It (Almost) Got Them Killed: President Bill Clinton

The US leader was saved shortly before his car was due to drive over a bridge in Manila where a bomb had been planted.

The foiled attack came during Mr Clinton's visit to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in the city in 1996.

At one point during his stay, he was scheduled to visit a local politician, his route taking him across a bridge in central Manila.

But as the presidential motorcade was about to set off, secret service officers received a "crackly message in one earpiece" saying intelligence agents had picked up a message suggesting an attack was imminent.

The transmission used the words "bridge" and "wedding" – a terrorists code word for assassination.

The motorcade was quickly re-routed and American agents later discovered a bomb had been planted under the bridge.

The subsequent US investigation into the plot "revealed that it had been masterminded by a Saudi terrorist living in Afghanistan – a man named Osama bin Laden".

Although al Qaeda members have admitted targeting Mr Clinton in the 1990s, no evidence has previously emerged suggesting the group's leader was involved or that the terrorists came close to succeeding.

Ken Gormley, an American law professor, said he was told by Louis Merletti, the former director of the Secret Service, of the bomb plot.

In The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs Starr, Prof Gormley wrote: "The thwarted assassination attempt was never made public.

"It remained top secret except to select members of the US intelligence community."

At the time, there were media reports about the discovery of two bombs, one at Manila airport and another at the venue for the leaders' meeting.

However, they were linked to a communist insurgency in the Philippines rather than as an external attempt to kill the US president.

A spokesman for the Secret Service refused to comment on Prof Gorman's allegations.

Commentators in the US questioned why the Clinton administration would keep quiet about the assassination attempt when it later needed to justify missile attacks on al-Qaeda training bases.

It could also have ramifications for the widely-held assumption that the Bush regime could not have anticipated the September 11 terror attacks.

Ramzi Yousef, the al-Qaeda member who used a truck bomb to attack the World Trade Centre in 1993, has admitted he plotted to assassinate Mr Clinton after fleeing to Manila, but was dissuaded by his high level of security.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described 9/11 mastermind, also lived in the Philippines in the mid-1990s and has admitted he considered trying to kill Mr Clinton.

The president and his national security team have been accused of passing up several opportunities to capture bin Laden and his associates in the 1990s when they were living in Sudan.

Mr Clinton has rejected such claims, insisting he was "obsessed" with the al-Qaeda leader during his time in office.

In the years leading up to the September 11 attacks, al Qaeda was blamed for bombing two US embassies in Africa and attacked the destroyer, the USS Cole.

However, Marisa Porges, a former government counter-terrorism advisor and an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, a US think tank, said the assassination plot, if true,would suggest al Qaeda was more developed than some thought it was prior to 9/11”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, said earlier this month that it was important to capture bin Laden, a goal that some believe has slipped down America's list of priorities in the years since the September 11 attacks.

Prof Gormley’s book, for which he interviewed Mr Clinton three times, focuses mainly on the former president’s pursuit by Ken Starr, the independent counsel.

Mr Starr’s conclusion that Mr Clinton lied during a sworn deposition about his affair with Monica Lewinsky led to the president’s impeachment.

Clinton arrives in Philippines for trade summit

November 23, 1996
Web posted at: 1:30 p.m. EST (1830 GMT)

MANILA, Philippines (CNN) -- President Bill Clinton arrived in the Philippines Saturday before the start of a trade summit with Pacific Rim nations aimed at creating the world's largest free trade zone.

But the most important part of his two-day visit may well be a private meeting Sunday with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit is Monday.

World leaders and trade ministers representing the 18 nations of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation organization (APEC) will meet in Subic Bay, near Manila, on Monday. The gathering brings together nations that comprise 46 percent of the world's trade.

Fresh from a state visit to Australia, Clinton hopes to foster better relations with China at a time of troublesome differences on issues such as trade, human rights and American arms sales to Taiwan. The economic stakes were underscored when the U.S. government reported this week that its trade deficit with China had widened to an all-time high of $4.7 billion in September.

Developing better ties with China is crucial to global trade, Clinton said. In a speech to Australia's parliament last Tuesday, he said the shape of the 21st century lies heavily in "the direction China takes in the years to come."

Clinton and Jiang are expected to announce an acceleration of talks concerning China's application to become a member of the World Trade Organization, which sets the rules for global trade. China has been trying to join for more than two years, but the United States has blocked the effort, arguing that Beijing has done little to dismantle barriers to free trade.

The two leaders could even announce plans to meet with one another in each other's capitals.

Following Sunday's meeting, Clinton is to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto and South Korean President Kim Young Sam in separate talks.

Security tight

Security has been beefed up throughout the Philippines as delegates prepare for Monday's talks. Some 26,000 police and soldiers have been assigned to protect the dignitaries. The United States has warned its citizens to be aware of possible terrorist attacks.

Marches and protests involving thousands of demonstrators have been planned Sunday to protest the summit. As part of the summit, APEC hopes to remove trade barriers among the member economies to liberalize trade by 2010 for developed countries and 2020 for developing nations.

But many people have angrily denounced APEC's goals, saying they represent self-serving trade efforts by the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Walden Belo of the Manila People's Forum points to Mexico as an example of how powerful nations have economically crippled smaller nations. Since Mexico joined the North American Free Trade Agreement, Belo said, Mexico has suffered from an "economic meltdown."  (195K/16 sec. AIFFor WAV sound)

Not so, Washington contends. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns says when the U.S. and other countries cooperate, both sides gain.  (112K/11 sec. AIFF orWAV sound)

Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor added that by removing trade barriers it "opens markets to U.S. products" that leads to continued "global growth."

APEC members are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and the United States.

From the Philippines, Clinton travels to Thailand for a brief state visit.

