Diego Rivera - LIRING/3 - "The Glorious Victory" (1955) - Corrected

I feel it incumbent upon me to offer a correction to this post concerning Diego Garcia as LIRING/3 for the CIA in Mexico. It was not Mr. Garcia. Though I had double checked 2 separate sources, another private author and the Senate hearings, the actual LIRING/3 is an unnamed protege of Mr. Garcia's .

This is the usual "hall of mirrors" employed by the CIA to obfuscate and mislead researchers and law makers in their quest for information. Please except my apologies for the error of being blinded by the light of the reflections/deflections of the CIA. I should have triple checked this source more diligently. At best this was probably a way for them to discredit Mr. Garcia's lifelong quest for social justice.

At any rate, it is not a good reflection on my research into Mr. Garcia , of whom I am a longtime fan. The real LIRING/3 is last referenced in a CIA document from 2013, when he was still alive, still unnamed, and in his 80's. I am now trying to ascertain which Mexican artist is the real LIRING/3.

As Winston "Win" Scott, one of the most enigmatic agents of the CIA, and a "master of deceipt", said in his still unpublished memoirs, "It Came to Little", taken from a biblical passage, "He looked for much, and lo, it came to little....", I expect my search will yield just that.

The quote comes from the book of Haggai, 1:5 to 9, when  the Lord speaks to Haggai, a prophet, and says of the people, who have not yet began to build the temple, that though they live in paneled houses and harvest much to eat, they are not yet satisfied, for, "Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little." Thus was, I believe a reference to the people not yet unraveling the mystery of JFK's assassination. I told you he was enigmatic.

My apologies again for the error of having been misled. I stand humbly corrected.

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Most people wouldn't know it but Diego Rivera was also a link, through an unamed protege named LIRING3 in the Mexico City CIA division in the early 1960's. His story came to light in the late 1960's as the JFK assassination theories were gaining ground. But that's not the focus of this post; which concerns only Mr. River's oil on linen painting by from 1955. 

 It was inspired by the cup d'etat in 1954 in Guatemala. Rather than re-write it in my own words I'll just quote from the two best sites about the painting, which includes The CIA's Dullles brothers, Foster and Allen, center left and Eisenhower on the bomb. 

 Each year around this time I think about the assassination and it's aftermath, up through the 1979 House Committee hearings which sprang from the 1975 Church Committee hearings into the abuses of the CIA. The Guatemalan coup was one of the things covered, or should I say uncovered, in those hearings. 

 By 1979 the conclusion of those hearings was that a conspiracy of some sort, by either the Cubans, or our own Operation Mongoose, had been the operation which led to the assassination of our own President, just 7 weeks after we had killed the Diem brothers in Vietnam, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin incident and resolution in September of 1964.

 Rivera's name enters the picture with the Silvia Duran story. All of that aside, the story told by Rivera in this painting is a story unto itself. You can get into the LIRING/3 aspects on your own if you so chose. But the story of the painting, and the symbolism in it, is fascinating enough. At the end of each of the quotes I have provided the links from where these quotes can be found in a more fuller version. 

Here goes. This is the story of Diego Rivera's "The Glorious Victory." I hope you find this history of the painting as fascinating as I do. 

"The oil on linen paiting addresses the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état that the CIA backed to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz. In the center stands a dumbfounded US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, striking a deal with Guatemala's newly installed right-wing president, Castillo Armas. To their left is a missile held by Foster and bearing the face of the US president Dwight D. Eisenhower. Other American officials surround them, including Allen Dulles, CIA director, and John Peurifoy, US ambassador to Guatemala. 

The group is wedged between an armed rebellion on the right and the slave labor of banana plantations on the left. These three events that seem to happen impossibly at a single moment, collapsing years of violence and corruption into one massive event."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Victory 

 And now from https://sites.psu.edu/arthistory/2017/01/30/glorious-victory/ which contains enlarged insets of the story. 

"On the left side of the mural, Rivera depicts the business of the United Fruit Company. Poorly clothed men carry bananas onto a ship destined for the United States. The onerous burden of the bananas symbolizes not only the physical baggage, but also the political baggage of the United Fruit Company’s presence in Guatemala. 

