Friday, September 16, 2016

The Patsy as a True Believer

The Patsy as a True Believer

By William Kelly

In a (September 9th) New York Times review of Kati Marton's new book, “True Believer - Stalin’s Last American Spy” (Simon & Schuster, 2016), Timothy Naftali writes:

“In these troubling times, we are more likely than our parents to accept on face value that John F. Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald could have been a Lone Wolf, the archetype of the self-radicalized individual - seduced by poisonous ideas into being a soldier for a cause, acting on dark impulses without need of a supporting organization and becoming a stranger to his family and community - now haunts the public imagination.”

While Marton writes about Noel Field as the True Believer in the Eric Hoffer mold, those interested in Noel Field should read what David Talbot says about him in his book “The Devil’s Chessboard," a book the New York Times refuses to review. 

In Naftali'a review he makes a lot of assumptions and tries to re-characterize Lee Harvey Oswald as JFK’s lone killer, a lone nut case and a self-radicalized “Lone Wolf” terrorist acting as a True Believer for a phantom cause.

Now in these troubling times, before we or our parents accept on face value any these three presumptions - 

1) The case against Oswald has been shown over the years to have been weak, specifically including the palm print on the barrel, the evidentiary value of the paper bag, the hair & fiber evidence, the timing of the shots, the condition of the rifle, Oswald's location at the time of the shooting, the line-up identifications, the timing of the Tippit murder and the shell casings.

2) Investigation over the years has shown that Oswald was not a "loner," and had a complex series of associations with a variety of people, such as George de Mohrenschildt, Volkmar Schmidt, Michael Paine, David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Guy Bannister, David Atlee Phillips and others.

3) Far from an archetypal self-radicalized militant, Oswald claimed to have been a Patsy and specifically denied shooting Kennedy and Officer Tippit ("I didn't shoot anybody, no, sir."), an adamant denial is the antithesis of a dedicated radical assassin.  Oswald also said during interrogation that JFK's death would probably not greatly affect US policy toward Cuba, since LBJ would likely carry out the same policy, and even the Warren Commission could not give Oswald a reasonable motive to kill the President. 

In addition, Oswald's defection to Russia may have been a fake defection, a dangle by a US intelligence service as the unusually lenient treatment he received on return to the States (e.g. – no known criminal investigation, no charges) is not characteristic of treatment one might expect to be afforded to a true defector during the height of the Cold War. 

Now apart from Oswald, let's take a moment to properly characterize Naftali, a former director of the Nixon Library and one of those Miller Center scholars who transcribed the Presidential Tapes, along with Philip Zelikow and Max Holland, whose blatant biases have already been exposed.

When they got to transcribing the Oval Office tapes JFK made in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they claimed what the President said in response to Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay’s statement that “You are in a pretty bad fix Mr. President,” was “unintelligible,” when to others it was clear JFK said, “Your in it with me.”

Philip Zelikow went on to be the chief of staff of the 911 Commission and kept the pre-911 Able Danger reports from reaching the commissioners and then kept the Saudi Arabian connections out of their final report.

Max Holland wrote the “JFK Assassination Tapes” book without mentioning the dozens of Air Force One radio tape transmissions from the Collins Radio Liberty station or the many other Collins Radio connections to the assassination that I have written extensively about and made presentations on at the Wecht and Bethesda conferences.

Zelikow, Holland and Naftali are in the same boat here, so we know where Naftali is coming from and where he is going with this.

As for Naftali's attempted re-characterization of Oswald as an archetypical Lone Wolf terrorist, the idea that Oswald was JFK’s assassin must first be rejected, as the evidence that implicates Oswald is questionable, and it is more likely he was framed as a Patsy as he claimed to be.

So Oswald may have been alone but he was not a wolf, he was a rabbit, Ozzie Rabbit - one set off for others to chase while the real killers slipped quietly away.

It wasn't Oswald who was seduced by poisonous ideas into being a soldier for a cause and a stranger to his family, it is Naftali who is acting on dark impulses with a need for such supporting organizations like the Miller Center and the New York Times.

Naftale says that Noel Field, as a True Believing Soviet spy offers us a “window on the delusion and narcissism that fuel the self-radicalized of any era,” it is Naftale and his Miller Center minions who offer us a window of insight into the Dark Side of the Black Arts and “Wilderness of Mirrors” who wants us to believe JFK was the victim of a Lone Wolf, so let's look more closely at them as well as the organizations that support them.

