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New Dylan (Zimmerman) BioPic Evades
His Pentagon Snitch Role During The Vietnam War
Yes, It's True, Bobby Was Working For The Man...



By Yoichi Shimatsu
Exclusive to Rense
1-13-25

 

Intro: He’s certainly not America’s composer like Stephen Foster nor a sophisticate as was Cole Porter, and if anything the musical appeal of the wailing and complaining Bob Dylan has faded over the decades into something of a period piece for historians puzzling over his cynical verses and nasal voice which falls way short of now-popular Mongolian throat gurgling. As a contemporary of that stoned-out bard, I take a long look back at his rise and treachery against the anti-war youth upsurge of the 1960s and his sneaky role as a secret agent for the Pentagon during the Vietnam War that brutally killed so many of our generation. He was a plagiarist of folk songs, an infiltrator of the Civil Rights movement, a Pentagon spook nestled inside the antiwar movement and an espionage agent for the Pentagon on his secretive tours of military bases around the world, including being deployed at an outdoors concert to distract Cuban guards from a spy operation at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Castro’s Cuba.

During his secret life as a traitor to his generation, Bob Dylan was an undercover agent on the wrong side of history during the darkest hours for truth, justice and most of all freedom in these United States of America. Meanwhile young students were then being subjected to beatings by batons, police gunfire and arrest during street protests against a war without mercy in Vietnam and those not-so secret wars in Laos, Cambodia and Latin America - the latter including the CIA hunt to kill Che Guevara, who was satellite-tracked by Al Baez, the military-intel father of Dylan’s minder Joan Baez.

But then again, to appease his restive audience who beg to see some good from his sniveling rotten carcass, Bob sometimes went a bit too far for the likes of his military controllers and got beat up for that infraction and then ordered to spy against Castro’s forces in Cuba, a sordid affair detailed further along in this retrospective essay. Presented here is the behind the scenes tale of a Midwestern deceiver, scoundrel and secret enemy of young Americans in that most troubled era when the LBJ White House abandoned all the principles of democracy that our generation was taught in primary school to college days.

Satire break! [West Texas - Whizzing past spindly live oaks along a country road that headed east toward Austin, you can almost see that longhorn-mounted Cadillac of LBJ tooling along to his favorite fishing hole while listening to the radio only to hear the god-awful lyrics of “With God on our side” and then after a silent pause, clearing his throat of phlem to spit out the open window, the President whispered in a drawl, “We’ve got to do something about that Jew boy of ours.” From the back seat came the response: “We can handle it, sir.” As usual the president returned to his favorite topic of the right bait for a hook that went: “If this is anything like our last outing, maybe I should be switching from cornmeal balls to mealy worms.”]

Invention of the Deep State

It was the rapper Ice Cube who perceptively noted that the hip hop genre was the invention of the Deep State intelligence agencies for psychological warfare aimed at the African American talent pool to brainwash a new set of impressionable urban youth into submission to the Power. That is truth-telling, bro’! In fact, the covert state-sponsored operation goes back a long ways to the founder and inspiring spirit of rapid-fire poetic rhyme in contemporary music - later morphed into rap and hip hop - that low-down snitch in the cultural Cold War against truth-telling musicians - the self-infatuated narcissist of Pentagon propaganda that being, of course, Bob Dylan aka Robert Zimmerman, the incoherent mind-altered poster-boy of the Deep State and made-for-profit Jewish Wall Street militarism.

Yet another worshipful movie about Bob Dylan - a military covert-ops asset during the Vietnam War era - was released on Christmas Day, presumably to an audience of Jews who had nothing better to do on that dreaded and despised Christian holiday. “A Complete Unknown” (taken from a line of his song “Like a Rolling Stone”) is the title of this deceptive bio-pic, rolled out in response to Dylan’s being awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. He was known alright to his controllers at the Pentagon.

Two honey traps

The greatly altered and much censored focus is on his early career relationships with two females - Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez. This movie is rife with biographical redaction about his involvement in intelligence operations, deliberate misrepresentations and downright lies, starting with his attraction to those two honey-trap female agents on opposite sides of the Cold War.

Suze (pronounced Susy) Rotolo was the daughter of two card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA at the height of the Cold War (the prime target in NYC for domestic intel surveillance) - whereas the fake “pacifist” Joan Baez was the propaganda tool of her father who was a Spanish-language linguist of Mexican origin and a key CIA analyst involved in code-breaking during the leftist upsurge in Latin America. Albert (Alberto) Baez, assigned to the U.S. military-sponsored Monterey foreign languages school (in the California coastal town of the same name) was involved in deciphering the primitive codes used by Fidel Castro’s military operatives, including and especially the adventurist Che Guevara in Bolivia, where his comrades were hunted down and he was brutally terminated by the CIA. Score one for “democracy”.

