“GRANDMOTHER IS ON THE ROOF”
Jeff Morley wrote: "...We can likewise treat with skepticism the CIA's latest interpretation of Kennedy's murder, proposed by Brian Latell, a former Cuba specialist at the Agency. In a new book, Latell has updated and modified the unconvincing "Fidel Castro did it" theory that was that was first put forward by the CIA within hours of JFK's death."
The Carlos Contract – A Novel of International Terrorism
(Macmillan, 1978)
by David Atlee Phillips
David Atlee Phillips has long been a person of interest in
the assassination of President Kennedy
Besides a number of non-fictional books, including the
auto-biographical “Nightwatch – 20 Years
of Peculiar Service” and a book about the murder trail of a Texas
While the book is labeled a work of fiction, Carlos is a
real person, as are a number of other characters in the book, including my
former college mate Glen Gebhard and a few CIA
officers thinly disguised behind such nick-names as “Hyphenated Jake” – aka
Jack Easterline and William “Mack” McLendon. Easterline was one of the planners
of the Bay of Pigs and Gordon McLendon was a Dallas
My college friend Glen went to Europe
where his passport was stolen. It apparently ended up in the hands of the real
Carlos the Jackal, so when he returned to Europe
a few years later with a new passport, he was violently interrogated at a border
post. Phillips uses Glen’s name as one of the aliases of Carlos, so there are
some doses of reality in Phillips’ fictional work. This book also details how
to set up a special operations team that can do something like locating a
specific terrorist, and it should be applied as one way to discover the real
killers in the assassination of President Kennedy.
As the story goes, “Mack” McLendon is called out of
retirement from a long career in the CIA
to go after Carlos, so he assembles his team and, as Phillps writes:
“In addition to questioning the wisdom of involving friends,
Mack questioned his own actual ability to outwit Carlos. Had his professional
talents and determination atrophied? Would he be a fool to enter the arena
again?”
“And, more importantly, did he still have the gift of
perceiving when grandmother was on the roof?”
“Mack had once been given a memorable bit of advice by a
senior CIA officer and veteran
Latin American hand: ‘An important part
of intelligence work is sensing, before you have hard proof, that a critical
development will occur. Call it professional intuition, the conviction that a
number of pieces, when eventually assembled into enough of the entire puzzle,
will constitute a revelation that is vital. I always try to think of it in
terms of knowing when grandmother is on the roof.’”
As a way of explanation, “the older officer then launched
into a story which he identified as Brazilian folklore, a ‘Portuguese story’
somewhat on the order of yesterday’s Irish and today’s Polish jokes.”
“A Portuguese man living in Brazil, Mack’s mentor had said,
received a cable from his cousin in Portugal, announcing the death of the
family cat, a pet the immigrant had been especially fond of. ‘Our beloved cat,’
the message said, ‘fell from our roof to her death in the street below.’”
“The immigrant wrote to his cousin in Lisbon: ‘Do not send
such a message again. I am a sensitive person; I can’t stand shocks. Should
such a thing happened again consider my temperament and let me know gently, in
stages. For example, you should have sent a message saying, ‘The cat went up on
the roof.’ Then, a few days later another, saying, ‘The cat went to the edge of
the roof.’ Then, finally, a letter with the bad news: ‘The cat fell off the
roof and died.’”
“Some months later the immigrant in Brazil received another
cable from his cousin. This time it read: ‘Grandmother just went up on the
roof.’”
“`So that’s what you must look for,’ Mack’s friend had told
him. ‘That one new piece of information, perhaps a single line in a report,
some awareness which gives you a funny feeling at the back of the neck – the
suspicion which suddenly becomes a conviction that something important is in
motion, that grandmother is on the roof.’”
Personally I have had a number of “Grandmother is on the
roof” moments – reading news reports of the Watergate burglary, the March 12,
1981 “Castro Plot To Kill Reagan” article by R. H. Boyce, seeing the twin
towers burning on 9/11 and most recently, when I read of the self-immolation of
a young man in Tunisia.
PAUL LINEBARGER – TRACING THE BLACK OPS COVER STORY
One of David Atlee Philip’s mentors, especially in regards
to psychological warfare and black propaganda operations, was Professor Paul
Linebarger of the School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins
University
Now John Hopkins is a good medical school which I believe is
based in Baltimore Washington D.C.
In order to get to his class Linebarger required his
students to take precautionary, evasive measures before arriving and after
leaving the class.
