Danny Sheehan Interview

one lawyer has been on the scene at every pivotal political event for 50 years

Do you know who Danny Sheehan is? I didn’t until recently. He’s been in the thick of every major event of the last 70 years. As a “people’s lawyer” with major investigative resources behind him, he has cross examined people and dissected evidence that shine a light on so many aspects of our post-war history.

In this two-part blog, I’m summarizing and organizing the content of this interview.

Topics of which Sheehan has had first-hand knowledge:

• Roswell UFO crash

• Yamashita’s gold 

• U2 incident

• CIA sabotage and assassination attempts in Cuba

• JFK assassination

• Pentagon Papers

• Watergate scandal

• Karen Silkwood trial

• Iran-Contra scandal

• Catholic pedophile scandal in Boston

• Drug smuggling by the CIA

And Danny thinks his biggest case is coming up this year…

• UFO disclosure

Yamashita’s Gold

Last year, I reviewed a book by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave, the only source I had ever found referring to an unimaginable quantity of gold and gems plundered by the Japanese during their conquests 1920-1945, buried in the Philippines, recovered by US military after the War, and gifted to the CIA so they would have unaccounted cash for dirty tricks during the Cold War. Sheehan has first-hand knowledge of this treasure, and the recovery of Yamashita’s gold.

Emperor Hirohito’s cousin, Prince Chichibu, had personally taken charge of burying the gold. The Seagraves told the story of how the US recovered Yamashita’s gold by kidnapping and torturing Prince Chichibu’s driver. What I learned today is that the man who tortured the driver was the same Ed Lansdale who fired at Kennedy at Dealey Plaza 18 years later. (More below…) Sheehan knows this because he personally took Lansdale’s deposition during the Watergate hearings. The gold was deposited in Swiss accounts, managed by Brown Brothers, Harriman.

176 burial sites, hundreds of feet underground, excavated with slave labor. The workers were entombed with the gold as each mine shaft was sealed and hidden, to make sure no one would be able to leak their locations. Sheehan estimates there was $10 to 20 trillion of gold at the 1945 price of $35 per ounce, which I figure is 10 to 20 million tons of gold. If you ask Wikipedia how much gold there is in the world today, their answer is 200,000 tons. So the quantity of gold, by Sheehan’s accounting, is 100 times as much as the official world gold reserves, worth thousands of trillions of dollars. Sheehan says that “only” 12 of the 176 sites were re-plundered by the US military. Ferdinand Marcos came into some of the rest. 

Watergate linked to the JFK assassination

Mark Felt was the “Deep Throat” who tipped off Bob Woodward to investigate the Watergate affair. He had been a protege of J Edgar Hoover, and implemented some of the nasty and illegal FBI capers for which the bureau was famous. The Woodward/Bernstein investigation linked the Watergate burglars to CREEP, the Nixon’s “Committee to Re-Elect the President”, but they never went deeper to uncover a connection to the Cuban team that murdered JFK.

Sheehan reveals that the motivation behind the Watergate burglary was not, as has been reported, to rifle through the files of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist. Nixon was afraid of being linked to the JFK assassination in 1963. The story is that Nixon, as Eisenhower’s Vice President in 1960, had assembled a team of CIA agents (headed by aerospace billionaire Howard Hughes, staffed by mafia thugs) to assassinate Fidel Castro. He was overconfident that he would win the Presidency later in the year, and would be able to authorize the plan in 1961. In fact, Kennedy won the 1960 election, and he nixed Nixon’s plan. But three years later, Kennedy had alienated the CIA and other warmongers in Washington. The team that was tasked with assassinating him in Dallas was the same that Nixon had pulled together three years earlier to assassinate Castro. Sheehan emphasizes there is no evidence that Nixon himself was involved in the JFK assassination, but in 1972, he knew what had happened earlier, and he was afraid that he was going to be implicated. This is what motivated the Watergate burglary. Larry O’Brien, newly crowned chair of the DNC, had been a lobbyist for Hughes’s defense contracting firm, and it was O’Brien who lived in the Watergate Apartments, and was the target of the infamous burglary. 

Hughes had casinos in Las Vegas. Some of the gambling money was skimmed off, laundered through Mexico, and passed through a bank in New Orleans to the thugs operating in Cuba and later Dallas. This is how Jim Garrison, DA of New Orleans, followed a money trail in 1966 that led to his discovery of the CIA plot to murder President Kennedy. 

The mobster wing of the assassination team was headed by Santo Trafficante, who had once been kingpin of a drugs and sex operation in Havana, closed down by Castro after 1957. Trafficante had every reason to want to kill Castro, and in fact had previously been engaged to subvert the Cuban economy with hitmen who blew up bridges and burned sugar fields. This was Operation 40, small time stuff on contract for the Eisenhower-Nixon CIA. Sheehan names Felix Rodriguez as one of the gunman who was on the ground in Dallas, firing the shot that killed JFK. He was a former Cuban refugee, working for our CIA at that time in 1963, and for many years thereafter. Rodriguez personally killed Che Guevara, and wears Che’s wristwatch to this day. Rodriguez is still alive, and was interviewed by Danny Jones last month. Other gunmen who were actually in Dealey Plaza doing the dirty work were Ed Lansdale, David Morales, Eugenio Rolando Martinez, Ricardo Chavez, and Rip Robertson. Sheehan also mentions a Raphael “Chichi” Pantero, whom I’ve been unable to link to. It was Morales, on the grassy knoll, who fired the deadly shot.