The Agency-compromised music rags, Rolling Stone magazine in particular, were under strict Pentagon orders to ignore the obvious espionage role of second-generation Pentagon assets like Dylan-Zimmerman and Joan Baez. Those spooks in hipster costume were decorative window-dressing over the systematic murder of abrasive foes of American domination and corporate exploitation worldwide. (This is not to say that Che and Fidel were angels - both being nasty hombres of the eye-for-an-eye variety.) Yeah, why give peace a chance when murder will do? There used to be something gentlemanly heroic about playing fair in war and love - an ethos cast aside in the scramble for citations, medals and retirement benefits in that ignoble era. .

Suze - pronounced Suzie (not to be confused with Vietnam War Suzy Q) - is presented in the fictive redacted movie as an average single woman working an obscure urban job who takes in the ambitious newcomer - a complete unknown with no direction of his own - without affordable “shelter from the storm” other than her nice and neat walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village. The script failed to mention that the film’s time-frame is during the (completely unmentioned) Vietnam War era. Suze was a slob more interested in “higher” values, which the bio-pic missed due to Dylan’s publicity photos back then of her tidied up rooms. The blotches across the armchair on which Bob posed with a guitar indicate a serious lack of stain remover. That bio-pic resembles the grungy armchair in that the filth remains visible. The real Dylan - aka Robert Zimmerman - was a rookie secret agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and its partnered CIA.

Their love relationship was a spy-vs.-spy affair (which would have made a far better period movie). And so unwisely he knocks her up and then with the breakup demanded she get an abortion. At the time, the creep was supposedly having a secret afair with Joan Baez, leaving poor Suze with the uneasy feeling of having been used and abused - for some unknown purpose. For X-mas sake, tell the whole G-damned truth about your “hero”, you moral cowards in Hollywood! Special agent Joan Baez just happened to be in NYC - far away from her California digs - to rescue poor little Bob from his soon-to-be commie inlaws, who no doubt were preparing to send the newlyweds to Moscow for a handshake with Stalin and then a gulag for Agent Bob.

Dylan’s entire biography is a compendium of half-truths, outright lies and official cover-ups of his role as a government spook nestled into the antiwar movement and music scene as a betrayer of his generation. While his doctored biographies from the sold-out entertainment press focus on Bob’s “supportive father”, in fact the lazy narcissistic boy was kicked out of his family home and had to find shelter with relatives (there’s a lot of Zimmermans and their in-laws in the Duluth region of Minnesota, many of them connected with the U.S. Air Force and the Pentagon.) One of his uncles - likely with his mother’s family - was a high-up Pentagon civilian official assigned to the distant early warning system aka the DEW Line. The military family’s influence in D.C. facilitated agent Robert Zimmerman’s rise as an informer Bob Dylan - with a spy mission of ferreting out commie sympathizers among his fellow musicians and to sideline many a rocker.

The Zimmerman Clan

During my high school years at a USAF base in Japan, one of my classmates was a Zimmerman and his father was a former fighter-pilot from Duluth. So the truth’s out about that family’s connections to the Pentagon. Now that it’s disclosed, let’s cut to the quick: Specifically one of his uncles was an executive with SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system) controlled by IBM’s largest-ever computers and tasked with calculating the trajectories and speeds of incoming Soviet missiles and strategic bombers arriving over the North Pole. The data was used to determine near-future flight paths to enable rapid interception and preemptive destruction by U.S. military anti-missile rockets and jet fighters. The Russian nuclear warheads were aimed at the annihilation of Chicago and Detroit. This info was kept top secret to prevent mass panic throughout the Midwest, the nation’s breadbasket and industrial heartland.

Bob’s familial connections to that Deep State operation is what accounts for his career rise as an asset for the Pentagon’s intelligence agency - that was then secretly plotting to outmaneuver overtly antiwar folk-singers (such as Peter, Paul and Mary for their finger-pointing in the song “Tom Dooley” - the Catholic navy doctor and journal writer in Laos who fomented the American intervention in the Vietnam conflict). If a singer person were to be blamed for the U.S. intervention in Viet Name, it was Dr. Dooley, who was well connected with New York’s Archbishop, the “most influential individual in the USA” and war hawk agitating for an invasion of Vietnam.

In those days of yore, a lot of musicians were second-generation children of Eastern European immigrants - including Jews from Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Ukrainian region of the Soviet Union. The music scene was a perfect platform for undercover espionage agents entangling and indoctrinating unsuspecting fans in the Cold War spy game. As a Jew with Ukrainian roots, Dylan/Zim easily fit into that scheme as an informer aka a snitch. His literal penetration of Suze enabled an insider’s surveillance of her commie family and their suspect associates.

But somewhere along the line, Dylan became himself an object of suspicion in the game of spy-versus-spy, likely due to the NYC party bosses contacting Communist Party members among the truck drivers for northern Minnesota’s iron-ore mines along the Mesabi Range that stretched-out from either side of his paternal home and furniture business in Hibbing. Thus compromised, Dylan had to fess up or suffer his legs getting broken by Polack thugs. Unwilling to limp for his country, Bob cut loose from pregnant Suze and fled to the protection of Joan Baez, a second-generation Deep-State spook inserted into the folk music scene.

