SPECIAL: Chapter 15 of John Newman's "Into the Storm" - Upgraded

FROM JOHN NEWMAN'S "Into the Storm" 

SPECIAL - John Newman has permitted JFKCountercoup to post his end chapter 15 of "Into the Storm" - Volume 3 of his ground breaking multi-volume study of the assassination of President Kennedy, and the "intermission" before continuing the quest in Volume 4.

This is copyrighted material, do not copy, paste or quote at length without the permission of the author.

As John Newman writes in the Introduction to this book, "Any standard - i.e., open-minded - examination of the events in Volume II and IV is encumbered by a labyrinth of deceptive information. The inaccurate and false clutter must first be succinctly identified and processed, and then disposed of, before the task of assembling the true sequence of events can begin....And so I found myself struggling for months on end trying to peer through the fog created by Yuri Nosenko, Samuel Halpern, and Antonio Veciana. Their stories are fraught with deception and inaccuracies. And so, I have resorted to putting their accounts under an electron microscope. In the end, I arrived at an intermission - a dark zone between the events that took place leading up to the summer of 1962 and what they portended for the rest of the Kennedy presidency. And I chose....to share my findings in Volume III without knowing how things will turn out in Volumes IV and, if necessary, beyond......"

                                                    

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

INTERMISSION:

THE WINDS OF WAR

                                          

At the precisemoment President Kennedy launched Operation Mongoose—on 3 November 1961—official Washington was already in an uproar over the report General Taylor had made that same day recommending that 8,000 U.S. combat troops be deployed in South Vietnam (see JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition, Chapter Seven).  Taylor had just returned from a mission to Vietnam for which the president had instructed him not to come back with a recommendation for U.S. military intervention.  Kennedy was so shocked by Taylor’s recommendation that he tried, unsuccessfully, to suppress it by recalling copies of the final report.[i] Taylor’s recommendation to send combat troops was a very closely held secret.

The fact that the president tried to suppress a recommendation to send combat troops to Vietnam on the same day that he launched Operation Mongoose tells us a lot about how he would react to a similar recommendation to send American combat troops into Cuba.  No record of the 3 November meeting that launched Mongoose has ever been found.[ii]  However, the decisions reached that day were summarized in a 30 November 1961 memorandum from the president to his senior cabinet members, as well as General Taylor and General Lansdale. Kennedy told his subordinates to “go ahead” with the project to “overthrow” the Castro regime.[iii]

Lansdale made use of that presidential memorandum in a report he authored on 20 February 1962.[iv]  But Lansdale’s report was remanded six days later by the Special Group (Augmented—SGA) because he had asked if the president would approve U.S. military intervention in Cuba.  I mentioned that key SGA meeting in Chapter Fourteen and promised to revisit it here.  Before I do that, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that eight days before the president gave the “go ahead” for Mongoose on 30 November 1961, he had overruled a recommendation by Secretary McNamara, Secretary Rusk, the Joint Chiefs and General Taylor, for U.S. military intervention in Vietnam.  Etched in stone in NSAM-111 on 22 November 1961, that was the defining decision on Vietnam during Kennedy’s presidency.  It was promulgated two years to the day before his assassination. 

The Battle Between General Lemnitzer and President Kennedy Over War in Vietnam

The key NSC meeting leading up to President Kennedy’s decision against intervention in Vietnam occurred on November 15, 1961.  During that meeting, a caustic and revealing exchange took place between JCS Chairman General Lemnitzer and the president.  When Kennedy asked for the justification for sending U.S. combat troops to Vietnam, this heated moment took place:

Lemnitzer replied that the world would be divided in the area of Southeast Asia on the sea, in the air and in communications.  He said communist conquest would deal a severe blow to freedom and extend communism to a great portion of the world.  The president asked how he could justify the proposed courses of action in Vietnam while at the same time ignoring Cuba.  General Lemnitzer hastened to add that the JCS feel that even at this point the United States should go into Cuba.[v]

This passage was a dramatic illustration of the degree to which the president had become isolated from the cold warriors demanding full U.S. intervention in Vietnam and Cuba.  It foreshadowed the uncompromising conflict that erupted three months later over Lemnitzer’s proposal for full U.S. military intervention in Cuba.