That’s why I got off the train suddenly outside Baltimore,
because I want to check out two places – Fort Detrich (MKULTRA) and Fort Meade
(NSA), which I unobtrusively cased out from a distance.
In any case, Linebarger wrote the textbook, “Psychological
Warfare – International Propaganda and Communications,” (Arno Press, 1948,
1954, 1972, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, N.Y.), which sets the tone for controlling
the minds of the masses by simply using the right message.
According to Linebarger: “Psychological warfare, in the
broad sense, consists of the application of parts of the science called
psychology to the conduct of war; psychological warfare comprises the use of
propaganda against the enemy, together with such military operational measures
as may supplement the propaganda. Propaganda may be described, in turn, as
organized persuasion by non-violent means. War itself may be considered to be,
among other things, a violent form of persuasion….War is waged against the
minds, not the bodies of the enemy.”
The term “propaganda” stems from the department of the
Vatican which had the duty of propagating the faith.
Specifically defined, “propaganda consists of the planned
use of any form of public or massproduced communication designed to affect the
minds and emotions of a given group for a specific purpose, whether military,
economic or political. Military propaganda consists of the planned use of any
form of communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given
enemy, neutral or friendly foreign group for a specific strategic or tactical
purpose.”
Linebarger: “Propaganda is directed to the subtle niceties
of thought by which people maintain their personal orientation in an unsuitable
interpersonal world. Propaganda must use the language of the mother, the
schoolteacher, the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the
ecclesiastic, the buddy, the newspaperman, all of them in turn. And propaganda
analysis, in weighing and evaluating propaganda must be even more
discriminating whether the propaganda is apt to hit its mark or not.”
Using what Linebarger called the STASM formula for spot
analysis, propaganda can be distinguished by the consideration of five elements
: 1 – Source (including the media), 2 – Time, 3 – Audience, 4- Subject, 5 – Mission
“This formula works best in the
treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to
note is the character of the Source – the true source (who really got it out?),
the ostensible source 9whose name is signed to it?); also the first use source
(who used it the first time?) and the second use source (who claims to be using
it as a quotation?). It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude. A
systematic breakdown of the STASM formula produces the following analysis
outline: applicable to any single propaganda item, civil or military, in war or
peace, spoken, visual or printed.”
There are
five types of propaganda: 1 – Defensive, which maintains an accepted form of
social action, 2 – Offensive, which interrupts social action not desired, 3 –
Conversionary, which challenges allegiance, 4 – Divisive, which splits aparts
opposition components, and 5 – Consolidation, which insures compliance of
target community.
White
propaganda is a press release, Light propaganda is attributed to a friendly
source, Medium to a neutral government, and so on.
Black
Propaganda, as compared to White, Light, Medium and Dark-Grey propaganda, is by
defination, specifically attributed to the opposition and allegedly supports
the oppossition’s position.
“Black
Propaganda is a fundamental intelligence operation,” notes Linebarger,
“because…it never identifies its real source, and pretends to originate within
or close to the enemy.”
At the end
of one of his classes, Joe Smith quotes Linebarger as saying, “I hate to think
what would ever happen if any of you ever got involved in U.S. politics. These
kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole
system would fall apart.”
The principles of Black Propaganda and psychological warfare
were applied with much success in “Operation Success” in the Guatemalan coup in
1954, which was a blatant interference by the USA CIA
on behalf of American corporate business interests, specifically United Fruit.
Then “the Guatemalan Model” was unsuccessfully, almost
disastrously applied to Cuba
These same principles of psychological warfare were also
applied to the assassination of President Kennedy, where the original
cover-story that Castro Communists were behind Kennedy’s murder, was surplanted
by the equally implausible substitute Lone-Nut Scenario, in the interests of
national security and world peace.
Since such
black propaganda operations as the ones used at Dealey Plaza
As an opening example of the application of the STASM
formula for the analysis of propganda, I will provide what I immediately
recognized as a Black Prop Op in action when I read the headline of the March 12, 1981 Philadelphia
Daily News: “Castro Plot to Murder Reagan.”
Black Prop Ops at Dealey Plaza
Jeff Morley wrote: "...We can likewise treat with skepticism the CIA's latest interpretation of Kennedy's murder, proposed by Brian Latell, a former Cuba specialist at the Agency. In a new book, Latell has updated and modified the unconvincing "Fidel Castro did it" theory that was that was first put forward by the CIA within hours of JFK's death."
John McAdams asks:
"Where did Morley get the CIA "put out the Castro did
it" theory?"
