Echoes Of Laurel Canyon - Part Thirteen

CIA Choices - Overthrow Guatemala Or Los Angeles?

My fundamental premise of this series of “Echoes Of Laurel Canyon” is that the CIA has always viewed the 34,000 square miles of Greater Los Angeles as a small, Central American country like Guatemala. That’s the fundamental premise of this series, which I call “Operation Hollywood.”

From its very inception, the CIA had far more to gain in overthrowing the Hollywood hierarchy than small countries in Central America, given the fact that almost all war propaganda was produced there in World War II.

Suppose the CIA was going to sell the American public on the idea that our former Allies of the Soviet Union of a few days before now represented the greatest threat to our Democratic way of life. In that case, Hollywood would need to get busy on that task. And Hollywood directors, writers, and producers responded almost overnight, given the same checks that Lookout Mountain Air Force Base in Laurel Canyon was writing.

And to those directors, writers, and studio bosses who wouldn’t fall in line, I have documented the House UnAmerican Activities Committee being repurposed in 1948 for the purpose of public humiliation and career destruction until 1953. After 1953 and the election of President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles sailed into power at the CIA, and his brother John Foster Dulles took the helm at the US State Department, the soon-to-be covert, diplomatic immunity-protected arm of the CIA.

In 1954, the Dulles Brothers overthrew the democratically elected government of Guatemala in nine days, barely bothering to tell President Eisenhower until the Coup was over. Hollywood movie propaganda shifted to how military power, especially in aviation, was the only way to keep the Red Menace in check. The ICBMs of IB Hale of General Dynamics/General Atomics were not yet the heroes of the Cold War. The individual jet pilot, like John Wayne in “Jet Pilot,” was still the focus of Hollywood.

The Dulles Communist propaganda war of 1955 to 1961 instead chose to focus on the Russian “leadership” in ICBMs versus brave American jet pilots countering the Soviet humanless onslaught of ICBMs. In the 1960 movie, “Rocket Attack,” an American Secret Agent thwarts all-out Soviet ICBM launch.

The ICBM abbreviation for Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile had not yet entered the American parlance, and IB Hale and his CIA backers with Nazi heavy lift rocket technology would have to wait for Hollywood to catch to popularize the demand for their ICBMs.