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Military Necessity and Homosexuality: Our “New Gender Order” Is Not Fighting Fit
by Ronald D. Ray
Indiana Policy Review
August, 1993

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“A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty, and to maintain a free government.”

-- Massachusetts Bill of Rights, 1780

The defense of the military ban against homosexuals rests historically and legally upon government deference, particularly by Congress and the federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, to the military on the basis of “military necessity.” Its singular mission is, as stated by the Secretary of Defense, on March 26, 1992, “to fight and win our wars,” to defend America from enemies foreign and domestic.

Anything or anyone who interferes with or inhibits the military’s ability to accomplish that high calling with the fewest casualties is a threat to national security. The military is an entirely separate society apart from the civilian society and necessarily governed by different rules and standards. Soldiers are recruited and selected from classified groups based on military selection criteria that were developed over time and proven on the battlefield. First and foremost the battlefield demands that young recruits between the ages of 18 to 26 be ablebodied. The military “discriminates” against classifications or groups such as convicted felons, non-high school graduates, drug users, the physically disabled, etc., because those groups have characteristics shown to be unfit for military service.

For example, there is absolutely no reason based upon military necessity’s battlefield standard to assign women, who as a group physically have one-third less strength, agility, speed and endurance than men, to the combat arms. This is especially true when the military is reducing forces and ample numbers of able-bodied men are available for combat service. The extraordinary physical demands of combat on land, sea and air are unchanging and are still critically important in war. Military leaders declare that the battlefield has not become less demanding because of today’s advanced technology, but rather more lethal.

There is also no sound military reason based upon this “military necessity” standard for allowing open homosexuals to serve in the military. In recent weeks the press has dealt with a variety of disruptions to the military’s good order and discipline raised by the possible elimination of the ban: morale and cohesion; lack of privacy; fraternization; favoritism; sexual harassment; etc. While these are important considerations, the decision is fundamentally flawed for one primary reason: The homosexuals are not as a group able-bodied. They are known to carry extremely high rates of disease brought on because of the nature of their sexual practices and the promiscuity which is a hallmark of their lifestyle.

Evidence to this fact abounds: The August 3, 1992, issue of Newsweek reported that 87 percent of all AIDS cases in adults over the age of 24 are attributable to drug use needle-sharing and male-to-male sex. Of AIDS patients aged 13 to 24, 77 percent admit to male-to-male sex. A compilation of recent health studies [1] shows that homosexuals account for 80 percent of America’s most serious Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STD); despite the fact that they account for less than 2 percent of the total American population. Youths engaging in homosexual behavior are 23 times more likely to contract a sexually transmitted disease than strictly heterosexual you6ths. Lesbians are 19 times more likely than heterosexual women to have had syphilis, twice as likely to suffer from genital warts, and four times as likely to have scabies. Male homosexuals are 14 times more likely to have had syphilis than male heterosexuals. They are also thousands of times more likely to contract AIDS. According to the Centers for Disease Control, at least two-thirds of all AIDS cases in the United States are directly attributable to homosexual conduct. [2]

It is often argued by homosexual advocates that this destructive behavior is merely a reaction to society’s unwillingness to accept homosexuality. But San Francisco, with its open validation of homosexuality, has an overabundance of the social and medical woes associated with homosexuality.

If America’s elected officials permit homosexuals to openly serve in the military with America’s sons and daughters, knowing full well that homosexuals carry, in overwhelming numbers, a disease more deadly than war’s killing fields, they will answer to America’s families. To place American servicemen and women at risk with no military purpose or benefit is very, very wrong.

Homosexual Practices

“Skin color is a benign, non-behavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison of the two is a convenient but invalid argument.” [3]

-- General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Sexuality may be the most profound and powerful life force, requiring strong discipline and commitment to be channeled in healthy ways or it can become destructive and deadly. Early in the 1970s, Dr. William H. Masters of St. Louis announced to the nation’s press that homosexuality is “natural” and by direct implication a normal sexual act or sexual condition. In so doing, Dr. Masters had “raised the status of the anus to the level of the vagina. What was until then a purely excretory organ had become a genital one – by decree.” [4] With the onslaught of AIDS there has been a blizzard of educational information on “safe sex” precautions for homosexuals printed and disseminated largely with government funds. An understanding of homosexual practices drawn from information in the “safe sex” materials may prove helpful to America as it deliberates the suitability of homosexuals serving openly in the military.

Beside the general “gay” sexual practices of mutual masturbation and fellatio/cunnilingus, other homosexual practices which are common in the “lifestyle” are more bizarre: Anal intercourse that often causes tearing or bruising of the anus or rectal wall, which is only one cell thick and not designed for this extreme activity. [5] Anal penetration (penetration of the anus by hand, arm, or foreign objects) – In 1983, well over a third of homosexuals admitted to participating in “fisting” – the insertion of hands or arms through the anus. Anal penetration by large objects (including bottles, cucumbers, carrots, light bulbs, dildos and other such “toys”) greatly increases tearing, bruising, and the risk of infection. It also debilitates the sphincter muscles which control the anus and bowel movements. [6] According to one medical study, ‘fist fornication’ is becoming increasingly common. [7] About 80 percent of homosexuals regularly use their tongues to stimulate the anuses of their partners, thus ingesting biologically significant amounts of fecal matter. [8] According to one clinical study: 92 percent of these men reported that they practiced anilingus [rimming]. This practice is particularly associated with the high incidence among homosexuals of Hepatitis A and Hepatitis B. [9] About 30 percent of homosexuals admitted to having “showered” in the urine of others, and about 20 percent admitted to ingesting urine. About 15 percent said they regularly seek to be urinated upon, and over 8 percent said they regularly ingest it. [10] In the latest national random survey, 17 percent of homosexuals admitted to having eaten or handled the feces of their partners, and 12 percent reported to giving and receiving enemas for sexual pleasure. [11] Sadomasochism – At least a quarter of homosexuals admit to ritual domination of partners, which involves the use of physical force, violence, and sometimes mutilation as a sexual stimulant.

The focus of male homosexuals is upon the anus. Contact with feces is an anathema to soldiers. Every soldier’s first overnight in the field includes instruction in basic field sanitation, avoiding the diseases that come from mishandling feces – and yet the military is being asked to lift the ban on a classification of people whose sexual practices involve oral-anal contact, and the ingestion of human feces. The prohibitions against mishandling feces in the field date at least from biblical times.

Politically Correct Science

”A latrine outside the camp is required, and a spade, to cover up your filth.”

-- Deuteronomy 23:13

The military is fully aware that the reports for nearly 10 years show that AIDS is still spread predominately by male-to-male sex. Others in academia, science, popular entertainment and the media appear to have misled the Pentagon and the American people about the “harmlessness” of homosexuality. On the contrary, homosexuality is a grave threat to not only our nation’s health but also our national security in several ways. Almost all homosexuals engage in sexual practices involving degradation or humiliation rarely practiced by heterosexuals. [12] The degrading nature of such practices constitutes the real basis of the homosexual security threat as photographs or a video of a service member or of a civilian policy-maker in such an extremely compromising position makes them vulnerable to blackmail or extortion. [13]

A Department of Defense report by Theodore Sarbin entitled, “Homosexuality and Personal Security,” was leaked to the press in October 1991, by an openly homosexual Congressman. The press quoted the Sarbin study saying that gay conduct is “unrelated to moral character” and claimed that homosexual and heterosexual trustworthiness and conduct are “identical.” Sarbin’s assertion is astounding when sexual infidelity and promiscuity are at the core of homosexual behavior, and it is inherently hostile to the moral order America was founded upon.

The much ballyhooed Sarbin study is little more than a pro-homosexual polemic. Sarbin’s study ignores many facts, repeats falsehoods concerning the nature of homosexuality, offers sheer conjecture regarding the nature of opposition to homosexuality, automatically discounts scientific and moral arguments against homosexuality and overlooks counter-espionage case histories involving homosexuals who became traitors through blackmail. [14] Its list of references includes not a single source on the actual experience of intelligence services with homosexuality.

Also, Sarbin’s oft-cited authority, John Money, blatantly demanded legalized adult-child sex in the “man/boy love” journal Paedophilia. Sarbin authority, Bullough, is one of a score of social science editors of Paedophilia. [15]

“The love between men and boys is at the foundation of homosexuality,” [16] or so says a recent editorial in the Sentinel, San Francisco’s premier homosexual publication. A plank in the “gay rights” agenda of 1972 called for striking down the age of consent laws which would allow sexual relations between adults and children. An organization called the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) champions “intergenerational sex.” The Rene Guyon Society expresses its philosophy in its motto, “sex before eight or it’s too late.”

In spite of the flaws inherent in Sarbin’s work, the study has gone on to influence judges, legislators, civilians and military personnel to force change with regard to homosexuals and security clearances. The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and others encouraged the director of the CIA to stop the long-standing practice of asking potential CIA employees in lie-detector tests whether they are homosexual and also stopped investigating sexual orientation when updating security clearances. The decision followed a 1991 study ordered by Mr. Gates and encouraged by Mr. McCurdy that found no case of a CIA employee’s ever having been blackmailed into committing espionage on account of homosexuality. [17]

Yet American agents in the CIA have been turned against their country after blackmail threats related to homosexual behavior. James Speyer Kronthal was entrapped by photographs of his sexual activity twice by hostile intelligence services – first by the Gestapo before World War II and later by the KGB while he was serving as the CIA’s station chief in Bern, Switzerland. [18] In Kronthal’s case, the absence of a ban on homosexuality would not have protected him from the blackmail which made him a traitor: the nature of Kronthal’s depravity was among other things a preference for young boys.

With the stakes so incredibly high, would homosexual leaders and their friends falsify data in order to gain ground? They did, as a matter of record, conceal health data from their own populations in San Francisco and New York during the early days of the AIDS epidemic.

The real connection between homosexual sexual practices and AIDS was squelched. Even gay leaders like Randy Shilts and Larry Kramer were outraged. One thing is certain: homosexuals would move rapidly forward in their quest for a new gender and sexual moral order if the military ban on homosexual behavior is lifted.

_______________

Notes:

Col. Ronald D. Ray, USMCR, is a senior fellow of the foundation. Ray currently is a reserve historian with the Marine Corps Historical Center, Washington, D.C., working on a project on Marine advisors in the Vietnam War in the period of 1954-1975. The foundation thanks First Principles, Inc., for permission to republish his essay.

1. H.W. Jaffe, and C. Keewhan, et al., “National Case-Control Study of Kaposi’s Sarcoma and Pneumocystis Carinii Pneumonia in Homosexual Men: Part 1, Epidemiological Results,” Annals of Internal Medicine, 99 (2), 1983, pp. 145-151; H.H. Handsfield, “Sexually Transmitted Diseases in Homosexual Men,” American Journal of Public Health, (9), 1981, pp. 989-990; Karla Jay and Allen Young, The Gay Report: Lesbians and Gay Men Speak Out About Sexual Experiences and Lifestyles (New York: Summit Books, 1979); Janet E. Gans, et al., America’s Adolescents: How Healthy Are They? (American Medical Association, 1990, p. 31.

2. “The HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report: Year-End Edition,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Division of HIV/AIDS, January, 1992, p. 9.

3. General Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, letter to Rep. Patricia Schroeder, 6 May 1992.

4. Socarides, Beyond Sexual Freedom (New York: Quadrangle, 1977). p. 121.

5. Paul Cameron, Ph.D., Exposing the AIDS Scandal (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1988), pp. 148-151.

6. Paul Cameron, Ph.D., “Sexual Orientation and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” Nebraska Medical Journal, vol. 70, 1985, pp. 292-299; J.R. Daling, “Sexual Practices, Sexually Transmitted Diseases, and the Incidence of Anal Cancer,” New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 317, 1987, pp. 973-977.

7. Kingsley, “Colorectal Foreign Bodies, Management Update,” Diseases of the Colon and Rectum, (vol. 28. 1985), 941-44.

8. M.T. Schechter, “Changes in Sexual Behavior,” Lancet, vol. 1293, 1984.

9. Walters, “Sexual Transmission of Hepatitis A in Homosexual Men: Incidence and Mechanism,” New England Journal of Medicine, [vol. 302, 1980], pp. 435-38; and Hepatitis B in Homosexual Men, American Journal of Medicine, 3A-21S-3A-25S [1989].

10. Id.

11. Cameron, Exposing the AIDS Scandal, pp. 149-52.

12. Lorraine Day, M.D., AIDS: What the Government Isn’t Telling You; Palm Desert, Calif.: Rockford Press, 1991, pp. 106-136.

13. William R. Corson, et al., Widows (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989).

14. Theodore R. Sarbin, Ph.D., and Kenneth E. Karols, M.D., Ph.D., Nonconforming Sexual Orientations and Military Suitability, Washington, DC: Defense Personnel Security Research and Education Center, December 1988).

15. Judith Reisman & Edward W. Eichel, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1990), pp. 23-24. See also Judith A.

16. “No Place for Homo-homophobia,” supra.

17. Commentary: Morton Kondracke, “Incoming fusillade … fired in haste?” The Washington Times, 25 November 1992.

18. William R. Corson, et al., Widows (New York: Crown Publishers, 1989).

Colonel Ray’s study has been abridged for publication in this journal. Members can receive a complete text by sending $2.50 to “At Issue: Military: care of the foundation.

James Speyer Kronthal
Widows [EXCERPT]
by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento
© 1989 by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

CHAPTER ONE: The First Death

I can't wait for 1984, Love Jim

MRS. LAVINIA THOMAS had been James Speyer Kronthal's housekeeper for many years. She enjoyed working for him. The daffodils in the small garden in front of the white brick town house in Georgetown welcomed her to work that cool spring morning. Usually Mr. Kronthal would be reading the Washington Post and finishing his juice when Mrs. Thomas arrived. It was April I, 1953, at 8:30 A.M. and the paper was still on the front step.

Picking up the paper, Mrs. Thomas went inside. On the console table in the small foyer were several letters to be put out for the mailman and a note from Mr. Kronthal saying he had worked very late and wanted to sleep in. Mrs. Thomas shook her head and wondered about what really went on at her boss's State Department office.

When the telephone rang an hour later there was still no sign of her employer stirring. It was someone from Mr. Kronthal's office who wished to speak to him. Mrs. Thomas explained that he had worked late and did not want to be disturbed. The caller asked her to wake him, that it was important. Mrs. Thomas called to Mr. Kronthal. There was no response. The caller asked Mrs. Thomas to have Mr. Kronthal telephone his office as soon as possible, and hung up.

Later that morning, just as Mrs. Thomas was about to go up and knock hard on Mr. Kronthal's second-floor bedroom door, the front doorbell rang. The two men at the door identified themselves as colleagues of Mr. Kronthal from the Department of State. They moved past Mrs. Thomas into the foyer. One of them said that it was vitally important for Mr. Kronthal to come to a meeting, so they would go wake him. She reluctantly let them precede up the stairs.

They knocked hard on the door, but there was no answer. One of the men turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. Opening the door, they saw a man lying across the bed, fully dressed. James Speyer Kronthal was not sleeping. He was dead. Murdered? Later, all Mrs. Thomas could ask herself and her friends was how this could have happened to such a nice young man.

On paper, James Speyer Kronthal was a perfect recruit for the young, burgeoning intelligence service just beginning to emerge in the United States. He had graduated from two of America's aristocratic educational institutions -- a B.A. from Yale in 1934 and an M.A. from Harvard in 1941. His linguistic abilities included fluency in German, French, and Italian. But it was his work during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime forerunner of the CIA, that caught the eye of Allen Welsh Dulles. During the war, Dulles ran the OSS station in Bern, Switzerland, where Kronthal showed him his mettle.

