The Journey 62. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould: America Murdered Afghanistan

RA “Kris” Millegan talks with Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould about their book, The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond – Allard Lowenstein, Oliver Stone, Wild Bill Donovan (who called his OSS agents Knights Templar), David Ferrie, Carter, Brzezinski, and “The Man Who Would Be King.”

Paul: Allard Lowenstein [Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign manager] told us, “I’ve done a lot of research on Jack’s [JFK’s] assassination and Bobby’s assassination. I’ve got all the goods. A lot of witnesses willing to come forward, but we’ve got to get Ted elected president. We’re going to get them. We’re going to show who the people were that did this and how they did it. But we got to get Ted as the president.” A couple of weeks later he was gunned down in his own office by someone who had worked with him as a student activist back in the 1960s.

Kris: “The Valediction” is a great book. It’s helping the reader understand that we need to go someplace else. We need to do something different. The system isn’t working. And it does it in such a nice way.

Liz: The Afghan government decided to let all the Western media back in. So we lost our exclusive. It was almost like a mystical message. That’s how we took it. We were being told, “Don’t waste your time. You’re not supposed to go back there.”

Paul: It was time to do something on our own. I thought [what we knew about Afghanistan could be a movie.] We started studying the craft of screen writing with people who had contacts on the west coast.

Liz: When we saw the film [”JFK”], we realized that Oliver Stone was onto something that we could relate to. The mystical aspects. He had the scenes where [Shaw and Ferrie] were wearing the Greek costumes. And there was something about the secret societies. Wild Bill Donovan, who ran the OSS, precursor to the CIA, referred to his agents as Knights Templar. You have to ask yourself why. And then you have to go find out what they were.

Paul: In the film, in David Ferrie’s apartment, they found some kind of cassock and said that he belonged to some rare, Catholic sect. We had done a story for CNN back in the early 80s that involved very wealthy, high-level Catholics in Texas who had billions. Their estate sat on top of billions of dollars’ worth of oil.

Liz: We went to Oliver to do a story about the esoteric reasons behind the assassination of JFK. We had been doing a lot of research into that. That formulated the idea [and book] called “The Voice.” And that became partly the history of the Fitzgerald family that we took back to the Twelfth Century Norman invasion of Ireland, and we were bringing it forward, trying to show the trail of evidence that there was no question that there was an esoteric implication there that needed to be factored in that could possibly be more important than what happened with Cuban-Americans, the Mafia. You know, all these aspects that were being talked about. So that’s what we brought him. But he said no to that.

Paul: He said, “I want your experience in Afghanistan. Give me a twenty-page treatment.” So I put it together and we sent it off to him. Then he asked for a full screenplay [which we sent him] and he optioned it. [But they didn’t make the movie.]

Liz: But that was actually partly our choice. At the end of three years, we felt that we would not get anything better out of Hollywood than we got out of the networks. And Oliver was up against forces, especially after the “JFK” crisis. That was a horrible experience.

Paul: He was wounded.

Liz: We realized that we had to move on. And we basically didn’t let him re-option it. [The screenplay evolved into this book, “The Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond.”]

We have a photograph on Valediction.net, if anybody wants to get a sense of the Afghan people and what they would have been today if Brzezinski and Carter had not chosen this poor country to become the place where they were going to win the Cold War. They basically murdered Afghanistan. This is a picture from the 1970s. Three Afghan women who are walking across Kabul University, when women were over 60 percent of the students. And these women look so proud and so confident. They’re wearing mini-skirts. All the things that you think about Afghanistan, that you’ve been misled to believe – the potential that was destroyed by what Carter and Brzezinski did. I mean, Afghanistan in the 1970s, their form of Islam was always moderate. They were known for their hospitality.

Paul: It was considered to be the Paris of Central Asia.

Liz: And the idea that what now represents them is the Taliban is beyond tragic. It is a crime against humanity at the highest level. And these people deserve Americans to at least know who they are, and still are, except in a very obviously desperate condition now. And they wouldn’t have been it if hadn’t been for America.

Kris: Now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their country. Tell your friends. Let’s get involved. Let’s do something. Let’s change the world. We can do it. We can do it. We can do it. We just have to do it.