I have been writing
about this subject for years. Here's a few of the articles:
Black Propaganda &
the JFK Assassination
THE PROOF IN THE
PROPAGANDA – Black Prop Ops and the Assassination of JFK
By William Kelly
Actually there were two conspiracies associated with the assassination of President
Kennedy – the first was the arrangement of his murder, the second concerns
the cover-up and thwarting of justice. The second conspiracy continues today.
The evidence in both cases is in the form of fingerprints – the fingerprints of
distinct intelligence techniques at work. Evidence of the first conspiracy
comes in the form of foreknowledge, individuals who had knowledge of the
assassination before it occurred and expressed this knowledge to others.
Fifth century Chinese philosopher and author of the classic manual “The Art of War” said that foreknowledge cannot be elicited by
spirits or obtained by magic but rather can only be acquired from an
operational network of spies. “Foreknowledge,” he said, “is the reason the
enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move.”
Proof of the second conspiracy stems from the fact that black propaganda
operations were utilized before the assassination, and continue to operate
today to maintain security and protect those responsible for the first
conspiracy.
That people had foreknowledge of the assassination before it occurred and black
propaganda operations were conducted in concert with the murder indicates that
the assassination was carried out by trained covert intelligence operatives and
not by a lone, deranged nut case or the Mafia. This does not preclude however,
members of organized crime or crazy people from being involved in the
operation.
That Fidel Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination is
disinformation and the deception plan behind the black propaganda operation
conducted in concert with the President’s murder. Over a dozen incidents, most
if not all of which can be traced back to the same source, attempt to portray
the assassination as the work of Castro or his G2. [See: List – Below]
Tracing the deceptive disinformation back to its source should also give us the
source of the operation that resulted in what happened at Dealey Plaza.
Since disinformation, propaganda and psychological warfare operations utilize
explicit techniques, they can be identified, isolated and studied as to their
content, intention and source, and thus provide a window into the nest of the
responsible party.
According to Ladislas Farago such, “Black Propaganda is a fundamental
intelligence operation,…because it never identifies its real source and
pretends to originate within or close to the enemy.”
Paul Linebarger, a professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University,
also taught the black arts of propaganda and psychological warfare operations
at his Washington D.C. home. Every Friday evening student spys
and would be spooks took a round-a-bout means to unobtrusively get to his house
where they learned the secret techniques of propaganda and deception.
One of his students, Joseph Burkholder Smith (“Portrait of a Cold
Warrior” G. Putnam/s Sons, N.Y., 1976), relates how Linebarger
explained that Black Propaganda is “carefully labeled to be acts of the enemy.”
Not a subject found in the curriculum of most colleges, the textbook is rare,
Linebarger’s “Psychological Warfare – International Propaganda and
Communications” (Arno Press, 1948, 1952, 1972, Duell, Sloan and
Pearce, N.Y.) is a still used by today’s psychological warriors. According to
Linebarger, “Psychological warfare, in the broad sense, consists of the
application of parts of the science called psychology to the conduct of war;
psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda against the enemy,
together with such military operational measures as may supplement the
propaganda. Propaganda may be described in turn, as organized persuasion by
non-violent means. War itself may be considered to be, among other things, a
violent form of persuasion. War is waged against the minds, not the bodies of
the enemy.”
The term propaganda stems from the name of the department of
the Vatican which had the duty of propagating the faith.
Specifically defined, propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of
public or mass produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions
of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic or
political. Military propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of
communications designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given enemy,
neutral or friendly foreign group for a specific strategic or tactical purpose.
Note that if the communication is not planned, it cannot be called propaganda,
and that if does not originate from an intelligence agency or service, it is
not disinformation.
Linebarger developed the STASM formula for spot analysis, in which propaganda
can be distinguished by the consideration of five elements – 1) Source, 2)
Time, 3) Audience, 4) Subject, 5) Mission. According to Linebarger, this
formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source
is known. First point to note is the character of the source – the true source
(who really got it out?), the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?);
also the first use source (who used it the first time?) and the second source
(who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?).
It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high
magnitude. A systematic breakdown of the STASM formula produces the following
analysis outline: applicable to any single propaganda item, civil or military,
in war or peace, spoken, visual or printed. There are five kinds of propaganda:
Defense – maintains an accepted form of social action; Offensive – interrupts
social action not desired; Conversionary – change allegiance; Divisive – split
apart enemy compoents; Consolidation – insure compliance of occupied civilians;
Counterpropaganda – refutes.
Security is designed to deep useful information from reaching the enemy, while
propaganda operations are designed to get information to him.