Both men were born to the same upper class, and both shared a similar, nonisolationist attitude toward international politics. As the war ended and the OSS was disbanded, its membership drifted back to the traditional Old Money roles: completing their educations, joining law firms, and managing family investments.

Less than two years later, Americans learned hard lessons about their once-close ally, the Soviet Union. First came the loss of the atomic bomb secrets, then the Armed Forces Security Agency discovered VENONA. This breaking of the Soviets' code revealed that the war alliance was mere expediency and that the Soviets were not America's good friends; they were, in reality, its dedicated enemy. Most Americans soon regarded the Soviets as the new threat. Congress quickly passed, and President Harry Truman signed, the National Security Act of 1947, which chartered the CIA. The infant spy service comprised the cream of the OSS -- mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males from wealthy families with good educations and some experience in wartime espionage. On April 21, 1947, James Kronthal became chief of Bern Station, one of the first seven CIA overseas offices. [1]

On the opposing side, the Soviets had older, more established, very well organized and successful intelligence departments, known informally as "the organs." The postwar U.S. intelligence organizations were so weak that the Soviets virtually ignored them and concentrated instead on penetrating the British counterintelligence and intelligence services, MIS and MI6, and the U.S. military forces deployed throughout Europe after the war. But the advent of the CIA offered the Soviets a rare opportunity to infiltrate a new service from top to bottom. The NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, calculatingly decided not to miss this unique chance to learn from the start about each new employee of the Agency and, of course, attempt to recruit some. [2]

NKVD head Lavrenti Beria expected his resident agents in the United States to learn as much as possible about everyone being assigned overseas by the new CIA. He wanted each of the seven new stations' employees thoroughly evaluated for weaknesses -- especially sex, money, or drugs. James Speyer Kronthal was no exception. Beria understood that the CIA was patterned after the OSS, and Bern proved to be one of the most important OSS stations. Counting on the predictability of the Americans, Beria gave the orders that all Bern personnel receive priority attention.

Beria had done very well in postwar Germany penetrating the young Bundesnachrichtendienst -- the West German Federal Intelligence Service -- known as the BND. That penetration would give the Soviets the information they needed on Kronthal to further their cause. By using old records from the OSS, the NKVD established that not only had Kronthal worked for Dulles in Bern, but also that Dulles and Kronthal were friends from the same social circles. That meant Kronthal had important connections. Establishing the true identities of those who worked for the OSS in Bern under Dulles helped the NKVD to determine whether these men were showing up under their true names elsewhere.

While the Soviets were busy trying to figure out whom to recruit in the CIA, President Harry Truman was trying to decide what to do with the new service. He looked upon the new CIA as a gatherer of information, not as a tool for fighting communist expansion in a direct way. Others wanted the CIA to be another OSS, only directed against the Soviets instead of the Nazis.

Operating under Soviet diplomatic cover in Washington, NKVD agents began to check into the backgrounds of the men who were being sent overseas by the CIA. They soon discovered something remarkable. The FBI was selected to perform the security checks on the new employees. The Soviet agents were astonished to learn that all these checks required was an inquiry at the various government agencies to find out if any unfavorable or derogatory information was known about an applicant. In addition, the Bureau would question neighbors, relatives, and classmates, seeking the same type of information. These "background investigations" were a far less rigorous test of loyalty than the NKVD employed for its agents and handlers.

While the FBI conducted its cursory check of Kronthal, the NKVD simultaneously performed a much more thorough one. The man whose resume looked so good to the CIA and FBI was regarded in quite a different way by the Soviets. In Moscow Center, the KGB's headquarters, Kronthal's middle name -- Speyer -- set off alarm bells. NKVD headquarters cabled Washington to find out more about Kronthal's middle name. When word came back that Kronthal's presumptive namesake was James Joseph Speyer, of Speyer and Company, the interest in Kronthal became intense.

The banking house of Speyer had done business with the Tsar. During the 1930s it ranked with Morgan, Kuhn and Loeb in New York, and Lee, Higginson in Boston as one of the major banking firms in the country. The company was originally founded in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1837, with the New York bank opening a year later.

The NKVD was able to learn that in 1913 when Leon Kronthal and his wife, Maude Mabel Ranger Kronthal, became parents, they decided to give their son a middle name after Leon's flamboyant business partner Joseph Speyer. Over the years Speyer treated young Kronthal like a member of his own family. Later this would bring heartbreak to Leon Kronthal, whose relationship with Joseph Speyer deteriorated as his son grew closer to Leon's business partner.

It is not hard to understand why Leon Kronthal and Joseph Speyer did not get along. They were exact opposites. Leon was a hardworking but dull man. Speyer, on the other hand, always dapper, was a womanizer and was the only Jewish member of several exclusive New York clubs. The young Kronthal's association with the Speyers was a great way for him to enter New York society.

Young Kronthal traveled on vacations with the Speyer family. He attended the Lincoln School in New York with Nelson Rockefeller and Michael Straight. [3] The NKVD found that at Yale, Kronthal did not take business courses as his father had urged him to, but majored, instead, in art history.

Yale was a heady experience for James Kronthal. He was young, reasonably attractive, and quite rich at a time when the Great Depression had swallowed up so many fortunes. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was a member of the Yale rowing crew. His personality resembled that of James Speyer rather than that of his father. He found Speyer's company more interesting too; upon graduation, James Kronthal ignored his father's differences with Speyer and joined Joseph Speyer & Co. Leon Kronthal "retired" from Speyer & Co. to found his own company in 1934.

The Soviet NKVD learned that Kronthal had been sent off to Germany by Speyer where he had used the Speyer family connections to sell artworks that the Nazis confiscated from Jews between 1933 and 1940. In addition to becoming the go-between for this financial service, he also became personally acquainted with Nazi leaders such as Goering, Himmler, and Goebbels.

It was during this period that Kronthal showed a sexual proclivity for young boys. He was entrapped by the Gestapo, and it took Goering's personal intervention to get him out of trouble. But the Germans kept very good records, and the Kronthal arrest record was carefully filed away.

The information on Kronthal later came into the hands of the NKVD through its penetration of General Gehlen's BND by Heinz Felfe. The moral of Kronthal's homosexual stumble is that knowledge of personal transgressions has a way of moving with a natural force from one intelligence service to another without regard to ideology or the sanctity of the sources. So when the NKVD took an interest in Kronthal, his history gave them a field day.

The NKVD kept digging. They learned that although Kronthal's work with Speyer & Co. had been financially rewarding, the emotional cost of profiting from other people's stolen wealth -- people who were sent to death camps -- had been enormous. Kronthal had decided to quit his job and return home to attend Harvard to get a graduate degree in art history. It was at Harvard that Kronthal became acquainted with a young Harvard Law School freshman named James Jesus Angleton. Years later, Angleton would rise to the highest ranks of the CIA as the man in charge of preventing its penetration by the Soviets -- or any other country's service.

Both Angleton and Kronthal had similar personalities and both were deeply suspicious of the motives of those who pursued wealth without regard to political consequences. These suspicions arose because both men had been associated with families that did just that.

After Pearl Harbor, both Angleton and Kronthal answered the call to the colors. Kronthal ended up in the Signal Corps. In 1944, after some combat service, he was assigned to the OSS. It was here that he met the men who would later form the heart of the CIA.

Because of his experience in Germany before the war, Kronthal was very useful to Allen Dulles at the OSS station in Bern. From Dulles's viewpoint, James Kronthal was an ideal subordinate. Not only did he know all the "right" people, but he also possessed a considerable amount of the guilty knowledge associated with the activities of the station chiefs older brother, future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Like Kronthal, the Dulles family had done business in Germany during the Weimar Republic and the early days of Hitler.

After the Germans were defeated, Kronthal proved how flexible a man he could be. On behalf of the OSS and its successors, he busied himself recovering the art that the Nazis had stolen during their ascendancy. Allen Dulles, fulfilling the paternal role that Joseph Speyer had once provided, largely left Kronthal on his own to handle these expensive and precious art treasures. Finding his personal life more freely fulfilled in the ruins of Europe, Kronthal simply did not want to go home and rejoin the banking business. His homosexuality would be too much of a burden to carry in that milieu.

Kronthal's appointment in 1947 as the head of the CIA's new Bern Station was the perfect solution to this unhappy young man's problem. Not only was Bern in charge of CIA operations in Switzerland, but also in much of the rest of Western Europe.

By now the NKVD had learned all they needed to know about James Speyer Kronthal. Moscow Center set two objectives: one was to blackmail him into becoming a Soviet agent, and the second was to make certain he was promoted up through the ranks of their new-found nemesis -- the CIA.

The NKVD was not interested in the information Kronthal could provide from Bern in the short term. It was clear to Beria that Kronthal had the potential to go places in the CIA. The aim with Kronthal was to recruit him to become an "agent in place" at the highest levels of the CIA. Perhaps someday, if politics and luck came together, KronthaI might even head the American clandestine services.

Chinese boys were supplied to Kronthal in Switzerland. He was secretly filmed and then blackmailed. Moscow Center wanted him totally under its control. Although Moscow already had access to the information Kronthal was providing CIA headquarters from Bern, by forcing him to send regular "packets" of information to Moscow Center, the Soviets made sure that Kronthal committed treason. The NKVD had him firmly in its grasp, and there was no turning back. Kronthal had done the one thing that could ruin his life. The Soviets had him.

In May 1952, Kronthal's Bern tour ended. He returned to Washington and was assigned to help plan a reorganization of the CIA to meet future needs and growth. His earlier apprehensions about returning home were now compounded by his betrayal of America. He was not a willing double agent.

The pressures had aged Kronthal dramatically during his overseas tour. He was a man under great strain. On the surface, however, his perfect resume was only enhanced by the addition of five apparently impeccable years in Bern. Kronthal was destined for greatness in the CIA. At Moscow Center, the NKVD believed victory was near.

In the United States, 1952 was an election year. The upcoming presidential election meant changes were coming to the CIA, and the NKVD was concerned. Walter Bedell Smith's declining health meant that he would probably step down as the head of the CIA. The NKVD pressured Kronthal to provide them with information on who was in line for the Director's job. It was critical to the Soviets. The exposure of their moles in 1951 -- Burgess and Maclean, Soviet agents in the British government -- meant that the Americans would obviously cut off the British from sensitive intelligence. The Soviets had to get more men in the CIA. The CIA had now become their primary opponent.

The NKVD was not pleased with the information Kronthal provided. But the kind of information they wanted did not exist. Eisenhower had not given a hint what his intentions were for the CIA. General Smith wanted General Lucian Truscott to replace him at CIA. But Truscott turned down the job when Eisenhower offered it to him. Eisenhower then turned to Allen Dulles. For Kronthal, his old mentor becoming head of the service was a personal tragedy. He knew the NKVD would pressure him to wangle a top job from Dulles. It meant that Moscow Center now had a gold mine in Kronthal.

Kronthal's work on an internal reorganization of the CIA was almost finished. His Soviet handler told Kronthal, who was never very good at politics, to press for his appointment to head the clandestine services. Dulles so trusted Kronthal that he was prepared to give him any post he wanted. But the pressures caused by his fear of being exposed as a homosexual and a Soviet agent were beginning to tell. Kronthal became paralyzed by his fear of exposure. He could not bring himself to fight off other colleagues who were aggressively seeking the same position.

Then chaos struck the Soviet Union. On March 2, 1953, Stalin died -- or may have been murdered. His death was not announced until three days later. Beria was fighting to maintain control over the intelligence organs. The pressures on Kronthal increased. Now, more than ever, Beria needed his agent in place. Beria moved to seize power too quickly. While he had the NKVD in his pocket, it was not a sufficient power base from which he could seize control of the Communist Party and the Politburo. Beria began to pull back and wage an internal war at home with the new leadership while pressuring his agents abroad to produce crucial intelligence.

On March 31, 1953, Dulles decided to find out for himself what position Kronthal wanted in the Agency. Dulles had to make the final top assignments in the CIA, so he invited his old friend over that evening for a working dinner. They lived only two blocks from each other.

What happened between the two men that night is lost to history. There is no evidence that Dulles ever discussed his last conversations with Kronthal that night with anyone else. What is known is that after dinner Kronthal walked to his Georgetown town house at 1662 32nd Street, N. W., sometime before midnight. At home, Kronthal wrote two letters. One letter was addressed to Allen Dulles and the other to Richard Helms. In addition, Kronthal left the brief note for his housekeeper, asking her not to disturb him.

At 9:30 A.M., when Kronthal failed to report to his office on the Mall, the CIA telephoned (under State Department cover) and asked Mrs. Thomas to wake him up. According to police reports, Mrs. Thomas called out but got no answer. She was hesitant to wake him because of his note. But within two hours, Gould Cassal and McGregor Gray arrived at the house from the CIA's Office of Security.

Over Mrs. Thomas's objections, the two men went to Kronthal's bedroom and found his fully clothed body lying on a daybed. His jacket was off, but he still had on a shirt and tie. An empty vial was on the floor. The two security men followed standard procedure and called the CIA's unofficial liaison in the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.

Lt. Lawrence Hartnett had gotten such calls before. He was in charge of cleaning up messes like this one. His job was to cover up what the CIA wanted hidden when it came to Washington police matters. In return, Hartnett was given terrific local intelligence. His files on Washington-based politicians rivaled J. Edgar Hoover's in volume. He had enough details on the local power structure to remain on the force as long as he wanted.

Hartnett carried the ball. He told the press that investigators had found a handwritten letter to a male friend indicating that Kronthal was "mentally upset because of pressure connected with work." This letter, to Richard Helms, and another to Dulles were delivered to their addressees rather than held as evidence by the police. The death was quickly hushed up. An autopsy placed the time of death around midnight, but a chemical analysis failed to determine the cause of death or the contents of the vial found next to Kronthal's body. The cause of death was listed as "apparent suicide."

While the notes to Dulles and Helms were found unmailed in KronthaI's house, he did manage to mail one letter before he died. In a letter to his sister, Susan, Kronthal made a clean breast of his homosexual proclivities and made reference to the "tremendous difficulties" they posed. Susan, already aware of her brother's sexual persuasion, was not alarmed or fretful over these revelations. However, Kronthal's confession that he was not really in the Department of State but, as she had suspected, in the CIA, caused her great concern. The last sentence in James Kronthal's final testament to his sister was, "I can't wait till 1984. Love, Jim."

Susan became the first of a generation of relatives to be stonewalled and lied to by U. S. intelligence agencies over the details of a loved one's death or disappearance. Susan's futile attempts to find out more of the facts surrounding her brother's death led her to believe that the CIA was covering up or withholding information that she thought she had a right to know. But the facts surrounding his death were stamped "Secret" and withheld from her, just as they would be kept from the family members of other, future Cold War casualties.

Kronthal had become an embarrassment and a liability to both sides. He knew firsthand the cost of making a deal with the devil; it must have been clear to his sister that he had little hope or faith that his countrymen would have the wit or wisdom to do any better than he did.

For Beria, the loss of James Kronthal was a major failure. The opportunity to penetrate the CIA at its highest level had been squandered. At Moscow Center the damage report on the Kronthal case made it clear that the Center had pressed him too hard for basically useless or unobtainable political information.