Spooks-R-US

From early childhood on, the spook versus spook game was second nature to me (both my father and step-father were deeply involved in military intelligence) which explains why during adolescence I tried to avoid an intelligence career - since that task demands duplicity. The escape route was becoming either a USAF fighter pilot or a pharmaceutical chemist - the latter proving to be a serious delusion which nearly got me into the MK-ULTRA program turning victims’ minds inside out. Believe me, it was living hell to get out of that paranoiac national-security rat-race and instead try to find what Buddhists call a noble path - by adopting a life of poverty, good works and prayers like the Basque monks exiled from Franco’s Spain who joined the Marist Order who had educated me in Kobe, Japan. Killing is much too easily done in a hundred different ways, whereas redeeming lives and souls is a difficult pursuit through a brutal and evil world along a narrow and lonely winding path. As in that Army song, that path like a soldier’s means you’ll never get rich you SOB.

Since the sanctimonious mantle of a pastor or bishop was appallingly hypocritical, I chose to be a freelance disciple on the road with a pen - a scribe seeking after the truth, somewhat like the realist writer Geoffrey Chaucer in the modern day. In print, that sound’s sickening misguided - but I’ve got no regrets. I’ve never mentioned this background for a writing career before but am disclosing now, because an arm’s length distance is necessary to discuss the diabolical dark forces that shaped the destinies of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (and many other insincere apologists for the Vietnam holocaust), who took the easy way of going along with their warped controllers and compromised family members to deceive their naive followers being marched into the FBI suspect list.

On the flip-side of acquiescence to power, of course, the many targeted talents who refused to collaborate with the war machine, including the trio of Jimmy Hendrix, Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison - who all died mysteriously during a 10-month span - due to their humanitarian antiwar principles. Another victim of the Deep State’s lethal suppression was Richard Farina, a multi-talented folk musician far superior to his rival “brother-in-law” Bob Dylan - the latter a sneaky beneficiary of those convenient murders. After all, that weasel Dylan served as a spy for the intelligence agencies that eliminated those musicians - and has never confessed his role as a mole.

If the James Mangold doctored bio-pic of Bob Dylan had never been produced and released on Christmas day - I would never have mentioned any of this Deep State background of that squirmy sewer rat whose biography goes something like: Silence was golden whereas going public is arsenic. After watching the big screen spit out the same old lies and deceptions - more than a half-century after the Cold War and Vietnam disaster - I am obligated to reveal the truth behind that disinfo operation of the Pentagon and CIA that deployed Dylan as an agent of distraction from the burning issues that confronted the ’60s generation.

Flight School dreams

Toward the end of my high-school years at a U.S. military base in Japan, there was a classmate named “Zim” whose father was a fighter pilot from Duluth, Minnesota. Their family name was Zimmerman. Military connections ran deep and wide in that border-region family, especially for agent Robert Zimmerman aka Bob Dylan. His early life and career success was largely due to the Air Force and Missile Command’s monstrous “Cube” aka SAGE - which is not an acronym for a wise-man but was the central tracking and response center for interception of incoming Soviet nuclear missiles and bombers.

As a beehive of military intelligence, SAGE was crucial to the creation of Bob Dylan and his counter-intelligence assignments in New York’s Greenwich Village and at the Guantanamo Naval Base nestled inside Castro’s Cuba. Dylan-Zim was a spook all along - in the guise of a weakling “anti-war civil rights activist” - but in reality was an infiltrator of dissident movements and ratty spy for his Pentagon-CIA masters, who kept a heavy-hand over the music industry.

On the other half of the spy circle was folksinger Joan Baez, the daughter of of Mexico-born intelligence official Albert Baez, a supposed "pacifist" who taught physics at MIT and Stanford - and served as a translator at the U.S. military’s Foreign Language School in Monterey, California. His more obscure assignment was, of course translation of the Pentagon’s communications intercepts during that era of the Castro brothers’ revolutionary agitation - along with his research specialty of satellite-based X-ray tracking and signals-blocking during the hunt for Che Guevara across Bolivia, and later suppression of the leftist Salvadore Allende government in Chile accomplished with mass executions. The self-proclaimed "pacifist" with no blood spattered on his own hands, Alberto must have done excellent work when considering Che and Salvadore were taken out "gently", a triumph for “Truth, Justice and the American Way” which appeared to many people South of the Border as disturbingly similar to fascistic state-sponsored terrorism on par with Peronist militarism - which exactly described our warped foreign policy in those times that was anything but humble promotion of democracy. That’s not to say Che wasn’t a brutal killer himself. Yeah, sure, we did it for their own good as put by Evita Peron's “Don’t cry for me Argentina!”

