From: Kelley Lynch <kelley.lynch.2010@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 8:24 AM
Subject: Leonard Cohen - Bay of Pigs & Yom Kippur War
To: MollyHale <MollyHale@ucia.gov>, "irs.commissioner" <irs.commissioner@irs.gov>, Washington Field <washington.field@ic.fbi.gov>, ASKDOJ <ASKDOJ@usdoj.gov>, nsapao <nsapao@nsa.gov>, fsb <fsb@fsb.ru>, "Doug.Davis" <Doug.Davis@ftb.ca.gov>, Dennis <Dennis@riordan-horgan.com>, rbyucaipa <rbyucaipa@yahoo.com>, khuvane <khuvane@caa.com>, blourd <blourd@caa.com>, Robert MacMillan <robert.macmillan@gmail.com>, moseszzz <moseszzz@mztv.com>, a <anderson.cooper@cnn.com>, wennermedia <wennermedia@gmail.com>, Mick Brown <mick.brown@telegraph.co.uk>, woodwardb <woodwardb@washpost.com>, "glenn.greenwald" <glenn.greenwald@firstlook.org>, lrohter <lrohter@nytimes.com>, Harriet Ryan <harriet.ryan@latimes.com>, "hailey.branson" <hailey.branson@latimes.com>, "stan.garnett" <stan.garnett@gmail.com>
Hello CIA,
I will
work on my FOIA requests today. If CIA is not permitted to reveal details
about a living person then perhaps CIA could explain what you feel might happen
to an individual who the Cuban soldiers believed was part of the first Bay of
Pigs landing team. See article below. I am also curious to know what
information, if any, you might have on Leonard Cohen's role in the Yom Kippur
War. As I've said, Leonard Cohen fabricates and embellishes stories and I
would like to understand how extensive the fabrications in his interviews on
these "revolutions" are.
Leonard Cohen's fabricated and embellished tales include stories about Phil Spector, Janis Joplin, Yom Kippur War, Bay of Pigs, and now me. I can assure you that I am not this man's ex-lover. I wouldn't attend his concert if I was paid to do so. This is just a narrative to cover up Leonard Cohen's wrong-doing. Stephen Gianelli has criminally harassed me, my sons and family, friends, and others since 2009. He appears to be engaged in psychological ops and worked in tandem with Phil Spector's former assistant, Michelle Blaine, and Cohen's fan, Susanne Walsh. Cohen's lawyer, Michelle Rice, was frequently copied in on these criminally harassing emails.
I'll
finish my CIA FOIA request up later today.
All the
best,
Kelley
Information
and Privacy Coordinator
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505
Dear Coordinator:
Under the Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. subsection 552, I am requesting information or records on any possible records you may have on singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s role in either the Cuban Bay of Pigs incident or Yom Kippur War. In his interviews throughout the years, Cohen has indicated that he’s stumbled into a number of revolutions and, with respect to Yom Kippur War, planned to join the Israeli military.
Cohen has repeatedly given interviews related to his stay in Cuba at the time of the Bay of Pigs incident. Evidently, Cuban soldiers suspected him of being part of the first American landing team and arrested him. He was then interrogated for an hour and a half and released.
Yom
Kippur War interviews.
If there are any fees for searching for, reviewing, or copying the records, please notify me before processing this request.
If you deny all or any part of this request, please cite each specific exemption you think justifies your refusal to release the information and notify me of appeal procedures available under the law.
Should
you have any questions about handling this request, you may telephone me at
Sincerely,
Kelley
Lynch
Bay of Pigs – Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen and the Bay of Pigs
The
story of a young Cohen in Cuba. Read this
story in Somersault’s free pdf issue!
By Evan Fleischer (Evan Fleischer lives
in Boston, Massachusetts. When he isn’t editing Somersault Magazine, he is a
writer-at-large.)
On one side, 1,400 American
paratroopers tried to invade Cuba in April of 1961. On another side, Cuba
repelled the invasion. And on the third side — the underappreciated side — a 27
year old Canadian by the name of Leonard Cohen was certainly doing something,
though the nailed down quality of what it actually was seems to be up in the
air.
In one telling, Cohen went to Cuba
because he was “fighting on both sides.” In another, he went because of “a deep
interest in violence. I was very interested in what it really meant for a man
to to carry arms and to kill other men — and how attracted I was exactly to
that process.” And in the the third, he went, he got drunk (on rum, Cuba
libre, or mojitos, quien sabe; déjame en paz y me deja
escribir), spent his time with late night movie operators and hookers, was
woken up by an official from the Canadian embassy, taken to said embassy, and
politely and firmly informed that his mother was worried about him.
Of the latter — Cuban militants tried
to bomb the airport, the press of which overplayed the danger of the reality,
thereby attracting his mother’s attention — Cohen said that he felt feisty when
he’d been woken by the embassy official, like Upton Sinclair. “I was on an
important mission!”
Cohen’s first album is four years off
at this time. Let us cheat with the Oujia Board you and I both share and
re-introduce the names of AM Klein, FR Scott, Irving Layton, and Lorca, Lorca,
Federico Garcia Lorca (a marble-like polaris Cohen enjoyed to roll with others
in his hand like worry beads, like prayer beads, like an oddly shaped coin he
keeps in his pocket because it makes him smile) to the equation — and when he’s
there, he’s in khaki shorts, lets his beard to stubble length, and returns to
his old habits of staying up ‘til three in the morning.
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not
departed or gone.
Come the Havana evening, Leonard — in
the words of one biographer — joined “the pimps, hookers, gamblers, small-time
criminals, and black marketers … roamed the urban slums of Jesus del Monte
to the swank waterfront suburbs of Miramar.
There’s also this.
Ira Nadel — the biographer quoted above
— explains: “Wearing his khakis and carrying a hunting knife, he was suddenly
surrounded by twelve soldiers with Czech submachine guns. It was late at night
and they thought he was the first of an American landing team. They marched him
to the local police station while he repeated the only Spanish he knew, a
slogan of Castro’s: Amistad del pueblo, ‘Friendship of the People.’
This made no impression on his captors, but after an hour and a half of
interrogation, Cohen convinced them he was not a spy buy a fan of the regime
who wanted to be there.”
Yes you who must leave everything that
you cannot control.
He convinced them he was an innocent
man. They brought out rum and bequeathed him a necklace of shells and bullets.
The next morning, he was driven back to Havana. It’s there this picture was
taken. It’s there he runs into American communists. It’s there he’s called a
bourgeois individualist.
Anti-aircraft fire fills the night. A
platoon runs down the street and crouches behind the statue of an iron lion.
“Hopelessly Hollywood,” Cohen later wrote.
The next morning he shaved and put on a
seersucker suit and wrote a letter to Jack McClelland, a Canadian publisher.
“Just think how well the book would sell if I’m hit in an air-raid. What great
publicity! Don’t tell me you haven’t been considering it.”
Cohen was temporarily detained, and —
given that — tried to leave the country. When he did, he discovered a red line
drawn through his name on a clipboard at the airport and was directed to a
security room, at which point the picture of him with the militants was
discovered. They put him under a guard, a fourteen year old with a rifle, a
fourteen year old with whom he then tried to have an argument, which went
nowhere. A scuffle broke out somewhere in the airport. The teenage guard ran
off to assist. Cohen was left alone.
Cohen looked around, repacked his bag,
got back in line, and boarded. No one asked for his ticket.
A poem to mark the occasion comes
quickly, blithely and fearsomely announcing in “the only tourist in Havana
turns his thoughts homewards” —
