The great rabbit-hole of a generation - the JFK assassination
conundrum. On one hand, there is so much more to know & understand than there was after the Warren Commission report, or even after the release of Oliver Stone's cinematic version of the Garrison debacle. A lot more information has been released, unearthed, published and debated - a process which continues to this day [very recent developments will be discussed shortly].
On the other hand, as far as an ultimate resolution of suspicions & doubts is concerned...very little has changed.
Warren Commission whitewash proven:
There's no doubt about it now - the Warren Commission report was a whitewash. That does not mean it contains no relevant or important information, nor does it mean that the sincerity of its witnesses is necessarily in doubt. Nevertheless, it is now clear that the Warren Commission was set up specifically to gather information supportive of a pre-fabricated conclusion - that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for the death of President John Kennedy. The bafflement and frustration of potential witnesses, who observed at the time that police, FBI investigators, or the Commission themselves seemed uninterested in what they had to say - or even appeared to be actively obscuring, fogging or burying certain kinds of information - has been vindicated. The Commission was not interested in collecting or airing information that might conflict with their pre-ordained "determination", and was very interested in burying information suggestive of any kind of broader conspiracy.
You can listen to genuine recordings of LBJ (Lyndon Johnson, who became President the moment Kennedy was declared deceased) discussing the situation with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as with people he intended to recruit into serving on his Presidential commission. The release of these recordings and transcripts proves quite conclusively that LBJ (or persons advising him) were determined to suppress any evidence or even quash rumors that Oswald might have been acting in concert with, or on behalf of, a foreign power or a right-wing coup conspiracy - and that Hoover's assessment of Oswald acting alone - developed within 24 hours of the assassination - would ultimately be endorsed by the Commission:
"In a memo of Nov 25 to the White House, Assistant Attorney General Katzenbach asserted that "the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin..... Speculation on Oswald's motivation ought to be cut off..... Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat--too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.)."
"The combined press of the Communist conspiracy "evidence" is presumably what induced such men as Chief Justice Earl Warren and Robert Kennedy to knowingly engage in or allow a cover-up. This is not to say that they necessarily believed in a Communist conspiracy, only that they knew that the alternative to the lone gunman theory would inevitably be a powerful effort to pin the assassination on foreign sources. That much of the evidence for the supposed Communist conspiracy was directly tied into extremely sensitive channels completely ruled out the possibility of a public airing of the actual evidence, whether the nation was capable of such a public airing or not. Instead, "wise men" decided to bury their knowledge or suspicions of what might really have happened on November 22, 1963"
I've never been a fan of LBJ, but I tend to believe he sincerely feared being pushed into a nuclear war with Castro/Soviet forces by the suspiciously immediate "Oswald was a Cuban/Soviet agent" propagandizing of the Cuban exile group DRE, and other interests (not least of which in his own Pentagon and Intelligence community) that might be keen to use the assassination as a pretext for war. I also believe that he feared being assassinated himself, that he probably held suspicions of a possible right-wing, military or CIA plot to eliminate more of the Kennedy administration (in the recordings, he asks Hoover if he ought to have an armoured car...), suspicions for which there were certainly some justification.
For example - a March 13, 1962 memorandum from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, (which has been dubbed "Operation Northwood"), outlined various possible "false flag" operations that could be used as a pretext for a full-scale declaration of war on Castro's Cuba.
[False Flag operations involve faking evidence of aggression against your contry by a foreign power, giving you a plausible pretext for attacking them]
"PRETEXTS TO JUSTIFY US MILITARY INTERVENTION IN CUBA"
These documents outline, quite cold-bloodedly, covert operations that would cause harm or death to innocents (including Americans) which could be blamed on Cuba. (These plans, and many others developed under "Operation Mongoose", followed the failed CIA sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion). The possibility that assassination of JFK, by an apparently pro-Castro, professed Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald could be part of a "false flag" scheme cooked up by rogue elements of the Pentagon or CIA as a pretext for a declaration of war on Cuba (and possibly, for seizing "emergency" control over all national policy) must have occurred to LBJ - just as it would occur to increasing numbers of ordinary Americans and others around the globe in the years to come.
Garrison Has Not Been Vindicated:
Unfortunately. I was once a fan of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and his investigation into the JFK assassination. Not because of the Oliver Stone movie, but because of his book "On The Trail Of The Assassins", which made a lot of sense to me at the time.
