Out of the Blue:

Space Drones, Black Programs, the Unveiling of U.S. Military Offensives in Weather as a Weapon, and the Coming Permanent State of Emergency.

keith harmon snow

Index (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (afterword) (reference)

13. Friends In High Places.  

Revisiting important details illuminated in this report, and tying them together here, provides significant insight into the nature of the machinery behind the clandestine intelligence and security apparatus and the implications for the subject of secret ENMOD development and operations.

The history and nature of Project Corona -- as one secret program recently declassified – offers a convenient doorway through which we can pass to explore the shrouds of secrecy and denial behind which ENMOD operations are proceeding. Corona documents reveal that satellite reconnaissance operations (1960-1972) were directed by top brass: including then CIA Director John McCone, then CIA Clandestine Services chief Richard Bissell (CIA director, from 1965), intelligence and security insider Dr. Eugene Fubini, and Cyrus Vance, DOD official (1960), Secretary of the Army (1962) and then Deputy Secretary of Defense (1963). [203]

George Bush Sr. began his association with the CIA in 1960, as Corona transitioned into full operation with satellite’s spying on cold war enemies, and just as ENMOD capabilities began to show promise, and secure major institutional support. He was appointed Director of the CIA in 1976, and he was one of the cold warrior architects of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) – Ronald Reagan’s supposed pet program – “Star Wars.” 

Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance later became Secretary of State under the Jimmy Carter Administration; he was also a director of the New York Times Corporation in the 1990s. [204] He was an insider to his death, and his role at one of the world’s premier institutions of perception management, the New York Times, should be appreciated for what it was: an elite director of editorial policy at the highest levels.

General Alexander Haig came to his warmaking maturity in parallel with the evolving militarization of space. Upon graduating from the U.S. Military Academy in 1947, Haig advanced through a number of military assignments, serving in Japan, Korea, Europe and Vietnam. Haig served in major posts in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan (Secretary of State, 1981-1982) administrations, and he was Senior Military Advisor to Dr. Henry Kissinger on the National Security Council. A CEO of aerospace giant United Technologies Corporation (UTC) prior to his appointment as Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff in the seventies, Haig remains today a director of UTC.

Like so many other premier American warmakers, General Alexander Haig is intimately involved with the shaping of the American mind through his many major interests in the news and entertainment media. Haig is on the Board of Advisors for the Corporation for Maintaining Editorial Diversity in America, a right-wing, warmaking front group openly backing the right-wing National Review Magazine. As pointed out above, Haig is a director for major media giant America Online, for the mammoth Hollywood films corporations Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), and he hosts a weekly business discussion TV program called World Business Review.

 

General Alexander Haig Consults with corporate executives John Balaguer, President, Pratt & Whitney Government Engines & Space Propulsion, and Ben Rich, Vice President, Lockheed Advanced Development Company. General Haig is currently senior advisor to United Technologies Corp. and on the Board of Directors for America Online, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., & MGM Grand. [205]

United Technologies is a major aerospace corporation, with subsidiaries Pratt & Whitney (advanced aerospace engines and propulsion systems), and Sikorsky (advanced Blackhawk and Seahawk and black helicopter programs) operating in major partnerships with Boeing Aerospace. UTC director Jamie S. Gorelick (check: Also Fannie Mae or Charels River or Trammel Crow?) serves on the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) National Security Advisory panel, while UTC director H. Patrick Swygert (also check!!!!!: Also Fannie Mae or Charels River or Trammel Crow?)  is a member of the National Security Agency (NSA) Advisory Board. UTC-Sikorsky helicopters are a standard feature of US defense and intelligence special operations.

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Former CIA director John McCone was as close to the privately held mercenary Bechtel Corporation as one could get, short of being born into the Bechtel family: in 1937 McCone teamed with Steve Bechtel to form Bechtel-McCone Corporation, a military industrial juggernaut with deep intelligence connections. John McCone later became Deputy Secretary of Defense (1948); Under Secretary of the Air Force (1950-51); Chairman of the secretive Atomic Energy Commission (1958-1960); and CIA Director (1961-1965). John McCone was chairman of the NSF during Project Mercury. A close comrad of Eisenhower, John McCone was also very close to Allen Dulles – McCone’s predecessor as director of Central Intelligence. [206]

Bechtel has always been politically untouchable. Ronald Reagan appointed then Bechtel Group President George Schultz as his Secretary of State (1982?) and Bechtel Vice-President and General Counsel Casper Weinberger as his Secretary of War: both men had guided Reagan’s presidential campaign. Casper Weinberger was a linchpin in the covert Iran-Contra Arms scandal, and, like then CIA director George H.W. Bush, he was central to the clandestine drugs operations and organized crime that led to the U.S. invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause, 1989). Kenneth Davis, Bechtel V.P. in charge of nuclear construction (1972-1982) was appointed Deputy Secretary of Energy under Ronald Reagan in 1982. [207] It is likely, as mentioned previously, that Bechtel was involved in the top-secret construction of Groom Lake (Area 51). George Schultz returned, and remains, a director of the Bechtel Group.

