Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza Revisited - An Update

VALKYRIE AT DEALEY PLAZA REVISITED (An Update)

By William Kelly 

Valkyrie was the code name for the German military officer’s plot to kill Hitler and take over the government that culminated in the July 20, 1944 bombing attempt that failed to kill Hitler, an event that repeatedly surfaces in the story of President Kennedy’s assassination.

Valkyries were the fairies of Norse legend who flew above the battlefield and decided who would live and who would die, and was the theme for Richard Wagner's classical composition Ride of the Valkyries. [(4) Richard Wagner - Ride of The Valkyries - YouTube ]

The association between the German plot to kill Hitler and the assassination of President Kennedy first came to my attention when I interviewed Volkmar Schmidt, a friend of George deMohrenschildt who hosted a house party set up specifically for Lee and Marina Oswald to meet Michael and Ruth Paine. While Michael Paine didn’t show, Ruth and Marina became fast friends, and while they conversed in Russian in the kitchen, Volkmar Schmidt and Lee Oswald had a lengthy two hour conversation. I talked with him for the same length on the phone in a recorded conversation in 1995:

Volkmar Schmidt: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/volkmar-schmidt-interview.html

Schmidt, born in Germany, was raised by his good friend’s father, Dr. Kuetemeyer a professor of psychosomatic psychology at the University of Heidelberg. In the course of their conversation, Schmidt said he used a reverse psychology technique taught to him by Kuetemeyer, in suggesting that right wing fascist General Edwin Walker should be killed much like Hitler should have been killed.

Schmidt even acknowledged mentioning the July 20, 1944 plot as an example, and told me that Keutemeyer personally knew two of the plotters, Herr von Halen and Dr. Adam von Trott zu Solz, both of whom were captured, tourtured and executed for their roles in the Valkyrie plot.  

When he learned that Oswald was accused of killing President Kennedy and was a suspect in the shooting of General Walker, Schmidt himself felt guilty for planting the seed in Oswald’s mind, as shortly after their conversation Oswald ordered the rifle said to have been used in both attacks.

Schmidt said, “….and naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry….I certainly didn’t tell him to take a pot shot at him (Walker)…I may have triggered it.”

In her testimony before the Warren Commission Marina Oswald mentioned that when he returned home the night someone shot at Walker he admitted he did it, referring to the idea that Walker should have been killed like Hitler should have been, echoing Schmidt’s reverse psychological reasoning.

An examination of Marina’s notebook included the name - , that turns out was what an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) psychological warfare officer said was Hitler’s real name in an attempt to embarrass him.   – See link: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2023/04/hitler-at-grassy-knoll.html

In a 2009 New York Post column promoting Lemar Waldron’s book “Legacy of Secrecy”, gossip writer Liz Smith called the Warren Commission a “fairy-tale” and wrote:

In parentheses: “(The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff even referred to the World War II plot to kill Hitler as their role model for getting rid of Castro. You can see that story told by Tom Cruise in the new movie ‘Valkyrie.’).”

[BK Notes: Just as Rupert Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson shortly after he did three shows advancing the idea that the CIA was behind the assassination of President Kennedy, Liz Smith was fired by Murdoch shortly after writing this column. JFKcountercoup: Murdoch Axes Smith and Carlson over JFK? ]

Since I had read all three of Waldron’s books on the assassination, and could not recall any such mention of the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, I had to do some digging, and found it mentioned by Gus Russo in a footnote in his book on the Kennedys and Castros Live By the Sword (thanks Gus) giving the RIF – Record Identification Form number – 202-1000101-10028 – that I found among the Mary Ferrell Foundation site (thanks Rex Bradford).

Higgins Memo: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-higgins-memo-of-jcs-meeting-of-sept.html

The memo was written by Colonel Walter Higgins, who served as an adjunct to General Victor “Brute” Krulak, then Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA), with offices in the Pentagon and White House. Krulak’s job was to give the CIA any special military assistance for covert actions, especially in Cuba and Vietnam and he wrote the memo of the minutes of the September 25, 1963 meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefing by Desmond FitzGerald, who had taken over responsibility for the CIA’s covert operations against Cuba from William Harvey, who had been relieved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Air Force Chief Of Staff General Curtis Lemay was acting as temporary chairman at the time because the chairman General Maxwell Taylor was on a special mission to Vietnam. While the whole memo is extremely important, and what I consider to be one of the most significant documents released under the JFK Act of 1992, Under Bullet Point 13. Higgins writes:

“He (FitzGerald) commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed.”

Then there’s the clincher: “He considers it as a parallel in history; i.e., the plot to kill Hitler; and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach. (against Castro).”

So the CIA had “studied in detail” the German military plot to kill Hitler and take over the government of Germany during WWII as a means of having disgrunted Cuban military officers to kill Castro and take over the government of Cuba.

Sounds reasonable enough, but when Jim Lesar of the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for their “detailed study” of the Hitler plot, they could find no records whatsoever in their files related to that plot. When the AARC sued in civil court for a more detailed response, they found one document, a cold war propaganda pamphlet that tried to blame the failure of the plot on communists.

While the CIA may have lost their “detaiiled study” of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, we know from the history of the story that the Valkyrie plan was devised by Col. Von Staufenberg as a contintunity in government emergency plan to have the Home Guard seize key governemnt and media buildings and ensure the leadership was continued, a plan that they had Hitler himself approve. The national emergency example given was a revolt by the millions of foreign slave laborers in the country.

The five aspects of the German military's Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler that also appear in the JFK assassination story include: 1) The use of Covert Intelligence Operational procedures and security - codes, no written records, need to know, etc; 2) Obtaining the victim's approval for the plan - Hitler approved Valkyrie, JFK and or RFK are said by Sam Halpern and David Belin to have approved the assassination of Castro; 3) Use of Home Guard (National Guard-Army Reserves in USA) to carry out the plan on the ground; 4) Control of Communications and Media -as was done with JFK in Collins Radio and Mockingbird; 5) Blame the opposition - Communists. 

The control of the mass media – radio, communications and newspapers, was considered a key element, as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, who planned Valkyrie and planted the bomb put it, “only the conspiracy must speak.”

Another key aspect of the Valkyrie plan was to blame the death of Hitler on the Gestapo, SS and Communists, who would be rounded up in the immediate aftermath.

Since the CIA’s Valkyrie study has no documented history in their files, it is possible that a number of persons living at the time could have filled them in on the details – Allen Dulles, Mary Bancroft and Hans Bernd Gisevius.

Gisevius was a German military intelligence officer who made the acquaintance of OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, and informed him of the plot, and received Dulles’ assistance. Dulles assigned his secretary and paramour Mary Bancroft to be Gisevius’ case officer, and she provides the details of her role in the plot in her book Autobiography of a Spy.

Gisevious was in Berlin at the time of the bombing, and with word from Stauffenberg that the bomb had killed Hitler, he began to issue press releases, but when it was determined Hitler was alive, and the plotters were being rounded up and executed, he went into hiding in the basement of a friend’s house. He got word to Dulles and Bancroft, who arranged for him to receive forged documents that allowed him to travel to Switzerland.

After testifying at the Nurenberg trials, sending some of his former associates to the gallows, Gisivious came to America, where he lived for a time with Dulles’ top lieutenant Tom Braden, and then Dulles arranged for Gisivious to get a job in Dallas.  On July 20, 1954, the tenth anniversary of the Valkyrie plot, Dulles and Gisivious had dinner together in Washington D.C. at a public restaurant that received newspaper coverage.