Is it odd that Agent Alberto’s elder daughter was a guitar strumming pacifist - and official “girlfriend” aka minder of that unsteady asset and dope-fiend Bob Dylan? Not if Joan was part of her Papa’s intelligence operation to detect spies of Soviet Russia nestled inside the peace movement to be sussed out and given the choice of collaboration with our surveillance operations or be squelched like cockroaches under a boot heel - not much different from Moscow. A lot of amateurish antiwar musicians and protest leaders in those dark days either disappeared or were fatally involved in “accidents” and terminal health issues. There was no stopping the trillion-dollar war-industry making mega-profits from “brush-fire” wars in Vietnam, Latin America, Africa and the Arab realm - to the benefit a Jewish-controlled defense industry in constant need of hard cash from captive taxpayers.

Given this obvious political-economic backdrop, the diversionary director aka propagandist James Mangold produced a incoherent whitewashed soft-ball piece to exonerate Dylan - whereas a keen observer such as John Le Carre would have made a splendid spy story with ironic suspense and edgy twists out of Dylan’s early career as a bumbling and incoherent amateur spook for an irritated and impatient military intelligence monstrosity.

The Red Daughter

Here, let’s deconstruct the BS bio-pic and cut to the quick. So who, really, was Suze Rotolo, other than Dylan’s first lover? Of interest to the intelligence community, she was the key to penetrating the network of communist spies in New York City that was conveying U.S. military secrets and related technical data to Red comrades in Europe and onto their masters in Moscow during the Cold War during the super-hot war in Vietnam. Thus, Bob Dylan’s marching orders - as a pawn in the game - was to befriend Suze in order to cozy up to her commie parents to befriend and betray their circle of party members and fellow travelers. With his antiwar tunes such as “A Hard Rain’s gonna fall”, Dylan enticed the naive leftist girl (no sane patriotic guy would come close to her) to woo him and by pleading poverty insert himself into the comfort of her walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village.

The next step in this “Circle Game” (as put by Joanie Mitchell) was to gain the trust of her family in order to befriend their well-disguised associates loyal to the Communist Party USA - and those further compromised by their affiliation with Moscow. The usual procedure was for the FBI to close the net and transfer the suspects to interrogators from military intelligence. The next step in the cut-throat game was a CIA offer of a deal to either face life in prison or consent to spying on their comrades and Russian masters.

The bumbling spy Dylan crossed the party line, however, by knocking up Suze. Instead of agent Zimmerman spying on her red clan, the idiot got himself ensnared in the Red Circle, which had long experience with eager young infiltrators who could be flipped to serve Moscow’s interests in the spy-vs.-spy game. The CIA tossed him a life-saver at that crucial moment, just before Bob was to be dragged off to board a tramp steamer to a Polish port and an interrogation cell for a bloody beating before spilling the beans to his new masters. Joan Baez, an Agency asset, conveniently just happened to arrive in NYC for a months-long gig at a recording studio to start “dating” aka bailing out Bob, while he got up the nerve to tell poor Suze to get an abortion. This sort of “bait and switch” game was familiar enough back then for MAD magazine to produce a regular comic strip of “Spy vs. Spy.”

That predicament served to expose the sort of creep Dylan was/is - indecent and selfish and cowardly to an extreme - sufficient evidence to convince any bystander that the pregnant girl was a victim of a cruel manipulative cad - which indeed he was. Self-centered pity is the essence of Dylan’s weak and nasty character, which can be discerned from many of his egomaniac musical lyrics and falling out with other musicians and political associates. The good fellas at the Moscow detention center would have meted out a righteous whipping for his countless misdemeanors - and honestly informed him that his ersatz folk music was total narcissistic crap. After that they’d might allow him balalaika lessons in Siberia. That’s probably the sole reason to regret the fall of the Soviet Union.

The right thing for an honorable man to have done is put up with the shame of his lousy behavior until the toddler could say “da-da” and then pay the divorce settlement - and bear the shame of a being a government stooge and a complete A-hole in love. And apologize to her violated parents regardless of their ideological folly. Honest regret is how to win the hearts and minds of the enemy, who might then realize their part in a chain-reaction of disaster. But Dylan was not made of the right stuff to be an honorable patriot or decent parent much less the noble bard of this proud nation. As a sick loser on all bases, he had to keep on moving on - from a clueless Joan Baez and then onto an obscure Native American squaw - until at last Zimmermen was forgiven of Gentile contamination through weary acceptance of his Jewish heritage. This downward spiral toward the flushing point is the bio-pic that was not produced.

Folk or Rock?

This travesty of a revisionist bio-pic then delves into Dylan’s switch in genres from folk to rock - as if folk-rock did not already exist in the works of Donovan, The Byrds, Kris Kristoferson, Janice Joplin and a much earlier Buddy Holly. His only original invention was raspy scratchy nasal drawl contaminating the airwaves of Armed Forces Radio. He was deep fake plagerist with an inability to craft songs from real-life hard-knocks and disappointment versus hopeful longings. His melody thefts included “Blowing in the Wind”, which was appropriated from the old Negro slave song “No More Auction Block” and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” stolen from the traditional ballad “Lord Randall”.

