ANOTHER CIA MYSTERY

The following item concerns my friend and colleague Charlotte Dennett. I first met her and her husband Gerard Colby in Vermont in 1995. They co-wrote "Thy Will Be Done: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil", an impressive 800+ page journalistic expose of the Rockefeller oil connection to the genocide and devastation of the Amazon. Here is my review of the book: http://www.cephas-library.com/church_n_state_rockefeller_and_evangelism.html

Her brother is none other than the brilliant and polemical science philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett

Charlotte has spent a number of years researching the mysterious circumstances of her father's death in an unexplained plane crash in the 1940's. He was a CIA agent stationed in the Middle East.

-CARMELO


http://thestory.org/archive/the_story_443_Dads_Secrets.mp3/view

Dad'S SECRETS

Charlotte Dennett, photo: Paul Boisvert

The CIA is under renewed scrutiny this morning. Lawyers and judges in Denmark and Spain have announced their push for evidence that the CIA directed secret flights through their countries. It's suspected that these flights were used to transport suspected terrorists to prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Charlotte Dennett has faced the secrecy of the CIA up close. Her father was a high level spy for the OSS, the pre-cursor to the CIA, based in the Middle East. He was killed in a mysterious plane crash in 1947, when Charlotte was just a baby. Charlotte never knew much about him, but years later, she became curious enough to go into her family's attic and open up an old steamer trunk. She found four scrapbooks of his letters and photographs - and ever since, she has been on a quest to find out who her father really was, and what he did when he was a spy.

So far she knows her father's code name was "Carat." And that there has been talk that his plane was sabotaged. For Charlotte, the personal fight to get at the truth has become political - fighting to get her father's papers, even going so far as to file suit against the CIA, she feels that she is fighting for the democratic process itself.

• Read a piece in The New York Times about Charlotte's journey
  
• Read a piece in The Village Voice about Charlotte

Charlotte would be very interested in finding out any information about the men on the plane. The roster included:

• Daniel C. Dennett, Jr. of Newton, Massachusetts (Charlotte's dad); American Cultural Attache at Beirut
• Don L. Sullivan of Beverly Hills, California; Petroleum Attache
• Lieut. Howard B. Smith, pilot, of Boise, Idaho
• Lieut. John Creech, Army Signals Officer, of Oregon
• Sgt. Dale M. Holmes, crew chief, of Iowa
• Master Sgt. Donald Tisdale, radio operator, of the New York area