[By Yoichi Shimatsu: Source] He’s certainly not America’s composer like Stephen Foster nor a sophisticate as was Cole Porter, and if anything the musical appeal of the wailing and complaining Bob Dylan has faded over the decades into something of a period piece for historians puzzling over his cynical verses and nasal voice which falls way short of now-popular Mongolian throat gurgling. As a contemporary of that stoned-out bard, I take a long look back at his rise and treachery against the anti-war youth upsurge of the 1960s and his sneaky role as a secret agent for the Pentagon during the Vietnam War that brutally killed so many of our generation. He was a plagiarist of folk songs, an infiltrator of the Civil Rights movement, a Pentagon spook nestled inside the antiwar movement and an espionage agent for the Pentagon on his secretive tours of military bases around the world, including being deployed at an outdoors concert to distract Cuban guards from a spy operation at Guantanamo Bay naval base in Castro’s Cuba.
During his secret life as a traitor to his generation, Bob Dylan was an undercover agent on the wrong side of history during the darkest hours for truth, justice and most of all freedom in these United States of America. Meanwhile young students were then being subjected to beatings by batons, police gunfire and arrest during street protests against a war without mercy in Vietnam and those not-so secret wars in Laos, Cambodia and Latin America - the latter including the CIA hunt to kill Che Guevara, who was satellite-tracked by Al Baez, the military-intel father of Dylan’s minder Joan Baez.
But then again, to appease his restive audience who beg to see some good from his sniveling rotten carcass, Bob sometimes went a bit too far for the likes of his military controllers and got beat up for that infraction and then ordered to spy against Castro’s forces in Cuba, a sordid affair detailed further along in this retrospective essay. Presented here is the behind the scenes tale of a Midwestern deceiver, scoundrel and secret enemy of young Americans in that most troubled era when the LBJ White House abandoned all the principles of democracy that our generation was taught in primary school to college days.
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