THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 1 - # 41:

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Fri Jan 06, 2017 3:54 am

01.06.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 15:John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum News:Back ST-C194-9-63. President John F. Kennedy Visits Grave of Lieutenant James Forrestal:Accession Number: ST-C194-9-63 Title: ST-C194-9-63. President John F. Kennedy Visits Grave of Lieutenant James Forrestal Date(s) of Materials: 30 May 1963 Photographer:Stoughton, Cecil W. (Cecil William), 1920-2008Description: Following Memorial Day Ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, President John F. Kennedy visits the grave of Lieutenant James Forrestal, first Secretary of Defense of the United States and former Secretary of the Navy. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland, Grant Stockdale, stands at far left. Arlington, Virginia. Physical Description: 1 negative (color; 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 inches) Subject(s):HolidaysMilitaryMonuments and memorialsPerson(s):Forrestal, James, 1892-1949Kennedy, John F. (John Fitzgerald), 1917-1963Stockdale, Edward G. (Edward Grant), 1915-1963Organization(s):Arlington National Cemetery (Arlington, Va.)Place(s):Arlington (Va.)VirginiaFolder Title:Memorial Day Ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, 10:50AMSeries Name:Cecil Stoughton (Office of the Military Aide to the President).Series Number: 02. Collection:White House PhotographsCopyright Status: Public Domain Credit Line: Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston Digital Identifier: JFKWHP-ST-C194-9-63View More JOHN F. KENNEDY PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUMColumbia Point, Boston MA 02125 (617) 514-1600Our PartnersSign up for eNewsContact UsMuseum InformationFind us on:

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Fri Jan 06, 2017 7:44 am

01.06.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 16:SPECIAL NOTE: (WHAT I FOUND EXTREMELY INTERESTING WAS THAT WHEN FORRESTAL WAS HOSPITALIZED AT BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL, ALLEGEDLY RUN BY MAJESTIC TWELVE AND THE CIA, WHERE JFK's BODY WAS TAKEN YEARS LATER. FORRESTAL WAS ALLOWED TO BE VISITED ONLY BY HIS WIFE, SONS, A MEMBER OF MAJESTIC TWELVE, AND... CONGRESSMAN LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON. THERE HAVE BEEN FLEETING RUMORS OF LBJ's LONG TIME SECRET RELATIONSHIP WITH THE U.S. SECRET INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, AND WHY LBJ WAS TRUSTED TO TAKE OVER AFTER THE REMOVAL OF JFK. THIS IS THE ONLY POSSIBLE CONNECTION THAT I HAVE EVER BEEN ABLE TO FIND. BB.)Richard Dolan Press:At around 2 a.m. on the morning of May 22, 1949, America’s first Secretary of Defense, James Vincent Forrestal, fell to his death from a small window of the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. The decline and death of Forrestal is an unresolved problem of history. There is no question that he suffered from a spectacular mental breakdown during 1948 and 1949. Exactly why he did so is less certain, but the answer may have relevance to American national security – and the pesky topic of UFOs. From the standpoint of conventional history — that is, sans UFOs — there were no shortage of problems facing Forrestal. Throughout 1948, Forrestal locked horns with Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington over defense spending. Truman demanded an impossibly balanced budget, and Forrestal’s job was to keep the services in line. He could not do this and, to some degree, would not. The result was the erosion of Truman’s confidence. It may not have mattered to Forrestal: like most of the country, he assumed Truman’s political career was over and that by the end of the year a Republican, probably Thomas Dewey, would be in the White House. But Forrestal, not Truman, was the doomed man. His relationship with Symington went from bad to worse. For reasons still unclear, Symington embarked, in the words of one author, “upon a kind of personal guerilla warfare” against the Secretary of Defense. Throughout the fall and winter of 1948, Forrestal’s mental health, physical condition, and authority as Secretary of Defense deteriorated. When Truman shocked the world in November by winning the Presidential election, Forrestal had still not obtained a budget consensus from the Joint Chiefs. Friends commented on his growing paranoia. He was convinced that “foreign-looking men” were following him, and that Symington was spying on him. Forrestal’s belief eventually came to the attention of Truman and Secret Service Chief U. E. Baughman, who decided that Forrestal was suffering from “a total psychotic breakdown.” On January 11th, 1949, Truman informed Forrestal that Louis Johnson would soon replace him as Secretary of Defense. By now, Symington and Attorney General Tom Clark were feeding stories to journalist Drew Pearson, in particular that Forrestal complained of “being followed by Jews or Zionist agents.” Forrestal accused Clark of having the FBI shadow him, which Clark denied, but which according to all of Forrestal’s biographers could well have been true. Forrestal finally left office in a formal ceremony on March 28th, his last public appearance. What followed after the ceremony remains mysterious. “There is something I would like to talk to you about,” Symington told Forrestal, and accompanied him privately during the ride back to the Pentagon. What Symington said is not known, but Forrestal emerged from the ride deeply upset, even traumatized, upon arrival at his office. Friends of Forrestal implied that Symington said something that “shattered Forrestal’s last remaining defenses.” When someone entered Forrestal’s office several hours later, the former Secretary of Defense did not notice. Instead, he sat rigidly at his desk, staring at the bare wall, incoherent, repeating the sentence, “you are a loyal fellow,” for several hours.The Death of James Forrestal:March 8, 2001 By Richard M. Dolancopyright ©2001 all rights reserved[This article is adapted from Richard Dolan’s UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941 to 1973, Hampton Roads Publishing, 2002. It appeared in the December 2001/January 2002 issue of UFO Magazine.]Forrestal was taken home, but within a day the Air Force flew him to Hobe Sound, Florida, home of Robert Lovett (a future Secretary of Defense). Forrestal’s first words were “Bob, they’re after me.” He met with Dr. William Menninger, of the Menninger Foundation, and a consultant to the Surgeon General of the Army. Captain George N. Raines, chief psychologist at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, soon arrived. It is not exactly clear what transpired during Forrestal’s brief stay in Florida. One story from Pearson was that Forrestal had several hysterical episodes and made at least one suicide attempt, certain that the Communists were planning an imminent invasion. Menninger explicitly denied this. He did say that upon his arrival, Forrestal told him that the day before, “he had placed a belt around his neck with the intention of hanging himself, but the belt broke.” But Menninger found no marks on Forrestal’s neck or body, nor did anyone find broken belts of any kind. Menninger considered Forrestal’s claim to be a nightmare. That’s about all we can know for sure. On April 2, 1949, “for security reasons,” Forrestal’s coterie flew him to Bethesda. During the trip from the Air Field to the hospital, Forrestal made several attempts to leave the moving vehicle, and was forcibly restrained. He talked of suicide, of being a bad Catholic, and several times of those “who are trying to get me.” He was admitted to Bethesda under care of Raines, who diagnosed Forrestal’s illness as Involutional Melancholia, a depressive condition sometimes seen in people reaching middle age, often who saw their life as a failure. Upon arrival at Bethesda, Forrestal declared that he did not expect to leave the place alive. In a highly unusual decision for a suicidal patient, Forrestal’s doctor was instructed by “the people downtown” (e.g. national security) to place him in the VIP 16th floor suite.[9/18/47: Stuart Symington sworn in as the nation's first Secretary of the Air Force.Forrestal looks distracted.]Meanwhile, Forrestal’s personal diaries, consisting of fifteen looseleaf binders totaling 3,000 pages, were removed from his former office and brought to the White House, where they remained for the next year. The White House later claimed that Forrestal had requested for Truman to take custody of the diaries. Such a claim, frankly, is preposterous. Throughout 1948, Forrestal had become increasingly alienated from Truman. Prior to the election, he had even met privately with leading Republicans to help insure his future with the Dewey administration. Truman then abruptly fired him in favor of Johnson, a man plainly not qualified for the job. Forrestal’s diaries contained sensitive information that Truman’s people needed to know about. Presumably they had ample time to review them during the seven weeks of Forrestal’s hospitalization. Throughout Forrestal’s hospitalization, access to him was severely restricted. One-time visitors were his wife, his two sons, Sidney Souers (a former DCI, NSC executive secretary, and alleged MJ-12 member), Louis Johnson, Truman, and Congressman Lyndon Johnson. Menninger visited twice. Although Forrestal was presumably glad to see his sons, he was not close to any of these visitors, and had a political antipathy to his government colleagues who came by. However, Forrestal was not permitted to see the several people he continually asked to see: his brother, a friend, and two priests.Henry Forrestal, for example, repeatedly tried to see his brother but was refused until he threatened to tell the newspapers and sue the hospital. Ultimately, he was able to visit his brother four times. Henry told Raines and the hospital’s commandant, Captain B. W. Hogan, that his brother wanted to talk with a close friend, Monsignor Maurice Sheehy. Hogan replied that he was aware of this, but still would not allow it.Indeed, Sheehy had tried seven times to see Forrestal. Each time he was told his timing was “not opportune.” (What kind of hospital policy denies a patient the right to see a priest, minister, or rabbi?) Sheehan, a former Navy chaplain, argued several times with Raines, and had the impression that Raines was acting under orders. Another priest, Father Paul McNally of Georgetown University, was also barred from seeing Forrestal, as was at least one other (unnamed) friend of the former Secretary. Still, by May, Forrestal was improving. When Henry finally got to see him, he thought his brother was “acting and talking as sanely and intelligently as any man I’ve ever known.” On May 14, 1949, Raines decided that he would leave Washington in four days to attend a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. After their last meeting on the morning of the 18th, Raines wrote that Forrestal was “somewhat better than on the corresponding day of the preceding week.” Forrestal continued in good spirits throughout all of the 20th and 21st. He showed no signs of depression, was well dressed, shaved, and in good appetite. But the more Henry Forrestal thought about his brother being shut up at Bethesda and denied the right to see Father Sheehy, the more it bothered him. He decided he was going to take his brother to the countryside to complete his recovery, and made train reservations to return to Washington on May 22. He also reserved a room at the Mayflower Hotel for that day, then phoned the hospital to announce that he would arrive on May 22 to take his brother.He was too late. The official account of Forrestal’s death runs as follows. During the night of May 21/22, Forrestal was awake at 1:45 a.m., copying a chorus from Sophocles’s Ajaxfrom a book of world literature. (The New York Times added that Forrestal had been asleep at 1:30, then awake at 1:45.) A Navy corpsman named Robert Wayne Harrison, Jr., responsible for guarding Forrestal’s room, checked in, as was his job every fifteen minutes. Forrestal told Harrison that he did not want a sedative, as he intended to stay up late and read. Harrison reported Forrestal’s refusal to the psychiatrist – Raines’ assistant, Dr. Robert Deen – sleeping next door. They returned five minutes later to an empty room. Deen later claimed that Forrestal had sent Harrison out on a “brief errand.” During this time, Forrestal walked to the diet kitchen across the hall, tied one end of his bathrobe cord to the radiator, the other end around his neck, removed a flimsy screen, and jumped from the 16th floor. The cord came untied, and he fell to his death after hitting part of the building on the way down. Forrestal’s most recent biographers discounted the possibility of murder, calling the Secretary’s death “a series of chance events.” Yet, discrepancies in the official suicide story were never clearly resolved, and several people close to Forrestal did not believe it. A biographer of Forrestal writing in the 1960s, noted that “even now . . . certain details have not been made public,” and that some believed Forrestal’s death to be “very much desired by individuals and groups who, in 1949, held great power in the United States.” Others went further, and maintained that Forrestal was murdered. Henry Forrestal, for one, believed strongly that “they” murdered his brother – they being either Communists or Jews within the government (Henry considered the Jewish connection because Forrestal’s geopolitics gave him a pro-Arab disposition). Father Sheehy had reason to suspect murder. When he arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital after learning of Forrestal’s death, an experienced-looking hospital corpsman approached him through the crowd. In a low, tense voice he said: “Father, you know Mr. Forrestal didn’t kill himself, don’t you?” Before Sheehy could respond or ask his name, others in the crowd pressed close, and the man quickly departed. There are several odd elements concerning Forrestal’s final moments. First, the young corpsman guarding Forrestal – that is, Harrison – was a new man, someone Forrestal had never seen before. The regular guard during the midnight shift was absent without leave and, the story goes, had gotten drunk the night before. Harrison was the only person to have had direct contact with Forrestal in the moments before his death, and ultimately it was on his word only that the official account rested. Also, Forrestal never finished writing the chorus from Sophocles, and in fact stopped in the middle of a word. Quite possibly, Forrestal had not even written the fragment that evening, especially if he had been asleep at 1:30 a.m. How reasonable is it to suppose that, sometime between 1:30 a.m. and 1:45 a.m., he woke up, got out some writing material, located a bleak poem within a huge anthology, copied out 17 lines, put on his robe, crossed the hall to the diet kitchen where he tightly wrapped and knotted his bathrobe cord around his neck and presumably tied the loose end to the radiator under the window; then climbed up on the window sill and jumped. There is also an odd juxtaposition of a tightly knotted bathrobe cord around Forrestal’s neck and the assumption that he tied the other end so loosely to a radiator that it immediately came untied and allowed him to fall to his death. This radiator was a rather improbable gallows: it was about two feet long, the top was six inches below the sill, and it was attached to the wall with its base a good fifteen inches above the floor. But there was no evidence that the bathrobe cord had ever been tied to the small radiator in the first place. If the cord had snapped under Forrestal’s weight, one end would have been found still fastened to the radiator. The cord did not break, however, and there was not a mark on the radiator to indicate it had ever been tied there.Bethesda Naval Hospital:Moreover, if Forrestal wanted to hang himself, why choose a tiny window by anchoring himself to a radiator when he much more easily have done the job from a door or sturdy fixture, such as the shower curtain rod in his own bathroom? On the other hand, if Forrestal wanted to go out the window, why bother with a cord? Why not simply jump, a far easier proposition? In sum, we do not know that the cord was ever tied to the radiator, but we do know is it was tied tightly to Forrestal’s neck. Later inspection found heavy scuff marks outside the window sill and cement work. Proponents of the suicide theory claim these were made by Forrestal’s feet while he was hanging by the neck from the radiator, and perhaps that he belatedly changed his mind and tried to climb back in. But the scuff marks confirm no such thing. They could just as easily have been made by his struggle with someone pushing him out the window. There are many other suspicious elements to this story, such as the decision to place Forrestal on the 16th floor. This was exactly opposite what medical opinion desired (the bottom floor of a nearby annex had been the first choice of his caretakers), but was pressed by unnamed individuals in Washington.Also, the official investigation of Forrestal’s death was as much of a sham as that of President Kennedy would be 14 years later. The hospital labeled his death a suicide before any investigation took place; the county coroner hurried over to confirm the hospital statements. In cases where there is even a slight possibility of murder, it is normal for a coroner to delay signing a death certificate until an investigation, an autopsy, and an inquest had been completed. This did not happen. Since the death occurred on a U.S. naval reservation, local police did not investigate. Instead, the head of the naval board of inquiry immediately announced he was “absolutely certain” that Forrestal’s death “could be nothing else than suicide.” If we concede the possibility of murder, we must ask who and why? One can hardly credit the budget issue, which was settled by then and especially moot once Forrestal was out of office. One proponent of the murder theory blamed Communists within the U.S. government, or perhaps even the Soviet KGB/GPU. The reason, it was claimed, had to do with Forrestal’s diaries and plans for a book after his release from the hospital. Forrestal was an inveterate anti-Communist, and might have been perceived as problematic for agents of the Soviets. Moreover, the Soviets were no strangers to the art of staged suicides. Of course, neither were the Americans. But there is at least one other avenue to consider. UFOs constitute the great hole of contemporary history. We know, at the very least, that this was a topic of great concern to those at the top of American national security policy, despite the near-complete absence of public references to it. It is the proverbial elephant in the dining room that no one wishes to discuss. There are several reasons to consider a UFO connection to Forrestal’s death. In the first place, Forrestal’s position within the defense community made him de facto a key player in the formulation of UFO policy. Because of the key importance, even urgency, associated with this topic in policy formulation during the late 1940s, we must assume that Forrestal was involved. The sensitivity of the UFO problem meant that Forrestal’s mental deterioration was a real security risk. One might even wonder whether Forrestal learned a truth about UFOs that contributed to his breakdown. After all, consider the recent developments of the UFO problem for American national security policymakers. By 1948 (if not earlier, e.g. Roswell), it was becoming clear that the Soviets were not responsible for UFOs, and neither were the Americans. It was equally clear that well qualified military observers and equipment had tracked these objects at speeds and maneuvering capabilities that were impossible with contemporary technology. In the spring of 1948, White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico had been the scene of an extraordinary UFO sighting that was analyzed in secret by the Air Force Scientific Advisory Panel and security personnel at Los Alamos. The investigating team decided that UFOs were “of extreme importance.” That summer, another incredible case occurred, which resulted in the famed “Estimate of the Situation” stating the extraterrestrial thesis as an answer to UFOs. This was shot down by Air Force Commander Hoyt Vandenberg. Even so, President Truman began receiving regular briefings that summer on UFOs from his Air Force liaison, Colonel Robert Landry (coordinated with the CIA). Such briefings lasted through the remainder of his presidency. By the end of 1948, the curious and unexplained “green fireball” phenomenon began appearing in very localized fashion over Los Alamos. This, too, receivedextreme levels of attention from America’s military and scientific elite, and did not (and do not) appear to be natural phenomena. In short, UFOs mattered a great deal within defense circles, and Forrestal was at the hub. Secondly, Forrestal’s concern about being followed by “foreign-looking men” is a common description of the legendary-to-the-point-of-cliché Men in Black. He never stated clearly just who he believed to be following him, at least not consistently. Others assumed that he was talking about Communists, Jews, and Washington insiders, but they could only assume.Drawing of the 16th Floor of the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda. Forrestal's room (A) shared a bath with his supervising doctor; he fell through a small, unsecured, window in the Diet Kitchen (B).Then there is the disconcerting relationship with Air Force Secretary Symington. True, Symington considered Forrestal to be an enemy. But why, in the moment of Forrestal’s departure from politics, amid a spectacular psychological collapse, did Symington take it upon himself to have a secret conversation with Forrestal that left him utterly incoherent? This goes beyond mere conventional political maneuvering: what did Symington say – or do – to Forrestal? At least one senior military person linked Symington to a type of UFO “control group,” and that was General Arthur Exon, former base commander of Wright-Patterson AFB, in an interview he gave in 1990. According to Exon, Symington was one of the “unholy thirteen,” one of those who knew the most about Roswell. Forrestal, said Exon, was another. An explanation centering on the UFO phenomenon accounts surprisingly well for the complete unhinging of a successful and brilliant individual, and more importantly, the need to silence someone who could no longer be trusted. Perhaps Forrestal’s psychological state was such that he did commit suicide. Although the facts of his death do not point toward this conclusion, we do not have definitive knowledge, either. But consider the case of American journalist George Polk. A year before, Polk had been investigating corruption in the Greek military regime, elements of which then murdered him. The Communists were promptly blamed, while America’s intelligence and media communities knowingly went along with the charade. Or, just a few years later, in 1953, when American biological weapons expert Frank Olsen “fell” from the 10th floor of the Statler Hotel in New York City, after he had a very bad LSD trip, courtesy of the CIA, and had become a security risk. During the bad old days of Stalin’s Russia, airbrushed photographs were a normal, if crude, way to sanitize history. American methods are less crude, but no less normal. Richard M. Dolan:2001 NOTE: Perhaps not surprisingly, there are precious few sources on Forrestal. See Arnold Rogow, James Forrestal, A Study of Personality, Politics, and Policy (MacMillan, 1963); Townsend Hoopes & Douglas Brinkley, Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal (Knopf, 1992); the extremely rare Cornell Simpson, The Death of James Forrestal (Western Islands Publishers, 1966); and the sanitized The Forrestal Diaries edited by Walter Mills (Viking Press, 1951). Truman and Forrestal in Florida in 11/48, after Truman had won re-election.Truman's smile was real; Forrestal's wasn't.