Related stories:

• Security alert for U.S. citizens in Philippines - November 22, 1996
• Manila under heavy security for APEC meetings - November 21, 1996
• Philippine government says 'pipe bomb' part of drill - November 20, 1996
• Bomb found near APEC meeting site - November 20, 1996

Related sites:

Note: Pages will open in a new browser window

• APEC
• APEC Philippines 1996

External sites are not endorsed by CNN Interactive.

Tell us what you think! You said it...

Philippine government says 'pipe bomb' part of drill

November 20, 1996
Web posted at: 11:45 p.m. EST (0445 GMT)

MANILA, Philippines (CNN) -- A pipe bomb discovered at Subic Bay on Wednesday was just part of a drill, and not a threat to a forthcoming summit of world leaders, Philippine officials said.

The bomb, which had no detonator, was discovered by janitors about 600 feet (200 meters) from the main gate of the base, Honesto Islepa, press undersecretary in the Philippines Presidential Office, told CNN.

He said the bomb was put there in order to test alertness of security personnel at the base.

Foreign and trade ministers of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum were to begin arriving Thursday for talks to prepare for the APEC summit that begins Monday. President Clinton is among the leaders planning to attend.

The ministers meeting is to be held in Manila and the summit of 18 APEC member economies at Subic Bay freeport northwest of the capital.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Security alert for U.S. citizens in Philippines

November 22, 1996
Web posted at: 3:20 p.m. EST (2020 GMT)

From Correspondent Steve Hurst

MANILA, Philippines (CNN) -- U.S. citizens in the Philippines are being warned to take security precautions because of threats against American diplomats during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, which began this week and concludes with a summit meeting Monday.

"We have general information that a group of people may be targeting American individuals here," State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns told reporters in Manila.

Burns declined to give additional information about what group or groups may have issued the threats, when they were discovered and what specific threat was involved.

It Got Them Killed: President James A. Garfield

"Nobody gives a hoot about who runs the post offices now, but boy they did then..." - Professor David Blight

"Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender." - President James A. Garfield, Innaugural Address

"I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! I did it and I want to be arrested! Arthur is President now!" - Charles Giteau

An engraving of James A. Garfield's assassination, published in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. The caption reads: 

"Washington, D.C.—The attack on the President's life—Scene in the ladies' room of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot—The arrest of the assassin / from sketches by our special artist's [sic] A. Berghaus and C. Upham."

President Garfield is at center right, leaning after being shot. He is supported by Secretary of State James G. Blaine who wears a light colored top hat. 

To left, assassin Charles Guiteau is restrained by members of the crowd, one of whom is about to strike him with a cane.

"There were southern secessionists who absolutely believed that even any discussion of slavery's future in the U.S. Congress should be suppressed, that they would no longer live in a union that even discussed what to do about the future of slavery. 

And I would say there's not only a kind of racial fear, a fear of loss of slavery by the planter class, but there's a certain kind of political fear going on as well, and that is the fear that southern polls now had — they'd had this for years, hadn't they? 

The fear was the growing, or the growth now for them of a kind of minority status, that that Republican Party in the North now had the potential, given the population of the North, this sectional, anti-slavery party, had the potential to really take over the House of Representatives, in huge numbers. 

Then you get Lincoln in the White House for four years — and what if you get him for eight? — and he appoints the next two, three, four, five members of the Supreme Court. And he can control the diplomatic corps around the world, and even more importantly he can control patronage of the post office system, which in those years, believe it or not, was very powerful; nobody gives a hoot about who runs the post offices now but boy they did then. 

And what was at stake? And we can see this all over their letters and their diaries, their speeches in secession conventions, was a loss ultimately for the slaveholding class of what James Roark and other scholars have called "planter control." 

So to say secession is about slavery is accurate, but there are layers beneath it, in what I'd call a kind of fear thesis."

"any party which commits itself to paper money will go down amid the general disaster, covered with the curses of a ruined people."

"By the experience of commercial nations in all ages it has been found that gold and silver afford the only safe foundation for a monetary system. Confusion has recently been created by variations in the relative value of the two metals, but I confidently believe that arrangements can be made between the leading commercial nations which will secure the general use of both metals. 

Congress should provide that the compulsory coinage of silver now required by law may not disturb our monetary system by driving either metal out of circulation. If possible, such an adjustment should be made that the purchasing power of every coined dollar will be exactly equal to its debt-paying power in all the markets of the world.

The chief duty of the National Government in connection with the currency of the country is to coin money and declare its value. Grave doubts have been entertained whether Congress is authorized by the Constitution to make any form of paper money legal tender. 

The present issue of United States notes has been sustained by the necessities of war; but such paper should depend for its value and currency upon its convenience in use and its prompt redemption in coin at the will of the holder, and not upon its compulsory circulation. 

These notes are not money, but promises to pay money. 

If the holders demand it, the promise should be kept.

The refunding of the national debt at a lower rate of interest should be accomplished without compelling the withdrawal of the national-bank notes, and thus disturbing the business of the country.

 I venture to refer to the position I have occupied on financial questions during a long service in Congress, and to say that time and experience have strengthened the opinions I have so often expressed on these subjects.

The finances of the Government shall suffer no detriment which it may be possible for my Administration to prevent.

Guiteau was destitute and increasingly slovenly due to wearing the same clothes every day, the only clothes he owned, but he did not give up. 

On May 13, 1881, he was banned from the White House waiting room. 

On May 14, 1881, Secretary of State James G. Blaine told him never to return: 

"Never speak to me again of the Paris consulship as long as you live."

"I think there are only three places that are of value enough to be taken ... One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico [sic]. Cuba and Porto Rico are not now imminent and will not be for a generation. Hawaii may come up for decision at an unexpected hour and I hope we shall be prepared to decide it in the affirmative."