Let's see, the Miller Center in Virginia is bankrolled in part by the Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS), one of the chief assets of the CIA’s Mockingbird program and source of numerous black propaganda disinformation stories on the assassination. These stories include those furnished Seth Kantor in Dallas by Hal Hendrix in Miami within hours of the assassination, and the bogus NSA report a few weeks before the Hinckley attempt to kill Reagan that falsely tried to blame both presidential attacks on Castro, a familiar CIA “active measure” that continues today.

Then there's Max Holland, Naftali’s Miller Center cohort who unabashedly writes for the CIA’s in-house publication and gets awarded grants from the Columbia-Lucas Foundation that was known as the Columbia-Catherwood Award before the Catherwood Foundation was exposed as a conduit for covert CIA action funds. And Holland lists among his benefactors a German Venetian blind company - how shady is that?

We won't even bother going into the New York Times, the paper of record that recently published an article calling for the release of the secret NSA records on the suspicious death of UN Secretary Dag Hammarskold, but doesn’t mention the still withheld NSA records on the assassination of President Kennedy.

So when Naftali and Holland and others try to describe the Patsy in the Dealey Plaza operation as an “archetypical Lone Wolf seduced by poisonous ideas - a soldier for a cause acting on dark impulses without a supporting organization,” you know they are the ones acting on dark impulses and poisoning ideas as a mercenary soldiers covertly working as a media assets for a nefarious secret organization.



William Kelly is a freelance journalist and historian whose JFK assassination research is partially funded by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Justice Investigative Journalism Project. He is Secretary of CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassinations (CAPA-HQ.com).

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Dear Max Holland - Re: Response to Russian Diz

Dear Max Holland - this is in response to your series of articles on Soviet Disinformation and the assassination of President Kennedy - and the recent reference to it in The Daily Beast .


Image result for CIA Disinformation

"An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare....The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister....  some of the most famous conspiracy theories to bombinate in backrooms, basements, street corners, college dorms were actually whole-cloth inventions of the Cheka. For instance...Many in 1963 doubted that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering John F. Kennedy; but only a precious few ever saw their paranoid Grassy Knoll explanation transformed into a Hollywood blockbuster. American researcher Max Holland found that the KGB fabricated letter that got planted in the Italian newspaper Paese Sera was the first to allege that one of the suspects for the Kennedy assassination, Clay Shaw, a New Orleans businessman, was actually an operative of Langley. The New Orleans district attorney, Jim Garrison, got hold of a copy of that letter and while he never cited it in court, his film version Kevin Costner most certainly did in the paranoid Oliver Stone movie JFK. Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB archivist who defected to the West and smuggled out six enormous cases of Soviet foreign intelligence files, later recorded that the 'KGB could fairly claim that far more Americans believed some version of its own conspiracy theory of the Kennedy assassination, involving a right-wing plot and the U.S. intelligence community, than still accept the main findings of the Warren Commission.'"  - Michael Weiss - The Daily Beast 

Re: Soviet Disinformation @ Dealey Plaza  - a Primer on American Propaganda

By William Kelly

As with our mutual interest in the Air Force One radio communications, I share Max Holland's interest in official government disinformation at Dealey Plaza though I am not as fixated on the Soviet variety as  Max Holland is.

First off I accept the classic definition of disiformation as intentionally originating from a state government Intelligence source, and not to be confused with misinformation, that's just plain wrong and not originating from an intelligence agency.

So far it is alleged Soviet intelligence sources were responsible for the Dear Mr. Hunt letter, the article on Permindex in Italian paper, and the support of conspiracy theorists Mark Lane and Jochim Joesterin. Mitrokin is the acknoweded primary source and it was Mitrokin  who established his bonifides by identifying (Robert Lipka), a Soviet mole in the National Security Agency.

When the former code and cipher clerk was arrested by the FBI years after the damage was done, he told the court at his arrangement that he saw official NSA documents that identified the real assassin of President Kennedy. The judge then adjourned the court but as the former NSA clerk was led away a reporter asked him the name of the real assassin - to which he replied - Louis Angel Castillo.

You want to follow Soviet disinformation then there's a deep political black hole where im sure you won't venture.

First off, why are the documents refered to by Lipka not among the NSA records released under the JFK Act, as thev should be?

Former FBI agent Bill Turner has disputed your contention that an Italian news article sparked Jim Garrison to initiate the New Orleans investigation, though he later became aware of it, so it's disconcerting for that to be quoted as fact.

The idea the Russians would use psych war, black propaganda and disinformation to influence American public opinion is disconcerting, but not so much as the CiA's own disinformation campaign to blame what happened at Dealer Plaza on Lee Harvey Oswald, Fidel Castro and Cuban Commies, a media campaign that continues today - - what you call "active measures."

While you come up with a half dozen attempts by the Ruskies to influence the public perception on  the assassination of JFK, there are dozens of examples - case studies of this well orchestrafter operation to falsely blame the assassination of JFK on Castro, most of them traced to CIA sources.