Bob · Post by **Bob** » Fri Jan 06, 2017 12:36 pm

Bruce Patrick Brychek wrote:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 13:01.06.2017:James Forrestal and John Kennedy: James Forrestal, who was assistant Secretary of the Navy and then Secretary of the Navy for most of World War II was a severe critic of the foreign policy and the war policy of the government for which he worked. We will perhaps never know just how severe a critic he was because when he was sent off to Bethesda Naval Hospital the Truman White House confiscated his diaries and only a severely edited version was published. What is purported to be the entire work is available for examination at the Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University, but it is frankly unbelievable that the most revealing negative passages would not have been removed, considering the chain of custody of the document. We can get some idea of the nature of Forrestal’s differences with the FDR and Truman administrations from a couple of published quotes. The first I have repeated in one form or another in several previous articles. It comes from page 7 of Senator Joe McCarthy’s book, The Fight for America, and it is the tail end of an account of a conversation the freshly elected Senator McCarthy had at a 1946 lunch meeting that Navy Secretary Forrestal had requested: Before meeting Jim Forrestal I thought we were losing to international Communism because of incompetence and stupidity on the part of our planners. I mentioned that to Forrestal. I shall forever remember his answer. He said, “McCarthy, consistency has never been a mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.” This phrase stuck me so forcefully that I have often used it since. The second quote comes from an October 15, 1951, article in Life magazine entitled “The Forrestal Diaries.” It is not from the diaries themselves but from a letter that Forrestal wrote to a friend during the war: I find that whenever any American suggests that we act in accordance with the needs of our own security he is apt to be called a [profane adjective deleted] fascist or imperialist, while if Uncle Joe suggests that he needs the Baltic Provinces, half of Poland, all of Bessarabia and access to the Mediterranean, all hands agree that his is a fine, frank, candid and generally delightful fellow who is very easy to deal with because he is so explicit in what he wants. (Cited in The Iron Curtain over America by John Beaty, 1958, p. 67) Moreover, in my article, “Forrestal Ignored: China Lost to Reds, Korean War Fought,” I show that Forrestal worked on his own to effect an earlier end to the war with Japan than what actually occurred in order to head off Soviet ambitions in the Far East and was frustrated in his efforts by his superiors. It should come as no surprise, then, that with views so different from the other advisers that President Harry Truman had inherited from Franklin Roosevelt, Forrestal was not a part of the official delegation to the Potsdam Conference shortly after the German surrender. What is more surprising—though perhaps not so much with a man like Forrestal—is that he went to the conference, held near devastated Berlin, on his own. * Most intriguingly, he took with him the 28-year-old Navy veteran son of a friend by the name of John F. Kennedy, “picking JFK up in Paris and taking him in his personal aircraft to Berlin, Bremen, Frankfurt, Salzburg, and Hitler’s aerie in Berchtesgarden.” The friend, of course, was Wall Street power and controversial former ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joseph Kennedy, and father Joe had used his influence with publisher William Randolph Hearst to arrange for young John to work as a journalist covering the conference. If the knowledgeable and strong-willed anti-Communist Forrestal could have influenced his new acquaintance McCarthy as strongly as he did with that one lunch meeting, one can only imagine the education he might have imparted to the young family friend, Kennedy, in the time they spent together on that Europe trip. Actually, one doesn’t have to imagine it completely. The speech that JFK delivered as a Congressman in January of 1949 blistering the administration, which was run by his own Democratic party, for its actions contributing to the Communist takeover of China could have been written by Forrestal himself. In all likelihood, young Kennedy hardly required a lot of information and influence from Forrestal to be aware of the alien and subversive forces at work within the United States. He was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy, after all. Consider this now famous passage from Forrestal’s diary that made it past the editing process: 27 December 1945: Played golf today with Joe Kennedy. I asked him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain’s position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy’s view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt’s [William C. Bullitt, then Ambassador to France] urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn’t fight, Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversation with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling him to put some iron up Chamberlain’s backside. Kennedy’s response always was that putting iron up his backside did no good unless the British had some iron with which to fight, and they did not. (Walter Millis, The Forrestal Diaries, pp. 121-122, emphasis added.) When Forrestal fell to his death from a 16th floor window of the Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22, 1949, JFK, knowing what he knew, is highly unlikely to have been naïve enough to accept the suicide story. He knew the kind of man Forrestal was and he was well aware of the Zionist and Communist forces that opposed him. He very likely had heard of the Jewish Stern Gang’s letter bomb attempts on the life President Truman in 1947 and before that on British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin. He no doubt knew that both groups regarded Forrestal as American enemy number one and he knew what they were capable of. It is in this context that we must consider JFK’s decision on Memorial Day, 1963, to visit the Arlington Cemetery tomb of his friend and mentor, Forrestal. Memorial Day is often confused with Veterans Day. It is not for honoring everyone who has served in the United States armed forces. Its purpose is to honor those who have died while serving in the armed forces. Forrestal would appear not to qualify. He was a veteran, having trained as a Navy flyer but never making it overseas in World War I, and he had made a great contribution to the World War II effort in his various capacities. He was also the nation’s first secretary of defense. But when he died he was a civilian and the country was at peace. Was it inappropriate, then, for JFK to honor Forrestal on Memorial Day as he did? I suggest that if one broadens—or perhaps narrows—the definition of the honorees of Memorial Day to those who died fighting for their country against its enemies the presidential visit to Forrestal’s grave could hardly have been more appropriate, and Kennedy more than likely knew it. Unfortunately, their common enemies would likely have known it, too, and they would have regarded it as just another strike against him. Another Interpretation of the Tribute: Kennedy’s visit to Forrestal’s grave has also been noted by Catherine Austin Fitts on her web site, The Solari Report. Like Forrestal she is a former official at the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read & Co. who later had a high position in Washington. In her case it was as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the George H.W. Bush administration. She mentions Forrestal’s opposition to the creation of the state of Israel and “controversy around the official explanation of his death,” but her conclusion can only be described as Delphic: “Presidents are busy people. They do not just take time off to visit graves over in Arlington after official ceremonies are over. It looks to me as though something was weighing on his mind. I can guess what it was. You can too.” She seems to have missed the fact that it was Memorial Day, and I don’t think she gives readers enough information for them to guess what it was that was weighing on the president’s mind. She does link to my “Who Killed James Forrestal?”, though. Perhaps she expects that you will read that before you do your guessing. Fitts also informs us that she learned of the Forrestal-JFK link from Michael Salla’s recent book, Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination. As the title of the book suggests, Salla is a complete UFO guy. A search of the Kindle version of his book for the words “Israel,” “Jew,” and “Jewish” all draw blanks. “Communist” turns up only this sentence with a comically misplaced modifier and a redundancy: “As a former communist defector, Angleton and the CIA could persuasively argue that Oswald’s involvement directly implicated the USSR.” Salla’s argument, as I understand it, is that both Forrestal and Kennedy were assassinated because of what they knew and were in danger of revealing about our encounters with extraterrestrial beings. He recognizes that in order to make his case he must first show that Forrestal was, in fact, murdered and did not commit suicide as we have been told. In doing that, though, he seems to be employing the spook-writing technique of careful avoidance of writing anything that might actually change anyone’s mind. No one can argue in the second decade of the 21st century that Forrestal was murdered without taking note of my work, which Salla duly does. He has four endnotes to my web site but the case he makes with it could hardly be weaker. The first is to the URL http://www.dcdave.com/article5/080429.htm, which he calls “Letter to former Virginia governor.” The article at the site is actually entitled “Lies about the Kennedy and Forrestal Deaths from the University of Virginia’s Miller Center,” which is a good deal stronger than the title Salla has chosen. Former Governor Gerald Baliles happens to be the center’s director. Salla references the letter, which is part of the article, for this short quote in his book: Forrestal resigned because he was asked to resign by President Truman. He had not suffered a nervous breakdown. None of the doctors who treated him at Bethesda Naval Hospital described his condition as a nervous breakdown. What is more important, though, recently uncovered evidence greatly undermines the theory that Forrestal voluntarily jumped out of the window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Just as the quote is beginning to get really informative, Salla cuts it off. He never tells the reader what that new evidence is. Instead he jumps to UFOlogist Richard Dolan for observations from his 2001, thoroughly outdated “The Death of James Forrestal.” He then references Part 1 of my “Who Killed James Forrestal?” three times before getting back to Dolan, but he does that only for what I have passed on from Cornell Simpson’s 1966 book, also titled The Death of James Forrestal. I have attempted to get Dolan to update his material on Forrestal’s death by incorporating information from the official investigation, known as the Willcutts Report, which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in 2004, but he has ignored me. Similarly, if one searches Salla’s book for “Willcutts Report” he draws a blank. A search for “broken glass,” which we discover from the Willcutts Report was tellingly found on Forrestal’s vacated bed, also turns up nothing. We have also shown that the poem transcription that the press and historians have treated as a sort of suicide note was not in Forrestal’s handwriting. We do get some hits searching “handwriting” in Salla’s book, but none of them have anything to do with the Forrestal death case. Since Salla’s purpose is to show that protectors of UFO secrets were behind both the Forrestal and Kennedy assassinations (A search of “UFO” turns up 72 pages of hits.) it is perhaps understandable that he would not mention those whom others regard as the top suspects. After all, searching “UFO” in my work on Forrestal’s death won’t turn up much of anything, either. His careful avoidance of the best evidence demonstrating that Forrestal was, in fact, murdered simply marks him as a disinformationist, however. America’s Sad “Historians”: Taking stock, almost a decade after I made public the long secret report on Forrestal’s death, three books, to my knowledge, have now made explicit reference to my work. In addition to Salla’s book, we have two anti-Zionist books, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel by Alison Weir and Part One of Alan Hart’s Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews entitled The False Messiah. Of these three, only Hart mentions the Willcutts Report, and he, like Weir, is a journalist, so the standard has not yet been met for the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to begin to modify its flat statement that Forrestal committed suicide: The web site is an educational site for general users. As such, we see our responsibility as providing our users with a mainstream interpretation of history. We do not publish groundbreaking new scholarship or challenge the historical consensus that is derived from secondary sources written by established academics. If you can point us to secondary sources written by established historians that discuss the Willcutts report and cast doubt on whether Forrestal committed suicide, we would be very interested in reading them. Nicholas Thompson in The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War makes quite extensive but still very selective reference to the Willcutts Report. We show in Part 6 of “Who Killed James Forrestal” how thoroughly dishonest Thompson is in his treatment of the Willcutts material, though. Thompson, too, is a journalist, so even if he had been honest with the Willcutts evidence it would not have been enough to get the Miller Center** to budge. They’re still waiting for “established academics” and “established historians” to weigh in. Considering the current sad state of the academic history community the wait is likely to be a long one. Reflecting the consensus of those academic historians, the Miller Center still says that all the shots that killed Kennedy and wounded Governor John Connally came from the Texas Schoolbook Depository and Lee Harvey Oswald remains the lone gunman. As for the Forrestal case, to date, the only person calling himself a historian who has taken note of the Willcutts Report is a young man by the name of Matthew McNiece, who teaches history at the obscure Howard Payne University in Texas. He did it in a puerile, semi-literate effort that passed muster as his doctoral dissertation at Texas Christian University. In my poem, “A Literary Toast,” I compare America’s journalists to the late, unlamented Union of Soviet Writers. The Soviet similarity is at least as great if not greater, it would appear, with America’s academic historians. * Here is how Elizabeth Churchill Brown in The Enemy at His Back explains Forrestal’s purpose: Forrestal…had been fairly popular with the elite Washington conference group until his patriotism combined with his intelligence forced [Assistant Secretary of State Joseph] Grew to share his dog house with him. Forrestal had been reading reports, making personal inspections, and had started asking questions. Unlike Mr. Grew, the Secretary of the Navy was not only well acquainted with those “certain elements” but he also understood their aims. Naval intelligence was perhaps the best of our wartime intelligence agencies (excluding the FBI), and Forrestal was reading daily the many intercepted messages between Japan and Russia in which the former was attempting to negotiate a surrender. Moreover, Forrestal had recently made a complete tour of the Pacific war theater where he saw the war being fought and talked with the officers and men doing the fighting. He was “dangerous.” Knowing the territorial loot that Truman was intent on giving the Russians at Potsdam, and realizing the tragic needlessness of such concessions, Forrestal came to the conclusion he must act, and quickly. He flew to the Conference in a desperate hope of being able to place a deterring hand on the President’s shoulder. But the day he arrived the conference came to an end and the damage was done. (pp. 139-140) ** It is of some interest that before Governor Baliles was given the job in 2005, the director of the Miller Center was Philip D. Zelikow, who was also the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. Zelikow, who also worked on George W. Bush’s transition team in 2001, is now Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UVA and in 2011 President Obama appointed him to his Intelligence Advisory Board. David MartinAugust 6, 2014Very good, Bruce. As people here in the forum and elsewhere try to wrap their minds around the MJ-12 aspect of the JFK assassination, the James Forrestal connection to JFK is probably the smoking gun in all of this. Like JFK, Forrestal pushed back on the status quo of the power elite in the United States. And like JFK, he suffered an untimely death.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Fri Jan 06, 2017 6:49 pm

01.06.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 17:Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination:Posted on October 30, 2013 by DEUS NEXUS 5 Comments:Reposted from: Exopolitics Institute News Service:A Review by Richard C. Cook:Kennedy's Last Stand Front Cover:Dr. Michael E. Salla is director of the Exopolitics Institute, which studies UFO and extraterrestrial phenomena from the standpoint of how we can penetrate the veil of secrecy drawn by governments over the massive amount of UFO/ET contact that has reportedly taken place worldwide over the past seven decades. The main culprit in this secrecy, of course, is the government of the U.S.Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Salla’s most recent book is Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination.In this book, Dr. Salla links two mysteries: UFO/ET contact, which, to those who follow the research, is familiar territory, and the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963, by parties as yet unknown. The question Dr. Salla addresses is whether there is a link between the two; more specifically, whether there is a connection between MJ-12, the secret governmental unit first set up by President Harry Truman to control information deriving from alleged UFO crashes at Roswell and elsewhere in the late 1940s, and the killing of JFK in Dallas, Texas, over a decade later.By now we know that the JFK assassination was a watershed in history. We know too, as the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded in 1978, that, contrary to the Warren Commission report, the deed was likely the result of a conspiracy. Since JFK was killed, with a major escalation in Vietnam following, the U.S. has increasingly fallen under the influence of policies oriented toward extreme militarism and intervention through force of arms around the world. But much of this has been orchestrated from behind the scenes. We know too that Kennedy opposed secretive government and was taking steps to rein it in. But the cloak-and-dagger operatives fought back. By tracing a paper trail through both public and leaked government documents, Dr. Salla tracks down a sequence of events, communications, and decisions related to the JFK murder that leads directly to the CIA.Early in this sequence came decisions by the top echelons of government that UFO/ET contact information would be kept hidden from the public. The motives for this were complex, though they were part of a broader movement to set up a hidden policy and operations machine that worked in the dark, allowing the president and his advisers to maintain a distance of “plausible deniability” with respect to major decisions affecting the nation and mankind.The story of how Truman authorized the creation of the CIA, NSA, and other secretive units for these purposes is well-known. What is less understood is whether and how an even more clandestine organization called MJ-12 came into being specifically to manage UFO/ET information and to oversee the adaptation of scientific knowledge deriving from UFO/ET contacts for national security purposes, including the development of spacecraft and weapons of extremely advanced design and performance. Helping with this were to be the German scientists spirited out of Nazi Germany after World War II under “Operation Paperclip” that UFO/ET researchers believe had already begun to utilize this technology.Not everyone in the government was on-board with the approach leading to total secrecy. One figure who favored more openness was, according to Dr. Salla and other UFO researchers, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, one of the original members of MJ-12, who allegedly committed suicide by jumping from a window at Bethesda Naval Hospital where he had been locked up. Tracking the assertions of whistleblower William “Bill” Cooper, who was shot and killed by local police at his Arizona home in November 2001, Salla cites the account whereby Forrestal was actually thrown to his death by operatives who wanted to silence him. Modern research discloses that Forrestal may have been killed due to his opposition to U.S. recognition of Israel.It was through Forrestal, a former Secretary of the Navy, that JFK enters the story. When he first joined the service during World War II, JFK, the son of Ambassador to Great Britain Joe Kennedy, became closely associated with Forrestal to the point of their becoming personal friends and confidants. Also, both Forrestal and the Kennedy family were Irish Catholics. It was then, Dr.Salla writes, that JFK acquired an interest in the emergent UFO/ET phenomenon.Under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, elected in 1952, the secret government grew in resources, power, and influence. The CIA became the focal point, with Allen Dulles, who became director of central intelligence in 1953, the key figure. Dulles also succeeded Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, Dr. Salla says, as head of MJ-12. Another name which crops up around this time was that of Nelson Rockefeller, described by Dr. Salla as intimate with Eisenhower and in charge of reorganizing the government along lines favored by the Republican Party. Part of this structuring was the turning over of key elements of foreign policy to the CIA through which clandestine operations began to run amok in the mid-1950s, including the overthrow of governments in Iran and Guatemala. While all this was going on, Eisenhower’s primary interests seemed to be playing golf and visiting his farm outside Gettysburg.The UFO/ET literature is full of accounts of Eisenhower’s own contacts with representatives of other worlds, which Dr. Salla reprises to some extent. But Eisenhower was fully a party to keeping the public from knowing anything of substance. And despite an apparent attempt to gain information about what was going on at CIA-controlled secret sites in Nevada, Eisenhower never had any control over what MJ-12 or the CIA were doing. When he gave his famous public warning against the growing power of the “military-industrial complex” just before leaving office in 1961, it was far too little and far too late. JFK was left holding the bag in inheriting this potentially disastrous situation.The die was cast. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco through which JFK learned the extent to which the CIA could lie, even to the commander-in-chief, Allen Dulles was forced from office. According to Dr. Salla, before his departure Dulles gave a secret order for JFK to be eliminated that was passed on to the CIA’s counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton for implementation. Dr. Salla provides photocopies of the implicating documents, though their authenticity is obviously difficult to prove. The deed was done two years later, with the research of past decades indicating that it was likely coordinated by the CIA which utilized hired killers from organized crime and the Cuban exile community, with cover provided by Lyndon B. Johnson, the military, and the FBI.Whether JFK was killed specifically, as Dr. Salla intimates, because he was too close to uncovering the secrets of MJ-12 and its plethora of “black” projects related to UFO/ET-derived technology is interesting to consider but difficult to isolate. Certainly the CIA and those who controlled it hated JFK enough to want to get rid of him, given his vision for an America that was open, honest, and supportive of human aspirations around the globe. Such a vision was definitely not part of the psychology of people who essentially want to enslave mankind to a society based on violence and corporate exploitation. That alone may have been sufficient to set the murder plot in motion. In other words, by the time JFK became president, the secret government was controlled by fascists and had a fascist agenda. He was not one of them, so “bam-bam.”But there may be even larger issues that Dr. Salla may want to explore in future works which have been hinted at by some UFO researchers. One question that may be asked is who controls the controllers? For instance, who does the CIA work for? It is impossible to believe that the bureaucrats sitting at their desks at Langley or other clandestine agencies make their own decisions about what people to assassinate, what countries to subvert, what governments to overthrow, or whether to perpetrate events like 911.In tracing the history, we return to the figure of Nelson Rockefeller, who, as Dr. Salla points out, was so integral to Eisenhower’s intent to reorganize the federal government along corporatist lines in the 1950s. Another name is Nelson’s brother David Rockefeller, in charge of the family’s banking wing. We know that David Rockefeller was a bitter foe of JFK’s economic policies, and we know that Henry Kissinger, so closely linked to various CIA plots involving Indonesia and elsewhere in the 1970s, was a Rockefeller family protégé. So was Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, who initiated the recession of 1980 that threw the presidency from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan in a coup that led to the greatest military build-up since World War II and lay the groundwork for the era of endless wars in the Middle East and elsewhere that has become such a scourge today.Note too that part of the “Reagan Revolution” was the diversion of vast resources to the development of space-based weapons, including directed-energy, particle-beam, and laser weapons under Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative or “Star Wars” program. Even though SDI was terminated after the space shuttle Challenger disaster deprived planners of their orbital testing platform, research and development continued. One such weapon could have been mounted in a military cargo plan and used against the Twin Towers in New York on September 11, 2001. That a directed-energy weapon was used can fairly be concluded by the most recent reported research. Was this too part of the high-tech arsenal developed covertly by utilizing UFO/ET-derived scientific knowledge, aided perhaps by information acquired when the FBI confiscated the working papers of Nikola Tesla after he passed away in a lonely Manhattan hotel room in 1943?Returning to the Rockefeller connection, some would say further that the Rockefellers were only a part, though an important one, of a larger worldwide conspiracy overseen by the Bilderbergers and the Illuminati. Others would go even further in linking these groups, along with the international financial cabal they control, to extraterrestrial sources of evil, known variously in the literature as the reptilians, the Crusaders of Orion, the Empire, the Others, the Archons, or the Prince of Evil himself. There are also those, myself included, who say that we are living in a time when planet Earth is in the process of Ascension, whereby humanity is poised to move into a new era known from the Book of Revelation as the “New Earth.”According to this view, the agents of evil cited above are now engaged in one last gigantic attempt to postpone the inevitable before they themselves are cast down into oblivion. The psychic atmosphere of anger and angst they have engendered lays on humanity like a shroud. As horrendous is the karmic load laid upon themselves by those people who have bought into the culture of death that the secret government has engendered. I include in this the makers of many contemporary Hollywood movies.The evil ones are being opposed by the “good angels” I call the Aeons, who are guiding us to a better future. Working through certain extraterrestrials, such as the Nordics or The Nine, the Aeons have prevented nuclear war, brought the internet into being to help people communicate globally, and are working through many teachers and groups to bring peace, calm, love, and forgiveness to the fore. This war between good and evil for the fate and soul of Earth and humanity has been raging at fever pitch for a couple of centuries now. JFK and others like him have been martyrs to this war but in the end will triumph in spirit. Other martyrs I have treated in my own writing were the seven Challenger astronauts that NASA killed in their haste to do the bidding of their political masters by launching flawed machinery for dubious ends.In standing up to the CIA, MJ-12, and the military, JFK proved himself to be a hero for the ages. If only other presidents since JFK had done the same, modern history would have been far different. These presidents and their relationship to the secret government have been as follows:Lyndon B. Johnson—complicit in the plot to kill JFK; became president as a result.Richard M. Nixon—loose cannon who was removed from office by the CIA set-up known as Watergate.Gerald Ford—member of the Warren Commission; installed as president as a “safe” place-holder.Jimmy Carter—a Rockefeller protégé but with a disturbing degree of conscience; removed from office by various covert ops, including the 1980 recession and the Iran hostage crisis.Ronald Reagan—ideal front man for takeover of society by the secret government and their banking allies; having failed to assassinate him, the CIA still kept him under tight control.George H.W. Bush—ringleader from the CIA inner circle but a “Bozo” as president.Bill Clinton—while governor of Arkansas, told by a CIA operative they had decided to make him president; they did, and Clinton did as he was told; became completely ineffective after the CIA entrapped him through the Monica Lewinsky affair.George W. Bush—totally without qualifications; trotted out to cover-up 9/11 and start new Middle East wars; Federal Reserve kept his administration afloat financially by creating housing bubble.Barack Obama—equally without qualifications; trotted out to cover-up a final New World Order triumph that may be intended to take place in the near future but which the Aeons are unlikely to allow; meanwhile, American society is collapsing at every level, with the secret government stoking the flames by fomenting the phony Tea Party rebellion.So congratulations to Dr. Michael Salla in moving our knowledge of JFK and his role in the deeper history of our time further along in such a courageous and coherent manner. There are many indications that the CIA has waned in its influence in the last couple of decades, though its power may have been supplanted by units within the nether regions of the Pentagon and/or other agencies, including the Mossad. Nevertheless, Dr. Salla’s book Kennedy’s Last Stand: Eisenhower, UFOs, MJ-12 & JFK’s Assassination is a must-read in furthering our understanding of these tremendously important themes and events. The human drama set in motion in Dealey Plaza is far from over. Available at Amazon.comRichard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who now teaches meditation at the Lifestream Center in Roanoke, VA, USA. His latest book is “Return of the Aeons: The Planetary Spiritual Ascension.” His websites are http://www.richardccook.com and http://www.meditatehealascend.org.Copyright 2013 by Richard C. Cook:

