Tag: CIA

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 4

    JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 4



    Part 4: Lunacy, Loyalty, and Failed Lie Detectors

    “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome aboard the star ship Boney M for our first passenger flight to Venus.”

    ~ Boney M, 1978; ‘Night Flight to Venus’


    Knock on Wood

    Let us return once again to those unfortunates the Woods, who in many ways are almost as big a stars of this essay as Timothy Cooper is. Because unless I am very much mistaken it is they, not their little urchin ‘Pip’ Cooper who have actually been pumping the UFO-JFK stuff too all and sundry over the years, inspiring people like Dickie Dolan to leap into the fray. After asking around it appears that the Woods are in fact very well liked. In particularly the Dad ‘Bob’ thus, a number of people are likely to be highly upset with the following. But spare me the tears please. The Woods themselves have asked for this. If they aren’t conmen in my mind they are utter ‘crackpots’. And while their credentials in the fields of physics and mathematics are impeccable, for all their obvious intellect they have clearly not put 1+1 together as far as Cooper and the Kennedy assassination is concerned.

    Indeed, the Woods are the 21st Century version of Arthur Young. But at least Young seems to have had the good sense to realize he had been manipulated by the CIA in some way.


    Wood I lie to you Baby?

    In 1999 at about the same time as his JFK-Lancer-Snoop memoranda came out. Mr Cooper failed a lie detector test, as the ‘Saucer Smear’ site explains.

    We hear that researcher Bob Durant is hopping mad at Tim Cooper and the Woods because of an incident that began when the four of them were on a radio show together last January. “Smear” readers will recall that Bob and Ryan Wood are the father & son team that has been pushing the “new” MJ-12 documents, and Tim Cooper is their principal source. Durant challenged Cooper to take a lie detector test regarding his claims and he agreed to do so. The test was given last April 18th by a polygraph expert chosen by the Woods, but unfortunately Cooper flunked it anyhow. Worse, the Woods tried to avoid telling Durant the outcome of the test, even though he had paid for part of it!

    The Woods comeback against the failed test is now something of a legend in UFO circles. They claimed that the questions which Cooper failed (those dealing with his sources) were because he knowingly kept the identifications of his sources secret; not to mention that ‘this was a good thing’. TO further this, on their webpage introducing the argument surrounding the authentication of the documents the third section is titled ‘Critic’s arguments are often speculative’

    Now if the above statements by the Woods weren’t speculative enough for you let’s examine the speculation involved in their ‘Ten Reasons Why Tim Cooper is NOT a Provenance Problem’. Which successfully places them in the league of the all time great conspirahypocrites.

    1. He did not seek out publicity for himself. In fact, he gave away documents and publicity to Tim Good with the “Hillenkoetter to Military Assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee memo of 19 September 1947.”

    Yes Cooper was extremely coy with publicising his ‘Majestic Tim’ email address and his comments with regards too Angleton and the Monroe-JFK-UFO stuff wasn’t he? Did he grow in confidence from 1992 onwards? It appears so. Its also interesting to note that in point 4) We can see that Good deemed the document Cooper fobbed off too him to be a fraud. Is it any wonder he wasn’t jumping around talking about it?

    2. If Bob and Ryan Wood did not visit him, talk with him, become his friend and ask for documents they would still be in Cooper’s attic gathering dust. This shows that Cooper is not seeking recognition for his alleged forgery, which is a characteristic action of forgery criminals.

    It’s bizarre enough the Woods seem to be writing this in third person, it’s another to say that Cooper was not seeking recognition, thus the Woods logic here is remiss. Prior, to their encountering Cooper as we have seen he had also contacted the aforementioned Good and Stanton Friedman, who was dubious of the claims and asked the Woods to check Cooper out for him. Which as you have seen already, was rather a big mistake on Friedman’s part. We have also seen that an intermediary of Cooper’s (discussed in Part V) had likely contacted Speriligo, in Hollywood at the same time.

    Another question for the Woods is why would Cooper have to promote his documents to them if they were keen to befriend him and get his documents off of him in the first place? Aren’t the Woods supposed to be objective investigators? An investigator isn’t there too gain trust and make friends. The endowment of trust and legitimacy is theirs to bestow upon the investigated. This ‘minor’ detail seems to have escaped them at the time. In much the same way as this rather incredible statement, in his 2009 email to Bob Hastings in which Cooper describes himself as an:

    Unwitting dupe in this charade (I must confess I was willing to be led into believing it by Friedman and the Woods).

    It’s one thing to say that he now believes the MJ-12 documents he had were fake. It’s another thing to slander Friedman, the ‘doubting Thomas’ of MJ-12’s second coming, and the Woods, that it was they who‘led’ him into believing in the documents’ authenticity.

    3. Tim Cooper has a skeptical attitude. He did not openly embrace the documents nor did he have the time to verify the details that have been partially checked by Wood & Wood and others.

    Cooper’s ‘skeptical’ attitude (or total lack thereof) were seen in his take on Monroe’s diary and her DOD ID in Part I. This article (which I found by typing Cooper’s ‘Majestic Tim’ email into a basic Google search) is an unsourced quasi religious UFO rant from the man, which touched briefly on how the MJ-12 Documents back up Biblical prophecy. . Now let us return briefly too Cooper’s bio on the Majestic Documents site also touched on in Part I. Here it is detailed that Cooper’s interests lie in ‘military history, intelligence practices’ but most importantly ‘Biblical textual research’. The most curious thing here is that on page 5 of one of the last documents Cooper was ever sent we see mad ramblings from a source called S-1 (Source 1) about MJ-12 being ‘Majestic Jehovah-12’, after Christ and the apostles. Cooper then finally topped himself with a contribution to a book entitled Exempt from Disclosure: The Black World of UFO’s one of the more maligned books in genuine research circles.

    We also hear from Tim Cooper a bit in this book and he has some interesting titbits. One was about a crash in 1948 or 1949 at White Sands in which Tim Cooper’s father Harry Cooper, a AF Msgt, says a very ancient Hebrew Bible was recovered from crash site. Code breakers at the NSA succeeded in breaking the Hebrew Bible Code and the information was given to MJ-12. The Hebrew Bible was thought to be the key to understanding the UFO/Alien phenomena.

    How this failed to set off alarms for the Woods is unfathomable. That numerous other tripwires should have gone off when Cooper told them his initial interest in conspiracy was piqued by the Kennedy assassination has me thinking it must have been a pure fluke that the Woods never hooked up with Marshall Applewhite, Raoul from the Raellians or had David Icke join their document authentication team.

    Tim says he was with his father on November 22, 1963, watching television about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Timothy told Bob Wood that there were tears in his father’s eyes when Harry Cooper said, ‘They really did it.’ That led Timothy to become very interested in the Kennedy assassination. Timothy Cooper started putting in Freedom of Information requests back in the late 1980s for information about the Kennedy assassination. At the same time, Timothy began to ask about UFOs. Timothy had put in FOIA requests too about fourteen different government agencies for everything they had about the Kennedy assassination and UFOs.

    An important figure here is Harry Cooper, Timmy’s dad. Harry, a Master Sergeant in his day is, judging by the actions of his spawn, a guy I wouldn’t put much trust in. On Bob Collins ‘Peregrine Communications site’ we can see that Cooper Sr. provided his son with (wait for it) a medal and a certificate from Curtis Le May for his work on UFO’s. And in the same commendation it congratulates Harry for…

    His exemplar knowledge of film processing and printing techniques.

    Now, considering it’s the first I’ve ever heard of LeMay handing out certificates for individuals working on a UFO assignment anywhere, we have to consider what one would do with a certificate from a likely classified operation. Mounting and framing it for decoration in the study or living room would certainly be a problem, and putting it in a CV for a job would be out of the question. One would also think that anyone in their right mind would raise an eyebrow to the potential for forgery of the certificate, considering Cooper Sr’s talents and his son’s proclivities.

    But for the umpteenth time, the lunacy of the Woods’ trumps itself yet again (and trust me these guys are still just warming up). If one scrolls down the page in which Harry Cooper’s ‘certificate’ is described, under the list of contributors to Peregrine Communications (the Peregrine is of course a Falcon, which was Collins’ ‘pal’ Doty’s Aviary codename) both the Woods are listed as major contributors to Collins’ studies and his book Exempt from Disclosure, their association with Collins may well have changed since then. The Woods’ failure to acknowledge the circuitous nature of Cooper’s interest in the Kennedy assassination, the information he received, what he peddled, the rants he made, articles he wrote, the company he kept, not to mention that Collins has a website linking all manner of outdated Cooper JFK conspiracy gibberish linked to his home page . All this means that, at the very least, the Woods have no qualities of discernment.

    4. Despite claims of forgery by Tim Good, Dr. James Black (a forensic typewriter specialist) was unable to conclude that the documents in question were typed with the same typewriter, only that the make and model are the same. Any of the tens of thousands of typewriters are suspect.

    The typewriter is merely inconclusive. It has not been proven or disproven and one could go either way. I tend to think it proves fraudulence. You, the reader, may not. For what it’s worth, this little technicality hardly saves him.

    5. Tim Cooper is just one of many sources of the Majestic documents that mutually re-enforce the content of the Cooper originated documents. Cooper is NOT the linchpin to dismissing the government paper trail of UFO and ET complicity.

    This comment is quite astounding. That Cooper is just one source is common knowledge. While the fact there are more sources clearly shows what an abysmal failure the fellows involved in MJ-12 would have been in throwing a surprise party. They’re also saying that he confirms his own documents and is not the ‘linchpin’ to dismissing the paper trail. But if Cooper is not the key to solving it all then who is? For since Cooper walked out on them in 2009 there’s been slim pickings MJ-12 wise.

    6. There is clear evidence in the form of postage meters, original envelopes, and postmarks showing that many of the documents Cooper received did in fact travel through the mail. Furthermore, two were postmarked “Langley Virginia” (CIA headquarters postage meter) and Ft. Meade, FOIA office.

    Postmarks are easy enough to forge. In particular when naïve people want to believe in what’s been delivered to the exclusion of all other possibilities. The funny thing is that Cooper could easily have sent these off to other people to be repackaged and sent back. Or someone at Langley conjured up some stuff for him to disseminate for a giggle. Of course these concepts require a little more abstract thought than the Woods are capable of.

    7. Several researchers have commented to Wood & Wood that Cooper’s writing style is inconsistent with the leaked documents. Although anecdotal, forensic linguistics is being applied to definitely conclude that Tim did or did not write any of the documents in question.

    This is a real doozy. There are numerous similarities and themes in Cooper’s documents, writings and his appalling research work. One needs not to do an in-depth investigation on him. I also sincerely doubt that people like the Woods, who also employed ‘remote viewers’ to check into the authenticity of Cooper’s claims (see number ten) will ever find the truth of the matter. What they really should have done was employ a handwriting expert (or a number of them), in particular with regards to the ‘similarities and themes’ found on the letter sent to Cooper by Thomas Cantwell in 1999, and in an extremely unlikely document in which William Colby writes about Angleton from November 12 1963 (which is appended here). It appears to my eyes that Cantwell, Colby and Cooper are all the same person. Furthermore Colby’s handwriting and signature on the document is not comparable to Colby’s informal printing style. I also hasten to add that if anybody who is an accredited document and signature analyst would like to pass judgement, please contact CTKA and an update will ensue.

    Colby handwriting scam

     

    8. Cooper’s failed lie detector test is consistent with him protecting his in-person document sources — the CIA archivist, the legionnaire, and Thomas (Cy) Cantwheel.

    It’s also very consistent with him denying that he created them isn’t it? Because we once again hit a familiar problem: ‘secrecy’. The amount of different people who contacted Cooper with information once again jeopardizes the covert nature of this highly sensitive operation. How unlikely is it that some random recipient recieves numerous top secret files from multiple sources for one, and how odd it is that none of them knew they were doubling up? Note also that Salina Cantwell (Thomas Cantwell’s daughter), a well known fable in MJ-12 lore like her father, also claimed to work for Angleton. Thus that makes it four sources of their top secret documentation-or insight. Three of them are from the CIA, and two are father and daughter whistle blowers who both worked in arch paranoic James Angleton’s office. There’s no evidence of Angleton having a family working for him in his enclave whatsoever, furthermore it doubles the chance of a security leak. And if you believe that Angleton, a man meticulous to the point of psychosis would do such a thing, you’d believe anything.

    9. No one has admitted, or come forward claiming authorship.

    Why would they when a whole crop of incompetent upper echelon figures couldn’t wait to get their names in or on the memos, even going so far as signing them for other people. Weren’t these self incriminating ingrates the authors themselves?

    10. Although of speculative value, high quality remote viewing (psychic) assets have targeted Tim Cooper and the documents and concluded the documents are predominately real and Cooper is not a forger. In fact, there seems to be multiple origins of documents feeding to Cooper.

    I had to read this comment numerous times toreally let this sink in. If they were really suspicious of Cooper, wouldn’t a private detective charting his movements be somewhat more efficient? Previously, I stated that Tim Cooper signed two affidavits stating that he was not the author of the materials he received, nor did he know who sent them. In article six of the second affidavit it states:

    That he and others have performed and are now performing due diligence to locate, identify, and bring forward the person AKA THOMAS CANTWHEEL or establish his true identity and credentials.

    But as Bob Greenwood and Robert Hastings comment:

    So Cooper was receiving ostensibly classified government documents in his personal PO box, illegally. He was also receiving improperly prepared materials in his mailbox, subverting post office fees without postage due. If Cooper was walking out of the post office with the documents in hand, and saying nothing, he was breaking the law (that is of course if they were genuine).
    Did Cooper report the illegal ‘mailing’ to the postmaster or box line clerk at the post office, exercizing “due diligence” to locate the perpetrator, Mr. Cantwheel? After all, Cooper could have gone to federal prison for Mr. Cantwheel’s alleged actions. How did Cooper know he wasn’t being set up for a sting by accepting the papers without question? None of this seemed to have been a concern to him.
    Cooper had a PO box. It was a locked box. Only he could get into it, unless he handed out his key to others, inviting abuse. One can’t hand a stack of papers to a clerk to put into a PO box for free. They must be in a mailing container with postage. If the clerk didn’t do this they would be fired. What mail clerk would repeatedly put classified government documents into a customer’s mailbox from a stranger for free, knowing full well that the postal inspection service is always trying to catch illegal acts like this?
    Cantwheel was said to approach 90-years-old. Did he break into the post office repeatedly and plant the documents, raising the question again: Did Cooper report the illegal activity to the post office? If not, why not? Only someone who knew they weren’t going to get into trouble would approve of this going on, and that would be because this story-line never happened. So where is the documentation of Cooper’s reporting a “crime” to the post office? By Cooper’s own words promoting MJ-12, he was outwardly committing a crime if he believed the documents were genuine. If he didn’t believe they were genuine, he was committing fraud.

    It is now 2011, the affidavits were written way back in 1999. Cooper gave up the ghost of MJ-12 ten years later in 2009. Likely without ever trying to find the identity of the individuals who sent him the documentation. Not that any of this concerns the Woods or Linda Moulton Howe, who cashed in her chips big time in light of the renewed interest in the Kennedy MJ-12 links. In so doing she also cashed out of any credibility she may have had.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 3



    Part 3: When Linda met Bob and Timmy

    Crop Circle Queen Takes on Kennedy Case

    “I would just like to point out that we would have no major frauds if this subject wasn’t filled with ignorant, gullible people. Don’t take that as an insult, because it’s not. It’s reality.”

    So said ‘Ignorethefacts’ on the forum of the extremely kook ridden tabloid conspiracy site ‘Above Top Secret’ on the 14th of March 2010. In a discussion which listed the heroes in the UFO community.

    And while it is not directed at the Woods, if anybody reads the full post I took this off of, they’ll note it very easily could have been. As seen, the Woods’ defense of Timothy Cooper is largely based on their unwillingness to accept the reality that he stiffed them. Big time! Much of what follows was picked up from Linda Moulton Howe’s website in which she utilised an old interview concerning the ‘Scorched/Lancer document’ and intersected it with the more up to date AOL piece linked in Part I. While this was a clever idea, the general execution was not. The repetition of the documents was unnecessary and interrupted the flow of banal questions by Moulton Howe, whose background investigating cattle mutilation and crop circles left her ill prepared for anything to do with the JFK assassination.

    Moulton Howe was part of the rather weird Laurence Rockefeller Alien study group of the mid 90’s, along with known CIA stooges like Bruce Maccabee (). This Rockefeller led group tried to convince world leaders of a so-called Contact Scenario, and further, to persudae them to make an annoucnemnt to the world about it. Howe was part of the pitch to Bill Clinton. Moulton Howe, like her buddy Lee Speigel, not only backed this Laurence Rockefeller War of the Worlds move, she demurred on the Burnt Documents as akin to being a ‘mystery’. It’s a mystery how anybody could take her seriously after being part of this group and reading her travesty of an interview with Robert Wood, the pater familas of ‘Majestic Documents’


    Bob Wood ‘King of the Impossible’

    Though not initially connected to the Howe interview, a quote from a piece claiming that Cooper’s character toward the Majestic Documents was beyond reproach (one of the many) struck me as particularly odd:

    In general, our opinion is that Tim is basically honest, hardworking and has very low motivation to forge anything. We have hired Tim as a consultant to research and write about the new Majestic documents. We can assure the sums involved are negligible motivation to fake these documents, given the massive multi-year effort that would have been required.

    Now, Cooper is the man who first surfaced the Angleton-MM-JFK document, which is almost certainly a forgery. Cooper first was in receipt of this red herring in 1992, just when the controversy about Oliver Stone’s film JFK reached it pinnacle. Further, he says he got it from a former CIA employee. Now, if this is not enough to raise any eyebrows, how about this: just a few months after receiving the above ersatz document, Cooper is the guy who began to also get the first Majestic Documents. Again, this was from a mysterious source thorugh his post office box. Stanton Friedman, a colleague and friend of Maccabee told Cooper to take the documents to the Woods, for verification! Yet somehow, Moulton Howe did not smell anything fishy about this.

    For in Part one of Howe’s interview, Bob Woods Sr. relates that for a fee they bought all of Cooper’s MJ-12 documents:

    But I got possession of the documents in 2001, when Timothy Cooper became disenchanted with the UFO subject, wanted to become a TV script writer, and was really short of cash. I asked him, ‘How much would it take to buy from you everything you’ve got?’ He agreed on a price and he shipped me the documents.

    This is informative as to how the Woods got started with their website. What struck me was that Cooper seems to have been paid to research his own documents and then decided too sell these documents to the Woods.

    Wood believes that Cooper’s long time contact was a fellow by the name of Thomas Cantwell. Cantwell is a man who also shared the same handwriting as William Colby, and claimed he was a member of James Angleton’s Counter Intelligence unit. Prior to this, his daughter, the mysterious ‘Salina,’ sent some documents and a forwarding letter to Cooper in 1996 with evidence of ‘Project Jehovah’, an initiative led by none other than Albert Einstein with his pal Robert Oppenheimer, exploring the physics behind Alien vehicles. This one has been shot to more pieces than a John Hankey documentary on a good day by Barry Greenwood.

    As discussed earlier, Salina, like her Dad also worked for Angleton. Thus for Moulton Howe the question of ‘Who was closest to Jesus James Angleton in his counter intelligence realm’ is a timely one, because Wood’s reply below gives us an indication of how far out of his league he really is.

    I don’t know. That’s research that needs to be done.

    This comment exemplifies the benign and misguided arrogance/ignorance many in the nexus like the Woods have. Unless ‘they’ have discovered it (usually meaning they forged it or made it up), it quite simply hasn’t happened. Thus I have to break it to Mr. Woods that ‘yes’ the research has already been done, right back in the days of the HSCA, later touched on by John Newman and expanded upon by Lisa Pease:

    Angleton’s complete counter-intelligence 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.

    Pease also mentions another highly important figure, Ray Rocca, a person anybody interested in Angleton should study. This article and small contributions from John Newman could be found in CTKA’s Probe Magazine and the excellent Pease and DiEugenio edited volume The Assassinations. The people in Angleton’s group were hand picked by him. Any sign of weakness, like simple human morality and concern for others was literally career ending, and any thought he had at all that you had crossed him, then look out. Thus it’s exceptionally hard to believe anybody would have picked one of Angleton’s documents out of a fire on a pang of conscience. For those of you interested in Angleton, we will later discuss the lengths Cooper has gone through to implicate Angleton in numerous areas of the US power apparatus.


    And we Thought Colby was a Cheese?

    Robert Woods’ comments concerning the nearest competitor to the ‘Scorched/Lancer’ memo for the title of ‘most stupid and fraudulent document Cooper has ever produced’ is of course the ‘Colby’ one dated the 12th of November 1963. This was also touched on briefly in the previous segment.

    In it we can clearly see that the name of the addressee is redacted. That’s okay; it’s likely John McCone anyhow. But the Woods, nor fellows like Michael E Salla, who gave a lot of attention to this practically worthless piece of paper never stopped to think about the problems (rather than supposed mysteries solved) that the comment below presents.

    “Response from Colby: Angleton has MJ directive”.

    Because, as I discussed with the ‘Scorched/Lancer’ memo, the idea that an intelligence professional like William Colby, future director of the Central Intelligence Agency, would ever write something like this and give Angleton’s position away as the head honcho is beyond mockery. What idiot would redact vast tracts of an internal document to the original addressee yet keep Colby’s scrawl intact? But that’s only the entrée. That a man like Colby, deeply involved in South East Asia, would concern himself with MJ-12, the man who would later end Angleton’s career upon his appointment as DCI in 1973, that this man would act as some kind of secretary for McCone and Angleton is pure fantasy.

    Luckily for Cooper, the Woods and Salla, there was an anonymous saviour at hand – it’s our old Biblical rant friend S-1 (Source 1). He wrote on page one of his paranoid diatribe that Colby’s death was because of his involvement with the aforementioned memo Cooper was sent some years back. The source supposedly another mysterious ‘agent’. The agent acatually wrote that somehow the UFO phenomenon was behind the Soviet gamble to place missiles inside Cuba therefore causing the Missiel Crisis. And Kennedy was briefed on this during that crisis.

    Uh huh. (I recommend everyone read this doucmnet. It’s a real doozy even for Cooper and the Woods.) 


    Operation Artichoke the Alien Andromeda Virus

    To further elucidate the acumenof Mr. Wood, when asked by Howe about numerous operations mentioned in the ‘Lancer memo’, Wood could only describe the notorious MK Ultra in the following terms:

    I think the part they have admitted to was the use of psychedelic drugs without permission of the subjects. If you look up MK-ULTRA in the public record, I think you’ll find a lot of bad stuff that has been released.

    Bob then shows his in-depth (or is it inept) knowledge of the CIA by not being able to discern between the validity and function of well-known operations like ‘Artichoke’, a torturous sub stream of MK Ultra which according to some researchers outlasted its more famous predecessor, and fantasies like ‘Spike’, ‘House Cleaning’ and ‘Domestic’. Operations which no one in the Kennedy world (generally more well read on average than those in ufology circles concerning authentic CIA projects) has heard of anywhere. Indeed Wood Sr. believes the document’s claims that those involved in Artichoke and MK Ultra were overseeing a biological weapons campaign ultimately containing Alien contaminants:

    My guess is that these projects, SPIKE, HOUSE CLEANING, ARTICHOKE and DOMESTIC might be responses to an ‘Andromeda strain.

    I suggest then that the Woods and Miss Moulton Howe tell the long suffering family of Frank Olson about this ‘strain’ sometime and why he died. I would be interested to see what would happen. I think we can all predict the reaction.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 2



    Part 2: JFK Killed over UFOs (and other crocks)

    ‘It had one eye, and it was purple. It had one horn. It flew. I’m sure it ate people too’

    ~ Sheb Wooley, 1958; ‘Purple People Eater’

     

    The Monroe-JFK-Aliens guff in 1992 set something of a precedent for what was to come. For seven years later, in 1999, Tim Cooper had a burnt nine page document ‘sent to him’, the infamous ‘Burned Memo’, seen hereand here. These memos posited that Kennedy’s dabbling in and around the UFO field was likely what got him killed. Let’s cut the bull and show you why not…..


    The JFK ‘Burned Memo’ is a Crock

    A complete dissection of the ‘Burned memoranda’ really isn’t in order as Cooper has disowned every MJ-12 document he was ever sent or was privy to. Yet from here till Part V, we return to this juicy morsel of disinformation for some rather large nibbles, in particular when we examine Moulton Howes travesty of an interview with Bob Wood, which has been splashed around the world. But I guess while we are here we can touch on some aspects of the Burnt Memo hoax. The cover letter for starters from Source-1 or S-1 is a good place to start.

    S-1 was supposedly an insider in Jim Angleton’s camp who apparently rescued the documents from incineration after Angleton’s death (we’ll get to that aspect a bit later). S-1 thought that Cooper’s decision to work with Dr. Woods ‘a good one as he has credibility’ (not any more), and that he and ‘Dr. Wood’ had started a ‘shit storm’ in Washington.

    Thanks to S-1 the Woods proudly brandish a document called the Counter IntelligenceCorps/Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Report’ which states on the 22nd of July 1947, Congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy was privy to information about aliens crashing at Roswell. The document never explains why he was privy to this information, bar his brief stint with naval intelligence and being Joe’s son. Joe was apparently sitting on a 12 member board called the ‘Commission on Organisation of the Executive Branch of theGovernment, geez, sounds scary doesn’t it? Well the reality of the board is that its true function was frighteningly banal. And why Herbert Hoover and Dr. James Kerr Pollock would be privy to anything bar the paper clip expense is beyond me.

    Enough of that silliness, let’s take a look at the actual ‘Burned Memo’ and the incendiary quote which appears on its very first page.

    “As you must know LANCER [JFK] has made some inquiries regarding our activities which we cannot allow.” 
    – Director of Central Intelligence (MJ-1)

    For starters, through the work of people like Lisa Pease, we know the CIA cryptonym for Kennedy was GPIDEAL. ‘Lancer’ was Kennedy’s Secret Service code name. At the time the document was surfaced it was well known that JFK’s Secret Service codename was ‘Lancer’. But Lisa’s work in the CIA files did not surface until about three years later. Thus the manufacturer of the document was hardly in command of a secret. In fact this makes the author of the undated and unsigned memo (supposedly John McCone or Allen Dulles according to ‘expert’ Robert Wood) look kind of stupid.

    If someone as well-known as JFK was a threat to those in power, in particularly skilled covert operators like, say Dulles, then they wouldn’t use him by a name he was well known in the system by. They probably would have called him something like ‘Homer’. But taken one step further, Dulles would have to be as brainless as Austin Powers to even commit this sort of thing to paper. And Angleton or anybody else who received it would have been exceptionally stupid to have even kept a copy. It would have been destroyed immediately. Yet in Linda Howe’s interview with Bob Wood in 2008, he champions an utterly ludicrous premise:

    “I would presume that the scenario involved is that MJ-1 is dictating this burned memo to a secretary. He, MJ-1, does not want the secretary to know that he is saying, ‘We ought to kill JFK.’”

    The above ridiculous statement leads one to ask the inevitable: “Dictated to a secretary”? How many people actually knew of MJ-12, that is the allegedly secret group meant to seek out the truth about interplanetary travel by space creatures? For a top secret operation it seems as if every ‘Tom, Dick and Secretary’ was in the loop. Including Kennedy’s own secretarial and clerical staff, as this memo seems to indicate.

    What’s inherently bogus about this document is that it’s trying to make out as if Kennedy was aware of, or involved in, some ‘psy-op’ element behind MJ-12. Now as we have seen previously, the CIA had been running their non MJ-12 counter intelligence as an in-house operation. To try and tie Kennedy to it is reminiscent of Lamar Waldron’s attempts to tie Kennedy into the bogus invasion of Cuba, or E. Howard Hunt falsifying documents manufacturing Kennedy’s role in the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem.

    These points aside, the Majestic Documents webpage it is located on states the following:

    The Kennedy signature looks genuine, but he often used an autopen so that is not an important authentication point. There seems to be no reason to doubt that this is a valid memo.