I quote The Enemy:

"As Secretary of State, Blaine was a transitional figure, marking the end of an isolationist era in foreign policy and foreshadowing the rise of the American Century that would begin with the Spanish-American War. 

His efforts at expanding the United States' trade and influence began the shift to a more active American foreign policy. Blaine was a pioneer of tariff reciprocity and urged greater involvement in Latin American affairs. An expansionist, Blaine's policies would lead in less than a decade to the establishment of the United States' acquisition of Pacific colonies and dominance of the Caribbean."

[Sounds an awful lot like British Intelligence, to me...]

Text: 

"The Samoan Situation

"As surrendered by Secretary Bayard to His Successor, March 4, 1889."

U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Francis Bayard points a rifle towards his successor, James Gillespie Blaine, who is climbing over the fence of "neutrality." 

During this time, Germany was expanding into Samoa, and the United States [and Edward, Prince of Wales, Grandmaster Mason of York Rite Freemasonry] was trying to counter this expansion.

From the University of Hawaii at Manoa Library: http://www.flickr.com/photos/uhmlibrary/8274363782/

"As will shock you all, calls for Chester A. Arthur coins are not big."

Vice President Biden,

announcing the suspension of the $1 Presidential Coin program

Washinton Times, Sept.10th 2001 Mossad: "Has capability to target U.S.forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

An elite U.S. Army study center has devised a plan for enforcing a major Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that would require about 20,000 well-armed troops stationed throughout Israel and a newly created Palestinian state.

There are no plans by the Bush administration to put American soldiers into the Middle East to police an agreement forged by the longtime warring parties. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is searching for ways to reduce U.S. peacekeeping efforts abroad, rather than increasing such missions.

But a 68-page paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) does provide a look at the daunting task any international peacekeeping force would face if the United Nations authorized it, and Israel and the Palestinians ever reached a peace agreement.

Located at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the School for Advanced Military Studies is both a training ground and a think tank for some of the Army's brightest officers. Officials say the Army chief of staff, and sometimes the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ask SAMS to develop contingency plans for future military operations.

During the 1991 Persian Gulf war, SAMS personnel helped plan the coalition ground attack that avoided a strike up the middle of Iraqi positions and instead executed a "left hook" that routed the enemy in 100 hours.

The cover page for the recent SAMS project said it was done for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But Maj. Chris Garver, a Fort Leavenworth spokesman, said the study was not requested by Washington.

"This was just an academic exercise," said Maj. Garver. "They were trying to take a current situation and get some training out of it."

The exercise was done by 60 officers dubbed "Jedi Knights," as all second-year SAMS students are nicknamed.

The SAMS paper attempts to predict events in the first year of a peace-enforcement operation, and sees possible dangers for U.S. troops from both sides.

It calls Israel's armed forces a 

"500-pound gorilla in Israel. 

Well armed and trained. 

Operates in both Gaza and the West Bank. 

Known to disregard international law to accomplish mission. 

Very unlikely to fire on American forces. 

Fratricide a concern especially in air space management."

Of the MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: 

"Wildcard. 

Ruthless and cunning. 

Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

On the Palestinian side, the paper describes their youth as "loose cannons; under no control, sometimes violent." The study lists five Arab terrorist groups that could target American troops for assassination and hostage-taking.

The study recommends "neutrality in word and deed" as one way to protect U.S. soldiers from any attack. It also says Syria, Egypt and Jordan must be warned "we will act decisively in response to external attack."

It is unlikely either of the three would mount an attack. Of Syria's military, the report says: "Syrian army quantitatively larger than Israeli Defense Forces, but largely seen as qualitatively inferior. More likely, however, Syrians would provide financial and political support to the Palestinians, as well as increase covert support to terrorism acts through Lebanon."

Of Egypt's military, the paper says, "Egyptians also maintain a large army but have little to gain by attacking Israel."

The plan does not specify a full order of battle. An Army source who reviewed the SAMS work said each of a possible three brigades would require about 100 Bradley fighting vehicles, 25 tanks, 12 self-propelled howitzers, Apache attack helicopters, Kiowa Warrior reconnaissance helicopters and Predator spy drones.

The report predicts that non-lethal weapons would be used to quell unrest.

U.S. European Command, which is headed by NATO's supreme allied commander, would oversee the peacekeeping operation. Commanders would maintain areas of operation, or AOs, around Nablus, Jerusalem, Hebron and the Gaza strip.

The study sets out a list of goals for U.S. troops to accomplish in the first 30 days. 

They include: "create conditions for development of Palestinian State and security of Israel "; 

ensure "equal distribution of contract value or equivalent aid" . . . that would help legitimize the peacekeeping force and stimulate economic growth; 

"promote U.S. investment in Palestine"; 

"encourage reconciliation between entities based on acceptance of new national identities"; 

and "build lasting relationship based on new legal borders and not religious-territorial claims."
Maj. Garver said the officers who completed the exercise will hold major planning jobs once they graduate. "There is an application process" for students, he said. "They screen their records, and there are several tests they go through before they are accepted by the program. The bright planners of the future come out of this program."
James Phillips, a Middle East analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said it would be a mistake to put peacekeepers in Israel, given the "poor record of previous monitors."