As David Talbot points out in his book The Devil’s Chessboard, Dulles’ assistant Mary Bancroft was a close personal friend and European traveling companion with Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Michael Paine’s mother.

It was Ruth Paine who arranged for Oswald to obtain the job at the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). The building's owner David Harold “D.H. Dry Hole” Byrd was on a big game hunting safari at the time of the assassination. Byrd had also been a co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) that included a young Lee Harvey Oswald.

If Africa Byrd visited Safariland, a hunting preserve that was owned by a German Werner von Alvensleben, whose father, according to an OSS report, was a German authority on assassination, who after the failure of the Valkyrie plot, wrote an essay in support of it.

D.H. Byrd financially supported his cousin, Admiral Richard Byrd’s polar expeditions, as did Art Collins, whose home made short wave radio receiver could pick up Admiral Byrd’s radio reports when the Navy couldn’t. Collins, a friend of Curtis LeMay, then received military contracts to install radio in all of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers as well as the Executive Air Fleet, including Air Force One.

Air Force General James Doolittle was another hunting partner of Byrd, and was one of the three members of the Eisenhower appointed Doolittle Commission to study CIA covert activities, and their report concluded that such covert operations were necessary against Communism and were increased.

When Byrd returned home to Dallas after his African safari trip he invited his host von Alvensleben to visit, and showed off his trophy room that included the stuffed heads of big game animals he had killed, as well as one of the sixth floor windows from his TSBD

THE CIA-MAFIA PLOTS TO KILL CASTRO

That the CIA had recruited mafia bosses to assist them in assassinating Fidel Castro was not known to the Warren Commission, except for Commissioner Dulles, who kept that fact to himself.

When Warren Commission attorney – the still living Sam Stern was questioned by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), he told them that had the Commission known about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro “they would have conducted an entirely different kind of investigation,” and not trusted the CIA as much as they did. 

Sam Stern and HSCA: JFKCountercoup2: HSCA Sam Stern Interview - Smoking Doc.#2

The plots to kill Castro are a key aspect of the assassination of President Kennedy, as President Lyndon Johnson said, “We were running a damn Murder Inc. in the Caribbean,” in regards to the CIA attempt to kill Castro.

And former Warren Commission attorney and Rockefeller Commission counsel David Belin even brings killing Hitler into the Castro-Kennedy assassination equation. While most people know of his book supporting the Warren Commission Report “You Are the Jury,” Belin also wrote “Final Disclosure,” in which he reports on his investigation of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and their signifiance.

David Belin – Final Disclosure:  https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/08/david-belins-about-face.html?m=1

In Final Disclosure Belin writes: “Moreover, inside the CIA people were developing scenarios to show why the presidential order was not necessarily appropriate for all occasions. The example most often cited was Adolf Hitler. ‘Would not the world have been better off it we had had a CIA in 1938 and someone had gone over to assassinate Adolf Hitler?....Yet there is still that question to be answered. What would we do if there were another Adolf Hitler who came into power and threatened world domination?”

So inside the CIA there was much talk about justifying the assassination of Castro by comparing him to Hitler, just as Volkmar Schmidt did with Oswald and Walker.

Now we recognize, as former Warren Commission lawyers Sam Stern and David Belin have, that the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro are extremely significant in regards to the assassination of President Kennedy, and should be studied as such.

Former FBI Agent, the late Bill Turner once concluded, “We now know what happened at Dealey Plaza to a fairly good degree of certainty. The motives were piling up – the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the two-track backchannel to Castro, - the motives were piling up to the point where they had to assassinate him. I think it’s now pretty obvious, with the information we have today, that the mechanism of it came out of the allegiance between the CIA and the Mafia. They already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just swittched targets and killed JFK instead.”

Turner’s opinion is shared by others, including Gene Wheaton, a former US miliitary investigator who blew the whistle on the Iran-Contra affair, and ran a CIA owned airline with former JMWAVE commando leader, the still living Carl Jenkins, who Wheaton lived with and met a number of Jenkins’ former anti-Castro Cuban commandos.

Wheaton: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2022/01/confirming-wheaton-and-jenkins-i.html

Wheaton told Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) attorney Ann Buttimer that based on his knowledge, “Cuban exiles who were orginally trained by the CIA to kill Castro, and killed Kennedy instead, considering him a traitor for his failure to support them at the Bay of Pigs.”

And the Higgins Memo brings the Valkyrie plot and the CIA plots to kill Castro together, a Castro plot that was redirected to JFK in Dallas.

At the time of the assassination, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, minus General LeMay, who was on a hunting expedition of his own, were meeting with their West German counterparts, the German General Staff, that included Generals Hans Speidel, who was responsible for convincing General Erwin Rommel to join the plotters, which led to Rommel’s execution, though Speidel survived.

During the meeting the Germans were surprised when they were interupted with the news that the President had been shot, and General Taylor continued with the meeting. When it was announced that the president was dead, the meeting was adjurned, and General Taylor took a nap.

Although the CIA has lost their “detailed study” of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, to be used against Castro, we know where it went – it became the AMLASH plot to kill Castro, with Dr. Rolando Cubella agreeing to kill Castro, an operation that was run personally by Desmond FitzGerald.

At the time of the assassination, FitzGerald was having lunch at the exclusive City Tavern Club in Georgetown with his assistant Sam Halpern, a rabid Kennedy haiter. Being informed of the assassination they left, with Halpern and FitzGerald wondering out loud if the assassination “had anything to do with Cubans.”  

As Desmond FitzGerald told the Joint Chiefs of Staff, there were a number of Cuban military officers who were disenchanted with the Castro regime, but they weren’t confident enough to talk to one another to plot a coup.

That wasn’t the case with the US military, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff were united in their oposition to President Kennedy over the air support for the Bay of Pigs, the failure to invade Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, his reluctance to approve the plans to assassinate Castro, and the idea that JFK could conduct backchannel  communications with Castro with the goal of normalizing diplomatic relations. Their disenchantment with President Kennedy rose to the level of despise and hatred, except for General Taylor, who was kept out of the Valkyrie loop.

The Valkyrie plan to kill Hitler failed, the Valkyrie plan that was studied by the CIA to be redirected to kill Castro was, according to CIA records, “disapproved by higher authority,” and was then utilized as the strategic plan against the higher authority - President Kennedy at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. 

Billkelly3@gmail.com

BK Notes: Sources, Footnotes and additions will be added ASAP.

Next Up: PATHFINDER @ Dealey Plaza - The Tactical Plan to kill JFK. 

Additional Links:

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-significance-of-higgins-memo.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2016/02/valkyrie-at-dealey-plaza-conspiracy.html?m=1

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/09/valkyrie-at-dealey-plaza-updated.html?m=0

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2022/08/byrd-alvensleben-doolittle-and-pawley.html

https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/thread-782.html

German References to Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza: https://books.google.com/books?id=rQhqEAAAQBAJ&pg=PT433&lpg=PT433&dq=jfkcountercoup+valkyrie+at+Dealey+plaza&source=bl&ots=zXpVNP9Yzp&sig=ACfU3U3h0IZg8HMBs30swdsI3io4pRt7zg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjyiP2otKD_AhUCGVkFHYPxBvwQ6AF6BAgdEAI - v=onepage&q=jfkcountercoup%20valkyrie%20at%20Dealey%20plaza&f=false

Hollywood's Next - The Assassination

                                        

 Far Out Magazine's Preview:  Al Pacino and John Travolta set to star in new JFK thriller

That's Far Out all right. 

