To: All Message #: 3657 From: New York On-line Submitted: 25 Apr 92 09:21:00 Subject: Ralph McGehee on Grenada Status: Public Received: No Group: PUBLIC_EYE (27) 9:03 pm Apr 13, 1992 by dxc4@po.CWRU.Edu in cdp:misc.activism. Ralph McGehee on Grenada Thanks to John DiNardo for providing me with this tape of a brief excerpt of a press conference by former CIA agent Ralph McGehee, broadcast on radio station WBAI in New York. ____________________________________________________________________ My own particular distress, if you want to call it -- it's much more than that -- with the Agency was deceptions over Vietnam. There were so many, it's hard to talk about. Its intelligence was almost an arm of its disinformation. Just one -- I'm not going to have time to go into that, but I'll talk about Grenada. I think the masterpiece of all disinformation operations, the _Piet`a_ of disinformation, was the operation at Grenada. Now the United States invaded Grenada on the basis that Grenada posed a threat to America's national security. Here's an island nation of 100,000 people, half of them children; they had no army, no navy, no air force, they didn't even have a commercial airline, that we invaded because it posed a threat to America's national security. Now you can sell that to the American people, you can sell them anything. And indeed, after this was done, Reagan's popularity soared. How did we do it? The armada that was going off to the Middle East because of the bombing of the Marines in Lebanon took a short stop at Grenada, and all media were not allowed on the island for several days. The President went on television and said, "My fellow Americans, we got there just in time. We found three warehouses loaded to the rafters, one with Communist weapons." And Grenada was going to sponsor revolution throughout all of Central America, the whole story. Finally, when the media was allowed on the island, they rushed to the warehouse to see these Communist weapons, and they noted that there were only some Communist weapons, only half full, and many of them were American weapons. Of course, you have to realise that the Department of Defense was solely in charge of disseminating information at that particular point, and [they were asked] well, how could these be Communist weapons? "Well, they were left behind in Vietnam." Later on, these weapons, by a circuitous route, ended up back in the CIA. There is also -- when the story that Grenada posed a threat to national security began to fade, you know, people began to appreciate that this little tiny country couldn't really pose a threat to anybody, we then retreated to television, on the nightly news, showing an artillery barrage, against -- they were wiping out pockets of Cuban resistance. What we weren't told was that this was totally staged: there was nobody shooting back. They were just shooting up in the mountains, some of the American soldiers shooting up there, and this was portrayed to us as wiping out pockets of Cuban intervention. Later we came to find out that Cuba had about fifty airport workers on the island, one or two military advisors, but that was after all the information had had its effect. My time is out. Disformation operations are the plurality of CIA covert operations; they have had a very mighty impact, particularly on the Vietnam war, which cost somewhere between three hundred and nine hundred billion dollars. Whenever you want to determine a target for overthrow, you look at the focus of the media and the use of its deception operations, and you can pretty well determine that this is a target. Thank you. -- Full frontal nudity? Yes, I'd do it if it was valid ... er, if the money was valid ... and if it were a small part. --- Tabby 2.2 * Origin: NY On-Line **The Best of Peacenet** 718-852-2662 (1:278/607) =-=-=-=-=