Covert Operation Quotes
See {584897} for a quotation from the speech. Spinning and giving advance copies of speeches to the press is not the invention of the 20th century media-savvy political handlers. It was a standard practice even in the 19th century.
This covert project — PBSUCCESS — to destabilize Guatemala was exposed by the Guatemalan government. To minimize the embarrassment in the U. S., the PBSUCCESS CIA staff asked headquarters to fabricate sensational stories to keep newspapers and the fledgling TV news busy and distracted from covering the Guatemala story that the CIA was trying to destabilize the government in order to bring about regime change. The CIA was prohibited by law from doing this but the agency at that time ignored many laws. It is not known if the phony stories were actually planted at that time.
Lumumba was too socialistic for Dulles. He was not only removed from power by a covert CIA operation but the allies we selected to succeed him, then murdered him as they feared they had no one to match Lumumba’s popularity with the people.
This quotation would not be memorable but for the fact that one of the other “passengers” on that Central Intelligence Agency “train” was Saddam Hussein, who later became the dictator of Iraq and the enemy of the United States. This was a classic example of unintended consequences of covert operations. The Cia covertly put the Baath Party in power in Iran, and some years later, the Iraqi Baath Party became a major enemy of the United States.
It was unusual for anyone to call for the assassination of a foreign leader, but for a leading Christian cleric, this was a strange way of “turning the other cheek.”
This quotation appears to be the origin of the ultra-right wing conspiracy theory that a communist will become President of the United States without the public ever knowing that he was a Communist. During the Obama administration, there were a number of ultra-rightists who believed that Obama was the culmination of this plan which the communists began in the 1950s and was only "discovered" Fred Koch and the John Birchers in 1963.