In the days immediately after Thanksgiving—26-29 November—Kennedy purged the Vietnam hawks in the State Department (see JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition, Chapter Seven).  At the same time, as I mentioned before, when the president fired DCI Allen Dulles and replaced him with John McCone, he warned the new DCI, “We want to welcome you here and to say that you are now living on the bull’s-eye, and I welcome you to that spot.”[vi]

The lesson from the president’s climactic Vietnam decision was this: Kennedy turned down combat troops, not when the decision was clouded by ambiguities and contradictions in the reports from the battlefield, but when the battle was unequivocally desperate, when all concerned agreed that Vietnam’s fate hung in the balance, and when his principal advisors told him that vital U.S. interests in the region and the world were at stake.

But the chiefs in the Pentagon remained frustrated with the president’s decision.  Air Force Chief of Staff General LeMay was particularly dismayed.  He later claimed that none of the Joint Chiefs at the time believed the president’s Vietnam program was “anything except some diplomatic fiddling around” with a little more aid.[vii]  On 13 January 1962, General Lemnitzer authored his most strongly worded warning yet that his recommendation to send U.S. military combat forces to Vietnam had to be considered again, and asked Defense Secretary McNamara to send it on to the president.[viii]  McNamara did this, along with his own comment that he did not endorse it.[ix]

In an emphatic and foreboding lecture to the president, Lemnitzer said that failure to heed his recommendation would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.”  Singapore and Malaysia would be lost as the Indonesian archipelago came under “Soviet domination.”  Control of the eastern access to the Indian Ocean would be lost and India would be “outflanked.”  Australia and New Zealand would be threatened, and the American bases in the Philippines and Japan would be lost.

Given Kennedy’s repeated refusals to intervene in Vietnam, Lemnitzer’s memo bordered on insubordination.  His the-sky-is-falling memorandum rebuked the president for his “failure” to send in U.S. combat troops.  Lemnitzer added impudently that this “will merely extend the date when such action must be taken and will make our ultimate task proportionately more difficult.”  The message to Kennedy was clear: We told you a year ago to send combat troops, but you didn’t listen.  If you fail to listen when your program falls apart, we’ll do it anyway.

And, as we know from the subsequent history of events, they did do it anyway.

The Battle Between General Lemnitzer and President Kennedy Over War in Cuba

The battle over U.S. intervention in Vietnam was the context for Lansdale’s 28 January 1962 submission of his “sensitive” Task 33 false-flag operation to create a pretext for U.S. intervention in Cuba.  As I mentioned in Chapter Fourteen, Lansdale took a surprising step forward on the path to U.S. intervention in his 20 February report titled “The Cuba Project.”[x]  Lansdale’s report began with this sentence:

In keeping with the spirit of the presidential memorandum of 30 November 1961, the U.S. will help the people of Cuba overthrow the communist regime from within Cuba and institute a new government with which the U.S. can live in peace.  [Emphasis added]

That statement was essentially true.  The president’s memorandum was simpler: “We will use our available assets to go ahead with the discussed project in order to help Cuba overthrow the communist regime.”[xi]

          But Lansdale’s report ended with a question that was completely at odds with presidential policy:

If the conditions and assets permitting a revolt are achieved in Cuba, and if U.S. help is required to sustain this condition, will the U.S. respond promptly with military force to aid the Cuban revolt?  …An early decision is required. [Emphasis added]

Of course, Lansdale knew that the president had barred U.S. military intervention from being considered in the Mongoose operation.  So, why had Lansdale become the stalking horse for a proposal specifically opposed by the president?  There can only be one answer: just as Lansdale had cast his lot with the chiefs on intervention in Vietnam back in the spring of 1961, now he was once again casting his lot with them on intervention—this time in Cuba.  While the president would keep Lansdale around for a while longer, that episode effectively ended his usefulness to the Kennedy brothers.  Lansdale’s embrace of U.S. military intervention in Cuba ensured that he would never be rewarded with his coveted prize—an assignment to Vietnam as a special U.S. advisor to President Diem. 