Murder or suicide in the Kronthal case could not be determined. If the Soviets had concluded that he had been identified as a mole by the CIA, they would have killed him. The "organs" did not have any compunctions about arranging to kill any "asset" who had outlived his or her usefulness. They readily killed millions of Russians. A foreigner was not worth any hesitation. If the CIA had learned about Kronthal's "problems," it is possible that Dulles himself would have approved an "executive action," not just to eliminate the problem, but also to send a message to the Soviets that the Agency knew the man had been compromised and turned. Certainly the speed with which the Office of Security arrived at the Kronthal home adds some support to that alternative. More likely, however, is the possibility that Kronthal confessed to Dulles that night over dinner. The next day, when Kronthal did not show up at work, a concerned Dulles concluded that something was very wrong and dispatched the security men.

For the Soviets, only one thing mattered. Kronthal was lost and had to be replaced. With Stalin gone, the winds of change were sweeping the country, and the NKVD had to have information to survive. The only real external intelligence threat left was the CIA.

Long before Kronthal's compromise and recruitment, the NKVD had begun an arduous and methodical program to penetrate the CIA. It was not a high-wire act like the Kronthal effort, but it did get the job done. The NKVD put together dossiers on thousands of Americans who had played a part in the joint war effort. Their World War II files on Americans were picked clean for potential recruitments. If an American showed an interest in the Soviet way of life or sympathy for the Soviet struggle, he became a candidate. He would be nurtured like a calf; he would be given help with his education and be guided toward a career in intelligence. It would be from this cadre that the CIA moles would be selected, trained, and sent on lifelong missions.

The file on Kronthal is buried deep in the archives of the CIA. It is a file on what is probably the first Soviet penetration of the infant intelligence service. It is a story known by only a handful of people who are alive today. The file of James Speyer Kronthal is a metaphor for what the Soviets have done to our intelligence services for a generation. James Kronthal was the first Soviet mole in the CIA. His previously untold story is the introduction to how the Soviets made a conscientious decision to penetrate the CIA and succeeded. His story would haunt CIA director after CIA director. The idea of penetration would never be far from Dulles's mind for the rest of his tenure. All the CIA directors that followed -- John McCone, Admiral William Raborn, Richard M. Helms. James Schlesinger, William Colby, George Bush, Admiral Stansfield Turner, William Casey, and William Webster -- would be held accountable for keeping the KGB out of the CIA.

_______________

Notes:

Chapter One: The First Death

1. The other stations were in London, Paris, Rome, Cairo, Lisbon, and Shanghai.

2. Narodnyi Kommissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) -- The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs -- the forerunner to the KGB.

3. An American whom Sir Anthony Blunt, a Soviet spy in British intelligence, recruited to work for the Soviets while they were both at Cambridge University in the 1930s. See Peter Wright and Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), p. 213. Further documentation can be found in Straight's own book and in Mask of Treachery by John Costello (New York: Morrow, 1988).

Part 1 of 2

John A. Paisley
Widows [EXCERPT]
by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento
© 1989 by William R. Corson, Susan B. Trento, and Joseph J. Trento

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

CHAPTER THREE: Paisley: The Plumbers

There was this bird that got a very late start on the passage south for the winter season. He got tired of flying and he rested on a telephone wire for the night. Well, the inevitable happened and the poor bird froze during the night and fell off the wire to the ground. Just as the bird woke up, a horse happened by and took a dump on the bird. The bird said, "Not only do I almost freeze to death, but now this happens to me." But the bird soon discovered that the horseshit was warming him up and he stuck his head out to look around. He let out a warble and a big cat came up to the bird and ate him. The morals of the story are: Just because someone shits on you, it doesn't mean they are your enemy-and if you're up to your neck in shit, don't sing about it.

-- John A. Paisley's favorite joke

PAISLEY AND MANY of his colleagues believed that Henry Kissinger was "cooking the books" by demanding that the CIA analysts work with political appointees to put together "intelligence memoranda." These National Intelligence [Security] Memoranda, or NISMs, were designed to carry as much weight as the Office of Strategic Research's estimates, but with Kissinger's stamp. They were devices to get the CIA to endorse White House policies -- a hybrid combination that would supersede CIA estimates because they had the endorsement of both the CIA and the White House.

Kissinger was convinced that if the Soviets were painted as being too advanced in strategic missile construction, then the Senate would not approve a series of treaties that he was negotiating and promoting as the rewards of "detente" with the Soviets. Arms control had progressed greatly since the 1950s. But to move beyond what Kennedy accomplished with his Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963 would take very bold moves. Kissinger seemed prepared to make those moves despite facts unearthed by some analysts at the CIA about the Soviets' true intentions.

By the end of 1969, Paisley was a "nervous wreck," according to Maryann. The battle between the Office of Strategic Research and Kissinger was raging. Paisley was in charge of putting together NISM- 3. This memorandum on the state of Soviet air defenses included the Soviets' anti-ballistic-missile capability. In terms of the SALT I negotiations, NISM-3 was most important. According to Paisley's colleague Philip A. Waggener, the argument boiled down to a determination on whether or not the Soviet's new SAM V missile gave them an anti-ballistic-missile (ABM) capability. [1] Paisley had learned from a Soviet defector that the SAM V had such a capability. But, inside the CIA, a debate raged on the accuracy of this information. Suddenly, Paisley found himself having serious trouble getting his bosses to agree to include his discoveries about the Soviets' deployment of an anti-ballistic-missile system around major cities. They attempted to explain to him that because policy and intelligence were now being combined in the NISMs, other considerations had to be included. Paisley, according to his wife, actually resigned. But Paisley's CIA colleagues tell a different story. They say Paisley seemed more caught up in his personal troubles than in policy battles.

By late 1969, John Paisley's work left him with little time for Maryann, Edward, and Diane. His wife demanded that he reorder his priorities. Maryann says she threatened to leave him that year if he did not do something about his life. [2] Paisley went to his CIA superiors and was given what amounts to a year off-a year at the Imperial Defence College in London. [3]

To the CIA, Paisley's year at the Defence College was part of their grooming him for his eventual ascendancy to the top position in OSR. But to Maryann and the children, the London sabbatical was a great opportunity to get to know John again. There was little real work in the London assignment. Most at the CIA considered it a reward for Paisley's hard work and dedication. The Imperial Defence College curriculum included studies in strategic philosophy and detailed studies on the regions of the world. Here, colleagues from various Western military and intelligence services could exchange ideas. After Paisley disappeared, counterintelligence chief James Angleton speculated that this relaxed, academic atmosphere was the perfect place for the Soviets to try to plant an agent or make a recruitment. He argued that the Imperial Defence College was the sort of gathering place for Western intelligence experts that the Soviets would be "fools" not to penetrate. [4]

The course work at the Imperial Defence College was divided into three terms that were separated by short trips to various NATO installations, as well as longer overseas tours. [5]

The family rented a flat in London. Edward Paisley recalls spending much of the time sightseeing. But a disappointed Maryann said she soon learned that John was more distracted, not less. "He couldn't wind down," Maryann recalls. Paisley behaved very strangely that year. Even though he had secure facilities at the U.S. Embassy in London (which was located near the Paisleys' CIA-rented flat), Paisley opened a post office box fifty miles away at Greenham Common, the town that gave its name to a U.S.-run nuclear base in the English countryside. Paisley was not cleared for the base, yet he kept a box on the base's secure grounds. There was no real "official" reason for him to have the post office box. [6]

For a CIA man like Paisley to have a "secret" box, located very far away from where he was staying, when better and more secure facilities were available at the Embassy, is the kind of activity that strikes fear in the heart of any security officer. Following Paisley's disappearance in 1978, when a newspaper reporter learned of the box, the CIA's Office of Security made a major effort to investigate it. The very fact that they investigated indicates that Paisley's CIA superiors had not been notified of the box. One frightening conclusion some security officers made was that Paisley could have been using it for illicit purposes. [7]

What was Paisley doing in London? One possibility is that he had been asked by the CIA to personally recruit someone with whom he was acquainted while on assignment in London. Experts in counterintelligence suggest that Paisley was being contacted for this mission through some sort of "drop" at the nuclear base. But others are more skeptical, including Paisley's own colleagues, who say they have no explanation for his activities.

According to his son, Edward, Paisley was in good spirits in London. Edward does not recall ever going to Greenham Common with his father. He explained that the family did not have a car in London since their flat was not far from the American Embassy. [8]

For Maryann, the memories of London were not wonderful. Their marriage continued its downward spiral. She remembers his being called constantly to the American Embassy to work. On several occasions she heard him use false names over the telephone. She also recalls his going to the embassy to use its secure communication channels. [9]

During this period, Maryann would write to the Paisley family in Oregon that things were fine. Maryann Paisley took great pride in her family and did not want to worry John's mother. [10] But by the end of their stay in London, she had serious doubts that her marriage to John Paisley could continue. He was now working between seventy and seventy-five hours a week. Like other CIA families she had come to know, her family was "compartmentalized," kept separate from his real daily life -- the Agency. [11]

John Paisley returned from London in January 1971, with a full beard. His marriage had deteriorated further, but his career was still soaring. [12]

Paisley's earlier unpleasant encounters with the Nixon White House receded as he and most of the Office of Strategic Research began to prepare for the marathon Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) negotiations. Paisley was providing briefings for Henry Kissinger. [13] Because of his high rank in the OSR, Paisley found himself being appointed to one troubleshooting team after another sent off to various points to do postmortems. These included Cyprus, India, Cambodia, and Geneva during the Nixon years. Paisley's professionalism never gave Kissinger or others he dealt with a hint of his personal disdain for the Nixon administration. Though his sister remembers him railing against Kissinger, Paisley found himself with increasing responsibilities as he played his part in putting together teams for the SALT I talks. The support work for such an arms limitation negotiation was tremendous. And it was Paisley's division that was charged with determining just how strong the Soviets were, and in what strategic areas. Those estimates would determine all U.S. negotiating positions with the Russians.

In spite of Paisley's earlier problems with Kissinger on the NISMs, it was Paisley who gave Kissinger one of his best pitches for selling SALT to political conservatives. Paisley and his CIA colleagues argued that the Soviets could no longer afford to support a huge defense buildup. Their Pentagon colleagues disagreed. The OSR's scientific division reported that the Soviet missiles, while being produced at ever-increasing rates, were heavier than ours, but were also amazingly inaccurate. They argued that because they were so inaccurate, it was necessary for the Russians to carry bigger warheads to destroy a target. Further, such information was being confirmed by FEDORA and TOP HAT, the code names of two Soviet agents who had been recruited by the FBI to work against the Soviet government. According to former CIA analyst David S. Sullivan, both agents reported that the Soviet ICBMs were inaccurate. This information, combined with Paisley's insistence that the Soviet economy could not support a massive nuclear buildup, created the foundation for America's negotiating positions. It was on these positions that Kissinger based his negotiations with the Soviets. In retrospect, they proved to be disastrous.

The image that Paisley and his colleagues painted of the Soviet Union, based on their estimates, used methodologies that were "flawed," according to Phil Waggener. Waggener, who worked with Paisley, says there were "very basic problems" in some of Paisley's original methods of measuring the Soviet military economy. The net result was that for years the CIA advised U.S. policy-makers that the Soviets were less able to support a major strategic military buildup than they actually were.

Waggener and other OSR employees see nothing sinister in the errors. But other colleagues are not so charitable. David Sullivan said that, because of Paisley's estimates, the United States went into the SALT I negotiations convinced that the Soviets did not have the economic wherewithal to engage in a major secret buildup. "But, as history shows, that is precisely what they did," Sullivan asserts.

After John Paisley disappeared, his son, Edward, recalls seeing a document indicating that the Soviets approached John Paisley overseas. He believes it was during the SALT I talks. Edward says this document was later stolen from his mother's lawyer's office. According to Edward, the document said Paisley was approached and told to go ahead and take the bait by the CIA. Edward said that was the last reference to it. [14] Later on, he claimed, the document had disappeared.

Paisley's boss, Hank Knoche, says that if such an approach by the Soviets took place, he believes he would have been told about it: "I think maybe he would have mentioned something like that to me. Maybe not. Maybe not. If he reported that and had been told to keep to himself, then others would worry about it. He would play that security game. He was a bug on security. Reclusive. It's hard to put together his life outside the Langley building, isn't it? Strange."

What disturbs Paisley's former colleagues is that after establishing himself as tough and independent of Kissinger before going to England in 1970, Paisley came back as almost a different person. "He just didn't speak out, he seldom stuck his neck out," OSR colleague Clarence Baier recalls. The net result of the CIA information given to Kissinger was that the Soviets were allowed to build up their strategic weapons force to a level that erased the longtime U.S. advantage.

As Paisley became acquainted with Kissinger and his staff, he found himself being used more and more for White House chores. The CIA had known since the Johnson administration that the White House had been involved in domestic spying. After all, one of these operations had been established in the CIA's own basement offices: Operation CHAOS. President Johnson had been convinced the Communist Chinese and the KGB had infiltrated the antiwar movement. Over the years of CHAOS's existence, more than one hundred office-size filing cabinets were filled with personal information on Americans and so-called leads to subversive overseas contacts. [15] The Nixon administration used that same argument to intensify its own domestic spyIng effort.

In January of 1971, a White House aide to Henry Kissinger and the National Security Council Staff named David R. Young was given what seemed like a routine White House assignment by Egil "Bud" Krogh, Jr., to declassify documents.[16] Officially, Young was responsible for the classification and declassification of documents. His new position also required him to work with other government agencies, including the CIA, to determine the possible sources of unauthorized disclosure or "leaking" of classified documents and secret information. Joining Young as his assistants were George Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt. Liddy, a lawyer, came to work for Young from an assignment at the Department of the Treasury on the recommendation of Bud Krogh during the early summer of 1971. Liddy had been working with Krogh on the international drug problem -- an investigation to which Paisley was also assigned. Krogh was convinced Liddy's experience would give Young what he needed. One of Liddy's new responsibilities was to serve as liaison with the Department of Justice in connection with the project.

Hunt was recommended to Young by Charles Colson. Colson believed that Hunt's CIA background would be of great help on the project. Hunt's role was to deal with the CIA on an informal level while Young would be the formal contact to the top people at the CIA like Director Richard McGarrah Helms and his deputy, Gen. Vernon Walters. [17]

On the surface the declassification project Young was running seemed benign. Officially the White House said it was merely trying to speed up the normally lengthy declassification process. But below the surface, the Nixon administration officials had other motives. They were trying to get their hands on files that contained embarrassing information about previous, Democratic presidencies so they could release this material to the public. In June, when the Pentagon Papers appeared in the New York Times, Young and other White House officials expressed anger that only documents embarrassing to the Nixon administration seemed to be leaked. Colson and Young began a campaign to convince more senior White House staffers like Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman that a series of selective disclosures about Democratic administrations could strengthen Nixon's political position. [18]

According to former FBI officials such as William Branigan, the Nixon White House first approached J. Edgar Hoover for assistance in setting up the "Plumbers" to plug unofficial government leaks, but he flatly refused. At first Nixon wanted to conduct the Plumbers under the FBI's own black-bag operations. But Hoover did not buy allegations that the Pentagon Papers had been leaked to the Soviets and that, therefore, the Bureau should get involved in the investigation. Besides, Hoover had his own problems. [19]

The White House then turned to the CIA for assistance. When David Young requested that Richard Helms send someone from the CIA to help plug leaks, Helms did what he usually did in security matters, according to former Angleton staffer Clare Petty: he turned to Angleton for advice. Angleton suggested to Helms's staff that the Deputy Director of Strategic Research had experience in previous leak studies. Paisley's name was sent back to Young as someone who might be able to assist. [20]


Why Paisley?

