The WAR between JFK and CIA

[Jim Hargrove]

Sorry Cliff, but I disagree. I think BOTH OSWALDS were played like fiddles by their CIA handlers. Looks to me like American-born LEE Oswald and Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald were creations of the CIA, whose goal more than a decade earlier was to give a Russian-speaking CHILD immigrant an American birth certificate and ID, so he could eventually become a spy and "defect" to Russia, which is exactly what happened, with poor results.

In the summer of 1963, this program became entangled in the Kennedy Assassination. In Dallas in the late summer and early fall of 1963, American-born Lee Oswald framed Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald for the hit. Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald (LISTEN TO HIS ACCENT IN EXTANT AUDIOS--IS THAT THE VOICE OF A SOUTHERN-BORN AMERICAN?????) was killed by Jack Ruby. American-born LEE Oswald got away.

Jim

[LR Trotter]

So those of us born in the baby boom period from 1946 through 1964 will never get it. I'm glad to know that now, so I will have no need to pursue the possibility of an invisable robot with a magic gun shooting magic bullets. "Boomers will never get it". Amazing.
::thumbsdown::

[Cliff Varnell]

Sorry Cliff, but I disagree. I think BOTH OSWALDS were played like fiddles by their CIA handlers.

Looks to me to like Oswald's CIA handlers got played like fiddles. That's why they were freaked out by the Garrison probe -- they knew they were in line to take the fall.

Looks to me like American-born LEE Oswald and Russian-speaking Harvey Oswald were creations of the CIA, whose goal more than a decade earlier was to give a Russian-speaking CHILD immigrant an American birth certificate and ID, so he could eventually become a spy and "defect" to Russia, which is exactly what happened, with poor results.

In the summer of 1963, this program became entangled in the Kennedy Assassination.

Jim, you're over-reaching. This program became entangled with the Kennedy Assassination cover-up.

This Ozzie-centered cover-up would certainly have provided the pre-text for the US Air Force and US Marine Corp to blast into Havana November '63 -- had the patsy been killed circa 1 pm CST 11/22/63, instead of getting himself arrested less than an hour later which killed the "false flag" aspect of the operation.

Were Oswald's handlers also Kennedy's killers? That, my old friend Jim Hargrove, is an assumption.

Looks to me like Kennedy's killers were brutally efficient. I'm suspecting a US Army Special Forces based team specializing in narcotics assassinations.

Looks to me like Ozzie/s killer/s were a bunch of fuck ups. Oswald, big loser. Ruby, big loser. Phillips, Morales, Angleton, Helms, Hoover were all losers.

99% of JFK research is devoted to unknowable shit like the head wound/s, or to studies of the losers.

[Cliff Varnell]

So those of us born in the baby boom period from 1946 through 1964 will never get it. I'm glad to know that now, so I will have no need to pursue the possibility of an invisable robot with a magic gun shooting magic bullets. "Boomers will never get it". Amazing.
::thumbsdown::

What's amazing is that leading into the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination there were 3 major conferences -- Wecht, COPA, Lancer -- and only once was the central issue of the murder of JFK raised from any podium -- "What happened to the bullets causing the back and throat wounds?"

Dr. Cyril Wecht asked the question in his speech at Wecht.

He didn't give any answer at the podium, but he gave an interview for local Pittsburgh TV and said that one bullet caused both wounds.

::facepalm::

Amazing!

Sorry Mr Trotter, Boomers don't do "high strange."

And the evidence in the JFK assassination MUST go there -- two wounds of entrance, no exits, no bullets recovered during the autopsy.

What happened to the bullets causing the back and throat wounds? Pre-autopsy surgery?

Too high strange.

High tech weaponry?

Too high strange.

Don't ask a Boomer about JFK. All they wanna talk about is Ozzie and the Headwounds.

Poor bastids.

[LR Trotter]

So those of us born in the baby boom period from 1946 through 1964 will never get it. I'm glad to know that now, so I will have no need to pursue the possibility of an invisable robot with a magic gun shooting magic bullets. "Boomers will never get it". Amazing.
::thumbsdown::

What's amazing is that leading into the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination there were 3 major conferences -- Wecht, COPA, Lancer -- and only once was the central issue of the murder of JFK raised from any podium -- "What happened to the bullets causing the back and throat wounds?"