But there was a lot that I didn't know then. As time went on and more information became widely available, it became apparent to me that Garrison had been imposing seemingly rational connections between persons & events - making sense from non-sense, in his own mind - upon what was in reality a choatic labrynth of tantalizing but unsubstantiated leads. Furthermore, some of his most important sources were habitual liars and shameless self-aggradizers. The final straw for me were revelations that Garrison had originally professed to beleive that the Kennedy assassination was some kind of homosexual thrill-killing conspiracy. A good skeptical resource on Garrison can be found here: Garrison criticisms Navigating The Info Jungle:
There's more to say about Garrison, but first some thoughts on the often contradictory morass of info that permeates every aspect of JFK assassination 'storyline' and research.
Many sources of solid, useful information and/or analysis are also infected with ideological overtones. There are obvious "left" or "right" political biases in many sources. This doesn't have to be a big problem, however. If you are aware that you are likely to encounter biased interpretations, and are capable of controlling your own tendencies to find compatible ideological interpretations more "attractive", you can pick out the core realities from the ideological "wishful thinkings". A more difficult problem can be, the self-aggrandizing, self-promoting nonsense woven into even some of the better sources. As you sift & sort through facts on various sites - comparing one to another to another - you develop a sense for which personalities had/have a tendency to spin tales that their audience wanted to hear.
I recommend being highly skeptical of uncorroborated information from these people:
- Gerry Hemming
- Richard Case Nagell
- Marita Lorenz
- anyone who claims to have been, or to have known "an assassin" of JFK (other than Oswald)
Or Has He?
Some of Jim Garrison's allegations have proven to contain elements of truth.
- Clay Shaw really did have a relationship with the CIA, but it may not have been anything more than being paid to pass along pretty mundane observations about places in other nations where he happened to conduct business. Thousands of American businessmen and travellers participated in this lowest level "intelligence gathering" at that time.
- The CIA really did monitor Garrison & his investigation, and made some attempts to interfere and discredit him: A CIA memo on Garrison however this CIA interest doesn't seem to be focused on the "case" Garrison was trying to build against Clay Shaw. It seems to have more to do with people or events or "operations" that Garrison might have had knowledge of but had not or could not tie into his Clay Shaw conspiracy hypothesis at that time.
Plots And Associated Threats To JFK:
Yup. They really existed, and there were several of them.
- Disgruntled Cuban exiles. I recommend this site as a source for all kinds of interesting information on the Cuban exile community circa 1956-present: Cuban Information Archives There was genuine heroism in many aspects of "the Cuban revolution", by native Cubans and also by some Americans living in Cuba or associated with Cuban revolutionaries. The attack by students upon Batista's palace, resulting in the deaths of most of the participants, was heroic. So was much of the revolutionary military action that eventually overthrew Batista.
After Fidel Castro "declared" his communist affiliations and intentions for Cuba, many anti-communist Cubans fled to the US eventually settling primarily in Florida. This included many small groups of post-revolutionaries with varying ideological orientations. CIA operatives made contact with these groups and attempted to meld them into one umbrella organization, ultimately culminating in the ill-fated Bay Of Pigs invasion 'army'. The Bay Of Pigs invasion was a hopeless cause, particularly as the invaders did not receive all the American support they had been promised. Many of the invasion survivors were taken prisoner, later released to the US in trade for tractors and food.