More dirty tricks were arranged under the code name Operation Northwoods. This was a false flag operation planned by our CIA to 

• blow up an airplane over Florida and blame it on Castro

• plant bombs in a Florida shopping mall and blame it on Castro

• attack the American military base in Guantanamo and blame it on Castro

These were to be triggers to justify a full-on US invasion of Cuba. Standard history tells us that Kennedy nixed the false flags, but Sheehan is not so sure. According to Sheehan, Kennedy apologized for the Bay of Pigs invasion in March of 1961 (which, in fact, he bore no blame for — it had been planned under the previous Eisenhower Administration, and kept secret from Kennedy when he came into office in January). Kennedy promised Khrushchev that he would shut down Operation 40. But Kennedy was preparing to double-cross Khruschev. Operation 40 was rebranded as Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy indeed harbored long-range plans for an invasion of Cuba. Khrushchev’s spies heard about this, and that’s why he began putting nuclear missiles in Cuba in the summer of 1962. 

Why was JFK murdered?

JFK made so many enemies among the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the CIA, the mafia, and his own VP, Lyndon Johnson that there are many credible theories about who it was who arranged his assassination. Sheehan’s story is that it was all traced back to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962. Khrushchev and Kennedy were both under pressure from their respective militaries to push the button for all-out nuclear war. Against all odds, K & K established enough trust during that crisis to avert world annihilation.

But they were both deeply chastened by the experience. In the wake of the crisis, a red telephone was set up in the Oval Office with a direct line to the Russian Premier. 

As a gesture of goodwill, JFK ordered the shutdown of Operation Mongoose for real this time. He closed bases in Florida that had been used for the attacks. The Mongoose team was furious, and they went rogue. Frank Sturgis (who became famous later as one of the Watergate burglars) launched an attack on Cuba, sinking a Russian ship in Havana harbor. Bobby Kennedy, JFK’s AG, had Sturgis arrested and jailed, re-establishing a tenuous trust with Khrushchev. Howard Hunt and Howard Hughes were not deterred, and had no respect for law or the authority of the elected government. They planned further attacks against Cuba from this rogue wing of the CIA. Kennedy sent a US military assault on our own base in the Everglades, from which the attacks on Cuba were being launched. This was Americans fighting Americans, but somehow it was kept out of the headlines. Months later, in June, 1963, the rogue CIA team was still planning surreptitiously to assassinate Castro, and actually launched a boat toward Cuba behind Kennedy’s back, complete with a Life Magazine reporter to document the historic event. 

Simultaneously in June, Kennedy was ordering the military to release all information about UFOs and reverse-engineered alien technology so that he could share it with Khrushchev. Kennedy and Khrushchev were planning a joint space program at the time when Kennedy was proposing to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. (Was he banking on reverse-engineered ET technology?)

Kennedy and Khrushchev negotiated through an exchange of letters, with Norman Cousins serving as go-between, to dismantle all nuclear weapons in tandem. Pope John XXIII was to be the guarantor that both sides complied. When the US military caught wind of this, they perceived it as an existential crisis. Both China and Russia had superior ground forces to the US. Without nuclear weapons, the US would certainly lose its world military supremacy. This was the proximate cause that created an urgent need to kill JFK before the bilateral disarmament could be announced.  

Allen Dulles was the organizer of the JFK assassination, not because he was disgruntled after JFK fired him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but in his capacity as counsel for Brown Brothers, Harriman, the elite investment banking firm. The richest, most powerful men in America pooled their interests at BBH, and they decided that Kennedy was to be murdered. 

Allen Dulles later engineered the cover-up of the Kennedy assassination as chair of the Warren Commission. (Tell me about foxes and chicken coops!) Warren was a sort of patsy himself. He was recruited by President Johnson who told Warren that he must not investigate these Cubans because if he did, then the “truth” would come out that it was Castro who assassinated Kennedy, and that could lead to World War III. Earl Warren was at the time one of the most trusted names in America. This is how he was snookered into signing on to the cover-up. 

Sheehan makes a point of connecting to both sides of the Bush dynasty, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. At the close of WW I, the steeply punitive provisions of the Versailles Treaty were forced upon Germany. Sheehan says this was the work of the Dulles Brothers, who were creating an opportunity for their BBH clients. Germany was desperate for cash in the 1920s, and BBH (including both Bush grandfathers) provided financing to pay reparations and also to launch the German Nazi party. In exchange, they were able to invest in valuable German industrial giants at fire sale prices, including I.G. Farben and the infamous ball bearing factories. In the broad course of history, Sheehan sees a hundred-year plan by the Robber Barons to take control of the US and the world.

END OF PART 1