The pioneering Greenwich Village folk (and folk-rock) singer with a booming voice Dave Van Ronk described Dylan as "the greatest sponge" (plagiarist and booze beggar) of all time. And he got away with it (from copyright lawsuits) due to the Department of Defense playing interference. Just more proof of his rather inadequate and begrudging role as a creepy intel asset and puppet of the CIA - who in reality didn’t really give a hoot about underground music.

Thus - inevitably - “A Complete Unknown” is total bull-crap and a pack of lies - and certainly not insightful biography. Given the egregious deception, it can be presumed that this bad joke of a Christmas movie was secretly funded and orchestrated by the CIA (admit it Mr. Mangol). “And this year’s academy award for best sick musical comedy goes again to - Langley Productions!”

Never heard of folk-rock?

The other contrived duality in this cinema fraud/sick comedy is between folk music and rock-n-roll, due to Bob Dylan’s disgust with the coterie of elitist outdated folk-music aficionados versus the impending threat of takeover of the rock scene by the “British Invasion” (by the likes of the Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Manfred Mann et al.) It‘s a losing argument to claim Dylan’s raucous voice teamed up with Canadian Danko and Robertson’s The Band posed any serious challenge to John Lennon. Mick Jagger or Eric Clapton. While The Band was a great folk-rooted group, Dylan was beyond his prime, and often incoherent, remained on the fringe despite ego-coddling articles in Rolling Stone magazine, uh-hum, an Agency rag.

Briefly, there was a lot objectionable about modern-era folk music, which was largely a concoction of the Rockefeller coal-mining monopoly in Appalachian West Virginia, the center of the Scots-Irish music tradition in America. The Depression-era federal arts grants from the Franklin Roosevelt administration monetized folk music and brought it to the forefront of the East Coast elites at concerts, recital halls and on street corners. Legacies of that patronage still influences the folk-music scene, which could never really breakout into the airwaves, multi-million disc sales and patronage from the elite donors (as in the Mountain Stage showcase). Given this context, Dylan’s rebellion at the Newport festival ran up his new banner of rock-n-roll as the contemporary music genre. Big deal.

The opportunistic break-up with his angel of mercy and artistic muse Suze put an end to his best work, and the irony of it was that bonding with her in marriage would have outlasted the Fall of the Berlin Wall and thus the communist delusions of her parents. It is astonishing in hindsight that the moral thing to have done was to be a skeptical fellow commie traveler sheltering his wife rather than a paid Pentagon spook. It’s obvious that Miss Rotolo’s role in editing his scrambled lyrics and as silent partner in arranging his music was key to his early success with his better songs. But he lost his nerve and could not face up to his secret sponsors at the Pentagon who bankrolled him. As put by the poet Robert Frost, the narrow path through the woods is the better road taken. Then as folk music sputtered out, Bob Dylan turned up the volume with electric guitars - but his confused verses were nowhere in the same league as Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, much less Hendrix. Why waste a film budget on a bio-pic of desperate failure?

On the Day the Music died

After getting through that morass of deception and betrayal, the secret world of Bob Dylan aka Robert Zimmerman as a minion of the Cold War military-intel command is disclosed here, for the first time ever - something the paid-off culture elitists are too damned scared to discuss. As a double military brat (both my dad and stepfather involved in defense intel), I realized “A Complete Unknown” was part of an official cover-up of the Zimmerman extended family’s deep and wide involvement with the Air Force and its Strategic Air Command at the height of the Cold War. Sufficient water has flowed over the Niagara Falls to discuss what’s now ancient history.

The generals and admirals had an extreme aversion to anti-war sentiment inflamed by folk singers and rock musicians influencing youngsters, including those in their own families, to dodge the draft and protest against the Vietnam War on their college campuses. The response as always was to get rid of the solution to save the problem, and the case in point being the triple deaths of Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison murdered with toxin-laced psychedelic drugs within a 10 month span in 1970 - under a joint CIA and MI-6 operation.

The assassination program against rock musicians likely began with surveillance at the Monterey music festival from the observations and phone intercepts of military intel agents associated with Albert Baez, the military intel father of Joan and Mimi. There was that infamous film clip of Jimmy Hendrix walking down a path to the Monterey stage with The Stone’s Brian Jones flaunting his royal access by wearing an ermine King’s robe - then and there both slated for the axe (excuse the pun - on the slang term for an electric guitar). That venue was also where the roadway attacks on the motorcycle-riding Bob Dylan and a bike-hitchhiking Farina were initially conceived. The military-intel termination team that participated in the hunt for a macho Che Guevana in the Bolivian highlands wouldn’t have had any difficulties taking down stoned-out sissy rock stars.