    Ignoring the last sentence, let’s think about the first for a second. Autopens were used primarily on mass mailed letters, and for general orders/directives/edicts/checks etc. to go around government departments. However, for top secret information, especially for something as delicate as MJ-12 is made out to be, we are asked to believe that Kennedy couldn’t be bothered to take the time to sign his name? Let’s have a look at what Kennedy’s lethargy would entail in two colorful scenarios:

    (1) Not wanting to sign the document, he casually walked over to the autopen machine and spent anywhere up to ten minutes setting the thing up and then turning it over to his secretary Evelyn Lincoln. Possibly with his suit jacket off or a dry cleaning note attached for ink spillages. (2) He gave this sensitive letter to Mrs. Lincoln, who handed it onto to the ancillary staff who likely went on to use the autopen to sign this sole top secret document, posting it, and then sending it off.

    Were Allen Dulles, John McCone and JFK truly that inept?

    Returning to the first page of the ‘Burned Memo’ we can see that this ‘moronic incontendo’ affliction had become contagious throughout US intelligence. The document has been sent to a number of individuals, ‘MJ’s’ ‘2-7’ to be precise. That’s a fair chop of people to have a top secret document routed through the cabals. Indeed, I encourage anyone to take a peek at the Woods’ master tabulation of operators involved with MJ-12 operations – it’s quite a guest list.

    One will notice the number of names mentioned in the documents as being part of, or knowledgeable of the operation. In reading the documents and then this list, individuals like Bill Colby (who apparently knew of Angleton’s supposed directive level), Dulles (whom had received memos on the issue and whom Wood suspected in the Howe interview as being a hidden MJ-12 Kingpin, John McCone (the individual apparently concerned about his poking his nose around MJ-12 business) knew. Yet Truman (who started it all) did not. Yet Bruce Pitzer and Lee Harvey Oswald did know?

    How many more people ‘not’ mentioned in this list knew what was going on? Indeed is this the correct question to ask? Shouldn’t the questions be how could anybody be so conceited enough as to fall for such a sham? Not to mention, could this sort of thing get any worse? Well it does and we haven’t even touched on the ludicrous John F. Kennedy to CIA, November 1963and what I now term the ‘Bogus Colby Memo’ which will be discussed later. I


    Did the Pres really give a fig about UFO’s?

    I have no recollection of precisely when I first encountered the disinformation pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination enacted because of his crossing MJ-12. But it was in the period between 1997-1998 in my chrysalis phase of research when I stumbled upon the often ‘silly’ but surprisingly entertaining graphic novel The Big Book of Conspiracies from the local library. Kennedy and Monroe, to my puzzlement, were depicted at the tail end of the book, on page 212, in bed discussing the UFO topic. From there on I noted that it was discussed on some UFO forums a long time before its current popularity. But I also noted it was a dead topic on the Kennedy ones. Thus I smelled a rat with this MJ-12 thing fairly early.

    The big problem with all of this is that outside of these utterly hilarious MJ-12 documents (and the reasoning of the Woods), Kennedy really wasn’t all that interested in flying saucers; he was busy fighting the ‘Martians’ in his own administration. As Larry Hancock explains:

    UFO’s were not a major media story during JFK’s term, there were no massive “waves” of sightings or headline stories such as had occurred in 1957 and 1958. In 1957 a radar sighting had produced a national alert extending to the White House. After JFK’s death, there would be major national media coverage of UFO’s in 1964 (the Socorro landing incident) and the huge wave of sightings in 1965. Irrespective of any personal interest JFK might have had, there is no evidence it was a subject that he was actively involved with, other Presidents displayed far more interest.”(Larry Hancock; email, 2011)

    In addition to Hancock’s comments, there is a letter from the National Aeronautics and Space Council’s, Maxwell W. Hunter to Robert Packard in July of 1963.

    If one has read the first Preamble, one can see it’s possible that Kennedy may well have uncovered Dulles’ dabblings in and around the UFO counter intelligence area, in particularly from Bob Lovett. But I may be a little melodramatic here, as there’s also the chance that Dulles, in a cooler period between the men, may well have told Kennedy of a few counter intelligence tricks that had been played in the interests of National Security.

     


    Possible Conversations about UFO’s

    Conversations with the likes of Lovett or Dulles aside, UFO’s are such a broad topic Kennedy could have chatted to anybody about them at any time. But it’s safe to say he never had any discussions with the likes of George Adamski. Nor did he discuss anything on the matter with the likes of Bill Holden aboard Air Force One, nor did he make any comments that his ‘hands were tied’ on the matter.

    Thus it was good to encounter true believers in UFO’s like Robert Barrow, whom showed all due respect for the subject by digging up information on some of Kennedy’s closest advisors (it’s a shame some of his links like Grant Cameron show very little of his common sense). As we can clearly see, Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, was not a fan of them. Nor was Robert Kennedy, himself a victim of ‘UFO infatuation’ hoaxes. This is why the list of people in official capacity that JFK had been associated with in the area and could have shot the breeze about the topic is short. 

     


    James Webb

    Kennedy without a doubt had contact with Webb about matters of the Cosmos, like this important one here to NASA chief exec James Webb (). Yet it seems this document was the basis for the utterly silly ‘Bogus Colby Memo’. It was after having a look around for information on this subject that I came across some good research which may indirectly hint at some possible discussions Kennedy may have had about them. First up, Bernice Moore found an interesting article which indicates that the ‘Pres’ was extremely concerned about the potential for a major PR failure with his space initiatives. Note that in this article both Kennedy and Webb were deeply concerned about gaining support for increased NASA funding for the project. Which makes the idea of Webb somehow being the man who ‘bit the hand that fed him’ over the issue of UFO disclosure somewhat hard to swallow. Kookery aside, Kennedy may well have discussed the issue of Alien existence with the likes of Webb. But there is no real evidence of this occurring, at least in an official capacity.

    Another figure Kennedy could have discussed the topic with was an individual called Captain Arthur C. Lundahl whom CIA Historian Gerald K Haines mentions Kennedy was rather taken by.


    Captain Arthur C. Lundahl

    In Gerald K. Haines rather lukewarm and misleading CIA public relations ploy, CIA’s Role in the Study of UFO’s 1947-1990’, one of the few things I did not disagree with him on was what he writes about Lundahl. Lunhdahl was the head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Centre (NPIC), a leading light in aircraft and satellite based reconnaissance. He was also a skilled de-briefer on these activities and briefed President Kennedy on the presence of Soviet Missiles in Cuba which sparked the missile crisis. Though evidence suggests he only became involved in the UFO related field in the late sixties in any official capacity, he was hired by the CIA after their investigations into UFO’s in the wake of their Robertson Panel hearings in 1953 for his skills in the area of photo recon. Indeed, Luhndahl apparently had a personal interest in the field of UFO’s and he may well have shot the breeze with JFK on the subject. But, as said, his interest in the subject appears to have started after Kennedy’s murder. However, if Luhndahl has piqued the reader’s interest there’s some good non Cameron articles on Lundahl at JFK researcher Bill Kelly’s Blog.

    Captain Bob Collins (an individual you will get to know very well later) made a bold statement that all Presidents are briefed about the UFO ‘situation’ upon assuming office. Kennedy was thus one of them. Well that’s if you believe dubious researchers like Grant Cameron who in turn believes dubious frauds like Collins, Timothy Cooper and Adamskyite Lou Zinsstag. Richard Dolan has long been pumping an angle that journalist Todd W. Zechel, was close with Luhndahl and was told that Kennedy had a great interest in the study. Yet after much looking around, I have found that Zechel himself never seems to have said anything about it, and the fact it comes from a huckster like Dolan doesn’t fill with me confidence.

    Thus if anyone could find the briefing in question Id like to have a peek. But, let’s put this aside judging by the rather lo-fi comments about Aliens abounding during Kennedy’s tenure. If true, Kennedy may have just shot the breeze (Presidents are allowed to speculate about UFO’s you know, Bill Clinton was a big fan after all and so was Carter).


    John McCone

    As we have seen John McCone, Dulles’ replacement, is also another overlooked avenue. Haines reported that the first internal government investigations in the sixties were more or less sparked in 1964 by CIA director John McCone whom Kennedy had appointed in 1961. Of course this was a convenient cover yet again for the CIA’s own in-house investigations following the assassination but I’ll leave that up for the reader to mull over. Could McCone have discussed the UFO issue with Kennedy at some stage prior to his assassination? Once again there’s no credible evidence to suggest so (remembering that the documents that purported these happenings have been disowned by the original recipient). But considering the generally good relations between the two it’s another remote possibility. Regardless of this, McCone’s concerns about UFO’s, and his internal investigations compiling the best evidence and analysis of the situation at the time, flies in the face of him being an insider and shadowy player in the big bad world of MJ-12, which Cooper attempted to paint him as.

     

    Prouty Redherrings

    Major General Charles P. Cabell

    Major General Charles P. Cabell was a well-known figure in the Kennedy saga, being fired as the Deputy Director of the CIA alongside Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles as a result of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Cabell appears to be a key player in the promotion of UFO’s within government circles, and if anyone was the prime candidate to have talked with Kennedy about UFO’s, Allen Dulles or Cabell were prime candidates. But if they did, well McNamara and RFK, as we have seen, didn’t buy it.


    Colonel L Fletcher Prouty

    Like Mae Brussell, Colonel L Fletcher Prouty has long been used and abused by lone nut and Nexus Magazine folk alike. Prouty, a decorated pilot, was a high level liaison between the CIA and the USAF. He has become precious to many individuals in the para-political field. Thanks in part to appearing in numerous documentaries and being the inspiration behind Donald Sutherland’s ‘Mr. X’ in JFK. Prouty, by his own admission, was not a ‘researcher’ of the assassination but an observer and commentator on it, as his books the Secret Team and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy provide testament to. Prouty himself was also a believer in UFO’s, as he wrote in 1983 (http://www.prouty.org/coment16.html):

    These nine or ten experienced air crew men were convinced, beyond any doubt, that what they were watching was a UFO. They made an initial report to their commanding officer; and later, after a night’s rest, they returned to make out individual formal statements. Their formal reports were then forwarded to Air Force Headquarters in Washington. The reason I’ve chosen to cite this factual UFO case from 1954 is because I was that commanding officer. I have heard nothing more about that incident since that day. However, I have heard about UFO’s flying along beside the world’s fastest aircraft, the Spyplane (SR-71), and I have heard that the Air Force has two “bodies” or extraterrestrial objects in storage on one of its bases. Most UFO stories contain elements I cannot believe; this case has been my only direct contact with an actual responsible sighting.

    Note that Prouty says ‘I have heard’ about this and immediately after he discusses the USAF’s storage of “bodies” he makes this important statement “Most UFO stories contain elements I cannot believe”. Prouty never stumped for the MJ-12 documents, nor did he ever write about UFO’s nor discuss them in any manner other than this.However, this has not stopped him from being targeted, like Sylvia Meagher before him, as a UFO ‘nut’ on John McAdams’ website (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/prouty.htm). As usual, McAdams grievously misquotes and distorts his comments in a number of, what can at best be described, as slanderous diatribes. While Dave Perry’s piece on Prouty and the Christchurch Star is doubly so (please check out ‘Dancing With Dave P’ in this article on Alex Jones.) Bear this in mind when Perry and McAdams make an appearance later.

    Nothing to see here Folks…..Well on Second Thoughts

    There are some crossovers in the Kennedy/Space field out there. But most of these were discussed in Preamble I. We all knew JFK wanted to send a man to the moon, while everyone is familiar with the nefarious activities of Fred L Crisman and that hoax on Maury Island. (If not I refer the reader to Part I of the Preamble). Not to mention how Crisman popped up in Garrison’s investigation. Had Garrison been capable of convicting Shaw and tying him effectively to Crisman in any capacity, perhaps he may have brought into question some of the Dulles created camouflage surrounding UFO’s.

    But the point I am making here is this: someone is creating specioius documents trying to connect the UFO world with JFK and his assassination. We have now seen it twice: with the JFK-MM-Angleton con job (which was also exposed by John Newman), and the so called Angleton “Burned Memorandum”. And clearly, whoever is faking this stuff understands the suspicions about Angleton that have surfaced in the last genration about his involvement in the JFK murder. They then seem to have tried to transfer his importance in the JFK research field and transpose it to the UFO field. Therefore trying to gain traction in both areas. Now, whoever is doing this, they are clearly up to mischief. Much valuable work on Angleton, by people like John Newman and Lisa Pease, is now being hijacked for the purposes of diversion and distraction.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 1

    JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 1



    Part 1: Majestic Documents & Marilyn

    “And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
    ’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”

    -Eric Idle, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, 1983

    Before we embark upon discussing Marilyn Monroe and the Majestic document fallacies surrounding her, let us take a look at how the new wave of MJ-12 related stories re-emerged this year thanks to a fellow by the name of William Lester and some extremely bad journalism.


    AOL, The Daily Mail, & The 2011 MJ-12 Tale

    When the FBI recently published details of a purported UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947, word abounded that it was the infamous Roswell crash. It garnered a good deal of attention, in particular from David Wilcock and other extremely dubious people who believe it is part of a new form of government disclosure preparing us for Alien co-existence. In reality, the document has been around since 1977 and the incident that occurred in Aztec, New Mexico is believed by those who seriously study flying saucers to be a hoax (as noted here).

    This story was promptly backed up in the press that ‘JFK’ was killed because of his belief in Aliens’ headlines in the AOL News (April 18, 2011) and Daily Mail (April 19, 2011). What amazed me was the exceptionally poor journalism in both articles. While the AOL piece was somewhat more critical of the documents, it still used the ever gullible Linda Moulton Howe (examined in Part IV) for a critique, and it never once questioned the absurd claim of author William Lester in the Daily Mail which said “The CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book ‘A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.’”

    William calls himself a ‘Doctor’, yet he earned this after apparently doing only three years of an undergraduate degree. Using his questionable Ph.D. status, Lester charges people to do a correspondence course via his website The American Institute of Metaphysics. In fact he runs a bunch of them. Unfortunately for Willie, I caught up with him on his aptly titled Game ‘Con’ Radio site which is dedicated to a niche of gamers and the paranormal community (and likely what ever game he’s running at any particular time). In fact I suggest anyone go have a chat with him about his dubious documents. You can see what happened when I did.

    Slick Willie Table!


    The Lester-Waring Con Game

    No one, and I repeat no one, has ever heard of William Lester in JFK circles till these two articles. These tried to insinuate that people like John Newman and Fletcher Prouty and Jim Douglass were wrong. Kennedy was not killed over his foreign policy. He was killed because of his outer space policy. It is doubtful Lester will ever front on any forum again. For a giggle I suggest you check out his pipe smoking musings on his At my Desk YouTube commentaries on ‘Bigfoot’.

    With logic like this it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Lester never, ever, received the documents from the CIA via the FOIA. They had in fact been peddled around since the nineties and deemed a hoax by all bar the worst cranks in all manner of conspiracy circles. Indeed another equally formless and empty boaster named Scott Waring (who never got the joke) claims he was the first to publish it. Lester’s proclamations, led one over-exuberant fellow by the name of Mark Bermann, to exclaim “It’s taken nearly fifty years, but someone has finally tied the JFK assassination to UFOs”. Oh really? If that wasn’t funny enough, Bermann’s next line will have you cringing: “While the separate UFO and assassination conspiracy theorists will likely join forces to say that Kennedy was knocked off to prevent him from learning the truth about aliens and UFOs, Lester said there is a more rational explanation for JFK’s requests for information.” As we can see from Bermann’s wild musings, with the upcoming 50th anniversary of the assassination looming there seems to be very real attempts by cheap hucksters like Lester and unnamed sinister government forces to once again try and link JFK researchers with the UFO field, thereby reducing Kennedy’s murder to absurd mush.


    The Majestic Documents Website

    If any one group are responsible for continually encouraging the likes of Lester and Waring, it is this group of MJ-12 devotes and their so-called ‘Majestic Documents’. headed up by the father and son team of Bob and Ryan Wood. The initial impression one gets from their website is that it is well organised, and I have to give top marks to the Woods in this regard. Thanks to the smooth feel to the site one gets the sense that the Woods and their team, which includes Stanton Friedman, Jim Marrs, Nick Redfern, Jim Clarkson and Timothy S Cooper (the father of the ‘new MJ-12’ documentation himself and no relation to Bill), have rigorously checked and authenticated the documents and other articles that they have come across from a diverse array of opinions. They even rate the documents there on an “authenticity meter”.


    A Dickensian Twist

    But it is not all happy families. This fine website is in reality something akin to Miss Havisham’s Mansion from Dickens and feels as if it too is overgrown with weeds, moss and ivy. This is because, like Havisham’s, the clocks have been well and truly stopped, as the site hasn’t been updated since 2009. I then got my first queasy ‘Pip’ like feelings when I noticed that all of the MJ-12 articles on the website pertaining to the Kennedys had a suspiciously high authenticity rating. Indeed, I noted that very few of the documents the Woods’ have ranked dip below halfway and on the rare occasions they do, the glowing comments about their ‘potential’ use as anecdotal evidence essentially invalidated their entire ratings system.

    But things get even stranger for the Woods in their house of Havisham. While Jim Clarkson believes the MJ-12 documents on the page endorse his research into the June Crain abduction, and the Woods and Jim Marrs have actively supported a document unearthed by Cooper linking Marilyn Monroe to Kennedy and UFOs, one would think that the rest of their ‘Investigative Team’ would hold similar views. But this is not a true investigative team. In reality, it’s more or less a collection of contacts. Because were these individual members truly consulted as to the validity of the documents in question, the ratings for many (if not all of them) would be extremely poor.

    While Marrs appeared to indulge in much of the MJ-12 mystique, he never believed that Kennedy for instance was killed by MJ-12 over UFOs. Nick Redfern believes MJ-12 to be a hoax, and Friedman emailed me stating that he believes the ‘new MJ-12’ documents to also be fake. But the real reason for the sombreness is that in 2009 the person who brought forth the 1992 batch of documents, Timothy S. Cooper, denounced Friedman and the Woods. Claiming that the papers he peddled were likely frauds. This came amidst mounting suspicion by Bob Hastings that Cooper and others wittingly forged them. Thus, much like Miss Havisham, it appears the groomsman stood them up, and they’re still getting over it (http://www.rense.com/general85/m12.htm).


    Marrs & Monroe

    On that note any aspiring ‘Pip’ would thus do well enough to stay away. In particularly if ‘Estella’ in the form of a UFO and JFK obsessed Marilyn Monroe is part of the mix. One of the many things that caught my eye on the ‘Majestic Documents’ website was an article by the rather rabid anti-Kennedy MUFON high-up Donald Burleson. In one of them, the concerns are the fraudulent Monroe tryst with JFK and some pillow talk they purportedly indulged in about Cuba and UFOs — supposedly this juicy gossip had come via James Angleton, the notorious CIA head its counter intelligence operations. Burleson had ignored the critiques of the document’s authenticity at the time he wrote his article, and his claim to fame in this sad tale is that the routing sheet for the document, upon closer examination, contained the signature of a one General Schulgen. Schulgen is important to Burleson because he was supposedly involved in the Roswell crash, and he tried to enlist FBI support in covering up the story and blaming the communists. Sadly for Burleson, the much more studious ufologist Barry Greenwood has effectively proven those Schulgen memos were fakes, seemingly cooked up by one Bill Moore, a notorious figure within the halls of UFOdom and a central figure in the original MJ-12 tomfoolery. Greenwood and Brad Sparks presented this paper at MUFOn Symposium 7 which effectively expsoed these documents as suspect.

    Another interesting aspect of Burleson’s article, published two years before he worte a book, is that he championed Monroe biographer Donald Wolfe’s hatchet piece which claimed – incredibly – that RFK was present when Monroe was ‘murdered’. Well, one would expect that of an individual with an antipathy to the Kennedys and little understanding of the case. In other words, where the whole ‘MM was murdered’ stuff ties into what Jim DiEugenio has called “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy”.

    Jim Marrs’s endorsement of the JFK-MM-UFO evidence, which can be seen in his book Alien Agenda, entertained this redundant angle. He later cemented his stance by giving something of a favourable review to the document, which brought the issue to light in his 2000 article “JFK, Marilyn and UFOs: An astounding but likely combination”.

    What made this report credible for Marrs is that, as seen on the document, in Dorothy Kilgallen’s conversation with Howard Rothburg, she mentions that she’d had discussions with English authorities about UFOs. According to Marrs this is vindicated by Air Marshall Dowding’s comments about them. I’d like to point out that she never spoke to Dowding, for what good it would have done her anyway, and the fact she had a piece published in the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper on the 23rd of May 1955 concerning UFO sightings in Britain. Marrs never once stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, someone clever could have gone back and found that very article and used it? Well maybe he did. When interviewed by Robert Wilonsky in a notorious hit piece instigated by Dave Perry Marrs said he “didn’t buy into it”. Yet in 2002 Marrs was again discussing many of the dodgey MJ-12 documents we shall cover in this study, and endorsing Richard Dolan’s utterly banal After Disclosure. Dolan, like Joseph Farrell, Kenn Thomas, David Icke and others is yet another tragic example of ufologists deciding ‘they know it all’ and drilling the unwitting out there with utterly worthless and banal work.


    Milo & Moon Unit

    In the Preambles I-II, one can see that well before the current dirge of tabloid Monroe-UFO madness. Miss Monroe had been tied to UFOs via Life Magazine. On the 7th of April 1952 the pouting starlet appeared on the cover in a stylish black and white spread. Near the top of the page was the small but stark headline “THERE IS A CASE FOR INTERPLANETARY SAUCERS”.

    Just as Life sought to cash in on the UFO craze (that hit its peak shortly after in July of the same year with the mass sightings in and around Washington), the timing of the Monroe MJ-12 document couldn’t have been better. If 1991 and Bill Cooper’s rants were the beginnings of a new age in Kennedy disinformation, 1992, the year after Stone’s JFK, heralded a golden age for any charlatan trying to cash in on renewed interest in the Kennedy murder. And this was when the MJ-12 documents linking Kennedy and Monroe appeared. The plethora of conspiracy fantasies was matched all the way by the anti-Kennedy gutter penmanship of the era, culminating in the most famous piece of anti-Kennedy trash of the era- Seymour Hersh’s 1997 The Dark Side of Camelot, for which the author attempted to hock bogus documents pertaining to Kennedy and Monroe prior to the publication of his book, before the fake documents were exposed as crude forgeries.

    No doubt adding to Hersh’s sleaze fest was Milo Speriglio’s Crypt 33: The Saga of Marylin Monroe (co-authored with Adela Gregory). This came out in 1993. Cooper, an ‘unwitting recipient’ of the MM documentation (or one of his associates), knew precisely whom to turn this supposedly ‘sensitive’ information over to. Not well established figures in JFK research at the time, not on your life. But none other than well-known tabloid celebrity sleuth Speriglio who had been writing turgid Monroe biographies since 1982. Speriglo, for all the hoopla he’d garnered, was considered (away from his decidedly studied and softly spoken demeanour) something of a tall story teller and a ‘gloryhound’ (bare this in mind in regards to Cooper later on).

    Much has been made by defenders of the document, including Marrs, that Speriglio was an avid document authenticist and not easily fooled. Yet judging by the tall tales he was willing to make on on behalf of notorious Monroe leach and con man Robert Slatzer (besides Speriglio, one of the single most loathed individuals in all of ‘Marilyndom’ ). Speriglo’s endorsement of the document obviously means very little. So little, Monroe researcher Marijane Gray (one of the more sober and responsble writers in that field) responded to my questions about the document in an extremely direct fashion:

    The basis of all science is evidence. UFO aficionados are already viewed with incredulity, but when they attempt to tie themselves in with the death of Marilyn Monroe they remove any credibility they may have had. Claiming that Miss Monroe was killed by a chupacabra has about the same amount of merit.

    Gray’s full work on the myths surrounding Monroe’s murder can be seen here. Indeed, we’ll see her work again very shortly.


    Another Stucco Veneer

    Tim Cooper, as we have seen (despite his disassociation with the Woods), is still the centrepiece of the ‘Majestic Documents’ group and looking at his resume one is initially impressed (or suspicious) of the variety of military positions and experiences he claims he has had. His treatise on the documents at his MJ-12 peak in 1999 which speculated that it had less to do with aliens than nuclear powered weapons systems and transport was intriguing, as was his claim that some of the documents now available may well have been written by some disgruntled ‘ufologists’ seemed vaguely sensible.

    His article “Paradox: Contradictions in Reality — Questions Regarding UFOs, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the Future of Ufology” which I tried to track down, seemed to also follow the same vein. Sadly, because none of the links to it seem to go any where, it received a rather nice write up: “It is the hope and desire of the author that the reader considers the topics mentioned as part of the paradox in which human society exists and what serious UFO research must address if the phenomena is to be taken seriously by science and religion”.

    Continuing on with his mild guise, and quite interestingly, our friend Mr. Cooper later signed two affidavits in an attempt to state in the case of any forgeries being discovered that he was uninvolved with the production and distribution of the articles sent to him in any way.


    Her Again

    But just as Speriglo’s quiet demeanour masked a pernicious and irresponsible agenda, the rational MJ-12 skeptic Cooper seen in the above articles (and the one championed by the Woods) melts under the microscope. In the link below we can clearly see him endorse the hoax documents he was actively advocating for at the time in the June-July 2000 edition of Nexus Magazine. And we also see him take a very careful and rerespectful attitude towrards and approach to the CIA’s counter intelligence guru James Angleton. The person (if you recall) to whom the Monroe-JFK-UFO memo is credited. And clearly, Cooper is trying to make some kind of connection between these documents, Angleton, and Kennedy’s death.

    Moving on from Angleton, we can clearly see that ‘Timmy’ enjoyed the notoriety. Just look at this link below supplied to me by Richard J Smith on the JFK Lancer Forum. One of his many email addresses around 2000 was majestictim@earthlink.net. And at that time Cooper was indeed given to wild theories about all manner of UFOs and conspiracies concerning Monroe and Kennedy. He was more than pleased to publicize the fact it was he himself who discovered the Monroe memo and that he was saddling her death on the Kennedy brothers:

    I am convinced that Marilyn Monroe was silenced and RFK was seen in a car with Peter Lawford by L.A.P.D. speeding to LAX on the day she was killed. And I bet he wanted to make sure she didn’t talk to the press regarding what she wrote in her little red diary, which disappeared from the L.A. Coroner’s office the day after her body was brought in for autopsy.

    Mr. Cooper really let himself and the credibility of his documents down here. There’s no evidence according to the most well known and respected Monroe biographer, Donald Spoto, that RFK was anywhere near Brentwood at the time. Furthermore the ‘little red diary story’ is a complete and utter myth as the aforementioned Marijane Gray writes:

    Myth Number Six: The Red Diary and The Press Conference- One of the most repeated rumours regarding Marilyn’s death was that she kept a ‘red diary’ where she jotted down the things she spoke about with John and Robert Kennedy, and that she was murdered either because of the contents of it or because she was threatening to hold a press conference to divulge everything about the ‘affairs’ after being rejected by both brothers. Both of these stories originate from Robert Slatzer, who met Marilyn once for about ten minutes but stretched that into a decades long career about lying about a relationship with Marilyn, going so far as to claim he secretly married her despite documents proving otherwise. He has been thoroughly and soundly discredited as a conman by every reputable Monroe scholar, yet the lies that took root in his 1974 book continue to grow. He claims that Marilyn kept a red diary where she would jot down national secrets supposedly told to her by the Kennedys. Although Marilyn was not a diary keeper, she did frequently jot down questions that came to her, lists for herself, and other random thoughts. However, as the recent book Fragments shows us in Marilyn’s own hand, she was not organized in her writings, nor was there any discipline or consistency to them. Her thoughts were written on hotel stationary, scraps of paper, and receipts. Even the closest thing to a diary that she had- a spiral notebook- is filled with thoughts with no cohesion or time consistency.

    The claims about a press conference ‘to reveal everything’ is even more outlandish. Marilyn was not a vengeful or spiteful woman; she was discreet and tactful to a fault. She never spoke ill of anyone publicly, no matter how they had wronged her. She never said a cross word about any of her ex-husbands, about co-stars who had vilified her, she was always proper and discreet. Her character simply does not coincide with a vengeful woman who would spill secrets to the press, but moreover, this rumour was started by the insufferable Robert Slatzer in his nearly completely fictionalized account in his book.