Dr. Cyril Wecht asked the question in his speech at Wecht.

He didn't give any answer at the podium, but he gave an interview for local Pittsburgh TV and said that one bullet caused both wounds.

::facepalm::

Amazing!

Sorry Mr Trotter, Boomers don't do "high strange."

And the evidence in the JFK assassination MUST go there -- two wounds of entrance, no exits, no bullets recovered during the autopsy.

What happened to the bullets causing the back and throat wounds? Pre-autopsy surgery?

Too high strange.

High tech weaponry?

Too high strange.

Don't ask a Boomer about JFK. All they wanna talk about is Ozzie and the Headwounds.

Poor bastids.

This will be my last response to the comments, but I will continue to be polite, as I have no need to be otherwise. Myself, I am not a military veteran, but a lot of "Boomers" ended up with their names on a wall after a one-way trip to S/E Asia. And some that came back, did not return with all they left with. Maybe they "get it". As for Cyril Wecht, I did not see/read his comments mentioned, but he was about age 15 when the "Baby Boom" era began in 1946.
::vroom::

[Jim Hargrove]

Jim, you're over-reaching. This program became entangled with the Kennedy Assassination cover-up.

This Ozzie-centered cover-up would certainly have provided the pre-text for the US Air Force and US Marine Corp to blast into Havana November '63 -- had the patsy been killed circa 1 pm CST 11/22/63, instead of getting himself arrested less than an hour later which killed the "false flag" aspect of the operation.

Were Oswald's handlers also Kennedy's killers? That, my old friend Jim Hargrove, is an assumption.

Looks to me like Kennedy's killers were brutally efficient. I'm suspecting a US Army Special Forces based team specializing in narcotics assassinations.

Looks to me like Ozzie/s killer/s were a bunch of fuck ups. Oswald, big loser. Ruby, big loser. Phillips, Morales, Angleton, Helms, Hoover were all losers.

99% of JFK research is devoted to unknowable shit like the head wound/s, or to studies of the losers.

Sorry, Cliff, but I just can't buy it. At the very time the Kennedy Administration's war with the Central Intelligence Agency had blown up so badly it was in newspaper headlines, we suddenly have all this chatter in Mexico City about a former USMC radar operator familiar with U-2 flights who had defected to the USSR telling our side he'd tell the Russians everything he knows, and Agency personnel in Mexico City AND CIA headquarters apparently can't tell how old he is or what he looks like.

And none of this is apparently important enough to bring to the attention of the Secret Service or the FBI.

I am willing to narrow my focus a bit, though. Bill Simpich knows a lot more about the Mexico City affair than I do, and here, minus all the evidence he puts together, is his take from the introduction of State Secret:
.

I offer the hypothesis that David Morales ran a piggy-backed operation on top of an anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation run by CIA officer John Tilton and FBI agent Lambert Anderson, outwitted both Angleton and Goodpasture, brought down the President, and got away with it. Whether or not Bill Harvey was part of this operation, his people were all over it and merit further scrutiny.
.

My essential point is that Harvey brought together a nest of trained assassins within the CIA who hated JFK for two related reasons. One was because of Kennedy's repeated refusal to order a military invasion of Cuba, even after the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and the horror of the Cuban missile crisis. Two was because Bobby Kennedy directly meddled in Agency operations in an insecure manner. That nest is the most likely place to find the people that were part of the impersonation of Oswald and the killing of JFK.

.

Others have argued to me that Angleton and covert action chief David Phillips were part of a plan to kill Kennedy, but my present perspective is that both of them like Goodpasture and operations chief Richard Helms, who I believe were in on the molehunt - were entrapped by the impersonation.

.

Angleton and Phillips drove the cover-up for their own protection. Otherwise, their careers and reputations would have been ruined, to say nothing of the future of the CIA. Phillips told investigator Kevin Walsh shortly before he died that he believed American intelligence officers were involved in the assassination. Angleton's last words were filled with regret and sorrow. "I've made so many mistakes."

In photo captions, Morales is identified as Counterintelligence and paramilitary chief at the CIA station in Miami and Harvey as the CIA official who ran Staff D signals intelligence, the anti-Castro Task Force W operation, and the ZR-RIFLE assassination program.

JIm

[Cliff Varnell]

Sorry, Cliff, but I just can't buy it.