Someone on Max Holland's team - I think his wife, suggested that you look for patterns - and here the pattern is quite clear - and decipherable.

In order to understand the very nature of disinformation and black propaganda you must read the basic literature - John Barron on Soviet disinformation and Paul Linebarger's standard text "Propaganda," that he wrote for the US Army.

While Barron focuses on the Soviets, as Max Holland does, Paul Linebarger pretty much created the American variety of such esoteric black arts that he taught at the John Hopkins Center for International Studies. Among his students were Joe Smith,  E. Howard Hunt, Edward Lansdale and David Atlee Phillips. Linebarger was especially proud of Lansdale and Hunt, who he said had "black minds," but he also cautioned his students - espionage agents in the making, that they shouldnt use such secret covert ops and dirt tricks to disrupt American democracy because it would ruin it.

When General William Odom, former Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and a Director of NSA, was asked - what makes a good intelligence case officer? Odom thought it over and said it was like the movie "The Sting," - the con, a response that indicated he took Linebargber's class.

Paul Linebargber's text book breaks propaganda into categories - white, grey and black, and outlines the STASM formula for identifying and determining the real source of black propaganda. But besides using his own book in his classes he also assigned his pupils a linguistic text that was republished as "The Big Con," by David Maurer. That book was the basis of the screenplay of the movie "The Sting," in which sophisticated confidence men swindle a mobster in a Big Con operation they called the Wire.

Maurer was a Kentucky lingustics professor who studied the slang of street thieves, pick pockets and gamblers who led him to the big time confidence men who practicted the Big Con. Unlike theves and gamblers Big Con confidence men designed to get the targeted victim - The Mark, to give up large amounts of money in the belief he can get even more in a shady but believable deal in which everyone except the Mark are actors in an elaborate play.

As the former NSA general said, and as Linebarger taught, Maurer's book "The Big Con," not only gives a good account of how to conduct a covert operation, it also gives good tips and directions on how to recruit agents and dispense with them after they are no longer needed - give them "the brush off," as the Con Artists would put it.

The CIA adopted the techniques, procedures and terminology of the Big Con in their operations as their Cuba affairs in the 1960s indicate. JMWAVE for instance was the largest CIA base ever, using the University of Miami south campus as the bogus Zenith Technologies corporation - a fake front like the façade of a Western town in old movies.

The JMWAVE base was what the con artists called "The Big Store," and as the NSA general said, the best intelligence agents and case officers were like the actors in the movie The Sting. Just as Paul Newman played Henry Gondorf - the smooth "Inside Man," others had different roles, including the "Ropers" - who identify and recruit the Marks, and "Outside Men," who run the play, whatever it is, just as David Morales and David Atlee Phillips were the Outside Men to the Inside Men - Ted Shackley, William Harvey and Des Fitzgerald at Mongoose, Task Force W and JMWAVE.

These techniques, procedures and terminology were taught - not only to the agents and case officers but to all the players, operators and assets "in the field," as they say.

Antonio Veciana was recruited by "Maurice Bishop," his case officer (aka David Atlee Phillips), and before embarking on a twenty year career as a covert CIA operative, he was given special training in psychological warefare that included black propaganda techniques, terminology and covert operational procedures that Linebarger outlined in his course.

Veciana's lessons were given at a language school in Havana and in an office at the Pan Am Bank building in Miami, that Mitch Werbel told HSCA investigator was frequently used by the CIA.

Jack Ruby deposited money in the Pan Am Bank for his Havana casino friends - the Fox brothers and Castro gunrunner Robert McKeown said he was paid in cash wrapped in Pan Am Bank wrappers, so there was some shenanigans going on there, and the Pan Am bank was one of the lines of inquiry Gaeton Fonzi and Richard Sprague were investigating when Sprague was sacked and Fonzi reigned in.

And just as Maurer's The Big Con warns that blowing off the Mark is often hard to do, Phillips had trouble getting rid of Veciana. Marks often want to come back and play some more even though they lost tremendous amounts of money because playing the game itself is addicting.  As it was for Antonio Veciana, who was paid off in six figures by "Maurice Bishop," but at first refused to positively identify Philips as Bishop because he wanted to work for him again.

Now with David Atlee Phillips dead and Veciana singing every song he knows that Bishop taught him, perhaps it is time to review - not the Soviet disinformation, but the all-American variety of black propaganda that purports to show that Fidel Castro was behind the Dealey Plaza operation, an "active measure" as they say at CIA, that continues today.

Additional Links -


Washington Decoded: The Power of Disinformation: The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination