Response to Powers' Review of Morley's "Ghost"

Kelly's Response to Powers' Review of Morley's "Ghost" 

https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/free/lobster76/lob76-powers.pdf

Powers:  https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n09/thomas-powers/the-monster-plot

http://www.maxholland.info/
www.washingtondecoded.com/

AND ANOTHER THING: 

Along with David Martin ("Wilderness of Mirrors"), David Wise ("Mole hunt"), Thomas Ross, with Wise ("The Invisible Government"), John Marks and Victor Marchetti ("The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence") and a few other journalists, Thomas Powers knows more about espionage and the history of the Cold War than many spies.

But as a 30 year veteran of the Council of Foreign Relations, he fails to tackle the assassination of the President - the ultimate mystery of our times - because he is an apologist for the same system that was responsible for the murder of the President.

The "intelligence community" still wants to protect its "sources and methods" (what Allen Dulles called the "craft of intelligence") - which are technically neutral and used by every intelligence agency and network since the days of Sun Tzu and the Art of War in China thousands of years ago. But it's too late, since these "sources and methods" have already been exposed, and counter-intelligence techniques are being properly applied to analysis of the assassination, as they should have been from the start.

Now that the "Wilderness of Mirrors" has been well documented and mapped out,

In his review of Jefferson Morley’s biography of James Jesus Angleton “Ghost,” Powers resorts to attacking Morley personally rather than wrestling with the evidence, something we can and must do.

Powers says Morley shouldn't be taken seriously and criticizes him for providing an uneven profile of Angleton - the CIA's chief of Counter Intelligence (CI) during whose watch the assassination occurred. 

But it is Angleton who provided the CI tools and trade craft, the means and methods needed to understand what actually occurred at Dealey Plaza.

Morley and Powers both tell us about Angleton's "Monster Plot" - an obsessive fear that the Soviets penetrated the CIA at its highest levels - as they did the British, West German and French intelligence agencies.  Crucial to the analysis are the alleged fake defectors who were muddying the waters - especially Anatoly Golitsyn, Yuri Nosenko and Lee Oswald, the accused assassin of the President.

Were they real or fake defectors? Thanks to the recent release of records we have the tapes and transcripts of Nosenko's interrogation, and the five CIA studies of Nosenko, one of which weighed the cost benefits of the information he gave up, and concluded he was a legitimate defector because of the value of the information.  Other knowledgeable researchers familiar with Nosenko's complete file are convinced that he lied and was a false defector.

And what about Golitsyn and Oswald? They are players in the "Monster Plot" we have yet to decipher.

Powers accuses Morley of being "strangely indifferent to the 'Monster Plot' story that engulfed Angleton - a plot that he says includes the JFK assassination," which Powers sees as "notoriously tricky" to tackle.

Powers contends that Morley is strangely indifferent to Angleton's "Monster Plot," and that Angleton's bugbear is somehow connected to the assassination of the President.  But Powers never elucidates that connection. 

It was JFK himself who nominated Michael Straight to head the National Federation of the Arts, which sparked an FBI background investigation of Straight, which discovered that he had attended Cambridge with Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean and others who were recruited to be Soviet spies before going undercover in the British government. Straight confessed to being approached for recruitment by Philby but declined Philby's overture, despite Straight's communist sympathies.

Philby tipped off Burgess and MacLean before they could be arrested, so they had already made it safely to Moscow. And Philby was warned of Straight's confession by MI6 officer Nicholas Elliott and permitted to escape to Moscow. Nicholas Elliot was a close personal friend and MI6 associate of NANA's Ian Fleming and his brother Peter Fleming. Elliot was sent to Beirut, Lebanon to confront Philby, and give him the opportunity to get while the getting was good.

But the damage was done, since Philby was the MI6 liaison to the CIA and already knew all the secrets. In fact, it was Philby who taught Angleton many of the CI crafts of intelligence during WWII.  Philby and Angleton later had three-martini lunches in Washington, which eventually led CIA analyst Clare Petty to suggest that Angleton himself was the Soviet mole.

As former FBI agent William Turner has said, we know that the assassination of the President was originally devised as a CIA plan to kill Fidel Castro and was diverted to kill JFK at Dealey Plaza. It was a carefully devised Plan, not a plot, a plan that included a black propaganda disinformation deception to blame the murder of Fidel Castro, an aspect of the plan that failed.

Those who say one man alone did it for his own unknowable irrational motives have solved the case in their minds, to their own satisfaction. Those of us who believe there's more to the story, however,  can look upon all of the evidence as part of a covert intelligence operation, and utilize the CI tools at our disposal to analyze it.