Not a problem, Jim. You and I are friends from waaay back.

At the very time the Kennedy Administration's war with the Central Intelligence Agency had blown up so badly it was in newspaper headlines,

Bingo!

From the Richard Starnes' Washington Daily News 10/02/63 article, from which Arthur Krock famously quoted.

Others Critical, Too

Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA.

"If the United States ever experiences a 'Seven Days in May' it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon," one U.S. official commented caustically.

("Seven Days in May" is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.)

CIA "spooks" (a universal term for secret agents here) have penetrated every branch of the American community in Saigon, until non-spook Americans here almost seem to be suffering a CIA psychosis.

Was this a "warning" to JFK that the CIA was plotting his overthrow, or was this a preemptive leak to help frame the CIA in advance in case the impending military-style ambush went awry?

I think there was a patsy-chain, Jim. There were a lot of guys on it. I think the reason Jack Lawrence went back to the car dealer and puked his brains out in the bathroom soon after the assassination was because he realized he'd been set up.

I think the reason LBJ had a breakdown in the AF1 bathroom (according to Gen McHugh) was because he realized he was set up to take the fall -- "They're going to get us all!" McHugh quotes the Texan as bawling out.

And that's why the CIA lost its shit over Garrison.

They knew they were set up, heads might have to roll, starting with that great career back-up patsy Howard Hunt.

we suddenly have all this chatter in Mexico City about a former USMC radar operator familiar with U-2 flights who had defected to the USSR telling our side he'd tell the Russians everything he knows, and Agency personnel in Mexico City AND CIA headquarters apparently can't tell how old he is or what he looks like.

And none of this is apparently important enough to bring to the attention of the Secret Service or the FBI.

I am willing to narrow my focus a bit, though. Bill Simpich knows a lot more about the Mexico City affair than I do, and here, minus all the evidence he puts together, is his take from the introduction of State Secret:
.

I offer the hypothesis that David Morales ran a piggy-backed operation on top of an anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation run by CIA officer John Tilton and FBI agent Lambert Anderson, outwitted both Angleton and Goodpasture, brought down the President, and got away with it. Whether or not Bill Harvey was part of this operation, his people were all over it and merit further scrutiny.
.

My essential point is that Harvey brought together a nest of trained assassins within the CIA who hated JFK for two related reasons. One was because of Kennedy's repeated refusal to order a military invasion of Cuba, even after the humiliation at the Bay of Pigs and the horror of the Cuban missile crisis. Two was because Bobby Kennedy directly meddled in Agency operations in an insecure manner. That nest is the most likely place to find the people that were part of the impersonation of Oswald and the killing of JFK.

.

Others have argued to me that Angleton and covert action chief David Phillips were part of a plan to kill Kennedy, but my present perspective is that both of them like Goodpasture and operations chief Richard Helms, who I believe were in on the molehunt - were entrapped by the impersonation.

.

Angleton and Phillips drove the cover-up for their own protection. Otherwise, their careers and reputations would have been ruined, to say nothing of the future of the CIA. Phillips told investigator Kevin Walsh shortly before he died that he believed American intelligence officers were involved in the assassination. Angleton's last words were filled with regret and sorrow. "I've made so many mistakes."

In photo captions, Morales is identified as Counterintelligence and paramilitary chief at the CIA station in Miami and Harvey as the CIA official who ran Staff D signals intelligence, the anti-Castro Task Force W operation, and the ZR-RIFLE assassination program.

JIm

This is good stuff, no doubt. What I can't buy is the notion that Morales was at the top of the plot.

I can see Morales as operating primarily not as a CIA operative per se, but as an operative for a pan-organizational team of elite-backed drug smugglers.

Morales was someone's tool. He was expendable after all, right?

[Cliff Varnell]

This will be my last response to the comments, but I will continue to be polite, as I have no need to be otherwise. Myself, I am not a military veteran, but a lot of "Boomers" ended up with their names on a wall after a one-way trip to S/E Asia. And some that came back, did not return with all they left with. Maybe they "get it".

My brother volunteered to go to Vietnam. Went in hating the Commies like all "good Americans" and came out hating the US government -- like all good Americans.

He doesn't get the JFK assassination, either.

In fact, I don't think people "get" the Vietnam War at all.