As I mentioned in Chapter Fourteen, the Kennedy brothers had seen the false-flag pretext for U.S. military intervention in Lansdale’s 18 January memorandum.  Two days later, Lansdale’s 20 February report went even further by asking if the president would agree to U.S. intervention to save a Cuban revolt.  It is likely the Kennedys understood that Lemnitzer was behind Lansdale’s switch to an intervention track.  And so, the brothers conducted countermeasures by using a key 26 February SGA meeting to 1) restrict Lansdale’s future mission to “short-range actions” to acquire “hard intelligence” about Cuba, and 2) order the deletion of Lansdale’s reference to the president’s memorandum in his (Lansdale’s) 20 February paper.  The message was unmistakable: Lansdale’s question about intervening militarily to save a Cuban revolt was decidedly not “in keeping with the spirit” of the president’s memorandum.   

The Kennedy brothers knew that clipping Lansdale’s wings was only the beginning of the battle that was about to unfold.  If the false-flag pretext was only Lansdale’s idea, then there was nothing more to worry about.  But the brothers intended to force the real snake in the grass out into the open.  And General Lemnitzer had no qualms about stepping to the front of the line.

Not surprisingly, Lemnitzer had already swung into action in the Pentagon.  A later (13 March 1962) memorandum traced the evolution of the activity Lemnitzer assigned to his Joint Staff.[xii]  By the time of Lansdale’s 18 January false-flag pretext proposal, Lemnitzer had already placed his chief of covert action, General Craig, in charge of a working group of five officers—from the Joint Staff’s J-5 plans and policy component—on a full-time basis.  After Lansdale’s 18 January recommendation, Lemnitzer enlarged Craig’s working group by “the addition of full-time representatives of the Joint Staff’s J-1 (manpower and personnel), J-2 (intelligence), J-3 (operations), J-4 (logistics), and representatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).  Lemnitzer was ahead of his skis at this point. 

          While neither of the Kennedy brothers was physically present at the crucial 26 February SGA meeting, their interests were well represented.   The presence of the president’s security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, and Defense Secretary McNamara, along with his deputy, Roswell Gilpatrick, was sufficient to apply the brakes on Lansdale’s future duties.  Lansdale was there to witness the first step on his journey toward impotence.  That surprise undoubtedly pleased William Harvey—who was also a witness to Lansdale’s falling star—but he was hardly oblivious to the worrisome implications.  Little did Harvey suspect at the time that Lansdale’s last act, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, would be to dismantle his own (Harvey’s) CIA fiefdom on the orders of Robert Kennedy.

          In Chapter Fourteen I mentioned that there was a lot more than met the eye taking place during that seminal February SGA meeting.  The unseen hand of the Kennedy brothers was responsible for the use of a bureaucratic trick the president had fashioned after the Bay of Pigs failure.  The participants at the SGA meeting were informed about several “papers for higher authority” that had to be drafted “before the coming weekend”—i.e. in four days.  There were two key papers.  The first paper was to plan for the maximum use of Cuban resources, while recognizing that final success will require decisive U.S. military intervention.  The second paper was to plan for the development of Cuban resources to facilitate, support, and justify that intervention.

