Showing posts with label Central Intelligence Agency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Central Intelligence Agency. Show all posts

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Friday, January 11, 1974. Births.

Long Suffering Wife was born.

The first surviving sextuplets in human history, David, Elizabeth, Emma, Grant, Jason and Nicolette Rosenkowitz, were also born in South Africa to Susan and Colin Rosenkowitz. The couple already had two children.

There have been, of course, massive changes in South Africa since 1974 and the history of these siblings demonstrates that, as they later moved, respectively to locations around the English-speaking world, with three remaining in Cape Town.

Their father, Colin, was raised in an orphanage, although he was not an orphan.  He'd been placed there, as would occur in those days, due to the financial distress of his parents. In 1989 Colin and Susan divorced with Colin obtaining custody of all of their children.  Susan, who was from the UK, seems to have returned to the UK.  The children were teens at the time, but the large family obviously put Colin in financial distress, and he worked until he was 83 years old.  He died in 2021.

Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba and Libya's President Muammar Gaddafi signed the Djerba Declaration, committing Tunisia and Libya to a merge as the Arab Islamic Republic, one of many various effort of Arabic nations to merge, all of which have failed.

Tad Szulc broke the news that the CIA had attempted to finance the assassination of Fidel Castro in 1964 and 1965, to be followed by an invasion of Cuba.

Bootmaker Tony Lama passed away at age 86.

Monday, September 11, 2023

Tuesday, September 11, 1973. Allende overthrown in coup.

 Although CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.

Church Committee.

On this day in 1973 nearly the whole of the Chilean military rose up to depose Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of the country.  The crisis had been brewing for months, and this coup was actually the second one attempted that year.

In the weeks and years to follow, hundreds would die at the hands of the military regime with many people, including the sister of a friend of mine, simply disappearing.   Allende refused to surrender himself and instead killed himself with an AK47 that had been given to him by Fidel Castro. Augusto Pinochet would become the military ruler of the country until democracy was restored in 1990.  Pinochet retired as commander of the Chilean Army in 1998.

As the Church Committee's report noted, the CIA did not initiate the coup or have a role in it, although the US has tended to be blamed for it.  The Administration was not sympathetic to Allende's regime, so the conclusion was probably natural enough.  Having said that, Allende had been in trouble for months and the coup was probably inevitable.  The coup was positively received, if not openly, by many Western nations, which saw it as preventing a Chilean descent into Communist rule.

Dealing with the coup in Chile has been problematic, with the country never getting over, for obvious reasons, the large number of people who disappeared. At the same time, support for the coup itself has grown in recent years, although it is still a minority of Chileans who feel it was justified.

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

The Wyoming Board of Geographic Names turns down a bad idea.

In a vote for art integrity, the Wyoming Board of Geographic Names refused Gregory Constatine's petition to name a bluff near Cody "Mount Jackson Pollack".

Pollack, as no doubt will be recalled, was the troubled artist who was born in Cody but who moved away with his family while an infant.  His "artwork", which might be better defined as complete crap, has no association with the state and, as noted, is complete crap.  It was boosted to some degree because of goofball Central Intelligence Agency sponsorship, unknown to Pollack at the time, based on the loony theory that if art that was complete crap was known to circulate in the United States Soviet citizens would somehow learn that and be impressed with freedom in the US.

The thesis was stupid, and Pollack's "artwork" is complete crap.

Constantine's artwork, which isn't much better than Pollack, features the bluff.  He earlier proposed naming it after himself.