Reagan’s Middle East envoy Philip Habib served as a private consultant to Bechtel: Habib was a career state department official from the 1950s, a senior advisor to the Secretary of State (1979-1980), and a resident fellow of the Hoover Institution think tank. Of course, prior to his Presidency, Reagan was for years a key spokesman and speech-giver, who was ever bringing good things to life – weapons, PCBs and nuclear waste – for General Electric. Francis Blake, now deputy energy secretary under George H.W. Bush, was a senior vice president at General Electric. Previously he was vice president and general counsel for GE Power Systems. GE contributed more than $100,000 to the George Bush presidential campaign and his inaugural committee.

Bechtel is entrenched in black operations, nuclear weapons production and military construction contracts. Bechtel Bettis, Inc. operates the Naval Reactors Facility that reports to DOE’s Pittsburgh Naval Operations Office. Bechtel is also involved with SAIC in the development of the Yucca Mountain High-Level Nuclear Waste dump in Nevada (and the Central Artery reconstruction project in Boston).

GE director Douglas Warner is a member of the Board of Counselors for the Bechtel Group, and a director of JP Morgan. Ditto for Morgan director Riley P. Bechtel -- the Chairman, CEO, and Director of the private Bechtel Group. JP Morgan director Douglas Yearley is a director of Lockheed-Martin and, through his interlocking directorships with Phelps Dodge, Yearley (read: Lockheed) is closely associated with long-time Phelps Dodge executive George B. Munroe – who is also a director of the New York Times Company. Note as well that Douglas Yearley is a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund and a director of the Compatible Ventures Group of The Nature Conservancy. JP Morgan director Hanna H. Gray is a director of Cummins Engine Company, and Atlantic Richfield (ARCO) – the latter being a primary player behind the HAARP project in Alaska. Morgan director Martin Feldstein is a director of TRW. Morgan director Richard D. Simmons is the President and Director of the International Herald Tribune, and director of the Washington Post Company and Yankee Publishing.

Bechtel National Incorporated (Riley P. Bechtel Chairman and CEO) is teamed with BWX Technologies (BWXT) at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. BWXT is a subsidiary of McDermott International, one of the largest aircraft carrier, nuclear submarine and submarine propulasion, and petroleum industry construction contractors in the world. McDermott director Bruce DeMars is a former U.S. Navy Admiral (Ret.), responsible for all major nuclear navy operations (1988-1996). McDermott director Kathryn D. Sullivan was formerly Chief Scientist for NOAA (1992-1996) and a NASA space shuttle astronaut from 1978 to 1992. 

BWXT is deeply entrenched in the national laboratories nuclear weapons complex, including INEL, Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories. The nuclear weapons complex is a good candidate cover for development of black programs ENMOD weapons of mass destruction.

The following information is lifted straight out of the Bechtel Annual Report 2002:

Weapons of Mass Destruction Training Program Even before September 11 cast a spotlight on national security, the Nevada Test Site north of Las Vegas was taking aim at terrorism. Managed by Bechtel Nevada for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, the site supports national security and U.S. intelligence and defense efforts, designs emergency response programs, monitors consequences of terrorist acts, and develops technologies to fight terrorism… The site also operates Remote Sensing and Special Technologies laboratories.

To reiterate, the Nevada Test Site “also operates Remote Sensing and Special Technologies laboratories.” And there it is, one of the primary candidate sites for the ongoing black operations in ENMOD weapons research, design, development, test and deployment.

President Richard Nixon’s Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, later served as a Bechtel consultant. Recall that Helms personally ordered Dr. Sidney Gottlieb – CIA Chief of Office of Technical Services -- to destroy all records of his experiments in developing the poison he hand-carried to the Congo to assassinate Patrice Lumumba (1961), and that Helms was convicted of perjury in 1977 for lying outright to a U.S. Senate Subcommittee about the CIA clandestine terrorism against Salvadore Allende and the people of Chile. [208]

With the field support of William Colby, then CIA operative and Special Ambassador to Vietnam (and later a CIA Director himself), CIA Director Richard Helms was one of the chief architects of Project Pheonix: the clandestine U.S. assassinations operation where U.S. soldiers routinely tortured, raped and massacred Vietnamese civilians, with between 20,000 and 40,000 Vietnamese dead. [209]