Returning to their camps in Florida, some chose to accept exile and integrated into normal life in American communities. A hard-core of anti-communist fanatics chose instead to continue plotting elimination of Castro and his government. This included members of "Alpha 66", the Cuban Student Directorate (DRE), and "MIRR". Some of these exiles were recruited into the CIA's "Operation Mongoose" and subsequently trained and funded to carry out guerilla terrorist and assassination activities: Operation Mongoose training, arming, supplying Among the counter-revolutionary exiles trained and funded by the CIA were two men who would subsequently carry out horrific acts of terrorism & assassination throughout Latin & South America - sometimes as mercenaries for American covert operations and sometimes apparently for their own purposes: Orlando Bosch Avila and Luis Posada Carriles In 1976, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada joined with another anti-communist Bay of Pigs survivor associate of theirs named Armando Lopez Estrada in forming Coordination of United Revolutionary Organization (CORU). CORU took credit for fifty bombings in Miami, New York, Venezuela, Panama, Mexico and Argentina in the first ten months after it was established. In a CBS interview on 10th June, 1977, Armando Lopez Estrada claimed: "We use the tactics that we learned from the CIA... We were trained to set off a bomb, we were trained to kill." "At approximately 6:30 P.M., January 10, 1962, Detective A. L. TARABOCHIA was contacted at his residence by Secret Service Agent ERNEST ARAGON in reference to alleged plot to assassinate the President of the United States. Agent ARAGON revealed that, according to the information received by his agency, RAFAEL ANSELMO RODRIGUEZ MOLINS, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Dominican ancestry, was en route to Miami from Chicago to attempt to assassinate President KENNEDY next time he arrives in West Palm Beach. The subject also known as RAFAEL MOLINA is a W/M, 39, 5' 10", brown eyes, black receding hair, and wears glasses. RODRIGUEZ is known to disguise himself as a priest and carries a weapon concealed in a camera case. Since the subject has a badly infected foot, there is a possibility that he walks with a limp. Agent ARAGON added that the subject was to contact a Cuban male living in the Miami area before proceeding to West Palm Beach. The Cuban, ARMANDO PABLO LOPEZ ESTRADA QUINTANA, was a member of the forces that attempted the invasion of Cuba on April 17, 1961. LOPEZ is a W/M, DOB 3/15/39, 6ft, 200 lbs., last known address New York City, NY"
There really is documentation that the CIA turned anti-Castro exiles into terrorist assassins, and that some of those persons were implicated in plots to assassinate Kennedy before November 22, 1963. There is also documentation that Lee Harvey Oswald had contact with elements of anti-Castro cuban exile organization while in New Orleans:
"In August, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald approached Carlos Bringuier, the...delegate of the Miami-based DRE in New Orleans, and offered to join Bringuier’s organization to train guerillas to fight Castro. Bringuier was suspicious of Oswald and thought he might be an undercover FBI agent looking to infiltrate Bringuier’s one-man organization. Oswald was rebuffed and later got into a street fight with several of Bringuier’s associates and was arrested for disturbing the peace. Oswald later wrote to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in New York and bragged that he had “infiltrated” Bringuier’s group (he had not). A week after the street fight, Oswald debated Bringuier and INCA’s Edward Butler on WDSU radio. Oswald’s attempted defection to the Soviet Union was revealed during this debate and Oswald’s career as an agent provocateur was over. In the wake of the debate, Bringuier sent out a press release, which consisted of a typed message on plain-white paper, to the local New Orleans media in an effort to get the media and others interested in investigating Oswald, whom Bringuier considered dangerous. Bringuier was the only person who tried to warn people about Oswald prior to the assassination."
- Right-wing extremists. There is documentation that elements of anti-communist right-wing extremist movements (Birchers, American Nazi Party, Christian Defence League, KKK) were plotting to kill JFK, and also that they collaborated with elements of the Cuban exile community in weapons smuggling and plots to kill Fidel Castro: Christian Defence League "The first indication that the Swift/Gale complex was interested in more than preaching religion came from George Harding in April 1963 when he informed the FBI that he was being recruited to become part of an eight man team to assassinate three hundred public officials in high positions of government. According to WCD 39 and WCD 1107 "Harding claimed that the leaders in the group were Dr. Wesley Swift, James Shoup and others.... The second in command was a Colonel William Gale...who was supposed to have been the youngest intelligence officer under MCARTHUR (sic)."
"The Secret Service and FBI generated another report in August 1963 by the arrest of Gale's associate George King, Jr. King was overheard discussing the possibility of assassinating the president and was later arrested that month for the sale of illegal firearms. A later FBI field report, CO2-26104 #6419, stated "King is extreme right wing, hates Jews, was arrested by ATF O'Neil for illegal possession of firearms. Emotionally unstable. Arrested 2-29-68 again. This time for CCU, John Bircher, Christian Def. League (sic), Am Nazi Party, Christian Defense League."
- The Mafia: Declassification of the CIA "family jewels" report in 2007, detaining illegal activities carried out by that agency from 1947 to 1973, provided absolute confirmation that the CIA attempted to hire mafia hitmen to help Cuban exiles assassinate Fidel Castro:
"The documents released yesterday describe how a CIA officer, Richard Bissell, approached the CIA's Office of Security to establish whether it had "assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action. The mission target was Fidel Castro".
Following the meeting with the Office of Security, Bissell employed a go-between, Robert Maheu, and asked him to make contact with "gangster elements". Maheu subsequently reported an approach to Johnny Roselli in Las Vegas. Roselli is described as "a high-ranking member of the 'syndicate' (who) controlled all the ice-making machines on the (Las Vegas) Strip and (who) undoubtedly had connections leading into the Cuban gambling interests".
The CIA is careful to cover its tracks. According to the dossier, Maheu told Roselli that he (Maheu) has been retained by international businesses suffering "heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro's action. They were convinced that Castro's removal was the answer to their problem and were willing to pay the price of $150,000 (£75,000) for its successful accomplishment".
Roselli was also told that the US government was not, and must not become aware of the operation.
Roselli in turn led the CIA to a friend, known as Sam Gold. In September 1960, Maheu was introduced to Gold and his associate, known as Joe. In a development that appears to underscore the amateurishness of the whole operation, Maheu subsequently accidentally spotted photographs of "Sam and Joe" in Parade magazine.
Gold was in fact Momo Salvatore Giancana, "the chieftain of Cosa Nostra (the mafia) and the successor to Al Capone". Joe was actually Santos Trafficante, Cosa Nostra boss of Cuban operations.
At a meeting at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Gold/Giancana suggested that rather than try to shoot or blow up Mr Castro, "some type of potent pill that could be placed in Castro's food or drink would be much more effective".
He said a corrupt Cuban official, named as Juan Orta, who was in debt to the syndicate and had access to the Cuban leader, would carry out the poisoning. The CIA subsequently obtained and supplied "six pills of high lethal content" to Orta but after several weeks of abortive attempts, Orta demanded "out" of the operation.
Another disaffected Cuban was recruited to do the job, but he demanded money up front. In the event, the dossier relates, "the project was cancelled shortly after the Bay of Pigs episode" (in April, 1961)."
However, the HSAC also uncovered evidence of widespread & frequent discussion by mafia bosses and associates about assassination of John Kennedy:
"We took very seriously the possibility that organized crime had a hand in the President's death. I personally did not believe it at the time. I thought we could prove that they didn't. The FBI had an illegal electronic surveillance on the major figures of organized crime in the major areas in this country -- in New York, Philadelphia, Buffalo and elsewhere. We did a survey of that illegal electronic surveillance: Eight months before the assassination and six months after. We were looking for some indication in these men's conversations that would connect them to the assassination - to either Lee Harvey Oswald, or to Jack Ruby. We found no evidence in it to connect them to Oswald or Ruby. On the other hand, what we did find, shockingly, is repeated conversations by these people that indicated the depth of their hatred for Kennedy, and actual discussions saying: "he ought to be killed," "he ought to be whacked."
The documentation of all this plotting and threats against JFK provides a very simple and unglamorous explanation for why so many members of various groups would later make comments along the lines of "well, we got the SOB!" Such comments don't necessarily reflect a "secret knowledge" about the assassination, they may simply reflect that the speaker was aware of seriously dangerous members of their own group having discussed "getting rid of" President Kennedy - and filling the void of authoritative info created by Jack Ruby's killing Oswald with an assumption that somehow "our guys" were probably involved too.
- Castro and/or KGB - Much to the chagrin of commie-haters everywhere, no doubt, not even declassification of the KGB's files on Lee Harvey Oswald have contributed any evidence that Oswald was "working for" Castro or any communist nation's secret service. Nor have any documents revealed over the years demonstrated that perceptions of Oswald's quasi-marxist political leanings were incorrect. Oswald may have imagined himself to be an anti-facist secret agent/assassin, but there remains no objective evidence that he really was.
The Cold-warriors Were Nuts!
James Jesus Angleton was known as the "mother" of today's CIA for his deep role in its formation and operations. Major General William Joseph Donovan was also deeply involved with James Angleton during that period as well; Donovan's codename on the other hand was "father". In 1954 Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence, named Angleton head of the Counterintelligence Staff, a position he retained for the rest of his CIA career. Angleton is notable for both his long tenure as Chief of Counter-Intelligence, but also his being deceived by a Soviet spy, Kim Philby. When Philby's close associates in Britain's Most Secret Services, MacLean and Burgess, defected, it was immediately clear that Philby had staged a massive and unprecedented long-term espionage ring in both the US and the U.K, directly under the noses of the finest minds in Counter-Intelligence available, including Angleton. Angleton's faith in his abilities was deeply shaken by how Philby had so successfully fooled him for so long. From that point on he was best known for his exceptional and relentless sensitivity to any sign of further molee-molee-molee MOLES within the CIA.
As a matter of fact, Angleton seems to have gone completely barking mad and proceeded to utterly destroy any counter-intelligence capability the CIA might have cultivated to that point.
"When Soviet intelligence officer Anatoly Golitsin defected to the West in 1961, he hinted strongly that a long-range penetration agent was active within the Central Intelligence Agency. The possibility of a "mole" in the ranks set CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton on an obsessive internal spy-hunt that eventually shattered the careers of many loyal officers and paralyzed the agency's Soviet operations... The joke at Langley headquarters was that Angleton ended up suspecting himself. As Angleton's institutional paranoia spiraled out of control, CIA director William Colby, aware that his counterintelligence chief had become a destructive force, dismissed him in 1974."
One of the starkest demonstrations of Angleton's lunacy involves the mistreatment of Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko. "Mr. Nosenko first supplied information to CIA in 1962 and finally defected to the US in 1964. Between these dates, the senior CIA officers responsible for the case had concluded that Mr. Nosenko had defected under KGB orders to give information which would confound and confuse our analysis of Soviet intelligence operations. Among the statements he made was the definite assertion that Lee Harvey Oswald had never been utilized by Soviet intelligence". But James Angelton and his deputy Richard Helms somehow "knew" that Oswald really had been a KGB assassin...
"Richard M. Helms, then head of the C.I.A.'s espionage operations, and later director of the entire agency, testified to the House Committee on Assassinations that he found Nosenko's claim "strained credulity. . . . I have not been able to swallow it." Helms's skepticism about Nosenko was shared by the influential chief of counterintelligence, James J. Angleton, who regarded Nosenko as a false defector. In part because of disbelief of Nosenko's story about Oswald, the K.G.B. man was imprisoned by the C.I.A. for almost five years under conditions that were, for much of that time, extremely harsh. Helms defended the C.I.A.'s actions by testifying that if Nosenko fed it false information about the K.G.B.'s relationship with Oswald, "it was fair for us to surmise that there may have been an Oswald-K.G.B. connection in November 1963, more specifically that Oswald was acting as a Soviet agent when he shot President Kennedy."
Nosenko stuck to his story and was eventually rehabilitated by the C.I.A. He now lives somewhere in the United States under an assumed name, still under the agency's protection."
Dr. Cleveland Cram was a CIA Station Chief who wrote the official internal classified CIA report on the history of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff under Angleton. The report filled twelve volumes, each 300 to 400 pages long. From Tom Mangold's "Cold Warrior" book about this report:
"Cram's conclusions were that the Angleton years (1954-1974) had a 'very detrimental' effect on the CIA. For the first eight years, Angleton had generally run the Counterintelligence Staff effectively. But, from 1962 on (after the arrival of Golitsyn), Cram found that there was no real counterintelligence. He judged that the search for evidence of the KGB's 'Monster Plot' had brought the CIA's collection of counterintelligence to a halt. He also stressed that Soviet operations had effectively ended after 1963, when Pete Bagley added his weight and authority to that of the Fundamentalists. The recruitment of Soviet agents and defectors had ceased because of the neurosis of the hunters and the belief that no Soviet defector or agent could be a bona fide defector. Cram further judged that Angleton's leadership had severely hurt CIA morale and had seriously damaged US intelligence liaison in Britain, France, Norway and Canada. He found that even more damage had been caused by the willful turning away of Soviet intelligence defectors and the ditching of their material. Inside the copious twelve volumes, the Cram Report contained the full and shocking indictment of a twenty-year period, with tragic case-by-case revelations scrupulously documented."
But Angleton wasn't finished with his paranoid disinformation campaigns. Like all the psychotic and psycopathic Cold Warriors of his era, Angleton felt compelled to infect the society around him with his sickness. Of Moles And Molehunters "When Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) William Colby dismissed him in 1974, Angleton for the next six months spent part of his time at Langley, introducing members of the new CI Staff to such people as his defector friend, Anatole Golitsyn. Gradually, however, the former counterintelligence chief realized that his career with the CIA in fact was finished. The dismissal was a terrible blow; he became embittered and withdrew for a time into alcohol.