          On the surface, the guidance for these two “papers” appeared to be an approval for what Lansdale (on behalf of Lemnitzer) had proposed on 18 January and 20 February.  But those instructions were a bureaucratic sleight of hand.  Officials who had experience trying to convince President Kennedy to approve something he did not support were used to being told to go write a paper and get back to him.  In this case, only one paper was drafted afterward, and it was written on 5 March by General Taylor with slight revisions by McGeorge Bundy and DCI McCone. The first two lines were identical, word-for-word, with the language used in the guidance from the 26 February SGA meeting.[xiii]

          The formula used at that meeting on behalf of the Kennedys was not a direct affront to Lemnitzer’s plans for war in Cuba.  But the reprimand of Lansdale put the ball firmly in Lemnitzer’s court.  He understood what he had to do.  And so, Lemnitzer put his Operation Northwoods on the table two weeks later, on 13 March.  In Chapter Fourteen, I discussed the morally depraved details of Lemnitzer’s plan—sinking an American ship, attacking Miami, Washington and other American cities, and blaming it all on Cuba.

Three days later, Kennedy and Lemnitzer met face-to face with, perhaps, a half dozen other officers.  It is very difficult to find a formal memo of the discussion in that meeting.We do have a brief handwritten note authored by Deputy Under Secretary of State U. Alexis Johnson who witnessed the event:   

The president also expressed skepticism that, in so far as can now be foreseen, circumstances will arise thatwould justify and make desirable the use of American forces for overt military action.  It was clearly understood no decision was expressed or implied approving the use of such forces although contingency planning would proceed.[xiv] [Emphasis added]

However, as this volume went to press, I discovered a memorandum indicating that a blunt rebuke of Lemnitzer by JFK took place.  I will discuss that memo further in Volume IV.

          Here, as a career U.S. Army officer, I am compelled to speak my mind.  I   speak for myself and will leave other officers of the American Armed Forces to their own counsel in this matter.  General Lemnitzer betrayed his country and his oath of office to protect and defend its constitution.  U.S. Army Major General Joseph Alexander McChristian, perhaps the finest Army intelligence officer ever to wear the uniform, was once asked what it means to lie about the enemy in a time of war.  He spoke for what is in my heart when he replied, “It jeopardizes not only the lives of the soldiers on the battlefield, but also the future liberty of your people at home.”[xv]

******************************

         

As the moment of maximum danger in the Cuban Missile Crisis approached, the president finally got around to firing Lemnitzer.  On 1 October 1962, Kennedy installed General Maxwell Taylor as the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  The choice of Taylor, as events turned out, was a very bad mistake.Taylor would end up working secretly with other senior officers to subvert President Kennedy’s order to begin the withdrawal of U.S. military advisors from Vietnam.

          The ship of the brothers Kennedy was sailing headlong into the winds of war.  Though they might still stop it in Cuba, war was coming nonetheless.  The miraculous conclusion of the Cuban Missile Crisis would be short-lived.  It was only an intermission—much like the passing eye of a huge hurricane.

At the moment, for me—save for the steadily building hatred for the Kennedy brothers and the metamorphosing CIAplots to assassinate Castro—what lies on the other side of that intermission is mostly dark.  But a saying John Kennedy was wont to quote comes to mind:

Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh in vain. [Psalm 127:1]

—Remarks prepared [undelivered] for speech at the Trade Mart

                                                                                                         Dallas, Texas, 22 November 1963

---

[i] Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, p. 169.

[ii] 11/3/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 270, Editorial Note.

[iii] 11/30/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 278, Memorandum from President Kennedy.

[iv] 2/20/62, Lansdale report on “The Cuba Project”; RIF 145-10001-10003.

[v] Notes on National Security Council Meeting 15, November 1961, LBJ Library, VP Security File, Box 4.

[vi] Kennedy, remarks at the swearing in of John McCone, CIA, November 29, 1961, Public Papers, 1961, p. 490.

[vii].LeMay interview with Belden, March 29, 1972, in Air Force History, p. 91.

[viii]PP, DOD ed., Book 12, pp. 448-54.

[ix] Ibid., p. 447.

[x] 2/20/62, Lansdale Report, “The Cuba Project”; RIF 145-10001-10003.

[xi] 11/30/61, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 278, Memorandum from President Kennedy.