According to Smith, “Linebarger’s two leading operational heroes whose
activities formed the basis for lessons he wished us to learn and whose
examples he thought we should follow were Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale and E.
Howard Hunt,” who had what Linebarger called “black minds.”
Besides his own textbook, Linebarger used another book in his classes, “The
Big Con” by David W. Maurer (Pocket Books, N.Y., 1949), which is the
story used as the basis for the screenplay of the movie “The Sting.” Maurer,
a Kentucky linguistics professor, began to study the unique slang of
confidence men, but developed that interest into a unique analysis of the Big
Con confidence games that proliferated during the early part of the last
century.
Linebarger says that book, “gives ideas on how to recruit agents, how to handle
them and how to get rid of them peacefully when they’re no use to you any
longer.” As Linebarger concluded, “Believe me, that last one is the toughest
job of all,” as David A. Phillips learned with Antonio Vechina.
“The big time confidence games are in reality, only carefully rehearsed plays
in which every member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly,”
wrote Maurer.
“Propaganda is directed to the subtle niceties of thought by which people
maintain their personal orientation in an unstable interpersonal world,” wrote
Linebarger. “Propaganda must use the language of the mother, the schoolteacher,
the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the ecclesiastic, the buddy,
the newspaperman, all of them in turn. And propaganda analysis, in weighing and
evaluating propaganda, must be even more discriminating whether the propaganda
is apt to hit its mark or not.”
Black Propaganda
Operations affiliated with the Assassination of JFK:
1) A
leaflet was distributed to the Florida Cuban community in November, 1963 that
warned of an “Act of God” that would put a “Texan in the White House.”
2) Lee
Harvey Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities in New
Orleans in the summer of 1963.
3) Oswald’s
visit to the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City in Sept.,
1963.
4) The
photographs of Oswald brandishing a rifle and pistol and copies of two leftest
but contradictory magazines in his back yard.
5) The
last two issues President Kennedy dealt with before leaving the White House
for Texas concerned his backchannel negotiations with Fidel Castro at
the UN and the discovery of a cache of weapons in Venezuela that
appeared to have come fromCuba. The weapons story was later discovered to be
over a year old and planted by the CIA to falsely
implicate Cuba.
6) Julio
Fernandez, one of three anti-Castro Cubans whose boat was financially supported
by Clair Booth Luce, called Luce, wife of the publisher of Time-Life on the
evening of the assassination to report information on Oswald’s activities
in New Orleans. Fernandez, a former Cuban publisher, was married to
an attorney who worked for Catholic Welfare Services in Miami.
7) In Miami,
shortly after the assassination, Dr. Jose Ignorzio, the chief of clinical
psychology for the Catholic Welfare Services, contacted the White House to
inform the new administration that Oswald had met directly with Cuban
ambassador Armas inMexico.
8) In Mexico
City, David Atlee Philips of the CIA debriefed a Nicaraguan
intelligence officer, code named “D,” who claimed to have seen Oswald take
money from a Cuban at the Cuban embassy.
9) In New
Zealand, U.S.A.F. Col. Fletcher Prouty read complete biographies of Oswald in
the local papers hours after the assassination, indicating to him that a bio of
Oswald was pre-prepared.
10) Brothers
Jerry and James Buchanan, CIA propaganda assets, began promoting the
Castro-did-it theme immediately. According to Donald Freed and Jeff Cohen (in
Liberation Magazine), the source of the Buchanan’s tales was the leader of the CIA supported
International Anti-Communist Brigade (IAB). “Back in Miami,” they wrote,
“a high powered propaganda machine was cranking out stories that Oswald was a
Cuban agent…” Sturgis is quoted in the Pampara Beach Sun-Sentinel as saying
that Oswald had talked with Cuban G-2 agents and fracassed with IAB members
in Miamiin 1962.
11) Jack
Anderson used Sturgis and mobster John Rosselli to keep the Castro plot
propaganda story going well into the 1970s.
12) The
same “propaganda machine” was still pumping out the same lines in 1976 when
Gaeton Fonzi interviewed Sturgis, who said that he had recently ran into a
friend who worked for the “company” who reminded him of an incident he had
completely forgotten about. Sturgis suddenly recalled, “that he had heard about
a meeting in Havana about two months before the Kennedy
assassination. At the meeting there were a number of high-ranking men,
including Castro, hs brother Raul, Ramiro Valdez, the chief of Cuban
intelligence, Che Guevara and his secretary Tanya, another Cuban officer, an
American known as ‘El Mexicano,’ and,…oh, yea; Jack Ruby. And the meeting dealt
with plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.”
