Judyth Vary Baker: Living in Exile

[Peter Lemkin]

Jack, have you been following this link? http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index....opic=14604 There is a fellow Bill Simpich who has good things to say. I have the feeling that Judyth didn't know everything about Lee, even if she knew a lot. What interests me is whether John Armstrong was aware of these kinds of considerations about building false identities, using variations on names, and all the rest:

With or without his knowledge, it looks like Oswald was used for counter-espionage purposes as part of a CIA molehunt for Soviet spies within the agency

The names of both Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina Prusakova were repeatedly misspelled as "Lee Henry Oswald" and "Marina Pusakova" in CIA messages during the time that Oswald was reported to have visited the Cuban and Soviet consulates in Mexico City. It wasn't just a typographical error. This error and others like it had been made repeatedly by the same person.

The CIA's Ann Egerter (also known as Egeter) told Congressional investigators that she worked at the office that spied on their own spies, known as the Counter-Intelligence/Special Investigations Group, or CI/SIG. Egerter assisted in the preparation of two separate CIA messages on 10/10/63, both referring to him as Lee Henry Oswald. One message inaccurately referred to Oswald as "approximately 35 years old, with an athletic build" and the other message more accurately described him as "born 18 Oct 1939, five foot ten inches, light brown wavy hair". In fact, Oswald's central CIA file was wrongly entitled by Egerter as "Lee Henry Oswald" several years earlier when he had defected from the Marines to the Soviet Union. By the time of the weekend of the assassination, even Walter Cronkite was calling him "Lee Henry Oswald".

There was another common practice among the agencies to invert Oswald's name as "Harvey Lee Oswald". Like most people, Lee Oswald never used his middle name except for official purposes. This practice of transposing his names emanated from CIA and military sources, and the FBI eventually picked up on it as well.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) knew about this practice and looked for Oswald files under these various names during their investigation of this case during the 70s.

Just a few of many examples:

1. A remarkable 1972 handwritten memo entitled "Harvey Lee Oswald" states: "Today the DC/CI (Deputy Chief, Counter-intelligence) advised me that the Director had relayed via the DDP (Deputy Director of Plans) the injunction that the Agency was not, under any circumstances, to make inquiries or ask questions of any source or defector about Oswald."

2. Thomas Casasin, chief of CIA's Soviet Russia Division 6, wrote that at one point he had "operational interest in the Harvey story" that involved the theme of defection.

3. The Warren Commission documented someone named "Harvey Oswald" appeared at the Selective Service office in Austin to complain about his military discharge at the same time that another Oswald was heading to Mexico City.

4. Lt. Harvey Oswald was reported to be seen in a well-known bar in Havana with leading FPCC leader Robert Taber right after the Bay of Pigs invasion.

5. "Harvey Lee Oswald" has a list of approximately a hundred documents attributed to him. Many of them have been destroyed or cannot be found, including an entire FBI file under that name.

In the intelligence practice of having two or more files on a subject, the regular name is used for material that is meant for the public domain, while the transposed or misspelled name is for covert information. In that manner, an agency can tell the "truth" about the contents of their overt file, and hide its covert information in the covert file with the transposed or misspelled name.

Author and professor Peter Dale Scott cites many of the errors discussed above (and more) in his groundbreaking essay Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole. Most of these errors were committed by highly educated agents like Egerter, whose careers depend on getting names right and accurately spelling the names of relevant parties.

Scott suggests that these errors are wholly deliberate, and that this pattern is one of the essential methods used by the CIA in a "molehunt" looking for Soviet spies that might be trying to penetrate the CIA itself. If a spy without proper clearances to the document were to repeat the misspelled name to another party, this "marked card" would point to the errant spy. Scott has written:

"In the game of molehunting, of course, the distinction between targeter and targeted is not a secure one. The situation is something like the parlor game of Murder, in which the culprit is"likely to be one of the investigators."

Egerter's boss James Angleton was the head of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton used CI/SIG in a ruthless manner, destroying the lives of innocent officers and anyone else who stood in the way of his hunt for Soviet agents supposedly penetrating the CIA. By the time Angleton was fired in the midst of the Watergate era, he was accused of being a Soviet mole himself. By 1980, Congress was forced to pass a bill to compensate the unfairly accused officers in what became known as the "Mole Relief Act".

This is from post #35 on the new thread. Very interesting stuff. I ask because it seems to be to raise the possibility that Armstrong's "Harvey & Lee" thesis may have been constructed by selecting from evidence that he (Armstrong) himself may not have completely understood. Is something like that possible?

[Aside: Wouldn't it be best to keep moon-landing stuff on a moon-landing thread - rather than one on JFK?]

I have long noticed the practice of both purposeful misspellings and name tossed-salad. The WC is full of this (though they act as if it is all just clerical error); it turned up in my investigation of various covert operatives - and they all claimed to be aware of its use in their lives and files - as well as those of their pals; and I had discussed it with Weisburg who was fully aware of it. I even found it being used to hide files in 1945 on a project I'm working on now...so its use is old. In fact I was able to find a file at NARA on someone, when NARA claimed they had NONE - they had quite a bit if you understood the variants that might be used to confuse. It is all part of the magic show, misdirection of attention and learning how to hide things in plain sight. Intelligence special operations activities and methods in large part use the methodologies used in professional magic and vice versa. My uncle, a professional magician, taught me some of the standard methods of hiding things, as well as misdirection of attention and it has served me well in my research life. The first item above (#1) is a corker!....that alone blows the WC out of the water....if it was a real investigation and not itself a magic show and cover-up.