[xii] 3/13/62, DOD/JCS memorandum, “Consolidated Status Report” for the Special Group (Augmented).  Note: This important memorandum may never see the light of day.  I discovered extracts from it in the Church Committee Index Card collection that I copied at NARA at a very early date after the passage of the JFK Assassination Records and Collection Act was passed in 1992.  I have made back-up copies for safe keeping of these valuable records (in secure locations) which contain more than a thousand index cards on important meetings of the Special Group and the National Security Council.  When the current Trump administration has finished whatever they decide to do pursuant to mandated full release of JFK records, we will take action to approach NARA and the JFK Presidential Library to ensure that what I have copied from this SSCIA Index Card collection will be available to researchers.

[xiii]3/14/62, FRUS, Vol. X, Cuba, Document 314, Guidelines for Operation Mongoose.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv]See Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 2017 Edition, p. xxiv.

John Newman's "Into the Storm"

John Newman’s “Into the Storm”

“Major John Newman has crafted a groundbreaking work that finally illuminates the dark places where democracy goes to die…Newman -- a twenty-year veteran intelligence officer -- here exposes the now undeniable involvement of high-level military and intelligence officials in the assassination of my uncle, President John F. Kennedy….”  —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance, author of American Values, Lessons I Learned from My Family.

There are two ways to approach the assassination of President Kennedy – either from the ground up, which always ends up chasing Ozzie the Rabbit around, or the top down, evaluating the victim and those around him who wanted him dead. While most conspiracy theorists and all those who believe one man alone killed the President follow the former, John Newman’s approach is a formal and detailed counter-intelligence operation - the correct one that will eventually lead to a resolution of the crime.

“Into the Storm” – Volume three of John Newman’s multi-volume study of the Assassination of President Kennedy, is meticulously written and well documented, so there’s no arguing with Newman over the facts or his logic and reasoning, well developed from his years as an Army intelligence officer and college professor.

While I had read and was impressed with his previous works, I was a little lax in reading Volume 2 of this series “Countdown to Darkness,” so it was with a little embarrassment when I wrote around to a small circle of researchers asking the identity of some codes and crypts and was told to just read Volume 2, where all of the answers to my questions could be found, and they were.

So I had to jump into Volume 3 right away, and found “Into the Storm,” like the earlier works, so detailed that I could only read one chapter at a time, and have to take a break to digest it all. Just as the books are built on the foundations he constructs, every word, sentence, paragraph, chapter and volume is built upon what was previously written, so you have to pay attention and follow this analysis of the Great Game as it progresses.

As I had heard Newman’s presentation on Sam Halpern and RFK in Dallas last November, and was familiar with his work on Antonio Veciana, I looked forward to reading those chapters the most, but found his other chapters fascinating.

All the chapters are important – Berlin 1961, the Castro Assassination Plots June 1961, RFK and the Castro Assassination Plots Parts 1-2-3, KGB-CIA Spy Wars 1962, Operation Mongoose and Northwoods.

But specially interesting is Newman’s clear demonstration of how a calculated shift in the black vote gave the 1960 election to JFK. Newman shows how this emphatic shift came about because of six incidents, each of which had to occur and happen in the sequence in which they did, otherwise JFK would not have won the black vote, or the election or have been in a position to be assassinated a few years later.

The strategic shift in the black vote came after Martin Luther King, Jr.  had been arrested at an Atlanta sit in, then was railroaded by the police when they discovered an old traffic ticket and had King sent to a state prison and sentenced to serve on a chain gang with murderers. JFK, on the campaign trail, at the urging of Sergeant Shriver and the late Harris Wofford, made an impromptu phone call to King’s wife Coretta Scott King, while RFK called the Georgia authorities to arrange for King’s release.

Although the Kennedy’s efforts on King’s behalf did not end in an endorsement, King’s father shifted his support from Nixon to JFK, and the black communities throughout the country knew this. And Shriver and Wofford made sure they knew it by printing thousands of blue leaflets that were distributed to black Baptist churches on the Sunday before the election, a leaflet Newman refers to as “the blue bomb.”

It is hard to believe that over fifty years after the murder of King we are still learning new things about him.