    Now if that wasn’t enough of a slap for Cooper’s logic at the time I don’t know what is. But the man was clearly on a roll! The next statement he made was a nothing short of a Hankeyian misrepresentation of Britain’s ‘Mr X-Files’ Nick Pope’s work. Read this mouthful:

    On that same note, Nick Pope has CIA files on Dorothy Kilgallen which relate how she was asked to find out what she could on the UFO scene and probably talked to Monroe about what JFK knew. She was found dead in her NY apartment shortly after she interviewed Jack Ruby in prison. Is it coincidence? I think not.

    What article of Pope’s did Cooper read? I could find nothing from Pope saying anything of the sort. In fact, Pope’s a pretty conservative kind of guy and is a bit of a let down for the ‘believers’ out there and shows a great deal of interest and cynicism with regard to conspiracies of all shades. Thus Pope saying this sort of thing is completely out of character. In his article discussing Kilgallen, all Pope does is confirm that she had likely heard the UFO story (which we have already discussed) from Lord Mountbatten. But note what Tim has done: Kilgallen’s mysterious death now is solved. It was all about UFOs and it jibes with the Angleton memo. But Cooper trips the light fantastic with the next sip of the conspirahypocritic Kool-Aid:

    The August 3, 1962 CIA/Monroe wire tap document given to me in 1992 draws some powerful connections to JFK, RFK, the Roswell 1947 incident, and NASA (which Kilgallen is mentioned talking about Monroe and the Kennedy brothers). There’s a connection somewhere in all of this and I am working on it right now. I do know this, the FBI and the CIA kept records on Monroe, the Kennedys, and Kilgallen (Monroe had a DOD ID card).

    That anyone took Cooper seriously then is bad enough. That people still take Cooper seriously today is terminal. There’s no denying at all that the FBI kept records on these individuals. But as for Marilyn’s DOD card, it’s no big secret every entertainer who performed for the USO had to have one as can be seen with this example from one of the Bell Sisters DOD ID card.

    If you have come to this article from a UFO background and know little of the assassinations of the Sixties, in particular President Kennedy’s, be warned the internet is awash with numerous myths about Monroe, JFK and RFK. Of which the UFO angle is the most recent arrival in this morass. Monroe may well have been intimate at some point with JFK as Spoto notes, but the clincher is that it was not ongoing, nor did Robert have anything much to do with her or her death. Let’s also be mindful that practically all serious Monroe researchers (not all of them Kennedy fans by a long shot), note there is no evidence that she was obsessed with either Kennedy brother to the point of suicide, or that she kept a tell all diary of their liaisons.

    I hasten to add that The Posthumous Assassination of JFK, Parts I and II by Jim DiEugenio in regards to the Kennedy-Monroe subject comes highly recommended. Also, if you have come from my review of Joseph Farrell’s sorry book you may want to consider combining the Monroe-JFK rumours in DiEugenio’s article with the James Angleton sponsored Farewell America and the likely Angleton product, the Torbitt Document. Angleton died in 1987, but his legacy lives on. To the point his story is now entwined in the very sort of disinformation campaigns he later helped Allen Dulles perform. By mixing up the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe and UFOs, he was constructing a design that was bound to be pounced on by the likes of Cooper and Speriglio. Thereby creating a phony sideshow, distracting many people from the real point.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Preamble II



    George Adamski

    George ‘A Scam I See’ Adamski

    Being a keen amateur astronomer as a kid, I read up all I could about the planets. One in particular was Venus because of its proximity to Earth and its comparable size. Thus when I was about 10 I found a glossy covered book from the late 70’s or early 80’s and read about someone whom had flown to Venus in the company of a tall blonde haired creature. Now while I was deflated because it wasn’t some scary bug eyed green thing, I also knew the landscape of Venus at the time. Because I was confused, how on earth could adults have ever bought that one about flying to Venus? My thinking at the time was that its in a book and somehow it must be ‘official’.

    It wasn’t until much later that I learned the story I had encountered was a glowing tale by the infamous UFO fraudster George Adamski. My awakening to George, and by forfeit my suspicions about human like aliens begun as a teen in New Zealand. I saw a UFO documentary on television entitled UFOs Miracle of the Unknown with my cousin Jason (part of which can be viewed here). Never being a fan of the X-Files, I knew relatively little about UFOs bar the stuff I had read in the odd book or Unexplained Magazine lying around my friend’s Dad’s place or at primary school. Later on, I began to be more circumspect. I didn’t buy into John Lear’s bogus ‘Aliens and Eisenhower’ meeting then and I sure as hell don’t now. One of the highlights of this cheap and tacky production was the director’s decision to intercut it with an inaccurately painted picture of a youthful looking George Adamski being hailed to a space ship by an Aryan Alien. The real clincher however was the nauseating pseudo hippie sleaze bag ‘astral’ voice-over which sounds like the love child of Hal 9000 discussing the importance of George Adamski and his important message for humanity from his alien visitors. My cousin and I were so inspired by the unintentional humour of it all we started a punk band.

    Since then George has never been far from my mind, nor indeed from New Zealand as it turned out. He visited here in 1959 and met with the ‘George Adamski Saucer Society’ set up in Timaru and his visit piqued the interest of the NZ Ministry of Defense. George’s impact on New Zealand ufology has been rather startling. One of the many well written biographies of Adamski’s life was authored in 2010 by my fellow Kiwi Tony Brunt, who though critical of Adamski’s character and general showmanship believed in his contact stories. New Zealand seems to have embraced the greatest conman in ufo history with open arms (we obviously like a rogue). Across the ditch, Australians (always a little more streetwise), appeared to have a large series of falling-outs over his appearance there. Indeed many Aussies were greatly worried about the hit their organizations would take in the credibility stakes by his being seen in association with them.

    As fate would have it George and I have crossed paths yet again. Because as CTKA followers know, a subject very close to my heart has been the Kennedy assassination which started in those tender teenage years I described earlier. Thus I had to chuckle when I came across a piece in Brunt’s book in which he claimed George met secretly with President Kennedy. Now alarmed as I was that NZ ufologists had greatly admired Adamski, the fact a fellow countryman could embarrass us so badly, left me deeply devastated. Thankfully I found that Brunt wasn’t alone in this crazy idea. People all over the globe (even some from Oz) had bought into this one. And luckily for my national pride, Brunt was positively mild when compared to some in this lot. As expected there are utterly no White House records, witnesses, nor even a mention from Kennedy’s posthumous ‘hack’ biographers like Richard Reeves and Sy Hersh about this. They would have if there had even been the merest sniff to associate JFK with the guy. To this end, an anonymous English critic of Adamski cuttingly noted “Adamski supporters also boast of a supposed secret meeting with JFK in Washington D.C. in which the former burger vendor briefed the President on the aliens’ concerns.”


    Space Brother Dulles: Did He Run Adamski?

    In his 1962 “Open Letter to Saucer Researchers” in Saucer News Davidson noted that Leon Stringwell had written in his ‘book’, the rather intriguing 1957 Inside Saucer Post…3-0 Blue: CRIFO Views the Status Quo: A Summary Report (pgs. 40-42), that Dulles himself would put an injunction against anyone appearing in court concerning Adamski’s book Inside The Space Ships. The injunction from Dulles apparently concerned author Thomas Eickhoff’s wanting the two unknown scientists Adamski had brought up in his publication to testify in a case charging Adamski with mail fraud for selling products which contained false claims.

    However, Timothy Good received a freedom of information Act request with some of Dulles’ actual comments concerning Eickhoff’s case. At first appearance it appears that Stringwell’s claims as used by Davidson may well be something of an exaggeration on behalf of Mr Eickhoff:

    Allen Welsh Dulles was Director of the CIA (DCI) from 1953 to 1961, and following a FOIA request to the Agency in 1984 I was sent a copy of a letter from Dulles to the Honourable Gordon H. Scherer, House of Representatives, Washington DC, dated 4 October 1955:

    The questions which Mr. Eickhoff has raised in his letter to you are largely outside of the jurisdiction of this Agency. Section 102(d) of the National Security Act of 1947 provides that the CIA shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal security. Insofar as Mr. Eickhoff appears interested in pursuing the problem of mail fraud in connection with George Adamski’s book entitled “Inside The Space Ships” it would appear to be a problem of law-enforcement, from which we are specifically barred by statute. CIA, as a matter of policy, does not comment on the truth or falsity of material contained in books or other published statements, and therefore it is not in a position to comment on Mr. Adamski’s book or the authenticity of the pictures which it contains. The subject matter of Mr Adamski’s book would appear to be more in the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.

    However, Good, who for a spell fell for the MJ-12 documents, is a well-known devotee of Adamski who even believes the tripe about his meeting Kennedy. He grossly misrepresented the context of Dulles’ statement. While it’s pretty obvious that this ‘fob off’ letter from Dulles to Congressman Scherer makes no mention of his threatening any blockage or legal proceedings, Eickhoff, is probably referring to the above message when he stated: “The answer that was forthcoming was so evasive that it even angered my very conservative lawyer friend.”

    As one will see in Stringwell’s work, the ‘injunction’ conversation appeared to have happened after this letter not before. Good states that there appears to be no more communication concerning this in the CIA’s files, and then being ever so helpful, gives a bunch of seemingly dead ends to pursue in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. As we’ve seen, the problem here is that Good hadn’t figured out (or being a staunch ‘Adamskiite’ chose to ignore the fact) that Davidson had already written his suspicions on whom the two scientists in the saucer were. Because the names of Bloom and Maxwell were both given a big write up in Adamski’s book prior to Inside the Space Ships namely the equally infamous The Flying Saucers Have Landed. He should also have read the preface to his mentor’s book Inside the Space Ships, brought to my notice by Davidson. Here he would have seen that Adamski wrote to a correspondent Charlotte Blodgett:

    As I have told you I do have witnesses to one of my journeys in a Space craft. Both are scientists who hold high positions… When they believe that they can release the substantial information they have, without jeopardising either the national defence or themselves, they have said that they will do so through the press… they were with me at the request of the Brothers.

    Good doesn’t seem to grasp that not everything goes through bureaucratic channels. On one hand, there need not be anything sinister here. Either Dulles may well have had a phone conversation or sent a letter to either Eickhoff’s lawyer himself or via some intermediary like Scherer. But without an affidavit, from the attorney concerned, let alone an ID for him (not to mention the fact that he like Eickhoff have likely passed away by now) without direct physical evidence from their remaining relatives there’s no actual evidence that Dulles threatened any injunction concerning the scientists. As much much as a gullible and deceitful merchant of disinformation as Good appears to be, he may have gotten something right (quite by accident). Nevertheless, before spoiling that particular surprise, let’s take a little detour.


    The CI-Age of Innocence

    Until more information concerning Eickhoff becomes known I am content to wait. I take this stance ecause it appears that Adamski had no problems discussing his ties to the government in his work anyhow. The people he named in the Flying Saucers Have Landed were genuine government employers as confirmed in Davidson’s article “I Agree With Adamski”.

    Adamski also openly commented in lectures that he was cleared by the FBI and the USAF to say such things, and numerous accounts speak of his having some kind of diplomatic passport. While one could say this was conjecture cooked up by Adamski, who likely revelled in the attention that led Hoover and the FBI to admonish and threaten legal action against him. This is where American laws once again seem different from the rest of the world. Adamski, in a very Crisman and Palmer like way, would go on maintaining the same old connections without ever being prosecuted. Thus, of course the question comes down to whom was protecting Adamski or what be revealed about their monitoring of him. Martin Jeffrey’s comments in his article “The Mystery of George Adamski’’seem to be a little wayward at times concerning the man possibly being an FBI stooge, but his citing the following was very well done:

    In a later memorandum dated 12/10/53, Hoover is told by SAC, Los Angeles that Adamski produced a document having a blue seal in the lower left corner, at the top of which three names of Government agents appeared. The names were erased in the de-classified document.

    As Coppens said in his discussion of NICAP and its many ties to the agency, back then times were more innocent. Having the FBI or the CIA show interest in your work in the UFO or any other field, let alone to be seen as working with their associates in a public capacity, actually enhanced one’s credibility, not detracted from it. People had little idea about the potential for life anywhere in the solar system, we would not land on the moon till 1968, and it was not till the mid seventies that photos of Venus revealed it as a barren wasteland. Thus the chances of benevolent ‘honkies’ on another planet must have been deeply reassuring to white middle America (Just imagine the panic if Orthon, Adamski’s Venusian pal, had been Black?)

    Thus in the aforementioned NICAP’s halcyon days in the fifties and early sixties, the vast majority of its membership had little idea the agency wasn’t watching the stars, but watching for them. Now this is a major difference to the Kennedy arena. To say you are CIA in this neighbourhood and to say you believe in a conspiracy is the kiss of death for all but the most gullible JFK researchers. No one nowadays admits they’re agency anywhere, even when people like John McAdams advertises them on his website. In UFO circles, many ufologists still try to make contact with known CIA or intelligence staffers for all manner of little crumbs and titbits. There seems to be a massive disconnect between what the reality of intelligence agencies are and how much any given person within an organisation who can be accessed easily would ever know anyhow.

    Now returning to Adamski, these groups were likely not working with Adamski (nor did they like being bandied with him), but the plus side to making someone as clearly deluded as Adamski think he was on the ‘inside’ so to speak (like the far less fortunate Paul Benewitz whom we shall come across in later episodes) was that it drew attention to the likes of Adamski from foreign operatives and the aforementioned malcontents, who would waste their time by following him around and/or out themselves in approaching him. It also attracted public attention as the Australian ufologists of the fifties complained, and Jeffrey of the 21st century writes, it wasn’t a good thing:

    The well-publicized books immediately turned the very people who should be investigating the UFO phenomenon away: The scientists. George Adamski had single-handedly (with a little help from Howard Menger) succeeded in making the subject of UFOs so utterly ridiculous, no serious scientist would want to have anything to do with it.

    This is why even some cynics of Adamski admit some form of government interest. The links between Adamski and the CIA (utterly off putting by today’s standards) hardly deters people like the abysmal Michael Salla from promoting his friend and Adamski fanatic Neil Gould, who gives an interesting analogy of duel usage and mutual benefit between the two. I understand there will be people stating that Adamski simply made these connections up to increase his standing, and he may well have on occasion. But what I will say here is that his flamboyance was always going to get him noticed and approached in some way. I mean saying that Aliens preferred Communism and that Russia could decimate the US in a nuclear strike probably weren’t the smartest things to do.

    So, however anyone ‘cuts it’, the notion of Adamski becoming ensnared in something far bigger than himself is something worthy of serious consideration. Yet Davidson also goes one step further and suggests that Adamski was coerced into a drug induced faux contact/abduction. The problem here is that Davidson’s accusations occurred over twenty years before the revelations about MK-ULTRA ever came out.


    Aryans, Adamski, Abductions & Acid

    Before we begin this passage, I provide a word of caution. Adamski may well have been flat out lying about his experiences with his alien pals; or he was telling the truth. Davidson believed that this visitation actually happened. Of course Davidson’s ‘stick in the mud’ was he didn’t believe Adamski’s corny tale as having anything to do with extra terrestrials, but with an experiment conducted by the CIA.

    Thus, let us return yet again to Space Brother ‘Al’ Dulles and his violations of CIA protocol. While Dulles was writing his sanctimonious reply to Eickhoff in 1955, one of his most infamous ‘pet-projects’ MK-ULTRA had ‘officially’ been running since April of 1953. Its horrific rampage while supposedly stopping in the late sixties would not be discovered till the mid Seventies. The equally insidious (but infinitely more subtle) Operation Mockingbird we have touched on a number of times in this work, like MK Ultra, debuted in the late 1940’s. Adamski, by all accounts, appears to have been the perfect guinea pig for both, and its an equally good reason why there is no trace of Eickhoff’s or Dulles’s communication (nor why the CIA has so little information on Adamski). Because there is every chance that when Dulles’ loyal lieutenant Richard Helms burned thousands of incriminating documents related to MK-ULTRA in the seventies, that information also related to UFO contact/abductions.

    As early as July 1953, just three months after MK-ULTRA had gotten the ‘official’ go-ahead, Davidson started a series of communications with Adamski whose book The Flying Saucers Have Landed had also come out that year. Davidson’s article “Why I Believe Adamski” provides some of the first insights into all manner of silliness which could well have shaped the United States in the decades that followed:

    1. The contact/abductees wave of the mid fifties and sixties.
    1. Adamski’s use of cinematic images in his book.
    1. The Venusians Newsreel Adamski witnessed was, according to Davidson “a collection of film clips which someone from the film industry of California could have prepared” (pg. 6). Later, Davidson notes that Bloom and Maxwell (whose identities he confirmed and whose credentials he’d exposed) had the requisite skills to create such an illusion (pg. 8). In addition, looking at it Davidson is bang on the money. Maxwell in particular had been involved in all manner of photoreconnaissance, film analysis and technology, and unsurprisingly had worked in Hollywood himself.
    1. Potential use of hallucinogen’s on Adamski’s person (despite Davidson saying Adamski’s tale does not appear hallucinatory), he does mention Adamski’s curious taste sensations and his drinking of liquids upon arrival in the ‘craft’ and how they were given again on the hour. Davidson questions whether or not these are “medicinal” and containing a “stimulant or other drug” (pg. 6).
    1. Adamski was certain that with the “ Brothers’ help his message, via his book Inside the Space Ships would become ‘accepted’ and spread his message. Davidson cynically states it had received a ton of publicity and had gone through “three reprintings in three months” (pg. 8).
    1. Throughout Davidson’s allegations, a key question is one of targeting. Why was a harmless crank like Adamski targeted in the first place? It appears that through flattery and the promise of inside information the imaginative, overly confident cult leader was perfect fodder.

    Is it a coincidence as numerous Michael Shermer/Randi types like Peter Rogerson think that the first large spates of UFO contacts began at around the same time in the mid-fifties? Is it also a coincidence to Rogerson that Davidson asked Adamski in a letter if he had any idea that when his ‘Space Brothers’ left him that there was a spate of similar incidence in the US and Europe. Is it also a coincidence that the Adamski inspired ‘contactee’ Howard Menger, blatantly came out at one time and said the Pentagon was using him to test the reactions of people he bought to his house?


    Flight of the Nordics

    As mentioned in Preamble I, Dulles’s good old PSYOP pal C.D. Jackson became an integral part of the ufology scene, involving himself with the bizarre tale of Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction in late September 1961. Jackson and his pal Robert Hohmann came up with the idea that the Hills experienced ‘missing time’ (John Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 1966, pgs. 42-58). How about Jackson and Hohmann (who also met the Hills) then discussing An Historic Report from Life in Space?

    Arthur Young, for his part, turned up in Berkley California circa 1972 with his Institute For Public Consciousness Organization. Young, also endorsed the ludicrous Adamski ‘Plaedian-Nordic’ hypothesis. He soon had company. A year later the Industrial Church of the New World Comforter was formed by a commune leader called Allen Noonan (who changed it to the infinitely cooler Allen Michael). His first epiphany happened in 1947, (funnily enough, it was the year the CIA formed and Young left Bell Helicopters; not to mention that Kenneth Arnold’s sighting also occurred). Amidst the alien abduct/contactee madness in 1954, Adamski encountered ‘Nordic’ aliens in the desert.

    Steve Snider runs a well-written ‘Fortean’ style blog which touches on a number of issues surrounding UFO related PSYOPs. I asked him kindly if he could comment on the human appearance of the Aliens in both the Adamski and Hill scenarios.:

    It seems like dwarves were more popular in South America… Maybe Nordics were all we Yanks could handle. In general, I tend to agree that much of the UFO stuff is PSYOPs; many alien abductions certainly seem to serve no other purpose than inducing trauma… I mean, surely an advanced alien species capable of travelling across the galaxy would certainly have developed more effective medical procedures than the anal probe, or draining an entire cow of blood. It’s just too illogical to be extra-terrestrials. (Steve Snider email; 29/07/11)

    Now here’s the grand finale in all of this pertaining to Adamski and Dulles. One of Adamski’s closest adherents, Ms. Lou Zinsstag, claims to be the second cousin of Jung himself. Indeed, in her book co-authored with the extremely bad Tim Good, George Adamski the untold Story, a discussion with the famed psychologist about Adamski is a key feature. Nevertheless, Zinsstag went one-step further, she herself is the originator of ‘Adamski met Kennedy’ line… It’s a small world after all.


    A Repose

    Davidson’s investigations and his allegations of Agency involvement in elaborate hoaxes like the one he felt Adamski had been part of, was, for the time, even more outrageous than anything Adamski had claimed. And there are still a few people out there whom may well take offence to this piece. Alternatively, maybe not. I am encouraged by the growing wave of rationalist ufologists, open to meeting in the middle, and respecting other people’s areas of research. Yet, there has been elaborate plots and hoodwinks in all areas for eons. I advise anybody to check out the nefarious ‘False Flag’ activities of Ed Lansdale another student of Paul Linebarger.

    Lansdale’s plans in Indoneisa and North Vietnam for example, were on a scale far more elaborate than Adamski’s little drug induced voyages. I mean just check out Lansdale’s ideas for Jesus liberating Cuba.


    Onwards to a new Dawn: A final Note

    This list of kooks and cranks with ties to US intelligence I have mentioned throughout this article — Crisman, Oswald and Novel to Adamski and Zinstagg — are just the beginning of a dark slope that many like Mark Pilkington, Robin Ramsay, Jim Hougan, George Michael Evica, Charles Drago, Steve Snider and Greg Bishop, Bill Kelly and Bob Hastings, Larry Hancock and others have explored in more depth before myself. Whether or not you or I agree with everything said by these sorts of people is irrelevant. They all contain one simple common thread. That being, the vast majority of the people attaching themselves to contactee or UFO groups have never ever been experimented on and have no ties to the agency. These people may simply be traumatised, over imaginative, or trying to cash in on a craze, or make a quick buck or two. Perhaps there is a very small chance there may have been a genuine abduction somewhere at sometime not to mention an alien sighting. Nevertheless, I am going to state that from 1947 onwards the waters have been so badly muddied and outright contaminated by the Agency you can’t blame anyone for being cautious, and more than a little suspect.

    It is also important to mention that those in or near the Dulles circle need not be as evil as he was, nor in on the game. They may just as likely have been the victims. For example, I briefly mentioned Admiral Roscoe Hillenkotter’s becoming a board member of NICAP, in Part A. However, it seems that Hillenkotter genuinely believed in UFOs as a board member of NICAP. As Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis have explained in their works, numerous high-ranking people in military and intelligence circles have benevolent hearts, but brains of fruit. Take good-natured ‘pacifists’ like Artie Young, for instance. Unlike utterly cynical figures like Dulles, Jackson or Angleton he genuinely thought he was doing the ‘Lords work’ for the Agency. At one stage, he asked Bill Kelly to his face if he really was a Plaedian ‘Nordic’ alien coming to visit him. Now if this is where Young’s head was at, one has to wonder how easily he could have been manipulated or have had his organization infiltrated. Scarily there is a hell of lot of wealthy Art Young types out there waiting to be tapped. Just look at Laurance Rockefeller, whom while the Rockefeller foundation provided cover and apparently funds for MK-ULTRA related activities, became a big campaigner for UFO disclosure in the 1990’s.

    The debates about the CIA’s double dipping in the field now and the growing movement of individuals’ writing or commenting about is in direct contrast to the outrage Jacque Vale’s 1977 book Messengers of Deception caused when he criticised UFO believers for accepting any old dross thrown at them about abductions and criticised the sceptics for ignoring what the real implications are if the aliens are less than benevolent and all too human. Martin Cannon’s essay “The Controllers” about contact/abductees being MK-ULTRA victims created another hoopla, the intense criticism that he was subjected to promptly led him to disavow his own work and leave the UFO field. Cannon’s treatment, however you look at it and the often-misguided passions it creates, is an alarming testament to how powerful an influence Dulles and US intelligence had been in destroying any form of critical analysis in both devotee and sceptic camps. When Cannon was writing, Davidson’s observations of the CIA’s antics were not well known (indeed Cannon’s use of sources like Whitley Strieber beg some questions). Thus his work seemed to lack some direction. Yet the good work done by the likes of Pilkington, Bishop, Coppens, and Steve Snider have helped shed much light on this ludicrously taboo area.


    Overall Conclusion; What of Davidson

    Davidson seems to have understood from a very early stage that the CIA aided and abetted shaping realities like no other agency on earth. Other valid question have to be asked. Was Davidson some anti CIA conduit for information? Did he have some kind of protection? In the world of feuding intelligence agencies, it is difficult to tell what real information is and what is not; or more precisely, why is that information not coming out? On the other hand, was Davidson simply smart enough and ‘in the know’ so to speak? What is important is that Dulles did have enemies and critics within the circles of power he himself owned. Though as we have seen in Preamble I, Dulles quite clearly had the means to obfuscate and destroy individuals (if necessary) on any number of levels. Davidson’s accumulated works I believe would be a treasure trove of commentary like Colonel Fletcher Prouty, and Bob Lovett (a scion of the Eastern Establishment). How much Davidson wrote about the Kennedy assassination is another question in point and it would be fascinating to see his evolution within that field. These two essays in no way cover the gamut of all UFO experiences nor as I said do I have all the answers to UFOs abductions and sightings, however I am stunned Davidson is not more well known, and why it has taken so long for genuine abductions and contacts to not be seen as some type of human experimentation. Knowing the CIA’s predilections for the big scam, I’d go for that well before I ever contemplated anything extra terrestrial. It is testament of the power of the covert operatives that so many do not.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Preamble I



    Doctor Feel Good & Alien Dulles

    Introduction

    To start I shall focus on Allen Dulles’ role in the creation of the modern day UFO phenomenon. This was born out of the Cold War, which have had far reaching and, dare I say, negative consequences on society and on research into the Kennedy assassination and other such areas. One person who consistently wrote about the problems of the CIA playing ‘God’ at the time was an important lower rung establishment figure by the name of Dr. Leon Davidson, who implicated Dulles all the way through his research career. Both parts of this essay are based largely on his commentaries. This focus on Dulles, flies in the face of the accusations that Jim Angleton was involved in running the asinine MJ-12 program to cover up UFOs; in this regard there’s little evidence that Angleton himself was part of a ‘disinformation campaign’. Individuals like Angleton may have pulled a shift or two in the alien palaver promoting bogus UFO stories, but not in the crucial period between the end of WWII and Dulles becoming DCI in 1953. It seems the core people behind Dulles pushing the original UFO agenda were Charles Cabell and CD Jackson, with important if indirect roles coming from Frank Wisner and Dulles’s brother John Foster upon Eisenhower’s election in 1952.


    Dr. ‘Feel Good’ Notes a Diversion

    “It should not come as a surprise that Davidson suffered persecution by the CIA. This is extremely telling when compared to the lack of action taken against other researchers who claim that the CIA and other agencies are engaged in a massive cover-up concerning alien contact. So it’s okay to say that the CIA is hiding little green men, but when you say the CIA has concocted the story of little green men, the CIA hunts you down…”

    -Phil Coppens, A Lone Chemist’s Quest to Expose the UFO Cover-Up

    “Over the next six decades, the UFO mythology, and those who engaged with it, would continue to be exploited, steered and shaped by America’s armed forces and intelligence agencies. Who knows how differently things would have evolved if the UFO community had paid more attention to Leon Davidson, ufology’s lost prophet.”

    -Mark Pilkington, Weapons of Mass Deception

    The fine work of Mark Pilkington and Phil Coppens concerning the studies of Los Alamos scientist and Manhattan Project participant Dr Leon Davidson have bought much needed clarity and scope to the UFO equation. Davidson, whom enjoyed some small fame as a commentator on the subject, had begun investigating and tabulating all manner of UFO interactions in 1949 (and researching those prior). He had grave suspicions about the CIA’s involvement with disinformation concerning UFOs and all manner of PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) well ahead of his time.

    Indeed, Davidson, often without knowing it, seems to have passed comment on both Operation Mockingbird and a certain infamous CIA drug induced program, years before they ever came to light. Davidson appears to have been open to the possibility of alien UFOs, but seems to have always believed in their being man made. He campaigned to have the government release unpublished documents pertaining to projects in the fifties namely Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. But what’s odd is that he soon felt that he had been a conduit for US intelligence passing off false data about the US military’s use of captured alien technology. When we consider that most ufologists of the time (represented by Davidson’s friend Col Don Keyhoe), would have considered this a major triumph (as many still do), we can see the difference in thinking that separated Davidson from his peers, then and now.