One reason that Angleton may have wanted Paisley in Young's proximity was that Paisley may well have been working for Angleton all along. As Chief of Counterintelligence, Angleton was growing more and more disturbed with Henry Kissinger. Paisley may have been sent over by Angleton simply to report back to him on what was going on.

Angleton had reason to fear Kissinger. He knew that Young had been involved with Kissinger on discussions of how hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium were transferred illegally to Israel to seed their nuclear weapons program. It was no secret in the intelligence community that Angleton had played a major role in assisting in the transfer. Angleton had supervised the United States' intelligence relationship with Israel for its entire history. If the news of the illegal transfer was made public, Angleton stood to lose everything -- including his role in running the CIA's "Israeli account."

On August 9, 1971, Paisley was personally requested by Young to conduct a crash investigation of security leaks to the press. He was asked to look at nineteen categories of leaked security information. The subsequent report sent out by Paisley under the signature of Director Helms so impressed the White House that Paisley was designated to handle CIA liaison with the Plumbers. [21]

Young's Plumbers unit was designed to paint as unpleasant a picture of the leakers as possible and to get this damaging information out in public. Soon Paisley found himself in the middle of this distasteful and paranoid world. Documents show that Young requested Paisley by name. Paisley's job was to provide fodder for Young's efforts from the repository of CIA secrets.

Soon Paisley was in the thick of efforts to discover everything embarrassing about Daniel Ellsberg, including the most intimate details of Ellsberg's sexual activities. [22] By August 18, 1971 the project to investigate Ellsberg and discredit the leakers of the Pentagon Papers took on new urgency. The White House code named the effort ODESSA.

All of these operations went on under an umbrella organization called the Task Force on Leaks. As John Paisley discovered, the Nixon leak task force was merely a team of second-story artists designed to uncover and then collect damaging and embarrassing evidence on "hostile" leakers. But domestic political "enemies" of Nixon and his administration soon became primary targets.

In one memorandum to Erlichman from Colson and Young is a reference to the CIA's performance in the project, saying the Agency had provided "little relevant material." It goes on to say that the "CIA has been understandably reluctant to involve itself in the domestic area, but responsive to the President's wishes, has done so. Overall performance to date is satisfactory." Donald Burton, who worked under Paisley at the CIA, said Paisley's being picked by the White House "does not surprise me. First a leak comes out and everyone says what are we going to do about those fucking leaks and how are we going to stop of all these leaks. This will come down right through the DCI and not the security side of things .... It happens in every administration .... So it will come down and hit the Chief [of OSR] and the Chief will then have to assign someone and it is going to be the deputy. So John's the deputy and it is a shit detail as far as John is concerned." [23]

What other operations did Paisley get involved in? There has been much speculation over what the Plumbers were really looking for in Lawrence F. O'Brien's office the night of the famous Watergate break-in. But perhaps the most important clues can be taken from Nixon's obsession with the Kennedys. Hanging over Nixon's head at the time was a $100,000 unreported campaign contribution to Nixon from Howard Hughes, accepted by his best friend, Bebe Rebozo. [24] Rebozo was under Justice Department investigation. In the 1960 campaign, a Howard Hughes loan to Nixon's brother, Donald, became a major issue. According to Robert Maheu, a former FBI and CIA man himself who managed Hughes's affairs for years, he had also delivered a $25,000 contribution to Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign. [25] Maheu says the idea that O'Brien had any detailed knowledge of any further contributions to the Kennedys is absurd.

It may have been details tying Hughes to the Kennedys that the Plumbers were searching for that night. Maheu explains that by this time a group of Mormons hired by Hughes had taken over his affairs. But why wouldn't Nixon, considering his close relationship with Hughes in the past, simply ask him about the loans? According to Maheu, Hughes was not "operating on all cylinders by this time," and the "Mormon Mafia" around him largely cut him off from the outside world, even from the President of the United States. Why, then, would Nixon believe that there was more to O'Brien and the Kennedy contributions than there actually was? Could Angleton, through Paisley, have planted that idea? Could the CIA actually tempt the Plumbers into an intemperate act over the promise of a memorandum showing a connection embarrassing to the Kennedys? Considering the fact that Young, Colson, Liddy, and Hunt left no stone unturned to find out damaging material about the Kennedys, having a trusted man like Paisley feed them this kind of a meal seems like a simple matter.

There are strong indications that some sort of Plumbers team was kept on even after the arrests that night at the Watergate. Top-level CIA sources suspect that it was the Plumbers who conducted an operation that ruined plans for the CIA's second mission by the Hughes-built ship, Glomar Explorer, to recover more of the wreckage of a Soviet submarine that sank in 1968. On June 5, 1974, two months before Richard Nixon resigned, the highly secure Hughes storage facility at 7020 Romaine Street in Hollywood, California, was burglarized. It was the third burglary of a Hughes facility in four months. According to Maheu, among the items taken, despite a security guard and impressive vaults, was a footlocker full of Hughes's records documenting his political contributions over the years, including the ones to the Kennedys. In that footlocker was also the memorandum detailing the Glomar Explorer arrangement. For then CIA Director William Colby, the burglary began the nightmare of trying to keep the Glomar Explorer operation secret from the Russians by keeping it out of the American media. [26] But to Maheu it was not the Glomar material that interested the burglars; it was the political material. Maheu believes it was the "Mormon Mafia" that tipped off the perpetrators in order to solidify their control of the Hughes empire. Maheu does not believe the break-in would have been possible without cooperation from inside the company. "I am familiar with 7020 Romaine. Hughes chose it for its total security. And some son of a bitch is going to show up in the wee hours and say to the guard, 'Take me to the vaults'?" Maheu asked.

Maheu also does not believe the documents in the trunk were for the exclusive use of the "Mormon Mafia." "This is funny. Here ends up top-secret information in the hands of a bunch of [Mormon] zombies that couldn't pass the lowest of security tests," Maheu said.

So who did burglarize Romaine? [27] Maheu believes that the "Mormon Mafia" that took control of the Hughes empire may have tipped off the Nixon White House about the footlocker in order to curry favor with the administration. Several FBI officials involved in the Watergate investigations believe Romaine Street may have been a last-ditch attempt to save the disintegrating Nixon administration. But perhaps the most logical suggestion comes from a former counterintelligence official of the FBI, who suggested that if Paisley had been working for the Soviets, using the break-in at Romaine to expose Glomar was the perfect way to keep the CIA from getting hold of several nuclear missiles the Agency had failed to retrieve on its first attempt.

For John Paisley's family, the first hint that Paisley might have been in the Plumbers came in 1973. Dale Paisley, then living in the San Francisco Bay area, recalls the incident vividly. "One time in late 1973 he came into the Bay area and called me up and asked me if I would drop him off at the Lawrence-Livermore Laboratory on the way back home. Well, a couple of days later, my son was telling me that a friend of his who was an Air Policeman said they had a raid down at Berkeley. [The friend said] in the background was a guy with a full white beard and he said he thought he was from the CIA or something. He described Jack to a T.... Well the next time I talked to Jack, I said, 'Hey, what's this I hear about that raid over in Berkeley that night?' And he said, 'How the hell did you hear about that?' That's all he said about it." [28] Confirming Dale's suspicions of Paisley's trip to Berkeley is a travel voucher dated December 3 through December 5, 1973, for "San Francisco and Berkeley, California." [29]

According to Paisley's sister, Katherine, "Mother was damn near psychic in a lot of ways about any of us if we were floating into some dangerous situation. And Mother was just paranoid over this Watergate thing that Jack was involved with, and I kept saying, 'Oh, Mother, no, he's not involved.'" While Paisley's mother had learned of her son's work for the CIA, she didn't believe him concerning his involvement with the Nixon administration. Katherine said Clara Paisley asked her son about his involvement with Ehrlichman, Dean, and Haldeman and he denied he had anything to do with them at the time. [30]

For Clarence "Bill" Baier, who worked with Paisley in the Office of Strategic Research, this was a period when John was absent "a great deal of time." Paisley never shared with his family his White House activities and the potential damage they could do to the CIA. He and Maryann grew farther and farther apart as he fell down the well of Watergate.

Of all of Paisley's mysterious behavior, none is more bizarre than his activities with "swinging clubs" in the Washington area. Paisley, who had a reputation as a sexual adventurer, was never known as a fool. For him to risk such indiscreet sexual activity could easily bring an end to his entire career. Yet, starting in 1972, John Arthur Paisley joined a series of sex clubs that would turn out to have the darkest of national security implications.

Given the fears today about AIDS, it is hard to imagine the Washington sex scene of the early 1970s. Even harder to fathom is why people with the highest forms of government clearances, like John Paisley, would risk blackmail by engaging in such activity. In the beginning, the parties were simply colleagues from work swapping spouses at their various suburban homes -- a dozen or so couples meeting in a member couple's house for a night of bed-hopping, drugs, and, in some cases, kinky sex. Usually the couples would chip in twenty dollars or more each to cover liquor and drugs, normally marijuana. But as the popularity of swinging grew, the parties among friends became more and more diverse as new swingers were recruited by word of mouth.

Eventually the sex clubs became more organized and were operated by a few people and run out of a wide range of bars. From "Capital Couples," which operated out of a former media hangout called The Class Reunion, to redneck watering holes in Prince Georges County, Maryland, the clubs flourished in the growing free-sex environment.

One party Paisley attended took place at the home of a couple Paisley met through his subordinate Donald Burton, who was a pioneer in the swinging scene. According to witnesses who asked not to be identified in order to protect their families, the setting was pretty typical. Paisley brought a dark-haired, attractive woman and not his wife, Maryann. The split-level, four-bedroom house in Falls Church, Virginia, seemed the picture of suburbia until one noticed couples having sex standing up against the kitchen stove, in the upstairs bedrooms, on the gold shag carpet in the living room, sitting on the upstairs stair railings, and even on the glass-and-wood coffee table.

Two participants in the sex parties recall an incident that they say demonstrated why they liked Paisley so much. Paisley had left a party. As he went outside, he saw that the house was surrounded by several police cars. Instead of taking off, Paisley calmly walked back into the house and told his host about the police and advised the guests to get rid of any marijuana in the house. It turned out to be a false alarm caused when a local youth next door was the subject of a high school prank.

Not all of Paisley's parties were in suburban homes. Paisley would, in later years, hold several sex parties on his sailboat Brillig. One female guest present said that "ten people trying to make love on a thirty-foot sailboat can get pretty intimate." Paisley loved to take nude photographs of his dates, and some of the parties were even videotaped. Paisley may also have hosted the least successful sex party conducted in the Washington area in the 1970s.

Today the Rush River Lodge is a peaceful country home near Washington, Virginia, about an hour south of the Washington, D.C., suburbs. In May 1972, Donald Burton and John Paisley formed the Rush River Lodge Corporation and bought the old lodge with the help of some other CIA friends in the hopes of turning it into a ski resort. [31] The place never worked out as a ski resort, but Burton and Paisley staged several sex parties at the lodge. According to Burton, this was done without the knowledge of their "straight investors."

In the days when Paisley and Burton decided to throw their swingers' party, the lodge was extremely rustic. One guest describes the experience: "The whole idea of going to a swingers' party is to have comfortable sex in a relaxed and unobtrusive environment. ... " The guest's wife finished the story: "Paisley and Burton decided it would be fun and very private to go down to their place. Well, there was nothing like it. A dozen people having sex with each other in every imaginable position for hours and then discovering that your weekend of passion doesn't include running water! The damn plumbing failed."

Most of the partygoers were middle-class, some were reporters, and most dropped out of the scene by 1980, when herpes came to wide public attention. Burton recalls bringing a clandestine CIA employee to one of the swinging parties. And some of Paisley's fellow guests were on the bizarre side. One high-level Nixon appointee enjoyed tying up women and beating them. A United States senator would walk around the parties nude and proclaim to every woman present that he was a senator.

Why was Paisley at the parties? Why in the world would he host some? As word got out about the parties and the fact that employees of the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA, Capitol Hill, and the administration were attending, the KGB resident in Washington wanted them penetrated. It was the perfect place for blackmail and recruitment. It was also the perfect place to make contact with other intelligence agents.

Paisley crossed paths at these parties with an attractive Czechoslovakian couple who would turn out to be high-level penetration agents from the Czech intelligence service. Karl Koecher was a tall and aloof man, and his wife, Hana, was a beautiful woman and Karl's opposite in personality. Worried intelligence officials now believe that Paisley may have worked in tandem with the Koechers.

The Koechers were placed in the United States as what counterintelligence agents call "sleepers" -agents who would work for years to build a solid reputation and a cover story before actually collecting intelligence. The Koechers left Czechoslovakia for New York in December 1965. They told U.S. immigration officials they were political defectors and had been forced to leave because of Karl's secret work for Radio Free Europe. In reality, Koecher had been a Czech intelligence agent since 1961. [32]

Trained in Prague in physics, Karl taught at Wagner College in New York between 1969 and 1973. Like Paisley, Koecher benefited from a connection to Columbia University. When Koecher took a two-year course offered by Columbia University's Russian Institute, he encountered Zbigniew Brzezinski. Prior to becoming well known as President Carter's National Security Adviser, Brzezinski had spent some time on the CIA's payroll. [33] Koecher hardly had to work at his role as a sleeper agent. The CIA was in such desperate need for language specialists that it did few background checks when he was recruited at Columbia for a job as a CIA translator in February 1973.

Koecher easily passed the CIA's vaunted Office of Security polygraph examination. He joined a long list of spies who had been "fluttered" and had fooled the operators completely. He went into the DDO, the covert side of the CIA, to translate cables from agents. His assignment to such a sensitive post is remarkable. It shows how lax security at the CIA had become. Koecher was given access to material from this country's most prized double agents, men hidden in the Kremlin bureaucracy.

Hana Koecher, an attractive blonde who was Karl's partner in espionage, remained in New York, working in the wholesale diamond business and assisting her husband in funneling out the secrets. The CIA put Karl to work in Rosslyn, Virginia, in a nondescript office building. Here, Koecher had access to important message traffic concerning Soviet Bloc agents and their CIA handlers. The name of this operation was the AE Screen Unit. Its job was to sift through material that was so sensitive that few people on the covert side of the CIA Operations Directorate could see it in its raw form. Koecher was given a top-secret clearance and access to some codeword intelligence. This practice was almost unheard of for defectors of any sort, according to the former deputy chief of CIA counterintelligence, Leonard V. McCoy.

The details of the sex parties and CIA involvement can be found in a lawsuit filed by the owners of one of the houses used for the parties. The neighbors grew tired of the traffic and noise in the usually quiet, posh, suburban Washington community of Fairfax Station, Virginia. The owners were a military officer and his wife, then stationed abroad. When word reached them that their home was being used for illicit purposes, they filed suit.

The owners had turned their sprawling, seven-bedroom house over to a Virginia realtor for management while they were out of the country. The owners and the realtor agreed before they left for their overseas tour that no singles would be considered for tenants. The owners then discovered that their house had ended up in the hands of a sex club known as the Virginia In-Place. Complaints over activities at the house caused the Fairfax County police to put the house under surveillance one weekend. It was during that weekend that several Paisley friends were identified as having attended a party. One car whose license plate was written down by the police belonged to Donald Burton. Burton was summoned for a deposition. [34]

Burton confirms he attended the parties and recalls bringing Paisley to some at a later period. But another Paisley friend went through his old calendars, which indicate he met Paisley in the swinging scene in 1972. In the major investigations that followed Paisley's disappearance, no references can be found anywhere to the parties or the Koechers. One reason is that Donald Burton says he never notified the CIA's Office of Security of the potential problem of his identity coming out in the court documents. To make matters worse, despite the FBI investigation into the Koechers, which led to their arrest and eventual trade for the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky on February 11, 1986, no one from the Bureau ever questioned Burton.