"In general, the Bush administration policy is to discourage a large American presence," he said. "But it has been rumored that one of the possibilities might be an expanded CIA role."
"It would be a very different environment than Bosnia," said Mr. Phillips, referring to America's six-year peacekeeping role in Bosnia-Herzegovina. "The Palestinian Authority is pushing for this as part of its strategy to internationalize the conflict. Bring in the Europeans and Russia and China. But such monitors or peacekeeping forces are not going to be able to bring peace. Only a decision by the Palestinians to stop the violence and restart talks could possibly do that."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/apr/5/20020405-041726-2086r/?page=all

Skull & Bones

Ron Rosenbaum - Esquire Magazine - September, 1977

Take a look at the hulking sepulcher over there. Small wonder they call it a tomb. It's the citadel of Skull and Bones, the most powerful of all secret societies in the strange Yale secret-society system. For nearly a century and a half, Skull and Bones has been the most influential secret society in the nation, and now it is one of the last. In an age in which it seems that all that could possibly be concealed about anything and anybody has been revealed, those blank tombstone walls could be holding the last secrets left in America. 

You could ask Averell Harriman whether there's really a sarcophagus in the basement and whether he and young Henry Stimson and young Henry Luce (Time magazine) lay down naked in the coffin and spilled the secrets of their adolescent sex life to 14 fellow Bonesmen. You could ask Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart if there came a time in the year 1937 when he dressed up in a skeleton suit and howled wildly at an initiate in a red-velvet room inside the tomb. You could ask McGeorge Bundy if he wrestled naked in a mud pie as part of his initiation and how it compared with a later quagmire into which he so eagerly plunged. 

You could ask Bill Bundy or William F. Buckley, both of who went into the CIA after leaving Bones - or George Bush, who ran the CIA / President - whether their Skull and Bones experience was useful training for the clandestine trade. ("Spook," the Yale slang for spy.) 

You could ask J. Richardson Dilworth, the Bonesman who now manages the Rockefeller fortune, just how wealthy the Bones society is and whether it's true that each new initiate gets a no-strings gift of fifteen thousand dollars cash and guaranteed financial security for life. 

You could ask...but I think you get the idea. 

The lending lights of the Eastern establishment - in old-line investment banks (Brown Brothers Harriman pays Bone's tax bill), in a blue-blood law firms (Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, for one), and particularly in the highest councils of the foreign-policy establishment - the people who have shaped America's national character since it ceased being an undergraduate power, had their undergraduate character shaped in that crypt over there. 

Bonesman Henry Stimson, Secretary of War under F.D.R., a man at the heart of the heart of the American ruling class, called his experience in the tomb the most profound one in his entire education. But none of them will tell you a thing about it. 

They've sworn an oath never to reveal what goes on inside and they're legendary for the lengths to which they'll go to avoid prying interrogation. The mere mention of the words "skull and bones" in the presence of a true-blue Bonesman, such as Blackford Oakes, the fictional hero of Bill Buckley's spy thriller, 'Saving the Queen', will cause him to "dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed." 

I can trace my personal fascination with the mysterious goings- on in the sepulcher across the street to a spooky scene I witnessed on its shadowy steps late one April night eleven years ago.

I was then a sophomore at Yale, living in Jonathan Edwards, the residential college (anglophile Yale name for dorm) built next to the Bones tomb. It was part of Jonathan Edwards folklore that on a April evening following "tap night" at Bones, if one could climb to the tower of Weir Hall, the odd castle that overlooks the Bones courtyard, one could hear strange cries and moans coming from the bowels of the tomb as the fifteen newly "tapped" members were put through what sounded like a harrowing ordeal. 

Returning alone to my room late at night, I would always cross the street rather than walk the sidewalk that passed right in front of Bones. Even at that safe distance, something about it made my skin crawl. 

But that night in April I wasn't alone; a classmate and I were coming back from an all-night diner at about two in the morning. At the time, I knew little about the mysteries of Bones or any of the other huge windowless secret-society tombs that dominated with dark authority certain key-corners of the campus. They were nothing like conventional fraternities. No one lived in the tombs. 

Instead, every Thursday and Sunday night the best and the brightest on campus, the fifteen seniors in Skull and Bones and in the Scroll and Key, Book and Snake, Wolf's Head, Berzelius, in all the seven secret societies, disappeared into their respective tombs and spent hours doing something - something they were sworn to secrecy about. And Bones, it was said was the most ritualistic and secretive of all. 

Even the very door to the Bones tomb, that huge triple-padlocked iron door, was never permitted to open in the presence of an outsider.

All this was floating through my impressionable sophomore mind that night as my friend Mike and I approached the stone pylons guarding the entrance to Bones. Suddenly we froze at the sight of a strange thing lying on the steps. 

There in the gloom of the doorway on the top step was a long white object that looked like the thighbone of a large mammal. I remained frozen. Mike was more adventuresome: he walked right up to the steps and picked up the bone. I wanted to get out of there fast; I was certain we were being spied upon from a concealed window. 

Mike couldn't decide what to do with the bone. He went up to the door and began examining the array of padlocks. 

Suddenly a bolt shot. The massive door began to swing open and something reached out at him from within. He grasped, terrified, and jumped back, but not before something clutched the bone, yanked it out of his hand and back into the darkness within. The door slammed shut with a clang that rang in our ears as we ran away. 

Recollected in tranquility, the dreamlike gothic moment seems to me an emblem of the strangeness I felt at being at Yale, at being given a brief glimpse of the mysterious workings of the inner temples of privelege but feeling emphatically shut out of the secret ceremonies within. I always felt irrelevant to the real purpose of the institution, which was from its missionary beginnings devoted to converting the idle progeny of the ruling class into morally serious leaders of the establishment. It is frequently in the tombs that conversions take place. 

NOVEMBER, 1976: SECURITY MEASURES 

It's night and we're back in front of the tomb, Mike and I, reinforced by nine years in the outside world, two skeptical women friends and a big dinner at Mory's. And yet once again there is an odd, chilling encounter. We're re-creating that first spooky moment. I'm standing in front of the stone pylons and Mike has walked up to stand against the door so we can estimate its height by his. 

Then we notice we're being watched. 

