The Devil is in the Details

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Phil Dragoo
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The Devil is in the Details

Post by Phil Dragoo »

We have become familiar with the ways of the military-intelligence establishment.

In fact, James Files' experience in Laos in 1959 and in Dallas in 1963 displays the covert operations lamented by Harry Truman in his December, 1963 editorial, "Limit CIA Role to Intelligence". http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry ... ticle.html

Add the further cutout of organized crime, "doing a job" for Charles Nicoletti, just as the chain of the Castro contract went from Helms to Harvey to Maheu to Roselli to Gianana--surely something strikingly similar--then, of course, the likelihood the matter was used as a ghillie suit for the Big Dance in Dallas.

Tracking the military today we have John Newman, in his JFK and Vietnam, 1992/2008 to his JFK assassination series awaiting its fourth volume, as well as his intelligence research, beginning with Oswald and the CIA, 1995, and now proceding through his series on the JFK Assassination, Where Angels Tread Lightly, Countdown to Darkness, Into the Storm, and a fourth in the works, Armageddon.

Heretofore unpublished was the research by Malcolm Blunt in the extant Agency files producing breakthrough understanding of the handling of the Oswald legend.

Now we have The Devil is in the Details, Malcolm Blunt in conversation with the uniquely qualified Alan Dale conducting a series of conversations sketching out the Agency standard operating procedure and its significant departure in the Affair Oswald.

We know the person was not in the window and did not fire a rifle; that the president's wounds were multi-axis and "by others"--including a young man in a fedora at the fenceline.

Yet how to sell the nation on the greatest Magic Beans swindle of the Twentieth Century--why, by controlling the perception of Oswald, the Krazy Kommie Kid Who Killed Kennedy.

Pursuing the trail of crumbs left by Langley has been a quiet detective as relentless as Inspector Lebel on the trail of The Jackal--Malcolm Blunt, who can find a clue in an initial on a routing slip, or the career syncopation of an American official in the Moscow Embassy.

Developing this epic effort into five hundred pages of intelligence tapestry has been interviewer par excellence Alan Dale; thus we have The Devil is in the Details: Alan Dale with Malcolm Blunt on the Assassination of President Kennedy. https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Details-Ma ... B08MQTCNFX

And after having the pleasure of reading it, I wrote this review on Amazon:

Petting the dog that didn't bark
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-revi ... B08MQTCNFX

The adolescent with his magazine knows only the airbrushed model emulating passion, not the multitextured reality beyond literary replication.

So it is with “assassination porn”, the speculation based on secondary sources, themselves based on a cascade of same.

Malcolm Blunt tired of such superficial accounts. He went on safari to observe and report on the elephant inadequately suggested by a succession of blind men.

The reader will find an unmatched mastery of deciphering the arcane, a tracker hip to the tricks of the wily fugitive, finding direction in initials here, a stapled page there, surmounting challenges of Eliot's “wilderness of mirrors”.

Does the amateur sleuth expect Bagley or Helms or Angleton to spell it out? Anticipate instead the champion listener for “the dog that didn't bark”, a negative template of invaluable use grappling with the dark matter of the Crime of the Twentieth Century.

Sherlock Holmes observed to Dr. Watson in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs”, “Touch him where we will he is false.”

The Central Intelligence Agency has been playing Mickey the Dope for fifty-seven years. It did so even prior to the assassination

Angleton wasn't lying when he told Seymour Hersh, “A mansion has many rooms. I'm not privy to who struck John.” The compartmentalism and manipulated distribution of documents is demonstrated and navigated by Malcolm Blunt in a way not available before.

As seen in his generous acknowledgments he has done what Mycroft would not, gone everywhere and seen and tested everything.

He describes the missing documents—and even in disappointment can produce a negative template to further understanding. Imagine the premier agency pretending Volume V never existed. After all, are you going to believe the wizards of Langley or your lying eyes?

And as Bernal Diaz made certain the historic importance of Cortez would be available five centuries hence, so, too, Alan Dale has produced a unique account in a continuing series of conversations. Stanley and Livingstone provide an invitation and a map so that others may follow in the exploration of the dark continent.

John LeCarre has left the building.

Malcolm Blunt will still be a while. Please pull up a chair.

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