Burton is candid about why he did not reveal his attendance at the parties to the CIA's Office of Security: "They would have fired me if I told them." He said if someone had attempted to blackmail him, he was fully prepared to "run right down to Security and tell them."

That so many intelligence officials were involved in the sex clubs, had contact with the Koechers, and never were asked to reveal it in any investigation is a devastating comment on the current state of counterintelligence in the United States. Though evidence of Paisley's involvement was easily obtainable, investigators for the CIA's Office of Security, the FBI, and the Senate Intelligence Committee all failed to follow up leads on the swinging groups.

Addams Family Little Movie

[Dr. Pinder-Schloss] [Heavy German Accent] Good Evening.



I am Dr. Pinder-Schloss.



[Thunder]



He was found in Miami,
tangled in a tuna net.
It was just last month,
during the Hurricane Helga.



The sky, it was black like pitch.
The waves, they were walls of doom.



Can you imagine?



They drag him from the ocean,
from the very jaws of oblivion.
I’m telling you.



There were tests, so many tests.



A complete psychological profile.
At long last,
the Florida Department of the Fish and the Game,



they say, lo and behold,
oh my, oh my, oh my …



go tell it on the mountains,
he is your brother.



[Gomez Addams] [Crying]



[Dr. Pinder-Schloss] Boom! They give him to me at Human Services,



and I am bringing him, after all these years,



after who knows what heartache,



after the naked and the dead,



I am bringing him home to you.

[Margaret Alford] That’s preposterous.



Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?



[Gomez Addams] It certainly is.



[Tully Alford] Ahh!

[Gomez Addams] Now you’re back.



[Tully Alford] Yes, back to share your joys, your sorrows –



Hey, everything.



[Margaret Alford] Well, I just don't know.

[Tully Alford] Honey, how does this work, again?

[Margaret Alford] An infant would understand.





[Grandmama] Ha ha ha.

[Morticia Addams] Fester Addams



home at long last.



[Fester Addams] Well, at least for a week.



[Morticia Addams] A week?



[Gomez Addams] Don’t be ridiculous. You’re home.

[Fester Addams] Sorry, but I have to get back.



Got a lot of things cooking in the Bermuda Triangle.

[Morticia Addams] Oh, Gomez –



The Bermuda Triangle.



[Gomez Addams] Devil’s Island.



[Morticia Addams] The black hole of Calcutta.

[Gomez Addams] Excuse us.



[Morticia Addams] Second honeymoon.



[Sizzling]

[Morticia Addams] Dr. Pinder-Schloss,



will you be staying with us, too?



[Dr. Pinder-Schloss] No, no. I must be going.

But I will be back, you can bet,

to be checking on Fester’s adjustment.



[Pugsley Addams] Cool.



[Wednesday Addams] Nobody gets out of the Bermuda Triangle,
not even for a vacation.
Everyone knows that.



[Dr. Pinder-Schloss] Oh, my little bundle.
So much you don’t understand.



The human spirit, it is a hard thing to kill.



[Grandmama] Even with a chain saw.

-- The Addams Family, directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

But, perhaps more significantly, Paisley also crossed paths with former Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein at several parties. In the opinion of some people interviewed for this book, the fact that Paisley was serving as CIA liaison to the White House Plumbers at the time of his meeting Bernstein at sex parties raises many interesting questions. Could Bernstein's sexual activities, they ask, have made him vulnerable to pressure from a man like Paisley who may have wanted to get specific news stories slanted in a certain way? Bernstein denies even knowing Paisley. In a December 1979 telephone interview, Bernstein denied having attended any such parties. A few days later he called back to say, "I may have attended the parties, but I never met anyone named John Paisley."

Half a dozen Paisley intimates place Bernstein and Paisley at the same sex parties beginning as early as 1971. Donald Burton recalls: "Carl Bernstein, when I first met him, was going to the parties about 1971. I didn't know who he was .... One day he says to me or my wife Nancy he is on to something big. He said he is working on something and something is going to come out. You know all we knew was here was this guy with long hair and I saw him at two or four of these parties and then he disappeared." [35]

In a more recent interview, Bernstein confirmed that he attended swinging parties, but claimed he did not know Paisley and "Paisley wasn't Deep Throat." "I gotta tell you off the bat, I don't even know who the guy is," Bernstein said. [36]

But the behavior of his reporting partner on the Watergate affair, Bob Woodward, in the aftermath of Paisley's disappearance, raises questions. Woodward, by 1978, was an editor at the Washington Post. After Paisley disappeared, Woodward assigned two reporters to investigate Carl Bernstein. When asked if he was aware of the investigation into his activities, Bernstein said, "Oh that's crazy, Jesus ... I think you got something very wrong there. I don't think there was such a thing." Bernstein said the question should be put to Woodward.

Woodward confirms that he and other Post editors authorized the investigation into Bernstein's activities. Woodward explained that two reporters came to him with "allegations about Carl and Paisley and he felt obliged to follow up." [37]

One of the reporters who did the follow-up, Timothy Robinson, enjoyed a reputation for being very careful. He was so concerned about the assignment at the time that he requested a meeting with the reporter from the Wilmington News-Journal who first broke the Paisley story to discuss what he said was an assignment Woodward had given him. Robinson was so nervous about meeting the reporter that it was arranged by a mutual source for the meeting to take place in the basement of the Federal Courthouse in Washington where the Watergate trials took place. [38]

"Deep Throat" was described, in Woodward and Bernstein's famed book All the President's Men, as Woodward's source in the Executive Branch. The authors say that it was the Post's managing editor at that time, Howard Simmons, who dubbed Woodward's source "Deep Throat" because of the source's desire for secrecy and the pornographic movie in vogue at the time.

Was the fact that Bernstein was attending sex parties with the CIA's liaison with the White House Plumbers just a coincidence, or was that how the source really obtained his name? Both Bernstein and Woodward deny it.

Another bizarre connection of Paisley with the persona of "Deep Throat" is his possession of a Washington Post newspaper delivery agent's identification number in his own name. The number and ID turned out to be fraudulent. But why would a spy like Paisley need or even want such identification? If it was not to meet secretly with a reporter, one possibility might be that he simply wanted to have access to the Washington Post complex itself, on 15th Street in Washington. The newspaper's loading dock shares a common alley with the Soviet Embassy. Paisley would eventually move to an apartment two blocks from the embassy. Another possibility is that Paisley was using the newspaper's delivery system for dead drops and communication with agents to set up meetings.

Another point made in All the President's Men is that "if Deep Throat wanted a meeting -- which was rare -- there was a different procedure. Each morning, Woodward would check page 20 of his New York Times, delivered to his apartment house before 7:00 A.M. If a meeting was requested, the page number would be circled and the hands of a clock indicating the time of the rendezvous would appear in a lower corner of the page. Woodward did not know how Deep Throat got to his paper."

Woodward said flatly that Paisley was not Deep Throat. He then said: "You know, if Deep Throat were someone who was dead, we would name him." The problem is that there is no conclusive evidence that Paisley is dead.

What worries counterintelligence officials is not simply the aspect of Paisley meeting Bernstein or even giving him information. The haunting possibility that Paisley may have been working for Soviet intelligence and may have been under instruction to leak embarrassing material about the Nixon administration looms over the entire episode. It is also possible that Paisley may have been attending the parties to collect potentially damaging information on reporters like Bernstein or on other intelligence officials. Was Paisley collecting this information for David Young and the Plumbers -- or for the KGB?

_______________

Notes:

Chapter Three: Paisley: The Plumbers

1. Interview with Phil Waggener, July 22, 1988.

2. Deposition of Maryann Paisley, November 5, 1980 (Maryann Paisley v. The Travelers Insurance Company).

3. Ibid.

4. Angleton made these comments in the aftermath of Paisley's 1978 disappearance.

5. The Imperial Defence College still accepts CIA staff today. While the course work varies from year to year, it has remained approximately the same as it was when Paisley attended.

6. Interview with Edward Paisley, October 30, 1987.

7. The existence of the box was discovered when one of the authors of the present work, Joe Trento, then a reporter for the Wilmington News Journal, learned that Paisley had given the box number at Greenham Common to the alumni office at the University of Chicago.

8. Interview with Edward Paisley, October 30, 1987.

9. None of Paisley's colleagues, and nothing in his files released under the Freedom of Information Act, explain either why he would be as pressed in London as Maryann describes, or why he would have a need for the post-office box.

10. Interview with Dale and Mary Paisley and Patrick and Katherine Lenahan, August 11, 1987.

11. Edward Paisley is convinced that his father was approached by the Soviets during this time, and that he was instructed by the CIA to play along with the approach. That might be an explanation for the events in London, but it is an explanation that Paisley's CIA superiors say is simply not true.

12. Interview with Bruce Clarke by author Joe Trento, November 1978. Interview with Hank Knoche, February 13, 1988.

13. First reported on ABC's "World News Tonight," on March 5, 1979.

14. Interview with Edward Paisley, October 30, 1987.

15. A big, rawboned man with bright red hair who stood taller than President Johnson was put in charge of CHAOS. Richard Ober was carried on the National Security Council staff as an aide. This position gave him instant access to the President and the White House staff so that he could keep them apprised of CHAOS'S progress in linking the KGB to the antiwar movement. Since very few, if any, real links between the communists and the American anti-Vietnam War movement were found in the three years the program operated during the Johnson administration, one might assume that Ober would be among the first to be shipped back to Langley, and the operation shut down when Nixon took office. But just the opposite occurred. Ober quickly gained direct access to Nixon; his position was enhanced, not downgraded. As one former military man assigned to the Nixon White House put it, "When Haldeman and Ehrlichman came in, this guy spoke their language and appeared to help them get through the barriers that were up at CIA." It was from the CHAOS files that Nixon compiled his enemy list. After only five months in office, the new administration began a program of wiretaps on White House aides and reporters whom they deemed untrustworthy. These wiretaps followed news reports that were leaked to the media detailing the Nixon administration's secret bombing of Cambodia. By 1971, rumors were flying within the CIA that some sort of massive domestic surveillance program was under way and that the intelligence services were somehow involved. In fact, CHAOS was suspected of being merely an appendage of James Jesus Angleton's counterintelligence shop. It wasn't. Richard Helms, who spent much of his later career trying to talk two presidents out of making the CIA continue to break the laws against domestic spying, allowed CHAOS to continue because he thought he had no choice. He was under orders from the President. Angleton, of course, was given copies of everything relating to CI from the CHAOS program.

16. Young had first met Henry Kissinger in the Rockefeller campaign of 1968. After Nixon was elected, Young volunteered his services and was made a lawyer on the NSC staff. Young went to work for Kissinger with high hopes in 1969. According to others who were NSC aides at the time, Young picked out Kissinger's clothes while Young's wife handled Kissinger's laundry. John Lockwood, a friend of Kissinger's, suggested that Young would make a good appointment secretary for the new national security adviser. But Young, according to Kissinger, did not get along with Alexander Haig, nor did he work out as Kissinger's appointment secretary. Kissinger sent him off to work "on files" in the White House Situation Room. Was Young really "downgraded," as Kissinger claimed, or did he remain a mysterious force on Kissinger's staff? Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Seymour Hersh points out in the The Price of Power, his book about Kissinger, that Young continued to be invited to the most sensitive meetings in the Nixon administration after his transfer to work on declassifying files. An example Hersh uses is that Young attended a session with top Atomic Energy Commission officials on the subject of a security clearance for a company in Pennsylvania that was suspected of diverting two hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium to Israel.

17. This entire history is detailed in a FBI Washington Field Office memorandum based on an interview with David Young on July 3, 1972. This interview was part of the early FBI probe into Watergate that seems to have missed the point.

18. Specifically, the administration made a major effort to leak embarrassing information about the Kennedy administration on the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the fall of the Diem government in South Vietnam. All this was aimed at neutralizing the man Nixon was convinced was his chief political rival -- Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Though Kennedy's presidential ambitions had already been destroyed by his involvement in the Chappaquiddick automobile accident -- costing the life of a young volunteer for his late brother Robert -- Nixon was still obsessed with the Kennedys. Colson and Young began to ferret out all the information they could that showed bad judgment by the Kennedys and their appointees. Various government agencies, including the State Department and the CIA, were ordered to turn over such material. But the CIA frustrated the Nixon administration's efforts to get the documents they wanted. The Agency would give the White House only what it specifically asked for. Unless they knew what to ask for, the kind of damaging documentation Colson believed existed could not be obtained. Colson ordered Howard Hunt to examine documents, including the Pentagon Papers, to find material that could harm the reputation of the Kennedys. At the same time, Young and Colson began personally interviewing people involved in the policies in the hopes that they would be willing to cast a negative light on what went on. Hunt interviewed old colleagues at the CIA who were involved in Saigon with the overthrow of Diem. While Young was working with the CIA to release files embarrassing to the Kennedys, efforts were implemented to tighten up the release of any materials that reflected negatively on Nixon from his vice-presidential days during the Eisenhower administration.

19. Interview with William Branigan, the former FBI counterintelligence head.

20. This information comes from three former subordinates of James J. Angleton. Clare Edward Petty, in an interview on July 21, 1988, said that he had a recollection of "someone being sent over on the leak problem at the White House .... Helms would have absolutely turned to Angleton on this sort of security question. That's how he always dealt with these things."

21. CIA memorandum dated September 30, 1971. Also a series of memoranda from Peter Earnest of the Office of Legislative Counsel of the CIA to Robert Gambino, the Director of Security at CIA, dealing with Paisley's connections to the Plumbers.

22. White House memorandum dated August 20, 1971, for John Erlichman from Egil Krogh and David Young.

23. Interview with Donald Burton, October 14, 1987.

24. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), p. 24.

25. Interview with Robert Maheu, February 1988.

26. Interview with William Colby, June 6, 1988.

27. A number of veteran CIA and FBI men believe that it had the unmistakable touch of the FBI's onetime premier black-bag artist. This man, who has been in continuing legal trouble in recent years, refused through his lawyer to answer any questions about Romaine Street or the possibility that he was recruited for the Plumbers and worked with Paisley.

28. Interview with Dale and Mary Paisley, August 11, 1987.

29. The voucher was released in part under the Freedom of Information Act and lists a variety of Paisley's travel destinations for 1972 and 1973.

30. Interview with Katherine Lenahan, August 11, 1987.

31. The Washington, Virginia, records office contains land records and corporate resolutions laying out the deal for the lodge. The records clerk said no investigators had ever asked to see the file, previous to the author's visit.

32. The first detailed account of the Koecher story appeared in Washingtonian magazine in an article by Rudy Maxa and Phil Stanford in February 1987.

33. According to numerous CIA employees in positions to know.

34. Details of the case are based on court records (At Law No. 38430) filed in Fairfax, Virginia.

35. Interview with Donald Burton, October 14, 1987.

36. Interview with Carl Bernstein, December 12, 1987.

37. Interview with Bob Woodward, February 11, 1988.

38. Coauthor Joseph Trento was the Wilmington News-Journal reporter who had the meeting with Tim Robinson. Shortly after this conversation, Robinson left on a fellowship to Yale Law School and became the editor of the National Law Journal.

Mom Can't Convince Herself Son Could Be Unabomber
by Associated Press
June 17, 1996 12:00 am

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The mother of Theodore Kaczynski says she still can't comprehend that he could be the Unabomber as authorities suspect, but she supports another son's decision to turn him into the FBI.

