American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us

Copyright © 2010 by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ventura, Jesse.

American conspiracies : lies, lies, and more dirty lies that the government tells us / by Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

9781602398023

1. Conspiracies--United States. 2. Conspiracy theories--United States. I. Russell, Dick. II. Title.

HV6285.V46 2010

973--dc22

2009052309

Printed in the United States of America

“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”

—Albert Einstein

First of all, let's talk about what you
won't
find in this book. It's not about how extraterrestrials are abducting human beings, or the Apollo moon landing being a colossal hoax perpetrated by NASA, or that Barack Obama somehow is not a natural-born American citizen. I leave these speculations to others, not that I take them seriously. What this book will delve into are a number of things you don't see on TV or read about in the papers. The fact is, the media—the fourth branch of government that our founding fathers anticipated would speak truth to power and keep our democracy on track—has at least since the assassination of President Kennedy systematically ignored any “conspiracy theory” that might rock the Establishment's boat. We are, excuse my French, in deep shit today because of this head-in-the-sand mentality.

Let's start out by defining what a conspiracy is. My 2,347-page
Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary
says: “a planning and acting together secretly, especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason.” Synonyms include plot, cabal, connivance, collusion. Hard to swallow? Think of the Roman senators who knocked off Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. But I guess we've come a long way since then, right? Think Operation Northwoods, circa 1962. We'll get to that in due course—
Seven Days in May
, that novel about a military takeover during the Kennedy years, wasn't far off the mark.

Clearly, there's something going on in our national psyche that the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
don't want to examine. Look at the popularity of
The X-Files
, or Mel Gibson in the movie
Conspiracy Theory
. Not that I think we should all booby-trap our doors and hide behind our file cabinets, but sometimes those “lone nuts” turn out to be right! I'm tired of being told that anybody who questions the status quo is part of the disaffected, alienated element of our society that ought to wake up and salute the flag. Maybe being patriotic is about raising the curtain and wondering whether we've really been told the truth about things like September 11.

I guess my questioning of the “official” line goes back to my school days, being taught that we had to fight in Vietnam to stop the domino effect of Communism. That's what I learned in school, but my father—who was a World War II vet—took the exact opposite position at the dinner table. He said that was a load of crap, that the Vietnam War was all about somebody making big money off it. At first I thought my dad was crazy, because I could not believe they would lie to me in school. I fought with him over it, and he'd keep doing his best to debunk what I was saying.

When I, in turn, went into the service and learned a whole lot more about Vietnam, I had the good fortune to come home and tell my father that he was right. Especially growing up in the Midwest, you never even contemplate that your government might not be telling the truth. You don't realize until you get much older that government is nothing but people—and people lie, especially where money and power are concerned.

The next prong in the fork was, when I got out of the navy and went to junior college one year, Mark Lane came to give a talk and I happened to hear him that night. That was the first time I ever paid attention to someone saying that what they told us about President Kennedy's assassination might not be true. I'd been in junior high school when JFK was shot, and I remember the announcement over the loudspeakers and being sent back to our homerooms and then school was dismissed. Like most everybody else, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on TV, but I never questioned the Warren Commission's report that this disaffected ex-Marine had acted alone.

After hearing Mark Lane that year, I was at the height of my wrestling career during the 1978 congressional hearings into the assassination and didn't really start delving into any of this until wrestling changed in the mid-1980s. All of a sudden, I was no longer driving to towns, but flying. Sitting on airplanes all the time becomes extremely boring, so I started reading. Besides Mark Lane's
Plausible Denial
, I remember Jim Marrs's
Crossfire
and then a whole bunch of other books. When I'd see anything about the Kennedy assassination in the bookstores, I'd buy it.

So as I got older and started looking back at the Sixties, where every assassin was supposedly a “lone nut,” I began thinking how could that be? These nuts who never told anybody anything or planned with anyone else, but just felt the need to go out and commit murders of prominent individuals—John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The odds of that, I figured, simply defied all logic.

It made me wonder who's really running the show. Especially when you look at things they now admit never happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that drew us into the Vietnam War. These things, as portrayed by our government and media, seem to be smaller segments of a bigger picture. It almost seems like a game of chess sometimes, where you don't understand the significance of one move until maybe a decade or two later and start to see the results of how things turned out differently.

You can bet that during my four years as the independent governor of Minnesota (1999 to 2003), I was shielded from plenty of information, because they figured this guy will come and go. At the same time, I had some personal experiences that would tend to make a sane public servant start looking over his shoulder. (As William Burroughs once said, “Paranoia is having all the facts.”)

The first inkling that certain people inside the federal government were out to keep an eye on me came not long after I took office. Sometime early in 1999, I was “asked” to attend a meeting in the basement of the Capitol building, at a time when the State Legislature was not in session. I was informed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was conducting a training exercise that they hoped I'd be willing to participate in. Well, by this time I knew that the CIA's original mission statement from 1947 meant they were only supposed to operate outside the U.S. The FBI was the outfit with domestic jurisdiction. But, being an ex-Navy SEAL and a patriotic citizen, I basically felt I should cooperate. Besides, I was curious as to what this was really all about.

Down there in the bowels of the building, some “fledgling” CIA operatives sat waiting for me in a conference room. There were 23 in all; I counted heads. They ranged in age from right out of college to what looked like retired people, both men and women, a very diverse group. Your average middle-class neighborhood types—except all of them were with the CIA, which was kind of chilling when you think about it. I was placed in the middle of a big circle of chairs, and they all sat there staring at me, with notebooks on their laps.