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Fri Jan 06, 2017 10:17 pm

01.06.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 18:SPECIAL NOTE: (Dr. Henry Kissinger, called The OVERSEER, was one of the most recent in charge of Cover-Ups for Majestic Twelve. Additionally Majestic Twelve is in charge of THE WORLD'S DRUG TRAFFICKING. Majestic Twelve is OVER the CIA . BB.)MAJESTIC TWELVE OPERATIONS: Summary: MJ-12 is a ULTRA TOP SECRET Research and Development, Intelligence Operation established by President Truman on September 24, 1947. MJ-12 was a "Committee" set up inside the NSC. In 1954, President Eisenhower signed the Secret Executive Order, "Order Number 54-12".(NSC=National Security Counsel).MJ-12 is a ULTRA TOP SECRET Research and Development, Intelligence Operation established by President Truman on September 24, 1947. MJ-12 was a "Committee" set up inside the NSC. In 1954, President Eisenhower signed the Secret Executive Order, "Order Number 54-12".(NSC=National Security Counsel).The NSC called this group the "54-12" committee which gave the President responsibility of approving all "Black" covert projects. This committee has undergone several changes over the years, and since then, has been called the "Special Committee"; the "303 Committee" and currently the "40 Committee". It is described as the "Directorate" of the NSC. The "40 Committee" (PI-40) has access to advanced technology and teams to cover-up, "the cover-ups". In the past, this committee was headed by Dr. Henry Kissenger (Code name: "The Overseer").OPERATION MAJORITY - CR-20M7/6.2 - FILE: MTR/K-25 MWC/JL - AFMWC/1972 USN:Operation Majority is the name of the operation responsible for every aspect, project and all consequences of Alien presence on earth. MAJESTY was listed as the code name for the President of the United States for communications concerning this information. GRUDGE contains 16 volumes of documented information collected from the beginning of the United States investigation of the Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO's) and Identified Alien Crafts (IACs). The project was funded by the CIA, (confidential funds, non-appropriated) and money from the illicit drug trade. (It was rumored in the higher echelon's of the Air Force that participation in the illegal drug trade was justified in that it would identify and eliminate the weak elements of our society.) The purpose of GRUDGE was to collect all scientific, technological, medical and intelligence information from UFO & IAC sightings as well as contacts with Alien Life Forms. This orderly file of collected information has been used to advance the United States Air Force Space Program, (ULTRA TOP SECRET). JASON SOCIETY (Jason Scholars) Former President Eisenhower commissioned a secret society known as the Jason Society (or Jason Scholars) under the leadership of the following; Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Welsh Dulles, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, President of the Trilateral Commission from 1973 until 1976, and Dr. Henry Kissenger, leader of the scientific effort, to sift through all the facts, evidence, technology, lies and deceptions and find the truth of the Alien question. The society was made up of thirty two (32) of the most prominent men in the USA. MJ-12 is the name of the secret control group inside the Jason Society. The top 12 members of the 32 members of the Jason Society were designated as MJ-12. MJ-12 has control of everything. They are designated by the code J-1, J-2, J-3, etc. all the way through the members of the Jason Society. The director of Central Intelligence was appointed J-1 and is the Director of the MJ-12 group. MJ-12 use to only be responsible to the President of the United States (not true anymore). The actual cost of funding the Alien connected projects is higher than anything you could imagine! Believe it or not, MJ-12 runs most of the worlds illegal drug trade. This was done to hide funding and thus keep the secret from congress and the people of the United States. It was justified in that it would identify and eliminate the weak and undesired elements of our society. A secret meeting place was constructed for the MJ-12 group in Maryland and is only accessible by air. It contains full living, recreational, and other facilities for the MJ-12 group and the Jason Society. It is code named "The Country Club". The land for The Country Club was donated by the Rockefeller family. Only those with ULTRA TOP SECRET - MAJI clearances are allowed to go there. MAJI - Majority Agency for Joint Intelligence. All information, disinformation, and intelligence is gathered and evaluated by this agency. This agency is responsible for all disinformation and operates in conjunction with the CIA, NSA, DIA, and the Office of Naval Intelligence. This is a very powerful organization and all Alien projects are under its control. MAJI is responsible only to MJ-12. MAJIC is the security classification and clearance of all Alien connected material, projects, and information. MAJIC - means MAJI controlled (MAJI plus controlled = MAJIC):NOTE: MJ-1 is the classification for the director of MAJI, who is the director of the CIA and reports only to the President. Other members of MAJI are designnated MJ-2, MJ-3, etc. This is why there is some confusion about references of MJ-12, the group or MJ-12 the person. * Designation for MJ-12, the group are MAJI or MAJIC:* Designation in official documents about MJ-12 means the person only. In 1947, PROJECT SIGN was created to acquire as much information as possible about UFO's, their performance characteristics and their purposes. In order to preserve security, liason between Project Sign and MJ-12 was limited to two individuals within the intelligence division of the Air Material Command whose roll was to pass along certain types of information through channels. Project Sign evolved Project Grudge in December of 1948. Project Grudge had an overt civilian counterpart named PROJECT BLUE BOOK, with which we are all familiar. Only "Safe" reports were passed to Project Blue Book. MJ-12 was originally organized by General George C. Marshall in July 1947 to study the Roswell-Magdalena UFO crash recovery and debris. Admiral Hillenkoetter, director of the CIA from May 1, 1947 until September 1950, decided to activate the "Robertson Panel," which was designed to monitor civilian UFO study groups that were appearing all over the country. He also joined NICAP in 1956 and was chosen as a member of its board of directors. It was from this position that he was able to act as the MJ-12 "Mole", along with his team of other covert experts. They were able to steer NICAP in any direction they wanted to go. With the "Flying Saucer Program" under complete control of MJ-12 and with the physical evidence hidden away, General Marshall felt more at ease with this very bizarre situation. These men and their successors have most successfully kept most of the public fooled up to the present, including much of the western world, by setting up false experts and throwing their influence behind them to make their plan work, with considerable success until now. Within 6 months of the Roswell crash on July 2, 1947 and the finding of another crashed UFO at San Augustine Flats near Magdalena, New Mexico on July 3, 1947, a great deal of reorganization of agencies and shuffling of people took place. The main thrust behind the original "Security Lid", and the very reason for its construction, was the analysis and attempted duplication of the technologies of the discs. The activity was headed up by the following groups. * The Research and Development Board (R&DB) * Air Force Research and Development (AFRD) * The Office of Naval Research (ONR) * CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence (CIA-OSI) * NSA Office of Scientific Intelligence (NSA-OSI) No single one of these groups knew the whole story. Each group was to know only the parts that MJ-12 allowed them to know. MJ-12 also operates through the various civilian intelligence and investigative groups. The CIA and FBI are manipulated by MJ-12 to carry out their purposes. The NSA was created in the first place to protect the secret of the recovered flying discs, and eventually got complete control over all communication intelligence. This control allows the NSA to monitor any individual through mail, telephone, telexes, telegrams, and now through on-line computers, monitoring private and personal communications as they may desire.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:35 am