Although the chapter on the reasons for the swing in the black vote is fascinating, and new to me, the other chapters are important too – especially in building a solid foundation for Newman’s basic hypothesis – that he lays out at the beginning of each volume, hypothesis similar to my own.

John Newman’s Five Hypothesis:

“Hypothesis One: At some point in 1962, regardless of how much earlier one might have wanted President Kennedy to be assassinated, the contours of the plot that eventually emerged began to fall into place: an American Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald would appear to have assassinated JFK and to have done so for Fidel Castro with the assistance of the KGB.”

“Hypothesis Two: The plot was designed to make it appear that the Kennedy brothers’ plan to overthrow Castro had been successfully turned by Fidel, resulting in the assassination of President Kennedy.”

“Hypothesis Three: Lee Harvey Oswald was sent by his agent handler to New Orleans in the summer of 1963 to build upon his pro-Castro Cuban legend that he had begun to establish in Dallas at the beginning of that year.”

“Hypothesis Four: Oswald’s CIA files were manipulated by CIA counterintelligence in the weeks before the assassination to support the design mentioned in Hypothesis One and Two. In this connection, Oswald (or an imposter) traveled to Mexico City (28 September – 3 October 1963) and spent time in the Cuban Consulate and met with a Soviet diplomat, Valery Kostikov, who was known by U.S. intelligence to be the head of the KGB assassination (Department 13) for the Western Hemisphere.”

“Hypothesis Five:  An essential element of the plot was a psychological operation to raise the specter of WWIII and the death of forty million Americans. This threat of a nuclear holocaust was then used by President Johnson to terrify Chief Justice Earl Warren – and some of the other men who served on the Warren Commission – to such an extent that they believed there was no alternative to writing a report stating that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had assassinated the president.”

My hypothesis are similar and pretty basic – what happened at Dealey Plaza – regardless of the role of the accused assassin, was a very specific type of conspiracy – a covert intelligence operation, one conducted using standard covert intelligence operational techniques and procedures and personnel trained in what Allen Dulles called “The Crafts of Intelligence.”

The Dealey Plaza Covert Intelligence Operation was carried out by well trained and compensated covert intelligence agents, operators and assets who had done such black wet ops before, and did them after November 22, 1963, events that I refer to as related covert ops, most of which had something to do with Cuba, specifically the Bay of Pigs, Northwoods, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Operation Mongoose and JMWAVE maritime operations.

My final hypothesis is that the specific covert intelligence operational plan that was utilized at Dealey Plaza was originally designed by the German military command to kill Hitler, the same plan “studied in detail” by the CIA and used as a contingency plan to kill Fidel Castro, an assassination that was to be blamed on a communist set up as a patsy.

Rather than a bomb, as the German Valkyrie plot failed to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944, a more certain plan was adopted called Pathfinder – which called for Castro to be shot in the head with a high powered rifle as he rode by in an open jeep – the plan that was re-directed to kill JFK in Dallas.

The five aspects of the Valkyrie plan to kill Hitler that were adopted to be used against Castro, and redirected to JFK in Dallas were the use of standard covert intelligence operational techniques, getting the victim to sign off and approve the plan, using the Home Guard (Army Reserves) as “boots on the ground” to carry out the operation, control of the communications and media and blaming the act on a communist.

As for the use of the Home Guard/Army Reserves, rather than the CIA, that was the case with Antonio Veciana, as Newman clearly demonstrates. Newman focuses on Antonio Veciana, the anti-Castro Cuban terrorists who claims he was recruited into the CIA by David Atlee Phillips (aka Maurice Bishop). But Newman takes what Veciana told Congressional investigator Gaeton Fonzi and a few journalists (Dick Russell and Anthony Summers), and writes in his book, and compares it to what’s in the government’s files released under the JFK Act. And vola! We find out that Veciana and his Alpha 66 gang were not run by the CIA but by Army Intelligence – specifically the ubiquitous Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI).