New Hollywood Version of The Assassination

Hollywood is getting set to produce “The Assassination,” a JFK assassination movie that has been ten years in the making and finally set to begin production in September, starring Al Pachino, John Travolta, Viggo Mortensen and Shia LeBeouf. It will be directed by David Mamet (House of Games and Wag the Dog) and produced by Gary Hamilton of Arclight Films.

The movie will attempt to portray the assassination of President Kennedy from the mob’s point of view, with a script written by Mamet and Nicholas Celozzi, grandnephew of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.

Giancana was a key player in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, two of which – code named Valkyrie and Pathfinder, were redirected to JFK in Dallas. But Giancana certainly wasn’t the mastermind behind the assassination operation, and his “orders,” if he gave them, were not what led to the murder any more than Carlos Marchello’s confession can be taken as real, or Clay Shaw or Castro were responsible.

Add The Assassination to Executive Action, JFK, The Irishman, and other JFK assassination films, though one stands out as it was basically missed - simply called Ruby, it delves into the life of Jack Ruby and as former reporter and mayor Wes Wise told me, Ruby best portrays the city of Dallas as it was at the time of the assassination. It also gets into the mob life and the mob molls who play a key role in the story. 

Giancana is a good starting point, as the mob boss of Chicago, heir to the Capone outfit, and chairman of the board of the National Syndicate of Organized Crime that was established in Atlantic City, NJ in the spring of 1929 to non-violently settle disputes among mobsters and avoid another St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

In Atlantic City the mobsters, led by Lucky Luciano, took Meyer Lansky’s suggestion to get heavily involved in casino gambling after the end of prohibition. They established casinos in Saratoga, NY, Dade County, Florida and Havana, where Lansky brokered a deal with Batista, the dictator, to allow the mob to control casinos in hotels with 500 rooms or more.

Although the mob had covered their bets and doubled down by supporting Fidel Castro early on, when he took over on New Year’s Day 1959 and threatened the casinos, they turned against him, as did the U.S. government.

When Eisenhower was still president, the CIA’s chief of covert operations Richard Bissell, who handled the U2 program, sent CIA officer James “Big Jim” O’Connell to Las Vegas to see if the mob was interested in working with the CIA in killing Castro. O’Connell went to former FBI agent and top Vegas attorney Robert Mahu, who in turn contacted John Rosselli, Sam Giancana’s man in Vegas.

Rosselli had to get Giancana’s permission, which was no problem, but Giancana insisted Havana and Tampa mob boss Santos Traficante, who Jack Ruby had previously visited in a Cuban detention center, be brought into the operation.

At first they decided to try to poison Castro when he dined at one of his favorite restaurants where Traficante had an associate who was paid ten grand in cash and given the poison, but Castro was a no-show, so the first CIA-Mob attempt to kill Castro failed. The CIA and the Mobsters weren’t through however, and then JFK was elected president.

Giancana certainly was a major player in politics and the assassination game. As a friend of Frank Sinatra he helped get John Kennedy elected by having Sinatra’s good friend Skinny D’Amato, owner of the 500 Club in Atlantic City, to get the West Virginia Sheriff’s Association to back Kennedy in the primary there, said to be the most pivital primary election ever. Giancana also helped JFK carry Illinois in the general election.

Sinatra had introduced both Giancana and Kennedy to Judyth Campbell Exner, who they both bedded, and used as a messenger moll between them. Sinatra and Giancana also bought the Cal-Neva Lodge and casino in Nevada, where old man Joe Kennedy used to live away from home. It’s also where Giancana brought singer Phyllis Maguire that led to Sinatra losing his Nevada gaming license. And Giancana, suspecting Maguire was also having an affair with comedian Dan Rowan, had an electronic bug placed n Maguire’s Vegas suite that was discovered by the police. But Giancana pulled out his Get Out of Jail Card because he was also working with the CIA in the plots to kill Castro. And it worked.

After the Bay of Pigs, O’Connell was replaced as John Rosselli’s case officer by William Harvey, who was in charge of the CIA’s assassination program code named ZR/RIFLE.  When President Kennedy asked to see “America’s James Bond” who was licensed to kill, he was presented with William Harvey, who checked his pistols with the Secret Service at the Oval Office door.

Harvey and Rosselli got along famously together, matched each other drink for drink, though Harvey did not get along with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, who was also responsible for overseeing the CIA’s Cuban operations.

They devised other ways to kill Castro, with Traficante being dropped out of the loop, though since Rosselli was Giancana’s right hand man, the Chicago mob boss was still in the hunt.

Besides ZR/RIFLE, Harvey was put in charge of the CIA’s Cuban Desk and the CIA Task Force on Castro, that Harvey renamed Task Force W and set up shop in the basement of the CIA’s new Headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Harvey also controlled the CIA’s Miami Station JMWAVE, at the University of Miami, where the remnants of the Bay of Pigs brigade were trained as commandos and infiltrated into Cuba on sabotage missions approved by the National Security Council. When RFK visited JMWAVE, he took a teletype out of a machine, and Harvey ripped it out of his hands saying he wasn’t cleared to read it, thus antagonizing their already strained relations.

JMWAVE was home of the Pathfinders, the best of the Bay of Pigs brigade, who were given special training and sent into Cuba weeks before the invasion to lay the groundwork, but once it failed, they were either killed, captured or escaped back to Florida where they were the elite commandos trained and run out of JMWAVE.

As far as I could tell there were at least three Pathfinder teams, each with its own boat, and each with its own private sponsor, giving it an air of independence from the CIA – with William Pawley, Clare Booth Luce and John Rosselli each having their own team.  At JMWAVE, Rosselli was known as “Colonel Rawlins,” and was dressed in a US Army colonel’s uniform. He worked with one of the three teams that was trained by former US Marine Carl Jenkins, CIA explosives and sniper expert John “I.F.” Harper, and US Army Ranger Captain Edward Roderick.

Roderick, along with US Army Ranger Captain Bradley Ayers, was cross posted to the CIA from the Army by General Victor Brute Krulak, the Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA), with offices in the White House and the Pentagon, where he was responsible for supplying the CIA with military support for covert operations, especially against Cuba and Vietnam.

Roderick told Ayers that Rosselli was a mobster who like to drink, and was supplying the Pathfinder unit with “strategic” advice. Rosselli also arranged for Harvey to supply his team with a U-Haul trailer full of special arms, sniper rifles, ammo and explosives that were infiltrated into Cuba to use against Castro.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, Harvey ordered the Pathfinder teams into Cuba, but when Attorney General Robert Kennedy learned this, he ordered them recalled. Once the Cuban Missile Crisis was peacefully resolved, RFK had Harvey fired as head of the Cuban desk and JMWAVE, and replaced by Desmond FitzGerald, who had the Kennedy looks and charisma but was not related to them, as many believed.

Harvey was made CIA chief of station in Rome, Italy, where James Jesus Angleton had served in the 0SS during WWII and Clare Luce Booth had been ambassador, but Harvey remained as case officer for John Rosselli, who was still Sam Giancana’s right hand man and running one of the Pathfinder teams out of JMWAVE, hell bent on killing Castro.