"I just can't convince myself that he could've done it," Wanda Kaczynski, 79, of Scotia, N.Y., told The Washington Post in her first interview since her elder son was arrested on April 3 at his Montana cabin.Theodore Kaczynski, 54, has been charged only with possession of bomb components and not with any of the Unabomber attacks, which killed three people and injured 23 in nine states. He was turned in to authorities by his brother David, 46.

"I ponder endlessly over it," Wanda Kaczynski was quoted in the Post's Sunday editions. "What could I have done to keep him out of the wilderness? What could I have done to give him a happier life? And yet there were so many happy, wonderful times with the family. I just don't, I just don't know."

One particular episode from young Theodore's life haunts her: seeing him restrained on a Chicago hospital bed at age 9 months, his eyes crossed in fright, while doctors photographed an unusual case of hives that kept him hospitalized and isolated from his mother for a week.

She recalls he would not look at her when she arrived for the one visit allowed that week. And how the infant would not look at her when she returned to take him home.

When he was 4, the family pediatrician showed mother and son the photograph in the file of the baby pinned to the bed.

"Ted glanced at it and he looked away," she recalled. "He refused to look at it anymore. And I thought, `Oh my God, he's having the same feelings that he had when he was held down that way."

Now, she worries about David and Theodore - Theodore for whatever lies ahead and David for any guilt he might feel about turning his brother in to the FBI.

He told his mother what he was doing on March 23.

"At first I said, `It can't be,"' she recalled. "`It can't be Ted. First of all, he didn't have the money for all that traveling. And secondly, he hates to travel. And thirdly, I can't conceive of him doing anything like that. He's never been violent all his life."'

David cried and paced and told his mother he was sorry, they recalled.

"She immediately got up from her chair and hugged me and said that she felt just awful for what I'd gone through," David told the Post. "And I can't tell you what a rush of gratitude I felt toward her in that moment."

A Few Good Men
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 2/12/18

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A Few Good Men is a 1992 American legal drama film directed by Rob Reiner and starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, and Demi Moore, with Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, Wolfgang Bodison, James Marshall, J. T. Walsh and Kiefer Sutherland in supporting roles. It was adapted for the screen by Aaron Sorkin from his play of the same name but includes contributions by William Goldman. The film revolves around the court-martial of two U.S. Marines charged with the murder of a fellow Marine and the tribulations of their lawyers as they prepare a case to defend their clients.

Plot

U.S. Marines Lance Corporal Harold Dawson and Private Louden Downey are facing a general court-martial, accused of killing fellow Marine Private William Santiago at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Santiago compared unfavorably to his fellow Marines, had poor relations with them, and failed to respect the chain of command in attempts at being transferred to another base. An argument evolves between base commander Colonel Nathan Jessup and his officers: while Jessup's executive officer, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Markinson, advocates that Santiago be transferred immediately, Jessup regards this as akin to surrender and orders Santiago's commanding officer, Lieutenant Jonathan James Kendrick, to train Santiago to become a better Marine.

When Dawson and Downey are later arrested for Santiago's murder, naval investigator and lawyer Lieutenant commander JoAnne Galloway suspects they carried out a "code red" order, a violent extrajudicial punishment. Galloway asks to defend them, but instead, the case is given to Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, an inexperienced and unenthusiastic U.S. Navy lawyer. Initially, friction exists between Galloway, who resents Kaffee's tendency to plea bargain, and Kaffee, who resents Galloway's interference. Kaffee and the prosecutor, his friend Captain Jack Ross (USMC), negotiate a bargain, but Dawson and Downey refuse to go along. They insist they were ordered by Kendrick to shave Santiago's head, minutes after Kendrick publicly ordered the platoon not to touch the would-be victim, and did not intend their victim to die. Kaffee is finally won over by Galloway and takes the case to court.

In the course of the trial, the defense manages to establish the existence of "code red" orders at Guantanamo and that Dawson specifically had learned not to disobey any order, having been denied a promotion after helping out a fellow Marine who was under what could be seen as a "code red". However, the defense also suffers setbacks when a cross-examination reveals Downey was not actually present when Dawson and he supposedly received the "code red" order. Markinson reveals to Kaffee that Jessup never intended to transfer Santiago off the base, but commits suicide rather than testify in court because he feels that he had failed to do the right thing by protecting a Marine under his command.

Without Markinson's testimony, Kaffee believes the case lost and returns home in a drunken stupor, having come to regret he fought the case instead of arranging a plea bargain. Galloway, however, convinces Kaffee to call Jessup as a witness despite the risk of being court-martialled for smearing a high-ranking officer. Jessup initially outsmarts Kaffee's questioning, but is unnerved when the lawyer points out a contradiction in his testimony: Jessup had stated he wanted to transfer Santiago off the base for his own safety and that Marines never disobeyed orders. But, if he ordered his men to leave Santiago alone and if Marines always obey orders, then Santiago would not have been in danger. Unnerved by being caught in one of his own lies and disgusted by Kaffee's questioning of the imperative to impose discipline within his unit, an enraged Jessup extols his and the military's importance to national security, and when asked point-blank if he ordered the "code red" he bellows with contempt that he did. As he justifies his actions, an exasperated Jessup is arrested; Kendrick is later arrested for his actions, too.

Soon afterwards, Dawson and Downey are cleared of the murder charge, but found guilty of "conduct unbecoming a United States Marine" and dishonorably discharged. Dawson accepts the verdict, but Downey does not understand what they had done wrong. Dawson explains they had failed to stand up for those too weak to fight for themselves, like Santiago. As the two prepare to leave, Kaffee tells Dawson he does not need a patch on his arm to have honor. Dawson, who had previously shown contempt for Kaffee for not understanding the Marine ethos, recognizes him as an officer and renders a salute.

Cast

• Tom Cruise as Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, USN, JAG Corps
• Jack Nicholson as Colonel Nathan R. Jessup, USMC
• Demi Moore as Lieutenant Commander JoAnne Galloway, USN, JAG Corps
• Kevin Bacon as Captain Jack Ross, USMC, Judge Advocate Division
• Kiefer Sutherland as Lieutenant Jonathan James Kendrick, USMC
• Kevin Pollak as Lieutenant Sam Weinberg, USN, JAG Corps
• Wolfgang Bodison as Lance Corporal Harold Dawson, USMC
• James Marshall as Private First Class Louden Downey, USMC
• J. T. Walsh as Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Andrew Markinson, USMC
• J. A. Preston as Judge (Colonel) Julius Alexander Randolph, USMC
• Michael DeLorenzo as Private William T. Santiago, USMC
• Noah Wyle as Corporal Jeffrey Owen Barnes, USMC
• Cuba Gooding Jr. as Corporal Carl Edward Hammaker, USMC
• Xander Berkeley as Captain Whitaker, USN
• Matt Craven as Lieutenant Dave Spradling, USN, JAG Corps
• John M. Jackson as Captain West, USN, JAG Corps
• Christopher Guest as Commander (Dr.) Stone, USN, MC
• Joshua Malina as Jessup's clerk, Tom, USMC
• Aaron Sorkin as a lawyer bragging in a tavern

Note: Joshua Malina is the only actor to reprise his role from the original Broadway production.

Production

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin got the inspiration to write the source play, a courtroom drama called A Few Good Men, from a phone conversation with his sister Deborah, who had graduated from Boston University Law School and signed up for a three-year stint with the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General's Corps. She was going to Guantanamo Bay to defend a group of Marines who came close to killing a fellow Marine in a hazing ordered by a superior officer. Sorkin took that information and wrote much of his story on cocktail napkins while bartending at the Palace Theatre on Broadway.[3] His roommates and he had purchased a Macintosh 512K, so when he returned home, he would empty his pockets of the cocktail napkins and type them into the computer, forming a basis from which he wrote many drafts for A Few Good Men.[4]

In 1988, Sorkin sold the film rights for his play to producer David Brown before it premiered, in a deal reportedly "well into six figures".[5] Brown had read an article in The New York Times about Sorkin's one-act play Hidden in This Picture, and he found out Sorkin also had a play called A Few Good Men that was having off-Broadway readings.[6]

William Goldman did an uncredited rewrite of the script that Sorkin liked so much, he incorporated the changes made into the stage version.[7]

Brown was producing a few projects at TriStar Pictures, and he tried to interest them in making A Few Good Men into a film, but his proposal was declined due to the lack of star-actor involvement. Brown later got a call from Alan Horn at Castle Rock Entertainment, who was anxious to make the film. Rob Reiner, a producing partner at Castle Rock, opted to direct it.[6]

The film had a production budget of $33,000,000.[8]

Nicholson would later comment of the $5 million he received for his role, "It was one of the few times when it was money well spent."[9]

The film starts with a performance of "Semper Fidelis" by a U.S. Marine Corps marching band, and a Silent Drill performed by the Texas A&M University Corps of Cadets Fish Drill Team (portraying the United States Marine Corps Silent Drill Platoon).[10][11]

Several former Navy JAG lawyers have been identified as the basis for Tom Cruise's character Lt. Kaffee. These include Don Marcari (now an attorney in Virginia), former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, Chris Johnson (now practicing in California), and Walter Bansley III (now practicing in Connecticut.) However, in a September 15, 2011, article in The New York Times, Sorkin was quoted as saying, “The character of Dan Kaffee in A Few Good Men is entirely fictional and was not inspired by any particular individual.”[12][13][14][15][16]

Wolfgang Bodison was a film location scout when he was asked to take part in a screen test for the part of Dawson.[17]

Reception

Box office

The film premiered at the Odeon Cinema, Manchester, England[18] and opened on December 11, 1992, in 1,925 theaters. It grossed $15,517,468 in its opening weekend and was the number-one film at the box office for the next three weeks. Overall, it grossed $141,340,178 in the U.S. and $101,900,000 internationally for a total of $243,240,178.[19]

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 58 reviews, with an average rating of 7/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "An old-fashioned courtroom drama with a contemporary edge, A Few Good Men succeeds on the strength of its stars, with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and especially Jack Nicholson delivering powerful performances that more than compensate for the predictable plot."[20] On Metacritic the film has a score of 62 out of 100, based on 21 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews."[21] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A+" on an A+ to F scale, one of fewer than 60 films in the history of the service to earn the score.[22]

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone magazine said, "That the performances are uniformly outstanding is a tribute to Rob Reiner (Misery), who directs with masterly assurance, fusing suspense and character to create a movie that literally vibrates with energy."[23] Richard Schickel in Time magazine called it "an extraordinarily well-made movie, which wastes no words or images in telling a conventional but compelling story."[24] Todd McCarthy in Variety magazine predicted, "The same histrionic fireworks that gripped theater audiences will prove even more compelling to filmgoers due to the star power and dramatic screw-tightening."[25] Roger Ebert was less enthusiastic in the Chicago Sun-Times, giving it two-and-a-half out of four stars and finding its major flaw was revealing the courtroom strategy to the audience before the climactic scene between Cruise and Nicholson. Ebert wrote, "In many ways this is a good film, with the potential to be even better than that. The flaws are mostly at the screenplay level; the film doesn't make us work, doesn't allow us to figure out things for ourselves, is afraid we'll miss things if they're not spelled out."[26]

Widescreenings noted that for Tom Cruise's character Daniel Kaffee, "Sorkin interestingly takes the opposite approach of Top Gun, where Cruise also starred as the protagonist. In Top Gun, Cruise plays Mitchell who is a "hotshot military underachiever who makes mistakes because he is trying to outperform his late father. Where Maverick Mitchell needs to rein in the discipline, Daniel Kaffee needs to let it go, finally see what he can do". Sorkin and Reiner are praised in gradually unveiling Kaffee's potential in the film.[27]

Awards and honors

Academy Awards nominations
The film was nominated for four Academy Awards:[28]

Best Picture
Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson)
Best Film Editing (Robert Leighton)
Best Sound Mixing (Kevin O'Connell, Rick Kline and Robert Eber)

Golden Globe nominations

The film was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards:

Best Motion Picture – Drama
Best Director (Rob Reiner)
Best Actor (Tom Cruise)
Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson)
Best Screenplay (Aaron Sorkin)

Other honors

The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists:

2003: AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains:
Colonel Nathan R. Jessep – Nominated Villain[29]
2005: AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes:
Col. Nathan Jessep: "You can't handle the truth!" – #29[30]
2008: AFI's 10 Top 10:
5 Courtroom Drama Film[31]

References

1. "A Few Good Men (1992 – Box Office Mojo)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved August 5, 2014.
2. "A Few Good Men – Budget". Nash Information Services, LLC. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
3. "London Shows – A Few Good Men". thisistheatre.com. E&OE. Archived from the original on June 8, 2011. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
4. "Aaron Sorkin interview". Archived from the original on July 16, 2011. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
5. Henry III, William (November 27, 1989). "Marine Life". Time. Archived from the original on March 7, 2008.
6. b Prigge, Steven (October 2004). Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. McFarland & Company. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-0-7864-1929-6.
7. "A Few Good Men (1992)". IMDb.
8. "A Few Good Men – budget". Nash Information Services. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
9. Jack Nicholson. IMDb
10. Daily Dose of Aggie History (December 11, 2016). "Dec. 11, 1992: A&M Fish Drill Team appears in 'A Few Good Men'". myAggieNation.com. Retrieved May 19, 2017.
11. Nading, Tanya (February 11, 2001). "Corps Fish Drill Team reinstated — Front Page". College Media Network. Archived from the original on June 23, 2009. Retrieved July 18, 2009.
12. Glauber, Bill (April 10, 1994). "Ex-Marine who felt 'A Few Good Men' maligned him is mysteriously murdered". The Baltimore Sun. Retrieved September 21, 2010.
13. Gisick, Michael (May 10, 2007). "Fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias embraces the media in his quest for vindication". The Albuquerque Tribune. Archived from the original on November 5, 2010. Retrieved September 21, 2010.
14. Johnson, Christopher D. "Christopher D. Johnson, Esquire". Retrieved September 21, 2010.
15. Beach, Randall (March 18, 2009). "Allegation delays homicide trial". New Haven Register. Retrieved October 28, 2010.
16. "Lawyer Didn't Act Like a "Few Good Men," Cops Say". NBC Connecticut. August 26, 2010. Retrieved October 28, 2010.
17. Noted in the A Few Good Men DVD commentary
18. "Historic Odeon faces final curtain". Manchester Evening News. February 15, 2007. Retrieved October 23, 2014.
19. "A Few Good Men – box office data". Nash Information Services, LLC. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
20. "A Few Good Men (1992)". Flixster Inc. Retrieved June 22,2011.
21. "A Few Good Men reviews". Metacritic. Retrieved July 25,2009.
22. "CinemaScore". cinemascore.com.
23. "Rotten Tomatoes – A Few Good Men review". Flixster Inc. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
24. Schickel, Richard (December 14, 1992). "Close-Order Moral Drill". Time Monday, Dec. 14, 1992. Time, Inc. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
25. McCarthy, Todd (November 12, 1992). "A Few Good Men – Review". RBI, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. Retrieved June 22, 2011.
26. Ebert, Roger (December 11, 1992). "A Few Good Men". Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved April 7, 2016.
27. [1]
28. "The 65th Academy Awards (1993) Nominees and Winners". oscars.org. Retrieved October 22, 2011.
29. "AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes & Villains Nominees" (PDF). Retrieved August 13, 2016.
30. "AFI's 100 Years...100 Movie Quotes" (PDF). American Film Institute. Retrieved August 13, 2016.
31. "AFI's 10 Top 10: Top 10 Courtroom Drama". American Film Institute. Retrieved August 13, 2016.

