Second Interview with William Bertram MacFarland, author of "Back Channel"

Since my initial interview with William Bertram MacFarland, (Bertie Mac), follow-up questions have been coming in to AWomansRoom.blogspot.com regarding when the second volume of the series was to be released.  Because of this, I contacted Bertie and he was kind enough to answer some additional questions. My original interview with Bertie took place after I first read “Back Channel – The Kennedy Years”, an amazing story of an amazing man during a very pivotal time in our nation’s history.  Back Channel is a fast reading, attention-grabbing novel – one that changed my perspective on many things including, but not limited to how to view information fed to us by the media.

Bertie’s website, www.bertiemac.com is an informative source regarding Bertie Mac and the important role he filled during historic events over many decades.  A visit to his website is highly encouraged.

I hope you not only enjoy this next interview, but also feel free to continue to contact me with any questions or comments you have about the book and/or its author.  Bertie would truly appreciate any and all questions and comments by those interested.

Enjoy the interview~

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A Woman’s Room:  Bertie, thanks so much for agreeing to another interview!  Our first interview received such a positive response that when I heard you were working on the second book, I was very excited to talk with you about it!  For those of you who many have missed the first interview, it may be found at: http://awomansroom.blogspot.com/2011/10/interview-with-william-bertram.html.

I’m excited that you have agreed to give us a tiny sneak preview of the second book in the ‘Back Channel’ series.  You ended ‘Back Channel -Book One: The Kennedy Years’ with a true cliff hanger when you were in the airport in Washington, DC, on your return flight from Italy, and an agent of the Secret Service told you, “President Johnson wants to see you right away, sir”.  What happened after that?

Bertie:  Well, I don’t want to give away too much, but the second book starts with that meeting with Johnson, recounts my resistance to President Johnson’s insistence that I work with the Department of Defense’s Planning Department, continues with my eventual move to Switzerland and some very interesting events that transpired both before and after that move.  I confess that recounting these events is much more difficult that I had ever imagined when I set out to write my memoirs.  In fact, if I had realized how painful it was going to be to dredge out – and re-live – all these things, I might not have had the courage to embark on this journey.  The good news is that the more I write, the more I’m sure that I’m doing the right thing.  The American public really should be aware of what happens in the pressure-cooker that is called the White House.  They need to know how the Vietnam war really got started, how and why Watergate happened, how and why the death of Chile’s President Salvadore Allende happened, and they need to know the real facts about Iran-Contra, etc., etc.  We desperately need more transparency – and more honesty – from our government.  Although I’m not personally religious, for more than five decades I have been an avid student of comparative religions and the astonishingly beautiful insights in the writings associated with religions ranging from Ayyavazhi to Zoroastrianism.  The one I’m thinking about here however is from the Christian bible in John 8:32 when it says something like, “And then ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

A Woman’s Room:  What do you mean when you say people need to know how the Vietnam War really got started?

Bertie:  It’s an immensely tragic but fascinating story.   Today, the truth about the triggering ‘event’ is public knowledge – or perhaps I should say the facts are in the public domain even though it’s startling (and dismaying) to discover how few people are really knowledgeable about it.  If there were any organization in Washington that is more secretive than the CIA, it would be the National Security Agency, the NSA.  In 1998, the NSA’s own internal historian wrote a very erudite and detailed study of the origin of the Vietnam War and it was published in the Winter 2000/Spring 2001 edition of NSA’s Top Secret internal quarterly publication, Cryptologic Quarterly.  At that time, the few people outside the NSA who knew the real facts were strictly prohibited from disseminating the information and besides that, they could never have had the full access to all of NSA’s Top Secret files that the agency’s own historian did.  Word somehow got out about the existence of this study and in 2002, there was considerable pressure on NSA to make it public.  NSA refused because it was afraid that ‘uncomfortable comparisons’ regarding faulty intelligence reports might be made with the coming invasion of Iraq based on Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Those weapons of course just weren’t there.  Similarly, the ‘outrageous attack’ on American ships by the North Vietnam Navy – and used by Johnson as the pretext for war -simply never happened.   In Vietnam more than 12 million people were killed or wounded.  58,000 of the killed and 303,000 of the wounded were Americans.  Iraq is much less clear.  Official U.S. figures are 4,404 American deaths and 31,827 wounded.  Estimates for Iraqi deaths range all over the place – from a little more than 110,000 to just over 1,000,000.   Whatever the real number is, it is appalling.  I don’t know how everybody else feels about this but I personally would feel a lot more comfortable if war could only be declared by an act of Congress.  It won’t solve the problem of old men sending young men to war but at least it would take a whole lot more old men.

A Woman’s Room:  As you write, are you uncovering more parallels between the events in the mid to late 60’s and the events of today?

Bertie:  Oh yes.  In fact sometimes I feel a little like I’m writing in some sort of weird Twilight Zone time warp.  It just doesn’t seem possible that we are doing the same dumb things over and over again.  The cost to our country for these never-ending wars is not only the immense cost of lives and treasure.  I fear that we as a nation are beginning to lose our way morally and ethically.  We used to be the ‘shining city on the hill.’  It pains me to see how badly we are slipping from that moral high ground.  Reputations for courage, honesty, decency and fairness take a very, very long time to build up but they can be lost appallingly quickly.