The CIA’s Dr.Gottlieb developed the chemical defoliants (Agent Orange) used in the U.S. saturation bombing of Vietnam. Meanwhile, the secret Vietnam era ENMOD “pilot program” Project Popeye was seeding clouds over Southeast Asia. It is notable that the Air Force itself called this a “pilot” program, indicating that there was probably far more programs and operations on the drawing board, if not in operation at the time. [210]

Now U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney succeeded Donald Rumsfeld as White House Chief of Staff under the Gerald Ford Administration (circa 1976). Dick Cheney is a former CEO of Halliburton Corporation, to which he retains deep ties. Halliburton continues to benefit from huge contracts following U.S. military operations (Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq).

Halliburton Director Anne Armstrong was co-chairman of the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1980. [211] Halliburton director George R. Brown financed Lyndon B. Johnson’s political campaigns and, subsequently, Brown & Root Corporation won billion dollar contracts to set up U.S. naval and airfields in Vietnam. In 1995, Brown & Root set up U.S. military bases for the covert U.S. supported invasion of Zaire (1996): subsequently, over 3.5 million people died in Zaire/Congo. [212]

Bruce Jackson was the chairman of the Bush Sr. foreign policy platform committee at the Republican convention, and he wrote the foreign policy platform for the Republican Party: he was also Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy of Lockheed Martin. Stephen J. Hadley, a partner in the Washington-based law firm Shea and Gardner, which represents Lockheed Martin, is deputy director of the National Security Council (NSC), and was a member of the NSC staff under George Bush Sr.

Another of the major George Bush Jr. administration’s total environmental domination advocates is Richard Perle, former Under Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, and a close ally of the Reagan-Bechtel administration’s point men, Secretaries of State and War, George Schultz and Casper Weinberger.

Lockheed Martin director Douglas H. McCorkindale is also Chairman, president and chief executive officer, Gannett Company, a diversified international news and information company with operations in 43 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Hong Kong. Gannett is the USA’s largest newspaper group, with 95 US daily newspapers (including USA Today); Gannett owns and operates 22 television stations; Gannett subsidiary Newsquest Plc. is one of the largest newspaper groups in the U.K. Headquartered near the Pentagon in McLean, VA. Gannett publishes nine major Department of Defense Journals.

A former director of the scandalized ENRON Corporation, Lockheed Martin director Frank Savage is also a director of Qualcomm, a secretive defense and intelligence insider company known to have close ties to the NSA. [213] Qualcomm deals in information technologies for aerospace platforms and missions. Qualcomm director Dr. Robert E. Kuhn was formerly employed by DARPA (1972-1985); and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the systems design of the Arpanet (again, the military precursor to the Internet). Qualcomm director Dr. Richard C. Atkinson is a former director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Qualcomm director Diana Lady Dougan, a permanent U.S. Ambassador, served in senior policy positions under numerous U.S. administrations over the past 30 years.

Qualcomm director and USAFLt. General (Ret.) Brent Scowcroft was the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs under George Bush (I) and Gerald Ford; he has held numerous deep-insider national security posts in the Pentagon and the White House, and he served as military assistant to President Nixon and as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs to Presidents Ford and Nixon. Prior to joining the Bush administration, General Scowcroft was vice chairman of Kissinger Associates, Inc. In the course of his military career, General Scowcroft has held positions in the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Headquarters of the U.S. Air Force, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. General Scowcroft had an aeronautical rating as a pilot.

Major classified aerospace and black programs contractor Northrup Grumman includes amongst its directors now CEO and Chairman of the Board Kent Kresa. An M.I.T. Lincoln Labs trustee and former Lincoln Labs insider, Kresa worked on ballistic missile technologies in the sixties, and for DARPA in the 1970s”. From 1976-1982, Kresa worked at the Northrup Ventura Division, a leader in the production of UAVs.  Northrup Grumman director Ronald D. Sugar previously served with the highly secretive and controversial Litton Industries, with Hughes Aircraft, and with TRW, where he was responsible for advanced [read: top secret] military and scientific space and electronics programs.