A stern looking military officer guards the proceedings, demonstrating how tightly intertwined politics and business were. While the left side of the fresco is a representation of subjugation, the right side is a representation of resistance. In this segment, a group of workers and farmers take arms to defend their elected government from the CIA coup. They brandish machetes and fight for the rights of their people, some of whom can be seen sitting in prison behind."

"Chasing Shadows" by Ken Hughes (2014)

The cover of this book is intriguing at first glance. It is a photo of President Lyndon Johnson in a White House elevator with President-Elect Richard Nixon on November 11, 1968, just days after Nixon won the Presidential election by the 2nd closest margin in the 20^th century; the first being John Kennedy’s victory over Nixon in the 1960 election. There is almost an irony to that alone.

The author mainly concerns himself with tying the Watergate Affair to the 1968 Presidential election, when Nixon basically sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks; talks which would have possibly cost him the election against Vice President Humphrey. Through back channel maneuvers with Anna Chennault; widow of the man who commanded the Flying Tigers during World War Two; Nixon was able to accomplish just that, narrowly winning the election in the bargain. That was in 1968; in 1972 he would win by a landslide.

The real surprise here is the role Lyndon Johnson played in defeating his own Vice President, whose aims and goals regarding Vietnam did not match the party position in reference to the bombing halt. Johnson wanted it pegged to the restoration of the DMZ; with which the Republicans agreed; while Humphrey and McCarthy wanted to stop the bombing without conditions in order to show “good faith” to the North Vietnamese.

Relying on thousands of hours of tape recordings at the Johnson Library and the Nixon Archives, the author paints an accurate picture of the political ambitions which got us into the war in the first place, and then kept us there far longer than was necessary. There were no “clean hands” in the bunch. The Republicans and Democrats were both focused on politics rather than what was right. These tapes prove the point.

While Johnson was advising Nixon; and Nixon was working with Chennault to delay the Peace Talks; an atmosphere of secrecy and subterfuge became the standard operating procedure in Washington. That attitude led directly to Nixon forming the celebrated “Plumbers Unit” in the White House; ostensibly to stop “leaks.” Left to their own devices they went on to embroil Nixon in the Watergate scandal; something he knew nothing about until after it happened. This was Nixon’s Bay of Pigs. He was blindsided by the same group of people in the same way in which Kennedy’s administration was blindsided by the last minute revelation of the full extent of the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

This is a very important book in that it finally ties the Watergate scandal to the things which preceded it. There are many who believe that Nixon was set up by the CIA and Howard Hunt; who were working with some Cuban exiles that were connected to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The real question is why?

Nixon was asking for the CIA files on the Bay of Pigs and even stuff related to Dallas from the moment he took office. Why? He was surrounded by people who all had ties to George Bush; either as an oil tycoon, or later as a politician and head of the CIA. Why? This book doesn't answer these questions, but they are inherently connected. The author has touched only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The name Bush doesn't even appear in the index. 

The author even blames the entire ineffectiveness of the B-52 bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail on Pentagon and Cabinet leaks while completely ignoring the Walker Spy Ring, which cost the U.S. approximately 15-20,000 more battle deaths. It is impossible to discuss the B-52 bombing raids, and their having been compromised, without at least mentioning the Walkers. But that is exactly what the author does.

This book is a very detailed and helpful account of the proposed policy to halt the bombing in Vietnam and how it was used as a campaign issue by both sides in the 1968 election. It even shows how Nixon forged a policy of secrecy and paranoia which would eventually culminate in the Watergate burglary and his eventual departure from the White House.

But the book never really answers the crucial question of how; or even why; Nixon would have allowed this to happen. For a wider scope on the issues raised in this book; particularly the “why” behind the Watergate break in; you can do no better than to read Russ Baker’s 2009 book “Family of Secrets.”

In spite of any shortcomings, this book is still an important one, if only because it goes beyond the basic assumptions of Watergate being the product of an overzealous staff and a paranoid President. Nothing as complicated as Watergate could possibly be that simple.