JFK Assassination: The Quintessential 'False Flag' Operation

[Charles Drago]

Trowbridge,

I'll selectively comment below. But first, thanks for your introductory remarks on the history and nature of false flag ops. They are deserving of a dedicated response, which I hope to get to soon.

For now, I'll pick up at the point where you bring Khrushchev and LHO into the discussion.

It was only after Nikita Khrushchev consolidated power after The Boss's apparent murder that 'false flag' efforts became again real possibilities. Once Khrushchev had cut down the KGB, Red Army, and the bureaucracy to size, the Party's General Secretary thought seriously of using them to expand the communist world, especially after American intelligence agencies started exploring their use in preventing it. To head the KGB after General Ivan Serov was exposed for having stolen the Belgian crown during its Smersh clean-up of Germany after the collapse of the Nazis, he chose Alexander Shelepin, the most ambitious head of the Young Communist League, to be its new director, making the security service the closest instrument of the CPSU. Shelepin saw the post as the ideal stepping stone for becoming the chief himself.

Shelepin's plan was based upon the comings and goings of ex-Marine Lee Harvey Oswald, of all people!

With the style and space limitations of Internet blog postings clearly in mind, I must ask for documentation of the above and of other of your apparent statements of fact as proffered below.

[size=12]Moreover, William King Harvey, its 'Executive Action' director, had apparently had Charles Siragusa aka QJ/WIN of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics recruit Oswald as a covert assassin just in case this most unlikely one - a person with no criminal record, had not worked for any US gov't agency, and was free to travel as he pleased - could work his way so into Moscow's confidence that he could bag someone like Shelepin or Nikita himself with little possiblity of blowback at the Agency's expense.

The Siragusa-as-QJ/WIN identification is quite the bomb. Please, again within the confines of this format, share the documentation that supports your as-fact assertion.

If this were the case, Harvey's known effforts to assassinate Fidel Castro by known underworld figures - Antonio de Varona, underlings of Johnny Rosselli, Santos Trafficante, and Sam Giancana, etc. - could have been mere diversions to protect the identity of more deadly assassins, like Oswald, for more serious game as the destruction of the Cuban leader and its most shaky regime seemed just a matter of time by either some clownish murder or by an anti-Castro invasion.

Okay, you're losing me on the LHO-as-super-assassin business. I know of nothing in the official and unoffical investigative records to support this claim -- which makes it all the more interesting to me. I want to remain open to serious challenges to conventional wisdom -- especially my own.

But this assertion needs support. And I'm concerned that it may be designed as an effort to balance the LHO-as-assassination-buster argument -- a balance intended to support the uncertainty that for me was and is a prime goal of the assassination's Sponsors.

*****

Forgive me for rushing past so much of your work, but I have no choice if I'm to get to the essence of my interest in it.

The non-invasion [of Cuba] pledge, though, would be the undoing of both JFK and Khrushchev.

Agreed.

The mere mention of Golitsyn's claims about the President's unreliability when it came to national security being apparently true - what could force his resignation if officially investigated - was good enough for his opponents in covert government, especially those in CIA who had worked so hard to eliminate Castro's Cuba, to start planning his assassination. Harvey, broken by the settlement of the Missile Crisis, and officially relegated to Rome because of his continuing Mafia associations, immediately put together a team to rapidly hypnotize Oswald, who had just asked for new visas for his family to return to the USSR. (John Marks has described the effort in The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate', pp. 202-3, and MKULTRA Subproject 129, Notes, p. 244.)

I just realized that I'm now reading all this as a lengthy treatment for a screenplay. "Harvey ... immediately put together a team to rapidly hyptonize Oswald" describes a fabulous play-within-a-play. Do you know that this actually took place? If so, how?

Langley's Angleton apparently asked the Mexico City station chief Winston Scott to find a suitable candidate, and it came up with a low-level unnamed agent who the Soviets had apparently doubled, almost assuredly Oswald, and Harvey, it seems, staged the attempt but it failed. A member of Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff who observed the test claimed that the hypnotic consultant, apparently Dr. George White, assigned to doing the task froze, but it seems much more likely that it didn't take because of Oswald's opposition to killing the President despite his desire for the money. The Agency settled for making Lee the programmed "patsy" for the assassination, while Giancana's underlyings Felix (Milwaukee Phil) Alderisio, Richard Cain, and Chuckie Nicoletti actually did it under Jack Ruby's direction..

Trowbridge, I too have had it up to here (pointing to my chin) with agents provocateur who infiltrate Internet forums and demand proof proof proof. Yet once again I must ask you how you know what Angleton asked Scott to do in this instance. And what exactly did Alderisio, Cain, and Nicoletti do? And what was Ruby directing?

[T]he plot went so badly awry in Dallas.[/SIZE]

I contend that the plot went almost precisely according to plan. But I digress.

Besides, Oswald had an alibi for the shooting, as he was standing at the base of the TSBD when the President was assassinated, as the photograph of it by AP photographer James Altgens established.[/SIZE][/FONT]

Perhaps you should consider a third alternative answer to the Oswald-or-Lovelady either/or query.

And perhaps you can make a clear, evidence-supported argument for:

the test firing of Oswald's [/SIZE][/FONT]rifle which almost killed Connally when Richard Cain fired it at JFK from the sixth floor on the TSBD.

In closing, I'll return to a previous observation.

My hat is off to you for the research and creative thinking that distinguishes your essay. In my opinion -- and I'll re-read the entire post -- what we've got here is a wonderfully rendered treatment for a major motion picture. It is complex, compelling, marvelously plotted -- although perhaps too intelligent for American audiences.

A six-part adaptation by the likes of Arthur Hopcraft for a BBC production would do your work justice, I think.

Best,

Charles