A slice of American Pie

The arranged deaths of those threats to military recruitment was preceded by an even more mystery-shrouded triple wipeout of those early rock musicians - Buddy Holly, Richie Vallen and the Big Bopper - in an extraordinarily confused series of misreads in early February 1959. On his last year of high school, Robert Zimmerman was given tickets to their last concert at the Duluth Armory, which no doubt fired up his ambitions to be a performer of rock music and still remaining a military brat (for his own personal safety against airplane crashes).

Following the concert, the trio of rockers and their band members boarded a chartered plane destined for their next appearance in a Minnesota town to the west of Duluth. The plane crashed, killing crew and all band members. The incident is obliquely recalled during the 1970s in Don McClean’s rather curious classic “Bye-bye American Pie”. There were many theories at the time of what caused the plane crash - bad piloting, a bolt of lightning, engine malfunction and so on.

The nearest and most probable cause was astutely avoided by the news media. In the vicinity of Hermantown between Duluth and Dylan’s birthplace of Hibbing was located the site of an interconnected pair of the world’s largest computers, designed by IBM to electronically compile and synthesize data from NORAD radar stations to track and predict the flight paths of incoming Soviet missiles and bombers. Motion tracking enabled the Defense Department team at SAGE to estimate with extreme accuracy the optimal airspace coordinates for shooting down incoming Soviet missiles and bombers crossing over the North Pole and Canada toward prime targets Chicago and Detroit.

Precise positioning by the micro-second were transmitted to ground-to-air missile batteries and fighter pilots with the USAF Air Wing based at Duluth Airport, tag-teams circling the region’s airspace night and day. Entrusted with the mission of preventing the nuclear-bombing of Chicago and Detroit (and consequent spread of deadly radioactivity across the nation), SAGE - the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment center was the sky-hunter - and the last resort for human survival in North America.

The chartered plane that was transporting “The Son, the Father and the Holy Ghost” of McClean’s mourning song was an unscheduled flight that was not reported to Duluth airport - in a national defense region where all air travel must be preregistered. Unfortunately, freelance pilots of prop planes were prone to flying at low altitude below cloud level in order to spot towns, rivers and highways to adjust their bearings. Civilian pilots had zero concept of anything dire of a risk as SAGE, and SAGE was on the constant lookout for ground-hugging intrusions by Soviet planes with fake Canadian or American insignias. Thus detection, confusion, reaction and tragedy. As Steinbeck put it: The best-laid plans of mice and men can go awry.

Familial Connections in the Far East

Bob Dylan, real-name Robert Zimmerman was part of an extended family that had a key role in the SAGE program. During my high-school days at a tiny USAF base on the Kanto Plain outside Tokyo, one of my classmates was a handsome but shy fellow who went by the nick-name “Zim” and refused to disclose his full name. Untalented at sports, he has zero chance of qualifying for our soccer squad, which took on many talented Japanese school teams. He preferred the company of girls. My bully-boy friends could not figure him out.

One late afternoon at the biggest airbase - Tachikawa, the logistics transfer hub for the Vietnam War - I was walking from the BX (base exchange) with newly released rock-n-roll records, when I ran into Zim and his father walking their small dog. Zim as usual was silent, whereas his father - a major in the air transport service - was effusive about meeting the stepson of his investigative partner in busting an ammo theft ring - that DOD civilian investigator being my stepfather.

That was the only time ever a general in charge of major military base had been court-martialed and given a prison sentence. His elaborate smuggling ring had allowed Yakuza gangsters to loot countless tons of spent ammo casings from a USAF and Navy aircraft shooting range on Japan’s Pacific coast. The reusable spent shells were shipped to a “copper ashtray factory” in Hong Kong, where only a few such items ever appeared in the tourist trinket markets. The vast majority of brass casings were secretly shipped to Red China for refitting with firing pins, bullets and gunpowder, and then sent to North Korea and North Vietnam to load weapons left by the U.S. Army in World War II. The net result was thousands of American and South Vietnamese casualties on the ground, rivers, hills and airspace. Treason for profit is unforgivable.

To answer what sort of music I had just purchased, I showed the major and his son “Blowing in the wind” by an interesting new folksinger. Their eyes lit up. The Dad said that they were from Duluth and that the performer was related to them. “Duluth?” I said, “that’s practically in Canada.” Then I mentioned that I had just been rejected by the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs because of damage to one eye due to being slugged by my angry biological father’s fist.

The major told me not to fret because the Academy is not the best place to learn to fly a fighter jet - and he recommended that I should go to Minnesota to a commercial pilot-training program or enroll in the university flying course and then try to enlist at the 149th Wing at Duluth air base. I nodded in appreciation at the former pilot, who had served in the Korean War. Yes, his advice to look up their extended family could also be invaluable indeed. Well, the secret government had different plans for me and instead I was enrolled in a pharmaceutical science program and never joined the military, therefore never having reason to get a pilot’s license.