David Cox: An outspoken Marine is found murdered
by unsolved.com
Accessed: 2/12/18

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

David Cox


David Cox

CASE DETAILS

Audiences lined up to see Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise in the hit movie, “A Few Good Men”. But not many were aware that it was based on a true story, one that may have led to the murder of a courageous former Marine.


Skeleton was discovered 5 miles away

David Cox joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school and was stationed at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. One day, while on duty, David became aware of a problem. Another platoon member, PFC William Alvarado, had written to his senator complaining about Marine misconduct.

David’s former squad leader, Christopher Valdez, explains how Alvarado was targeted for a “Code Red,” or hazing:

“We didn’t actually decide to have a Code Red for Alvarado on our own. Our platoon commander had given us an implied order that if we were good Marines, something should happen. Saturday night we went into Alvarado’s room. We blindfolded him and gagged him and then dragged him off of his bed. Dave (Cox) started shaving his head, and within five minutes, he had stopped struggling.

”


Theory: murder

David Cox convinced his platoon to stop the hazing. When they removed the gag and untied Alvarado, he was unconscious.

Alvarado was rushed to the hospital. He recovered, but his 10 attackers, including David Cox, were brought up on charges. Cox was going to be charged with attempted murder. But he said he was just following orders.

Don Marcari was appointed to defend David Cox:

“I told David, that this was a defense – obedience to orders – that had not been successful at Nuremberg, had not been successful for Lt. Calley at My Lai. And plus, we had a colonel denying he ever gave an order.”

David claimed the Code Red started with implied orders from his superior officers. For Don Marcari, that meant an even more uphill battle loomed:

“We had the additional burden of now saying he was following an implied order. And it was a very difficult case to win, and I told David that. He decided he wanted to fight it because he believed in his heart that he didn’t do anything wrong.

At his trial, David was convicted of simple assault. He was sentenced to time already served in the brig. He then completed his duty and received an honorable discharge. He returned to civilian life in his hometown near Boston.

Years later, “A Few Good Men” was released. David felt that the filmmakers had stolen his story. David Cox’s girlfriend, Elaine Tinsley, recalls at the time:

“He was stunned. Here was this movie company that was making tons of money off of his story, and if it weren’t for him, the story never would have existed in the first place.”

David and some of the other Marines involved in the Code Red, sued the movie production company. While they waited for a ruling, David spoke out about his case on radio talk shows.

By January 1994, David was living with Elaine and hoping his temporary job with UPS would become permanent. The night before he was supposed to get the good news, David’s back was giving him trouble, so he spent the night on the couch. The next morning, Elaine left at about 8:30, and then called home at about noon. David didn’t answer, but there was a message for him on the machine: UPS wanted to hire him. Elaine was happy David would be getting his wish:

“I was like, cool, Dave’s gonna get this job and he’s gonna be so excited. Then I called back again at 1:00 to check the messages, and that message was still there, and the UPS guy had called again, too.”

At 5:30 pm, Elaine returned home:

“When I came into the house that night after work, I realized right away that the doors to all the rooms were open, and our rabbit, who we usually just kept in the kitchen, was hopping all over the place.”

David’s truck was still in the driveway, with the keys in the ignition. His un-cashed paycheck was on the dashboard and his 9-millimeter gun was in the glove box. But David was gone. Elaine didn’t know what to make of the situation:

“As the days went on and there was no news from him – we checked his bank account. There was no activity on his bank account. You start to believe that, you know, maybe something did happen, but why?”

The answer came with the spring thaw. The body of David Cox was discovered on the banks of a river in Medfield, Massachusetts, about five miles from his apartment.

Sgt. Kevin Shea of Massachusetts State Police, describes the manner of death:

“He was shot, according to the ME, four times – once at the base of the rear of the neck and three times in the left side torso area.”

It was clear that robbery was not the motive. David’s cash and his credit cards were still in his wallet. And police ruled out a random attack.

Sgt. Shea believes David left home with someone he knew:

“It’s our belief that he got in the car willingly, that he knew who was coming to pick him up, and that he went to this area and walked into the woods with this person. I think that if it was somebody that was just holding a gun on him or something like that, that they would do it within the first 30 or 40 yards into the woods. David was found almost three-quarters-to-a-mile walk into the woods.”

David’s attorney, Donald Marcari, thinks the murder was somehow related to the military:

“I don’t know why David was killed. I personally believe it had something to do with the military. He was taken out of his house without signs of struggle, he was wearing his Marine Corps jacket, which he never wore. He was found between two hunting ranges where gunshots would not be unusual, and he was murdered execution style.”

But what was the motive?

After the release of “A Few Good Men,” David gave an interview on the radio. He was quite vocal about his story and the U.S. activities in Cuba. David’s mother worried that he had been too outspoken:

“After I heard that interview on the radio, I spoke to him, and I said, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing. I think what you’re doing is dangerous.’ I think he felt far too free to just speak his mind.”

David’s brother, Steve, had a different theory suggesting another possible scenario. He thought that perhaps the murder was connected to David’s job at UPS:

“A couple of months before Dave disappeared, he’d mentioned to me that he had come upon a supervisor and one of the drivers involved in some type of activity, what he believed to be was theft.”

According to Sgt. Kevin Shea, nothing has been ruled out and the investigation is still open:

“It’ll remain open until we solve it. Again, we’ll follow any leads that come through vigorously, and do that until it is solved.”

Ex-Marine who felt 'A Few Good Men' maligned him is mysteriously murdered
by Bill Glauber
Baltimore Sun
April 10, 1994

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

NEEDHAM, MASS. — A photo accompanying an article in Sunday's Sun about the murder of an ex-Marine whose experiences were the basis for the movie "A Few Good Men" misidentified the man's attorney. His name is Don Marcari.

The Sun regrets the errors.

FOR THE RECORD - CORRECTION

NEEDHAM, Mass. -- They are apparently unrelated flashes of violence, framing the final eight years of David Cox's life, from the front lines of the Cold War in Cuba to a muddy river bank in suburban Boston.

The most traumatic incident of his military tour in Cuba would inspire a movie that left him indignant, his and his comrades' service careers altered to quench Hollywood's desire for drama.

But just when Mr. Cox's life appeared to be coming together, when he was on the verge of securing his first steady and lucrative civilian job, when he had finally decided to join a lawsuit against the makers of "A Few Good Men," he mysteriously disappeared Jan. 5.

For nearly three months, police searched for him as his family prayed for him, even consulting with psychics in futile attempts to contact him.

And then, April 2, a canoeist on the Charles River spotted a single white sneaker that led to a discovery in a wooded area.

Under branches ripped from nearby trees lay the body of Mr. Cox.

There were three bullet wounds in the torso and one wound behind the neck.

"It doesn't make any sense," said Elaine Tinsley, Mr. Cox's girlfriend. "I want to find out what happened."

So do the police. They have few clues, no suspects and no motive in the apparent execution-style murder.

But overshadowing all is the story of Mr. Cox, a 27-year-old ex-Marine who saw part of his life spread across a movie screen and who wanted to retrieve his good name.

David Cox and Jay Steeves were best friends, growing up together in Needham, a town of neat homes, manicured lawns and lush parks.

When they graduated from high school in 1985, they made a pact, enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps under the "buddy system" that guaranteed they could go through basic training together on Parris Island, S.C.

The night before they left home, they even called a local radio station and requested their favorite song, Bruce Springsteen's "Born In The USA."

"The two of us always said, the things we learned in the Marine Corps, you could never learn in any college," Mr. Steeves said. "He loved the Marines. He loved the discipline."

Gung-ho Marine

David Cox, brush-cut strawberry blond hair, blue eyes and thick muscles spread across his 5-foot-11, 170-pound frame, was gung-ho Marine all the way.

He was the perfect candidate for one of the Marine Corps' tougher assignments, manning the perimeter at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It's a lonely, pressure-filled job at the base they nickname Gitmo. Hour after hour the Marines on the guard line stand watch, sometimes less than 600 yards from Cuban soldiers. It is a frozen standoff in searing heat, a last vestige of the Cold War.

For about six months, Mr. Cox was part of Rifle Security Company, Windward Side, 2nd Platoon, a group of 30 men who lived by a fierce code of honor.

"We were the most gung-ho of the gung-ho Marines," said Christopher Lee Valdez, the platoon leader and Mr. Cox's best friend on the base.

July 1986 was a tough time for Mr. Cox's comrades at Gitmo. According to interviews and published reports, they had a man they perceived as a malingerer among them, Pfc. William Alvarado.

They believed that he had informed about a Marine firing shots into Cuba.

'Code Red'

One night, while watching a videotape of the movie "Animal House," the other Marines decided to take action, calling a "Code Red," jargon for a hazing, to teach Private Alvarado a lesson.

Ten Marines blindfolded him, stuffed a rag in his mouth, pummeled him and gave him a haircut.

It was Mr. Cox who handled the shears and who apparently first noticed that Private Alvarado's face was turning blue.

The incident had gone awry. Private Alvarado's lungs filled with fluid, he spit up blood and passed out.

"We didn't beat him to death," Mr. Valdez said.

Private Alvarado was taken off the island for emergency care in Miami. Eventually, he recovered from the assault.

But the Marines at Gitmo would also suffer wounds.

The commanding officer, Col. Sam Adams, was shipped out.

Seven of the attackers accepted "other than honorable" discharges. And of those, only Mr. Valdez would get his discharge upgraded to honorable.

Three men stood their ground, refusing the Corps' offer of a military plea bargain. They would take their chances in a full-blown court martial.

Would fight Corps

Mr. Cox was prepared to fight the Corps he believed in.

The first time Don Marcari met Mr. Cox was in the brig at Gitmo.

Mr. Marcari was a Navy attorney preparing to take his first case to trial. And Mr. Cox was his client.

"I had on my little white uniform and stuck out at Guantanamo Bay," Mr. Marcari said. "I'm going through this brig, and here I see this kid standing at attention. I gave him a little wink and he gave me a smile, and I guess he knew then that I wasn't that bad a guy."

By turning down the deal for an "other than honorable discharge," Mr. Cox faced a general court-martial and a potential 20-year sentence at Leavenworth. So Mr. Marcari wanted to be sure his client understood the stakes.

Mr. Marcari recalled, "David told me, 'I have nothing else. All I want to be is a Marine.' I said, 'David, you could take this deal and go home.' And he again said, 'No, I want to be a Marine.' "

So attorney and client fought the Marines. And they got the best victory they could in a four-day court-martial at Guantanamo.

Mr. Cox was found not guilty of aggravated battery but guilty of simple assault, a misdemeanor that carried a 30-day jail sentence. But because he had already served 38 days in the brig, the sentence was waived.

And Mr. Cox was free to resume his Marine career, serving out the final two years in places as diverse as South Korea, Panama and North Carolina.

When he was discharged in 1989, Mr. Cox held the rank of corporal.

He had served his country. And now, the blemish of his career seemingly behind him, he prepared to return home to settle down, to find work, to start a career.

'Back to square one'

"The kids who had gone to college were going on to $60,000-a-year jobs," Mr. Steeves said. "And we were back to square one. You don't have a skill for the civilian world. David was a scout sniper. But that leaves you nothing."

Steven Cox remembers his younger brother David this way:

"He was warm-hearted. Compassionate. Outgoing. The kind of guy who would yell at a baseball game. But also the kind of guy who broke down and cried for two hours the day [Boston Celtics' star] Reggie Lewis died.

"And my brother also worked hard," Steven Cox said.

David Cox always had one kind of job or another.

He hauled trash, pumped gas, worked with Mr. Steeves in a home improvement business, worked a year for a rug shampoo company, attended bartender school, even received a two-year paralegal degree.

But Steven Cox also said this about his brother: "In his heart, he remained a Marine."

His friends and family say that David Cox was not embittered by his Marine experience. Talk of the court-martial died down long before he returned home. It was forgotten, even.

And then, "A Few Good Men," a play written by Aaron Sorkin that opened on Broadway in 1989 and ran for 14 months, was turned into a movie that was released in the winter of 1992-1993.

"That's when all hell broke loose," Steven Cox said.

Life on screen

They clasped hands in the darkness of the movie theater. They whispered. And they watched.

As the story of two Marines facing a court-martial unfolded in the film "A Few Good Men," Elaine Tinsley remembers David Cox fidgeting in his seat.

In the movie, there was an accidental murder, a tight little cast of characters led by Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson and Demi Moore and dishonorable discharges for the two fictional Marines, Harold Dawson and Loudon Downey.

But in real life, the life Mr. Cox led, nobody died, and no one was dishonorably discharged.

"For me, it was just a movie," Ms. Tinsley said. "But for him, it was his life. He went through that."

Mr. Cox was apparently outraged. He gave a February 1993 interview with a local newspaper, the Natick Bulletin, in which he said, "If I hadn't known the truth, it probably would've been the best movie I've ever seen in my life."

Mr. Cox said he was struck by the similarities between the events of his life and the movie.

The fictional setting was Guantanamo Bay.

The victim's name in the movie is William Santiago, who, like the real-life William Alvarado, wrote a letter to officials to complain of illegal firing into Cuban territory.

Following orders

And, as in Mr. Cox's court martial, the key element of the defense was that the Marines were following implied orders from their superiors.

"Mostly, he didn't like the outcome -- that the two Marines were relieved of duty and dishonorably discharged," Steven Cox said. "The whole thing ended up rotten in the end."

A spokesman for Castle Rock Entertainment, a Beverly Hills-based company co-owned by the film's director, Rob Reiner, declined to comment.

Repeated attempts to reach Mr. Sorkin's California-based agent also were unsuccessful.

"David wanted to see fairness," Steven Cox added. "He felt they [the filmmakers] were going to make millions with this movie, a movie that was based on some of his experiences. David and some of the other guys said, 'Jeez, this is an invasion of privacy. And then, they portray us as killers.' "

David Cox was mad, all right.

Mad enough to sue.

Mad enough to contact his former attorney, Mr. Marcari, now in private practice in Virginia Beach, Va., the pair writing the first chapter of a planned book that would set the record straight.

But Mr. Cox never got a chance to complete his plans.

Something was wrong

Elaine Tinsley arrived in the apartment she shared with David Cox in Natick at 5:30 p.m. Jan. 5.

She knew something was terribly wrong because the pet rabbit named Lenny that he gave her on her 21st birthday was hopping wildly in the kitchen.

A few glasses were tipped over, and David Cox's 1988 Ford truck was still parked in the driveway.

There was no sign of David.

Frantically, she began to call family and friends to see where he was. No one knew. The next day, she filed a missing person report with the Natick police.

"It wasn't like David just to leave without telling anyone," she said.

Days turned to weeks, turned to months, and still no sign of David.

Nothing added up.

For the first time in his life, he was poised to embark on a profession. During the Christmas season he worked part-time as a driver for United Parcel Service. On the day of his disappearance, Mr. Cox's supervisor called to tell him he had been hired full-time.

After much deliberation, Mr. Cox told his girlfriend that he was ready to join a suit against those who made "A Few Good Men." But he had yet to do so when he disappeared.

Movie maker sued

Five of his fellow Marines, including Mr. Valdez, had filed suit in federal District Court in Houston against Castle Rock Entertainment and others, for, among other things, invasion of privacy, civil conspiracy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

The plaintiffs say the filmmakers "stole [their] real life story, changed a few names and passed it off as their own creation."

But for now, the Cox family has put aside all thoughts of pending litigation.

During the first thaw of a New England spring, Mr. Cox's decomposed corpse was discovered along the riverbank near Medfield, 17 miles southwest of Boston.