A small red foreign car has pulled up on the sidewalk a few yards away from us. The driver has been watching us for some time. Then he gets out. He's a tall, athletic looking guy, fairly young. He shuts the card door behind him and stands leaning against it, continuing to observe us. We try to act oblivious, continuing to sketch and measure. 

The guy finally walks over to us, "You seen Miles?" he asks. We look at each other. Could he think we're actually Bones alumni, or is he testing us? Could "You seen Miles?" be some sort of password? 

"No," we reply. "Haven't seen Miles." 

He nods and remains there. We decide we've done enough sketching and measuring and stroll off. "Look!" one of the women says as she turns and points back. 

"He just ran down the side steps to check the basement-door locks. He probably thought he caught us planning a break-in." I found the episode intriguing.

What it said to me was that Bones still cared about the security of its secrets. Trying to find out what goes on inside could be a challenge. And so it was that I set out this April to see just how secure those last secrets are. It was a task I took on not out of malice or sour grapes. I was not tapped for a secret society so I'm open to the latter charge, but I plead guilty only to the voyeurism of a mystery lover. I'd been working on a novel, a psychological thriller of sorts that involved the rites of Bones, and I thought it wouldn't hurt to spend some time in New Haven during the week of tap night and initiation night, poking around and asking questions. 

You could call it espionage if you were so inclined, but I tried to play the game in a gentlemanly fashion: I would not directly ask a Bonesman to violate his sacred oath of secrecy. If, however, one of them happened to have fudged on the oath to some other party and that the other party were to convey the gist of the information to me, I would rule it fair game. And if any Bonesman wants to step forward and add something. I'll be happy to listen. 

What follows is an account of my search for the meaning behind the mysterious Bones rituals. Only information that might be too easily traced to its source has been left out, because certain sources expressed fear of reprisals against themselves. Yes, reprisals. One of them even insisted, with what seemed like deadly seriousness, that reprisals would be taken against me. 

"What bank do you have your checking account at?" this party asked me in the middle of a discussion of the Mithraic aspects of the Bones ritual. I named the bank, "Aha," said the party. "There are three Bonesmen on the board. You'll never have a line of credit again. They'll tap your phone. They'll..." 

Before I could say, "A line of what?" the source continued: "The alumni still care. Don't laugh. They don't like people tampering and prying. The power of Bones is incredible. They've got their hands on every level of power in the country. You'll see - it's like trying to look into the Mafia. Remember, they're a secret society, too." 

WEDNESDAY NIGHT, APRIL 14: THE DOSSIER 

Already I have in my possession a set of annotated floor plans of the interior of the tomb, giving the location of the sanctum sanctorum, the room called 322. And tonight I received a dossier on Bones ritual secrets that was compiled from the archives of another secret society. 

It seems that one abiding preoccupation of many Yale secret societies is keeping files on the secrets of other secret societies, particularly Bones. 

The dossier of Bones is a particularly sophisticated one, featuring "reliability ratings" in percentiles for each chunk of information. It was obtained for me by an enterprising researcher on the condition that I keep secret the name of the secret society that supplied it. 

Okay I will say, though, that it's not the secret society that is rumored to have Hitler's silverware in its archives. 

That's Scroll and Key, chief rival of Bones for the elite of Yale - Dean Acheson and Cy Vance's society - and the source of most of the rest of the American foreign policy establishment. 

But to return to the dossier. 

Let me tell you what it says about the initiation, the center of some of the most lurid apocryphal rumors about Bones. According to the dossier, the Bones initiation ritual of 194O went like this: 

"New man placed in coffin - carried into central part of the building. New man chanted over and 'reborn' into society. Removed from coffin and given robes with symbols on it. (sic) A bone with his name on it is tossed into bone heap at start of every meeting. Initiates plunged into mud pile." 

THURSDAY EVENING: THE FILE AND CLAW SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERY OF 322 

I'm standing in the shadows across the street from the tomb, ready to tail the first person to come out. Tonight is tap night, the night fifteen juniors will be chosen to receive the one-hundred- forty-five-year-old secrets of Bones. Tonight the fifteen seniors in Bones and the fifteen in each of the other societies will arrive outside the rooms of the prospective tappees. They'll pound loudly on the doors. When the chosen junior opens up, a Bonesman will slam him on the shoulder and thunder: "Skull and Bones: Do you accept?" At that point, according to my dossier, if the candidate accepts, he will be handed a message wrapped with a black ribbon sealed in black wax with the skull-and-crossbones emblem and the mystic Bones number, 322. The message appoints a time and a place for the candidate to appear on initiation night - next Tuesday - the first time the newly tapped candidate will be permitted inside the tomb. Candidates are "instructed to wear no metal" to the initiation, the dossier notes ominously. (Reliability rating for the stated to be one hundred percent.) Not long before eight tonight, the door to Bones swings open. Two dark-suited young men emerge. One of them carries a slim black attaché case.