Later, the press began to seek him out, and this revived his combative spirit. Angleton began to play off one writer against another, planting his ideas and opinions among them. He also changed his luncheon venue from a local Washington restaurant to the more politically congenial atmosphere of the Army-Navy Club. A counterattack was planned against the Agency, in particular the new CI Staff. His objective was to prove how wrong its assessment of Soviet operations was and to indict his successors for negligence of duty.
In this period, Angleton, while not neglecting the possibility of KGB penetration, stressed his belief that the main threat came from KGB deception and disinformation. To support his thesis, he continually cited evidence that Golitsyn had provided. Angleton's ideas, propounded by Epstein and other writers, caught fire and created a virtual cottage industry of academic and think tank specialists on the issues he raised.
Publication in 1978 of Edward J. Epstein's Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald provided enormous stimulus to the deception thesis by suggesting that Yuriy Nosenko, a Soviet defector, had been sent by the KGB to provide a cover story for Lee Harvey Oswald, who, the book alleged, was a KGB agent. Epstein in effect wrote two books: one focused on Lee Harvey Oswald's Marine career in Japan, his time in Russia, and his return to the United States; the second gave Nosenko the key role in an alleged KGB deception operation designed to cover Oswald (and the Soviet Government) and negate Golitsyn's revelations.Because Epstein cited so much classified information that could only have come from someone with intimate knowledge of the Nosenko case, blame for the leak naturally focused on Angleton and his supporters. Thus, it came as no surprise when, two years after the former CI chief's death, Epstein admitted his sources had included Angleton, Tennent H. Bagley, N. S. Miler, and other ex-Agency associates who shared his views. Despite some negative reviews, the book sold well and was important in spreading Angleton's theory of a super KGB manipulating American society and politics through its sophisticated deception apparatus"
Thus, propelled by his psychotic paranoia Angelton not only wrecked the CIA's counterintelligence capabilities during his own career, but ended up becoming the very "leak" of classified data that he had vainly hunted all those years. Angelton was, effectively, the greatest "mole" the KGB could have ever hoped to have: Angelton As KGB Asset
"Former Major in the KGB who was in the same KGB class as Russian President Vladimir Putin. Shvets is the author of "Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America. This article appeared in a Washington magazine in the 1990s.
It was a cold winter day in 1981. I was a KGB rookie, sitting with my colleagues, future Soviet intelligence officers, in a lecture hall at the Yuri Andopov Institute--simply put, a spy school. The lecturer, a gray-haired KGB colonel, was telling us about the CIA and its chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton.
"He was our best asset," said the colonel.
We were stunned. The famous CIA mole-hunter was a KGB asset? Were we the best in the business or what?
"Take it easy, guys," smiled the colonel. Angleton wasn't really our agent. He was, the colonel explained, "our useful idiot." But given his position and his obsessive hunt for moles in the CIA, he was more valuable to us than a whole army of real agents.
The theory goes all the way back to V.I. Lenin. The founder of the Soviet Union believed that his enemies would always have in their midst certain high-ranking people fighting so hard to defeat Communism that they'd do more harm than good to their own cause. Lenin considered such individuals a vital part of the Communist "fifth column." The KGB liked that idea, since it cost nothing and sometimes paid huge dividends.
Angleton unwittingly provided the KGB with something it couldn't have possibly gotten through its own efforts. He demoralized the CIA beyond the wildest dreams of the party bosses back in Moscow. Best of all, from the KGB's point of view, was the fact that Angleton's mole-hunting discredited CIA counterintelligence efforts for years to come. The result was an atmosphere in which real Kremlin moles, like Aldrich Ames, could flourish."
Angelton "knew" that the whole Western world was permeated with KGB misinformation, because his CIA cohorts had been permeating the same societies with their own misinformation since 1948! Operation Mockingbird
"Operation Mockingbird was a Central Intelligence Agency operation to influence domestic and foreign media, whose activities were made public during the Church Committee investigation in 1975 (published 1976).
Deep in the pages of his 2007 memoir American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate and Beyond, E. Howard Hunt pulls open the curtain on covert history and details the existence of “Project Mockingbird,” in which print and broadcast media players were used for both propaganda and active intelligence gathering inside the United States, a direct violation of what was then its technical legal function.
In 1948, Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects (OSP). Soon afterwards OSP was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."
"Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic and foreign media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post to run the project within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great; "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."