Investigators are piecing together what few clues they have.

* Three 9 mm shell casings.

* The camouflage jacket, dungarees and sneakers Mr. Cox wore.

* And the site itself, remote, a half-mile from the nearest road, yet strategically located between two gun clubs.

Four shots fired, even in the middle of the day, would elicit little surprise.

"We're really starting from ground zero," said Peter Casey, the assistant district attorney for Norfolk County, where Medfield is located.

Mr. Casey said "there is no indication," that the murder was tied to drugs, to Mr. Cox's well-known passion for gambling at race tracks and with local bookmakers, or to the litigation over "A Few Good Men."

"He was well thought of," Mr. Casey said. "He seems to have been a pretty good guy."

The search for an ex-Marine's murderer continues.

And a family grieves.

During the months that he was missing, David's family and his girlfriend consulted with psychics.

"They said that he was surrounded by water and that he was in a warm and safe place," Steven Cox said. "But my brother wasn't warm. And my brother wasn't safe."

A Few Good Men: The True Story with Don Marcari
by coldtraces.com
October 22, 2017

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

In today’s episode, we hear from Don Marcari (view his law firm’s website here – NC, SC, and VA) who was David Cox’s lawyer in Gitmo after he was involved in the hazing of a fellow marine. David and the other marines involved in the incident were charged with attempted murder and faced decades in jail. But there was an offer on the table – David could take an other than honorable discharge and go home. It sounds like an easy decision, but David said he was simply following orders and he decided to fight the charges in court.


DON MARCARI (PHOTO CREDIT: DON MARCARI)


DAVID COX

This story became the inspiration for the hit movie ‘A Few Good Men.’ After the movie was released, David was outspoken about the differences between the movie and what really happened in Gitmo and he was planning to file a lawsuit against the filmmakers. But before he could do so, David was murdered. He was shot from behind once in the base of the neck and three more times in the left side of his torso.


BASE IN GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA 1986 (PHOTO CREDIT: DON MARCARI)


ATTORNEYS FOR THE CASE. DEBBIE SORKIN, SECOND FROM LEFT, THE SISTER OF AARON SORKIN, WHO WROTE “A FEW GOOD MEN,” AND DONALD MARCARI, FAR RIGHT. (PHOTO CREDIT: DON MARCARI)


WATCH TOWER IN GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA 1986 (PHOTO CREDIT: DON MARCARI)


PART OF WILLIAM ALVARADO’S LETTER COMPLAINING ABOUT THE SITUATION ON THE BASE (FROM UNSOLVED MYSTERIES SEGMENT)

David’s article, ‘Art Imitates Life: Natick resident sues over plot of the movie “A Few Good Men”‘ from the Natick Bulletin, February 1993:


NATICK BULLETIN PAGE 1


NATICK BULLETIN PAGE 2

Despite the above article, David was not a part of the lawsuit because he was murdered before it could come together. The lawsuit was filed by five of the other marines involved in the incident after he went missing:

February 1994 (David disappeared January 5th 1994)

VALERIE KUKLENSKI United Press International

A FEW GOOD LAWYERS: A few not-so-good Marines have taken legal action in Texas against Castle Rock Entertainment, writer Aaron Sorkin, director Rob Reiner and others over the Tom Cruise-Jack Nicholson hit movie ”A Few Good Men,” which the Marines contend was based on their own court-martial for the hazing of a young recruit. The ex-Marines — Kevin Palermo, Ronald Peterson Jr., Brett Bentley, Dennis Snyder and Christopher Lee Valdez — claim Lt. Debra Sorkin, the attorney who defended one of them, later told her brother Aaron about the case. Attorney Gary Patterson noted that unlike the character in the movie, the hazing victim in the real 1986 Guantanamo Bay incident survived. ”The profits made from this movie and subsequent video rentals (are) mind-boggling,” the lawsuit said. ”However, plaintiffs did not give permission to defendants to make public what is a very private event.” Now that their little secret has been blown, the ex-Marines want $10 million in damages.

Art Imitates Life: Natick Resident Sues Over Plot of the Movie “A Few Good Men”
by Dan Phelps
Natick Bulletin
February 4, 1993

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.

When David Cox saw the movie “A Few Good Men” recently, he was so nervous that he had his first cigarette in three years.

It’s not often you watch a major event from your life being acted out on the big screen by famous actors.

That’s how Cox feels about “A Few Good Men.”

The Natick resident and two fellow ex-Marines have filed a lawsuit against Castle Rock Entertainment, the maker of the popular film, claiming the film is based on a real-life event in which Cox and the other two men were involved.

“I was a wreck watching the movie,” Cox said in a recent interview. “I quit smoking about three years ago, but I had my first cigarette during that movie.”

The movie, which carries a disclaimer that the events depicted in it are fictional, is about the trial of two Marines accused of killing a fellow Marine. The Marines, named Harold Dawson and Loudon Downey, are charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and conduct unbecoming an officer.

The movie centers around an incident in which the two Marines, while stationed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, admittedly bound and gagged another Marine who had written to the Naval Intelligence Service to complain about members of his platoon illegally firing into Cuba.

The lawyer assigned to defend the two Marines uses the defense that the Marines were merely following orders from their commanding officers to “train” the other Marine for disobeying the chain of command and going against the Marines’ code of working out problems within the unit.

In the movie, the Marines are found by a Navy jury to be innocent of murder and conspiracy to commit murder but guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer.

For Cox, Christopher Valdez of Sarasota, Fla., and Dennis Snyder of California, that scenario is a little too real to be fictional.


David Cox, a Natick resident, feels the movie ‘A Few Good Men’ hits a little too close to home.

Cox, who has lived in Natick for three years, said after he joined the Marines in September 1985, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay as his first duty station.

There, he said, at the age of 19, he was chosen by commanding officers to join a select group of Marines called “The 10.”

“They only let the best Marines in, the most loyal ones, the ones in the best physical condition, the ones who could keep their mouths shut,” said Cox, now 26.

“We worked directly under the base colonel and company captain. We were out there on the fence lines every day, shooting at Cubans, trying to instigate a war. The physical training (for The 10) was totally against the Uniform Code of Military Justice. We’d go out when it was 110 degrees and do five-mile runs along the fence lines with our helmets and flak jackets on.”

Cox said that as part of the initiation into The 10, the Marines had to, among other things, shoot at their “mirror,” the Cuban soldier stationed directly across the lines from them, which was illegal. They also had to hang from their hands from a 60-foot tower for 60 seconds.

“It’s not as hard as it sounds,” he said. “You just can’t slip.”

Cox claims a Marine named William Alvarado was caught writing letters to his congressman, telling him of some of the illegal activities of some of his platoon mates.

While one ranking officer decided it would be best to transfer Alvarado to another site so the other Marines wouldn’t seek revenge against him, Cox claims – and another officer, Capt. David Robb, testified in court – that the colonel, Samuel Adams, ordered that Alvarado remain in camp.

Cox claims the order came down through the chain of command that Alvarado should be taught a lesson. “Our platoon commander pulled us aside and said, ‘Don’t take him up to the roof and throw him off and kill him, but if he were to fall down the stairs in the middle of the night, oh well,’” Cox said.


Cox (right) and his lawyer, Donald Marcari, 1986.

At about 1:30 a.m., one Sunday in September 1986, according to Cox, he and the nine other members of The 10 went into Alvarado’s room, tied him up, forced a rolled-up pillowcase into his mouth, and started to cut Alvarado’s hair off.

Cox said that during the attack, in which his job was to cut Alvarado’s hair, he noticed that Alvarado had stopped breathing and his face was turning purple. Alvarado was taken to the medical facility at the base, and the next morning The 10 Marines admitted their involvement and were placed under arrest and put into the brig.

A key difference from the movie’s plot is that Alvarado lived, whereas the character of Santiago died.

Cox’s story is supported by Donald Marcari, the Navy lawyer who successfully defended Cox.

“I think the movie is clearly based upon the trial,” Marcari said this week from his office in Virginia Beach, Va. “There’s a lot of dramatization – it’s probably 50 percent fact and 50 percent fiction. But it’s based on the trial. I don’t think there’s any doubt that it was based on the trial.”

The 10 Marines were each appointed a lawyer and were told they could either accept an other-than-honorable discharge or go to trial on charges of attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Seven of the Marines chose to take the other-than-honorable discharge. Cox and two others decided to fight it, faced with a possible 40-year jail sentence if convicted. Marcari was assigned to defend Cox.

At a preliminary hearing, the charges against the three were reduced to aggravated battery.

In the trial, Cox, who didn’t want to turn in his commanding officers, said he was nonetheless forced to testify that he and the other Marines were given an implicit order to teach Alvarado a lesson.

“We were so brainwashed and so pro-unit – we didn’t want their asses to burn,” he said. “They were our mentors. But as time went on and it was the third or fourth week in the brig, we started realizing what they’d done. We decided it was time to start singing like canaries.

“We were willing to give them a chance to step forward. We waited as long as we could.”

According to Marcari, during the trial, Col. Adams, who is now retired, denied ever giving an order for the Marines to discipline Alvarado, but Capt. Robb said the order was implied.

“One of them was lying,” he said.

In the end, Marcari successfully defended the case on the grounds that the Marines were merely following the orders of superior officers.

They were found not guilty of aggravated battery but guilty of simple assault, a misdemeanor. That crime carried a 30-day jail sentence, but since Cox and the other two had already served 38 days in the brig awaiting trial, they were set free and allowed to keep their ranks.

“One of the jurors told me the only reason they found (Cox) guilty of anything was that someone got hurt. But he felt like he just followed implied orders,” said Marcari, now a partner in the law firm of Kershner, Hawkins and Marcari in Virginia Beach, Va.

Cox went on to serve 2-1/2 more years in the Marines, and he said he was involved in the first action of Operation Just Cause, the U.S. military operation in Panama that resulted in the arrest of President Manuel Noriega.

He left the Marines in September 1989 and returned to Massachusetts. Cox, who grew up in Needham, settled in Natick.

“A Few Good Men” is a box-office success and is considered to be a candidate for the Academy Award for best picture. Its director, Rob Reiner, is also considered a candidate for the award for best director.

The movie stars Tom Cruise as Navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee (a role Cox feels is patterned after Marcari), Jack Nicholson as Col. Nathan Jessup (the role of Col. Samuel Adams, according to Cox) and Demi Moore as a Navy lawyer who assists Kaffee.

A spokesman for Castle Rock Entertainment, a Beverly Hills-based film company partly owned by Reiner, said this week the company has no comment on the lawsuit.

A disclaimer at the end of the movie states that the “characters and incidents portrayed and names used herein are fictitious” and that any similarity to real incidents or names “is purely coincidental.”

Another aspect of the story is that Aaron Sorkin, the man who wrote both the play and the movie on which it was based, is, according to Marcari and Cox, the brother of Deborah Sorkin, the lawyer assigned to one of the Marines who opted to take an other-than-honorable discharge rather than go to trial.

They believe Sorkin got the story from his sister and turned it into the script.

Attempts to reach Aaron Sorkin and his agent, Creative Artists Agency, were unsuccessful. Both have unlisted phone numbers in New York City.

Indeed, the similarities between the incident depicted in the movie and the 1986 incident that involved Cox are striking. They include:

* Not only were the Marines in the movie based on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, they were based in the same location and in the same division as Cox and his fellow Marines;

* The victim’s name in the movie is William Santiago. In the real-life incident, it was William Alvarado.

* In the movie, one of the Marines says, “We were only going to cut his hair.” Cox said the purpose of disciplining Alvarado was to cut his hair into the shape of a checkerboard to teach him a lesson.

* In the movie, Santiago writes a letter to the Naval Investigative Service to complain of some of the members of his platoon firing illegally into enemy territory. In the real-life incident, Alvarado wrote a letter to his congressman to tell him of illegal activities within his platoon, including illegally firing rifles into enemy territory.

* In the movie, the cloth used to gag Santiago is believed to have been dipped in poison, thus causing him to hemorrhage. In the real-life incident, the possibility that poison was on the rag was introduced in the trial but was dismissed.

But despite the similarities, two major differences between the movie and the real-life incident bother Cox even more. Ironically, it’s those two differences that may hinder the success of his current lawsuit against Castle Rock.

The first difference is that, in the movie, Santiago died, while in the real-life incident, Alvarado lived.

The other major difference is that the two Marines in the movie, while found not guilty of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, were found guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and were dishonorably discharged.

In real life, Cox and the other two Marines that went to trial were found guilty only of simple assault and remained in the Marines, even keeping their ranks.


David Cox on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, 1986

Cox and Valdez, one of the Marines who took an other-than-honorable discharge instead of going to trial, feel that since the movie is obviously based on the incident that involved them, the movie unfairly portrays them as murderers who were dishonorably discharged.

But Marcari, Cox’s lawyer then but not in the current lawsuit against the film company, feels those differences between the script and what really happened, as well as other fictionalized dramatizations in the movie, may be enough to protect Castle Rock if the case goes to court.

“It’ll be a tough case,” Marcari said. “Any trial is a matter of public record. They changed it sufficiently to protect (themselves). But it’s definitely based on what happened.

“I don’t think (the lawsuit) will be successful, but that’s just my opinion, and I don’t practice in that area of the law,” he added.

Another aspect of the movie that Cox is angry with is the portrayal of the Marines on trial.

“We were typically portrayed as dumb 19-year-old robots in the movie,” he said. “But we knew exactly what we were doing. We knew what we were up against.

“I don’t regret what I did. I regret the fluke results that came about,” he added. “If I had to do it all over again, I would. I’d just use a different gag.”

Valdez, the former Marine who is a co-plaintiff with Cox in the lawsuit against Castle Rock, reached this week at his home in Sarasota, Fla., said he has no doubt the movie’s script was drawn from the real-life incident in which he was involved.

“But the way they portrayed us is disturbing,” he added. “They left out some of the facts. They said we actually killed this guy, when we didn’t. Obviously, the reason I’m disturbed is that they did portray us in a false light. We have enough proof.”

Calls to Cox’s lawyer in Brighton and Valdez’s lawyer in Florida were not returned.

Cox received his honorable discharge from the Marines in August 1989 after serving out his four-year stint.

With a paralegal degree, he may go on to law school in the future. He still keeps in touch with Marcari. In fact, he and Valdez are meeting with Marcari this weekend to start discussing the possibility of writing a book about the incident.

Marcari said he feels bad about what happened to Cox and the other Marines and that the only thing they were guilty of was being good Marines.

“They were all good officers. That’s the sad thing,” he said. “If they said, ‘Take that hill,’ they’d take that hill. They were clearly the 10 best Marines down there.

“The Marine Corps teaches them to take care of their own,” he added. “If there are any problems, handle them within the platoon.”

And he said Cox was a victim just as much as Alvarado, a victim of commanders who gave an order that shouldn’t have been given.

“He’s a great guy,” he said of Cox. “He’s loyal. He’s a good Marine, and he probably would have made a great Marine if he stayed with it. He felt like he was following orders. He loved the Marine Corps, and he wanted to stay in. And I think he would have stayed in if this didn’t happen. I think it kind of soured it for him.”

Cox said he and the other two Marines are pursuing the lawsuit because they feel they’ve been unfairly portrayed.

He said he and Valdez even contacted Sorkin when they heard the movie was in the works and offered to help out, but Sorkin never called them back.

“All they had to do was call us,” Cox said. “I would have been glad to take a leave of absence to go out there and tell the real story.”

But how does he feel about the movie?

“If I hadn’t known the truth, it probably would’ve been the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”