Was the purpose of the Vietnam War to prevent communists from taking over So. Vietnam -- or was the Vietnam War waged to keep the Corsican Mafia from controlling SE Asian heroin production?

As for Cyril Wecht, I did not see/read his comments mentioned, but he was about age 15 when the "Baby Boom" era began in 1946.
::vroom::

I'm missing your point. Wecht is not the only target of my critique.

The older cohort -- GreatestGen/Boomer/OlderGenX -- just doesn't do "high strange", ok?

Very few people in that age range can comfortably "go there" -- everyone feels silly talking about bullets that dissolve in the body, in spite of significant evidence that that's exactly what happened.

It's pop cultural conditioning. What else would it be?

[Cliff Varnell]

I told this story over at the EF last fall, good time to tell it here.

A while back I asked a Millennial friend of mine -- a New Englander in her mid-twenties -- why it was that her generation didn't have that much interest in the JFK assassination, as some polls might lead one to believe.

"It's because they make it so boring," she said.

A couple of weeks later she asked me what I'd been up to and I said I was having a blast on the internet, giving people hell over the central issue of the JFK assassination.

She asked me what was the central issue of the JFK assassination. I told her she didn't want to know, but she insisted, no nonsense.

I explained that JFK had a wound of entrance in the back with no exit, and there was no round recovered in the autopsy. There was a wound of entrance in the throat, no exit, no round recovered during the autopsy. What happened to the bullets causing the back and throat wounds? That's the central issue.

She thought a moment and said -- "But was it a real autopsy?"

I said there were a lot of problems with the autopsy, but nonetheless, that was the situation. Two wounds of entrance, no exits, no bullets.

I said -- "Some people think the bullets were removed prior to the autopsy--"

"--Or it was some government shit that dissolved!"

I was floored. A previously dis-interested 25-year old reflects for a moment on the basic facts of the case and trumps all three major JFK 50 conferences with its accumulated research experience measured in millennia.

It's because high-tech solutions are obvious to today's youngsters, but to the older cohort its the stuff of silly sci-fi.

[Jim Hargrove]

Was this a "warning" to JFK that the CIA was plotting his overthrow, or was this a preemptive leak to help frame the CIA in advance in case the impending military-style ambush went awry?

I think there was a patsy-chain, Jim. There were a lot of guys on it. I think the reason Jack Lawrence went back to the car dealer and puked his brains out in the bathroom soon after the assassination was because he realized he'd been set up.

I think the reason LBJ had a breakdown in the AF1 bathroom (according to Gen McHugh) was because he realized he was set up to take the fall -- "They're going to get us all!" McHugh quotes the Texan as bawling out.

And that's why the CIA lost its shit over Garrison.

They knew they were set up, heads might have to roll, starting with that great career back-up patsy Howard Hunt.

Maybe you're just being too clever. Why isn't it more likely that this was exactly as it appeared to be? That Administration officials were alarmed that a powerful, secretive organization had gone rogue, and these officials were so alarmed they were starting to go public. No one hated Kennedy like the anit-Castro Cubans and, I suspect, the CIA people handling them. Hatred cuts through a lot of what otherwise might be finessed.

This is good stuff, no doubt. What I can't buy is the notion that Morales was at the top of the plot.

I can see Morales as operating primarily not as a CIA operative per se, but as an operative for a pan-organizational team of elite-backed drug smugglers.

Morales was someone's tool. He was expendable after all, right?

Don't forget Bill Harvey. He was pretty far up the food chain.

To me, though, it always goes back to Oswald. Whoever was setting up Oswald in Dallas in the fall of '63 knew pretty much how the hit would take place. And I think that guy was the American born with the name Lee Harvey Oswald. Listen to the speech of the guy killed by Jack Ruby. New Orleans accents can get a little weird, but does that sound to you like the voice of a man born and raised in the American south and southwest?

The clearest, simplest explanation for all of this is that the Oswald Project was simply a CIA spy program from beginning to end, using the idea of look-alikes that Allen Dulles wrote so fondly about, and that some or all of the Oswald handlers turned it into an important part of the assassination in the late summer and fall of '63. In the end, DNA evidence will prove or disprove this, but it may take time to make it happen without the wrong fingers in the test tubes.

We'll probably just have to agree to disagree, again.