The last time Harvey and Rosselli met, according to the official CIA records, was in Florida in June, 1963, when Harvey wined and dined Rosselli in Miami, and put the hotel bill on his ZR/RIFLE assassination project account.

Of the hundreds of plots to kill Castro that were hatched, and dozens of plans developed by the CIA, the one most likely to succeed was called the Pathfinder Plan, that was to utilize a team of Pathfinders to infiltrate into Cuba near Veradero, a plush resort town on the north shore where Castro was known to visit the former DuPont estate called Xandu. The plan was directed by Carl Jenkins and called for Castro to be shot in the head by snipers as he drove by in an open jeep, a plan that according to CIA records, “was disapproved by higher-authority,” and the plan that I believe was redirected to “higher authority” in Dealey Plaza.

As soon as Giancana learned that JFK had been killed, he flew to Mexico where he hid out at a desert lodge for a few weeks with Richard Cain Scalzitti, a Chicago policeman, mobster and Giancana associate.

When Sam Giancana was asked about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro, he said that they would “get us all killed,” and he was right, as he was killed by someone he knew shortly before he was to testify before Congress about his role in the Castro plots. His main man, John Rosselli, did testify in closed, secret session twice, but went to see Jack Anderson afterwards and told him what he had to say – that his JMWAVE commando team was sent in to Cuba to kill Castro but were captured and turned around by Castro to kill Kennedy.

Well they didn’t need to have Castro convince them to kill Kennedy as they hated JFK as much as they wanted to kill Castro, and if they turned on JFK they did it on their own, and were protected by their team leader, the still living Carl Jenkins and JMWAVE director Desmond FitzGerald, who wondered, when he learned of JFK’s death, if his Cubans were involved. And I wonder too.

Rosselli was then found dismembered in an oil drum, his bodily fluids more powerful than the chain and cement used to weigh him down in Biscayne Bay. Both the murders of Giancana and Rosselli remain unsolved, though we know why they were killed, as we know why JFK was killed.

Now if the new movie The Assassination tells that story, it might get close to the truth, but knowing how Hollywood operates, they aren’t interested in the truth, just box office recipts, but I will give them the chance to do it right.

Billkelly3@gmail.com

Project Four Leaves NSAM 261 Revisited

  

Project Four Leaves NSAM 261 Revisited

Some years ago, in 2008, I learned about a top secret government project code named Four Leaves, the subject of National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM)261  signed by President Kennedy in late September 1963. The only published or posted reference I could find about it was where I learned about it - on the JFK Presidential Library web site where there is a mention of it in the digital on line vesion of JFK’s office Rolodex desk date book.

Later they posted the original NSAM 261 and basic information about it that we are allowed to know:

https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKNSF/342/JFKNSF-342-005

One guy who goes by the name of Izambeni, found my blog by doing an internet search for Project Four Leaves, came up with my 2008 post and on May 13, 2023 wrote to me:

“You have just about the only info on NSAM 261, Project Four Leaves on the internet. Thank you for the info you have pulled together about it. So, it's a DPA project and has something to do with communications. I was just looking at all 3 pages in that file at the JFK library. The first page gives the vague request for approval of Four Leaves, the third page has been removed from the file. (Hmmmm...) But the 2nd page outlines who is to get a copy and it: One copy goes to the VP/the Chairman of NASA, one copy to the to the Administrator of NASA, one copy to the Secys of State, Defense, & Commerce, one to the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, one to the Director Bureau of Budget and one to the Director Office of Emergency Planning. One has to ask why it's such a complete mystery 60 years later.”

Izambeni continues: “ Given it mentions NASA twice, and has something to do with communications - this never crossed my mind in the past when pondering it - but I wonder if it could be some top secret plan to communicate with UFOs/aliens? Just a thought given the Pentagon has finally admitted that they are real, well at least UFOs are...they're still in denial about ETs. Somehow they dance around that topic. If UFO's are indeed real, then WHO do they think made them?! Obviously a far advanced race of beings who make us look like Neanderthals.”

BK: Well, personally, I don’t think it was about UFOs or Aliens, but rather an arm bending attempt by the administration to get some major defense contractors to do something that’s really necessary for national security, and now, sixty years later, we should know what that is.

Then Ixambeni asked a key question - “Has anyone ever FOIA'd Four Leaves?”

BK: I must admit I was neglegant in not submitting an FOIA about Four Leaves in 2008, but it’s never too late.

Izambeni: “Addendum: Was just reading a bio of Roswell Gilpatric (who signed/sent the NSAM 261 memo to JFK) on the Historical Office Office of the Secretary of Defense site. This might mean something (or not), but I thought it could be significant, given my above theory. It says ‘McNamara also delegated to him certain areas of responsibility, including Pentagon relations with the Central Intelligence Agency and NASA’.”

Yes, Roswell Gilpatrick is a key player, who also worked closely with General Dynamics on the TFX jet fighter contract, but here he is put into a position of handling Pentagon relations with CIA and NASA, that makes me think this has something to do with satellites.

Here’s what I wrote in 2008:

Project FOUR LEAVES & the DPA

After reading the September 25 Higgins memo re: FitzGerald briefing of JCS, which mentioned a secret memo from Bundy orally read to the JSC, I looked to the JFK Library at Bundy's papers and JFK's Diary to see if anything relevant is published there.

SUBJECT: Assignment of Highest National Security Priority to Project FOUR LEAVES

In response to a recommendation by the Secretary of Defense, the president, under the authority granted by the Defense Production Act of 1950, today established the program listed below as being in the highest national security priority category for development and production.

FOUR LEAVES

McGeorge Bundy

THE WHITE HOUSE DIARY
SEPTEMBER 23 1963

http://www.jfklibrary.org/White%2BHouse%2B...eptember/23.htm

“President Kennedy assigns the highest national priority to Project FOUR LEAVES to develop and produce a military communications system.

[A tip of the hat to Robert Howard for the White House date book and diary reference.]

 I also came across the fact that Gen. Taylor wasn't at the JCS briefing because he was on his way to Vietnam with McNamara.

I considered that Four Leaves may have to do with that trip when I read: There is the note that on September 25, 1963 "Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Saigon to investigate what effect the political problems in South Vietnam have had on the military situation. They are expected to visit the-country's four military regions. (3:1)"

Four Leaves, four military regions?

Mark Knight thought not, calling attention to the fact that the Defense Production Act doesn't just pertain to Vietnam, and that the reference to the DPA may be a key.

Then I came across this Yahoo! Group called coldwarrcomms@yahoogroups.com, who shoot the bull about cold war military communications.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coldwarcomms/message/7124NSAM

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/coldwarcomms/message/7124

In the only open source reference to Project Four Leaves I can find, a guy named Sam asks, "Does anyone know what the DoD's Project FOUR LEAVES was? NSAM 261 from 9/23/1963 assigns it to the "highest national priority category for development and production" in response to a recommendation from the Secretary of Defense. I can't find any reference to the project other than the NSAM. Figured someone on this list may have heard of it."

In response, Albert writes, "I'd heard that name a few years ago, and looked into it a little. I nevercould find anything about FOUR LEAVES, but I came to the conclusion that the NSAM was actually referring to FALLING LEAVES. FALLING LEAVES was the Cuban Missile Early Warning System. It consisted of radar stations at Moorestown, NJ, Laredo, TX, and Thomasville, AL, with hotline links to the Pentagon, NORAD, and SAC. I learned of FALLING LEAVES purely by luck while reading a book titled "The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons" by Scott D. Sagan (1993), which devotes more than a dozen pages to the topic.