    Phil Coppens has done a great job of straightening out Davidson’s seemingly hasty writing style which, though insightful, could sometimes come across as unintentionally kooky or specious due to his prose style. A case in point is a piece by Davidson from 1977 which can be seen in the article The CIA and the Saucer. Davidson’s interest in Dulles and the CIA’s involvement in a number of UFO related areas led him to make some seemingly odd calls concerning the Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, UFO incident years before in 1964. Namely that the ensign seen on the vessel spelled out ‘CIA’ and was also an anagram for Allen Dulles. Davidson notes that it was either the CIA having a joke, or another agency (like the DIA or the FBI) pulling a prank to try and draw attention to the CIA’s nefarious dealings in the area. Now, while the famed Dr. J. Allen Hynek seems to be in agreement with Davidson concerning the logo, I personally agree with Phil Klass that anything could be made out of the name (no, I am not an advocate of Klass).

    The FBI (whom he opined could have been in on the prank) as we know were busy elsewhere. Davidson fails to note that the famed Socorro sighting occurred at the same time as the Warren Commission was moving into high gear. Nor did he mention that his Public Enemy Number One, Allen Dulles, was in on that one as well. This omission aside, Davidson hits on a very real and important observation (even if he missed the point himself in this case). That being that the CIA seemed to be wheeling out and utilizing UFO stories as if on cue to divert the public’s gaze at certain opportune moments.

    Thanks to this sort of sighting John McCone, whom had been head of the CIA since 1961, embarked upon an investigation of UFOs using the CIA’s, OSI (Office of Scientific Investigation) that year. The spate of UFO sightings in and around 1965-1967, caused a brand new UFO flap which resulted in the USAF commissioning the Condon Report (supposedly the final word on the issue). One year after Davidson wrote his article a well known civil case taken by a group led by journalist Ted Zechel released a number of documents from a number of agencies. Indeed Roswell resurfaced that year, 1978, thanks to the efforts of government disinformation agent Bill Moore whom was encouraged by Stanton Friedman to explore the long forgotten crash. Moore published his book The Roswell Incident in 1980. This renewed interest in the paranormal occurred in and around when the HSCA stated that there had been probable conspiracies in the JFK and MLK case. The following year, 1979, a Cuban exile in Miami, Filberto Cardenas, had a hilariously lame abduction tale which got big news.

    Davidson was deeply affected by and interested in the Kennedy assassination. He was a passionate supporter of Richard E. Sprague’s People and the Pursuit of Truth publication. He also appears to be one of the first people to raise mention of the Chicago plot and a possible French connection to one of the assassins (Davidson, People and the Pursuit of Truth Vol. 2, No. 5 September, 1976, pg. 7.)


    Alien Dulles, the original Martian

    Coppens and an increasing chorus of others have pointed out that, in the early years of UFOs, most researchers believed them to be man-made objects. Those whom believed in their being of ‘alien’ origin were part of a ‘kooky’ minority. Yet, Davidson and those like him, who were open to yet sceptical of the ET answer to the equation, found themselves effectively swallowed up by the complex machinations of Allen Dulles. As we shall see, Dulles played all sides of the UFO angle. When he, without doubt the single most influential individual in the history of US intelligence, truly became involved in the espionage field is a veritable black hole and worthy of another study altogether. He worked for the fledgling US intelligence operation prior to and during WWI and again for the US under the banner of the more organised OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in WWII. In both conflicts, his base was Switzerland, an extremely important location in both conflicts. Dulles was therefore an integral part of both the OSS and the CIA from their inceptions and would go on to become the CIA’s longest serving DCI.

    Prior to its establishment, the CIA had been the aforementioned OSS and briefly, the CIG (Central Intelligence Group). Little is actually known of the OSS and CIG’s interest in the examination of UFOs. However, it’s utterly inconceivable the OSS didn’t take notice of the now famed ‘foo fighter’ sightings by Axis and Allied pilots from the early forties onwards. Neal H. Petersen who studied and compiled highlights from Dulles’ wartime correspondence with various OSS officials, wrote on page 37 of From Hitlers Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles that “OSS Bern reported frequently on the development of Secret Weapons by the Nazis.” Dulles wrote that the Germans were working on a “flying contraption perhaps in the form of an aerial torpedoin February of 1943, a year before the V1 and V2 rockets hit London. These intelligence reports came by way of a fellow called Fritz Kolbe codenamed ‘George Wood’. Kolbe, would also go on to furnish Dulles with plans for the Nazi ME 262 jet fighter. What is curious is that while Agency friendly writers have been quite prepared to discuss the V1 and 2 rockets, they barely raise an eyebrow about Dulles’ involvement in procuring this information. We all know of Dulles’ acquisition of the German military intelligence officer, General Reinhardt Gehlen. Not to mention those very rocket scientists Dulles had begun hearing about in early 1943, whisked away in Operation Paperclip. Let’s not forget the fact that there are documents detailing Nazi drug experimentation in places like the Dachau ‘Hilton’. Experiments which documentation of became available almost immediately after the war, and which and play an interesting role in Part II of this essay.

    But for all Dulles learned during the war, it likely pales in comparison to when he took control of intelligence in post war West Germany. The many Nazi secrets he then discovered, and precisely what he learned, we may never really know. What is apparent is that by the time the United States Army Air Force Intelligence started to hunt down all manner of abandoned top-secret German aircraft at the war’s end in 1945, Dulles and the OSS seem to have been one-step ahead.


    Ken Arnold and How to Stiff the USAF

    I just mentioned Project Paper Clip, and I really don’t want to. Why? Well I cannot overstate the amount of crazed disinformation there is in regards to a whole matter of uber-conspiracy authors on that subject. It is true the Nazis likely experimented with anti-gravity, but after over seventy years, we only have an inkling of what the US had and when they actually began test flights (Igor Wikowski & Nick Cook: UFOs The Secret Evidence, 2005). Also the Nazis have been given far too much credit by fantasist elements for the invention of what we would call UFO craft, as a number of individuals and companies had also begun making designs and prototypes of unconventional aircraft in the US prior to WWII.

    Northrop’s own Flying Wing Bombers (whose ‘flying wing’ design would eventually evolve into the B-2 Stealth Fighter) had been in development since the 1930’s; around the same time as the German equivalent the Horten IX, which apparently became the first flying wing jet flight in late 1944 or early 1945. Therefore, there is an extensive history of unconventional aircraft and mankind’s experimentation with them, interest in them dating back years before the Kenneth Arnold incident. I am in agreement with Coppens, Pilkington, Davidson and an increasing amount of others, that what Arnold saw that fateful June day in 1947 was more than likely entirely man made (I feel much the same way about Roswell). Indeed, in 1947, the year the CIA came into being, there were numerous UFO sightings.

    UFOs possess speed and agility that apparently outmatch anything we have. While speed can often only be estimated, its the uncanny agility of these aircraft operating at high speeds which have long been considered the ‘ET’ component of their flight. However, as we can see here, machines don’t bother about G-Forces like humans do. Of course the discussion in the previous link is based on 21st Century understandings and technology, yet Greg Bishop discusses that Nikolai Tesla himself operated a radio control boat in 1895. While Mark Pilkington notes that UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) had been in mainstream use since the 1930’s, and had started out being used as far back as WWI. It’s also interesting to note that Lt. Joe Kennedy Jr, President Kennedy’s older brother, was a WWII pilot who was tragically killed in a classified experiment with radio controlled craft in 1944.

    Thus it wasn’t just many designs that had been tested, but technologies like radio control that were still relatively unknown to the post war public that had been explored for decades before the Arnold sightings on June the 24th, 1947. This started the modern day UFO phenomena. Whether the objects he saw that day were an alien entity, an infamous Vought ‘flying flap jack’ XF5U or a VI73, as Pilkington and Davidson say Arnold saw, some variation of the Northrop or a captured German Horten HO IX model, a prototype glider, or a UAV. All this is open to debate.

    But there’s also a question that hasn’t been properly asked. Thus we return to Kenneth Arnold. Arnold himself was reluctant to go down the Extra Terrestrial avenue (except when dollar signs were shown it seems). He also has an interesting story to tell. When Arnold saw the UFOs he also saw a DC-4 in the same vicinity as the objects. Yet, no effort I know of has ever been made to track this plane down or interview it’s occupants. Arnold was a well respected businessman, search and rescue pilot, and was a Deputy Sheriff whom worked closely with his local police department, aided in prison transfers, was a part time Federal Marshall, by all accounts had a number of contacts in the US military, and was close friends with Colonel Paul Wieland with whom he investigated pollution of the Salmon fisheries.

    Now no conversation about Kennedy and UFOs would be complete without mentioning this incident. After Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, he went on to investigate the Maury Island hoax which had occurred some three days before Arnold’s own encounter. Arnold was paid two hundred dollars to come and investigate the claims of Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman, by one Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories and the man who invented the term ‘flying saucers’. I ask the reader to forget all the dross pitched over the Maury Island topic by the likes of Joseph Farrell, Kenn Thomas and Peter Levenda. I also advise the reader to tread carefully around references to the contentious ‘easy papers’. Just read Coppens’ breakdown of the topic, entitled “The Strangest UFO encounter,,,or a hoax?”. It’s far superior to anything pitched by this sad bunch concerning Maury Island.

    According to Coppens, Davidson himself contacted Jim Garrison concerning the nefarious activities of Fred Lee Crisman and Ray Palmer. In the mid 40’s Crisman had written a letter to Palmer and got it published in his magazine concerning all manner of bizarre encounters concerning one Richard Sharpe Shavers’s Lemuria and other fantastic stories. Palmer caught Davidson’s eye no less than five years before Garrison began digging around the case. In his ‘Open Letter to Saucer Researchers’ article on page 4 Davidson writes:

    The June 1947 Maury Island (Tacoma, Washington) sighting did not become widely known until after the secret Grudge Report was released in 1949. (Released only to the Military and the AEC. It was not — and is not yet — available to the public.) The Maury Island incident was referred to by the Rand Corporation in its chapter of the Grudge Report. The Maury Island affair is fully described in the book by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer. (And thus Palmer is associated with the earliest stages of the flying saucer story.)

    One question the majority of people never ask in this case about Crisman and his companion Dahl is why they would both admit that the Maury Island incident was a hoax to an Air force investigation team. Now I do not know how things work in the United States, but were someone from say Canada to pull a prank on the local Air Force, let alone one which resulted in the deaths of two brave airmen in the area of Kelso nearby the sighting as a grown adult, they would likely be prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned. Furthermore, there is a high likelihood he would be publicly shamed in the press nationwide for doing so. Screwing with one’s military outside of the US is that big of a deal for the rest of us. In particular when this is on record as being the reconstituted USAF’s first ever fatal plane crash.

    That Crisman, Dahl, and in particular Palmer (whom knew of Crisman’s predilection for tall stories yet still promoted the incident) all got off ‘Scot free’ for pulling this stunt, and then went on to cash in on this purportedly ‘childish’ prank, is shocking, but this seems to be how things are done in America. There is a curious cultural precedent for this type of weirdness. You may recall the US Marines once let an avowed Communist monitor their top-secret U-2 spy flights over Russia and let him return home after promising to divulge state secrets, and that a fellow by the name of Gordon Novel never faced prosecution for his running interference in Jim Garrison’s trial. In the modern era, we have individuals falsifying government documents like MJ-12 then profiteering from them, yet not a finger has been raised against these people either. Don Ecker, one of the few UFO people to have written cautiously on the topic of Fred Crisman made this statement which I believe is very pertinent: “Had these men been exposed, Garrison would have unsealed the Pandora’s Box on flying saucers, which, if it had occurred, would have forever ripped away the then nearly 20-year-old mythic fabric wrapping the UFO mystery — a veil since used to great benefit by the military to conceal the testing of classified aircraft.”

    And what of Kenneth Arnold? If the UFO Hunters did anything well with their abjectly awful show it was getting hold of Barry Fisher the great nephew of one of the victim’s Lieutenant Frank Brown. Fisher explained his uncle was not just an investigator but was involved in ‘counter espionage’, and further, that they gave his uncle’s personal belongings and military ID to Mr. Arnold. A fact which no one has explained to my satisfaction


    The Sound of PSYOPs

    Let’s return now to our Dear Mr. Dulles. While Dulles was interested in the analysis and development of weapons like the ME 262 and the V1 and 2 rockets, it didn’t really float his boat. It was in the dark arts of covert and psychological operations that Allen’s heart really was. In Davidson’s March 1962 address “An Open Letter to Saucer Researchers” he quotes Captain Edward Ruppelt of Project Bluebook (and author of the 1956 “Report On Unidentified Flying Objects”) as having wrote that Allen Dulles had become interested in the use of flying saucers as ‘psychological weapons’ as early as 1950. While I could not find this mention of Dulles in Ruppelt’s book anywhere, Davidson was likely referring to comments made by Ruppelt in his personal correspondance with him. Either way, Ruppelt and Davidson were correct about Dulles growing interest, but as we have seen they were likely off by some 6 or 7 years.

    No one should be surprised about Dulles’ proclivities. He’d had a well known lifelong fascination with mass psychology and was by all accounts an admirer and associate of the insidious Edward Bernays, and the man he inspired, Josef Goebbels. Dulles was also close friends with one of psychology’s most famous pioneers: Carl Jung, who became fascinated with the subject of UFOs and wrote the much vaunted Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1959. However, in terms of the biggest influence on Dulles’ use of them, or more precisely how to use them one cannot overlook the highly influential writings of PSYOP specialist Paul Linebarger whose 1948 book Psychological Warfare is a classic in the intelligence field. It should be mentioned that Linebarger’s hobby was writing science fiction. Linebarger wrote under the pen name ‘Cordwainer Smith’ and his writings, which predate Jung’s, show a very real connection between UFOs and religious expression. Dulles was also fascinated by religion, and throughout his time in intelligence he infiltrated all manner of religious institutions and organisations (as noted here). We can see the potential for Dulles’ abuse of the idea and the creation of a cultural phenomena. Quite simply the CIA’s use of advanced studies into psychology and a vast black budget helped the CIA become the most successful and lethal advertising agency in the world.

    Now, Walter Bedell-Smith is viewed as being the first person to envisage the CIA using UFOs as potential PSYOPs via this message he sent to Raymond Allen, head of the PSB (Psychological Strategy Board) in 1952:

    I am today transmitting to the national security council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems connected with the UFOs appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations… I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive and defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.

    The reality is that the decision to utilize UFOs for psychological purposes likely happened sometime earlier than even Davidson suggested, and well before Bedell Smith ever cottoned on to the idea. It likely started in the bowels of the OSS immediately during the war with an increase in sightings of unidentifiable aircraft. C.D. Jackson of Time-Life was a man with an extensive PSYOPs background and had a major role in the formation of that organisation, not to mention that of it’s follow up group, the Operations Coordinating Board (OSB), in 1953. He was also involved with the dubious NICAP organisation that interviewed Betty and Barney Hill about their alien abduction story in 1961. (See the book The Interrupted Journey, which was adapted into the 1975 TV film The UFO Incident.)


    Mockingbirds from Mars

    In Davidson’s examination he clearly implies that a Life magazine issue that Marilyn Monroe appeared on the cover of and which contained numerous articles discussing bogus sightings from 1947 onwards (a reproduction of one of those articles can be found here) was part of what seemed to be a disinformation campaign. As we have discussed in the case of Ray Palmer, Davidson was clearly suspicious of a collusion between the media and the CIA, well before the revelations of Operation Mockingbird in the seventies and revelations of the intensely cosy relationship Dulles had with both C.D. Jackson editor/publisher of Time-Life, and and it’s owner Henry Luce. A formidable figure in Mockingbird was Dulles’ earliest right hand man, Frank Wisner. It was Wisner, who formed the CIA satellite OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) in 1948. This became the CIA’s covert operations branch, and it was in and around the same time that Operation Mockingbird became a formalized series of media relationships.

    The links between the Time-Life, publishing empire of Henry Luce, his closeness to the OPC, Dulles and the Kennedy assassination are well known. But there is more. For starters one of Dulles’ most loyal assets was Clare Booth Luce (Henry’s wife). While ambassador to Italy she saw a UFO but had no idea what it could be. (Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, pg 238). Ruth Paine, the woman at the centre of Oswald’s rise to infamy in Dallas, had ties to the CIA and Dulles through a series of family friendships. Allen was close friends with family friend Mary Bancroft whilst she was his employee in Switzerland during the war years. Michael Paine’s mother re-married ‘ace’ Bell Helicopter designer Arthur Young, who became Michael’s stepfather at 18. Young himself would become noted for embracing and promoting all manner of George Adamski type ‘touchy feely’ alien-astrology ideas.


    Airforce + UFO + Investigations = CIA

    With heavy PSYOP backing and loyal media assets in tow, not to mention key insiders placed within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, it appears that Dulles and his cabal pulled of one of the greatest ongoing cons in the bureaucratic history of the time, and its cultural ramifications have been massive. The United States Airforce studies on the UFO phenomena officially began in 1948 with Project SIGN. However, it seems that SIGN really began in 1946 under its original name ‘Saucer’. SIGN was replaced by Project Grudge in 1948. What was significant about it was it showed a division between those in the Air Force who believed UFOs had to be of Russian manufacture or extra-terrestrial. Grudge changed under the encouragement of Lieutenant General Charles Cabell, the then head of the AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations), which was the Air Force’s in house intelligence arm. Cabell apparently wanted the extra-terrestrial aspect of the case to be taken more seriously. This happened and Project Bluebook enjoyed a successful transition under what ufologists describe as its most successful era under Captain Edward Ruppelt. He is the individual credited as coining the term ‘UFO’. Project Bluebook with Ruppelt at its helm ran from 1951-1953. Though Bluebook, would continue long after Ruppelt left, it became an ongoing joke as a debunking apparatus of the USAF until its dissolution in 1969.

    Many ufologists put the death of Ruppelt’s Bluebook down to the CIA led Robertson Panel in January of 1952. The Panel essentially set out to discredit incidents on the periphery of Bluebook and Ruppelt’s investigations. But it is also true that since Kenneth Arnold’s sighting near Mount Rainier in Washington State, the public had gone saucer-crazy, not to mention that the CIA were indeed concerned about the use of saucers being used to create confusion in the face of a Soviet attack (pg. 25) “We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skilful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behaviour and harmful distrust of duty constituted authority.”

    It’s not a lie either that just a page earlier the CIA recommended civilian UFO groups be monitored for potentially subversive activities (ibid, 24):

    The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” (Los Angeles) and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin).  It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind. 

    Pre 9/11 this sort of thing sounds extremely odious. However, it gets better before it gets worse. For the sake of effect, I omitted until now the Robertson Panel’s discussions on how to educate the public that UFOs were an explainable phenomena, i.e. utilizing Hollywood studios like the Jam Handy Co. (who made propaganda films for the military during WWII) and Disney, not to mention making broad comments like “This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.” (ibid, 20-21).

    While Ruppelt’s era is seen by many in the UFO field as some last gasp against secrecy, the reality is — and its one that many ufologists’ simply don’t want to entertain for the life of them — that Ruppelt himself later wrote in his book, and to Davidson, that he felt he had merely been the figurehead for an investigation and was being used as little more than a PR man. Davidson’s observations on the relocation of Washington’s jet air cover and Ruppelt’s humiliating story of trying to investigate the famous 1952 Washington UFO sightings are hilarious, as Coppens observes:

    Davidson was working in Washington that year and saw classified photographs of a certain Navy guided missile which in itself disproved the Air Force denials that the US had no devices that looked like UFO sightings reported by the public. He also questioned several “incidents” that occurred during the “invasion”: jet interceptors were removed from Andrews Air Force (4 miles from Washington) to New Castle Delaware (90 miles) in the time framework of the sightings, so that no visual confirmation was possible. Did someone make use of this window to stage a UFO wave?

    In his 1959 expose in a Saucer Scoop article ‘ECM+UFO=CIA’ Davidson explained that UFO identification with radars was fraught with all manner of problems (least of all the USAF had long been utilising Electromagnetic Counter Measures to train their own and swindle enemy radar operators). He quotes from an article in Aviation Research and Development circa 1957:

    …paths, and velocities can … simulate … realistic flight paths… Speeds up to 10,000 knots (about 11,500 mph) are easily generated… The target can be made to turn left or right… For each target there is … adjustment to provide a realistic scope presentation.

    Davidson also surmised that the “skilful hostile propaganda” which “could induce hysterical behaviour” and the irresponsibility of UFO organisations was due in large part to the very intensive disinformation, nay ‘education’ the CIA themselves had helped spread about UFOs existing, right throughout the media in a classic case of subterfuge or ‘paradox’, as Mark Pilkington explains here. By 1954 James Angleton had risen to become the head of counter intelligence and within two years some large civilian organisations emerged, the biggest of which was NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena). Formed by supposedly reputable and balanced science types. But with Dulles, it should come as no surprise that the board was riddled with numerous individuals involved in CIA counter intelligence theatres. As all of whom seemed to have either pushed for ET answers to the UFO question or utterly ridiculed the notion. Laying the foundations for the modern day extremist debates between the two sides. Eventually voices excluded or marginalised from this sort of debate were people like our very own Dr. Leon Davidson.

    Lamentations aside, the first head of the CIA, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkotter (1947-1950) himself joined NICAP in 1957. This is where it gets interesting, and I’ll reiterate this point later. What I feel Davidson and Coppens didn’t explain is that intelligence work is extremely compartmentalised. Only the very senior figures know what the overall plan of any operation actually is. It is precisely this lack of knowledge pertaining to this most basic of intelligence credos that have led many people, in particularly ufologists, to concoct grand conspiratorial narratives within which JFK-MJ-12 type fantasies abound, or are encouraged. Davidson and Coppens undoubtedly knew this, but their writing on this issue leads to the type of bogus conspiracy evangelist generalisations, namely the idea that practically ‘everyone’ is in on any given plot.

    While Hillenkoetter’s tenure as DCI, is noted for his astute navigation of the bureaucratic minefields in Washington, and it was Hillenkotter who was also behind the CIA’s unmandated covert operations at the behest of then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Yet, Hillenkotter (whom had been deeply reluctant to take the position as DCI of the CIA), was ill at ease about the agency operating outside of it’s original mandate. Forrestal, who had worked with both the Dulles brothers in the formation of the aforementioned CIA satellite OPC, shared no such concern.

    That annoying little detour aside, Hillenkoetter, much like John McCone some eleven years later, really had no idea of the rather lethal capabilities of the persons underneath him. But he got the picture pretty sharply. Major D.H. Berger’s study The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool is a useful insight into the politics of covert operations of this era. As are Col Fletcher Prouty’s commentaries. Hillenkotter appears to have wanted the CIA to have more oversight and coordinate its activities with other agencies; he also struggled with the idea of the CIA operating outside it’s mandate.


    Comrade Cabell, in the Cabal

    Let us return to a key figure in the early days of UFO investigations, the aforementioned General Charles Cabell who had been the inspiration behind the creation of Grudge in 1949 and Bluebook in 1951. The signing of the 1947 National Security Act by Harry Truman made the United States Air Force independent from the army. However, the longhorns in the OSS and the CIA, knew how to take advantage of the situation when the AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) was formed in 1948. Thereupon, one Charles Cabell stepped up to bat. In addition, he did not just bat, he hit it out into, well, space. Cabell, you can recall, had caused a great stir about the existence of UFOs, according to Ruppelt, by calling a high-level meeting with all his top staff about the issue (Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, pgs. 92-94). However, in 1951 he had moved on to the position of director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By 1953 at Dulles’ ascension to the top job in the agency seemingly out of the blue, Cabell became Allen Dulles’ DDCI, going on to become the longest serving deputy in the CIA’s history. Cabell, whom had become an associate of Dulles since WWII, and was intensely loyal to him, had absolutely no problem whatsoever with the CIA’s sticking the knife into the USAF over the very time wasting UFO investigations that he himself had called for. Cabell played Judas to perfection. and while most biographical sketches tout Cabell’s organizational ability, this seems to be only one aspect of the man. He was part of a complex disinformation campaign designed to spread confusion about UFOs throughout the US power structure itself, and if we recall Davidson’s comment about being shown the 1952 Tremonton, Utah film, well that was hardly an exclusive, it was actually hocked around the Pentagon and other places by the CIA.


    Keeping the Brakes On the Imagination

    While one could wax lyrical about the sinister brilliance of the Dulles gang’s machinations in befuddling the state with UFOs, one has to really put the brakes on here. There are a myriad number of legitimate security reasons for the rather elaborate deceptions they pulled in governmental and citizen circles. Furthermore, all intelligence agencies were doing something dirty in and around the area. The CIA quite simply was well organised, had the media onside, and had lots more cash. Pilkington explains much of this in his excellent, “Weapons of Mass Deception” article.

    For instance, here was much discussion of the US’s inability to see behind the Iron Curtain and from at least 1952 onwards the USAF had planned for a series of competing tenders to create a high tech super sonic surveillance aircraft. Cabell would have been well aware of these endeavours and aspirations at this time. He also would have been aware of Curtis LeMay, and of the SAC’s reluctance to cut the CIA in on any counter surveillance action. This would lessen in later years as Colonel Fletcher Prouty explains that a number of CIA men were able to infiltrate the higher ranks of military circles via Air Force General LeMay, with PSYOP king Ed Lansdale being the most prominent. Eventually, by 1955, the CIA, the USAF, and Lockheed Martin had agreed on a course of action from which one time Atomic Energy Commission land near Groom Lake, Nevada would be used and the infamous Area 51, not to mention the U2 spy plane, would emerge in 1955-1956. However much credit Richard Bissell takes for managing the U2 spy flights, the forgotten heroes of the interdepartmental dirty war from the late forties till the U2 flights began really seem to be General Charles Cabell’s quite brilliant ducking and diving in Pentagon circles. Allen Dulles, whom though initially reluctant about the flights, with help from his brother appears to have gotten Eisenhower onside and kept the U2 a civilian CIA operation.

    The Dulles cabal played the Wurlitzer and created false stories for their own benefit. This eventually blew back to influence official policy or inflame civic concern, or manipulate either side of a debate (often over nothing at all). This was the epitome of what a PSYOP was like, and what Mockingbird was all about. With Dulles’s allies, whom had been well entrenched in the media and military circles for decades, combined with the influence of his brother John Foster Dulles and their other Eastern Establishment buddies, he simply took advantage of the disorganization and the governments fixation on the ‘red menace’ to create an additional often benevolent Alien one. It’s ramifications have been felt ever since as explained in the important “Alien Overlords” article by Coppens which provides a vitally important back drop for everything I am going to cover in the essay, and from which I quote the following statement.

    UFO incidents, did not evolve around whether or not UFOs were alien spacecraft, or, whether or not, ET crashed in Roswell and the Air Force put his tiny, grey body on ice. The UFO psychological warfare was a display by a small group of people, who pretended to have a big secret; a big secret they pretended to have the power to shield from the public as a whole, and the President and his entourage in specific. It was a mechanism whereby even the President was led to believe there were men somewhere in his government whom he had to fear tremendously. The latter was true – but not because they were in possession of alien beings. In truth, it was — and is — nothing more than an exercise in power, in which a myth was created, then promoted, then apparently covered-up, even though each cover-up was a confirmation of the existence of the myth, so that we would believe. In truth, it was an empty secret.
  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Introduction



    First a Warning

    If someone would like to take a good no nonsense look at the history of the MJ-12 documents I advise reading this overview from Phil Coppens. Bar his comments concerning the ‘real MJ-12’ being behind the false documents, it provides another important backdrop for what you shall read herein.

    I’d like to point out before we go on that: no, CTKA is not turning into some Fortean organisation. I’m just going to speak a few home truths to some of the more imaginative types out there concerning something very sacred to ufologists. How, since 1947 the CIA rather than starving you from accessing them, have actually force fed you with it.