A Woman’s Room:  Is that a general observation or do you have something specific in mind?

Bertie:  Both, actually...  The specific thing I have in mind is torture by the U.S. military/CIA.  As readers of my first book know, I was betrayed by my own government and turned over to the Soviet KGB for torture in their infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow.  But few people are aware of the fact that our own government has a highly developed and long history of officially sanctioned torture.  We could start at a much earlier date, but in WWII, to get around the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of POW’s, Eisenhower had them re-classified as ‘Disarmed Enemy Combatants’ in order to deny them food.  We had a pretty robust program in Korea but our super-secret Phoenix program in Vietnam has been called "the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the Nazi death camps of World War II."  A Congressional Committee headed by Senator Frank Church determined that “over 20,000” Viet Cong, North Vietnamese and Cambodian (yes, we were there too) prisoners were murdered.  From the documents that I have examined, the number was way more than 20,000.  Horrifyingly enough, the ones that died might have been, in some ways, the more fortunate ones but I don’t want to get into that here.  The thing that is immensely troubling to me is that our torture program is being robustly continued even as you read this.  Abu Ghraib was shut down only because some of the military torturers sent pictures to their friends and some of those pictures got leaked.  (Who can forget those pictures?)  You would simply not believe the several hundred additional pictures that the Obama administration refused (probably rightly) to release.  They are even more soul shattering.  It is simply staggering to realize that these laughing people are uniformed members of the American military.  Though Abu Ghraib is gone, Guantanamo is very much alive and well and what goes on there is just as horrifying.  The wonderful documentary Torturing Democracy, financed in part by the Ford Foundation and other such entities and discussed on PBS by Bill Moyers can be viewed for free on-line.  You have to see it to believe it.

A Woman’s Room:  Bertie, are you comfortable with revealing all this information?

Bertie:  No.  I’m very uncomfortable but I believe it has to be done.  I freely confess that I have some real worries about my own safety – particularly as this series advances closer and closer to what’s going on today.  People in power play rough – look what the Bush/Cheney administration tried to do to Valerie Plame.  She was finally ‘exonerated’ – not that she did anything wrong to begin with – but the constant attempts at character assassination on her – and her husband – must have been dreadful to endure.  I’m afraid of that and of much more permanent attacks.  Believe me, if they decide to do it, there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

A Woman’s Room:  But don’t you have all those highly classified documents – your so-called ‘insurance policy’ - that will protect you?

Bertie:  Yes, but as I grow older I’m starting to have some questions.  For those that haven’t read my first book, the ‘insurance policy’ referred to is a collection of highly classified documents that I have accumulated over my 50 years of government service.  Some of the older documents are now declassified but I challenge you to actually find them.  They may be old but they will shake you.  The whole collection is stored in a Western European bank’s safety deposit box, the key to which is held by a well-known and internationally respected law firm in that country.  Should I, or any of the other people on a short list that I have provided to them, die in a suspicious manner, the law firm will launch an investigation.  If, in their sole discretion, they determine that the death was neither natural nor accidental, their instructions are to release photocopies of the entire file to every major newspaper and media outlet in the entire world.  Given that the documents are indisputably authentic, there’s no hope for the ‘Valerie Plame’ attack.  I really don’t want this release to happen for two reasons.  First and foremost, it would be incredibly damaging to the United States as a whole.  Yes, everybody knows that there are exceptionally few people who always and in every circumstance tell the truth – and that the probability that one of that select group is also in a high government position is next to zero.  I don’t think the American public is going to be quite ready for the serial duplicity and outright lies told to them personally and to our ‘trusted allies’ over a period of more than 50 years by every administration from JFK to GWB.  It’s incredibly tawdry and deeply shocking.  The other point is that such a release would be in retaliation for my death.  I’d far rather have a means of preventing it.

A Woman’s Room:  How could you do that?

Bertie:  If I can get enough people reading and following my books I’m hoping that I will be enough of a ‘public figure’ whose sudden death would generate too many ‘uncomfortable questions.’  It’s hard to get to that status because I couldn’t get a traditional publisher to publish my book and the publicist that I hired quit and sent me my money back after he had read the book.  He was too frightened by it.  So it’s hard getting the word out. But, so far, everyone who has read the book says they really liked it and can’t wait for the second book to come out.  I hope your readers will order a copy from amazon.com (it’s available either in print or as an eBook) and spread the word to their friends.  There’s one other thing I would ask your readers to do.  Get involved in my Facebook group called “Saving Democracy.”  It’s a wonderful place to discuss the issues of the day.  Anybody can join and the only rule is that of unfailing courtesy and comity.  The first time there is a nasty comment or personal attack, you will receive a warning.  Two strikes and you’re out.  Join and contribute!

A Woman’s Room:  Bertie, as always, it’s truly interesting to discuss your books and your life with you via the Internet.  I appreciate the time you took to answer my questions so thoroughly.  Hopefully, I will have more questions for you from readers of AWomansRoom.blogspot.com.  Perhaps we can talk again when the second in the series of “Back Channel” books is released?  I’ll look forward to hearing from you again in the near future.

Bertie:  Thanks so much and thanks for having me.