Obviously they're on their way to tap someone. I decide that Bones initiates are taken to a ceremony somewhere near the campus before the big initiation inside the tomb. The Bonesmen head up High Street and pass the library, then make a right. Passing the library, I can't help but recoil when I think of the embarrassing discovery I made in the manuscript room this afternoon. The last thing I wanted to do was reduce the subtleties of the social function of Bones to some simpleminded conspiracy theory. And yet I do seem to have come across definite, if skeletal links between the origins of Bones rituals and those of the notorious Bavarian Illuminists. For me, an interested but skeptical student of the conspiracy world, the introduction of the Illuminists, or Illuminati, into certain discussions (say for instance, of events in Dallas in 1963) has become the same thing that the mention of Bones is to a Bonesman - a signal to leave the room. Because although the Bavarian Illuminists did have a real historical existence (from 1776 to 1785 they were an esoteric secret society within the more mystical freethinking lodges of German Freemasonry), they have also had a paranoid fantasy existence throughout two centuries of conspiracy literature. They are the imagined mega cabal that manipulated such alleged plots as the French and Russian revolutions, the elders of Zion, the rise of Hitler and the House of Morgan. Yes the Bilderbergers and George De Mohrenschildt, too. Silly as it may sound, there are suggestive links between the historical if not mytho-conspiratorial, Illuminists and Bones. First consider the account of the origins of Bones to be found in a century-old pamphlet published by an anonymous group that called itself File and Claw after the tools they used to pry their way inside Bones late one night. I came upon the File and Claw break-in pamphlet in a box of disintegrating documents filed in the library's manuscript room under Skull and Bone's corporate name, Russell Trust Association. The foundation was named for William H (later General) Russell, the man who founded Bones in 1832. I was trying to figure out what mission Russell had for the secret order he founded and why he had chosen that particular death-head brand of mumbo jumbo to embody his vision. 

Well, according to the File and Claw breaking crew, "Bones is a chapter of corps of a German university. It should properly be called the Skull and Bones chapter. General Russell, its founder, was in Germany before his senior year and formed a warm friendship with a leading member of a German society. The meaning of the permanent number 322 in all Bones literature is that it was founded in '32 as the second chapter of the German society. But the Bonesman has a pleasing fiction that his fraternity is a descendant of an old Greek patriot society founded by Demosthenes, who died in 322 BC." They go on to describe a German slogan painted "on arched walls above the vault" of the sacred room 322. The slogan appears above a painting of skulls surrounded by Masonic symbols, a picture said to be "a gift of the German chapter." "Wer war der Thor, wer Weiser, Bettler oder Kaiser? Ob Arm, ob Reich, im Tode gleich," the slogan reads, or, "Who was the fool, who the wise man, beggar or king? Whether poor or rich, all's the same in death." Imagine my surprise when I ran into that very slogan in a 1798 Scottish anti-Illuminatist tract reprinted in 1967 by the John Birch Society. The tract (proofs of a conspiracy by John Robinson) prints alleged excerpts from Illuminist ritual manuals supposedly confiscated by the Bavarian police when the secret order was banned in 1785.

Toward the end of the ceremony of initiation in the "Regent degree" of Illuminism, according to the tract, "a skeleton in pointed out to him [the initiate], at the feet of which are laid a crown and a sword. He is asked 'whether that is the skeleton of a king, nobleman or a beggar.' As he cannot decide, the president of the meeting says to him, 'The character of being a man is the only one that is importance'". Doesn't that sound similar to the German slogan the File and Claw team claims to have found inside Bones? Now consider a haunting photograph of the altar room of one of the Masonic lodges at Nuremburg that is closely associated with Illuminism. Haunting because at the altar room's center, approached through the aisle of hanging human skeletons, is a coffin surmounted by - you guessed it - a skull and crossed bones that look exactly like the particular arrangement of jawbones and thighbones in the official Bones emblem. The skull and crossbones was the official crest of another key Illuminist lodge, one right-wing Illuminist theoretician told me. Now you can look at this three ways. One possibility is that the Bircher right - and the conspiracy-minded left are correct: The Eastern establishment is the demonic creation of a clandestine elite manipulating history, and Skull and Bones is one of its recruiting centers. A more plausible explanation is that the death's-head symbolism was so prevalent in Germany when the impressionable young Russell visited that he just stumbled on the same mother lode of pseudo-Masonic mummery as the Illuninists. The third possibility is that the break-in pamphlets are an elaborate fraud designed by the File and Claw crew to pin the taint of Illuminism on Bones and that the rituals of Bones have innocent Athenian themes, 322 being only the date of the death of Demosthenes. (In fact, some Bones literature I've seen in the archives does express the year as if 322 BC were the year one, making 1977 anno Demostheni 2299.)

I am still following the dark-suited Bonesman at a discreet distance as they make their way along Prospect Street and into a narrow alley, which to my dismay, turns into a parking lot. They get into a car and drive off, obviously to tap an off-campus prospect. So much for tonight's clandestine work I'd never get to my car in time to follow them. My heart isn't in it anyway. I am due to head off to the graveyard to watch the initiation ceremony of Book and Snake, the secret society of Deep Throat's friend Bob Woodward (several Deep Throat theories have postulated Yale secret-society ties as the origin of Woodward's underground-garage connection, and two Bonesmen, Ray Price and Richard Moore, who weree high Nixon aides, have been mentioned as suspects - perhaps because of their experience at clandestine underground truth telling). And later tonight I hope to make the first of my contacts with persons who have been inside - not just inside the tomb, but inside the skulls of some of the Bonesmen.

LATER THURSDAY NIGHT: TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SEXUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

In his senior year, each member of Bones goes through an intense two-part confessional experience in the Bones crypt. One Thursday night he tells his life story, giving what is meant to be a painfully forthright autobiography that exposes his traumas, shames, and dreams. (Tom Wolfe calls this Bones practice a fore-runner of the Me Decade's fascination with self.) The following Sunday-night session is devoted exclusively to sexual histories. They don't leave out anything these days. I don't know what it was like in General Russell's day, maybe there was less to talk about, but these days the sexual stuff is totally explicit and there's less need for fabricating exploits to fill up the allotted time. Most Sunday-night sessions start with talk of prep school masturbation and don't stop until the intimate details of Saturday night's delights have come to light early Monday morning. This has begun to cause some disruptions in relationships. The women the Bonesmen talk about in the crypt are often Yale co-eds and frequently feminists. While it might seem to be a rebuke to Bone's spirit of consciousness raising, none of these women is too pleased at having the most intimate secrets of her relationship made the subject of an all-night symposium consecrating her lover's brotherhood with fourteen males she hardly knows. As one woman put it, "I objected to fourteen guys knowing whether I was a good lay...It was like after that each of them thought I was his woman in some way." Some women have discovered that their lovers take their vows to Bones more solemnly than their commitments to women.