Well, before they could start asking me questions, I said I had a few for them. First of all, what were they doing
here
, in the FBI's territory? Nobody seemed to want to say. Then I started going around the room, asking for their names and their job descriptions. Maybe three or four answered, but the others dummied up. Either they'd describe what they did without identifying who they were, or neither. Considering that I'm an elected governor, I thought this was not only rude, but rather brash. So I told the group, “Well, being that you're not being too cooperative with me, it's going to be difficult for me to cooperate with
you
.”

They asked their questions anyway, and it was interesting. They all focused on how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly could win when we went into the campaign? Basically, how had the independent wrestler candidate pulled this off? Sometimes I answered and other times I didn't, just to mess with them a little. They remained very cordial and proper. Nobody raised their voice or made me feel I was being interrogated. But I've got to say, it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was baffled by the whole experience.

When I got home that day, I called my friend Dick Marcinko. He wrote all the
Rogue Warrior
books, created the anti-terrorist SEAL Team Six, and I figured he'd probably know more about how the CIA operates than anybody else I knew. Dick started laughing as I told him the scenario of what had happened. I asked why he thought this was so funny.

“Well, I'm not privy to exactly why they were there,” he said, “but I could give you my educated guess.” He went on, “They didn't see you coming. You were not on the radar screen. And all of a sudden, you won a major election in the United States of America. The election caught them with their pants down, and their job is to gather intelligence and make predictions. Now, next to Bill Clinton, you're probably the most famous politician in America.”

Then Dick added this: “I think they're trying to see if there are any more of you on the horizon.”

So were they trying to gather information to insure this would never happen again? I wondered: Was I that much of a threat?

Not too long after that meeting, I found out something else and it stunned me. I revealed this for the first time in my memoir,
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!
, and it raised a lot of eyebrows. It just so happens there is a CIA operative inside every state government. They are not in executive positions—in other words, not appointed by the governor—but permanent state employees. While governors come and go, they keep working, holding down legitimate jobs but with a dual identity. In Minnesota, this person was fairly high up, serving at the deputy commissioner level.

I wasn't sworn to secrecy about this, but only my chief of staff and I were allowed to know his identity. I had to go meet with the person and later, when somebody else took the cover post for the CIA, I had to know who the new agent was. I still have no idea what they're doing there. Are they spying? Checking out what direction the state government is going in and reporting back to someone at headquarters in Langley? But who and for what purpose? I mean, are they trying to ferret out traitors in the various states? (Or maybe just dissidents—like me!)

Anyhow, I wasn't told the reason and was simply left to ponder how come our Constitution is being violated. Let's say it gave me pause. I've seen it firsthand. And that's another reason why I am writing this book, because I believe it's vital to our democracy to see the hidden pattern that's been undermining this country for most of my lifetime. The Bush Administration, which made lying into an “art form” that took us into the Iraq War, was in a way the logical extension of all the cover-ups, crimes, and conspiracies that preceded it.

Researching this book has been fascinating, but I wouldn't call it fun. When you look back on how the power brokers have deceived us over the years, it gets pretty damned depressing. Maybe that's why so many people prefer to remain in denial. The way I look at it, though, is that old truism from the Bible: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Until we come clean about our recent history, there's no way to move forward and return to the representative democracy that our forefathers intended America to be.

We'll start by looking back at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. If you're like me, you certainly know the name of John Wilkes Booth—just like we do Lee Harvey Oswald (ever wonder why lone assassins always have middle names set down, too? Maybe so we'll get them firmly implanted in our minds?). But how many of us were taught that Booth had eight known coconspirators, and that it's never been resolved as to whether he may have been involved with someone in Lincoln's own circle?

Then we'll cut to the 1930s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt got elected in the midst of the Great Depression. That's when a cabal of wealthy industrialists using a veterans' front group embarked on a plot to get rid of FDR and institute a fascist-style regime in this country. They'd probably have succeeded, except they chose the wrong man to lead the way: Major General Smedley Butler, a true American hero who'd twice been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Butler blew the whistle to Congress, which held hearings that exposed the whole scheme. And guess who was among the conspirators, along with J.P. Morgan, DuPont, and other titans of finance? None other than Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. and father of George H.W. Prescott, also happened to be a business partner and American banker for a German steel and coal baron who funded Hitler's rise to power!

I'm going to devote several chapters to the assassinations of the 1960s, because in my view the truth has been covered up about all of them. We'll start with the one I've studied the longest, and that's the conspiracy that took President Kennedy's life on November 22, 1963. I believe our country has never been the same since that terrible day, which established a precedent for treachery in our contemporary political life that we're still living with.

I don't believe you can ever form an opinion and say: this is absolutely what happened. That's one of the reasons the perpetrators succeed, because when the most powerful entity in the world is doing the covering up, it becomes extremely difficult to know that you can ever lay the truth completely bare. I think I probably read a scenario that's true, but there might be several others as provocative and just as well true. Or they might all be intertwined into one. The criticism of Oliver Stone's film
JFK
(which I've watched many times) is that he just threw all the mud at the wall to see which part sticks. Well, he
had
to. He was putting it all out there and letting you the viewer decide what you wanted to take home to the bank. It didn't make it any less of a great film because Oliver couldn't pinpoint exactly what went down.