    Like the vast majority of JFK researchers, I am not an ufologist. I don’t pretend to speak for anyone in this area either. Nevertheless, I don’t believe a fake UFO invasion will be used to unite the world under a one-world government. That fake invasion (that the likes of Alex Jones and other conspiracy magnets bleat on about) and that one world corporation have already happened. Because if the mainstream media is prepared to present balanced discussions about UFOs and whether God exists, then surely a balanced discussion covering cosmically irrelevant issues like the potential for a planned murder of a head of state, and a few others aspiring to benefit all humanity, wouldn’t even be a trifle, or even an afterthought at that.

    I believe we went to the moon and I’m a believer in the Drake equation, not to mention an admirer of the likes of Greg Bishop, Mark Pilkington, Larry Hancock, Bill Kelly, Robert Hastings (despite his disagreements with Bishop) and (with particular regards to this essay) Phil Coppens. His work, though poorly referenced, does bear up to scrutiny and has been an excellent resource. This is why I’m puzzled that the terminally appalling Nexus Magazine never picked up on him, nor seemed to have learned anything from him, instead being mates with David Hatcher Childress. Thanks to the efforts of those above, I find myself in a comfortable place of 90 percent sceptic and 10 percent ‘open to anything’ as far as UFOs go… okay, maybe 12. I blame this on my discovery of Bob Hastings. Without Hastings’ work in outing the liars involved with the MJ-12 hoax some years ago this field would be all the poorer.

    I also admire the above individuals for not falling for the perpetrators of the JFK-MJ-12 documents and their work in outing them. It appears that the Dulles cabal in the CIA created a powerful myth with UFOs that they have since used as a diversion both internally and externally for myriad purposes, not just the obfuscation of secret weapons and aircraft, but have nurtured a powerful social phenomenon. Both the Kennedy assassination and UFOs are massive cultural happenings that pervade practically everything in Western Civilisation. However, for all of this, the Kennedy assassination and UFOs are and will always be two different areas of study, bar sharing some of the same progenitors of UFO disinformation. Sadly, many people have made the mistake of conjoining the two in some mega plot utilising the MJ-12/Torbitt Document/Gemstone Files inspired nonsense.

    The Layout of the Essay

    Students of the JFK case, like my self have largely ignored the comings and goings on of those inhabiting Zeta Reticuli, and dare I say most of the time, with very good reason. But with regards to this ongoing JFK-MJ-12 mess we really shouldn’t have. This foreword serves to provide something of a backdrop to the madness herein. It’ll give a series of brief and not so brief looks into the current explosion of JFK-MJ-12 hype, the leeches that have fed off it, the origins of said documents, and a clarification of where I stand on the issue of UFOs. More specifically, I shall adress this topic in the following sections:

    Preamble I and II seek to provide a backdrop to Scientist Leon Davidson, who made a number of alarming accusations against the CIA’s whipping up UFO mania. In turn, he created a powerful cultural phenomena–picked up by other agencies who know a good thing when they see it–that is to hide, subvert and confuse all manner of issues within and outside of the government. I would like to point out that I am well aware that there is much conjecture on the topics I bring up. I have tried as best I could to provide some antecedent or give a relevant example to any points made. I hope that the reader will appreciate my honesty in this regard as far too many individuals covering this ground mistake their own fantasies and musings for reality (I hope Richard Dolan and Joseph Farrell read this). All I aspire to is that in putting this out there to provide a template to work from or to debate.

    Part I – Majestic Documents & Marilyn deals with how the current craze has started and who has cashed in on it. But primarily it deals with the Wood’s family’s Majestic Documents group, their use of the bogus documentation surrounding Marilyn Monroe, and their attempts to link her death to Kennedy and UFOs and vice versa.

    Part II – Kennedy Killed Over UFOs (and Other Lies) deals with the recent assault on the senses concerning dubious evidence concerning Kennedy’s murder being enacted for sticking his nose in and around the UFO issue. In so doing, I rationally (a key word here) discuss what Kennedy’s interests in the phenomena likely was.

    Part III – Lunacy, Loyalty and Failed Lie Detectors returns to the Woods, focussing on denials of Tim Cooper’s wrongdoing in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.

    Part IV – Tweedle Dee Rob Meets Tweedle Dee Linda discusses Wood Sr. and his lack of knowledge concerning the basics of Cold War intelligence initiatives, with resident UFO/JFK ‘expert’ Linda Moulton Howe. What’s important about this section is that aside from giving the abdominal muscles a good work out from reading this clueless duo is that (depending on one’s prerogative) it also expands upon some issues pertaining to the MJ-12 stuff mentioned in parts II & III.

    (Parts V and VI of this essay embark from a more solid and factual basis established in Parts I to IV, becoming more speculative due to the dodgy nature of the subject and the people involved.)

    Part V – A Very Sad Attempt At Making a Rabbit Hole in effect discusses how people unprepared to confront the fact that just because someone is a ‘con’ and has a history of being one, doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligence agency material. In fact it often makes them prime candidates for being so and they are thus particularly effective in disinformation campaigns. There seems to be a total and utter failure in UFO circles to acknowledge that counter intelligence is in itself designed to mislead and misrepresent. Once one realizes that intelligence agencies like to ‘cut it both ways’ then looking over scraps from them loses its lustre. It’s not a rabbit hole after all, the hole doesn’t even exist, but well you fell into it anyhow. Nevertheless, it discusses the extremely dubious company the originator of the documents has kept. Not too, mention how one well-known figure in the MJ-12 drama has absurdly escaped a great deal of scrutiny.

    Part VI – Gus Russo, Phone Home! is effectively a continuation of Part V and discusses how outcasts from the JFK scene like Gus Russo have made homes for themselves in a field all to willing to be taken in by the ‘next bright thing’. In many ways it’s also the most important chapter of this study as it examines why the JFK community ignored the MJ-12 palaver, but more importantly it explores why ‘truth seekers’ and ‘crank busters’ like Russo and others avoided the JFK-MJ-12 issue altogether and gives an outline of one of the potential targets of this disinformation.

    Part VII – The Conclusion is a summary of all that has been covered, in the essay and essentially the bookend to this foreword.

  • Journalists and JFK, Part 3: The Real Dizinfo Agents at Dealey Plaza

    Journalists and JFK, Part 3: The Real Dizinfo Agents at Dealey Plaza


    Intro
    Part 1
    Part 2


    Besides their reporting on the assassination of President Kennedy, Hugh Aynesworth, Priscilla Johnson and Gordon McLendon share an interesting common trait in that they applied for jobs with the CIA and didn’t get them. But rather than become full fledged agents, it appears they were assigned a contact officer and served as CIA assets for decades, which is especially interesting in how their CIA associations affected their activities related to the assassination.

     

    HUGH AYNESWORTH

    As a local reporter for George Bannerman Dealey’s Dallas Morning News, Hugh Aynesworth was all over the place during the assassination weekend. He was at Dealey Plaza, the Tippit murder scene, the Texas Theater where the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, the house in Irving where Oswald’s wife lived, the rooming house where Oswald lived and the Dallas Police Department where he was killed.[1]

    It’s important to mention Aynesworth’s background and his presence at so many crime scenes because while it always seemed suspicious, and his CIA ties were confirmed with the release of CIA records by the JFK Act.

    As Jim DiEugenio notes, “many more pages of documents have been released showing how tightly bound Aynesworth was with the intelligence community. It has been demonstrated that Aynesworth was – at the minimum – working with the Dallas Police, Shaw’s defense team, and the FBI. He was also an informant to the White House, and had once applied for work with the CIA. As I have noted elsewhere, in the annals of this case, I can think of no reporter who had such extensive contacts with those trying to cover up the facts in the JFK case…”[2]

    Rex Bradford, the web master of Mary Ferrell’s extensive files on the case wrote, “Declassified documents show that Dallas reporter Hugh Aynesworth was in contact with the Dallas CIA office and had on at least one occasion ‘ offered his services to us.’ The files are chock full of Aynesworth informing to the FBI, particularly in regard to the Garrison investigation….Also of note is a message Aynesworth sent to…LBJ’s White House, in which Aynesworth wrote that ‘My interest in informing government officials of each step along the way is because of my intimate knowledge of what Jim Garrison is planning.’” [3]

    Most incredible however, is the CIA report written on October 10, 1963 when J. Walton Moore, the head of the Dallas CIA Domestic Contacts Division reported to the Chief of the Contact Division on “the possibility of Hugh Grant Aynesworth making a trip to Cuba.”[4]

    One month before the assassination J. Walton Moore – the same CIA agent who has been meeting regularly with the accused assassin’s best friend George DeMohrenschildt, is also meeting with Hugh Aynesworth about going to Cuba.

    Moore’s first mission with the OSS during Word War II was to China with Charles Ford, who later became the CIA agent assigned to work with RFK at JMWAVE. Using an Italian alias, Ford worked with John Rosselli, the mafia boss the CIA previously recruited to kill Castro. In his interview with the Church Committee, Ford said they were trying to overthrow, not kill Castro, but those who have it in for RFK use Ford as a lynchpin to crucify Bobby, as we have seen with Sy Hersh in the Dark Side of Camelot, Evan Thomas in Robert Kennedy – His Life , and David Kaiser in The Road to Dallas , and Max Holland. But with the release of Ford’s records by the JFK Act, they have all gone silent. [5]

    However there could be an association between Hugh Aynesworth, J. Walton Moore, Charles Ford and David Atlee Phillips, especially in regards to the timing of Moore’s memo and Phllips’ travels, not just as it relates to Cuba, but to what happened at Dealey Plaza. This is especially so since J. Walton Moore – the CIA contact agent to the accused assassin’s best friend, served in the same capacity with Hugh Aynesworth about a trip to Cuba a month before the assassination. And the day before Aynesworth met with Moore, David Phillips was at JMWAVE, the CIA’s Miami, Florida base, where anti-Castro operations were planned and carried out.[6]

    How did these damning records get released? And if this was released, what’s in the thousands of documents that are totally redacted or are still partially withheld for reasons of national security? Many of these withheld records include many pages of the files of Hugh Aynesworth, Priscilla Johnson and Gordon McLendon.

    As David Talbot points out, “…some of these journalists did the CIA’s bidding: see, for instance, a January 25, 1968 CIA memo on Hugh Aynesworth, who covered the JFK assassination, first for the Dallas Morning News and then Newsweek . Aynesworth – who at one time, according to the memo, ‘expressed some interest…in possible employment with the Agency’ – was considered by the CIA to be a solid ‘Warren Commission man on the assassination.’”[7]

    And indeed he was. He eagerly did the agencies bidding to squash the Garrison investigation, and he doesn’t consider the Kennedy assassination among the unsolved homicides in his 1994 book Murders Among Us: Unsolved Homicides, Mysterious Deaths and Killers at Large .[8] But his article, “The Strangest Story I Ever Covered,” details how he came to expose the head of the local crime commission was himself a criminal who had crafted a new identity to hide his past. So Aynesworth is capable of uncovering conspiracies when he wants to. If he applied the same investigative skills to the homicide at Dealey Plaza, perhaps he would have helped uncover the truth instead of promoting the cover story and blaming the murder on the patsy.[9]

    Joseph Goulden was one of Hugh Aynesworth’s colleagues who also covered the events in Dallas and also pushed the lone-nut myth. When rumors began to circulate that Oswald was an FBI informant, and was even assigned an informant number, Aynesworth, along with Houston reporter Lonnie Hudkins and Goulden, floated the story that they had made up an informant number to make it seem real. The Warren Commission held a closed door executive session to discuss it, and former CIA director Allen Dulles explained that even if Oswald was an informant, there would be no record of it, though there was a record of Jack Ruby being such an FBI informant.[10]

    Just as there was a lot of friction between the FBI and the Dallas Police, there was also friction between the FBI and the Secret Service and the FBI and the CIA. So Goulden’s story actually took some of the heat off the CIA, especially in regards to Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union and his trip to Mexico City, both of which called unwanted attention to CIA operations they wanted to keep secret.

    It was also a diversion that appeared to dissipate when Aynesworth and Goulden acknowledged the story was bogus. So the idea of Oswald as intelligence operative went south and the public image now became one of the deranged loser, and lone nut assassin.

    Today, both Aynesworth and Goulden write for the Washington Times newspaper, founded by Sun Myung Moon and owned by the Unification Church, who some suspect acts as a front for the CIA.[11]

    When Priscilla Johnson McMillan testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), she said that in the course of researching Marina’s story, she discovered who actually obtained and leaked Oswald’s “Historic Diary” to the Dallas Morning News and Life magazine.[12]

    Who was it? Hugh Aynesworth.

     

    PRISCILLA JOHNSON MCMILLAN

    mcmillanAt a fairly young age, Priscilla Johnson developed an interest in all things Russian. After attending Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, she studied Russian at Middlebury School, and worked for John F. Kennedy before embarking on a career as a journalist and correspondent based in the Soviet Union.[13]

    According to the official records, Johnson applied for employment with CIA in 1952.

    Thanks to the JFK Act, we now know what that her CIA Security File (ID #71589) reads, “During the course of the current investigation, thirteen-developed informants were contacted. She is generally described as stable, intelligent, well-informed, mature, of excellent character, morals, and reputation, and a loyal American citizen. Subject is further described as liberal, internationally minded and overly polite to such a point that it was thought that she was putting it on…”[14]

    Johnson said she withdrew the CIA job application in January 1953, but then was officially denied a security clearance in March 1953. The denial was said to be based on her attendance at Middlebury, an institution listed among those officially deemed subversive by the government, and her participation with the World Federalists, who advocated support for the United Nations and the establishment of a world wide government. From the documentary records it is apparent that she was a member of the World Federalists while at student at Bryn Mawr, in Philadelphia, and was affiliated with the Pennsylvania state World Federalists and the national and international World Federalists, founded by her Locust Valley, New York neighbor Cord Meyer.[15]

    Although Priscilla Johnson was never officially asked if she knew Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, they were both active in the World Federalists in Philadelphia, in the same city at the same time. It makes one wonder if, from their mutual association with the World Federalist in Philadelphia, if Priscilla Johnson knew Michael Paine’s mother at such an early date in the proceedings?[16]

    According to CIA files Johnson was rejected because some of her associates would require more investigation. The document was signed by  Cord Meyer, who was then chief of CIA Investigations and Operational Support, and incredibly enough, the founder of the World Federalists, one of the subversive organizations that the CIA’s Office of Security considered suspicious.[17]

    On 17th March, 1953, W. A. Osborne, sent a memo to Sheffield Edwards, head of CIA security, saying that after checking out Johnson’s associates he “recommended approval.” However, on 23rd March he sent another memo saying that “in light of her activities in the United World Federalists” he now “recommended that she be disapproved”.[18]

    That Priscilla would be disqualified from joining the CIA because of her association with the World Federalists is hard to believe since that organization was founded by her friend and former neighbor Cord Meyer, who was one of Allen Dulles’ top deputies at the CIA. He later controlled the International Organizations Division of the CIA that included the World Federalists.

    When Priscilla Johnson was questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and was asked if she worked for the CIA, she denied even knowing anyone in the CIA. She failed to mention her friend and neighbor Cord Meyer, Dulles’ deputy and head of the CIA’s International Organizations Division, who signed her security check.[19]

    As Priscilla Johnson herself admitted when questioned by the HSCA, there is one inherent difference between an independent journalist and a covert intelligence agent posing as one: you can’t depend on the agent to tell the truth or give an accurate appraisal of the situation because of their hidden allegiances.

    Priscilla Johnson told the congressional investigators that she withdrew her application for employment with the CIA before they determined that she wouldn’t pass muster because of her affiliations with the subversive World Federalists.

    They still considered her a valuable asset however, as the records reflect she was later given a conditional clearance in 1956 and continued meeting with CIA officials throughout her career. From the records released under the JFK Act, it is apparent she maintained contact with a CIA liaison officer for years, and was passed off from one contact officer to another.[20]

    Instead of officially working for the CIA however, Priscilla Johnson was hired by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), the organization she was officially working for in Moscow when she interviewed the American ex-marine defector, Lee Harvey Oswald.

    The North American Newspaper Alliance doesn’t exist today as a corporate entity, but over the years NANA was owned by American and British intelligence officers and employed correspondents that have repeatedly become entangled in clandestine affairs.

    Priscilla Johnson didn’t have to work for the CIA if she worked for NANA, an allied agency whose intelligence associations were cemented by Ernest Cuneo, Ivar Bryce and Ian Fleming. In his official biography The Life of Ian Fleming, John Pearson relates “During the next few years Bryce (and Cuneo)…. were to play their part in the story of James Bond and the life of his creator…Bryce had bought himself an oil well in Texas which had just started to produce, and out of the proceeds he had decided to acquire a controlling interest in the North American Newspaper Alliance. NANA was one of the big American agencies specializing in syndicating feature articles, but by the time Bryce bought it its prestige was not what it had been. He and his associate, Ernest Cuneo, were planning to restore NANA to its former glory, and… Fleming was drawn into the project.”[21]

    Cuneo was a former aid to both New York Mayor LaGuardia and President Franklin Roosevelt, served as an OSS officer during WWII, and as Pearson puts it, was “one of the group around General Donovan and William Stephenson who formed the basis of close U.S. and British cooperation during World War II and the Cold War that followed. Cuneo served as official wartime liaison between British Intelligence, the OSS and the FBI.”[22]

    According to Pearson, the purchase of NANA was Cuneo’s idea. “For Bryce it was never more than a rich man’s hobby. Cuneo was more interested, and Fleming was invited to help. More than this, he was asked to take charge of the European end of the operation, with the resounding title of European vice-president.” Fleming recognized the attributes of a good reporter were the same as those of a good spy.

    Sidney Goldberg, who worked for Fleming at NANA, agreed that there was a thin line between Fleming’s responsibilities as an editor and his espionage operations. NANA, notes Goldberg, had a reputation for hiring beautiful, young women as NANA correspondents – such as JFK’s World War II paramour Inga Arvad, Cord Meyer’s wife Mary Pinchot Meyer, Latin American correspondent Virginia Prewett and Priscilla Johnson.[23] As a foreign correspondent working for NANA in Moscow, Priscilla Johnson was one of the first American reporters to interview Lee Harvey Oswald. In what was later characterized as “an ironic twist of fate,” she later obtained the exclusive rights to the story of Oswald’s wife after the assassination.

    She learned about the young ex-Marine defector from John McVickar, a US embassy assistant who concluded that Oswald “…was following a pattern of behavior in which he had been tutored by [a] person or persons unknown…, it seemed to me that there was a possibility that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps tour who had guided him and encouraged him in his actions.”[24]

    After meeting with Oswald in a Moscow hotel room, Johnson filed her story to NANA the next day. But most of it wouldn’t be published until after the assassination. In her two year stay in Moscow, Priscilla Johnson filed over 100 reports to NANA, although not all of them were published. According to Goldberg, “…The primary reason we chose not to publish Priscilla’s Oswald story in 1959 was because it was a marginal operation, picking up and distributing free-lance stories here and there…I suspect that by their very nature, these outfits could have been easy vehicles for providing journalist ‘cover’ to CIA operatives, although I do not know this to be a fact.”[25]

    John Newman, who interviewed Priscilla Johnson for his book, Oswald and the CIA, noted in a footnote: “Years later, rumors would surface that NANA was associated with the CIA…NANA was run by Ernie Cuneo and Priscilla’s editor was Sidney Goldberg. Priscilla had no inkling of any NANA-CIA relationship at the time. Today she has heard the rumors.”[26]

    In more recent times, Sidney’s wife Lucianne Goldberg, a New York literary agent and former NANA correspondent herself, advised Linda Tripp to secretly and illegally tape record Monica Lewinsky about her affairs with President Clinton.[27]

    Priscilla Johnson also revealed to Newman that she was a friend and neighbor of Cord Meyer, a CIA officer who “was waiting for her to grow up,” and after she grew up, she knew him through her application for a job with the CIA and their mutual association with the World Federalists.[28]

    According to her HSCA testimony, upon her return to the United States from Moscow in November 1962, Priscilla Johnson was debriefed “for the first time” by an agent of the CIA at the Brattle Inn in Cambridge, Massachusetts. On 11th December, 1962, a CIA memo (declassified in August, 1993) reported: “I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want. It will require a little more contact and discussion, but I think she could come around… Basically, if approached with sympathy in the cause she considers most vital, I believe she would be interested in helping us in many ways. It would be important to avoid making her think that she was being used as a propaganda tool and expected to write what she is told.”[29]

    Another CIA document dated 5th February, 1964, reports on an 11 hour meeting with Johnson, the main objective was to debrief her “on her flaps with the Soviets when she was in the USSR, notably at the time of her last exit.” She was also asked if she “would be interested in writing articles for Soviet publications.” Gary Coit, the CIA officer who conducted the interview reported that “no effort was made to attempt to force the issue of a debriefing on her contacts”. However Coit told her he would “probably be back to see her from time to time to see what she knows about specific persons whose names might come up, and she at least nodded assent to this.”[30]

    Apparently she did not have to be debriefed after interviewing Oswald in Moscow because everything they needed to know was contained in her November, 16, 1959 report to NANA, including the parts not published in the newspapers. Besides Priscilla Johnson, one of the CIA’s more prolific media assets was NANA correspondent Virginia Prewett, who covered Cuban and Latin American affairs during the height of the CIA’s war against Castro.

    After Antonio Veciana told Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi that his CIA control officer was “Maurice Bishop,” whom he had once seen with Oswald in Dallas, another journalist, Anthony Summers, located Vecina’s former secretary. This new witness recalled that “Bishop” was also associated with an American journalist named “Prewett.” Summers located Virginia Prewett in Washington and arranged to meet her with a Washington Post reporter from England, David Leigh. As a NANA correspondent Virginia Prewett recalled writing about Alpha 66 and anti-Castro operations in the Sixties, and knew both Veciana and “Mr Bishop.” When asked about them she said, “You had to move around people like that.” Indeed.[31]

    NANA owner Ernest Cuneo, NANA correspondent Virginia Prewett and Life magazine’s Clare Booth Luce were among the founders of the Citizens Committee to Free Cuba (CCFC), one of the anti-Castro groups backed by the CIA whose operations entwined with the events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy. Top heavy with media types proficient in psychological warfare, the CCFC group was just one arm of the CIA’s propaganda network that conducted operations related to the assassination of President Kennedy.[32]

    While Hugh Aynesworth, Priscilla Johnson McMcillan and those publishers, editors and writers at Scrips-Howard New Service (SHNS) and Life were part of the Dealey Plaza clean-up crew, radio mogul Gordon McClendon was closer to the action, especially in regards to the murder of Oswald, the designated Patsy.

     

    GORDON MCLENDON

    JFKmcLendonIn 1967 former CIA director Allen Dulles wrote a letter to a CBS executive suggesting an idea for a television program, saying that, “something should be done in the field of television with regards to intelligence which would be somewhat comparable to what the FBI is now doing effectively in that field…I feel there is now in the public domain as the result of a series of publications, book articles, and newspaper reports relating to various phases of intelligence which could furnish the background material which might be used without a formal sponsor.” [33]

    Shortly thereafter, two Texas men – former CIA officer David Phillips and Dallas broadcast millionaire Gordon McLendon began planning the production of a television series based on the exploits of CIA agents.  Phillips initiated the project, pitching it to CBS executive producer Larry Thompson, who developed a pilot program with Phillips and Don Penny, Gerald Ford’s former speech writer. Thompson was quoted as saying, “Ideally, we’d like to show that people in the CIA are American citizens with families and a job to do.”

    One possible true-to-life script they could have used is how all thee men – Allen Dulles, David Phillips and Gordon McLendon became entwined in the events surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy.

    After being forced out as head of the CIA by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs, Allen Dulles served on the Warren Commission. He didn’t bother informing the other members of the commission that the CIA plotted to kill Fidel Castro. Although the Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in murdering the President, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and other independent investigations have concluded there is evidence of conspiracy in the assassination of the President, a conspiracy with distinct Cuban connections.

    Both Gordon McLendon and David Phillips, the men behind the CBS-CIA TV show, were questioned by HSCA investigators. McLendon denied knowing Jack Ruby very well. Even though it had already been established that Ruby listed McLendon as one of his six closest friends, patronized his radio stations, repeatedly made phone calls to McLendon’s home, and visited his radio station studio on the weekend of the assassination.[34]

    David Phillips, figured prominently in both the Church Committee and House Select committee probes. Phillips worked at the Mexico City CIA station and was personally responsible for monitoring the Cuban embassy when Oswald was said to be there a few months before the assassination. Phillips is also suspected of being the mysterious “Maurice Bishop,” a clandestine case officer who directed the activities of a network of anti-Castro Cubans led by Antonion Veciana Blanch of Alpha 66. Veciana said “Bishop” met with Oswald in Dallas shortly before Oswald went to Mexico City. Immediately after the assassination, Gordon McLendon avoided questioning by going to Mexico himself.[35]

    Born in Paris, Texas, McLendon covered sports events in school, graduated from Kemper Military Academy, was a Skull and Boner at Yale and served as an intelligence officer in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II. In 1943 he married Gay Noe, daughter of the former governor of Louisiana. McLendon left Harvard Law School to take over interest in a Texas radio station he purchased with his father.[36]

    Nicknamed “The Old Scotsman,” McClendon founded the Liberty Radio Network and broadcast major league baseball games over 400 affiliated stations. With Clint Murchison, he broadcast Radio Nord, a pirate radio station off Sweden. In 1947 McLendon founded KLIF (The Mighty 1190) in Oak Cliff, and introduced the Top 40 format that became standard AM radio programming in the 1950s. He is also credited with establishing the first mobile news units in American radio, the first jingles, traffic reports, all news and the “easy listening’ format.

    McClendon also aired a politically oriented radio show financed by H. L. Hunt called “Life-Line,” which aired conservative anti-communist programs that affected the opinions of many people, including Jack Ruby.[37]

    Jack Ruby knew McLendon, called his unlisted home phone number on the day of the assassination, visited the KLIF studios, and arranged interviews with Dallas officials for KLIF reporters from the Dallas Police Department. Ruby appeared to pose as a reporter at the Dallas jail, even though most of the Dallas cops knew him as a nightclub owner.[38]

    The day after the assassination Ruby bought dozens of sandwiches from a deli and delivered some of them to KLIF studios and the rest to the Dallas police, using the sandwiches as an excuse to get into the building and stalk Oswald. After a number of tries, Ruby finally did get close enough to kill Oswald, leaving his dog and a pile of “Life-Line” radio show scripts in his car. The scripts found in his car were on the subject of heroism, and written by Warren H. Carroll, a former CIA propaganda analyst.[39]

    McClendon was also the first person Ruby asked to see in prison. Ruby told McClendon that he thought his jailers were trying to poison him, and later told the Warren Commission that McLendon was his “kind of intellectual.”[40]

    From among the government records released under the JFK Act, we learn that like Hugh Aynesworth and Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Gordon McClendon was also considered for work with the CIA. But like the others, he too was denied a security clearance.

    While it isn’t clear whether the millionaire media mogul actually applied for a job with the CIA, as Aynesworth and Johnson both did, someone at the agency requested he receive a clearance so he could be used as an agent, asset or source. They went by the books, not only to get a security clearance for him, but to “run a trace,” so as not to violate tradecraft, making sure that he wasn’t already being used by another agent or agency. As with Aynesworth and Johnson, many of McLendon’s records are sill classified, nearly fifty years after the assassination.[41]

    One thing that is clear however, when David Phillips resigned from the CIA in the mid-70s, he did so to try to counter the negative publicity about the CIA being generated by the Congressional investigations by forming the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO). He did this with his old friend Gordon McLendon.

    In a telephone interview shortly before he died Phillips denied being the mysterious “Maurice Bishop” or knowing Oswald. But he said he knew Gordon McLendon in Washington D.C. during World War II, and then lost track of him and didn’t hook up with him again until he left the CIA.[42] When they reunited, they decided to try to promote the CIA with the suggested TV program, and in 1977 formed the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO).