There is the case of the woman who revealed something very personal - not embarrassing, just private - to her lover and made him swear never to repeat it to another human. When he came back from the Bones crypt after his Sunday-night sex session, he couldn't meet her eyes. He'd told his brothers in Bones. It seems that the whole secret society system at Yale is in the terminal stages of a sexual crisis. By the time I arrived this April, all but three of the formerly all male societies had gone co-ed, and two of the remaining holdouts - Scroll and Key and Wolf's Head - were embroiled in bitter battles over certain members' attempts to have them follow the trend. The popular quarterback of the football team had resigned from Scroll and Key because its alumni would not even let him make a pro-coeducation plea to their convocation. When one prominent alumnus of Wolf's Head was told the current members had plans to tap women, he threatened to "raze the building" before permitting it. Nevertheless, it seemed as though it wouldn't be long before those two holdouts went co-ed. But not Bones. Both alumni and outsiders see the essence of the Bones experience as some kind of male bonding, a Victorian, muscular, Christian-missionary view of manliness and public service. While changing the least of all societies over its one hundred forty-five years. Bones did begin admitting Jews in the early Fifties and tapping blacks in 1949.

It offered membership to some of the most outspoken rebels of the late Sixties and more recently, added gay and bisexual members, including the president of the militant Gay Activist Alliance, a man by the name of Miles. But women, the Bones alumni have strenuously insisted, are different. When a rambunctious Seventies class of Bones proposed tapping the best and brightest of the new Yale women, the officers of the Russell Trust Association threatened to bar that class from the tomb and change the locks if they dared. They didn't. The sort of thing is what persuaded the person I am meeting with late tonight - and a number of other persons - to talk about what goes on inside: after all, isn't the core of the Bones group experience the betrayal of their loved ones' secrets? Measure for measure.

Home

October Surprise: Cyrus Vance, Operation Eagle Claw and the RogueNetwork

What’s the single decision you made as president that you most regret?

President Carter: 

I would say the hostage rescue effort in Iran in April of 1980. 

It was a perfectly planned, highly secret, somewhat complex procedure that everybody agreed to do. 

And in order to extract all of the hostages plus all the rescue team from Iran, we had to have six functioning helicopters. 

So I ordered eight helicopters and two of them had to fly from an aircraft carrier about 600 miles across areas of Iran and Oman and land in a desert, which we had already explored.

One of the helicopters, with no reasonable explanation since then, turned back to the aircraft carrier, which left us seven. 

Another one was forced down in the desert by an unexpected sandstorm, which left us six, which was fine. 

And so our whole rescue operation assembled there in the desert. And then one of the helicopters developed a hydraulic leak and couldn’t fly. 

So I had to abort the rescue operation. We couldn’t have afforded to extract five-sixths of our people and leave one-sixth of our people in Iran to be executed, so we had to terminate the exercise.

So it was not sending a large enough squad of helicopters?

If I’d sent one more helicopter, there’s no doubt in my mind we would have had a successful operation.

The Iranians never knew we were there until after we all left. But we would have had the hostages rescued, I would probably have been reelected, and so forth. So that was a bit of a turning point.

WHEN Cyrus Vance decided to resign in 1980 he sought to do it with a minimum of fuss, for that was his style. He wrote to his president, Jimmy Carter, that a plan to try to rescue by force 52 Americans held prisoner in the United States embassy in Tehran had been made against his judgment and that he was resigning as secretary of state, whether the mission succeeded or failed. 

Several days later, when the mission had failed, dismally, Mr Vance's resignation was made public. But he was not allowed to bow out quietly. 

No one could remember a secretary of state, the highest post in the cabinet, resigning on a matter of principle. 

It took some searching to find a single precedent, William Jennings Bryan, a pacifist who had resigned as secretary of state in 1915 because he believed American policy favoured joining the war in Europe.

Mr Vance was not a pacifist. 

He had served in the navy in the second world war, and saw action in the Pacific. He had no liking for the revolutionary government that had taken over Iran. But he believed that some of the American prisoners might die in an attack, and that even if the mission, called Eagle Claw, were successful it would disturb an already unstable region. 

He was doubtful about the ability of the army to cope with conditions in a land they had no knowledge of. 

[NB - This is a blatant and complete lie : since the draw-down of US Forces and Vietnamisation of the Vietnam War in 1973, for five consecutive years, the Military Assistance Program (Arms Sales and CIA) to Iran was astronomically vast, with literally tens of thousands of experienced US service personnel, technicians and tacticians, with particular emphasis given to Special Forces, Black Ops and Covert Ops veterans being stationed in Iran, training the Iranian military, conducting joint exercises and developing firm relationships.

US military involvement and experience in Iran and with Iranians has always been intimate, comprehensive and extensive, but in the decade prior to 1980, it was second to none on the planet.

The idea that US Special Forces and military brass "didn't know" the Iranian nation, climate, territory and culture is just flat out deceitful.]

He had no great faith in the marvels of military technology. In 1962, when he was secretary of the army, the walkie-talkies of soldiers guarding blacks from white supremacists in the southern states failed at crucial moments. His misgivings were justified. 

[NB - As with Desert One, sabotage is a far more likely explanation; these were not US Army Troops, they were Alabama National Guardsman, ordered to disobey their Commander-in-Chief Govenor Wallace and accept what they considered to be illegal orders from a foreign Head of State they didn't vote for and didn't like]

Eagle Claw never got near the prisoners. Helicopters that were the mainstay of the mission were disabled in an unanticipated sandstorm in the Iranian desert. 