13) Seith
Kantor, a Scripps-Howard News Service Reporter inDallas during the
assassination, couldn’t understand why his telephone call records
from Parkland Hospital were being withheld because “disclosure
would reveal confidential source of information.” When Kantor checked his own
records he discovered his editor had told him to call another reporter
inFlorida or some deep background on Oswald. The reporter
inFlorida had everything on Oswald, FPFCC, Russian defection, New
Orleans radio debate, etc., but instead of using it himself, fed it to
Kantor. The reporter was Hal “the Spook” Hendrix, who won the Pulitzer Prize
for his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and earned his nickname when he
“reported” on the Dominican Republic Coup on September 24, 1963, the day before
it happened. His CIA affiliations became better known when he went to
work for ITT in Chile and was found guilty of withholding
information from a Congressional committee concerning his role in the Chilean
coup.
14) While
other major news organizations have been exposed asCIA media assets, such
as CBS News, Life Magazine, the North American Newspaper Alliance and the
Copley Newspaper chain, the Scripps-Howard News Service (SHNS) stands out not
only because of the Kantor-Hendrix connection, but because of the March 12 news
report out of Washington. An obvious black propaganda operation that stems
from NSA intercepts (note that the NSA does not issue press releases), and
continues to implicate Castro in not only the assassination of President
Kennedy, but in the planning of an assassination on President Reagan. This
story is remarkably similar to the one that Sturgis tells [in #12] and includes
many of the same conspirators. [See: SHNS Story]. Also please note that two
weeks after this obvious piece of black propaganda disinformation was
published, President Reagan was shot in front of the Washington Hilton by John
Hinkley.
Example of Black Prop
Op and JFK Assassination.
Why weren’t the
records of this incident released by the NSA under the JFK Act?
Scripps-Howard News
Service – By R. H. Boyce. Thursday, March 12, 1981
Washington – The
National Security Agency has alerted the CIA, the White House and State
Department to a Latin American newspaper report saying Cuban President Fidel
Castro is plotting the assassination of President Reagan, Scripps-Howard News
Service has learned.
The NSA, which monitors published and broadcast information around the globe,
does not makes such “alert” messages available to the press. But SHNS obtained
a copy, which was marked “for official use only.” It included the text of the
newspaper report as well as a garbled message about the news story directed to
the head of Castro’s controlled news agency, Presna Latina.
Without revealing its sources, the news report, published yesterday in
the Caracas, Venezuela, newspaper El Mundo, asserted the
assassination plot called for the slaying to be carried out by Illich Ramirez
Sancho, an international terrorists known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos is said
to have organized the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games
in Munich, West Germany, and has been involved in dozens of
terrorists acts.
U.S. officials
said the NSA’s action in alerting the U.S.intelligence community “suggests
that while they are not necessarily ready to believe the report of an
assassination plot, nevertheless they (NSA) find it at least worthy of looking
into.”
The Caracas newspaper story said the assassination plan, “was
discussed in a meeting of the International Trust of Crime in Cojimar, an
exclusive beach club east of Havana, with the participants of Montonero
and Tupamaro thugs, Illich Ramirez, Ramiro Valdez, Cuban Police Minister Carlos
Rafael Rodriguez and Fidel Castro.”
No identification was found of Ramiro Valdez. Montonero “thugs” are terrorists
operating primarily in Argentina while Tupumaros thugs operate
in Uruguay. The article said Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir
Arafat also participated in the plan.
Presna Latina (Latin Press) often has been used by Castro for political ends.
The Pressa Latina correspondent in Caracas, at 9:47 a.m.
EST yesterday, began transmitting the El Mundo article by cable to Prensa
Latina headquarters in Havana. NSA monitored it. At the close of the text,
Prensa Latina Caracas began adding what appears to be commentary on the El
Mundo report. It reads:
“Everything seems to indicate that Fidel Castro is planning the assassination
of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the same way that he previously ordered the
assassination of John F. Kennedy and whose participation the
high-ranking U.S. government circles hid…”
There the Prensa Latina cable transmission stopped. Had it been ordered broken
off by the Venezuela government, say U.S officials, NSA would
have added the words: “transmission interrupted,” to show Venezuela’s
action. There was no such NSA notation. Officials provided no explanation of
why the transmission ended in mid-sentence.
Scripps-Howard News
Service – By R. H. Boyce. Thursday, March 12, 1981
That's where granny must've gotten run over by the reindeer…….. on the roof.
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