Some like it Hot, Some like it too Hot!

St. Valentine's Day - a commercialized celebration of romance and flowers that had already come to stand for the worst in what it means to be American - just got a lot worse. A super bowl celebration in Kansas City gone mad with - according to police - absolutely no evidence of violent extremism or terrorism to blame it on: Just good old fashioned American gangsterism that ended in extreme terror, fear and death. Or maybe it was something more to the two men charged with killing one young woman and wounding 22 others ranging in age from 6 to 47 with at least half under the age of 16. Maybe it was just their way of saying happy Valentine's Day to an American society blind to its own way of getting things done through extremism and terrorism, just the way Al Capone said it on February 14, 1929. Now that was the St. Valentine's Day massacre we all got groomed to love. The one when Al Capone's gang gunned down Bugs Moran's gang in a Chicago garage full of bootleg liquor. Al Capone merged mob violence with Romance in 1929 and thanks to Billy Wilder's 1959 Hollywood film Some Like it Hot with Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemon - Valentine's Day has been that way ever since. But there was another Valentine's Day massacre fifty years later in Kabul Afghanistan that got a lot hotter than Billy Wilder could ever have imagined about 1929.

Everybody knows the assassination of JFK took the United States off a course towards world peace and cooperation following the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but how many people know that the assassination of U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979 ensured that the US would permanently pivot back to the same Apocalyptic course that was inaugurated with the murder of JFK.

So, this story is about that other Valentine's Day massacre as described in our book Valediction Three Nights of Desmond and to start we want to go back to 1979.

Few people today realize what failure in the Vietnam War really meant to the people who made American policy. To quote from author Fred Kaplan's 1983 Wizards of Armageddon "Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America's national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals, [Formerly known as the New York Intellectuals]. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action."

Nevertheless by the mid -1970s the same people who'd created that "abstraction" were busy reinventing themselves from a "fringe movement" into a Neo Conservative political force and in 1976 - the year of Jimmy Carter's election - joined forces with old right-wing Hawks and Defense Democrats to oppose De'tente and Strategic Nuclear Arms Limitation by convening an official panel called the Team B. Recommended by Leo Cherne, chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and approved by CIA Director George Bush, Team B's stated objective was to determine whether the CIA had underestimated Soviet capabilities and to no one's surprise their ideological analysis not only changed the National Intelligence Estimate around by 180 degrees but went on to prophesy that the Soviets would soon exploit this American weakness to invade a neighboring country.

A veil of intrigue surrounded the creation of Team B from the start. Leo Cherne along with his young partner, future Reagan CIA director William Casey, had written the book on militarizing the American economy in a 1939 manual titled Adjusting Your Business to War. And in a fall 1941 newsletter they'd prophesied the U.S. wouldn't enter the war in Europe until "a triggering event occurs in the Pacific."

John Arthur Paisley, the CIA's liaison charged with reviewing Team B's conclusions (and a Team B critic) disappeared in September 1978 while writing his report on a boat in Chesapeake Bay. A body fixed to diving weights and shot in the head "execution style" was later found that failed on numerous accounts to match his description. And yet Paisley's death was ruled a suicide and the body cremated.

A campaign waged by Team B supporters would claim the discrepancies proved Paisley was a KGB mole and that the real Paisley had been whisked away behind the Iron Curtain - but in the end no proof of KGB hijinks ever emerged.

In the final analysis Team B's real objective was to avoid the American system of checks and balances and politicize intelligence by delivering the levers of power to followers of Leo Strauss and turn reality into whatever they wanted. As described decades later by a horrified ex-member of the neocon fraternity - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Neoconservative agenda of Team B was to scare the government into establishing a full mobilization and endless war against Russia and in this, they ultimately succeeded.

Following the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, this new neoconservative alliance led by Richard Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Nitze and Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, continued to lobby against Strategic Nuclear Arms Limitation and De'tente and found a powerful ally in President Carter's national security advisor - the well-known Russophobe, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Brzezinski had helped elevate Carter to the presidency as a member of the Trilateral Commission, a Rockefeller-funded group whose goal was to restore U.S. hegemony after the Vietnam War. In return Carter appointed him to the exclusive national security advisor post which Carter had elevated to cabinet level and which Brzezinski then reorganized to assume control over CIA covert action and seize power from the Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. In the words of neoconservative author David Rothkopf "it was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order" with Carter doing precisely what he'd promised not to do.

According to former Secretary of Defense and CIA director Robert Gates, despite President Carter's campaign promises to establish better relations with the Soviet Union, upon coming into office in January 1977 Brzezinski immediately began destabilizing pro-Soviet regimes and looking for a place to trap the Soviets. Then, in an effort to fulfill Team B's prophecy he activated covert action inside Soviet territory bordering Afghanistan hoping to provoke a response. By April of 1978, Brzezinski's efforts were bearing fruit when a radical Marxist group led by the U.S. educated Hafizullah Amin seized power in a bloody coup in Kabul. And by the time the new American Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph "Spike" Dubs arrived that May, the Afghan trap was ready to be sprung.

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