"After 1953, the network was overseen by Allen W. Dulles, director of the Central Intelligence Agency. By this time Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. These organizations were run by people with well-known right-wing views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor)"
If the CIA was engaged in permeating society with calculated disinformation, Angelton would reason that the KGB must be doing the same thing! Therefore, no information of any kind could be assumed to be unmanipulated or genuine. If all information is actually disinformation, then there is no objective underlying reality and "truth" is whatever the more powerful agencies of the world say it is...only an "initiated adept" (i.e. - a counterintelligence expert) is qualified to "read between the lines" and separate valid info from disinformation. Everyone else is either a deluded innocent or an active disinfo agent of your enemies - so its acceptable to shape & manage your own citizen's thinking so that they believe whatever you've determined is "for their own good" to believe, because if you don't do that then you're enemies will fill their heads with beliefs that benefit your enemy instead...
Which leads us to "CIA Memo to Media assets at CBS, ABC, NBC, New York Times, Item 2 CIA Document #1035-960 4 January 1967" - "Countering Criticism Of The Warren Report"
"1. Our Concern. From the day of President Kennedy's assassination on, there has been speculation about the responsibility for his murder. Although this was stemmed for a time by the Warren Commission report, (which appeared at the end of September 1964), various writers have now had time to scan the Commission's published report and documents for new pretexts for questioning, and there has been a new wave of books and articles criticizing the Commission's findings. In most cases the critics have speculated as to the existence of some kind of conspiracy, and often they have implied that the Commission itself was involved. Presumably as a result of the increasing challenge to the Warren Commission's report, a public opinion poll recently indicated that 46% of the American public did not think that Oswald acted alone, while more than half of those polled thought that the Commission had left some questions unresolved. Doubtless polls abroad would show similar, or possibly more adverse results."
"2. This trend of opinion is a matter of concern to the U.S. government, including our organization. The members of the Warren Commission were naturally chosen for their integrity, experience and prominence. They represented both major parties, and they and their staff were deliberately drawn from all sections of the country. Just because of the standing of the Commissioners, efforts to impugn their rectitude and wisdom tend to cast doubt on the whole leader- ship of American society. Moreover, there seems to be an increasing tendency to hint that President Johnson himself, as the one person who might be said to have benefited, was in some way responsible for the assassination. Innuendo of such seriousness affects not only the individual concerned, but also the whole reputation of the American government. Our organization itself is directly involved: among other facts, we contributed information to the investigation. Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. Background information is supplied in a classified section and in a number of unclassified attachments."
Bear two things in mind; the CIA is fully aware that the Warren Report was a meaningless whitewash, and, the CIA leadership believed at this point in time that Oswald was in fact a KGB assassin and therefore that the conclusions of the Warren Report must be false and fraudulent!
The purpose of this memo cannot be "to get the truth out", then, since the Warren Report does not represent "truth" as Angelton & cohorts understand it - it's purpose can only be to "manage & manipulate" the population's thinking "for their own good". It must be deliberate misinformation, and if that is the case then there must still be something important to hide.
This is a natural conclusion to draw, which is why the majority of the population continue to hold this opinion in the absense of definitive, conclusive proof of conspiracy. But it is not just the average Joe who is affected in this manner. Everyone within the American intelligence community and government administration who is not the author of the memo but knows about Angelton & cohort's opinions on the matter, is likely to draw the same conclusion - "they" wouldn't be putting out propaganda like this unless there was still something important to hide. Hence, seeds of doubt are likely to arise in the minds of even CIA Directors as well as lower level operatives, that...maybe "we" really did have something to do with the assassination - after all, there were those terrorist assassins we created through Operation Mongoose and some of our people have been batshit-crazy fanatics capable of organizing such a thing on their own...
And that would not be paranoid thinking, because many of "their" people really were batshit-crazy cold-warrior fanatics like Angelton. Or Allan Dulles, John Foster Dulles, Lyman Lemnitzer, Edward Lansdale, William Pawley, Clare Booth Luce, Ronald Reagan, General Edwin Walker, Cord Meyer, Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, William Casey, Frank Wisner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Welch, Felix I. Rodriguez, Ted Shackley, Gen. John K. Singlaub, Oliver North, Richard Secord, Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham, Nelson Bunker Hunt, Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada, Richard Helms and all the other Dr Strangeloves who came & went over the years.
The Latest Developments:
Journnalist Jefferson Morley has been waging a legal war with the CIA, attempting to force that agency to account for and release documents related to a deceased CIA officer named George Joannides.