I did not discover until much later that I had been channeled with grants into the pharma field. The things you don’t know can kill you and everyone else. My biochemistry professor, who was chief consultant to Eli Lilly during its secret work to produce lysergic “Acid” for the CIA MK-ULTRA program, was murdered right off-campus. That put the kibosh on a dozen of his students - especially those with any military or intel connections. That’s how I was cut loose to scramble for laborer work and why I drifted eventually into journalism. That long forgotten memory of one of Bob Dylan’s extended family from Duluth did not come back to me until this New Year’s day when I was contemplating over a glass of scotch whisky whether to write this article or not. It’s like the ghost of the major was tapping on my snow-covered window.

Sky-watcher Sphinx of the North

In his early military career, Zim’s dad had been a pilot among the round-the-clock patrols over Duluth. One of his high-level family members (name still kept secret) was in the executive group that administered that key node of DEW, the Distant Early Warning System, whose vast array of radar units, telescopes and surveillance aircraft kept watch over the vastness of Canada and the northern states for Soviet missiles speeding over the North Pole.

The arrays of analog computers including IBM’s Big Two at SAGE were in constant need of testing, adapting, code-writing and repairs, which was done with the aid of rotating computer code experts and linguists familiar with foreign-language as converted to radio signals, including the Pentagon linguist Albert Baez, who was knowledgeable about computer code after decoding radio transmissions (such as the CIA messages to and from the hunt for Che Guevara in Bolivia). It’s a small world after all, he being the father of folk-singer Joan, the presumed lover No.2 of Bob Dylan. It’s all in the family of secret agents of Empire. My suspicion is that the love relationship between Bob and Joan was a faked public-relations diversion to keep the news media away from their extracurricular assignments for the MIC, the military-industrial complex.

That background, which has been suppressed as an unmentionable for music writers and critics, is the key to understanding why Bob and Joan kept her younger sister Mimi Farina out of the loop and why her husband and co-performer Richard Farina was murdered by DIA hitmen assigned by Al Baez. Hollywood and the Establishment media have been discouraged from any mention of the far more musically talented folk musician Farina - the main folk-music rival of Bob Dylan, if only because he had married Mimi Baez, the lute-player who was the younger sister of Joan. Can’t hurt her feelings, eh, or piss off her Dad now, right?

For CIA asset Dylan to survive unsuspected Farina had to be sidelined with a press blackout of his performances and when all else failed, silenced forever in a faked “motorcycle accident”. On Mimi’s 21st birthday party at the Baez home in Monterey, CA (near the Pentagon’s foreign language school where Albert taught Spanish), Farina had to hitch a motorcylce ride to his-and-her countryside cottage with one of party-goers (a fellow he had not previously met), According to a questionable police report, the motorcycle skidded along a turn in the road, heaving Farina from the rear seat over the wire netting of a grape vineyard, where his head was crushed on impact.

Back in the early1980s, on one of my monotonous drives from San Francisco to visit relatives in Los Angeles, I took a diversion for a look at Farina’s alleged crash site. By the fatal vineyard, the road was a straight-away at long distance from any curve, there was no evidence of ironwork-supported netting (such as anchor blocks or pipes) and instead a stone masonry wall. My conclusion drawn from on-site evidence was that the police report was falsified by intelligence agencies and that Richard Farina was the victim of a state-sponsored murder. The facts pointed to Joan and Mimi’s father as the planner of this untoward regrettable event.

And that unsolved case - with any hint of murder avoided by Rolling Stone magazine - should have been the storyline for this Christmas movie production instead of the blatant cover-up of Dylan’s role as a weak-kneed Pentagon spy and front-man for unsung military intelligence operatives. In the month following Farina’s lethal “motorcycle crash”, Bob Dylan was rumored to have been assaulted by unidentified motorist assailants while riding his motorcycle along a country road in New York State in July 1966. Due to injuries sustained, Dylan disappeared from public engagements for two years - which was a cover story to evade exposure of his role in betraying Richard Farina and also to prevent any questions about his participation in non-USO military-sponsored concerts to the U.S. troops at sensitive locations around the world as part of a Pentagon spy mission. None of his secret agent career is mentioned in any biography or bio-pic - James Mangold, shame of you for not doing your digging with a spade and thereby earning a grade of F-minus for the lack of historical veracity like the rest of the media swine soaking in their own stinking swill.

Since Bob Dylan would have been fingered as the primary suspect in the elimination of his arch-rival Richard Farina, the news of his own bike crash was aimed at dangling a conspiracy theory suggesting some dark force took-out the two folk-rock musicians. Yeah, blame the commies again, the usual fall-guys. If indeed the Dylan bike crash was a fabrication, what was he doing for the next two years? That time-frame fits in with his debriefing, psychological “therapy” (not his first) and preparations for his “unknown tour of the world” sponsored by the Defense Department. His concert appearances for American troops in South America, Southeast Asia, Alaska and other remote bases far from U.S. news coverage were part of late-Vietnam morale boosting - in addition to foreign espionage. It’s been kept a state secret.