    Just as Ian Fleming used Ernest Cuneo as a character in one of his spy novels, E. Howard Hunt and David Phillips also used people they knew in their spy fiction. Hunt claimed he didn’t know Frank Sturgis before the Watergate operation, but he had used his name and profile as a Cuban soldier-of-fortune in Bimini Runa 1949 pulp paperback novel.[43] Then Phillips created the fictional character of “Mac McLendon” as the chief protagonist in his novel The Carlos Contract, portraying him as a refined intelligence operative called out of retirement to catch a notorious terrorist.[44]

    As the former chief propagandist for the Guatemala coup of 1954 and also the Bay of Pigs, Phillips himself was sent off into retirement in order to orchestrate the CIA’s public relations campaign in the wake of a series of Congressional investigations. Both the Senate Church Committee and the Pike Committee of the House of Representatives, exposed CIA scandals that fueled the fire that created the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

    Gaeton Fonzi was an investigator with the Schweiker/Hart Sub-Committee of the Church Committee when he first interviewed Antonio Veciana. The anti-Castro Cuban and leader of the Alpha 66 terrorists group told Fonzi about his CIA handler, the mysterious “Maurice Bishop,” who he saw with Oswald in Dallas shortly before Oswald went to Mexico.[45]

    Fonzi was later hired by the HSCA and suspected that David Atlee Phillips was “Marucie Bishop.” To confirm or refute his suspicion, Fonzi arranged for Veciana to meet Phillips at a conference of Phillps’ Association of Former Intelligence Officers in Washington DC. The last time Veciana met “Mr. Bishop,” he was handed a suitcase full of cash, ostensibly his salary accumulated over the years for his work as one of Bishop’s primary agents.[46] At the time Phillips was head of the entire Western Hemisphere Division of the CIA, and was being considered to head the agency as director.

    When Fonzi introduced them, Veciana studied Phillips carefully, while everyone else listened the AFIO keynote speaker, our old friend from Life, Clare Booth Luce.

    But Veciana was reluctant to positively identify Phillips as “Bishop,” because according to Fonzi, Veciana wanted to resume his association with “Bishop” and his anti-Castro activities.

    Fonzi later recounted what happened when he was asked in an interview,

    “How did you reconcile, in your own mind, when you had the confrontation at that luncheon, with Veciana meeting face to face with David Atlee Phillip, that Veciana basically could not identify Phillips as Maurice Bishop?”

    Fonzi replied, “WOULD NOT identify him….At the time I was terribly confused, because I sat there for quite a long period of time watching him and watching Phillips shaking, literally shaking, avoiding Veciana’s eyes while Veciana was staring at him from across the table. Phillips was re-lighting cigarettes, and then the encounter in the hallway, where he was a terribly shaken man, so much so to the point that when we asked him if he didn’t remember Veciana’s name, he said ‘no.’ In fact, he asked Veciana again, ‘What did you say your name was?’”

    “Veciana, said, ‘You don’t know me?’”

    “And he said, ‘No.’”

    Later in his testimony before the committee, Phillips had to explain how he, as the head of the CIA’s Cuban operations did not know the leader of the largest anti-Castro organization.
    As Fonzi explained,

    “It was an interesting experience, and at the end of it, walking out of it, I was confused, and I asked Veciana,

    ‘Isn’t he Bishop?’”

    “And Veciana didn’t answer right away, didn’t say ‘no,’ instead, he first said,

    ‘He knows.’”

    “I remember walking back to the car, during this discussion, repeating, “He knows?  What do you mean, ‘He knows’?”

    “’He knows’.”

    “And I said, ‘He knows WHAT’?”

    “I asked, ‘You mean he knows who Bishop is’?”

    “And he said, ‘Yeah’.”

    “So it was a very interesting experience, and at the time I was confused, until I figured it out.”

    Fonzi figured out that Phillips really was “Bishop,” and thought he was given the run around by Clare Booth Luce, Tony Veciana and David Atlee Phillips, as they all had their own interests at stake, and they certainly weren’t interested in figuring out what really happened at Dealey Plaza.

    Then at a roundtable discussion between Cuban intelligence officers and JFK researchers, at one point in the proceedings, it is noted that: “….We got some information before the very first national conference of the Coalition of Political Assassinations (COPA) about a luncheon meeting between top former CIA officials …Ted Shackley and William Colby…Gus Russo was apparently there and he told some people that they had a concern about what was going to be presented in our conference and one of their main concerns, they said, was with how we were going to deal with their friend David Atlee Phillips…Joe Goulden was also present at that meeting and he was exceptionally close to Phillips. And, in fact, is executor of David Phillips’ estate. And his history with Phillips goes way back, they are both from Texas and I believe Goulden grew up in the same town that David Phillips’ father was from – Marshall, Texas. Anyway, it was a long time relationship between Goulden and Phillips. And Goulden has been extremely concerned about Phillips’ legacy…”

    Most of those who were involved in these affairs are now dead, but Joe Goulden today is the custodian of the official papers of David Phillips. [47] And you can still read Goulden’s articles in the Washington Times and analysis in The Intelligencer – the Journal of US Intelligence Studies, the official publication of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.[48]


    NOTES

    HUGH AYNESWORTH

    [2] DiEugenio, James. “Hugh Aynesworth Never Quits”. Also See: James DiEugenio “These are Your Witnesses?”

    [3] Bradford, Rex. On Aynesworth. Bradford, Rex. Kennedy’s Ghost. http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Essay_-_Kennedys_Ghost – fn_2

    [4] Moore, J. Walton. Aynesworth to Cuba. Offers Services to CIA: On October 10, 1963 J. Walton Moore wrote to the Chief, (Domestic) Contact Division on the possibility of Hugh Grant Aynesworth Making Trip To Cuba. http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=594957

    [5] 5) Moore, J. Walton and Charles Ford, Ford Report Sept. 28, 1962 http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=55224&relPageId=43; Ford & Bobby, – Sy Hersch in the Darkside of Camelot, Evan Thomas Robert Kennedy – His Life (p. 178), and David Kaiser in The Road to Dallas notes (47-48 p.446). Max Holland writes about “The Paper Trail” in his Washington Decoded blog: http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/files/conspiracy_theories_keep_coming_but_under_scrutiny_the_plot_gets_thinner.pdf

    [6] 6) Scott, PD. – Phillips at JMWAVE. Oct. 63. PDS Deep Politics III – http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm – _ftn196 From about October 1 to October 9 Phillips made a quick trip, authorized by the Special Affairs Staff, to Washington and then Miami.[193]  On October 1 the Mexico City CIA station also sent a cable directing that a diplomatic pouch, sent on October 1 to Washington, should be held in the registry until picked up by “Michael C. Choaden” (i.e. Phillips) presently TDY (temporary duty) HQS.”[194][195]  The  date October 1 catches our eye, in as much as it is the date of the alleged Oswald-Kostikov intercept. One is also struck by Phillips’ presence in the Miami JMWAVE station from October 7-9. There are reports that Rosselli, who had good standing in the JMWAVE station, met on two occasions in Miami in early October with Jack Ruby.[196]

    [7] Talbot, David. Re; Aynesworth. Talbot, David Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years . (P. 445 Notes: 390) …Talbot Note: NARA record number 104-10170-10230. Offers Services to CIA: http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=594957

    [8] Aynesworth, Hugh. Murders Among Us: Unsolved Homicides, Mysterious Deaths and Killers at Large (signet & Onyx True Crime, 1994 w/Stephen Michaud) http://www.fishpond.com.au/Books/Murderers-Among-Us-Stephen-G-Michaud-Hugh-Aynesworth/9780451170576

    [9] Aynesworth, Hugh. “Strangest Story I Ever Covered”. http://www.dmagazine.com/Home/1983/08/01/The_Strangest_STORY_1_Ever_Covered.aspx

    [10] Meagher, Sylvia.  Accessories After the Fact  (p. 348) Oswald FBI Informant. Also see Spook Journalist Goulden: http://www.dcdave.com/article1/081198.html

    [11] Aynesworth and Goulden at Washington Times .

    [12] Priscilla Johnson and Oswald’s Diary. PJM on Aynesworth got it from John Thorne, Esq. and Martin. http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=95330&relPageId=27

    PRISCILLA JOHNSON MCMILLAN

    [13] PJM Background Parents: Stuart H. Johnson – Brooklyn 7/16/92 Locust Valley, NY. Eunice Clapp – Germantown 5/27/96

    http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=103934&relPageId=69/   

    • CIA Security File on Priscilla Johnson MacMillan – p. 44 #71589

    http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=103934&relPageId=44

    [14] Applied for employment with CIA in 1952 and withdrew application in Jan. 53. Denied security clearance in March 53

    http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=95330&relPageId=28

    [15] Priscilla Johnson in World Federalist: Bryn Mawr College 1950, Member of the National Chapter of the World Federalist – College Chapter and Penn State Chapter

    http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=103934&relPageId=54 Also see: As a student she was a member of the United World Federalists, an organization run by Cord Meyer.” http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjohnsonPR.htm

    [16] Ruth Forbes Paine Young in World Federalists. “Believing every citizen who was able should act to help prevent further catastrophic war, she joined the World Federalists…” http://www.arthuryoung.com/ruth.html.

    Also See: Carol Hewett, Esq: http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/13th_Issue/copa_paines.html

    [17] Cord Meyer doc re: PJM security clearance. According to CIA  files she was rejected because some of her associates would require more investigation. The document was signed by Cord Meyer who was now chief of CIA Investigations and Operational Support. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjohnsonPR.htm

    [18] Osborne doc re: PJM On 17th March, 1953, W. A. Osborne, sent a memo to Sheffield Edwards, head of CIA security, that after checking out Johnson’s associates he “recommended approval.” However, on 23rd March he sent another memo saying that “in light of her activities in the United World Federalists” he now “recommended that she be disapproved”. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKjohnsonPR.htm

    [20] 1956 Granted Clearance “In 1956 she was granted by the Office of Security an Ad Hoc Clearance through the status of “Confidential” provided that caution was exercised.” – Jim DiEugenio “Priscilla Johnson McMillan … She can be encouraged to write what the CIA want”.

    [21] Pearson, John. Ian Fleming – The Authorized Biography (McGraw Hill, 1966 ) Re: NANA and Fleming, Cuneo and Bryce. http://www.ianfleming.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=164

    Also see: “The Cuneo Era: by the early 1950’s the syndicate…was purchased by a small group of investors led by Ernest Cuneo, formerly associated with British Security Coordination and the OSS and Ivar Bryce. They gave the job of European Vice President to the writer and their mutial friend Ian Fleming…Because of Cuneo’s association with former members of American and British intelligence,…critics have suggested that NANA under his tenure was a front for espionage…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Newspaper_Alliance

    [22] Stevenson, William. Man Called Intrepid . Re: William Stephenson (INTREPID)

    Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stephenson

    [23] Goldberg, Sidney – Phone conversation with William Kelly.

    Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucianne_Goldberg

    [25] Goldberg, Sidney – Phone conversation w/ William Kelly
    Also see: EIR, Vol. 25, #44, Nov. 6, 1998
    https://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1998/eirv25n44-19981106/eirv25n44-19981106_063-new_light_on_transatlantic_assas.pdf

    [26] Newman, John. Oswald & the CIA (p. 540) Re: No inkling NANA & CIA. Priscilla McMillan, interview with  John Newman, July 15, 1994. 5. See NARA JFK files, . “…Priscilla had no inkling of any   NANA CIA  relationship at the time. ”

    [27] Lucianne Goldberg and Linda Tripp – Literary Agent Was Behind Secret Tapes”. Washington Post, Jan. 24, 1998, by David Steitfeld and Howard Kurtz http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/story012498.htm
    Also see: http://www.eurekaencyclopedia.com/index.php/Category:Lewinsky_Affair

    [28] Newman, John. Oswald and the CIA: the documented truth about the unknown relationship between the US government and the alleged assassin of JFK (Skyhorse Pub., 2008 p. 65) Johnson said, Cord Meyer was “waiting for me to grow up.”
    http://books.google.com/books?id=tfJBrSFNUNkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0 – v=onepage&q&f=false

    [29] Whitmey, Peter R. “Priscilla Johnson McMillan and the CIA”. Re: CIA debriefing in Mass. http://www.clintbradford.com/pjm-cia.htm

    [30] CIA Coit memo. See: Peter Whitmey on Priscilla and Lee – http://www.jfk-info.com/pjm-4.htm “Reference was made to a reporter/translator named Victor Louis associated with both McGraw-Hill and NANA, whom Priscilla felt had a ‘…lousy reputation in Moscow;’ she attempted unsuccessfully to get NANA to ‘drop Louis.’ She also encouraged NANA to hire ‘…Ruth Danilov, the wife of another correspondent’ (possibly Victor Danilov, author of Rural Russia: Under the New Regime (Univ. of Indiana Press, 1988), but more likely Nicholas Daniloff, a Newsweek correspondent who wrote Two Lives: One Russia (Avon Publishing, 1990) – Coit might have misspelled Ruth’s last name.) However, the Soviets refused to accredit her. Priscilla pointed out that NANA subsequently hired Dick Steiger who was immediately accredited, due to his ‘left wing past.’ Brief reference was also made to Frieda Lurye, a liberal Russian who had spoken at Harvard, as well as Yelena Romanova,…”http://www.clintbradford.com/pjm-cia.htm

    [31] Summers, Anthony. Conspiracy (1980, Afterword) Virginia Prewett – See “Afterword: the search for “Maurice Bishop.” From Lobster http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/online/issue10/lob10-03.htm #10 (Jan, 1986) and reprinted here: http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/S Disk/Summers Anthony/Item 47.pdf

    Note: British reporter David Leigh accompanied Summers when he interviewed Prewett and wrote an article for the Washington Post that was never published.

    [32] Citizens Committee to Free Cuba: http://cuban-exile.com/doc_051-075/doc0052.html

    GORDON MCLENDON

    [33] CBS TV program on CIA Proposes Weekly TV Show on CIA like FBI show.

    http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=103959&relPageId=4 Also note: Washington Post. Wed. March 22, 1978 p. A12 by Bill Richards

    [35] Veciana & Bishop http://www.jfk-online.com/daphscavec.html

    McLeondon in Mexico: Scott, Peter Dale. 20 WH 39 (Ruby). Scott notes: The information about the McLendon family trip I owe to Mary Ferrell, a close friend of some of McLendon’s children. http://www.history-matters.com/pds/DP3_Overview.htm – _ftn196

    [36] McClendon Background: http://gordon-mclendon.co.tv/

    [37] McClendon & Hunt, Gordon McClendon Gave Ruby “free plugs” http://users.aristotle.net/~mstandridge/mclyndn.htm

    [38] Ruby and McLendon “Ruby called McLendon’s home the night of the assassination. (5 H 188). Ruby’s WC Testimony:
    http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/issues_and_evidence/jack_ruby/Ruby_WCR_testimony_1.html

    [39] Ruby and KLIF – Texas Monthly April 81; Texas Monthly Nov. 1975 “Who Was Jack Ruby?” Cartwright, Gary, http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=122829201077790, Warren Carroll and CIA and Lifeline. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_H._Carroll Also see: http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2915nghbrs_kttns.html and Mae Brussell http://www.think-aboutit.com/conspiracy/INSIDETHEHEARSTKIDNAPPING.htm

    [42] Phillips’ phone interview with Bill Kelly.

    [43] Hunt, E. Howard, Bimini Run

    [44] Phillips, David, A. The Carlos Contract .

    [45] Fonzi & Bishop: Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, (p. 320) http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_Last_Investigation

    [46] Veciana & Bishop – The HSCA on – www.jfk-online.com/daphsavec.html Also: Steve Bochan interviews Gaeton Fonzi http://cuban-exile.com/doc_001-025/doc0007.html

    [47] Goulden & Phillips papers. “was given by Joseph C.   Goulden  in 2003. Processing History: The  papers  of   David Atlee Phillips  were arranged and described in 1995. http://frontiers.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/uploaded_pdf/ead_pdf_batch_15_September_2009/ms009050.pdf

    [48] Goulden & Intelligencer – Journal of U.S. Intelligence Studies http://www.afio.com/publications/INTL_TableOfContents.pdf

    Other books and articles by Goulden: http://intellit.muskingum.edu/alpha_folder/g_folder/goulden.html

  • Journalists and JFK, Part 2: The Real Dizinfo Agents at Dealey Plaza


    Intro
    Part 1
    Part 3


    Henry and Clare Booth Luce, C. D. Jackson & Issac Don Levine – That’s LIFE

    In the immediate aftermath of the assassination of President Kennedy a decision was made at the highest levels of government; that, even though the evidence indicating the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting at the behest of Cuba was not true, it could be used to strong arm reluctant leaders in the legislative and judicial branches of government to do what the new president wanted.

    Earl Warren later explained in an oral history interview for the LBJ Library, that after he was asked to head the commission, “I told them I thought I shouldn’t do it, and I made some suggestions to them as to people whom they might get who would fill the purpose. And I thought that was the end of it. And then in about an hour I got a phone call from the White House and was asked if I could come up and see the President. And I said, ‘certainly,’ so I went up there. And the President told me that he was greatly disturbed by the rumors that were going around the world about a conspiracy and so forth, and that he thought that it might because it involved both Khrushchev and Castro – that it might even catapult us into a nuclear war if it got a head start, you know, and kept growing.”

    “And he (LBJ) said that he had just been talking to McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense then,” Warren continued, “and that McNamara had told him that if we got into a nuclear war that at the first strike we would lose sixty million people. And he impressed upon me the great danger that was involved in having something develop from all this talk. He said he had talked to the leaders of both parties and that members of Congress – Dick Russell and Boggs on the Democratic side and Ford and Cooper on the other side – and John McCloy from New York and Allen Dulles would be willing to serve on the commission if I was to head it up.” (1)

    And this was not just an off-the-cuff decision, as John Newman puts it, “It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy.” (2)

    By threatening nuclear war if it were true, LBJ used the disinformation of Castro and Cuban complicity to convince the Chief Justice and congressmen to join the Commission. The nuclear threat helped persuaded them to go with the Lone-Nut scenario because a conspiracy had to be a foreign one. To accept the Lone-Nut scenario as possible or even plausible, all of the accused assassin’s intelligence connections had to be ignored and the assassin portrayed as a sociopathic loser acting upon unknown psychological motives. (3)
    Life magazine was one of the most prolific supporters of this fairytale. Just as it had been previously in leaking Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis and Mongoose intelligence. And as it would after the assassination in anointing the disputed Tonkin Gulf Incident in order to get Congressional authorization for the war in Vietnam. (4)

    As the most popular magazine in America, Life was more influential than radio and TV news at the time. Life was the perfect platform to deliver any disinformation the CIA wanted widely distributed to a mass audience. It was used to influence key policy makers as well as the public, and also to discredit President Kennedy, as it tried to do on numerous occasions.

    Who were these guys? Well in looking at the Life magazine masthead of that era you will find a number of pertinent names – including Henry and Clare Booth Luce, C.D. Jackson and Issac Don Levine.

    Henry Luce, born in China to missionary parents, attended Yale, was a member of Skull & Bones, and with his schoolmate and partner Briton Hadden, quit the Baltimore News to form Time Inc., publishing Time Magazine in 1926, Fortune in 1930 and Life magazine in 1936. He remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964. A powerful Republican Party leader and committed anti-communist, he was a strong supporter of Chiang Kai-shek and “the China Lobby,” and against Castro in Cuba. Although Henry Luce died in 1967, his legacy continues to make an impact today. (5)

    It wasn’t a one-man show. Luce surrounded himself with like-minded publishers, editors, photographers and writers, most notably his second wife, Clare Booth Luce.

    Before dealing with Clare Booth Luce, it should be noted for the record that Henry Luce is also said to have had an affair with Mary Bancroft, one of Allen Dulles’ OSS agents and paramour, while Dulles is said to have been intimate with Luce’s wife. And in retrospect, Clare Booth Luce was in many ways more of a player than Henry Luce himself. (6)

    Before she became a Congresswomen and ambassador (to Italy), Clare Booth Luce had struck up an early friendship with John F. Kennedy, sending him a good luck coin during World War II. (7)

    Clare Booth Luce has been aptly described as, “One of the wealthiest women in the world, widow of the founder of the Time, Inc. publishing empire, former member of the House of Representatives, former Ambassador to Italy, successful Broadway playwright, international socialite and longtime civic activist, Luce was responsible for later ‘leads’ in the JFK assassination aftermath. Luce will later claim that sometime after the Bay of Pigs she receives a call from her ‘great friend’ William Pawley – who wants to put together a fleet of speedboats which would be used by the exiles to dart in and out of Cuba on ‘intelligence gathering’ missions. Luce eventually sponsors one of the boats. She refers to the crew of this boat as ‘my boys.’ Luce will also maintain that it is one of these boat crews that brings back the first news of Soviet missiles in Cuba. JFK, she says, didn’t react to it so she helped to feed the information to Senator Kenneth Keating, who made it public.” (8)

    She sat in the same limo with LBJ on JFK’s inauguration day, and when she asked him why in the world he took the Vice Presidential slot instead of staying in the more powerful position he held in Congress, she quoted him as saying, “Clare, I looked it up; One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” (9) Although the true odds were one in five presidents, or twenty percent, died in office, perhaps LBJ knew he could improve those odds, and it wasn’t such a gamble at all.

    With the new Democratic administration, Luce brought aboard a new publisher, C. D. – Charles Douglas– Jackson, an OSS hand and President Eisenhower’s personal administrative assistant on psychological warfare and Cold War strategy. (10)

    While Jackson would remain in the background, devising strategy, Clare Booth Luce wrote a weekly column and an occasional photo feature for Life. The magazineran articles on the impending invasion of Cuba before the Bay of Pigs, and in one column, a week before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Clare Booth Luce chastised the President for ignoring the evidence of offensive missiles in Cuba. (11) She says she had been told this by ‘her boys,’ who ran commando missions in and out of Cuba. But she also apparently saw the U2 photos leaked by the Air Force liaison to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, before they were revealed to the president. The NPIC U2 photos of missiles in Cuba were also shown to Sen. Keating (R. NY) by Col. Philip J. Corso, who later bragged about leaking it in his book The Day After Roswell. (12)

    After the Cuban Missile crisis was successfully resolved, Luce began writing stories about Mongoose, the CIA’s covert operations against Castro, which you could have read all about in Life, as they ran photos and stories about Operation Red Cross (aka the Bayo/Pawley Mission), and other anti-Castro missions. Clare was particularly proud of “her boys,” the team of anti-Castro commandos who ran maritime missions into Cuba in their speed boat, and she financially backed, though they were also supported by the CIA. They were based out of the CIA’s JMWAVE base in Florida, affiliated with the DRE and led by JulioFernandez. (13)

    On the night of the assassination, Clare Booth Luce says she was awakened from sleep by a phone call by Fernandez. He claimed to have exclusive knowledge of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, including recordings of him, and other records that appeared to substantiate his pro-Castro leanings i.e. the original Phase One cover-story., Castro did it. Luce told him to call the FBI. But he didn’t, or at least there is no record of him having done so. (14)

    The Luces could have slept soundly that night, knowing that Life was on top of the story. They had people at Dealey Plaza – the scene of the crime of the century. And before the weekend was over they would have sole ownership of the single most desired peace of evidence in the case, the Zapruder film. They would also obtain the infamous Backyard Photos of the accused assassin, his “Historic Diary,” exclusive photos of the Oswald family and then contractually tie up Marina’s story for decades.

    But before the weekend was out, the accused assassin would be killed while in police custody, and then branded the lone assassin. It was just a matter of whether he was going to be portrayed as part of a Cuban Communist conspiracy or as a deranged, lone nut, the answer to which would depend on how it all played out in public.

    Life had a good team working on the assassination. Texas bureau chief, Holland McCombs was in Austin, working on a story about the sex lives of college students. McCombs got the job at Life after giving Henry Luce a raucous tour of Texas, introducing him to cantinas, tequila and hot peppers. After Luce hired him, its rumored that his first job was to get a spy in the office of the president of Mexico, clearly showing Luce’s interests also went south of the border. (15)

    McCombs had served in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) so such an operation was within his wherewithal. McCombs later helped abort Life’s belated 1967 investigation of a domestic conspiracy. McCombs supported his friend Clay Shaw, a suspect in Jim Garrison’s case in New Orleans, even though his own team had developed evidence that supported a conspiracy.

    As early as February 1964 McCombs and Life had developed the fact that the McCurley brothers, who had assisted Oswald in handing out the FPCC leaflets in New Orleans, patronized the Black Lamp, a gay bar in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At that tavern, there was a bartender named Frankie Hydell. The Warren Report claimed that there was no such person as Hidell, which was the name Oswald used as an alias. And the information McCombs and Life developed went uninvestigated by both Life and the Warren Commission. (16)

    Although McCombs was in Austin at the time of the assassination, he had hired a young intern and stringer, Patsy Swank, who was heels on the ground in Dallas and would come up with the scoop on the Z-film.

    As soon as they heard about the assassination, McCombs, and the west coast editor in Los Angeles Richard Stolley, flew immediately to Dallas, probably under orders or assignment from C. D. Jackson in New York. Stolley brought along photographer Alan Grant. Writer Tommy Thompson, who was from Dallas, also flew in. Stolley set up shop in a room at the Adolphus Hotel, just across the street from the Carousel Club, and where the Secret Service and White House Communications Agency (WHCA) had their base of operations during the President’s visit. (17)

    Although the FBI maintains it had lost track of Oswald when he moved to New Orleans, and he kept a room by himself in Oak Cliff, Oswald had subscribed to magazines that were sent to the Paine home, including The Worker, the official organ of the Communist Party in the USA, the Trotskyite Militant, and Time Magazine. Therefore, at the time of the assassination, Time-Life had Oswald’s address at the Paine home in their files in New York, where their offices were at Rockefeller Center. (18) Which is also where the British Security Coordination was based, and where Oswald’s mother had worked in a retail shop on the first floor of the Empire State Building. While it may have been unknown to some of the authorities who were looking for him, Time-Life had Oswald’s address in their subscription file. And it didn’t take long for the Life team to get there.

    While Thompson and photographer Alan Grant went out to the Paine house in Irving, Patsy Swank was at the Dallas Police Department, where she had been tipped off about a film of the assassination. She called Stolley at the Adolphus on the phone and in a hushed voice so other reporters wouldn’t hear her, told him about the movie of the assassination that was taken by a man whose last name began with a “Z.” Stolley quickly found Zapruder’s name in the phone book, assumed it was him, and called his home every fifteen minutes until Zapruder finally answered. Mr. “Z” had been driving around aimlessly thinking about what he had witnessed through the lens of his camera. Stolley wanted to meet him immediately but Zapruder told him to see him at his office early the next morning. (19)

    Meanwhile, with Grant snapping exclusive photos, Thompson had gotten Marina’s confidence, and with C. D. Jackson persuading her with cash, the wife and mother of the accused assassin agreed to give them their exclusive story if Thompson would take them to see Oswald at the jail. (20)

    Although the Zapruder film, the Backyard Photos, the “Historic Diary,” Thompson’s articles and Grant’s photos that Life published, have all been examined extensively and deserve even further scrutiny, Marina’s story is the clincher. With the death of Oswald, his guilt or innocence in the eyes of the public depended on how she portrayed him for history. But it wasn’t really Marina’s portrait of Oswald in Life. It was the author’s portrait, as described, at least in part, by Marina in Russian, and translated by the author.

    At first it was reported that Marina’s story would be ghost written by Issac Don Levine, its in-house Russian defector and professional anti-communist propagandist. (21) Levine would have been perfect for the job, if they were going to stick with the Cuban Communist Conspiracy Cover-story. But that fell by the wayside as it became apparent that it just was not accurate.

    That didn’t matter to Levine any more than it didn’t matter to LBJ. Levine had previously written The Mind of the Assassin, about Leon Trotsky’s killer Raymond Mercader, who Levine cleverly unmasks as a deep penetration agent of Stalin’s KGB’s assassination directorate SMERSH. Mercader got to Trotsky in exile in Mexico City and stabbed him to death, was convicted for it, served time in prison and was later released. (22)

    Oswald had described himself as a Trotskyite, and subscribed to The Militant, the monthly publication of the Trotskyite party in the United States, which was founded by the father of Michael Paine, Oswald’s chief benefactor at the time of the assassination. Besides providing room and board for Oswald’s wife and two kids, Michael Paine also handled Oswald’s belongings, including the alleged assassination rifle, which was kept in his garage while Oswald went to Mexico. (23)

    It’s still unclear what Oswald did in Mexico City, but with his fascination with Trotsky, one must wonder if he visited the apartment where Trotsky was killed, or knew the details, as written and published by Levine in his book. If you look up Issac Don Levine’s Wikipedia biography, it fails to even mention The Mind of the Assassin, possibly his most important work. (24)

    Marina’s story is not listed there either. But for a different reason. Because he never got the job. Instead, the contract was given to Priscilla Johnson (McMillan). Priscilla, like George DeMohrenschildt, had the unique attribute of having made the acquaintance of both the President and his accused assassin. Oswald’s good friend DeMohrenschildt knew the Kennedys from their support of the Cystic Fibrosis Charity that he established with his second wife, Dr. De De Sharples. Priscilla knew JFK from Massachusetts, where she worked for him in 1954, and a few years later she met Oswald in Moscow at the time of his defection. (25) So she wasn’t entering the drama cold. She was already a player, and an integral part of the disinformation network that promoted the Dealey Plaza operation cover-story and protected those responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy.