BK: I disagree with this assessment, that Project Four Leaves is actually Project Falling Leaves, for a number of reasons. For one, I don't think Mrs. Lincoln, who typed up the memo, would make such a mistake, or Bundy would make a mistake in such an important document - a National Security Action Memorandum.

So it's not a mistake, a typo or Mrs. Lincoln mishearing Bundy or the President, but it may be part or offshoot of the Falling Leaves program.

In addition, Falling Leaves was an October, 1962 circa project, a year earlier, and concerned miliary communications and nuclear mishaps, not the establishment of a military communications system. It concerned the estalishment of a number of rardars that could detect the launch of a ballistic missile in Cuba, since most of the miltiaray’s radars were directed north over the North Pole towards the USSR.

The standard history of military communicaitons also fail to mention Project Four Leaves, though it does account for the development of satelite communcaitons around the same time period.

Blitz wrote, "That is interesting, because I dont find much on it either. Prob still clasified. One can put a bit of light on it, as its immediately prior to VietNam...when they were still fumbling for reasons to be there...also it was just prior to the Kennedy assassination. Interestingly, shortly prior to it, in NSAM 252, the establishing of a National Communications system."

http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/winter2002/01.html

So I went back to the Defense Production Act of 1950 to see more of what that was all about.

As Mark suggested, the DPA is a key. John Dolva started a thread on the subject at the Education Forum:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=13902

Wikipedia: Defense Production Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act

 

BK: NOTE – I have also reposted the entire DPA at JFKCountercoup2.blogspot.

https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2023/05/defense-production-act-dpa.html

The Defense Production Act (Pub.L. 81-774) is a United States law enacted on September 8, 1950, in response to the start of the Korean War. It was part of a broad civil defense and war mobilization effort in the context of the Cold War. Its implementing regulations, the Defense Priorities and Allocation System (DPAS), are located at 15 CFR §§700 to 700.93. The Act has been periodically reauthorized and amended, and remains in force as of 2007.

The Act contains three major sections. The first authorizes the President to require businesses to sign contracts or fulfill orders deemed necessary for national defense. The second authorizes the President to establish mechanisms (such as regulations, orders or agencies) to allocate materials, services and facilities to promote national defense. The third section authorizes the President to control the civilian economy so that scarce and/or critical materials necessary to the national defense effort are available for defense needs.[1]

The Act also authorizes the President to requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of basic resources, impose wage and price controls, settle labor disputes, control consumer and real estate credit, establish contractual priorities, and allocate raw materials to aid the national defense.[1]

The President's authority to place contracts under the DPA is the part of the Act most often used by the Department of Defense (DOD) since the 1970s. Most of the other functions of the Act are administered by the Office of Strategic Industries and Economic Security (SIES) in the Bureau of Industry and Security in the Department of Commerce.[2]

Korean War-era usage
The DPA was used during the Korean War to establish a large defense mobilization infrastructure and bureacracy. Under the authority of the Act, President Harry S. Truman established the Office of Defense Mobilization, instituted wage and price controls, strictly regulated production in heavy industries such as steel and mining, and ordered the disperal of wartime manufacturing plans across the nation.[3]

The Act also played a vital role in the establishment of the domestic aluminum and titanium industries in the 1950s. Using the Act, DOD provided capital and interest-free loans, and directed mining and manufacturing resources as well as skilled laborers to these two processing industries.[4]

Use as innovation tool
Beginning in the 1980s, DOD began using the contracting and spending provisions of the DPA to provide seed money to develop new technologies.[5] Using the Act, DOD has helped to develop a number of new technologies and materials, including silicon carbide ceramics, indium phosphide and gallium arsenide semiconductors, microwave power tubes, radiation-hardened microelectronics, superconducting wire, and metal composites.[4]

Defense Production Act of 1950
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Defense_Production_Act_of_1950

The Defense Production Act of 1950 (Public Law 81-774) was enacted due to "Rising wages and prices during the Korean War [which] caused serious economic difficulties within the United States. In an effort to expand production and insure economic stability, the Defense Production Act of 1950 (Public Law 81-774) authorized Governmental activities in various areas, including requisition of property for national defense, expansion of productive capacity and supply, wage and price stabilization, settlement of labor disputes, control of consumer and real estate credit, and establishment of contract priorities and materials allocation designed to aid the national defense. Under section 712, the Joint Committee on Defense Production was established to serve as a 'watchdog' over Federal agencies administering the various programs authorized by the act. The members of the committee were drawn from the Senate and House Committees on Banking and Currency."[1]

The Defense Production Act Title III Program "authorities were first used extensively during the early 1950s to expedite expansion of industrial capacity for many strategic and critical materials, machine tools, and a number of other critical items needed to satisfy evolving defense requirements. Despite (or, perhaps, partially because of) enormous successes in expanding needed domestic production capabilities, use of Title III declined markedly during the late 1950s and early 1960s and eventually ended altogether by the end of the 1960s. Congress revived and modernized the Title III authorities in the mid 1980s, and these authorities have been used since that time to promote improvement and expansion of industrial capabilities needed for national defense purposes."[2]

"Today's Title III Program differs in fundamental ways from the original program established in 1950. First, the original program was created in response to the national emergency resulting from the Korean conflict and Cold War tensions. Today's program focuses primarily on promoting the transition of new technologies from research and development to efficient and affordable production and the rapid insertion of these new technologies in defense systems."[3]

"Second, the original program was based on virtually unlimited authorities to encourage private investment in materials production and supply. Today's program is subject to a number of restrictions to ensure that Government action is needed and that Title III authorities are the best means to meet the national defense need. Moreover, proposed Title III actions are subject to prior review by Congress and are funded with moneys appropriated for Title III purposes."[4]

"Third, the original program was supported by a funding ceiling of $2.1 billion (in 1950s dollars) and was permitted to obligate these funds based on probable ultimate net cost to the Government rather than total contract liability. Today's program has been funded at an average annual rate of $20-$25 million and has been required to obligate funds at 100 percent of contract liability."[5]

"Despite the significant differences between the original program and today's, the basic purpose of the Title III authorities has not changed - to expand domestic production capabilities to meet defense needs."[6] And, some would argue, to specialize these domestic production capabilities only towards defense needs, assuming that control of global finance, trade and port facilities will continue to feed the civilian sector, and that there is no need, e.g. for US self-sufficiency in oil.


And John Dolva also calls attention to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) of the US DOD, which developed the Internet among other things.

 

In any case, we should, sixty years on, know what Project Four Leaves and NSA Memo 261 is.

 

Billkelly3@gmail.com

New AOTUS Dr. Colleen Shogan

New Archivist of the United States - AOTUS - Dr. Colleen Shogan

Bk Notes - I will be adding to this as I learn more about her.

There's the new Archivist of the USA - Dr. Colleen Shogan, the eleventh to hold that position, who was nominated by Biden last August and approved by the Senate on May 10. 

While she looks like your neighborhood librarian, she is actually a high bred Ivy League academic Archivist, who we must convince to enforce the JFK Act, and have the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) assume the duties of the defunct Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB), as Congress intended and the law prescribes, so the NARA will resume identifying and accumulating new relevant records to be included in the JFK Collection. 