As Dylan was fond of blurting: “I see a lot of myself in Lee Harvey Oswald”. No kidding. Does anyone still recall U.S. Marine Oswald’s journey out of the nuclear-warhead depths of Atsugi Naval Air Station in Japan to ride the Trans-Siberian Railway from Vladivostok to Moscow? Those sort of idiotic yet bold and brilliant shenanigans aka secret operations are exactly why a free press that might reign in the folly should exist - and why it doesn’t.

His infamous (at least to the audience of sailors) outdoor concert at Guantanamo naval base in Castro’s Cuba exemplified the multi-level espionage that involved Dylan as planned by his military-intelligence handlers. The outdoor stage, as recently recalled to me by two aging veterans who were then in attendance, was pointed above the heads of the sailors and Marines in the outdoors audience. Unusually large recording cameras were augmented with long-distance telescopic lenses. While he sang - not very impressively - the cameras were focused on Cuban military facilities and docks surrounding the American base. The real purpose of that concert was to provide cover for a defense-intelligence spy mission. And Dylan was a knowing collaborator in this military surveillance operation on behalf of his “partner in espionage” (and probably not in bed) Joan, daughter of the CIA’s Spanish lingo expert Albert Baez - the same spook who orchestrated the hunt for Che Guevara. Why does this most interesting chapter in Bob Dylan’s chameleon career not appear in any of his bio-pics and biographies? Could “anti-war” Dylan’s role as military spy still be classified?

Getting The Axe

Finally, about that last scene in the bio-pic of the mayhem at Newport Folk Festival in the chorus of booing against Dylan’s electronic-armed folk-rock band. Peter Seeger did try to grab a fireman’s axe to cut the cables to the sound system but was scolded for his temporary insanity by his Japanese wife. Japanese wife? Yep, Peter met her while serving in the U.S. military in Japan - get it now? Yet another Pentagon-appointed minder. The whole lot of ‘em were collaborators of the war machine to one degree or another. Which is why the intel folks had friendly Pete mentoring the novice Bob.

Dylan’s rebellion was not mainly about music genres, however. Tired of all the holier-than-thou posturing by the tame traditional folk crowd, Dylan had been reassigned by his other intelligence officers - in the civilian CIA - to get involved with penetrating the Civil Rights movement, which was heavy into singing during protest marches. That’s why he and Joan Baez sang at the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King and soon thereafter made a tour of poor black shacks in the Deep South.

His celebrated switch to heavy-metal folk rock provided the excuse for fading from the traditional folk events schedule and charity tours of poor Negro farms. Yet there was no escape, he would discover, after his provocative misdemeanors including the blasphemous “God on their side” and rebellious “Ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more” a fitting complaint - except he ain’t black. So they reeled him in, first with kindness and sympathy - and then with a scary beating attributed to a bike accident in the literal wake of Richard Farina’s termination. He was their boy with no way out other than inside a cremation urn. Once in, never out so learn to behave yourself, little boy.

For his civil rights visits to meet black folks in the Deep South, Dylan was given the Tom Paine award - which he soon despised himself for accepting - as a fraud and paid agent of the government intel agencies that kept the niggers down. The U.S. military officer corps back then originated mainly from the territory of the old confederacy. Soon thereafter JFK was shot in Dallas, followed by the assassination of alleged hitman Lee Harvey Oswald, taken out by the Lansky Jewish-mobster Jack Ruby. Notoriously, Dylan often said that he saw “parts of Lee Harvey Oswald in myself.” That’s because both agent Lee and Bob were puppets of the Deep State - and the elimination of witnesses and perpetrators is a key part of the program’s clean sweep policy. Dylan was no artistic genius but just a pawn in the Game.

There’s one last point in need of disclosing about this travesty of a bio-pic. Dylan was depicted as an inspired fan of Woodie Guthrie, visiting him a New Jersey hospital. In fact, his folk-music hero was confined in an insane asylum.

At some point in the near future, I may try to get out a long look back on the life and times - and death - of Richard Farina - as a remedial response for the abject failure of Rolling Stone magazine and the rest of the trash entertainment media’s refusal to document the actual history of American music culture. And maybe I won’t if the music critics finally start disclosing the truth about overbearing government censorship and nasty intrusions into the lives of musicians and writers as part of its control agenda for the culture industries. The rough-and-ready generals are not the most obnoxious foes of democracy - far from it - the elitist “liberal” nervous-nelly do-gooders are the ones that get the job of marginalizing, silencing and then suppressing freedom.

As put by Richard and Mimi Farina: Let there be no more “Sellout Agitation Waltz!” Here’s wishing you a profitable New Year for your fondest melodies and wildest dreams! But keep it all confidential because you never know who’s next on the list.