    Notes

    1. LBJ strongarm. LBJ Library Oral History Collection. http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/oralhistory.hom/Warren-E/Warren-e.PDF
    2. See Video: J.E. Hover, L.B. Johnson, and the Warren Commission’s role -1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZdtTa_164o
    3. Newman, John – Oswald & the CIA (2008 edition); http://droberdeau.blogspot.com/2011/05/page-13.html
    4. Life and Tonkin Gulf Incident. Life Magazine August 14, 1964 p. 21 Special Report – “From The Files of Navy Intelligence Aboard the Maddox” p. 21 – Cover story on LBJ – “The Complex and Extraordinary Man Who Is The President” – In Two Articles – an intimate and revealing portrait. http://books.google.com/books?id=cUkEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA21&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2 – v=onepage&q&f=false
    5. Henry Robinson Luce New York Times Obituary, March 1, 1967. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0403.html
    6. Bancroft, Mary – Autobiography of a Spy. http://jungcurrents.com/bancroft-sp/
    Also see: http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-A-Bu-and-Obituaries/Bancroft-Mary.html
    7. Clare Booth Luce gives coin to JFK & JFK Letter to CBL
    http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/timeline/postwar/election/jfklettr.html
    Clare Booth Luce background http://www.lkwdpl.org/wihohio/luce-cla.htm.
    8. Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology.
    9. http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/1054343251/presidents-talk-about-presidents-john-f-kennedy – “I looked it up; one out of every four Presidents has died in office.  I’m a gamblin’ man, darling, and this is the only chance I got.” — Lyndon B. Johnson, to Clare Booth Luce, on why he accepted the Vice Presidential nomination from JFK, January 1961. Also see: Ira David Wood III – JFK Assassination Chronology. http://www.assassinationresearch.com/v2n1/chrono1.pdf
    10. Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology. See above.
    11. C. D. Jackson background “The CIA’s assimilation of old guard fascists was overseen by the Operations Coordination Board, directed by C.D. Jackson, formerly an executive of Time magazine and Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Cold War Strategy.”
    http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MOCK/mockingbird.php
    Before he became an ardent cold warrior, C.D. Jackson was
    http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAjacksonCD.htm
    According to Carl Bernstein, Jackson was “Henry Luce’s personal emissary to the CIA”. He also claimed that in the 1950s Jackson had arranged for CIA employees to travel with Time-Life credentials as cover.
    11. Clare Booth Luce & Cuban Missile Crisis – Cuba –and the unfaced truth – Our Global Double BindLife Magazine, Oct. 5, 1962, p. 53.
    12. Corso & NPIC Leak – Corso, Philip J. (Day After Roswell, Simon & Schuster , 1997) and Wood, Ira David III. JFK Assassination Chronology.
    http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=15829
    Corso & JFK black prop op – see: “The Zipper Documents,” Gregory.
    13. Clare Booth Luce & Julio Fernandez & DRE Clare Booth Luce and Julio Fernandez:
    http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/julio-fernandez.html
    Also see Gary Shaw and John Stockwell: http://images.mitrasites.com/illustration/julio-fern%C3%A1ndez.html
    14. Clare Booth Luce & Julio Fernandez on 11/22/63
    15. Holland McCombs & Luce – Kelin, John – Holland McCombs – “The Investigation that Never Was.”
    http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/09/fp.back_issues/32nd_Issue/holland.html
    16. Kelin, John – Holland McCombs – The Investigation That Never Was. Also see McCombs archive at University of Tennessee.
    http://www.utm.edu/departments/acadpro/library/departments/special_collections/manus/ms001.htm
    17. Life Team in Dallas Patsy Swank & Z film. Thompson, Josiah. Why The Zapruder Film Is Authentic, JFK Deep Politics Quarterly, April 1999, Vol. 4, No. 3. http://www.manuscriptservice.com/DPQ/dparchiv1.htm – FILM
    18. Oswald address & Time-Life – Education Forum – Life Magazine and the Assassination of JFK – John Dolva post.
    http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=5046
    Stolley bio: http://www.santafe.com/articles/author/richard-b-stolley/ http://www.life.com/image/72386160
    20. Thompson & Marina. Grant, Alan. The Day The President Was Shot – The Kidnapping of the Oswald Family.
    http://www.allangrant.com/oswaldstory.htm For Alan Grant’s photos see: http://www.allangrant.com/newsevents7.htm. Also see: Richard Stolley on Tommy Thompson:
    http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20087091,00.html
    21. Issac Don Levine (19 January 1892 – 15 February 1981) Scott, Peter Dale,  Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1996. says C. D. Jackson, on the urging of Allen Dulles employed Issac Don Levine to ghost-write Marina’s story. This story never appeared in print. Levine background:.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Don_Levine.
    Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker_Chambershttp://en.wikipedia….saac_Don_Levine
    22. Issac Don Levine & Trotsky – Levine, wrote the book Mind of the Assassin, that details how the KGB’s agent Raymond Mercader assassinated Trotsky. See Peter Sedgwick’s Review
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1960/11/assassin.htmhttp://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2139856.The_Mind_of_an_Assassin
    23. Michael Paine, Trotsky & Oswald in MC. Weberman. Nodule X16 http://ajweberman.com/noduleX16-PAINES CIA CONNECTIONS.pdf
    Forbes Family history (Linda Minor): http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg22399.html
    Michael Paine Warren Commission Testimony: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/russ/testimony/paine_m1.htm
    24. Levine & Wiki & “Mind of the Assassin.” Bibliography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Don_Levine
    25. Lee Oswald, Marina and Priscilla Johnson.
    ARRB Testiomony http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/arrb/index4.htm
    PBS Interview: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/interviews/mcmillan.html

  • Russ Baker, Family of Secrets


    This book has a rather deceptive title. In two ways.

    First, although it says it will be about the Bush family, strictly speaking, it really is not. There are only a few pages about Prescott Bush, father of George H. W. Bush, the man who really started off the whole regime. But further, there is next to nothing on important figures in George’s brood like Neil, Marvin, and especially, Jeb Bush. Which means that the book really examines the careers of two men only: George Bush Sr. and Jr.

    But it’s even more constricted than that. From a careful reading of the volume, the book spends over 40% of its text on just three events in the lives of those two men. In order they are: Senior’s alleged involvement in the JFK case and Watergate; and Junior’s much debated service in the Texas Air National Guard. That’s it. Check for yourself. Think for a moment of all the rather dark and deadly things those two men have been involved with. Its hard to believe that Baker makes short work of the following: the Iran/Contra affair, the elimination of the Sandinistas through lethal means, the October Surprise, Gulf War I, Oliver North’s drug running, the election heists of 2000 and 2004, the incredible intelligence failure that resulted in 9-11, the phony pretenses for Gulf War II, and the 2007 collapse of the American economy. That list is, of course, selective and reductive. But Baker gives all of these matters the once over. In fact, some are not dealt with at all. It is an odd choice.

    Baker would probably say that there have been reams written about the above topics. Which is true. Yet, there are two salient points to be made in that regard. First, one can always do more digging into matters like the above. For the simple reason that they are very large and complex subjects that have yet to be exhausted. One great comparison is what Jim Hougan did with Watergate. By the time he issued Secret Agenda in 1984, there had been scores of books written on the matter. Yet his book made you reconsider the whole affair from Step 1. Secondly, the Bush family role in the above events I listed is certain. It is not a matter of manufacture, conjecture or speculation. As we shall see, that is not the case with two of the three areas that Baker has chosen to concentrate his book on.

    I

    Let us start with what I perceive to be the strength of the book. This would be the discussion of George Bush Jr. and his rather weird and spotty service in the Texas Air National Guard. Baker had written about this subject previously and at length in publications like The Nation. So this is clearly something he had followed through time as the issue gradually mushroomed in importance. The climax of its public debate was the veritable explosion that erupted at CBS in 2004-05. As Baker describes it, Dan Rather and others were dragged over the coals when they used some questionable copied documents to explain the gaps in President Bush’s service in the Guard.

    The problem all began in 1968, after Bush Jr. graduated from Yale. Once out of college, George would lose his student deferment and almost certainly be eligible for a tour in Vietnam. The problem was this: although the Bush clan supported the war in public for political fodder, they secretly understood it was a terrible mistake that was not worth fighting in, much less dying over. So they had to finesse George W. Bush dodging his impending service in Indochina. The clan decided on an exit ticket: W. would join the National Guard.

    Specifically, George would join the 147th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air National Guard. The trouble was that, understandably, many young men in Texas wanted to join this group at the time. It was nicknamed the “Champagne Unit” because many of the offspring of wealth and power joined up to dodge combat in Vietnam (p. 139) In fact, special positions were created to accommodate the many demands for entry. (ibid)

    The Bush story has been that George talked to unit commander Lt. Col. Walter Staudt and Staudt told him positions were open. (p. 138) In reality, strings were pulled by state Speaker of the House, Ben Barnes, to get Bush Jr. into the unit. (p. 139) But, once in, W. got even more special treatment. Usually, to be commissioned a second lieutenant, one has to either attend officer training school, pull 18 prior months of service, or have 2 years of ROTC. Bush did none of these, but he still got the commission. (p. 140) Secondly, the unit paid to train Bush to be a pilot from square A. Which was another exception to procedure. The unit usually either borrowed trained pilots from the Air Force or further trained those who had had some experience. Bush had none. (p. 139)

    And then there were the strange interludes, let us call them vacations. After George Jr. took six weeks of basic training in San Antonio, he got a two-month leave to work on Ed Gurney’s Senate campaign in Florida. (p. 140) Gurney’s campaign was being run by a friend of Bush Sr. named Jimmy Allison. It was after this episode that Bush Jr. took his first training lessons, on both a Cessna and a simulator, in Valdosta, Georgia. That took about a year. (p. 141) He then returned to the Houston area and Ellington Field for the “more daunting task of learning to fly a real fighter jet.” (ibid)

    In the summer of 1970, having completed his jet pilot training, his full-time obligation now transformed to a part-time status, usually referred to as a “weekend warrior”. But after this, in early 1972, something began to go wrong with Bush’s flying career. For some reason that has never been fully explained, he was taken out of the cockpit and placed in a two-pilot training plane. (p. 148) From which he had already graduated. Sort of like going back to trainer wheels after one has learned to ride a bicycle. On these regressive two-seater flights, his friend Jim Bath sometimes accompanied him. It didn’t seem to work. Because back in the F-102, he needed three passes before he made a landing. In fact, he had become such a liability in the air that, according to the author, the last documented record of him flying alone is April 16, 1972. (ibid) He then left both the unit and the state. The problem is he had not fulfilled his time obligation yet. This now begins the second stage of murkiness to the Bush National Guard saga: in addition to not flying again, did he or did he not fulfill the rest of his service obligation?

    The latter question is partly covered up by another political campaign. George Jr. said he now was going to work on another Allison managed enterprise. This one was the senate run of Red Blount in Alabama. So George Jr. requested a transfer to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance unit in Montgomery at Dannelly Field. The question then became: Did Bush Jr. then fulfill his service at Dannelly? Well, the former base commander said the following: “I’m dead certain he didn’t show up.” (p. 150) And in fact, as Baker writes, “no credible records or eyewitnesses ever emerged to back” his claim of fulfilling his weekend service requirement in Alabama. (ibid) In fact, former members of the Dannelly unit ran ads offering monetary rewards in a Guard periodical to anyone who had any evidence that George Jr., had fulfilled his service. No one replied to the ads. (ibid) But Baker did find a number of witnesses who testified to Bush being a rather boisterous drunk during the Blount campaign, and two who said he combined his alcohol intake with illicit drugs. (p. 151)

    And this angle perhaps links to why George had to get out of flying, and also the 147th. According to a witness who talked to Jerry Killian, Bush’s wing commander, Bush was getting the jitters about flying. Killian said he “was having trouble landing, and that possibly there was a drinking problem involved.” (ibid)

    After Blount’s loss in November of 1972, George Jr. packed his bags and returned to Texas. But he did not return to Ellington as he was supposed to do so. He first went to Washington DC and then to Florida for the holidays. He then returned to Dannelly in Alabama for a routine x-ray, except, oddly, it was done by a dentist. (p. 153) He also called a former female Blount worker and invited her to dinner. Over dinner, he told her he was there for guard training. As Baker notes, this sure sounds like George Jr. was laying in a future CYA trail to disguise the facts that a.) he had not served in Alabama and b.) he was not returning to Ellington.

    Junior now went back to Texas to try to allegedly fulfill his service requirement. Except his superiors did not want him back. (p. 154) In fact, there is no record of him serving back at Ellington after Alabama. Further, no paperwork for alternative service in Alabama was ever sent to Ellington. (p. 156) As Baker logically deduces, “Just about all the evidence suggests that George W. Bush went AWOL from National Guard duty in May 1972 and never returned, thus skipping out on two years of a six-year military obligation.” (ibid) Clearly, someone was pulling strings for Bush Jr. As Texas reporter Jim Moore wrote, if Guardsmen missed drills or were late they were hunted down and arrested. If they missed a second exercise you could be made eligible for the draft. (p. 157) Who was doing the pulling for W.? Well, at around this time, George Bush Sr. was becoming head of the Republican National Committee.

    From the beginning of Junior’s political career his handlers knew this National Guard episode was going to be a problem. When Moore first questioned W. about it during a debate for the Texas governorship in 1994, he was later accosted by campaign advisers Karen Hughes and Karl Rove. (pgs. 407-08) They wanted to make it clear that these questions were somehow out of bounds. But as Bush’s career advanced along to the point that he was now considering running for president, the issue would not go away. And it appears that when the presidency got on their radar screens, the Bush team fiddled with the files.

    According to Guard manager Bill Burkett, this began in 1997. After a call from a Bush staffer, he saw some Guardsman in a room with Bush’s file. It was being pilfered. One of the documents discarded was a ‘counseling statement’. This explained why George was being grounded and the changes in assignment, slot, and his wages. (p. 411) Burkett first made these claims at that time. He then wrote letters to state legislators. He then phoned Bush adviser Dan Bartlett. (ibid) Burkett was then sent to Panama in 1998. He got sick on his way back and had problems getting his medical benefits. People who tried to help him in the Guard were fired.

    As Baker summarizes it, whatever one thinks of Burkett, there are documents missing from Bush’s Guard file that should be there. For instance, on how Texas handled his transfer to Alabama, and also a panel report that should have been written up after Bush stopped flying. (p. 412) Further, “microfilm containing military pay records for hundreds of Guardsmen, including Bush, was irreversibly damaged”. (ibid) This also occurred in 1997, the year when Burkett’s reported pilfering incident allegedly happened.

    What is so utterly fascinating about this whole sorry tale is that no MSM source did any real reporting on it until late May of 2000. This was when W. had more or less vanquished the GOP field and was closing in on the presidential nomination. Only then did reporter Walter Robinson of the Boston Globe break a story , which included interviews with Bush’s former commanders who did not recall seeing him in Alabama or Texas in 1972 or ’73. (ibid)

    Mickey Herskowitz made this saga even more interesting. Herskowitz was a longtime Texas sportswriter who also co-wrote several biographies of celebrities e.g. John Connally and Mickey Mantle. The writer knew George Bush Sr. and he suggested that he co-write a book with his son in time for the 2000 presidential campaign. Karl Rove OK’d the project and W. said he would do it if he didn’t have to work too hard. He also wanted to know how much money was in it. (p. 420) But W. also worried if there was enough material there for a book since he thought he had not really accomplished all that much. Therefore he felt it might be a good idea to focus on his policy objectives. When Herksowitz asked what those would be, W. replied, “Ask Karl.” (ibid)

    The pair had about twenty meetings about the book. Herskowitz said that although Bush was reserved about his National Guard service, he did say some interesting things. The writer asked him what he did about his obligation once he went to Alabama and served on the Blount campaign. Bush replied, “Nothing. I was excused.” (p. 420) This may or may not be true. But it contradicted the cover story that was already out there, and also later cover stories to come. Bush also told the author that he never flew a plane again after he left the Texas Guard in 1972, either military or civilian.

    There was one other tantalizing thing that W. told Herskowitz. He said that his father “had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, and he wasted it … If I have a chance to invade … if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed…” (p. 423)

    This is a very important statement of course. For the attacks of 9-11 gave W. the opportunity to invade Iraq. And to complete the job that he thought his father had not. Even if Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9-11! That is how predisposed W. was on this issue before the 2000 campaign even began. And the fact that he had dodged his military service in Vietnam, and then gone AWOL in the Air National Guard personally made it easy for him to commit tens of thousands of young men to an awful war, since he had never come close to fighting in one. Therefore, with the terrible war in Iraq as a backdrop, Bush Jr. and his Guard service should have loomed large in the debate over sending young men into a questionable war. That the national media never pursued this angle with any relish or consistency tells us all we need to know about the state of the MSM at that time. Especially since W. was now sending National Guard troops to serve in Iraq. (p. 440)

    In 2004, right before the re-election campaign, things did heat up. Burkett appeared on Hardball and made his accusation about seeing Bush aides clean up the Guard records. This story had some bounce, as it later appeared on the CBS News and in the New York Times. (p. 447) Then two things happened to suck any helium left out of the balloon.

    First John Kerry, and his campaign manager Bob Shrum, made one of the biggest miscalculations in the history of presidential races. Rather than attacking the first four years of W.’s presidency, they decided to center Kerry’s nominating convention, and a large part of his early campaign, on his service in Vietnam. Baker properly scores them for this. It was a misguided strategy, especially in light of the fact that there was so much in the Bush presidency to go after. But we all know what made it worse. Karl Rove created the whole phony Swift Boat Veterans for Truth mirage. And, unchallenged at first by the Kerry campaign and the press, this Rove manufacture was allowed to disseminate through rightwing outlets like Fox News.

    The second event that helped bury the issue was the Dan Rather-Mary Mapes-CBS News bloodbath. Most of us know this story by now. Burkett got hold of some documents about George’s service in the Texas Guard. One seemed to depict a transfer from Killian due to George’s inability to meet standard on his pilot training, and his failure to get a physical. (p. 456) This, and 3-4 other documents whetted Mapes’, Rather’s 60 Minutes producer, appetite. She wanted to use the documents for a 60 Minutes segment on the issue.

    There were two problems with this. First, Burkett got them from a source who did not want his name divulged. In fact, this mysterious source did not even turn them over to Burkett. A go-between named ‘Lucy Ramirez’ did so. Consequently, the provenance of the documents was under a cloud. Second, the documents themselves were copies. Further, Mapes had Burkett fax them to CBS in New York. (p. 457) This resulted in further distortion of the lettering on the papers.

    Everyone knows what happened next. Via what appeared to be some GOP operatives who just happened to view the show, the Bush allies on the Internet began to question whether the documents were real or fakes. This created a tempest in the midst of an election campaign i.e. the whole phony issue of whether or not the “liberal media” was out to get a sitting GOP president. CBS management did a bad job in meeting this challenge. They eventually gave in and authorized an “independent panel”. Which, of course, was not really independent. Their job was to essentially get rid of or demote everyone involved with the program. How bad was this panel? They never even investigated or ruled on whether the documents were actually genuine.

    If Bush Jr. had planned it all in advance, it could not have turned out better for him. Through the Swift Boat mirage, his military service backfired on Kerry. And because of the Web attack, Bill Burkett, and the whole Texas Guard issue was taken out like a machete had cut it away.

    Beyond any doubt, this is the high point of the book. Baker combines some original reporting with work by people like Moore and Mapes to put together a good, juicy, and factually solid summary of this whole sorry episode. What it all says about W., and even worse, the national media, seems to me to be of the utmost importance and interest. The former abdicated his responsibility to the Guard. And the latter abdicated its responsibility to the public.

    II

    If the rest of Family of Secrets was as sound as this section, the book would have been a good and valuable effort. In my view, such is not the case. In fact, it’s not even close. And the bad part is that the rest of the book really means upwards of 90% of it. Baker’s reporting on Bush Sr. does not reveal anywhere near the amount of factual data, reliable testimony, logical inference, and investigative reporting that he does on the Texas Guard story. And since, as I note above, these other areas take up much more space than this first story, the overall effort suffers mightily for that.

    A clear objective of the book is to counter and modify the work of Joseph McBride for the Nation. In two essays done in 1988, McBride unearthed documents and interviews that indicated that Bush Sr. was involved in providing cover for Cuban exiles for the CIA. McBride did not go any further than what the documents indicated. He came to the conclusion that Bush’s actual CIA status-whether he was an agent or asset– could not be really evaluated. But it looked like he was a businessman used as an asset. One of the main objectives of Baker’s book is to somehow show that Bush Sr. was much more than just a CIA asset at the time of the Bay of Pigs. In fact, Baker tries to insinuate that Bush Sr. was a CIA officer from the fifties onward. In fact, his chapter on Bush Sr. becoming CIA chief in the mid-seventies makes this objective clear. It is entitled “In From the Cold”.

    Generally speaking the argument is made through three steps: 1.) Bush’s alleged service as an agent in the fifties 2.) His alleged role in the JFK case, and 3.) His alleged role in the Watergate effort to bring down President Nixon.

    I cannot do any better than Seamus Coogan did in his brief discussion of the import of the 1988 McBride articles. (Click here to view his essay.) The relatively brief McBride articles are also reprinted on pages 371-78 of Mark Lane’s book Plausible Denial. McBride does not pass judgment on what Bush actually was up to in the Agency. But he did interview a trusted source who said Bush had probably helped with the Bay of Pigs. Which would make sense. For as Seamus noted, Bush’s oil company operated off of Cay Sal island, about 40 miles off the coast of Cuba.

    Now, inexplicably, Baker writes that the McBride articles elicited a collective yawn from the media at the time of publication. (p. 11) Not really so. As McBride notes in his second piece, his story “received wide coverage in the media.” The Bush team’s initial denials, and the CIA’s break with tradition to issue a formal reply were extraordinary. It was made worse when, in a dumb stroke, the Agency tried to say the document actually referred to a different George Bush. McBride tracked down this second George Bush, who did work for the CIA at the time. From the interview, it is very hard to believe the memo from J. Edgar Hoover, warning of a possible exile attempt to attack Cuba in the wake of JFK’s death, referred to him. (Lane, pgs. 376-78) All this mucking about created a buzz in the press. Especially considering the fact that, back then, there was no Internet to speak of at all. But I think Baker wants to characterize it as much less than it was in order to somehow portray himself as a pioneer in uncovering the long ignored clandestine career of Bush Sr. In other words, McBride’s work was the tip of the iceberg and it greatly understated who Bush Sr. was and what his ties to the Agency really were. It took Baker to reveal it. Let us evaluate his case for the long withheld clandestine career of George Bush Sr.

    He begins his excavation on page 12. He says that researcher Jerry Shinley has found a document that places Bush’s service with the CIA back into the early fifties. The problem is that the phrasing in this document is quite ambiguous. It says that through a Mr. Gale Allen the CIA had learned in 1975 that Bush had knowledge of a terminated project dealing with proprietary commercial projects in Europe. Bush learned of them through CIA officer Tom Devine. Now, the fact that Devine told his sometime oil business partner about a since deceased CIA project does not mean that Bush Sr. was in the CIA. In the memorandum’s terms, at least as Baker presents it, the wording suggests what I just wrote: Bush had acquired the knowledge through Devine. Another problem is that Bush’s commercial projects were not in Europe, but in America and the Caribbean. So I got the feeling that, unlike with the Air Guard story, the author was stretching his data thin.

    That impression was strengthened when I discovered that, Baker was relying largely on one source for the rest of his information about Bush and the CIA prior to the Bay of Pigs. That source was the same one that John Hankey used in an online discussion with me, namely Joseph Trento’s 2005 book entitled Prelude to Terror. Let me explain why this creates a problem.

    Trento is a longtime writer on intelligence matters. In fact, he figures importantly in Lane’s Plausible Denial. But it’s the way he figures in that book that should have given Baker and Hankey pause. Trento is not an intelligence writer in the way that say Jim Hougan is. Hougan is a digger, a man who does not accept the world of intelligence by its surface measures or by what its maestros tell him. And it’s that skepticism that makes him a trusted and valuable source.

    Trento is not a digger. And he trusts what most of his sources tell him. To the point that sometimes he just writes their declarations out in sentence form. A good example of this would be his previous 2001 book, The Secret History of the CIA. Which, to put it mildly, did not live up to its title. Since two of Trento’s most trusted sources were CIA operators like James Angleton and Robert Crowley, the book has a definite spin to it. For example, in spite of much contrary evidence, it says that it was not Henry Cabot Lodge who spawned the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, but President Kennedy. (Trento, p. 252) Trento, listening unswervingly to Angleton, characterizes Lee and Marina Oswald as Russian agents, and the Kennedy assassination as a KGB plot. (pgs. 258ff) Trento mentions the fact that George DeMohrenschildt said he had been told by the CIA to contact Oswald. But Trento, quoting Angleton writes, “Angleton, however, maintained that DeMohrenschildt worked for the KGB and that he was the Oswalds’ control officer.” (ibid, p. 258) He also adds that DeMohrenschildt took his own life in 1983, when in fact he died mysteriously in 1977. (ibid) Angleton tells Trento that Oswald’s cavorting around with Cubans in New Orleans was a KGB charade to blame the assassination on Cuba and not Russia. (ibid, p. 260)

    I could go on and on in this vein but let me just add this: Trento tells us that another of his sources, William R. Corson, was dispatched to Dallas by President Johnson to begin his own investigation of the case. (Trento, p. 267) And that Corson ended up working for the Warren Commission. Corson told Trento that Cuban DGI agents convinced Jack Ruby to kill Oswald. (ibid) Need I say that this last is right out of a Gus Russo disinformation script. And for the same reason. Just as Russo is ‘oh so trusting’ of his CIA sources, so is Trento.

    But what makes this last bit even more interesting is that of his three major sources, Corson is probably the most trustworthy. Corson was a military intelligence officer who served in Vietnam and wrote a highly critical book on US involvement in that struggle. But part of the problem is that Corson died in 2000. The two Trento books under discussion were both published afterwards. So whatever corrective influence Corson could have had on these last two books was probably weakened.

    In spite of all the compromising elements I have listed, its from Trento’s Prelude to Terror that Baker gets the large part of the rest of his information about George Bush and his previously secret ties to the CIA. In light of all I have outlined above, here is a question that Baker should have asked himself: “If this information about George Bush is true and viable, then why didn’t Trento use it in his previous book? After all, it was titled The Secret History of the CIA. Wouldn’t George Bush be part of that?”

    What makes this even worse is that in the area of Prelude to Terror where the early CIA employment of Bush is discussed, virtually every endnote is to an interview with a CIA officer. (See Prelude to Terror, pgs. 362-64) In other words, it’s all anecdotal. But furthering my original point, these interviews were almost all done many years ago. So why didn’t Trento use them in the previous book? It doesn’t help matters that almost all these interview subjects are now dead, so they can’t be cross-checked. Why should they be? Consider this: “It was in the late 1950’s that the covert operations culture called upon George H. W. Bush’s talents. Bush was at first a tiny part of Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s code name for their anti-Castro operations.” (ibid, p. 16) Baker didn’t seem to notice that the CIA could not have first called on Bush in the late 50’s to be part of Mongoose because Mongoose did not begin until 1962.