Northrup Grumman director John T. Chain is a former U.S. Air Force General (Ret.), a deep insider and former military assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force (1978). Director Charles R. Larsen is a former Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and a recent naval aide to the U.S. President. Director Aulana L. Peters was from 1984-1988 Commissioner of the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) and is now a director of southern California community television. Director John Brooks Slaughter worked with the National Science Foundation from 1976 to 1978, and was NSF Director 1980-1982. He is today a director of Atlantic Richfield Corporation – one of the sponsors and chief corporate beneficiaries of the HAARP Program. Note that Northrup Grumman in December of 2002, finalized their acquisition of TRW Corporation after lengthy negotiations to neutralize charges and violations of monopoly levied by the SEC. [214]

Like those identified above, perhaps the most interesting of all the interlocking but generally untransparent interconnections are those between major mass media concerns and the aerospace and defense sector. Consider John A. Williams, the Vice President of Business Development, for Gannett Co., Inc. Williams is also one of the directors of a very interesting multimedia company called Space Holding Corporation. According to their web site: Space Holding Corporation is the first multimedia company dedicated to space and space related content. Space Holdings publishes Starry Night, the world’s leading family of astronomy software, Space News, the premier business-to-business international newsweekly dedicated entirely to space and aerospace business, and the SPACE.com web site that offers rich and compelling content, including space business news, information, education, and entertainment. Space Holdings is headquartered in New York City with offices and news bureaus in Washington, D.C., Port Canaveral, Florida, Toronto, Canada, and Paris, France.

Highlighting the incestuous relationships in and amongst the select individuals, organizations, intelligence agencies, and media and aerospace corporations is the case of Bernard Eastlund and Space Holding Corp. On the web site for Eastlund Scientific Enterprises Corporation (ESEC), weather modification scientist Dr. Bernard J. Eastlund references the Space Holding Corporation web site (www.space.com), where they carry a story about Dr. Eastlund and the ENMOD technologies he peddles.

Space Holding Corporation functions as a public relations and perception management front for the aerospace warfare industry, peddling the ostensibly “benign” character (and necessity) of aerospace and space warfare technologies through insidious astronomy “news,” “entertainment,” “education” and ‘scientific” multimedia productions – including “award-winning” children’s space exploration astronomy programs. Directors and Advisers of Space Holding Corporation include President and CEO Dan Stone, former Executive V.P. of Turner Broadcasting (CNN International); two former NASA astronauts; a former NASA Mars Explorer Program director; a former Cosmonaut; and – surprise, surprise -- Norman R. Augustine, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Lockheed Martin.

General Dynamics (GD) is involved with major “Future Combat Systems” (FCS), including Fire Scout and Dragon Warrior UAVs, and various Semi-Autonomous Reconnaissance Vehicle (SARV) initiatives. General Dynamics is a major producer and operator of satellite ground stations essential to ENMOD C4IST/R networking capabilities. General Dynamics is also a major producer of attack submarines, thus providing another diverse portfolio of platforms for ENMOD technologies, including advanced weather and satellite surveillance systems, and ENMOD (missile) delivery systems for monitoring and modification capabilities. General Dynamics is intimately connected to the Pentagon through directors Carl E. Mundy Jr., General, U.S. Marine Corps. (Ret.); Julius W. Becton Jr., Lt. General U.S. Army (Ret.); George E. Joulwan, General, U.S. Army  (Ret.); and Carlisle A.H.Trost, Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.). [215]

And then there is Donald Rumsfeld, now U.S. Secretary of War. Under George Bush Sr., Donald Rumsfeld was White House Chief of Staff; he was Secretary of Defense, under Gerald Ford. He is a former director (circa 1996) of the huge privately held Swiss-Swedish multinational Asea Brown Baveri (ABB) Corporation, one of the largest and most secretive construction and defense contractors. [216] Rumsfeld has sat on the board of directors of the Tribune Company since 1992, and as Helen Caldicott has noted, the Tribune Company “boasts in its publicity statements, with “television, radio, newspapers and the Internet, [that it] reaches nearly 80 % of American households every day.”” [217]

Rumsfeld is also closely associated with the Center for Security Policy think tank, “the de facto nerve center of the Star Wars lobby. [218] Adopting the language used in one apologetic propaganda article about U.S. space dominance, Rumsfeld’s national security objectives can be summarized as “denying sanctuary with persistent surveillance, tracking, and rapid engagement, with high-volume precision air strikes in all times and weathers, and in all terrains.” To operate “in all times and weathers” requires major ENMOD capabilities. Note that the same article unquestioningly adopts the U.S. military stance where “weather watching” – and not the certain deployment of major ENMOD tactical assets – is the state of the warmaking art. [219]

Last, note that Donald Rumsfeld served as a liason between the Bechtel Group and the Iraqi regime in the 1980s, in a bid to finesse t he building of an oil pipeline. [220] The Bechtel Group, bidding to secure contracts worth up to $900 million in the aftermath of the US military deconstruction of Iraq in 2003, donated some $770,000 to the Republicans between

1999 and March 2003. [221]