01.07.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 19A - CONTINUED IN 19B:SPECIAL NOTE: BOTH MEYER LANSKY AND JAMES JESUS ANGLETON HAD THE COMPROMISING SEXUAL PICTURES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER WITH CLYDE TOLSON. THIS PARTIALLY EXPLAINS MEYER LANSKY's ABILITY TO KEEP HOOVER AWAY FROM THE MAFIA. FURTHER IT ALSO STRONGLY INDICATES HOW ANGLETON WAS ABLE KEEP HOOVER's FOCUS ON LEE HARVEY OSWALD AND THE LONE NUT THEORY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING AFTER JFK's REMOVAL, AND HOW ANGLETON WAS ABLE TO FURTHER DIRECT HOOVER's CONTROL OVER THE WARREN COMMISSION. BB.James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 1:Tuesday, 15 August 2000:James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 1:Written by Lisa Pease:An excerpt from the first of a two-part study of the CIA counterintelligence chief who very likely was in control of the Lee Harvey Oswald 'legend'.From the July-August 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 5) of Probe:"f intelligence-gathering agencies are as necessary as I believe them to be, then they must repay our blind trust and acknowledge that there may always be moments in all secret organizations when tyranny manages to slip its leash. "This was one of those occasions."1August 12, 1990, was a very big day for Susan Hendrickson. While looking at a cliff in South Dakota, she saw something no one else had noticed before. Where others had seen only a sheer wall of rock, she thought she saw something more special. In the wall of a cliff, she found the outline of a skeleton that proved to be of enormous importance. The skeleton this amateur paleontologist discovered now bears her name, Sue, in Chicago's Field Museum, and is the largest and most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex ever found. From an outline, Sue helped reconstruct the past.After a succession of ever more interesting file releases from the National Archives regarding the Kennedy assassination, it's time we started recognizing the outline of one of the biggest skeletons in our national closet, the outline of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy. Each new release fits into one cohesive picture. And no single figure is more prominent in this outline than the man who headed the CIA's counterintelligence unit for 25 years, James Jesus Angleton. It was in his realm that a secret, restricted file on a man named Lee Oswald was opened, long before the assassination. History professor and former intelligence analyst John Newman has deemed this curious item "the smoking file" because the lies related to it are so serious as to suggest the CIA had much to do with Oswald's activities just prior to the assassination of President Kennedy, something the CIA has consistently denied. What was the nature of that involvement and how far did it reach? One cannot answer that without examining the near omnipresence of Angleton in all matters surrounding the assassination. Over this two-part series, we will explore how Angleton and his associates are present at every twist and turn in this case, both before the assassination and after.Background:James Jesus Angleton was the son of James Hugh Angleton, an NCR executive who had once participated in General Pershing's pursuit in Mexico of Pancho Villa, and Carmen Moreno, a Mexican woman. He grew up in Boise, Idaho and later Dayton, Ohio, where NCR was headquartered. At the age of fourteen, his family moved to Milan, Italy (where NCR manufactured cash registers). Angleton spent summers at British prep schools and Malvern College. He participated in international Boy Scout Jamboree events in Scotland, Hungary and Holland. Angleton biographer Tom Mangold indicates that when the Nazis took over the Boy Scouts in Germany, Angleton made friends with some anti-Nazi leaders and carried their letters back to the founder of the international Boy Scout movement in England. Both father and son would serve the OSS. Angleton's father was described by Max Corvo, a top OSS officer in Italy, as "ultra-conservative, a sympathizer with Fascist officials. He certainly was not unfriendly with the Fascists."2When he reached college age, Angleton attended Yale, where Angleton first showed a pension for staying up all night. Insomnia was to plague him most of his life. Although many who knew him described him as "brilliant," Angleton's record at Yale was undistinguished; during his junior and senior years he received two F's and four D's, and ended up withdrawing from another class relating to his major, English. But Angleton managed to impress teachers with his mysteriousness, his apparent maturity, and his self-assurance.Angleton took a serious interest in poetry and, with Reed Whittemore, co-edited the poetry magazine Furiouso, which included poems by e e cummings and Ezra Pound, among other notables. Because of his interest in this area, he was to be called by some the "Poet-Spy."After graduating in the lowest 25% of his class, Angleton enrolled at Harvard Law School. According to Mangold, "Angleton's move to Harvard was not the consequence of any strong ambition to study law. Rather, like many young men at the time, he was putting his future on hold." During his Harvard period, Angleton met and married his wife, Cicely D'Autremont. The marriage took place a few weeks after Angleton had been drafted into the Army. Shortly thereafter, through the combined efforts of his OSS father, and his former Yale English professor Norman Pearson, then heading up the OSS Counterintelligence effort in London, Angleton was transferred to London to study Italian matters for X-2, the OSS counterintelligence component.It was during this period that Angleton met Kim Philby, the man who would become every counterintelligence officer's nightmare. Philby rose to a position of great influence in the British intelligence service, until he was finally exposed as a Soviet agent and fled behind the Iron Curtain. Angleton was devastated by this, despite having been warned by Bill Harvey at an early time that Philby looked like a mole.In October of 1944, Angleton was transferred to Rome as commanding officer of Special Counterintelligence Unit Z, a joint American-British detachment. Less than half a year later, Angleton was made the Chief of X-2 in Italy. He was the youngest X-2 chief across OSS. His staff included Raymond G. Rocca, who would loyally serve by his side until Angleton's ouster from the CIA in 1974.While he was clearly an accomplished counterintelligence expert by this time, there was another aspect which deserves mention. In his book The Real Spy World, longtime CIA officer Miles Copeland describes, through a slightly fictionalized veil in which he calls Angleton by the false nickname "Mother," a different story. For background, SI, referenced within, was, according to Copeland, an OSS division which X-2 officers held in contempt. According to Copeland:In 1946, an X-2 officer known within the organization as "Mother" took a lot of information on Palestine from The New York Times; spooked it up a bit with fabricated details, places, and claims of supersecret sources; and sent it to the head of SI, Stephen Penrose, for appraisal. After studying it carefully, Penrose and his assistants decided that the material was "genuine," that its source must be very deep inside secret Zionist and Arab terrorist groups, and that arrangements should be made for developing the sources into a regular espionage network. Mother then negotiated with Penrose for a budget, meanwhile leading the SI officers through a maze of fake names, fake background reports, and the like, and finally established that SI would be willing to pay as much as $100,000 a year out of what was left of OSS funds. Mother then confessed that the whole thing was a hoax and that the information could have been acquired for 25 cents through the purchase of five issues of The New York Times.3In other words, Angleton's activities, however successful, were not limited to acts of loyalty to his fellow intelligence compatriots, but could occasionally be directed to more personal, vindictive measures. Copeland paints this as a jolly escapade. But in his footnotes, he admits that Penrose, against whom this operation was conducted, suffered a near-breakdown as a result, and was transferred to less stressful jobs. "[Penrose] and various other top people in SI (with a few conspicuous exceptions, such as Richard Helms, who defected to X-2 and went on to become the CIA's director) were generally thought to be ëtoo Christ-like for the spy business,' as Mother put it."4 Copeland, by the way, was one of twenty-five OSS officers Angleton wanted to remember in his 1949 will. Others included Allen Dulles, "the operator, the patriot;" Richard Helms; and Ray Rocca.5After the war, Angleton did not wish to return to his new wife, nor his son, born in his absence, and chose instead to remain in action in Europe. X-2 was folded into the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), ostensibly a War Department unit and a temporary holding place for the then defunct OSS.Two years after the war, Angleton would return stateside to his wife and son to work for the amalgam of temporary intelligence agencies that would eventually become the CIA. There, he would achieve notoriety for his late hours, and for being, as his secretary Gloria Loomis related, "a terrible taskmaster."6The SSU and other remaining intelligence units evolved over time into two separate pieces ñ the Office of Special Operations (OSO), and the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Richard Helms served with Angleton and Rocca in the OSO. Stewart Alsop, in his book The Center, the "Prudent Professionals," labeled the OSO people the "Prudent Professionals." Alsop called the OPC crowd the "Bold Easterners." The OPC included Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Edward Lansdale, Desmond Fitzgerald and Tracy Barnes.In Italy, 1947, Angleton participated in an OSO operation given to a group called SPG, or Special Procedures Group, in which propaganda and other means were used to keep the Italians from voting any Communists into office.7 Other means included the Mafia. "Wild Bill" Donovan, founder of the OSS, helped release "Lucky" Luciano and other Mafia criminals from jail in New York so they could return to Italy and provide not only contacts, but if necessary, the strong-arm tactics needed to win the war against incipient Communism in Italy. Angleton's later reported contacts with the Mob may well stem back to this period.One of the groups most interested in defeating the communists in Italy was, not surprisingly, the Vatican. Angleton both gave and received intelligence to and from the Vatican. Among Angleton's most famous agents in Italy was Mons Giovanni Montini. Montini would become famous in 1963 when he became Pope Paul VI.8 Angleton has been named as a source for funds which were used to defeat the Communists. In return, evidently, Angleton obtained access to the Ratlines the Vatican was using to move people out of Europe to safety abroad. Angleton and others from the State Department used the Ratlines to ferry Nazis to South America.9The OPC crowd held enormous sway in the early days of the CIA, but that changed in the wake of the spectacular failure at the Bay of Pigs. Curiously, Richard Helms and Angleton both saw their careers rise by standing on the sidelines and keeping free of all dealings related to the Bay of Pigs.Angleton made an interesting comment about the Bay of Pigs episode. He told the HSCA that before the Bay of Pigs, he had asked Bissell, "Do you have an escape hatch?" He asked Bissell most plainly, "In case the thing falls flat on its face is there someone who goes to Castro and says, you have won the battle. What is your price ?'" Angleton explained to the HSCA that he was trying to say, "have you planned for the failure as much as planned for the success ?" The implication was that this was Angleton's own modus operandi in such matters.10 We would do well to remember that statement in the context of the Kennedy assassination and cover-up.During the period between the end of the war and the formation of the CIA, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, the establishment lawyer who created the OSS, lobbied long and hard for a single intelligence agency to pick up where the OSS had left off, running secret operations and gathering human intelligence or "humint" in new and creative ways. In the end, although Donovan would not be a part of it, the Central Intelligence Agency or CIA was ultimately formed through the National Security Act of 1947.Before the CIA was created, many in Congress feared that the creation of a new intelligence agency would lead to a police state similar to the one they had just defeated in Germany, and refused to back Donovan's efforts. But the loudest protest came from J. Edgar Hoover, who feared a direct encroachment upon the FBI's turf. One could argue that the OSS people won because they made the better case. But there is another possibility here.Angleton, Hoover and Blackmail:In Tony Summers' book about J. Edgar Hoover, Official and Confidential, Summers showed that Meyer Lansky, a top Mob figure, had blackmail power over Hoover through possession of photos that showed Hoover and his lifelong friend and close associate Clyde Tolson together sexually. In the paperback edition of the same book, Summers introduced another figure who evidently had possession of such photos: James Angleton. If Angleton had such photos, imagine how he could have used them to force the FBI's hand during the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.Summers names two sources for this allegation: former OSS officer John Weitz, and the curious Gordon Novel. Weitz claimed he had been showed the picture by the host of a dinner party in the fifties. "It was not a good picture and was clearly taken from some distance away, but it showed two men apparently engaged in homosexual activity. The host said the men were Hoover and Tolson ...." Summers added in the 1994 version, "Since first publication of this book, Weitz has revealed that his host was James Angleton."11Novel's account is even more interesting. Novel said that Angleton had shown him some photos of Hoover and Tolson in 1967, when Novel was involved in New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's case against Clay Shaw. "I asked him if they were fakes, " Novel recounted, "but he said they were real, that they'd been taken with a special lens. They looked authentic to me ...." Novel's explanation of why Angleton showed him the pictures is even more interesting:I was pursuing a lawsuit against Garrison, which Hoover wanted me to drop but which my contacts in the Johnson administration and at CIA wanted me to pursue. I'd been told I would incur Hoover's wrath if I went ahead, but Angleton was demonstrating that Hoover was not invulnerable, that the Agency had enough power to make him come to heel. I had the impression that this was not the first time the sex pictures had been used. Angleton told me to go see Hoover and tell him I'd seen the sex photographs. Later, I went to the Mayflower Hotel and spoke to Hoover. He was with Tolson, sitting in the Rib Room. When I mentioned that I had seen the sex photographs, and that Angleton had sent me, Tolson nearly choked on his food."12Now, Novel has been known to fell a few tall tales in his day. But he has on other occasions been forthcoming with interesting and sometimes self-incriminating material (such as his own participation in the Houma raid and the association between David Phillips and Guy Banister).13 Given Weitz's corroboration, and given Angleton's enormous power over many in high places, Novel's account rings true. Novel added that Angleton claimed the photos had been taken around 1946.14 During the 1945-1947 timeframe, Hoover was battling hard to prevent the creation of any other intelligence organization separate from the FBI. And during this period, Angleton was involved with the Mafia in the Italian campaign. It's certainly possible under such circumstances that Lansky or one of his associates may have shared the photos with Angleton. And the reverse case can also be considered.Miles Copeland adds additional credibility to this scenario in his account of this period. "Penetration begins at home," Copeland has Angleton/"Mother" saying, "and if we can't find out what's going on in the offices where our future is being planned, we don't deserve to be in business."15 Copeland presented this scenario:There are several stories in the CIA's secret annals to explain how the dispute was settled, but although they "make better history," as Allen Dulles used to say, they are only half-truths and much less consistent with the ways of government than the true ones. Old-timers at the Agency swear that the anti-espionage people would almost certainly have won out had it not been for the fact that an Army colonel who had been assigned to the new management group charged with the job of organizing the new Agency suborned secretaries in the FBI, the State Department, and the Defense Department and organized them into an espionage network which proved not only the superiority of espionage over other forms of acquiring "humint" (i.e. intelligence on what specific human beings think and do in privacy), but the necessity for its being systemized and tightly controlled. The colonel was fired, as were the secretaries, but by that time General John Magruder, then head of the group that was organizing the CIA, had in his hands a strong argument for creating a professional espionage service and putting it under a single organization. Also, thanks to the secretaries and their Army spymaster, he had enough material to silence enemies of the new Agency – including even J. Edgar Hoover, since Magruder was among the very few top bureaucrats in Washington on whom Mr. Hoover didn't have material for retaliation.16Is he saying what he appears to be saying? Copeland added, cryptically, "The success of the old SSU cadre (former OSS and future CIA officers) in perpetuating itself has been due in part to an extraordinary capacity for Byzantine intrigue ...." And in a footnote to this phrase, Copeland explains, still somewhat cryptically, "This intrigue was mainly to keep ëThe Hill' off its back." Copeland seems to be insinuating that more people than Hoover were blackmailed to ensure the creation and perpetuation of the CIA.David Wise also lends credence to such a scenario with this episode. Thomas Braden, a CIA media operative was confronted by Dulles over a remark Braden had about one of Dulles' professional relationships. Wise recounted what followed:"You'd better watch out," [Allen] Dulles warned him. "Jimmy's got his eye on you." Braden said he drew the obvious conclusion: James Angleton had bugged his bedroom and was picking up pillow talk between himself and his wife, Joan. But Braden said he was only mildly surprised at the incident, because Angleton was known to have bugs all over town.17Braden described how Angleton would enter Dulles's office "first thing in the morning" to report the take from the overnight taps:"He used to delight Allen with stories of what happened at people's dinner parties ... Jim used to come into Allen's office and Allen would say, ëHow's the fishing? And Jim would say, ëWell, I got a few nibbles last night.' It was all done in the guise of fishing talk."18More to the point, Braden was upset because "some senator or representative might say something that might be of use to the Agency. I didn't think that was right. I think Jim was amoral."19 It would not be beyond belief that Angleton routinely used information gathered through clearly illegal taps to blackmail people into supporting his efforts. No wonder some of his Agency associates feared him.Indeed, just about everyone in the Agency who knew Angleton came to fear him and to avoid crossing his path. This extended from subordinates to some of the highest officials to serve the agency, including Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. Angleton was called "no-knock" because he had unprecedented access to senior agency officials. Said Braden,"He always came alone and had this aura of secrecy about him, something that made him stand out – even among other secretive CIA officers. In those days, there was a general CIA camaraderie, but Jim made himself exempt from this. He was a loner who worked alone."20Angleton knew that knowledge was power, so not only would he go to extraordinary lengths to obtain such, he would also lord his knowledge over others, especially incoming CIA directors. Said one Angleton contemporary,"He would put each new director through the embarrassment of having to beg him to indoctrinate them in important CIA matters. Jim was enormously clever, he relished his bureaucratic power and was expert at using it. He was utterly contemptuous of the chain of command. He had a keen sense of what the traffic would bear in relation to his own interests. It worked like this: when a new director came in, Jim would stay in his own office out of sight. If a top staff meeting were requested, he simply wouldn't attend and would offer endless delays. He was a master at waiting to see the new director alone – on his own terms and with his own agenda."21Angleton's most powerful patrons were Allen Dulles and Richard Helms. As biographer Tom Mangold described it,He was extended such trust by his supervisors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities. The result was that his subsequent actions were performed without bureaucratic interference. The simple fact is that if Angleton wanted something done, it was done. He had the experience, the patronage, and the clout.22It wasn't until William Colby, a longtime nemesis of Angleton's, became the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) that Angleton's power was dimmed, and eventually extinguished. But it was a long time coming.Angleton and the CIA:Before examining Angleton's relationship with Oswald, it would be useful to understand Angleton's relationship with the CIA. Angleton ran the Counterintelligence unit. The primary role of Counterintelligence is to protect agents from a foreign intelligence organization from uncovering CIA assets and operations. Another important role is the ability to disseminate disinformation to foreign intelligence services in an effort to create for them a false picture of reality, causing them to act in ways that may be ultimately against their own interests. In other words, Counterintelligence was a unit that conducted operations, not just research. For that reason, the CI staff resided inside the Directorate of Plans (DDP) and not on the analytical side of the agency.In addition to owning counterintelligence, Angleton also had control over the FBI's relationship with the Agency (he owned the liaison relationship between FBI and CIA), and sole control of the Israeli desk, which included liaison with their intelligence service, the Mossad.In the early days of the agency, units were given single-letter identifiers of (at least) A-D instead of names. Staff A later became Foreign Intelligence; Staff B became Operations; Staff C became Counterintelligence ; and Staff D, which dealt with NSA intercept material, among other more notorious activities, apparently was never called anything other than Staff D.23From the agency's inception until 1954, Staff C was run by William Harvey, a former FBI man who was to one day be introduced to President Kennedy as "America's James Bond." During this same period, Staff A was run by Angleton.After the publication of the Doolittle Report in 195424, Staff C, which then became simply Counterintelligence, was handed to Angleton. Harvey was given the coveted Berlin station, a vortex point for operations against the USSR.CI/SIG and Oswald:Angleton's complete counterintelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton's most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only "about four or five" people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O'Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton "Scotty" Miler, and very few others. Miler was, as of 1955, "either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O'Neal," according to Angleton.25 O'Neal, Egerter and Miler all play interesting roles in this case.SIG is all-important in the case of the Kennedy assassination because, for whatever reason, SIG held a 201 file on Lee Oswald prior to the assassination. Both the Church Committee and HSCA investigators fixated quickly on this point, because it made no sense under the CIA's scenario of their relationship (or, as they professed, non-relationship) with Oswald. What did SIG really do, and why would Oswald's file have been there? Why wasn't it opened when this ex-Marine (who had knowledge of the CIA's top secret U-2 program) defected in 1959, telling embassy personnel he might have something of special interest to share with the Soviets? Why didn't that set off alarm bells all over the place? Why was a 201 file on Oswald not opened for another year after that event? And why, when he returned to the States, did the CIA not debrief him? Or did they? These questions and more were adequately raised, to the HSCA's credit, but not adequately answered by CIA.Let's start with the first issue. What did SIG do ? Angleton described the primary task of SIG to the Church committee in this fashion:The primary task was the penetration of the Agency and the government and historical penetration cases are recruitment of U.S. officials in positions, code clerks. It had a very tight filing system of its own, and it was the only component in counterintelligence that had access to the security files and the personnel maintained by the Office of Security.26The Office of Security's primary role was to protect the CIA from harm. This involves monitoring the CIA's own employees and assets to ensure that no one leaks data about the CIA, or betrays the CIA in any way. Because of the nature of what was done there, Office of Security files were the most closely guarded in the Agency. It is significant, therefore, that Angleton's CI/SIG group had access to these files. It is also significant that the Office of Security also had a file on Oswald, and was running an operation against the FPCC at the time Oswald was attaching himself visibly to that organization.To the HSCA, Angleton gave a slightly enlarged definition:...it had many duties that had to do with other categories of sensitive cases involving Americans and other things which were not being handled by anybody else or just falling between the stools and so on.27Asked whether SIG's charter would elucidate its operational mandate, Angleton replied,It would probably be in fairly camoflauged terms, yes. It was not a unit, however, whose duties were in other words, explained to people. I mean, in training school and do on it was very much fuzzed over if anyone was laying out the CI staff.28According to Angleton's close associate Raymond G. Rocca, SIG...was set up to handle especially sensitive cases in the area of security or personnel and in particular, cases involving security of personnel who were also of operational interest, as operators.In other words, it was an interface with the Office of Security.29When asked what would cause CI/SIG to open a 201 file on someone, Rocca gave this answer:I would imagine that they would have had that occasion whenever a question arose that concerned people that came within the purview of the mission that I have described, namely, the penetration of our operations or the advancement of our particular interests with respect to the security of those operations .... I mean, there were many sensitive areas that involved aspects, that involved sources and access to materials that were of higher classification than what you have shown me.30When the conversation is brought around to Oswald in particular, Rocca's answer is even more interesting:Rocca: Let me go back and open a little parenthesis about this. What I regard now, in the light of what you said, is probably a too narrow view of what SIG was interested in.They were also concerned with Americans as a security threat in a community-wide sense, and they dealt with FBI cases, with the Office of Security cases, and with other cases on the same level, as they dealt with our own, basically .... It would be with respect to where and what had happened to DDP materials with respect to a defection in any of these places.Goldsmith: Again, though, Oswald had nothing to do with the DDP at this time, at least apparently.Rocca: I'm not saying that. You said it. [Emphasis added.]31Rocca's answer hangs out there, teasing us with ambiguity. Did Oswald have something to do with the Directorate of Plans, the DDP?...The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease.Notes1. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior / James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 10.2. Biographical data from Thomas Mangold, Cold Warrior, Chapter 2. This particular quote appears on page 33.3. Miles Copeland, The Real Spy War (London: First Sphere Books edition, 1978), pp. 41-42.4. Copeland, p. 42.5. Mangold, p. 45.6. Mangold, p. 44.7. Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrtes: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York, Pocket Books ed., 1979), p. 35.8. Mark Aarons and John Loftus, Unholy Trinity (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 89. There are several long passages about Angleton's relationship with Montini, the ratlines, and the Vatican throughout the book. Montini became Pope after the 1963 death of the very liberal Pope John XXIII, about whom the movie The Shoes of the Fisherman was made.9. Aarons and Loftus, p. 237.10. Angleton, 10/5/78 HSCA deposition, p. 92.11. Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential (New York: Pocket Books ed., 1994), p. 28012. Summers, pp. 280-28113. Lisa Pease, "Novel & Company: Phillips, Banister, Arcacha and Ferrie," Probe Vol. 4 No. 6 Sept-Oct 1997, p. 32.14. Summers, p. 28115. Copeland, p. 44.16. Copeland, p. 41.17. David Wise, Molehunt (New York: Avon Books ed., 1992), p. 3118. Wise, p. 32.19. Wise, p. 32.20. Mangold, p. 5121. Mangold, p. 5222. Mangold, p. 5223. Wise, p. 121.24. The Doolittle report contained this famous instruction: "If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of ëfiar play' must be reconsidered," and "We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us." Quoted in David Martin, Wilderness of Mirrors (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 62.25. Angleton 9/17/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition), p. 16.26. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 17.27. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.28. Angleton HSCA Deposition, p. 146.29. HSCA Deposition of Raymond G. Rocca (hereafter Rocca HSCA Deposition), p. 20630. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 207.31. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 21832. HSCA Deposition of Ann Elizabeth Goldsborough Egerter (hereafter Egerter HSCA Deposition), p. 8.33. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 9.34. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 9-10.35. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 10.36. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 25.37. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 22-24.38. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 43-44.39. Angleton 2/6/75 Church Committee Deposition (hereafter Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition), p. 21. Schweiker says, "We had a CIA employee who testified to us that he saw a contact report on Oswald over at Langley."40. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 20-2641. The Eldon Henson story is documented in John Newman's Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). But a near identical episode is also described by David Atlee Phillips in his memoir, The Nightwatch (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977). Compare Phillips' account, pp. 162-164 (paperback version), with Newman's account, pp. 362-362. Then look at the document of this episode, published on page 507 of Newman's book. Note that "[redacted] witnessed meeting from nearby table." In his account, Phillips describes watching the trap his agent was setting for Hensen from a nearby table in a restaurant. According to the document, Hensen was speaking with Maria Luisa Calderon, a woman who appeared to perhaps have some foreknowledge of the assassination. (See Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 163-164.) Curiouser and curiouser.42. Newman, p. 32.43. Rocca HSCA deposition, p. 230.44. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 30.45. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 33.46. Reproductions of these cards can be seen in Newman, p. 479.47. Rocca HSCA deposition, pp. 226-227.48. Newman, pp. 221-222.49. Angleton 9/17/75 Deposition, p. 38 and p. 62. The project chief was John Mertz, and evidently Birch O'Neal was involved as well, (pp. 62, 64) but in Angleton's words, "Mr. Miler ... had the day to day work" and described Miler as the principal person to talk to about it. p. 120.50. Martin, p. 140.51. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 1552. Egerter HSCA Deposition, p. 30.53. Egerter HSCA Deposition, pp. 31-38.54. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 210.55. Rocca HSCA Depostion, p. 212.56. Philip Agee, Inside the Company: CIA Diary (New York: Bantam Books, 1989 ed.), p. 49.57. Letter from Sullivan to Belmont, dated May 13, 1964.58. Angleton 2/6/75 Deposition, pp. 34-3859. Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1976), p. 397.60. Smith, p. 397.61. Harvey's notes were uncovered by the Church Committee. Quotes here come from Martin, pp. 121-123.62. Wise, p. 121.63. Wise, p. 176.64. Powers, p. 107.65. Agee, p. 358.66. Bill Davy, Let Justice Be Done (Reston: Jordan Publishing, 1999), pp. 88-89 and Davy, "File Update", Probe, Jan-Feb 2000, pp. 4-5.67. Davy, Let Justice Be Done, p. 88.68. For an example, read about the Loginov episode in Cold Warrior, Chapter 1.69. Wise, p. 69.70. HSCA Deposition of Scelso (John Whitten), p. 71.71. "Hunt says C.I.A. Had Assassin Unit," New York Times 12/26/75, page 9, column 1.72. Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1991), p. 164.73. Martin, p. 34.74. Martin, p. 144.75. Angleton Deposition to the Church Committee, 6/19/75 (hereafter Angleton 6/19/76 Deposition), p. 87.76. Peter Wright, Spycatcher (New York: Dell, 1987), pp. 201-205.77. Angleton 6/19/75 Deposition, p. 84.78. Scelso/Whitten Deposition, p. 168-169.79. Rocca HSCA Deposition, pp. 8-9.80. Rocca HSCA Deposition, p. 9.81. RIF 104-10086-10003, date not readable, cable apparently from JMWAVE to the Mexico City Station.82. Cable 57610, from DIRECTOR to Mexico [ ] JMWAVE, dated 12 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.83. Agee, p. 319.84. Cable 58683, from DIRECTOR to MEXI, dated 16 Nov 65. See p. 29 this issue.Last modified on Sunday, 16 October 2016 19:11Published in John Fitzgerald Kennedy Tagged under JAMES ANGLETON CIA JFK ASSASSINATION LEE HARVEY OSWALDLisa PeaseLisa Pease was co-editor with Jim DiEugenio of Probe Magazine and also edited with him The Assassinations. She has written a number of ground-breaking essays on the connections between Freeport Sulphur, the Eastern Establishment and the CIA, on James Angleton, and on Sirhan and the RFK assassination. Lisa is currently finishing her book on the latter subject, the product of more than two decades of research. She also runs a blogspot on recent history and current events.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Sat Jan 07, 2017 4:39 am

01.07.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 19B - CONTINUATION FROM 19A:James Jesus Angleton and the Kennedy Assassination, Part 2:From the September-October 2000 issue (Vol. 7 No. 6) of Probe:Bobby knows so little about us. One night he began to talk of muffled suspicions and stifled half-certainties, and said to me, "I had my doubts about a few fellows in your agency, but I don't anymore. I can trust John McCone and I asked him if they had killed my brother, and I asked him in a way that he couldn't lie to me, and he said he had looked into it and they hadn't. I told that story to Hugh. You know how rarely he laughs aloud. He actually struck his thigh. "Yes," he said, "McCone was just the man to ask." "What," I asked him, "would you have answered?" "I would have told Bobby that if the job was done properly, I would not be able to give a correct answer." - From Norman Mailer's novel Harlot's Ghost. (The character of Hugh Montague (Harlot) is based on James Angleton):The most consistently prominent players in the assassination saga continue to be James Jesus Angleton and his counterintelligence staff. They held a file on Oswald predating the assassination by at least three years. After the assassination, Angleton and his closest associate, Ray Rocca, served as the gateway between the Warren Commission and the CIA. If anyone was in a position to move Oswald around prior to the assassination and control the cover-up afterwards, it was Angleton.The key associates of Angleton who show up frequently in the Oswald/JFK assassination story are Raymond G. "The Rock" Rocca, Ann Egerter, Scotty Miler, and Birch O'Neal. Rocca had been with Angleton since his OSS days in Italy, and would control the Warren Commission's relationship with the CIA. The latter three were members of the tiny CI/SIG unit. Egerter opened Oswald's 201 file under the name "Lee Henry Oswald." Scotty Miler controlled the watch list during the period when Oswald was placed on and taken off that list. Birch O'Neal controlled CI/SIG during the period of the building of Oswald's strange 201 file.In Part I, we examined the likelihood that Oswald was directly involved with Angleton's counterintelligence unit in the CIA. When queried about this, Anne Goodpasture, who played a role in the Mexico City aspects of Oswald's story, did not deny a relationship between the two:Q: Have you had any reason to believe that...CI staff had any role in respect to Oswald prior to the assassination?A: I don't know.1She was not asked if she had any knowledge, but if she had any "reason to believe." If she truly had no reason to believe this, her only possible response would have been "no." Her response indicates clearly that she does have some doubt about the matter, that she may indeed have had reason to believe this.Another group that shows up in a few places in the assassination story is Army intelligence. It is worth noting that, during the interim between the ending of the OSS and the formation of the CIA, Angleton served as a major in the Army and helped organize Army Intelligence's efforts to track down German agents who were using false identity cards.2 Angleton was not one to lose a contact. Once made, he would continue to use contacts for life.Other CIA people who show up often in this story include David Atlee Phillips of the Western Hemisphere division, who worked with Bill Harvey and later Des Fitzgerald on Cuban operations; Win Scott and his "right-hand man" Anne Goodpasture from the Mexico City station; John Whitten ("Scelso") of the Western Hemisphere, Division 3; Charlotte Bustos of the Mexico City desk at Headquarters; and Richard Helms and his deputy Thomas Karamessines, who play large roles in the pre- and post-assassination paper trail. We should also note that the entire Western Hemisphere was run by J. C. King, a man closely linked to Nelson Rockefeller. King himself had been involved in the CIA's assassination plots involving Castro and Trujillo.3Interweaving Mexican ThreadsThere are strange connections that link these various players. Shortly before the assassination, Oswald's CI/SIG-held 201 file was transferred to the Mexico City Headquarters desk, responsible to John Whitten and supported by desk officer Charlotte Bustos. (Bustos is identified as Elsie Scaleti in the Lopez Report.4)Bustos, Ann Egerter of Angleton's CI/SIG unit (the woman who opened the 201 file on "Lee Henry [sic] Oswald"), and Stephan Roll, Angleton's CI liaison to the SR (Soviet Russia) division, drafted the two now infamous communications that cause much suspicion of the CIA's involvement in the Kennedy assassination.5 Although the two communications were drafted at the same time, the cable to CIA in Mexico City describes Oswald as 5'10", 165 pounds, with light brown hair; whereas the teletype to the State Department, Navy and the FBI describes Oswald as being approximately 35 years old, 6' tall, with an athletic build and a receding hairline. Why would Angleton's people be collaborating with the Mexico City desk officer to mislead other agencies within the government unless they were in some measure trying to hide or protect Oswald's identity?Immediately following the assassination, Bustos allegedly found a photo of Oswald from the CIA's Mexico City surveillance operations. Phil Agee, Joseph Burkholder Smith, Daniel Watson, and Joseph Piccolo, all CIA employees at some point, recalled hearing aboutóand in the latter two cases, actually viewingósuch a photo. According to Agee, Bustos found the photo within an hour or two of the President's assassination. John Whitten said of Bustos that she had a "fantastic memory" and yet, like E. Howard Hunt, Bustos cannot recall what she was doing the day of the assassination.6 But Anne Goodpasture is the person who supplied the photo the CIA showed to the FBI as a possible picture of "Oswald". (Curiously, Goodpasture said in an unsworn ARRB interview that headquarters refused to send a photo of Oswald to Mexico City, and she was never sure why.7 Of course we know from Oswald's CIA file that indeed news clippings from his defection with his photo were present, so the CIA did have a photo of Oswald to share, and could also have easily obtained more had they asked the Navy or FBI.)If Bustos had found a photo, another question is raised. Was Bustos' picture a true picture of Oswald? Or was it a picture of just another person who was not Oswald? If Bustos' picture was of Oswald, for the CIA to have supplied Goodpasture's "Mystery Man" photo in place of the real photo suggests a deliberate effort to deceive. In that case, Bustos' picture would have to have been "disappeared" by the agency, lest the evidence of their deception come to light. And if Bustos' picture was not Oswald but another man who looked like him, that also suggests a deliberate effort to deceive, as the picture was shown to at least two others within the CIA as evidence that Oswald had been in Mexico City, a point which has never been fully proven. To date, the CIA has taken the only safe road available, claiming (despite multiple accounts to the contrary) that no such picture was ever found.Anne Goodpasture told Jeremy Gunn of the ARRB that she had worked at one point during her CIA career for James Angleton as a counterintelligence officer, and that it was the CI group that sent her to Mexico City in 1957.8 Asked to explain the difference between CE (counterespionage) and CI (counterintelligence), Goodpasture replied, "Counterespionage was the activity and Counterintelligence was the product."9From Mexico, Goodpasture had worked on the case of Rudolph Abel,10 a Soviet agent working in New York City and curiously, living one apartment below famed author, FPCC activist and latter-day CIA apologist Norman Mailer.11 Angleton said of Goodpasture, "I personally have had very little dealings with her but my men had had a lot of dealings with her. She was always in on very sensitive cases."12 Goodpasture was also involved with Staff D, which was seriously involved with several coup attempts and assassination plots. To the ARRB, Goodpasture downplayed her involvement in Staff D, claiming that she was simply involved in duplicating and distributing materials.13 However, according to Angleton, Goodpasture was "very close" to Bill Harvey.14Goodpasture maintained that in 1963 her sole duty was to the Mexico City station and Win Scott.15 Goodpasture tells us that Win Scott was "very, very conservative. He was from Alabama and I think he was a supporter of George Wallace."16Goodpasture was later to receive a career achievement award on the recommendation of David Atlee Phillips, who cited her for having discovered Oswald at the Cuban embassy. Goodpasture was responsible for delivering the "deep snow"17 photo of the Mexico "Mystery Man". Significantly for our purposes, Goodpasture was also the liaison and in most cases, the sole point of contact, outside of Win Scott, David Phillips, and Scott's deputy, Alan White, to the other agencies of the U.S. government regarding the Mexico City station's CIA operations.18 And like too many others in this small cadre of CIA employees, Goodpasture has trouble remembering the moment of Kennedy's assassination:I think I heard about it from a phone call from our outside person on the phone tap operation, and I believe it was around lunchtime when there weren't too many people there and as they all filtered back in, there was office gossip, but I have tried to remember. I've heard so many people say I can remember, I was standing at the telephone or I was in the drugstore, or I was in church and I really don't remember who all were there at the time. Dave Phillips said that someone from the military attaché's office came up and told him about it and I don't remember that....I don't even remember him being in the station at that time.19According to Eddie Lopez, Goodpasture, in addition to her duties for Scott, ran all of David Phillips' operations. When asked about Phillips' politics, Goodpasture tells a story that remains redacted, a fact especially disturbing when one considers the whole purpose of the ARRB was to release previously classified materials, not to add to the secrets. But from the nature of the testimony around the redacted portion, we can gather that she is giving us some indication that Phillips was not the liberal he painted himself to be. The redaction ends with Goodpasture saying,...but there again, I hate for things like this to be published because there are 2,000 – over 2,000 books already been [sic] written. The thing that they are looking for is something of this type that they can put in the other book to come that will be just short of slander, and I feel that I shouldn't really comment on the personalities for that reason. I don't want my former co-workers or in Phillips' case, his family, to think that I'm trying to project him as a personality that was a show-off or something other than the very sincere wonderful man that they feel that he is....20Phillips is the CIA man who most closely ties Angleton in the frequency of his appearance in the assassination story. Phillips appears to have been seen in the presence of Oswald by Antonio Veciana.21 And a "Mr. Phillips" who was running CIA operations against Cuba at a time when that was David Phillips' job was seen by Gordon Novel in the presence of Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, who were themselves in turn seen with Oswald. Oswald even rented an office in Banister's building that had previously been rented by Sergio Arcacha Smith.22 When the HSCA investigators tracked down the many false "Castro did it" leads, they kept tracing back to assets run by Phillips.23 Dan Hardway, who had much documentation to support that allegation, told Gaeton Fonzi,I'm firmly convinced now that he ran the red herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him. That's what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel.24Angleton was close friends with Win Scott and ran operations with him. Scott, in turn, was so close to Phillips that he recommended Phillips be his deputy in the Mexico City station while waiting for the next Deputy, Alan White, to arrive.25 Phillips, in turn, connects to JM/WAVE.26 JM/WAVE is another key component in the assassination story, because JM/WAVE trained assassins and participated in some of the plots against Castro. The line between Des FitzGerald's Special Affairs Staff (the replacement for Harvey's Task Force W) and the actions of JM/Wave is blurred. The weekend of the Kennedy assassination, John McCone's executive assistant Walt Elder saw Fitzgerald, and FitzGerald told Elder he had met with Rolando Cubela. He did not tell him that he had given him a poison pen to be used against Castro, nor that he had pretended to be an emissary of Bobby Kennedy's (Helms had told him not to worry, that he would approve that lie). No mention of assassination was made. But Elder had the distinct impression that FitzGerald was particularly upset that weekend. Evan Thomas, in his book The Very Best Men, painted the following scene:Elder was struck by FitzGerald's clear discomfort. "Des was normally imperturbable, but he was very disturbed about his involvement." The normally smooth operator was "shaking his head and wringing his hands. It was very uncharacteristic. That's why I remember it so clearly," Elder said in 1993. He thought FitzGerald was "distraught and overreacting."Des Fitzgerald's wife told author Evan Thomas that the first and last time she ever saw her husband break down in tears was when Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. Her husband had been upset from the moment of the assassination, and sat silently, watching the news along with millions of others around the globe. When Jack Ruby performed his deed, Fitzgerald began to cry, and said, somewhat cryptically, "Now we'll never know."27 Thomas evidently thinks this has something to do with Cubela. But does it? Cubela later turned out to be a double agent. But when was that known? Was the CIA trying to provoke Castro, knowing Cubela was his agent and planning a plot with him? Was the CIA engaging in a true assassination plot, or a deception they could later refer to in Castro-did-it scenarios?Angleton's Back Channel ?:If one was planning an assassination within CIA, wouldn't it make sense to take some precautions as to what was communicated, and through what channels? We saw in Part I of this article how Bill Harvey stressed, "never use the word 'assassination'" and that nothing should be put on paper. But some communications need to transpire nonetheless to pull an operation of that scale off. According to Anne Goodpasture, Angleton had a back channel to Mexico City, and possibly other stations as well:Q: Could you describe the different kinds of channels of communication that Mexico City had with CIA headquarters, and by that I mean cables, dispatches and that sort of thing, if you needóif Mexico City station needed to communicate with headquarters, what would be the different methods that could be done?A: Well, there would be cables, there would be dispatches, there would be intelligence reports, there would be attachments, I can't think of anything else.Q: For cable communications, was there more than one channel of cables used by CIA to go to headquarters?A: I can't really answer that but I think there was what they call back channel [sic], but I don't know the details of it. There again Mr. [Alan] White [, Scott's deputy in the Mexico City station] would be the more knowledgeable on that than I am or someone from communications.Q: Have you heard, for example, that CI may have had a back channel, not just in Mexico City but in other stations as well?A: Well, there's gossip that I think I have seen or have heard or I don't think I dreamed it, that they discussed things through the back channel, but I'm not sure what that was. You might checkóMr. Helms would be the person who would know.28So Angleton appeared to have a private channel he could use with Scott and presumably other areas around the world to communicate traffic too sensitive to be seen even by other sworn CIA operatives. And Helms knew about these....The rest of this article can be found in The Assassinations, edited by Jim DiEugenio and Lisa Pease:Notes:1. Anne Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, December 15, 1995, p. 90.2. Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 41.3. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 325, 348, 354, 738-740.4. Compare the Mexico City Report by Eddie Lopez and Dan Hardway (hereafter called the Lopez Report), p. 109, with the quote from the deposition of "Scelso", now known to be John Whitten (hereafter known as the Whitten deposition), p. 31. In both she is described as "sort of the Major Domo of the Branch."5. Bustos' involvement is related in the Lopez Report, and Roll's involvement is revealed in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995). Egerter's involvement is noted in both.6. See "Who's Running the Country" by Lisa Pease in the Vol. 4 No. 2 (Jan-February, 1997) issue of Probe for sourcing. The allegation and investigation of Bustos' photo is investigated in the Lopez Report.7. Anne Goodpasture ARRB Interview (unsworn, not her deposition), April 23, 1998, p. 9.8. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, pp. 9, 10.9. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 12.10. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 37.11. Mark Riebling, Wedge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), p. 145-146.12. James Angleton HSCA deposition, October 5, 1978, p. 157.13. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, pp. 13, 15.14. Angleton HSCA deposition, p. 157.15. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 22.16. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 57.17. "Deep snow" was the term given to this photo by David Phillip's friend, the FBI Legal AttachÈ in Mexico City, Clark Anderson. See the FBI memo from SA W. R. Heitman to SAIC, Dallas, dated 11/22/63 (released in 1994).18. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, pp. 19-20.19. Goodpasture ARRB Deposition, p. 28.20. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 59.21. See Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993) (much of the book is devoted to this topic), and Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime (New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998), pp. 370-371.22. Gordon Novel's Playboy deposition.23. Fonzi, pp. 292-293.24. Fonzi, p. 293.25. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 54.26. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, p. 54. Goodpasture confirmed that Phillips had liaison between Mexico City and JMWAVE.27. Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 308.28. Goodpasture ARRB deposition, pp. 39-40.Last modified on Sunday, 16 October 2016 19:16Published in John Fitzgerald Kennedy Tagged under JFK ASSASSINATION CIA JAMES ANGLETON LEE HARVEY OSWALDLisa PeaseLisa Pease was co-editor with Jim DiEugenio of Probe Magazine and also edited with him The Assassinations. She has written a number of ground-breaking essays on the connections between Freeport Sulphur, the Eastern Establishment and the CIA, on James Angleton, and on Sirhan and the RFK assassination. Lisa is currently finishing her book on the latter subject, the product of more than two decades of research. She also runs a blogspot on recent history and current events.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Sun Jan 08, 2017 4:01 am

01.08.2017:THE REMOVAL OF JFK # 20:JOAN MELLEN:Official website of Author and Temple University Professor Joan Mellen. Her twenty-two books, most recently "A Farewell To Justice," "Our Man In Haiti" and "The Great Game in Cuba," explore the history of the Central Intelligence Agency and its role in the planning and Cover-up of the Kennedy assassination.OUR MAN IN HAITITHE GREAT GAME IN CUBAA FAREWELL TO JUSTICEJIM GARRISON: HIS LIFE AND TIMES, THE EARLY YEARSLITERARY MATTERSBOOKS AND BOOKS PRESENTATIONCREATIVE WRITING AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITYDASHIELL HAMMETT LECTUREHAITIAN ART GALLERY PRESENTATIONPOLITICS AND FILMWHO RULES AMERICA ? HOW DID WE GET HERE ?JFK ASSASSINATION9/11 AND 11/22OTTO OTEPKA, ROBERT KENNEDY, WALTER SHERIDAN AND LEE OSWALDTHE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND THE CURRENT POLITICAL MOMENTWHO WAS LEE HARVEY OSWALD ?PHOTO GALLERY, CUBAJOAN MELLEN BOOKSTOREJOAN MELLENThe Kennedy Assassination and the Current Political Moment:JANUARY 28, 2007:THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION AND THE CURRENT POLITICAL MOMENT:by Joan Mellen:It happened going on forty-four years ago, and yet the murder of President Kennedy remains simultaneously a subject of fascination and yet is still taboo within mainstream discourse. You will not find a free exchange of views on the Kennedy assassination in the “New York Times” nor, to date, an acknowledgement of the unanswered questions arising from 9/11. This past November, I spoke at a Jewish Senior Center on the Upper West Side [in New York] where the director, Sara Tornay, remarked that the “Times” had listed the lecture the week before mine, and the lecture the week after. My talk on the Kennedy assassination had slipped down the memory hole. How come? she wondered.So I’m grateful to the 92nd Street Y for the liberalism of outlook and independence of mind that made this evening possible. The Kennedy assassination will not go away, and I’ll try to explain why, heartened as I am by the fact that the former governor of Minnesota, Arne Carlson, gave a speech in November entitled “The JFK Assassination: Its Impact on America’s History.” That’s my subject as well: How the Kennedy assassination illuminates the present political moment.The Kennedy assassination is present even in its absence in the recent film, “The Good Shepherd,” a movie about the CIA. Its central character, played by Matt Damon, is based largely on the late head of CIA Counter Intelligence, James Jesus Angleton. The distortions of “The Good Shepherd” return us to the meaning of the Kennedy assassination. James Angleton in real life was the mastermind not, as the film suggests, of the Bay of Pigs (that was Richard Bissell), but of a false defector program that sent spies into the Soviet Union. Among them was one Lee Harvey Oswald. I am basing this talk either on interviews I conducted for “A Farewell to Justice,” or on new interviews I’ve done since its publication a year or so ago. I am referring as well to some of the more than four million documents released under the JFK Records Collection Act and now residing in Maryland at the National Archives.It was actually an FBI document that demonstrates that Oswald, indeed one of Angleton’s assets in the Soviet Union, communicated back to the CIA through a CIA asset at American Express named Michael Jelisavcic. One of my discoveries for “A Farewell to Justice” was the original of a note that Oswald, arrested in New Orleans for a street fight, handed to the police lieutenant who was questioning him, Francis Martello. One CIA document refers to an FBI “65” file, an espionage file, for Jelisavic, a reference inadvertently unredacted when CIA declassified the document.This number clearly directs CIA to an espionage file. Oswald also had Jelisavcic’s name and room number in his possession. Angleton’s false defector program, not mentioned in “The Good Shepherd,” remains among CIA’s most closely guarded secrets, a secret necessary to preserve the fiction of the Warren Report.The figure of Lee Harvey Oswald, and his peculiar biography as a low-level intelligence agent, continues to haunt those whose paths he crossed. After “A Farewell to Justice” was published, this was last April, I drove down Alligator Highway in Central Florida to interview a very interesting nonagenarian named Otto Otepka. Mr. Otepka was high up in State Department security under the Eisenhower administration and into the 1960s. Routinely, he came upon the names of people who had defected, and whom it was his job to investigate for security purposes.Highly commended for his diligence, Mr. Otepka displayed to me, proudly, a wall filled with a display of framed commendations, including one signed by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on behalf of President Eisenhower. (Certainly in these times President Eisenhower seems to be a bonafide liberal, not only for his prescient remark about the military industrial complex, but for another of his observations, that most of America has accepted the idea of the New Deal, but for a few oil millionaires in Texas).Otepka saw at once that there was something unusual about Lee Oswald, “tourist.” As he placed this list of defectors into his security safe, Mr. Otepka planned to request that the CIA look into this individual, “Oswald.” A nighttime burglary, obviously an inside job, resulted in this file vanishing. Soon Otto Otepka was demoted to an inconsequential post, writing summaries of documents. Oswald’s “defection” was not to be scrutinized. Later I’ll explain whom Mr. Otepka believes was responsible for the burglary and the destruction of his career.This all took place in the early sixties. In the year 2006, “The Good Shepherd” still could not mention Angleton’s false defector program which would have driven the film to the door of the Kennedy assassination. Instead the film conveniently closes in 1961 at the time of the Bay of Pigs.That Oswald was an employee of the CIA I demonstrate in my book, a fact recently re-confirmed by a historian named Michael Kurtz. Professor Kurtz reports on an interview he did in 1981 with Hunter Leake, second in command at the New Orleans field office. Leake admitted that CIA used Oswald as a courier and that Oswald came to New Orleans in April 1963 because the CIA office there intended to use him for certain operations. Leake either was disaffected from the Agency, or, perhaps, was just an honest man. He admitted that he personally paid Oswald various sums of cash for his services. Oswald was on the CIA payroll, Leake knew. He himself paid Oswald’s CIA salary.Leake also explained in this telephone interview with Professor Kurtz why there was no documentation on Oswald’s employment with CIA in New Orleans. After President Kennedy’s assassination, he drove the files personally to Langley, Virginia. They were so voluminous that he had to rent a trailer to transport them. Shouldn’t revelations from so credible a source have made the newspapers or CNN? I don’t know why Hunter Leake, who figures prominently in “A Farewell to Justice,” talked to Professor Kurtz, but I discovered that the original Hunter Leake family estate, in 1927, was sold to purchase Hammond Junior College, which became Southeastern Louisiana University – where Professor Kurtz teaches.In “A Farewell to Justice,” I write for the first time that Oswald had also been enlisted by U.S. Customs in New Orleans, information I gleaned from the documents deposited at the National Archives by the Church Committee. Not a single newspaper or magazine or television program chose to notice this astonishing revelation. I show how the framing of Oswald in Louisiana by the CIA began even before the shooting in Dallas. I shall return to that subject.As you study the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, you discover repeatedly that the press relinquished its freedom more than forty years ago. The latest document I was sent came from the LBJ library in Austin. Dated 1967, it was a telegram from the “Newsweek” columnist, Hugh Aynesworth, to George Christian, Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary. Aynesworth was announcing that he was sending the President, in advance of publication, his latest attack on New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the better for the President to take steps against Garrison’s investigation.CIA releases, once marked “Secret,” are filled with revelations of how reporters, another was Al Burt, the Latin America editor of the “Miami Herald,” visited the CIA to be instructed on what was and was not in the Agency’s interest that he print. There are precedents for our present co-opted press, from FOX to CNN, its twin. Even Keith Olbermann on MSNBC seems unduly cautious.In his forthcoming memoir, “American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate & Beyond,” long time CIA operative, E. Howard Hunt, who died last Tuesday – as with Richard Helms, with his secrets intact – suggests that Lyndon Johnson should be viewed as the prime suspect in “having Kennedy liquidated.” It seems clear that Hunt, age 88, was still engaged in the business of drawing attention away from the massive evidence connecting CIA to the assassination. Lyndon Johnson, the direct beneficiary of the assassination, seemed to Hunt a likely target.Hunt was far too clever to regurgitate J. Edgar Hoover’s disinformation that the Mafia planned and then covered up this crime. His obvious intention was to provide a false sponsor, someone other than the Agency. Even Hunt didn’t bother to revive the fantasy that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or acted at all, in the assassination.The young Warren Commission lawyers could find no motive for Oswald’s shooting of President Kennedy, even as they blamed him. You might well ask, what, then, was the CIA’s motive? Return to 1963 and the pressure by both the CIA’s clandestine service and the Pentagon for a full-scale invasion of Cuba. President Kennedy opposed an American invasion of Cuba as not in the national interest, just as he had no intention of embedding us in the quagmire of a ground war in Vietnam. That was the first Texas President who profited from John F. Kennedy’s murder, and who did the bidding of those forces John Kennedy opposed.Look at Richard Reeves’ biography quoting President Kennedy’s fury at the sabotage of his presidency by the CIA. In the one true political moment in “The Good Shepherd,” Kennedy threatens to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and cast them to the winds. “I’ll get those CIA bastards if it’s the last thing I do,” Kennedy said, famously, underestimating his adversaries. The CIA’s “Executive Action” (read murder) capability was in place by 1963. CIA had already been involved in the murder and/or attempted murders of various heads of state, efforts outlined in detail in the papers of the Church Committee.Our mainstream press manages to avoid confronting those documents, writing about CIA as if it had no history, but was born in the aftermath of 9/11. They are particularly unwilling to connect our present political morass to past events. Foreign reporters have not been similarly restrained. On a recent fifteen minute magazine segment on BBC-2 this past November, came an extraordinary photograph connecting the assassination of John and Robert Kennedy. (You won’t find this information in that other Kennedy movie of this season, “Bobby”).That press photograph was taken at the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of the assassination of Robert Kennedy where a crowd had gathered to celebrate his victory in the California primary. Pictured standing together were three high level CIA operatives. One was Gordon Campbell, the second in command at JMWAVE, the big CIA station in Miami, from which emanated plans for the sabotage of Cuba and the assassination of Fidel Castro.With Campbell was a long-time CIA operative named David Sanchez Morales, who worked with CIA propaganda expert David Atlee Phillips, a figure I discuss at length in “A Farewell To Justice.” Morales had assisted Phillips in the 1954 coup against President Arbenz in Guatemala. Morales’ lawyer, Robert J. Walton, had quoted his client to the government investigator in Miami, Gaeton Fonzi: “I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch, and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard.”Morales was also close to a CIA operative named Felix Rodriguez, famously present at the murder of Che Guevara in Bolivia, so that he came away with Guevara’s wristwatch. Rodriguez was so close to George H. W. Bush that he included photographs with the Bushes in his autobiography. (Present in Dallas that November morning of the 22 nd were not only George H. W. Bush, shortly to depart for Tyler, then return that afternoon to Dallas, but also Richard Nixon. Neither Bush nor Nixon, of course, staged the shooting itself. But it does seem odd that they were in Dallas along with David Atlee Phillips.The third unlikely well-wisher of Robert Kennedy in this trio was CIA psychological warfare specialist, George Joannides. Joannides was CIA handler in Miami for an anti-Castro group called DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil). Lee Oswald’s adversary in his street scuffle in New Orleans was a man named Carlos Bringuier, who claimed to be the DRE representative in New Orleans. Both were arrested. All trails lead to Lee Harvey Oswald.That street fight was clearly staged, as I show in my book. I also discovered what Oswald actually said to Lieutenant Francis Martello, and which Martello chose not to share with the Warren Commission: “Call the FBI. Tell them you have Lee Oswald in custody.” Yet another recently declassified FBI document, again, once marked “Secret,” reveals information given to the Bureau by a CIA officer. Dated 11/23/63, it confirms that Oswald was indeed a shared agent of both agencies.It may be (here I’ll speculate, I hope for the last time), that the street fight on Canal Street that established Oswald as pro-Castro, purveyor of leaflets for “Fair Play For Cuba,” was a propaganda victory by Joannides, whose specialty was psychological warfare. Five years later, there Joannides apparently stands, awaiting the impending murder of Robert F. Kennedy. The BBC documentarian, Shane O’Sullivan, tells me that he plans to release a full-length film on the anniversary of Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June. I hope he has added further identifications to that photograph. I’ll just add that there was a complete blackout in the U.S. media of O’Sullivan’s BBC segment. On the website of the London GUARDIAN newspaper, you can find a report entitled, “Did The CIA Kill Bobby Kennedy?”I’m sure many in this audience are aware of the third recent moment at which the Kennedy assassination has surfaced. There are a few scant degrees of separation between1. the two Bush presidents.2. the role of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination.3. Lee Harvey Oswald, the CIA asset.This surprising invocation of the Kennedy assassination occurred on January 2 nd at the funeral of President Gerald Ford, the last surviving member of the Warren Commission. I’ll read this extraordinary revealing paragraph from George H. W. Bush’s eulogy for those who missed it:“After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness – and a conspiracy theorist can say what they will – but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this matter. Why ? Because Gerry Ford put his name on it and Gerry Ford’s word was always good.”Allow me to add that when amendments were offered to the Freedom of Information Act, enlarging public access to affairs of state, Gerald Ford vetoed the bill, only for Congress to override his veto. Ford was no more a supporter of the truth than Mr. Bush’s son. George H. W. Bush’s own word was not always so good either. There are powerful reasons why George H. W. Bush was motivated to invoke the Warren Report, even, amazingly, to refer to a “conspiracy theorist,” as if that designation would at once banish some truths he does not want available. Only two degrees of separation separate George H. W. Bush from Oswald himself.At his 1976 confirmation hearings for the post of Director of Central Intelligence, a post into which he was elevated by Gerald Ford, Bush denied that he had any prior connection to the CIA. This was a falsehood. At the National Archives, and on the Internet, is a CIA document directed to its clandestine service (Record Number 104-10310-10271) that reveals that when, in the 1950s, Bush founded Zapata Oil, his partner was one Thomas J. Devine, who was not only an oil wildcatter, but a long-time CIA staff employee. Thomas Devine’s name does not appear in the original papers of Zapata, but it does in the company Bush created shortly thereafter as “Zapata Offshore.”This CIA document reveals that Thomas Devine had informed George Bush of a CIA project with the cryptonym WUBRINY/LPDICTUM. It involved CIA proprietary commercial operations in foreign countries. By 1963, Devine had become not a former CIA employee, but ‘a cleared and witting contact” in the investment banking firm which managed the proprietary corporation WUSALINE. WUBRINY involved Haitian operations, in which, the documents reveal, a participant was George de Mohrenshildt, the Dallas CIA hander of – Lee Oswald.In late April 1963, in Haiti, de Mohrenshildt appeared to discuss investment possibilities. The CIA officer, the author of the document, named only as WUBRINY/1, had no idea of de Mohrenshildt’s already long-standing CIA connections, and in particular his role in shepherding Oswald in Dallas. De Mohrenshildt could safely pursue CIA interests in Haiti because it was that month, April 1963, that Lee Oswald, his charge, moved from Texas to New Orleans, on the orders of the CIA, with Oswald reporting to – Hunter Leake.A May 22, 1963 CIA document has de Mohrenshildt admitting he had “obtained some Texas financial backing” and had visited interested people In Washington regarding the candidacy of one M. Clemard Joseph Charles for President of Haiti, “as soon as Duvalier can be gotten out.” So we are reminded of CIA’s efforts to influence the political configurations of other countries – an obvious example is CIA’s obliging British Petroleum – for a price – and overthrowing Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, replacing him with the Shah.To summarize: George Bush is linked in April 1963, seven months before the Kennedy assassination, to a CIA project involving Lee Oswald’s handler, Count Sergei Georges de Mohrenshildt through his own CIA partner, Thomas Devine. Bush and Devine later traveled to Vietnam together, a trip for which the Department of Defense issued Devine an interim “Top Secret” clearance. No surprise there: Devine obviously had never left the Agency.On the day Gaeton Fonzi was to interview de Mohrenshildt for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, de Mohrenshildt was shot, his death ruled a suicide. Fonzi’s card was in his pocket. Let me refer you as well to Joseph McBride’s “Nation” magazine article where he exposed how George H. W. Bush was debriefed by the FBI about the Kennedy assassination on November 23 rd . The inadvertently released document refers to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” It was a different George Bush, George William Bush, who worked for the Agency, Bush claimed. But it wasn’t so. George William came forward to say he was never debriefed by anyone.Every road leads to the assassination of President Kennedy. What should also give us pause is that these documents about ZapataOffshore, which had offices on several continents, but never did much business, though the Offshore company most likely has received a suspicion business cash advance or two, as the CENTRO MONDIALE COMERCIALE in Rome, on whose board of director’s Garrison suspect Clay Shaw served, did little trade, and George Bush’s CIA partner, were released under the JFK Act as Kennedy assassination documents. So it is the Agency itself, not the dreaded “conspiracy theorists,” that links George H. W. Bush with the Kennedy assassination. Or: it’s the government that is the ultimate “conspiracy theorist.”It is the task of the historian to examine on whose behalf the CIA murdered President Kennedy. Although President Kennedy threatened the very existence of the Agency, and had begun to reduce its powers, and to restrict the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence, the motive goes beyond that. When we examine who benefited from the assassination, whose interests were served, despite the latest puff of smoke blown by E. Howard Hunt, we also go beyond the first Texas president, Lyndon Johnson, to the second and third Texas Presidents. Certain Texas businesses, among them Halliburton, of course, and then independent Brown and Root, were not doing particularly well in 1962 and 1963.Among those who benefited immediately from the removal of President Kennedy and the ascendancy of Lyndon Johnson was a fabulously successful wildcatter named David Harold, also known as D.H. for “dry hole” Byrd. (Not all the holes, of course, were dry). Byrd’s company LTV was about to go under. In early November, 1963, Byrd and a partner, James Ling, bought a sizable amount of outstanding LTV stock. Then LTV received the first defense contract from the Pentagon – for a fighter plane – accompanying the escalation of the war in Vietnam that was the direct result of the Kennedy assassination. Although that airplane was not ultimately built, LTV stock soared. As Byrd writes in his autobiography, “I’ve run fifty-two companies, many of them in no way connected with oil.” The man who brought George H. W. Bush west from Connecticut to Texas was named Neil Mallon, another of Byrd’s partners.Other Texas companies saved by the Vietnam War were Halliburton and Brown and Root, which Halliburton had purchased in – 1962. The Browns, even Herman, who began by hating Lyndon’s New Deal tendencies, were Johnson’s primary financial benefactors, as Robert Caro has shown. It was through my own research into Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation that I found a 1967 CIA document revealing that George Brown was a CIA asset, and none of the historians have noticed that.Other CIA documents list the executives of Texas petroleum companies who were CIA assets. The list is considerable. Although these documents were made available under the JFK Act, as with the story of George H. W. Bush and his CIA partner, the Kennedy assassination is not mentioned.From the government’s own records, we find connected:(1) the CIA angry about the Bay of Pigs, that CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba whose code name, “Zapata,” returns us to George H. W. Bush and his CIA partner, Devine(2) the military with its Vietnam defense contracts, and(3) the Texas Presidents.“Dry Hole” Byrd just happened to own the Texas School Book Depository, from which someone, not Lee Oswald, but someone, fired at the President on November 22 nd. Six weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, when Byrd wanted a souvenir of this historical building, he chose the South Westernmost window of the sixth floor, not the window from which Oswald purportedly fired with his creaky rifle with its loose telescopic sight, that was the Southeast. No, Byrd took the window from which a Dealey Plaza witness and his wife told the Warren Commission they saw a man with a gun. It seems D. H. Byrd knew exactly which window was the souvenir, and, by inference, that Oswald was no shooter.To contemplate the political context of the assassination, as Governor Carlson of Minnesota suggested that we do, we note that the President was shot down in front of a building owned by a Texas defense contractor who won the first defense contract of the escalated Vietnam War, an escalation possible only with the removal of President Kennedy. D. H. Byrd was a founding member of the Civil Air Patrol, that group which boasted a group in New Orleans led by one David Ferrie, Jim Garrison’s chief suspect, in which Lee Oswald participated as a teenager. Chronicling the CIA’s cover-up of the assassination, we must acknowledge that the Agency did not act in the assassination entirely on its own behalf.I believe we can trace to that November day in 1963 an anarchism not visible in American society since the 19 th century when, rebelling against Mexico, for a time Texas operated without a government. It was that chaotic lawless moment in Texan history that seems to have been revisited upon us. Following the Patriot Act, and the Military Commissions Act, eroding the right to habeas corpus, 2006 closed with a Postal Reform Bill. This bill, passed by Congress, insisted that the government needed a warrant to open people’s mail. President Bush’s “signing statement,” asserting his personal interpretation of the law, insisted that under “exigent circumstances,” the President can, in fact, open mail “otherwise sealed against inspection” without a warrant.This particular engorgement of Presidential power recalls to us once more “The Good Shepherd” and James Angleton. A particular Angleton project was the CIA’s opening of the mail of American citizens. During the first half of 1960, at least two hundred people were on the CIA’s list world-wide to have their mail opened. Lee Harvey Oswald’s name was among them.“A Farewell to Justice” was published a year ago. In the intervening time, new documents have emerged that corroborate my view that the Central Intelligence Agency planned, supervised and implemented the assassination of President Kennedy. Those who claim that we will never know what happened to President Kennedy would do well to spend some time at the National Archives.Among the lessons Philip Zelikow, former Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission learned, he admitted on National Public Radio, was that he would not make the same mistake the Warren Commission did. He would not make the papers of the 9/11 Commission available to the public. In this era of authoritarian government secrecy – witness today’s “New York Times” editorial on how the Department of Justice, against the Constitution is refusing to make public its briefs in the case involving illegal government surveillance – we owe also a debt of gratitude to the Congress of the early 1990s for passing the JFK Act. My op ed piece, “9/11 and 11/22,” remains on my web site, http://www.joanmellen.net . Zelikow, who resigned this past November from the staff of Condeleeza Rice, was the person assigned to supervise the transcription of President Kennedy’s office tapes, suggesting we had better cast a critical eye on those transcriptions.CIA’s Counter Intelligence component always claimed that Oswald was never debriefed after his return from the Soviet Union. Yet in a CIA document released in December 2005 a person who fits the precise description of Oswald – it could be no one else – was debriefed in New York, where Oswald on his return from the Soviet Union did disembark. This man had reported to the CIA details about the radio factory where he worked in Minsk.“A Farewell to Justice” chronicles how “Fair Play For Cuba,” for which Oswald handed out leaflets in New Orleans, was heavily infiltrated by CIA through its master propagandist, David Atlee Phillips. New documents confirm CIA’s involvement. The co-director of Fair Play, Richard Gibson, it turns out, had a PRQ from the CIA, indicating his employment with them.Also released was a July 1962 letter where Gibson requests that the CIA employ him. Another “Secret” CIA document lists five CIA cables from “sensitive source” in Operations, regarding Gibson’s connections with Lee Harvey Oswald, whom Gibson refers to, coyly, as “Lee Bowmont.” When the Swiss Federal Police wiretapped Gibson’s hotel room, and provided the FBI with transcripts of these “overhears,” Gibson was not so coy. He referred to “Oswald” as “Oswald.”Part III:As I wrote “A Farewell to Justice,” I had to decide not only what documents like these meant, but which witnesses were credible. I borrowed from lawyers: a witness gained in credibility to the degree that he spoke against his own interest. If he would gain nothing from talking to me, but might even damage himself, I took him seriously. If notoriety was anathema to the person, and he had demonstrated that, I took him more seriously.I chose to believe a man named Thomas Edward Beckham, whom I discuss in the book as an alternative patsy. Beckham told me that Oliver Stone’s staff had managed to find his cell phone number and call him. He denied his identity. “I don’t know anyone by that name, ma’am,” Beckham told the caller. Stone paid his witnesses and consultants, so Beckham could have enjoyed both fame and fortune should he have signed on to the film, “JFK.”Beckham also took the risk of my discovering that not only had he been a con man over the years – it was what saved his life because his scams rendered him impeachable – but he continued in certain dubious practices while he was talking to me. Con men are no more or less likely to tell the truth than white collar ENRON types. As I learned during the process of writing a biography of Lillian Hellman, liars don’t always lie.In 1963 in New Orleans, Beckham was a young man tapped by the CIA to be trained at a Virginia facility. He was to be an alternative patsy and take the blame for the assassination should Oswald vanish into the night.Tom Beckham was not informed of the purpose of his CIA training that spring of 1963. The same was true for Lee Oswald, who was instructed by his New Orleans CIA handlers, David Ferrie, and a CIA operative named Clay Shaw, the managing director of the International Trade Mart. Oswald was ordered to apply for a job at the East Louisiana State Hospital at Jackson. Ferrie and Shaw drove Oswald up to Jackson from New Orleans.The hospital application form inquired whether you were a registered voter in East Feliciana Parish. Ferrie and Shaw then drove Oswald to Clinton, the county seat, to register Oswald to vote in order to facilitate his being hired by a mental hospital, a good place from which a crazed lone assassin might escape only to wind up arrested in Dallas. No operation is without glitches. How could Ferrie and Shaw imagine that on the very day they were taking Oswald to register, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) would be holding a huge voter registration drive?The whole town became witnesses to Oswald being in the company of those two CIA operatives. A good number of people, both African American and Caucasian, came forward to tell what they had seen. Oswald, in fact, did register. Jim Garrison’s investigators, Anne Dischler and Francis Fruge, got to Clinton and discovered that fact. The following day the entire registration book at Clinton had disappeared without a trace.Arrested by Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw denied he knew David Ferrie, no matter that the whole town saw them together – he counted on the CIA to protect him. Yet I was able to find a witness to a loan document Ferrie had taken out so that he could rent an airplane to fly to Dallas the week before the assassination. Ferrie later told both the FBI and the Secret Service that he hadn’t been in Dallas for eight to ten years, clearly a lie. The co-signer of that note was…Clay Shaw! Jim Garrison, defamed over the years, was prescient and right and is owed a posthumous apology.Thomas Edward Beckham also handed me the original of a government document describing his CIA training and why CIA had concluded he could be useful to them. This document had been given to him years earlier by his CIA handler, a man named Fred Lee Crisman, as an explanation of how CIA had utilized him. Its letterhead is not “CIA,” but “UNITED STATES ARMY AIR DEFENSE COMMAND” out of Colorado Springs, and, yes, such an outfit does exist.Beckham told me that his original handler in New Orleans was a strange character named Jack Martin. You don’t find identity cards confirming that someone is CIA, just as you didn’t find Communist Party membership cards. Jim Garrison’s investigation inspired CIA to conduct a trace search on Jack Martin, only for them to decide that their employee “Joseph John Martin” was not the New Orleans Jack Martin, although the documents reveal a bushel of similarities between the two. One CIA document refers to the name “Jack Martin” as “generic,” suggesting that as such the name “Jack Martin” was in use by CIA.What does all this mean? This past fall, I hired an attorney to request of the CIA all its records on this New Orleans Jack Martin, particularly his Security file, a suit that is still in progress. We requested all records related to Jack S. Martin, aka Jack Martin, aka John J. Martin, aka Jack M. Martin, aka Lawrence J. Martin, aka John M. Martin, aka Edward Suggs, as well as Joseph James Martin. For good measure, we threw in Beckham’s other CIA handler, Fred Lee Crisman.CIA acknowledged that they had three separate “Jack Martin” files, representing three different people, all with different middle initials. Each bore an AINS or “Agency Identification Number,” which is used when you want to claim later that the person never “worked” for the Agency. According to CIA, there was no significance to an AIN, unlike EINs, which are rock-solid employees or contractors.Jack Martin in New Orleans in one document describes as CIA assets people who “were either crazy, ex-convicts, jail-birds, or even worse.” These categories apply both to himself and to Beckham. Of the three Martins the Agency acknowledges, CIA omits its openly acknowledged Joseph James as its former employee. Meanwhile Jack Martin of New Orleans used terminology like “operational penetration of these groups” and “legitimate front, such as an intelligence unit, for its cover,” clearly suggesting his intelligence background.In the batch of CIA documents came an interesting letter. It demonstrates, and is the only internal document to do so, that Fred Lee Crisman, Beckham’s lifetime handler, was, indeed CIA. This letter refers to “documents” identifying Crisman’s Agency connections obtained by the sender, whose name is obliterated. This anonymous individual worked for a section of the Agency different from Crisman’s. He managed to obtain Crisman’s file through his own internal connections.Now he urges that it be made known that Crisman served “only a part of the CIA” and that Crisman’s Agency activities even be made public. The document is dated September 13, 1969. It reveals internal conflict within the CIA that matches President Kennedy’s own battle with the clandestine service. So not everyone knew about the utilization of Oswald, or Beckham; not every component was in on the plot to murder President Kennedy.Without subpoena power, or the power to charge someone with perjury, this research is expensive and exhausting. Results, when they come, are often as fragmentary as this extraordinary letter about Fred Lee Crisman. Meanwhile every few years a CIA inspired book appears insisting that it was the Mafia that accomplished this murder, no matter that they could never have engineered the massive cover-up, the better that the public throw up its collective hands and conclude that we will never know the truth.The Warren Commission chose not to investigate a visit to an anti-Castro Cuban activist named Sylvia Odio in late September 1963 in Dallas by Oswald and two Cubans. As her Warren Commission testimony reveals, a day or so later, one of those Cubans telephoned Mrs. Odio to say that “Leon Oswald” had talked about how someone should kill President Kennedy over how he betrayed the Bay of Pigs operation.“A Farewell to Justice” identified those Cubans for the first time. One was Angelo Murgado, who worked closely with Bobby Kennedy in his anti-Castro operations on which he collaborated with General Edward Lansdale. The other was a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, the aforementioned Bernardo de Torres, the man who telephoned Mrs. Odio implicating Lee Oswald.My primary source was Mr. Murgado, who, when he became an American citizen, he told me, changed his name to “Angelo Kennedy” in homage to Bobby Kennedy, a person he continues to admire. After the President was assassinated, and their relationship came to a close, Robert Kennedy asked Mr. Murgado if he needed anything. Mr. Murgado said “no.” He did not want to profit from political work in which he believed. He came away poor.This enhanced his credibility for me. I believed Angelo Kennedy because he sought no notoriety, had never talked about the Odio incident before, did not court “assassination buffs,” and spoke against his own interest. These were painful memories. On November 22 nd , Mr. Murgado told me, he vomited when he realized that the murderer of President Kennedy, as far as he knew, was the man he met at Sylvia Odio’s. Ostensibly that man, called “Oswald,” was just another volunteer in their anti-Castro operations.The implications of this evidence, which I published for the first time, are enormous. Bernardo de Torres, the CIA releases reveal, was a CIA operative. If he was involved in framing Oswald, it was on behalf of the CIA. A multitude of sources place de Torres as Oswald’s Dallas CIA hander, keeping Oswald under constant surveillance.It was deeply moving to watch on CNN earlier this month Senator Edward Kennedy compare the Iraq War with Vietnam during his speech at the National Press Club. It was the day before George Bush’s Iraq troop acceleration, or “surge,” was announced. Kennedy read out quotations about “staying the course” and the need for “more people,” and then told the audience, no, this was not George Bush speaking. It was Lyndon Johnson, forty years ago. The spirit of John F. Kennedy hovered near.It was a great disappointment to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison that Robert Kennedy did not assist him in his investigation. Instead, Robert Kennedy actively attempted to thwart his efforts. He sent Walter Sheridan, his “confidential assistant,” Sheridan’s job description, to New Orleans to discredit Garrison. As a historian of Jim Garrison’s investigation, I too have pondered why Bobby Kennedy remained aloof, and I have concluded that it could only have been because he did not want his own part in the assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, during which Oswald came to his attention, to emerge.I located a document from the CIA’s own Secret History, in which the CIA’s History Staff is interviewing a CIA officer named Sam Halpern. Halpern reveals his own incredulity that Bobby Kennedy should be working with the Mafia in attempts on the life of Castro at the very same time that he was trying to send other Mafia figures to jail. A CIA operative named Charley Ford, alias Charley Fiscalini, was assigned by Bobby Kennedy to make contact with Mafia types in this country and Canada for the purpose of murdering Castro.To all this, Charley Ford testified under oath before the Church Committee. That Bobby Kennedy repeatedly attempted to enlist anti-Castro Cubans for these assassination attempts against Castro I learned first-hand from Isidro Borja, of the DRE. “I know Bobby Kennedy was behind it,” he told me indignantly, “because his people approached ME!” Borja told me Bobby’s people did succeed in recruiting his good friend Rafael Quintero Ibaria, also known as “Chi Chi.”Even after “A Farewell to Justice” was published, I continued to attempt to confirm a lead I was given that Robert Kennedy gave a talk at Homestead Air Force base in Florida to a group of anti-Castro people, with Lee Oswald supposedly in the crowd. It was summer of 1963. I was able to confirm that Oswald was in Miami at the time. A fellow writer claimed he had a source, an aging documentary filmmaker, to whom Robert Kennedy personally revealed that when he spoke at Homestead Air Force base, Oswald in the audience. When I asked the writer to return to the source, he did, only for the source to become evasive.To give you an idea of how difficult this work is, to confirm this information, if it was information, I interviewed a slew of documentary filmmakers. I located Robert Kennedy associates: John Nolan; Peter Edelman; John Seigenthaler; press secretaries Frank Mankiewicz and Ed Guthman; Robert Kennedy’s daughter, Kathleen; his cousin Joey Gargan; and George Stevens, Jr.I moved on to soldiers of fortune like Ed Kolby, whose name appears in Lee Oswald’s address book; Mr. Borja; and a mercenary living among Cuban exiles in Australia named James Richards. Richards told me that a group of Cubans who feared they might be implicated in the assassination had migrated to Australia. Richards added that Bernardo de Torres admitted to him that he had been in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Perhaps the story about Homestead had been invented by someone who knew Robert Kennedy was aware of Oswald (this fact I confirmed with Angelo Kennedy), to underline the point.John Seigenthaler suggested that I consult the appointment books of Robert Kennedy’s secretary, Angie Novello, for 1963. These reside at the Kennedy Library. When I did, I was informed that the appointment book for 1963 was missing. In no uncertain terms, I was told not to inquire again. “The curators have no idea as to its disposition,” the librarian told me.There is another unanswered question that has bedeviled me. In April of 1963, Lee Oswald took shots at General Edwin Walker in Dallas. Walker believed to his dying day that the Department of Justice sent word to the Dallas police not to pursue Oswald “for reasons of state.” The relevant police file, #F48156, is missing from the Dallas police files, like the 1963 appointment book of Robert Kennedy.By the mid 1970s, the FBI was still instructing Dallas police Chief Jesse Curry to remain silent about the “handling” of the Oswald evidence. Dutifully, Curry denied he had ever heard of Oswald before the assassination. The missing document purportedly connects Oswald with his own assassin, Jack Ruby, an association made to seem outlandish by the Warren Commission, except that I discovered for “A Farewell to Justice” that Ruby and Oswald were very well known to each other.The seeming Justice Department directive, alternately described as a CIA order transmitted by the Justice Department, demanding that Oswald be left alone, returns us to the story of poor Otto Otepka, and his being fired from his high position in State Department security. Mr. Otepka told me he believed Walter Sheridan (he kept a huge file on Sheridan at his home) and Bobby Kennedy were behind his being hounded from his job, that Sheridan was behind that theft of the defector files from his office safe. Who, in a very high place, because it wasn’t easy to break into those high risk files, was protecting Oswald, and why ?What sounded alarms in all kinds of places was Mr. Otepka’s innocent request of the CIA that they check into Oswald, a routine request he made when the name of someone he was investigating raised questions. The fact that, before the assassination of President Kennedy, Oswald was known to Robert Kennedy, as he was to CIA, the FBI, and Customs, accounts in no small measure for why Robert Kennedy remained silent about who was responsible for his brother’s death. Kennedy loyalists, Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger, have been similarly silent. It has been an anomaly of the Kennedy assassination that, to borrow the terminology of Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel, “The Road,” both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” have conspired to keep the truth from us.I’ll close with the quotation from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” engraved on the National Archives building in Washington, D.C. It asks that we connect the murder of President Kennedy, and the motives for that crime, with the increasingly unrecognizable America in which we find ourselves living today:“The past is prologue.”Joan MellenSubstantially updated (100 new pages) with a section of CIA documents in a new appendix.The text has also been revised.ABOUT JOAN MELLEN:Joan MellenJOAN MELLEN is the bestselling author of twenty books, including A Farewell to Justice, her biographical study of Jim Garrison’s New Orleans investigation of the Kennedy assassination. She has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Baltimore Sun. Mellen is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.In 2004, she was awarded one of Temple University's coveted “Great Teacher” awards for outstanding achievement, in particular in the graduate program in creative writing.Joan Mellen lives in Pennington, New Jersey.TITLES BY JOAN MELLEN:Faustian Bargains(Hardcover)The Great Game In CubaThe Great Game in Cuba: How the CIA Sabotaged Its Own Plot to Unseat Fidel Castro (Hardcover)Our_Man_in_Haiti_cover-medOur Man in Haiti: George de Mohrenschildt and the CIA in the Nightmare Republic (Paperback)Farewell-Justice-MellenA Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (Paperback)Jim_Garrison_Early_YearsJim Garrison: His Life and Times, The Early Years (Paperback)RECENT POSTS:“Faustian Bargains” Review: American History MagazineJoan Mellen Discusses New Book “Faustian Bargains” at “November In Dallas”Review of “Faustian Bargains” by James DiEugenioPraise for “Faustian Bargains” at AmazonInterview on Bob Wilson’s ANTENNAE RADIO September 19, 2016RECENT INTERVIEWS"The Power Hour"Genesis Communications NetworkThursday, March 5, 2015 CONNECT WITH JOAN MELLENTHE LAST WORD ON THE ASSASSINATION (2014)This unforgettable event features 'The Garrison Tapes'...the definitive documentary on the horror that changed America and the world...followed by a fascinating panel of the most knowledgeable, brilliant writers in the field: Jim Marrs, Joan Mellen and Dick Russell. Along with Host and Garrison film executive producer, John Barbour.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Sun Jan 08, 2017 6:26 am

01.08.2017THE JFK REMOVAL # 21:SPECIAL NOTES: (JAMES JESUS ANGLETON's (JJA) FILES WERE MORE EXPLOSIVE THAN J. EDGAR HOOVER's. JJA WAS NAMED CIA LIASON WITH THE WARREN COMMISSION, AND REPLACED JAMES WHITTEN AS OFFICIAL CIA INVESTIGATOR FOR THE CIA FOR THE WARREN COMMISSION. 01.08.2017. BB.)JAMES JESUS ANGLETON IS A KEY TO THE JFK ASSASSINATION:James Jesus Angleton In the 1960's was known around Langley by his CIA code name: Kingfisher:It’s probably not a good idea to take on an exalted title like that unless you have some real power to wield and as the director of counterintelligence, Angleton was responsible for a lot of the dirty tricks at CIA during his reign. He’s become the subject of dozens of books and movies, most recently The Good Shepherd, although his multiple connections to the JFK hit never seem to surface in the mainstream media.Angleton got his powerful post after serving as the Vatican’s OSS liaison during WWII, working closely with Allen Dulles to shield important Nazis who were given new jobs working for US interests after the war. According to Angleton, before getting his promotion, he had to promise Dulles never to put him or any of his Wall Street-connected cronies on lie detectors in order to question them about financial relations with Germany during the war. You see, many US corporations employed neutral countries to trade with the enemy, including Standard Oil, a company owned by Dulles’ cousin by marriage David Rockefeller. If you want to get really rich during war, sell to both sides.Not only did Angleton remain in charge of the important CIA-Vatican connection, he also became the strategic CIA link to Israel and their efficient Mossad, an intelligence agency not hampered by red tape.The sad reality is that after he got his post, Angleton was swiftly compromised by British double agent Kim Philby, who gleaned many secrets before departing back to England. Philby had spent many nights plying the chain-smoking Angleton with liquor so they could talk shop. The main subject of conversation was the suspected mole inside British intelligence who kept the KGB one step ahead of Angleton, and who might that mole be ? Before long, a nest of Soviet spies (the Cambridge 5) was uncovered and a few revealed, although Philby was exonerated and Victor Rothschild never seriously investigated. Philby began working as a journalist covering the Middle East, while secretly reporting to MI6. But in 1961, Anatoliy Golitsyn, a KGB major, defected to the West and established his bona fides by offering up Philby as KGB and part of the Cambridge ring that had been operating since before WWII.CIA spook William Buckley would write the first major book on how Angleton went crazy after Philby was unmasked. Buckley is Skull & Bones and card carrying member of the oligarchy, just like Angleton, only maybe a little higher on the pecking order. But Golitsyn was a fake defector seeding disinfo. His major thrust was that many highly placed people in Western power were really KGB, just like Philby. Golitsyn even claimed British Prime Minister Harold Wilson was a KGB spy. And he also claimed there was another KGB spy was very high up in the US government as well. Obviously, these rabbit holes served mostly to amp up Angleton’s paranoia. He’d spend the next few years hunting for an imaginary highly-placed mole in Washington DC, and at one point accused just about everyone in power. Did Golitsuyn also finger JFK as well as Wilson? I think this seems pretty likely. Strangely, Golitsyn became an Honorary Commander of the British Empire. And what do you think would have happened if Angleton had written a report saying JFK was a Soviet spy? Would that have justified a national security project to remove JFK from power ?But after JFK was assassinated, along came a real Soviet defector name Yuri Nosenko, who arrived in 1964. Since Nosenko did not concur with much of anything Golitsyn had been saying, and, in fact, was more highly situated and knew more than Golitsyn, Nosenko was held prisoner for four years and tortured continuously and fed LSD and other drugs in an attempt to break him down. And the entire time Angleton kept telling everyone Nosenko was a fake whose only mission was to discredit Golitsyn.In retrospect Angleton seems borderline incompetent since he’d been played by Philby and Golitsyn. One wonders how Angleton kept his job so long, although keep in mind his files were probably more explosive than J. Edgar Hoover’s.And then, of course, there’s Angleton’s vast connections to the JFK assassination cover-up. It’s no accident Angleton was named CIA liason with the Warren Commission and swiftly replaced John Whitten as official CIA investigator of the incident. Moves like that are made when a fox is needed to watch the hen house.The dead bodies piled up pretty quick around Angleton, especially his wife’s best friend Mary Meyer and his former friend Win Scott, the Mexico City CIA station chief who launched his own private investigation into JFK’s assassination, something Angleton seemed desperate to shut down before it got started.Since the assassination was organized through the CIA’s JM/WAVE station and William Harvey played a key role, it’s critical to consider Angleton’s role in shielding Harvey after JFK ordered him fired. Angleton moved Harvey to Rome and then likely brought him back for the operation. Ted Shackley was running JM/WAVE so he had to know what was going on, as did Richard Helms obviously because he went on to become CIA director. In fact, if you want to know who was involved in some aspect of this coup, just consider who assumes great power in later years. Certainly the Bush family could owe a portion of its rise to prominence through a hidden connection to the coup. Shackley went on to run the Phoenix program in Vietnam with William Colby and that became the largest CIA assassination program in history. I talked to one of the key players involved a few years ago, and he told me that he’d gone back to Vietnam after the war only to discover the man in charge of providing many of the names of those who needed to be assassinated turned out to be a double agent. He later became an important figure in the Vietnamese government. If that’s true, then the people getting assassinated by Phoenix were probably just moderate tribal leaders because once you wipe out the true alphas of any tribe, it leaves the door open to put some corrupt stooges in their place.Maybe if you connect enough of these dots you realize why the burnt-out shell called Communism was propped in place to justify those incredible military expenditures on both sides ? And why was it so easy for the CIA to whack their President but so impossible to whack Fidel Castro ? Since JFK and RFK started working for world peace in 1963, one wonders if they even understood the nature of the game they were involved in. You can pick either side of the managed dialectic, but peace is never an option when your nation is run by the National Security State.