    Finally, let me add one last word about why the use of this book seems suspect to me. The general message of Trento’s tome is that the use of private intelligence networks, set up by people like Ted Shackley, has led to our present problems in places like Afghanistan. (ibid, pgs. 316-17). The book blames some of this on George Bush Sr. because of his well-known ties to the Saudi Arabian monarchy. It is also highly critical of this network’s Saudi ties to Pakistan and the death of President Zia. In fact, it blames the Saudis inability to keep control of Pakistan’s atomic weapons quest as the reason why the quest became Islamicized, that is, anti-Israel in intent. Who is a major source for Trento’s view of Bush and the Saudis in all this: Angleton’s scribe Edward Epstein. (See p. 324) I should note that one of Angleton’s later responsibilities in the CIA was supervising the Israeli desk and interfacing with Mossad.

    Baker writes not a word of caution, qualification, or warning about any of the above. That’s how much he wants to make Bush Sr. a longtime CIA operator. And the drive does not stop there. Not by any means.

    III

    As most commentators on the life of George Bush Sr. acknowledge, by the early sixties, he was trying to transition out of his previous petroleum business life style. He wanted to get into national politics-a goal at which he later succeeded in a big way. So in 1963 he was living in Houston and became chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. As such he was supporting Barry Goldwater for president. He also decided to run for the senate against liberal Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough. An important point to enumerate here, as Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin do in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, is this: Bush was in on the beginning of the revival of the GOP in the south. And, unlike Dwight Eisenhower’s GOP version, it was a particularly virulent strain of the GOP. One that would eventually and naturally evolve into the Newt Gingrich slash and burn version, whose intent would be to essentially raze the New Deal.

    According to Tarpley, Bush had run hard for the county office in 1962, with his wife in tow. They went from meeting to meeting telling listeners that there had to be a viable two party system in Texas. It was from this county position that Bush decided to scaffold his run against Yarborough. He announced his candidacy on September 10, 1963. He would have to win a primary first before he took on the populist Yarborough.

    Just about all the above is missing from Baker’s treatment of Bush’s first senatorial run. To Baker, all this rather interesting drama takes a back seat to what he perceives as the real and hidden importance in that run: George Bush’s role as a covert CIA operative in the killing of John F. Kennedy. In fact, Baker devotes more pages to this subject than any other. (About 90 of them.) He begins his Chapter 4 on a rather unusual note, one that will establish his creeping solipsistic view. He actually implies that Bush became chair of the Harris country party not for the above stated political ends. Oh no. He did it so he could travel all over Texas. Why? Because “Bush’s political work, like his oil work, may have been a cover for intelligence activities.” (Baker, p. 49 By the way, the supposition about his oil work being a cover is largely from Trento.)

    A few pages later, on page 52, Baker introduces what will clearly be the main entrée for his theory of Bush the covert operator in the Kennedy hit. This is the Parrott memorandum. It is to Baker what the above-mentioned Hoover memorandum about Cuban exiles was to John Hankey in his film JFK 2. That is, Baker is going to drag every single piece of nuanced meaning he possibly can out of it. If the Parrott memo were a cow, Baker would have worked every last drop of not just milk–but blood, water, and tissue from it. To the point that someone would have had to kill the cow to put it out of its misery.

    To provide the background: on 11/22/63, George H. W. Bush called the FBI. He said that he had heard in recent weeks that a member of the Young Republicans named James Parrott had been talking about killing Kennedy when he arrived in Houston. The FBI characterized Parrot as rightwing, a quasi-Birchite, a student at University of Houston, and active in politics in the area. Further, that a check of Secret Service indices revealed that they had a report that Parrott had threatened to kill Kennedy in 1961. The FBI interviewed Parrott’s mother and then Parrott himself. They found out that Parrott had been discharged from the Air Force for mental reasons in 1959. Parrott said that he had been in the company of another Republican activist at the time of the shootings. Bush at first denied making the call, and then he said he did not recall making it. (See Tarpley, Chapter 8b.)

    In light of the above basic facts, let us watch what Baker does with this. First of all, if you were a covert CIA operator in on the Kennedy plot, would you announce in advance that you would be in Dallas to give a speech on the evening of 11/21? Further, would you put that announcement in the newspapers? Well, that is what Bush did in the Dallas Morning News on 11/20.

    At the actual time of the assassination, Bush was in Tyler, Texas. The author says he made the FBI call about Parrott to establish an alibi. This makes no sense. Why? Because Bush already had an alibi. As Kitty Kelley established, the vice-president of the Kiwanis Club-a man named Aubrey Irby-was with Bush at the time of Kennedy’s murder. Along with about a hundred other people. For Bush was about to give a luncheon speech at the Blackstone Hotel. He had just started when Irby told him what had happened. Bush called off the speech. (Baker, p. 54) Question for the author: With about 101 witnesses, why would you need a phone call to establish your alibi?

    The author then writes that Bush told the FBI he would be in Dallas later on the 22nd, and that he would be staying at the Sheraton that night. Baker finds it suspicious that he did not stay the night as he said he was going to. Or as Baker writes in his full Inspector Javert-or John Hankey-mode: “Why state that he expected to spend the night at the Dallas Sheraton if he was not planning to stay?” (p. 59) Well Russ, maybe he was planning to. But because he later realized that Dallas would not be a real good place to campaign in that night, he changed his mind. I mean don’t you think the populace was mentally preoccupied?

    What Baker does with the figure of Parrott is just as odd. As Tarpley wrote, the man had been discharged from the Air Force for psychiatric reasons. He was from the rabid right in Texas, which is pretty rabid. And the Secret Service had a source that said he had made a threat against Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. Baker soft pedals all this to the max. He tries to make Parrott into a sweet misunderstood lad who Bush somehow magically picked out to provide him an alibi he didn’t need. I could find no mention in Baker of the previous Secret Service file threat by Parrott which Tarpley mentions. And because that is not here, an important part of the story get jumbled.

    In Bush’s report to the Bureau, he mentioned a man named Keary Reynolds as someone who may have told him about Parrott. From Parrott and his mother, Baker says that Reynolds actually came to Parrott’s house to ask him to paint some signs for the GOP campaign. So this now becomes Reynolds giving Parrott an alibi. (Which, like Bush, he did not need. Because, as I wrote above, he had been with another Republican activist.)

    Baker then interviews Reynolds. Reynolds does not recall making the paint job offer or visiting the Parrot house. (pgs. 61-63) He says he vaguely recalled the name because a young man had come around HQ previously and someone told him that he had threatened JFK. He also recalled escorting Parrott to the Secret Service office on 11/22 because of that. So what Reynolds does is back up the Secret Service having a threat file on Parrott. He also seems to back up Bush hearing about this reactionary around HQ. Finally, he seems to undermine the whole “visit to Parrott’s house to offer a job” thesis. Reynolds says he was never at the Parrott home. Parrott and his mom may have fibbed about that to conceal the fact that the Secret Service called him in that day because of his past history. And also perhaps because of the Bush phone call.

    But Baker is still not done. Barbara Bush is apparently part of the plot, or at least the cover up. Barbara Bush wrote a note about her activities on 11/22/63. Addressed just generally to members of her family, it talks about her being at a beauty parlor when she heard the news on the radio of Kennedy being shot. (Baker, pgs. 53-54) Again, Baker gives the letter the Javert-Hankey going over. First, he asks where was George? Russ, Kitty Kelley already established where George was. Did you expect him to be at the hairdresser’s with his wife during a primary campaign? Back then, guys used combs and Brylcreem. Baker then asks why the letter had not surfaced earlier. Maybe because this was Barbara’s first book of personal memoirs? As far as I can see, that was the case. Barbara Bush did write one book previously called Millie’s Book, but that was really a children’s book about the White House, wryly written from the point of view of her dog. Baker/Hankey then asks for the original, which he says he cannot get since Bush and his wife would not talk to him for the book. I wonder why.

    What I think Baker is getting at-and he’s always getting at something or other– is this: Somehow Barbara faked this letter years later to establish another alibi. But again, for who? Her husband already had one. (I really hope Baker does not mean for herself.) Further, back in 1994 when her book was published, who harbored any suspicions about Bush Sr. and the JFK case? Hankey and Baker were years off.

    The rest of this overlong JFK section is, for me, even worse than the above. It basically amounts to what I scored Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann for in their two bad books: guilt by name association. A friend of the Bushes was letting them use their plane during the campaign. I think Baker means us to believe that this was not a friendly gesture between friends: Mr. Zeppa was really an accessory to the plot as he squired Bush around. Don’t ask me how or why. Jack Crichton was a pal of Bush’s in the Texas GOP. But Crichton, in turn, was a friend of Deputy Police Chief Lumpkin who was driving the pilot car in Kennedy’s motorcade. What that means is never made clear. But Baker also brings up the fact that Crichton provided a translator for Marina Oswald who wrongly worded her Russian phrases. What Baker leaves out is that Marina had a few translators, and they were all questionable.

    In spite of the speciousness of the above, Baker caps it off with Jack Ruby’s famous speech in an empty courtroom about people in “very high positions” putting him in the place he was in after his conviction for murder. (p. 118) I actually think Baker wants to imply that Ruby was referring to Bush.

    If he was doing that, all I can say is, Baker has as much unearned chutzpah as John Hankey. And in regards to the JFK case, he also has about as much balance and judgment as his soul brother does. Let us note just how misguided the guy is. For the sake of argument, let us grant him one of his premises in regards to the Parrott episode: That it was a charade meant to divert attention. (And with all I pointed out above, that is a very generous grant of credit.) Here’s my question: What would be the point of a diversion if both Bush and Parrott had credible alibis? Which they did. This is what the author says: “Poppy Bush was willing to divert the investigative resources of the FBI on one of the busiest days in its history.” (p. 65) When I read that I had a Hankeyian moment: I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Can Mr. Investigative Journalist Russ Baker really be this ignorant about the FBI and the Kennedy murder? As Tony Summers discovered long ago, J. Edgar Hoover was “working” on the Kennedy case from the racetrack the next day. (Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 315) As everyone except perhaps Baker knows, Hoover had closed the case against Oswald within about 2-4 hours. (Vanity Fair, 12/94, p. 90) He did so for many reasons, including the strong possibility that Oswald was an FBI informant. So the fix was in almost immediately. And it never let up. The idea that somehow Hoover was actually going to investigate 1.) Who Oswald really was, and 2.) What the true circumstances of the murder were is a preposterous tenet. But that is somehow what Baker is proposing: the Parrott episode somehow upset Hoover’s apple cart.

    Concerning J. Edgar Hoover and the JFK case, Baker is only slightly less silly than John Hankey.

    IV

    As was established in The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, from their days in the oil business in Texas, Bush Sr. knew George “the Baron” DeMohrenschildt. This was probably because the Baron partnered an oil investment firm with Eddie Hooker. (Baker, p. 75) Hooker had been Bush’s roommate at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. (ibid, p. 72) And they had stayed friends through the years.

    After giving a brief but serviceable overview of the Baron and his brother Dimitri, plus the development of the White Russian community in Dallas, the author begins to describe why the Baron was in Haiti at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. According to Baker, it was only the Baron’s distance from Dallas at the time of the murder that allowed his actions to escape the purview of the Warren Commission. (p. 113) Again, this shows how shallow Baker is on his view of the Kennedy case. Can he really be serious? Who the heck did not escape the purview of the Warren Commission? You can make a pretty good list of all those they had myopia about. In addition to DeMohrenschildt, there was Ruth and Michael Paine, David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Kerry Thornley, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Sylvia Duran, and even Sylvia Odio (who the Commission never took seriously). And that’s just those dealing with Oswald’s direct associations. The Commission was a set-up from the start. And it was meant to be so. Whether DeMohrenschildt was in Haiti or not.

    He then compounds the above with this thundering truism: “The bottom line is that the Warren Commission did not assign a seasoned criminal investigator to figure out DeMohrenshildt’s relationship with Oswald and his larger circle of connections.” (p. 127) Oh really Russ? Maybe Baker doesn’t know that the Commission had no private ‘seasoned criminal investigators’ on their staff. They relied on the FBI, CIA and Secret Service. Who, as most informed observers realize, were covering things up. Baker didn’t know this? Maybe that’s why they publish him in the New York Times.

    The author found out the real reason that DeMohrenschildt was able to escape scrutiny. It wasn’t actually because of the above. It was the blinding obfuscation of the sisal plant. Hold on a moment. Let me explain this Bakeresque idiom. See, once DeMohrenschildt handed off Oswald to the Paines, he left Texas for Haiti. Before departing he and his partner had a couple of meetings with government agents i.e. the CIA and Army intelligence. He and his business partner Clemard Charles were then paid almost $300,000 by the Haitian government for geologic testing and a prospective sisal plantation. There has always been a question about whether or not this money was really a disguised reward for his mission with Oswald.

    As far as I can see, Baker ignores the money angle. He then says that the sisal proposal was a cover to disguise what DeMohrenschildt was really doing. (pgs. 104-105) I am assuming Baker means what he already did with Oswald. But here’s my question: Who was the sisal motif supposed to fool? Critics of the Commission have always been suspicious of the Baron and his Haiti payoff. The money may have been for his Oswald duties, or it may have been for a role in a later coup against the Duvaliers in Haiti. Which attempt did take place, and Charles was jailed for his perceived role in it. But the point is, what did Baker think was going to be discussed and put on paper before the two left? Did he really think the CIA or Army intelligence was going to write that the Baron was now coming off his clandestine assignment with the future patsy in the upcoming JFK murder? Or that the interviewers were going to outline the upcoming overthrow attempt? These kinds of thing do not get written about in memoranda.

    About 140 pages later, the DeMohrenschildt story gets picked up again. This time it’s in the midst of the hurricane created by the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, and the formation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations to reopen the JFK case. In September of 1976, the Baron wrote a short letter to the new CIA Director, George Bush. (p. 268) In it the Baron described the painful situation he now found himself in: he said his phone was bugged, he was being followed, and the FBI would not help him. He thanked his old acquaintance and asked him if he could do something to help.

    If anything, the Baron was underestimating his drastic situation. He did not describe two other elements. First, the psychological treatments he was getting, actually electroshock. This may have been from the loss of his daughter three years hence; or, as Jim Marrs has written, a mysterious doctor may have inflicted it on him. (Baker, p. 271) Secondly, the weird figure of Willem Oltmans was pursuing him, trying to get him to “confess” to his role in the Kennedy murder.

    Oltmans was a Dutch journalist who knew DeMohrenschildt from a few years back– 1968 to be exact. (HSCA testimony of Oltmans, p. 10) Just precisely what he was up to, or why he pursued George insistently over the years, these have never really been explained. But its interesting that after George suddenly died on 3/29/77-allegedly a suicide-Oltmans began to spread the news that the Baron had confessed to him before he supposedly took his life. It was a bizarre plot that involved Russian KGB agents with Texas oilmen. But, according to Oltmans, the Baron himself was also involved and Oswald had acted on his instructions in this plot. (ibid, p. 28). Oltmans began his campaign to tell the world of this right after his former friend died. He testified before the HSCA in closed session on April 1, 1977. When one reads this deposition you will note that the longer Oltmans talks, the less Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum believes him.

    At around this time, reporter Jerry Policoff of New Times met with Oltmans in New York. Policoff had secured notes DeMohrenschildt had made while working on a manuscript left with his lawyer. The notes expressed his considerable fear of Oltmans and the reason he had fled from him in Amsterdam. He felt the journalist was trying to drug him in order to get him to say things he did not want to say. He also thought Oltmans was bisexual and was making a homosexual pass at him. Oltmans had heard that Jerry had secured the notes and got in touch with him to meet. Oltmans reacted to the notes by saying they were forgeries. Policoff said he was confident they were genuine. Oltmans then made some thinly disguised threats on his health. Policoff left. Oltmans’ behavior left Policoff with the strong suspicion he was some kind of intelligence asset. (Communication with Policoff, 6/24/10)

    Yet Oltmans was only one side of a pincers movement. Once George ran away from Amsterdam to escape him, Edward Epstein awaited him in the USA. And he promised the Baron thousands of dollars to just sit and talk with him about Oswald. In fact, Epstein was the last person to see him before DeMohrenschildt died. On the morning of his death, he had been subpoenaed by the HSCA. Epstein wanted to talk to George since he had been working on a biography of Oswald for Reader’s Digest. Epstein’s unofficial adviser was James Angleton. The book that derived from this effort, Legend, insinuates that the Baron was a KGB control agent for Oswald. The reader should note here the rough parallel with what Oltmans eventually was selling.

    Bush made two replies to the 9/76 missive by the Baron. One was to his staff, which had forwarded the letter to him. These are rough bullet notes saying the following: that he did know DeMohrenschildt, that the Baron got involved with dealings in Haiti, that his name was prominent in the Oswald affair, that the Baron knew Oswald prior to the JFK murder, at one time DeMohrenschildt had money, Bush had not heard from him in years, and he was not sure what his role was in the JFK matter. (p. 267)

    On the whole this is accurate. But Baker takes issue with the last two points. Concerning the first, he says that Bush was in contact with the oil geologist in 1971, and that DeMohrenschildt had written Bush a note when he became GOP County Chair in 1973. Bush may or may not have gotten that note. If he did not, he had not heard from him in about six years. Concerning the last, if Bush was not in on the JFK plot, then in 1976, that was a quite defensible stance.

    Bush wrote the Baron a brief letter back saying he sympathized with his situation. But although there was media attention to his case, he could not find any official interest right then. He then said he wished he could do more, and then signed off. Considering the fact that Epstein and Oltmans were likely working off the books for Angleton, his observation about “official interest” was probably correct. Thus ended the Bush/Baron relationship. Almost like he knows he has very little here, Baker tags on some meandering scuttlebutt about a man named Jim Savage who delivered the Baron’s car to him in Palm Beach on his return from Amsterdam. Its another of his Scrabble type name association games: Kerr-McGee, the FBI, Sun Oil, even the Pew family. (pgs. 275-277)

    The above two sections are pretty much the sum total of Baker’s work on Bush Sr. and the JFK murder. If anyone can find anything of significance here, something that somehow changes how we look at the case, please let me know. In all honesty, I can’t.

    V

    As threadbare as Baker’s work is on the JFK case, his two chapters on Bush Sr. and Watergate are probably worse (pgs. 175-252). In fact, having read much on the contemporary political scandals that have rocked the American scene, I would rank Baker’s work on Watergate with some of the most pretentiously empty political reporting I can recall. It’s so bad that it made me think he had a desperate rationale behind it all. (Which I will discuss later.)

    Baker begins his section on Watergate with a discussion of a scandal that is not even normally associated with Watergate. In fact, it may not even be a scandal. In early 1970, Richard Nixon authorized H. R. Haldeman to funnel funds from White House contributors to some 1970 congressional campaigns. The idea was to reward Nixon loyalists with campaign cash and ignore those who were not perceived as such.

    There are two important things to remember about the so-called Townhouse Operation. First, the machinations behind it occurred before any of the planning of the crimes associated with Watergate began. This would be the missions done by the infamous Plumbers units who did burglaries and surveillance operations. The planning of Townhouse predates the summer 1970 hiring of Howard Hunt by Charles Colson by about six months. (Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda, pgs. 32-33) Hunt did not start recruiting members of his Plumbers Unit until April of 1971. (Hougan, p. 29) Their first operations did not formulate until two months later with the NY Times exposure of the secret Pentagon Papers. (ibid) It was then that things like the burglary of Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office and the forgery of documents linking President Kennedy with the death of Ngo Dinh Diem began. (ibid, p. 33) In fact, in the rather lengthy three articles of impeachment against Nixon prepared by the House of Representatives, you will not find any specific mention of the Townhouse Operation. (Click here)

    Further, none of the money funneled into Townhouse was used to finance the Plumbers illegal capers. Third, in a technical sense, it is hard to argue that Townhouse was illegal. For the simple reason that laws regulating campaign funds, and their eventual usage, were not enacted until after the Watergate scandal. In other words, although it was a ‘slush fund’, it was not a violation of law. For these reasons I was curious as to why the author began with Townhouse, an event which you seldom see even mentioned in chronicles of Watergate-either conventional or revisionist.

    And make no mistake, Baker has drunk deep the revisionist history of Watergate. So in an effort to set up a Nixon vs. CIA backdrop, he mentions Nixon’s desire to attain secret CIA files that Richard Helms was reluctant to turn over. (p. 181) He says that Nixon wanted CIA files on the days near the end of the Kennedy administration. Hmm, maybe dealing with the Kennedy assassination? Problem: the paragraph where he mentions this is not footnoted. But the next paragraph is. In that paragraph Baker has John Ehrlichman telling Bob Haldeman that the CIA is holding something back and the way they are acting, it must be dynamite. The problem with this quote is that when I looked it up in the source Baker named, The Haldeman Diaries, I couldn’t find it where he said it was. I then searched that book for all references to CIA Director Richard Helms, who Baker said Nixon demanded the documents from. Still no luck.

    Now, most informed observers know that there are two sources for this ‘secret file” tale. Haldeman wrote about a meeting with Richard Helms in which he was instructed by Nixon to mention the whole “Bay of Pigs thing”. Helms came unglued when he did. So Haldeman came to believe that the phrase was a code term for the JFK murder. (See pgs. 38-39, of Haldeman’s The Ends of Power. But oddly, in those pages, Haldeman writes that although he actually wanted to do a private inquiry into the JFK case, Nixon turned it down.)

    Another source for this is Ehrlichman’s roman a clef novel, The Company. In that work, Ehrlichman is referring specifically to the secret Bay of Pigs Inspector General report. But what Baker writes here is simply confusing. He refers to “[relevant files] … regarding the turbulent and little-understood days leading up to the end of the Kennedy administration”. These secret CIA documents do not exist anywhere that I know of in file form. So what Baker is referring to, and why he uses it, are things never really made clear. And the author reveals his own confusion when he later contradicts himself by saying the files Nixon was seeking were about the Bay of Pigs. Which, of course, was at the beginning of the Kennedy presidency. (Baker, p. 200)

    The reader should note: with Townhouse, which is not really part of Watergate, and these nebulous “secret CIA files”, Baker is off to a rather unpromising start. He never recovers.

    As I said, Baker has read much of the Watergate revisionist library. He will now cherry pick from it in a way worthy of the likes of Lamar Waldron in order to fulfill his own agenda. Incredibly, the author writes the following: “My independent research takes … the facts in a completely new direction. It leads to an even more disturbing conclusion as to what was really going on, and why.” (Baker, p. 204) As we will see, Baker did next to no new research on Watergate. And his new direction is a fabricated one that I can guarantee no one will follow in the future since it is based upon quicksand.

    It was under Nixon that George Bush actually became a player on the national stage. In fact, one can argue that it was Nixon who salvaged Bush’s political career. Bush had tried to break into that national theater in two runs for the senate from Texas. He first lost to Ralph Yarborough and then to Lloyd Bentsen. Afterwards, Nixon gave Bush a job first as United Nations Ambassador and then as chair of the Republican National Committee. Nixon made it clear that although he perceived Bush to be part of the Eastern Establishment-of which he was not-he liked and trusted him. And no serious commentator whether of a conventional or a revisionist stripe-e.g. Stanley Kutler or Jim Hougan-has ever proffered that George Bush had anything to do with what happened to Nixon during Watergate. Like most Republicans, he supported him through the crisis as long as he could. His advice basically consisted of advising Nixon to tell his whole part of the story as truthfully as possible. One can read any number of Watergate books and this is what will come through.

    Baker can’t settle for that. Why? Because if Watergate was a CIA operation, it doesn’t fit his agenda of defining George Bush as this super duper Agency Black Operator from way before the Bay of Pigs. So as with the Kennedy assassination, he has to create a function for him in this labyrinthine plot. At first he dredges up Townhouse. And at first he does not tell the reader that Bush himself was a prime recipient of those funds-that is how much Nixon liked him. He then links this at the end with a call Bush made as RNC chair to Lowell Weicker. (p. 233) Weicker was a Republican member of the Senate Watergate Committee, which investigated those crimes in televised hearings. Bush, now chair of the RNC, asks Weicker if he should destroy the Townhouse records. Baker, in super conspiratorial high gear, casts this as being a ploy to get Weicker mad, knowing that Weicker was also a recipient of some of the funds, though in a much smaller way.

    To me this is ridiculous. First, Weicker needed no egging on to be outraged against the crimes of Watergate. From the beginning of his career, which goes back further than Baker outlines, Weicker has always been 1.) An independent minded politician who defies easy categorization, and 2.) Against corruption in government. For a Republican, he is so independent minded that Ted Kennedy actually presented him with a Profiles in Courage award. The idea that a character like him needed egging on, or else his actions would have been different , is completely unjustified in light of his record. Both before Watergate and after.

    Second, far from Baker’s spin, the purpose of the call seems to be for Bush to keep himself out of Townhouse, since he was the largest beneficiary of the funding. This may be why Baker soft-pedals this fact until near the end of the discussion. In fact, in his discussion of this phone call, he never reveals that Bush ranked first in Townhouse funding. (pgs. 232-33)

    To me, this angle yields about zero. But Baker has a fallback.

    As I said, the author has drunk deep in the literature of Watergate revisionism. So he is familiar with the books, Secret Agenda and Silent Coup. But you will see very little of the revolutionary discoveries about the Watergate break-in from the former in this book. This is at first seemingly odd. Why? Because it was those actions that 1.) Made the scandal front-page news 2.) Sprung a trap on Nixon which he did not at first understand and from which he could not escape 3.) Is the clearest indication that the break-in was deliberately sabotaged by CIA operatives masquerading as Nixon campaign workers.

    The above is undeniably true. But the problem for a guy with an agenda the size of Baker’s is this: there is no evidence that Bush had anything of any substance to do with any of it, in any aspect.

    So what does the ever-inventive author do? He goes over to the inferior revisionist book on the subject, Silent Coup. He borrows their aggrandizement of the role of John Dean in the scandal. Why? Please sit down before I write this. Its because in March of 1973, in a phone call with Nixon, Bush-at the urging of others– suggested sending Dean to testify before the Watergate Committee. (p. 213) That’s about it.

    The reader should understand something: in March of 1973 Nixon was being attacked in the media because of his stonewalling of the Watergate Committee. (Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate, p. 268) In fact, he was being specifically pilloried over this issue that Bush is talking to him about. That is, his invoking blanket executive privilege over public testimony by members of his staff. Nixon even said that the doctrine of executive privilege was not subject to question by the other branches of government. (ibid) What made it worse was that Dean was supposed to be writing a report on Watergate for the White House at the time. So he should have been an important witness. (ibid) Further, because Dean had cooperated with acting Director of the FBI Patrick Gray on Watergate, the threat was that if Dean did not testify, Gray would not be approved. (ibid, p. 269) So this made the issue Bush was addressing important booth in Congress and in the media. How bad did it get? It got so heated that three conservative GOP senators, Jim Buckley, John Tower, and Norris Cotton all implored the president to get Dean before congress. (ibid, p. 270) Weicker even wanted Haldeman to testify at this rather earl date. (ibid)

    So Bush was doing what several other Republican leaders were. By not informing you of that, by not specifically mentioning the circumstances and acts of many others, Baker tries to make what Bush did into some covert conspiratorial act. Which it is not. And that’s bad journalism. In fact, this whole section on Watergate is really a confession of bankruptcy on Baker’s part. Failing to find anything to implicate Bush in either the conventional or revisionist versions of Watergate, he concocted something that, for all intents and purposes, doesn’t exist. And then, after he produces nothing, he has the Hankeyan chutzpah to state that Bush was actually behind it all. (p. 232) Which is nothing but pretentious and bombastic balderdash.

    I almost don’t want to go on. But I should mention that what Baker does with the JFK and Watergate episodes is symptomatic of the rest of the book. He wants to somehow implicate the Bushes in crimes for which there is next to no evidence, while not reporting on the ones for which there is plenty of evidence. Therefore, somehow the Bushes are also involved in BCCI, the stealing of the Marcos Gold, and even the Phoenix Program. And there is about as much evidence in those instances as what Baker produces in the JFK and Watergate cases. My question then is: Why stop there? Why not involve them in the King and RFK cases Russ? (I hope I didn’t give him any ideas.)

    The overall poor quality of this book worries me. We are at a crossroads in America between the fall of the Old Media and the rise of the New. (See here for a view of that.) We know what we got from the Old Media, which is still hanging on. But if the New Media means a choice between the likes of The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast on the one hand, and the unfounded conspiracy mongering of the likes of Alex Jones and Family of Secrets on the other, then are we really any better off than we were before?

    I’m not sure.