"For four years, the agency has been battling in federal court to block my Freedom of Information Act request seeking disclosure of the secret operations of a deceased CIA officer named George Joannides. He is a shadowy figure in the complex story of JFK's assassination. At the time of the Dallas tragedy, Joannides was serving as chief of the CIA's Miami-based "psychological warfare" operations against Cuban leader Fidel Castro. In December, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Court of Appeals threw out the many of the agency's decades-old claims of secrecy around Joannides.
Circuit Judge Judith Rogers and two colleagues ordered the CIA to search its operational files for more material on Joannides. They also ordered the agency to explain why 17 reports on Joannides' secret operations in 1962, 1963 and 1964, are missing from CIA archives. In legal briefs, agency officials have claimed that more than 30 documents about Joannides's actions in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be made public in any form--for reasons of "national security."
Joannides' curious connection to the JFK assassination story was unknown until 2001. Declassified CIA records revealed that Joannides had guided and monitored a Cuban exile student group that publicly denounced the pro-Castro activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in August 1963. Three months later, Oswald shot Kennedy dead from an office buildings. Joannides' agents in Cuban Miami shaped the first day press coverage of JFK's assassination by generating evidence of Oswald's support for Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
The Joannides files could shed light on the question of whether CIA officers overlooked, underestimated or manipulated Oswald as he made his way to Dallas.
To date, all efforts to pierce the veil of secrecy around Joannides' actions in 1963 have been thwarted. The agency has ignored an open letter from two dozen leading JFK scholars calling on the CIA to release the records.Last year, the National Archives requested access to the records without success. And the agency's public affairs officers agency refuse to answer any questions about Joannides.
"Joannides' service as case officer of the Cuban exile group which dealt with Oswald make his files highly relevant and in need of public release," said Rex Bradford, senior analyst at MaryFerrell.org, the largest online archive of declasssified JFK assassination records. "The files are clearly within the scope of the JFK Records Act which remains in effect despite the CIA's failure to recognize the fact."
The JFK Records Act, passed in 1992 after Oliver Stone's controversial movie, mandates the "immediate" public release of all JFK-related records."
The JFK Records Act, passed in 1992...mandates the "immediate" public release of all JFK-related records - and still the CIA continues to fight release of these documents. They might as well parade down the street holding banners proclaiming: "WE STILL HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE" in letters two-feet tall, because that will inevitably be the interpretation placed upon their actions by a majority of the public.
It doesn't even matter if the documents actually contain disappointingly mundane information - CIA bureaucrats will have been conditioned to fight to defend whatever "secrets" might be left in relation to the JFK assassination, having come to believe that their agency really must have "something to hide" even if they can't personally comprehend what that something might consist of. It could be anything - who knows where some innocous-looking trivia might lead, eh? The ghost of Angelton's paranoia will gnaw at their souls and paralyze their minds, and justly so. Their continued, illegitimate existence is what they ultimately need to "hide", because everything they do today cannot help but be stained with associations to their past victims - whether that includes JFK or not.
Summation:
Did Lee Harvey Oswald really sqeeze off the fatal shots in Dealy Plaza? If so, was he acting as part of a conspiracy or "on his own"? The definitive, indisputable "smoking gun" to answer those questions continues to elude us. That's not surprising, actually, because if such a thing had ever existed it is beyond belief that it would have survived down to our time in a recognizable form.
Nevertheless, a smoking gun of sorts can be discerned behind all the strands of data that we do now possess. There did exist, in 1963, a lethal meme that circulated informally through various social groupings in the United States - through the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA, the Mob, right-wing extremists, and anti-Castro cuban exiles. That meme was: "someone ought to take that guy (JFK) out!". The commonality between these groups through which the meme was disseminated was virulent anti-communist fanaticism.
Who can say how pathetic, delusional loser Lee Harvey Oswald came into contact with the meme and became infected with it? Was it passed to him directly through association with members of one or more of these groups? Through the mass media? We will probably never be certain, but we can be certain that fanatical anti-communism had it's finger on the trigger of whatever weapon(s) caused JFK's death, that it was the co-conspirator we've been seeking to identify all these years. Because, even if Oswald acted alone - in delusional retaliation for the Bay of Pigs invasion or the attempts to assassinate Castro or misguided American military/paramilitary action elsewhere in the world - anti-communist fanaticism was ultimately responsible for those actions and events.
Around this time last year, this blog ran a series of articles responding to and analyzing another series that appeared in a local weekly magazine called "VUE Weekly".