Bruce Patrick Brychek · Sun Jan 08, 2017 4:10 pm

01.08.2017:THE JFK REMOVAL # 22:March 19, 1975 Washington, DC JAMES JESUS ANGLETON:The Orchid Man - THE GREATEST MASTERMIND’S OF ALL TIME, FEARED AND RESPECTED BY THE DULLES BROTHERS, HUNT, HELMS, PHILLIPS, ETC.:I first met James Jesus Angleton in the dining room of the Madison Hotel in Washington. Several months earlier he had been fired as the chief of the counterintelligence staff at the CIA. On the phone, he insisted on a particular table in the corner for "security reasons."I knew nothing then about his secret world of counterintelligence, but I thought he might be able to help with the book I was writing on Lee Harvey Oswald. The missing piece in Oswald's career was the nearly two years that he had spent in the Soviet Union before he returned to the United States and moved to Dallas. What had happened to Oswald during this period ? Had he had any connection with Soviet intelligence during this period ? Had the KGB sponsored his return to the U.S? Had he been given any mission ? The Warren Commission, which had been given the responsibility of investigating the assassination, had been unable to answer these question when it wrote its report in 1964.I had completed six hour of interviews with Nosenko, but I found several of the assertions he made about the KGB's treatment of Oswald inconsistent with other evidence furnished the Warren Commission. To be sure, Jamie Jamieson, his CIA handler, had assured me that he was utterly reliable. Yet, I was not completely satisfied. For example, his insistence that the KGB had never contacted Oswald during his stay in the Soviet Union seemed implausible since Oswald had loudly advertised on his arrival that he had some secret information of special interest to the Soviet Union.My doubts were further stirred by a lunch I had with a Soviet diplomat in Washington earlier that week. Igor Agou had informed me that my request for visa to go to Russia to find out about Oswald's stay there was unnecessary. "There is no need for you to go to Russia. The best source on Oswald's visit there is in America... Yuri Nosenko". I found it curious that the Soviet Embassy would recommend that I see a Soviet traitor: indeed, the same traitor the CIA had also recommended to me.I then went back to see Jamieson. I asked him why the Warren Commission had not used this Nosenko as a witness. After all, his defection was known to the KGB, as was his access to the Oswald file. He could have filled an important gap.He then told me, for the first time, that there had been some "minor problem" with Nosenko at the time. He assured me that now it was cleared up, which was why I was permitted to see Nosenko.When I asked further about the nature of the "problem," he said that it was "too sensitive" to be discussed. He closed the issue by saying "in any case, it is not relevant to your book".I decided that I needed to know more about Nosenko. Since current CIA officers wouldn't talk about the "problem," I began looking for ex-officers. Angleton fit the bill: he had been fired after the New York Times revealed that he had been involved in illegal counterintelligence operations in the United States.Angleton arrived in a black homburg, looking like someone that central casting in Hollywood might have chosen for the part of a master spy. Even though he was six feet tall, he shuffled down the hall with a stoop that made him seem shorter— and older, He was ghostly-thin , with finely sculptured facial features set off by arched eyebrows. Throughout the evening, he drank vintage wine, chain-smoked Virginia Slims and coughed as if had consumption. A quarter of a century in counterintelligence had extracted some toll.Angleton told me a little about his extraordinary life— the little he wanted me to know. He was born in 1917 in Idaho. During a punitive raid on Mexico the year before, his father, William Angleton, cavalry officer in the Idaho national guard, courted and married his mother, a seventeen year old Mexican beauty. The family then moved to Italy, where his father worked for the National Cash Register Company. Living in a magnificent villa overlooking Rome, he became quickly accustomed to the wines and cuisine of Europe. He attended school at Malvern, an elite public school in England. In 1937, with war tensions building in Europe, he returned to America and enrolled at Yale. While there, he founded and edited "Furioso", a quarterly devoted to original poetry. To write for it, he recruited a number of world renown poets including Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, and E.E Cummings. After he graduated in 1941, he went on to Harvard Law School. A year later, both he and his father volunteered for service in the OSS -- America's socially exclusive espionage service (nicknamed Oh-So-Social"). His intelligence career began in England. He was one of a small grouped of promising recruits who were handpicked to learn the secrets of the most arcane part of espionage--counterintelligence. After being trained by English counterintelligence experts who had long experience in running double-agents in what became known as the Double Cross System, Angleton went on to Rome. As the war came to an end, he so excelled at finding his way through the labyrinth of Italian -- and Vatican-- politics, that he was singled out by the William Donovan, the Director of the OSS, as its "most professional counterintelligence officer."When the OSS was dissolved in 1945, Angleton elected to remain in secret intelligence as part of a minute unit, called the "Central Intelligence Group." His job involved maintaining three by fives cards in the registry on possible recruits-- all that remained of the once sprawling memory of an all but defunct intelligence service. With the rapid deterioration of the Soviet-American relations, he assumed it was only a matter of time before Congress authorized a new espionage service. This came about in 1947 with the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency.Angleton then, at the age of thirty, had come to so personify the art of intelligence that the CIA briefly considered using his profile as its official logo-- though the idea was rejected. He returned to Washington in 1949 to take over as the liaison with other allied intelligence services. Since the CIA still relied heavily on the British, French, German and other "partners" to do much of the dirty work in post-war espionage in Europe, such as setting up agent networks in Eastern Europe to spy on the Russians, he was in a very central position in the inner circle of western intelligence. It also brought him into direct contact with the leading anti-Soviet specialists in the European intelligence services, H.A.R. "Kim" Philby.Angleton was far more circumspect about this dangerous liaison. Philby had arrived in Washington, a few months after Angleton's return, as the liaison between MI-6, the British secret service, and the CIA. He was, if anything, overqualified for the job. Clever and quick-witted, Philby had distinguished himself academically at Cambridge University, before joining British Intelligence in 1938. where he had a meteoric career.. After having worked against German diplomats in Spain-- and cultivating among them a number of sources for MI-6, he was transferred to the Anti-Soviet section, which targeted Soviet diplomats as prospects to be approached and, if possible, subverted into working for the British. Then, in 1944 , he was promoted to being the head of this section. As such, he directed all the operations aimed at recruiting Russians to spy on the Soviet Union-- which was still an ally of Britain and the United States. As the Cold War heated up, his section became the most important element in MI-6. His transfer to Washington thus was more than a routine assignment. British intelligence, with its half-century experience in espionage, was the senior partner in the Anglo-American alliance; and Philby's mission was to lay the ground work for future cooperation between it and the CIA in the secret war. As Angleton and other top CIA officials were told by the British, Philby was slated to head the British Secret Service on his return to London.On this basis, Angleton entered into what he admitted was an eventually disastrous, working relationship with Philby. They had much in common. Philby's intelligence career had roughly paralleled his own. They both also had similar literary and epicurean tastes. About once a week, they dined together at Harvey's restaurant in downtown Washington. It was called "The Kim and Jim Show"; two dedicated intelligence officers, the reputed best and brightest of their services, discussing, as Angleton put it, "Cabbages and kings". ( Philby later noted that Angleton "He was one of the thinnest men I ever met, and one of the biggest eaters".)Angleton couldn't help being impressed by Philby's cynical view of world politics or amused by his waspish humor. At these, and more formal meetings, Philby eventually got down to business. He presented long list of questions. As CIA liaison, it was Angleton's job to furnish it-- unless, as in a few rare cases, the information was specifically embargoed from the British. For some eighteen months, he responded to Philby's questions. These talked about everything from CIA plans for the recruitment of Russian agents to more general evaluations of secret information received from behind the Iron Curtain.It emerged in the spring of 1951, however, that British intelligence was not the recipient-- or at least the exclusive recipient of this secret information. The CIA learned through a break of the Soviet diplomatic code that some of it was passing into the hands of Soviet intelligence. Two British diplomats, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean, were identified as possible sources for some of the data; both, however, defected to Moscow before the mystery could be clarified. U.S. intelligence remained convinced by the intercepted coded messages proved that there was a third man, and by August, the cross hairs of the investigation intersected on Kim Philby. It appeared virtually certain that at least some of what Angleton told Philby was getting to Moscow. Although there was no legally admissible evidence against Philby, caution was the better part of valor. Philby was recalled to London and secretly cashiered from MI-6. As Angleton observed, intelligence services do not "relish in exposing their own weaknesses."He was fascinated with the irony that he unwittingly had been the CIA's liaison with Soviet intelligence. The problem was what he termed "the vulnerability of the intelligence-gathering system" itself. Espionage services, as he explained it, must depend ultimately for their prized commodity-- secrets-- on sources inside the enemy camp. Individuals, who are betraying their country, or, hidden microphones. And either can be detected by the enemy. If they are, information, true or false, can be placed in their path that will mislead.From this perspective, and with the advantage of hindsight, Angleton set out to reconstruct Philby's career. He found that all the early successes against both the Germans and Russians in the 1940s came from Philby having available to him secret information unavailable to other British intelligence officers. He concluded that it had been probably provided by his contacts Soviet intelligence which had been stage-managing his rise in British intelligence. If so, his promotions first to being head of anti-Soviet operations and then Washington liaison were no accident, but part of a Soviet design. Moreover, if Philby could be moved into such positions by Soviet intelligence, so could other of their agents.He spent the next three years working on the problem. The solution went beyond. ferreting out individual agents (who, he pointed out would then be replaced by unknown ones.) What was necessary was somehow thinking like the KGB and anticipating its targets. Angleton proposed creating a small "think tank" that would literally enter the mind of the enemy. It would piece together a mosaic from all the separate contacts that Soviet intelligence had with western intelligence services, a mosaic that would yield a picture of the enemy's thinking.Allan Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence in 1953, bought the idea. He attached the new unit, Angleton's "counterintelligence staff," directly to the office of the Deputy Director for Plans, who was in charge of running the clandestine side of the CIA.Initially, according to Angleton, it was so secretive that not even executive officers in the CIA knew its true function. It had two main functions, liaison with other services, and record-keeping. Through the liaison function, Angleton held the strings in his hand that connected with other American intelligence services, including the FBI and National Security Agency, as well as with the British, French, Germans, Italian and Israelis intelligence. He was through these liaisons able to trade and exchange information, available to none of the other divisions of the CIA, about intelligence activities around the world. This network eventually gave Angleton great power within the CIA.Angleton was also given the responsibility for keeping, and updating, the CIA's central registry of foreign agents. These sources had been recruited and operated by case officers in the six geographic divisions of the CIA. These were the Soviet Russia Division, the Western European Division, the Eastern European Division, The Middle East Division, The Far East Division and the Western Hemisphere Division. The Soviet Russia Division, which had over half the clandestine personnel of the CIA in it, would, for example, maintain contact with Soviet sources, mainly diplomats, military attaches and KGB officers, who supplied information to the CIA. The responsibility that Angleton assumed in updating their records in the registry was determining which of the double-agents were "bona fide" sources. If an agent was labeled "bona fide" it meant that he was under the control of the CIA (and therefore had not been detected by the KGB). If he did not receive this stamp from Angleton, it meant that the agent could still be under the control of the KGB. From this vantage point, Angleton played a key role in the spy war for the next two decades.Since Angleton's counterintelligence staff had the responsibility for evaluating information supplied by KGB defectors, I assumed that he would be in a position to clarify what Nosenko had been telling me about Oswald and the KGB. I had no idea then that Nosenko had been the subject of a bitter ten-year debate inside the CIA that had destroyed a half-dozen careers, and which helped precipitate the downfall of Angleton himself. Not knowing the mare's-nest of issues surrounding this case, I expected a simple answer when I asked him "Was there any problem with Nosenko's veracity?"Angleton answered, with a thin smile, suggesting a deliberate understatement, "Truth is always complicated when its comes to defectors". He then added that the case was "still sensitive" and he could not discuss it. With that, he abruptly cut off the conversation about Nosenko, and moved on to a subject of which I had no understanding at all: Orchids. Ordering another bottle of vintage wine, he went into elaborate detail about the pollinating conditions for Dendrobian, Phalaenopsis, Cattyleas, Cymbidian and other tribes of orchids, especially their deceptive qualities. He explained it had not been the fittest but the most deceptive orchid that had survived. The perpetuation of most species of orchids depend on their ability to misrepresent themselves to insects. Having no food to offer the insects, they had to deceive them into landing on them and carrying their pollen to another orchid in the tribe. Orchids are too dispersed in nature to depend on the wind to carry their pollen.To accomplish this deception, orchids use color, shape and odor to mimic something that attracts insects to their pods of pollen. Some orchids play on the sexual instincts of insects. The tricocerus orchid, for example, so perfectly mimics in three-dimensional the underside of a female fly, downs to the hairs and smell, that they trigger mating response from passing male flies. Seeing what he thinks is a female fly, the male fly swoops down on the orchid, and attempts to have sex with it-- a process called psuedo-copulation. In doing so, the motion causes the fly to hit the pollen pod, which attaches itself to his underside. The fly thus becomes an unwitting carrier. When the fly then passes another tricocerus orchid, and repeat the frustrating process, it pollinate that orchid.It gradually became clear that he was not only talking about an insect being manipulated through deception but an intelligence service being similarly duped, seduced, provoked, blinded, lured down false trails and used by an enemy.The last waiter was waiting for us to leave. It was almost 1 a.m. Angleton seemed drunk and I was disappointed. I had learned more than I ever wanted to know about botany but nothing about the subject at hand. As he got up to leave, I made a final try to get back to Nosenko. "But can Nosenko be believed about the assassination ?" I asked.He was silent for a long moment, obviously disappointed that I had not grasped the meaning of his orchid discourse. "I told you I could not discuss cases," he said. "But you might want to buy orchids for your greenhouse...""I don't have a greenhouse, but Nosenko..."He cut me off. Why don't you come with me to Kensington Orchids next time I go."January 26, 1976, Kensington, Maryland:The high humidity in Kensington Orchid house so fogged my glasses that I hardly see Angleton. He was examining a long, spiny orchid with a flash light. "See this oncidium orchid," he said, as I approached through the corridor of plants. "It has an almost exact replica of a bee's head on its petals." He meticulously traced the upside-down bee's head for me with his flashlight. "Here's the illusionary foe— the killer bee." Unable to distinguish the simulcrum from the real bee, the wasp is triggered to attack. When it plunges its stinger through the petal, the orchid's pollen pod adheres to it. The wasp then flies away and, if it sees another similar orchid, attacks again. But this time its stinger deposits the pollenate from the first orchid on the second. Angleton explains, " provocation is the means by which this species survives". Such deceptions work in nature, Angleton explains, because the deceived does not have the differentiate the real from the fake.I asked if the CIA possesses that ability."It had counterintelligence," he said, speaking in the past tense."So did they know if Nosenko was real or fake."Without answering, he proceeded on to a nearby odontoglossum orchid. He explained it blinded its carrier through deception. Its nectar odor lured moisquitos into its the coils of its fleshy tubes. When the moisquito pushes around a bend it runs into a spike of pollen pod, which jams into its eye. When it then back out of the tube, it is temporarily blinded. So it flies around until it smells a similar nectar and, again, following the trail of odor into a tube, it runs into another spike, which it willy-nilly pollinates with the pollen in its eye. "Did you come to buy orchids?" he asked."I came to Washington for a second interview with Nosenko, tomorrow? " Angleton drove me back to the Madison hotel in his silver Mercedes. On the way back, he played a cassette of an Israel violenist he said he had had privately recorded, Evidently, Angleton's private world extendend to even his music. After several brandies in the Madison bar, he asked me what I planned to ask Nosenko."Any suggestions ?" I replied.He then dictated, with precision I had never heard before from anyone, thirteen questions. (see Missing Pieces) They contained names and aliases I had never heard before— Rumyanstev, General Rodin, Shitov, Colonel Semonov and Corevan, for example, as well as KGB units like the 13th Department of the First Chief Directorate (which was rumored to handle assassinations abroad). I wote them down and asked if he could further elaborate."I can't do that. I would be revealing secrets. All you need to know-- and all I can tell you is that Nosenko never got his bona fides-- not while I was at the CIA." ***

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