The Patsy as a True Believer
By William Kelly
In a (September 9th) New
York Times review of Kati Marton's new book, “True Believer - Stalin’s Last
American Spy” (Simon & Schuster, 2016), Timothy Naftali writes:
“In these troubling times, we are
more likely than our parents to accept on face value that John F. Kennedy’s
assassin Lee Harvey Oswald could have been a Lone Wolf, the archetype of the
self-radicalized individual - seduced by poisonous ideas into being a soldier
for a cause, acting on dark impulses without need of a supporting organization
and becoming a stranger to his family and community - now haunts the public
imagination.”
While Marton writes about Noel Field
as the True Believer in the Eric Hoffer mold, those interested in Noel Field
should read what David Talbot says about him in his book “The Devil’s
Chessboard," a book the New York Times refuses to review.
In Naftali'a review he makes a lot
of assumptions and tries to re-characterize Lee Harvey Oswald as JFK’s lone
killer, a lone nut case and a self-radicalized “Lone Wolf” terrorist acting as
a True Believer for a phantom cause.
Now in these troubling times, before
we or our parents accept on face value any these three presumptions -
1) The
case against Oswald has been shown over the years to have been weak,
specifically including the palm print on the barrel, the evidentiary value of
the paper bag, the hair & fiber evidence, the timing of the shots, the
condition of the rifle, Oswald's location at the time of the shooting, the
line-up identifications, the timing of the Tippit murder and the shell casings.
2) Investigation over the years has
shown that Oswald was not a "loner," and had a complex series of
associations with a variety of people, such as George de Mohrenschildt, Volkmar
Schmidt, Michael Paine, David Ferrie, Sergio Arcacha Smith, Guy Bannister, David
Atlee Phillips and others.
3) Far from an archetypal
self-radicalized militant, Oswald claimed to have been a Patsy and specifically denied shooting Kennedy and
Officer Tippit ("I didn't shoot anybody, no, sir."), an adamant
denial is the antithesis of a dedicated radical assassin.
Oswald also said during interrogation that JFK's death would probably not
greatly affect US policy toward Cuba, since LBJ would likely carry out the same
policy, and even the Warren Commission could not give Oswald a reasonable motive to kill the President.
In addition, Oswald's defection to
Russia may have been a fake defection, a dangle by a US intelligence
service as the unusually lenient treatment he received on
return to the States (e.g. – no known criminal investigation, no charges) is
not characteristic of treatment one might expect to be afforded to a true
defector during the height of the Cold War.
Now apart from Oswald, let's take a
moment to properly characterize Naftali, a former director of the Nixon Library
and one of those Miller Center scholars who transcribed the Presidential Tapes,
along with Philip Zelikow and Max Holland, whose blatant biases have already
been exposed.
When they got to transcribing the
Oval Office tapes JFK made in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis,
they claimed what the President said in response to Air Force Chief of Staff
Gen. Curtis LeMay’s statement that “You are in a pretty bad fix Mr. President,”
was “unintelligible,” when to others it was clear JFK said, “Your in it with
me.”
Philip Zelikow went on to be the
chief of staff of the 911 Commission and kept the pre-911 Able Danger reports
from reaching the commissioners and then kept the Saudi Arabian connections out
of their final report.
Max Holland wrote the “JFK
Assassination Tapes” book without mentioning the dozens of Air Force One
radio tape transmissions from the Collins Radio Liberty station or the many
other Collins Radio connections to the assassination that I have written
extensively about and made presentations on at the Wecht and Bethesda
conferences.
Zelikow, Holland and Naftali are in
the same boat here, so we know where Naftali is coming from and where he is going with this.
As for Naftali's attempted
re-characterization of Oswald as an archetypical Lone Wolf terrorist, the idea
that Oswald was JFK’s assassin must first be rejected, as the evidence that
implicates Oswald is questionable, and it is more likely he was framed as a
Patsy as he claimed to be.
So Oswald may have been alone but he
was not a wolf, he was a rabbit, Ozzie Rabbit - one set off for others to chase
while the real killers slipped quietly away.
It wasn't Oswald who was seduced by
poisonous ideas into being a soldier for a cause and a stranger to his family,
it is Naftali who is acting on dark impulses with a need for such supporting
organizations like the Miller Center and the New York Times.
Naftale says that Noel Field, as a
True Believing Soviet spy offers us a “window on the delusion and narcissism
that fuel the self-radicalized of any era,” it is Naftale and his Miller Center
minions who offer us a window of insight into the Dark Side of the Black Arts
and “Wilderness of Mirrors” who wants us to believe JFK was the victim of a
Lone Wolf, so let's look more closely at them as well as the organizations that
support them.
Let's see, the Miller Center in
Virginia is bankrolled in part by the Scripps Howard News Service (SHNS), one
of the chief assets of the CIA’s Mockingbird program and source of numerous
black propaganda disinformation stories on the assassination. These stories
include those furnished Seth Kantor in Dallas by Hal Hendrix in Miami within
hours of the assassination, and the bogus NSA report a few weeks before the
Hinckley attempt to kill Reagan that falsely tried to blame both presidential
attacks on Castro, a familiar CIA “active measure” that continues today.
Then there's Max Holland, Naftali’s
Miller Center cohort who unabashedly writes for the CIA’s in-house publication
and gets awarded grants from the Columbia-Lucas Foundation that was known as
the Columbia-Catherwood Award before the Catherwood Foundation was exposed as a
conduit for covert CIA action funds. And Holland lists among his benefactors a
German Venetian blind company - how shady is that?
We won't even bother going into the
New York Times, the paper of record that recently published an article calling
for the release of the secret NSA records on the suspicious death of UN
Secretary Dag Hammarskold, but doesn’t mention the still withheld NSA records
on the assassination of President Kennedy.
So when Naftali and Holland and
others try to describe the Patsy in the Dealey Plaza operation as an
“archetypical Lone Wolf seduced by poisonous ideas - a soldier for a cause
acting on dark impulses without a supporting organization,” you know they are
the ones acting on dark impulses and poisoning ideas as a mercenary soldiers
covertly working as a media assets for a nefarious secret organization.
William Kelly is a freelance
journalist and historian whose JFK assassination research is partially funded
by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Justice Investigative Journalism
Project. He is Secretary of CAPA - Citizens Against Political Assassinations
(CAPA-HQ.com).
