learning experience. And everyone better realize that we are not going to tolerate this [rioting] in our communities. We promise you that.”
He proceeded to then direct a post at the Tonawanda police, who did not respond to the protests as aggressively as the Watchmen would prefer, stating that they must “Do your fucking job or we will do it for you!”
It is clear that the Watchmen wanted a confrontation with the protesters. Pellien claimed that the Tonawanda police were “holding us back so Antifa can terrorize the town with no resistance.” In this sense, the group serves to mobilize fascists within the police to violate orders from elected officials in the Democratic Party-run city.
The most aggressive expression of this comes from Pete Harding, a leading organizer for the Watchmen and several other right-wing and anti-mask groups.
Harding has taken to posting regular Facebook livestreams in which he rants against the “Marxist radicals” that he believes have infiltrated the state and are sponsoring terrorism. He frequently refers to BLM and Antifa as “terrorist organizations” and has argued that “any business that donates to Black Lives Matter should be arrested and criminally charged because they are supporting a terrorist organization at this point.”
In an unhinged rant, Harding accused the town of Tonawanda supervisor and police chief of being BLM and Antifa sympathizers who should be “locked up.” This came as a correction to his prior call for the town supervisor to be lynched. He quickly backtracked, saying it was not the right word, but the word “lynch” is not one that is used accidentally.
Harding’s hostile attitude towards Democratic politicians is a common thread in his social media posts. On October 8, following the revelations of the plot to kidnap and execute Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Harding posted the following on Facebook:
So let me see if I understand this right. If you murder thousands of the people in your state that you govern, if you destroy the lives of millions in your state with treasonous and unconstitutional decisions, if you bring your state down to its knees with you [sic] terrorism and terrorist decisions, if you invite violent terrorists into your state and cities who destroy those cities and you do nothing about it to arrest, charge or try those terrorists, law enforcement will do nothing to you.
If you are an actual terrorist burning, destroying, occupying, assaulting, murdering property and people in Michigan, you are protected and you will not be charged arrested or prosecuted. If you commit acts of hate, terror and violence and hold cities hostage for weeks, nothing will happen to you.
If you plot to unseat these terrorists and hold them accountable for their actions, you will be arrested and face up to life in prison.
Harding’s support for the coup plot of 14 fascist militiamen to kidnap and murder a government official is telling and raises concerns about how many people with possible ties to the Trump administration share his views. He has accused Diane Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters of being “psychopaths who are inciting riots,” further stating that “I don’t know why that isn’t treason, I don’t know why they aren’t being arrested.”
Harding has directed his vitriol towards protesters as well. He has claimed to have informants in protest groups that allow the Watchmen to “show up to events even before they do.” In a Facebook video posted on October 16 he began reading out the names of protesters to his audience before informing them that they “better put that helmet on. .. because we know who you are.. . I’m not giving your last names guys, but we got ‘em.”
The possibility of the New York Watchmen violently clashing with protesters is not out of the question. Neither is the possibility that their connections to the Trump administration go beyond cordial relations with Michael Caputo.
The working class must be wary of groups like the New York Watchmen. As they grow and as the political crisis deepens, they may very well be welcomed by police to join in violent clashes with protesters and striking workers.
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