Palembang To Pine Gap : Cia, Jfk And Whitlam

The story follows CIA covert operations, the background to JFK's assassination and the real story behind the Whitlam dismissal. What might have happened had the bullet that changed history in Dallas missed its target? If the Governor General of Australia, had not been "their man" would the conspiracy in Canberra have escalated to the assassination of Whitlam? The book starts with a real Japanese war criminal and a fictional Dutch family in Palembang. It begins with the execution of the Dutch man by Masanobu Tsuji who was the Operations genius on General Yamashita's staff during the ten week charge down the Malay Peninsula to take Singapore in 1942. It traces the JFK assassination and those conspirators behind it and offers an alternate history, had the bullet missed in Dallas. It also reveals the actions of the queen and governor general, along with MI6, the CIA and the US ambassador to Australia who all conspired to bring down the Whitlam government. Whitlam had warned he would name all CIA personnel in Australia when parliament resumed on 11th November 1975 and stated his intention to terminate the Pine Gap lease when it was up for renewal four weeks after that date. The fictional Dutch van der Laan family lived in Palembang, Sumatra where Luuk van der Laan ran the Shell oil refinery specialising in the production of AVgas which the Japanese were desperately short of. Luuk came to realise that his family were living on the bulls eye of the target that was the oil and resource rich Dutch East Indies. Luuk is captured and beheaded by Tsuji but his wife, Mila, and two children Pieter and Anouk escape via flying boat to Broome and onto Sydney to establish a new life. She remarries and becomes a Labor backbencher and socialist providing a picture of the politics and a slice of life in "white Australia" during the 1950s. Luuk's son Pieter, after service in the Australian Navy, flies for the CIA airline Air America in the "secret war" in Laos and discovers that his father was beheaded by Masanobu Tsuji on Changi Beach in Singapore. In following Tsuji, Pieter is led to Dallas in November 1963 where, because of the CIA's need to distance itself from the assassination of JFK, Tsuji has been tasked with organising Korean assassins. Here the story meets a fork in the road with the bullet passing harmlessly between JFK and Jackie and the president serving a further two terms, withdrawing from Vietnam, dismantling the military industrial complex and effectively ruling the world according to the principles of the "Peace speech" which he had delivered in June 1963. The second ending is reality where JFK is assassinated and the global consequences that follow. This leads onto the coup d'état to remove Whitlam in 1975, revealing the reasons the conspirators were willing to go to such lengths to remove the leader of a sovereign country, supposedly an ally, but it has a surprise twist in the tail.

• | Author: Steve Johnson
• | Publisher: Independently Published
• | Publication Date: Mar 18, 2019
• | Number of Pages: 323 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1797843443
• | ISBN-13: 9781797843445