The previous Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) was a blogger who promoted himself as one who sought open records and transparency - he really did nothing when it came to enforcing the JFK Act, and his recommendations to Presidents Trump and Biden are still sealed, but we know that both men, despite saying they would release all of the JFK assassination records, failed to do so, and cow towed to the CIA and Pentagon in keeping thousands of records sealed and others from entering the JFK Collection at all. 

Shogan Confirmed by U.S. Senate as 11th Archivist of the United States - ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

National Archives |

Although her background as a mainstream Ivy Leaguer with strong ties to the administration, so it doesn't seem likely she will do the right thing and enforce the law - we at least must make the effort to convince her to do so, and we should do it in a public manner so others come to bear on the issue. 

Dr. Colleen Shogan - AOTUS 

NARA 3301 Metzerott Road, 
College Park, MD 20740-6001

Her phone number is 202-741-6000 

Fax: 202-741-6012 

Email; FRC@nara.gov 

Quiet Releases

BK Notes - I will be adding to this as I get time to read through what's there.

Quiet Releases

I almost didn't notice, but the National Archives released a number of new batches from previously sealed or redacted records from the JFK Collection on April 13, April 27 and May 11th that you can access on line at: 

 JFK Assassination Records - 2023 Additional Documents Release | National Archives

While I have not perused these documents yet, one of my associates said that all of the records that have et to be released are significant and should be read carefully to determine why they have been continually held past the Congressionally mandated release date of October 2017. 

Someone who has gone through these newly released records informed me of one that refers to Volkmar Schmidt, one of my favorite subjects, though they spell his name wrong three different ways. 

RIF# - 104-10006-10284 

Is labeled SCHMIDT, Folkner and the Requester of the file is A. W. BRASKO 

And notes he came to US from Germany in 1961.and was living in US Texas. 

Art Dooley called Bill B. on 29 Feb. 64, noting that the FBI talked to Volkmer Schmidt (DRA 65834 14 March 1964 about G.D.M. - (BK:: Obviously Schmidt's friend George deMohrenschuildt) Although your trace was on Vallker Schmidt, the two first names are unusual enough that ou should still send over trace results." 

The way their files worked at the time, an index card gives the basic info and refers to other files that may be in the system. 

This index card reads: 

SCHMIDT, VOLKER 

10N-279871 

DOB 180212 

GERM, JUETRICHAU 

A. SCHWABE JOACHIN 

V. SCHMIDT WALKER 

WEST GERMAN INTEL SERVICE. EE/G/L. MACHINE LISTING. 

NO OTHER IDENTIFING INFO. 

The reverse side of the card reads: 

SCHMIDT, Folke (Prof.)    200-126-1-153 

With the note: This card filed in Main Index. 

200-7-213-1

Subject has written an article appearing in "Svensk Juri...Title: "Right of Asylum for Property", includes info. on situations that maybe faced with demands by a state other (than) the property of a refugee. 

This card filed 15 JAN. 1954 

Ernst SCHMTT (qv-SFX) attended grammer school in Copenhagen and lived with a family by name of.......... 

There is no more - but we know Schmidt lived with the family of a professor in Heidelberg, not Copenhagan. 

IN ADDITION - Among the newly released (April 27, 2023) records there is an interview with James Jesus Angleton that Jefferson Morley, author of an Angleton biography (Ghost), thinks is important because it continues to redact the name Israel as the country that Angleton maintained a CIA-Mossad liaison  with that he writes about here: 

Biden Maintains Veil Over Israeli Nuclear Bomb Program

John Newman's Uncovering Popov's Mole

Uncovering Popov’s Mole – The Assassination of President Kennedy Volume IV (2022) 

by John M. Newman.

When I read the pulp paperback edition of William Hood’s Mole, the inside story of Soviet military intelligence officer Pyotr S. Popov, who became a defector and CIA double agent in place, I knew immediately that it was somehow connected with the assassination of President Kennedy, though I didn’t know how. But I wasn’t surprised, when the CIA released the CIA’s pre-assassination records on Lee Harvey Oswald and William Hood’s name was cc’d on many of the documents.

What stood out to me was not only the fact that Popov was an important character in the Great Spy vs. Spy Game of the Cold War period (1945-1992), but the extent that tradecraft was used by both sides, just as it was used by all sides in the JFK drama.

At the first meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles brought a book with him about American assassins by Robert Donovan, the same author who wrote PT109, that makes the case for American assassinations being perpetrated  by deranged lone nut cases. Instead Dulles should have passed around copies of his own book The Craft of Intelligence, that explains how the Great Game of espionage is played by certain argreed upon rules that date back thousands of years.

The fact that the assassination of President Kennedy was a covert intelligence operation, regardless of Lee Harvey Oswald’s role, is buttressed by the multiple covert operations that are entangled with the Dealey Plaza operation, including the numerous defectors and double-agents that are players in the great game and the assassination drama. Oswald, Richard Case Nagel, Rolando Cubella, Golitzen, Nosenko, Popov, Sylvia Duran, Igor Vaganov, Fedora, Philby and the Cambridge spy ring, and Popov’s mole.

Were they real or false defectors? Who were the double-agents really working for? Who was the high level mole in the CIA? This book tries to answer those questions by focusing on the identity of Popov warned us about. But what do we do with what we learn from all this?

As Soviet spy Rudolph Able said, “What is the next move when you don’t know what the game is?” Why it’s the Great Game, the same game that has been played since the days of Sun Tzu and The Art of War.

And now, with the unleashing of so many millions of government documents under the JFK Act, it is unnerving that we must first decipher the alias and code names before beginning to understand what they actually say, and Mary Ferrell has assisted us greatly along these lines. . 

Mary Ferrell:    CIA Cryptonyms /  Featured CIA Cryptonyms 2  /      /  https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Main_Page.html

In his Prelude to this volume, Professor Peter Dale Scott says, “An unsuspected consequence of the John F. Kennedy assassination and cover-up has been an unprecedented exposure of previously secret CIA and FBI records. In the resulting new field of serious scholarly research, John Newman, with an intelligence background of his own, has emerged as a preeminent master. For his latest volume, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, Newman has perused thousands of conflicting documents, and distilled them into a coherent answer to a problem that CIA professionals were unable to resolve; who was the Soviet mole in the CIA. Newman’s arguments will, I am sure, dominate all future discussions of this surprisingly important political question.”

It would take years, if not decades to figure it all out if it wasn’t for a handful of dedicated researcher who have waded through the morass of records, took a dive into the Rabbit’s Hole, went into the wilderness of mirrors, and came out with a sort of GPS road map of how to get through it all with an understanding of whose who and what’s true and false.

Trained as a US Army intelligence analysist, Professor Dr. John Newman is the best of this lot, that also includes Bill Simpich, Rex Bradford, Jefferson Morley, Rolf M. Larsson and a few others.  And Newman has the tenacity to try to explain it to the rest of us. He is doing so in a series of books on the JFK assassination, and while Armageddon was set to be published now, this book is sort of a speed bump on the road that has pushed it back to later this year.

It isn’t so much the answer to the question of who was Popov’s mole? Or who killed JFK?  Rather it is how we can answer these questions. Newman’s book Uncovering Popov’s Mole isn’t important for attempting to answer the question, and identifying the mole, but it’s more important for laying out the means – the type of Counter-Intelligence - CI investigation that is needed to really break these cases. We have to acknowledge that we are no longer conducting a criminal investigation of the assassination, looking for assassins, murderers, co-conspirators and perjurers, but rather searching for the truth by whatever means necessary, with a critical eye.