[NB - Again, this is a lie. One of them turned back in the Sandstorm, citing a red light in his control board warning of a loss of pressure due to microfracture in one of the rotor blades. The manual states that this warning light is not grounds for an abort, but requires an immediate maintaince check on return to base.

This red light had never occurred before in operation of this model of helicopter - two more of the helicopters developed the same fault on this mission - one more had a hydraulic fault requiring the system to be flushed, which couldn't be done in the desert. 

With insufficient lift to complete the mission, the President order them to withdraw and abort the phase one insertion. 

No lives had been lost, and the mission itself not compromised - the insertion team had not been detected by Iranian radar.

Then one of the remaining choppers crashed into one of the two C-130 Hercules on the ground, whilst refuelling and people began to die before the withdraw could begin.

None of this had anything to do with the sandstorm]

Eight American servicemen died and eight aircraft were lost. The mission was judged a brave one, but stupid. 

[NB - It wasn't, and it wasn't anything LIKE as stupid as the NEXT rescue plan they began developing, Operation Credible Sport...]

The embassy Americans were eventually freed as a result of painstaking negotiation, a process Mr Vance had pressed for.

Cyrus Vance was aware that, despite his exalted job, others could have a say in making and carrying out American foreign policy, particularly at times of great national stress. (The present star in the war against terrorism is the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a man of strong words and once a champion wrestler.) 

At the time of Eagle Claw Mr Vance's rival for President Carter's ear was his hawkish national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

For much of his three years as secretary of state Mr Vance was uneasy as he battled with Mr Brzezinski for influence over foreign policy. Mr Vance knew that the president backed him in many ways, particularly in the view that human rights should be a pillar of American foreign policy; that was one of the reasons he had been picked for the job. 

But in the run-up to an election against Ronald Reagan, Mr Carter wanted to show that he could be tough with the Iranians. 

[NB - Not true. He was told it would work, and there is no reason that it wouldn't work]

Mr Vance was even bothered that his office in the State Department was a mile or so from the White House, whereas Mr Brzezinski's office was next door to the president's. Even the great and the good exhibit human fears.

[NB - But justified; Brezezinski has frequently boasted about this in relation to his "rivalry" with Vance, stating "it's not hard to control a President in such a way"]

Polish-born Mr Brzezinski, a naturalised American, was clever, ambitious and ten years younger than Mr Vance. He saw him, he wrote later, as a relic of “the once-dominant WASP elite” whose “values and rules were of declining relevance”. 

[NB - As charming as usual, Ziggy...]

Mr Vance was indeed a WASP, born to a prosperous family in West Virginia and expensively educated. He had a successful career as a lawyer and seemingly was without political ambition. He once said,

"A lot of us were raised in families where we were taught that we were very fortunate, that we were going to have a good education, and that we had the responsibility to return to the community some of the benefits and blessings we had, and that there was an obligation to participate in government service at the local, state and national level."

For some 30 years various presidents, among them John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson as well as Jimmy Carter, together with international organisations, valued his WASPish talents. 

His departure as secretary of state did not end his service to government and the United Nations. He would be lured away from his law practice, given a working title, special this or special that, and asked to take on problems that had no solutions but could perhaps be made less menacing. 

So he went off to the Middle East, to the Balkans, to the Koreas, to Cyprus, and, until it broke up and created a new set of problems, to the Soviet Union. He was sceptical of any proposed American “master plan” for the world. His method was to take each problem, look at it as a lawyer would a brief, judge what could be negotiated, and draw up a contract.

[NB - Bilderberger AND Trilateral Commissioner]

Mr Vance was sometimes compared with another indefatigable American traveller, Henry Kissinger. 

Philip Habib, an American career diplomat who worked with many negotiators, greatly admired Mr Kissinger. 

[NB - Habib is an Iranian-born Kissingerite Rockefeller Man greatly implicated in October Surprise and the fall of the Peacock Throne.]

His capacity “to put things together, to move, to produce the precise word at the right time, and his wit, were marvellous things to behold”. 

But Cyrus Vance's “absolute, total and complete honesty” made him “probably the finest public servant I ever worked with”. 

[NB - That Cyrus is named for the the greatest Persian ruler in Historu (as is fellow October Surprise alum and Israeli arms dealer, the late Persian Jew Cyrus Hoshemi, is a fact also not lost on Habib]

Not bad for a WASP of declining relevance [Working for the Central Intelligence Agency].

Gary Sick, your national security advisor for the Middle East, and a number of others have written convincingly that Reagan’s campaign staff were conspiring against you to keep the hostages held for fear you’d win reelection if they were released. 

Do you believe that? Does that resonate with you?

I never have taken a position on that because I don’t know the facts. 

I’ve seen both sides. 

I’ve seen the explanations that were made by George H. W. Bush and the Reagan people, and I’ve read Gary Sick’s book and talked to him. 

I don’t really know.

The thing that I do know is that after they [the Iranians] decided to hold the hostages until after the election, I did everything I could to get them extracted, and the last three days I was president, I never went to bed at all. 

I stayed up the whole time in the Oval Office to negotiate this extremely complex arrangement to get the hostages removed and to deal with $12 billion in Iranian cash and gold. 

And I completed everything by six o’clock on the morning that I was supposed to go out of office. 

All the hostages were transferred to airplanes and they were waiting in the airplanes. 

I knew this—so they were ready to take off—and I went to the reviewing stand when Reagan became president. 

Five minutes after he was president, the planes took off. They could have left three or four hours earlier.

But what, if any, influence was used on the Ayatollah to wait until I was out of office, I don’t know.

Excerpted from Conversations with Power: What Great Presidents and Prime Ministers Can Teach Us about Leadership by Brian Michael Till.