Malcolm Blunt, a British researcher who had spent more time at the National Archives than anyone I know, has collected a massive archive of documents that he thought were relevant enough to copy and share with others, including Newman and myself, and I must credit Malcolm with passing along the NPIC Pathfinder documents that I consider key records necessary for understanding what really occurred at Dealey Plaza.

Blunt has been a big help to Newman as well, and introduced him to the records of Blunt’s late associate, Termnent H. “Pete” Bagley (aka Amos Booth), a CIA CI officer who, after reading the pre-assassination documents on Oswald that Blunt provided him, concluded that Oswald was a “witting” false defector.

Today Blunt says, “For nearly 60 years we have witnessed the proliferation of highly individualized conceptions of one man’s identity: who was Lee Harvey Oswald?”

“From the publication of the Warren Report in 1964, all the way up to the present day,” Blunt continues,
“range and diversity of opinion about Oswald has emerged from a doctored, incomplete, a fractured documentary record which is then reflected, quite naturally, within a fragmented field of assassination researachers….by which we find ourselves still grappling to ascertain fundamental answers to fundamental questions. In addition, we must contend with a myriad of intelligence agencies and watchdogs that seemed pre-programmed to thwart any meaningful research.”

Blunt believes that in this book, and the others in Newman’s ongoing series, Newman is creating a “paradigm shift,” but to access this new paradigm “John must first introduce to the reader a detailed chronology of Cold War deceptions: KGB v. CIA, spy v. spy, bona fide defectors v. false defectors, advocates v. detractors, true molehunts v. false molehunts. This lesson will prove essential if we are to understand the context of what is new in relation to what must be replaced.”

And I for one am following along, and I think I get it, though I was predisposed to accept his work because it dovetails so much with my own.

One of Newman’s positive attributes is that when he realizes he was wrong, he corrects himself, as he has done here with James Jesus Angleton.

As noted years ago, the CIA paperwork associated with Oswald’s 1959 defection, that should have been disseminated to various relevant desks within the Soviet Russia Division (SRD), instead, as Blunt puts it, “went sideways,” to the Agency’s Office of Security. The idea was to catch to mole, suspected to be within the SRD, when Oswald’s file was reviewed, using the false defector as bait to surface the mole.

Newman used to call it the “Angleton mole hunt,” though now he realizes that Angleton had an office – the CI – Counter-Intelligence Staff – that supported the OS – Office of Security, that had 700 personnel, and the molehunt was actually under the control of the Research  Branch (RB) headed by Bruce Solie, not a name you will find in the Warren Report or most books on the JFK assassination.

Not a spoiler, the name to most people means nothing, just as the names of the first class snipers who blew off JFK’s head will mean nothing when we learn them, as they are not as important as who they were working for.

Angleton was once quoted as saying, “A house has many rooms. I was not privy to who shot John,” that I take to mean Angleton may have been in on the pre-assassination use of Oswald and his files, but not the conspiracy to kill the President, though he knows who it was. And d it wasn’t Solie’s room either.

I believe the room at the CIA where the Dealey Plaza operation was planned was at the Miami JMWAVE station, where the Pathfinder plan to kill Castro was pulled off the NPIC shelves and resighted to kill JFK in Dallas. But to get there, we must learn to use the CI tradecrafts much like Newman uses to uncover Popov’s mole.

In compiling the mainly circumstantial evidence that indicates Solie was Popov’s mole in the CIA Newman focuses on Solie’s travel records, that are certainly important. In the course of my own research I had a name file, a subject file, a chronological file and what I called a Time-Place-Matrix model of places where and when people me and things occurred.

Solie’s travel records indicate that he visited Beriut, Lebanon, what Newman considers a clincher, since British-Soviet double-agent Kim Philby, Angleton’s mentor and three martini lunch drinking partner, also was living at the same time.

As Newman puts it: “If the mole cannot communicate, then his high-echelon access is of no use. In the end, encrypted messages are vulnerable to being broken. Only face-to-face meetings in a safe location with the other service (for which the mole is working) ensure the continuing viability of the penetration. And therefore, it is the means by which the mole must travel to the safe location that – while necessary for secure communication – remains the ultimate Achilles heel in such espionage operations due to the possible exposure from the need to travel…”

In February 1957 Solie traveled to Beirut where Newman suspects he met with Philby, who was staying at his father’s rural estate instead of his own apartment, that we know (from Spy Among Friends), was bugged by the British MI5.

 Ian Fleming’s official biographer suspects that when Fleming visited Beirut he too visited Philby. Fleming arrived in November 1960 on his way to Kuwait, where he had been commissioned to write the official history of the Gulf emirate by the Kuwait Oil Company. In Beirut he met up with his friend and MI6 contact Nichoals Elliot. According to Fleming biographer Andrew Lycett, “…Elliot was delighted to see him. Their conversation ranged over a variety of intelligence-related topics, including Kim Philby, a key participant in the Missing Diplomats affair, who had been working in Beirut as a newspaperman since 1956. Ian told Elliot that he had his own minor freelance intelligence assignment to perform: the then NID chief Vice Admiral Sir Norman Denning had asked him for information about the Iraq port of Basra…Ian did not delay…at 10:30 sharp he asked to leave, saying he had a rendezvous with an Armenian in the Place de Canons in the center of town.”

Elliot had the distinct impression Fleming had arranged to see a pornographic film, “but perhaps, speculated Lycett, “Ian was meeting Philby, whom he had certainly met during the war.”

Now it is quite bizarre that Solie, who may have taken over Philby’s role with Angleton, flew to Beirut where Philby was living, but how we come to know this is even more bizarre.

Ancestry.com

In checking out all of the open source internet information on Bruce Solie Newman’s crew discovered that in 2010 Solie’s travel  records had been posted on line at Ancestry.com, sometime after his death, probably by a granchild or inlaw, and those records show that Solie traveled to Beirut when Philby was there in the spring of 1957.  

“It is a fact,” says Newman, “that Bruce Solie arrived in Beirut at a time when a replacement for Angleton’s mentor since 1948 – Kim Philby – was urgently needed,” and Solie filled that bill.

As Newman says, “The location of spies on treasonous missions away from their place of work are crucial evidence of their true loyalties and intentions. That turns out to be the case for nearly all of Solie’s overseas travel records....,” and “The reader will need to decide for themselves if this is another reason for considering Bruce Solie as a likely candidate for Popov’s mole.”

And I would request that anyone with access to William Harvey’s travel records (June-Dec. 1963) to please post them on line, as someone did with Solie’s records.

So as the search for Popov’s mole comes to an end, it is not the name that counts, but the means by which we have come to know it, and those are the means, the CI- Counter-Intelligence tradecraft  by which we must adapt to use across the board in our study of the assassination of President Kennedy.

William Kelly

Billkelly3@gmail.com

Murdoch Axes Smith and Carlson over JFK?

 Murdoch Axes Smith and Carlson over JFK? 

Was Liz Smith fired over this? 

Shortly after Tucker Carlson did a series of shows on the assassination of President Kennedy, concluding that the CIA was behind the dirty deed, he was fired by his ultimate boss media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

That sparked a number of serious questions as to whether the two things were related.

Well, as Ian Fleming used to say, one time is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, but three times is enemy action.

And the coincidence is the case of New York Post gossip columnist Liz Smith, who was fired by Murdock in 2009 shortly after writing an article denouncing the Warren Commission Report as a “fairy-tale,” and promoting Lamar Waldron’s idea that the Carlos Marcello mob hijacked a CIA plan to kill Castro and redirected it to JFK in Dallas.

While it doesn’t rise to the level of “enemy action” yet, it is quite a coincidence and I’m sure that all of the beat reporters in Murdock’s extensive media empire have taken notice and will refrain from wandering too deep into the JFK assassination waters.

I have all three of Lamar Waldron’s books on the JFK assassination, and think highly of his work although we disagree on the Mafia’s contribution to the killing. While the plan to kill Castro was a CIA plan, it was not "hijacked" by the mob, but rather was an off-the-shelf plan “disapproved by higher authority” that was redirected to “higher authority” in Dallas.

Those anti-Castro Cuban Pathfinders who were paid by the CIA and trained to kill Castro, but were prevented from doing so by JFK, first at the Bay of Pigs, then during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and finally during the JFK-Castro back channel negotiations at the UN that were on-going at the time of the assassination. Those Cubans, expert and well practiced snipers, hated JFK as much as they hated Castro, so it didn’t matter who they were shooting at. It’s the chain of command where it gets murky and where the “switch” occurred and who ordered it.

Liz Smith must have known Waldron personally to provide such glowing praise about a book she could not have read, at least in full, as I did, so someone must have told her the contents

She begins with Carlos Marcello’s well worn “confession,” before diving into Waldron’s “Legacy of Secrecy,”

Smith writes, “By the time of JFK's murder, dozens of Marcello associates had infiltrated a CIA operation code-named AMWORLD, a project started by JFK himself. Writer Waldron revealed this back in 2005. This was the CIA's top-secret plan to cooperate with Cuba's army commander, Juan Almeida, to stage a coup against Fidel Castro on Dec. 1, 1963. That was 10 days after JFK's trip to Dallas.”

Although some of the Pathfinders and those involved with Rolando Cubella to murder JFK were also involved in the AMWORLD project, Juan Almeida was on a plane to the Congo on December 1, 1963 and was not in a position to pull off a coup in Cuba, even if he was one of the disenchanted Cuban military officers that Desmond FitzGerald had identified and told the Joint Chiefs of Staff about in the September 25, 1963 briefing, that Smith alludes to.

She writes, in parentheses: “(The CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff even referred to the World War II plot to kill Hitler as their role model for getting rid of Castro. You can see that story told by Tom Cruise in the new movie ‘Valkyrie.’).”

Since I had read all three of Waldron’s books on the assassination, and could not recall any such mention of the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, I had to do some digging, and found it mentioned by Gus Russo in a footnote in his book on the Kennedys and Castros Live By the Sword (thanks Gus) giving the RIF – Record Identification Form number – 202-1000101-10028 – that I found among the Mary Ferrell Foundation site (thanks Rex).

Now Gus is a leader among those who try to pin the tail for the Dealey Plaza operation on Castro's butt, the latest being former Church Com attorney James H. Johnson in Murder, Inc - The CIA Under John F. Kennedy (Potomac Books, 2019), all of which refer to LBJ's "we were running a Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean," and fail in the attempt to claim Castro retaliated for the CIA attempts on his life. But what we know occurred is that it was our own Murder, Inc. that redirected its rifles to JFK in Dallas. 

Russo says (on page 294) that, "....Joseph Califano of the Pentagon's Cuban Coordinating Committee, was being pressed by Des FitzGerald for all the Defense Department intel he could get on key Cuban military officers, scoping for a ''mole' within the regime. (52) FitzGerald was to about to brief the Joint Chiefs and, although Califano was excluded from the meeting on September 25, Des and the Agency were, according to memos later released, studying how German generals had plotted to kill Hitler, in order to develop a way to organize high-ranking Cuban officers to kill Castro" (53) 

(53) - "Califano citing: JCS Memo for the record, Walter Higgins; "Briefing by Mr. Desmond FitzGerald on CIA Cuban Operations and Planning,"{ JFK Collection, JCS Papers, J-3, #29, 202-10001-10028; NARA)"

And there, among the bullet points the CIA’s chief of Cuban operations Desmond FitzGerald spoke about in his briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a time when Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay was acting chief while General Maxwell Taylor was on a special mission to Vietnam, is the key note on the CIA's "detailed study" of the Hitler plot. 

The memo was written by Colonel Walter Higgins, adjunct to General Victor “Brute” Krulak, then Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA), with offices in the Pentagon and White House. Krulak’s job was to give the CIA any special military assistance for covert actions, especially in Cuba and Vietnam.

Under Point 13. Higgins writes: “He (FitzGerald) commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed.”

Then there’s the clincher: “He considers it as a parallel in history; i.e., the plot to kill Hitler; and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach. (against Castro).”

I have been working on this line of inquiry for some time now, and consider the AMLASH – Dr. Rolando Cubella as the  major participant and not Waldron’s Almeida.

When Jim Lesar and the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) filed a formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a copy of the CIA’s “detailed study” of the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler (code named Valkyrie), the CIA said it had no records whatsoever in their files regarding that Hitler plot. When the AARC took that response to court, the CIA finally relented and acknowledged that they found one reference to the plot in a propaganda pamphlet that blamed the failure of the plot on communists.

As a good example of Peter Dale Scott’s “negative template” thesis, that holds that what is missing or being withheld is of more significance than what is released to the public, then the CIA’s “detailed study” of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, to be used against Castro, certainly stands out.

That doesn’t prevent us from looking into the details of the Valkyrie Plot ourselves, and as Liz Smith points out, Tom Cruse’s movie “Valkyrie” certainly is a good introduction, as it details how the plot developed, was carried out and failed.

Another good source is Mary Bancroft’s “Autobiography of a Spy,” as Allen Dulles’ OSS assistant and paramour, she served as Dulles’ liaison to German military intelligence officer Hans B. Gisivious, a major player in the plot who Dulles and Bancroft assisted in escaping Berlin after the failure of the coup and thousands were being rounded up and executed. Some conspiracy. 

Since there is no written record on the Valkyrie plot in the CIA files, if we take their word for it, then they probably just consulted with the living survivors of the plot - Gisivious, Bancroft and Dulles were all right there to inform them. 

In the end, it is quite clear that both Tucker Carlson and Liz Smith had reported on the conspiracy to kill President Kennedy shortly before Murdoch sacked them, and that any other Murdoch reporter will meet the same fate if they transgress the line that Murdock and other major media moguls have drawn in the sand against revealing the truth to the assassination of JFK, still a sore spot in our national security after more than half-century.

And I believe someone will, as when something happens twice, it usually happens a third time, and I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

LINKS

Tucker Carlson on JFK:

Ruby and Oswald: https://youtu.be/PAiRmhXvJHs

CIA was involved: https://www.foxnews.com/video/6317311778112

What Source says: 

Tucker Carlson: Source says yes, the CIA was involved in JFK's assassination | Fox News Video

Liz Smith:

On Waldron and Valkyrie: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2012/08/liz-smith-column-on-valkyrie-plot.html?m=1

NYT Rise and Fall: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/nyregion/liz-smith-lions-of-new-york.html

 

Higgins Memo: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10246 - relPageId=5