To the collection of Colonels at Dealey Plaza Newman adds a few more – Colonel J.E. Boyt, who approved operational use of Veciana and Alpha 66 and Colonel Jeff W. Boucher, chief of the ACSI’s Collection Division.

JFKcountercoup: Colonels at Dealey Plaza

JFKcountercoup: More Colonels at Dealey Plaza

Veciana is a major player in this drama but Newman shows that these guys - trained psychological warriors can’t be taken at their own word, but their stories must jive with the facts we know from the documentary records.

Then there’s the RFK-Sam Halpern nexus over the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.

While Colonel Von Staufenberg got Hitler to sign off on the Valkyrie plot by lying to him, both JFK and RFK refused to approve the CIA plans to assassinate Castro, as the Pathfinder plan was “disapproved by higher authority,” so Halpern and the others in Task Force W and JMWAVE had to lie about that.

Where Newman’s research crosses paths with my own, besides our mutual hypothesis, is with one Charles Ford.

For more on Charles Ford: JFKCountercoup2: Charles Ford - Updated

Ford was originally from Atlantic City and was attending Princeton when World War II broke out and he enlisted in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After the war Ford began work for the CIA, primarily in the office of Training, frequently at the Agency’s “Farm” at Quantico, Virginia.

Ford worked exclusively in the office of Training except for one eventful year at Task Force W – the Cuban operations desk in the basement of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. There Ford worked closely with William Harvey, Desmond FitzGerald and the executive officer Sam Halpern, who described Ford’s job to Sy Hersh for his book, ‘The Darkside of Camelot.”

Halpern said Ford was assigned to run special tasks for the attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, one of which included visiting the mobsters – Sam Giancana, Santo Traficante and John Rosselli, who were entwined in the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro.

While Hersh bought and retold Halpern’s tales verbatim, Newman documents them in a chronological timeline, as he did with MLK and the black votes and Anthony Veciana, and clearly shows that Halpern lied when he tried to say RFK was behind the Castro assassination plots, and the files released under the JFK Act prove this, especially Charles Ford’s own testimony.

Ford testified before the Church Committee twice, though the transcript for one testimony is missing, as are many other Church Committee records, something that the Congressional Oversight Committee should look into if they ever get around to holding hearings.

Ford told the Church Committee that at no time did he ever meet with mobsters at the urging of RFK, though he did work closely with Halpern, Harvey and FitzGerald for that one “operational” year.

Othewise he was assigned to the Office of Training, where he was given custody of an early copy of the Zapruder Film – given to the CIA by the Secret Service “for training purposes.”

Unlike Ford, Halpern was never in the same room with RFK, never met him, yet he tried to falsely pin the Castro tail on RFK by claiming he was behind the CIA’s assassination plots.

Because the part of the plan to blame the Castro assassination plots on the Kennedys failed, it is the very aspect of the plan that gives us insight into the mechanism at work, and who was behind it.

At the time of the assassination Halpern was having lunch with Desmond FitzGerald at an historic Georgetown club when they were informed of the assassination. While walking out, Halpern quotes FitzGerald as wondering aloud if his Cubans were involved – the Pathfinders, who were paid and trained to kill Castro with a high powered rifle as he rode in an open jeep, but instead, turned their sights on JFK in Dallas.   

Where were the Pathfinders on November 22, 1963?

Now we have digested Volume 1 “Where Angels Tread Lightly,” - Volume 2 “Countdown To Darkness” and Volume 3 “Into the Storm,” – and we aren’t even in Texas yet. But the tempest is brewing, we are under full sale, and with John Newman at the helm, we are confident of navigating through these treacherous waters in good hands.

To order any of these books: 

https://www.amazon.com/John-M.-Newman/e/B001IZT9DK

John Newman on Hypothesis One and Two

JOHN NEWMAN:

Hypothesis One: At some point in 1962, regardless of how much earlier one might have wanted President Kennedy to be assassinated, the contours of the plot that eventually emerged began to fall into place: an American Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald would appear to have assassinated JFK and to have done so for Fidel Castro with the assistance of the KGB.

Hypothesis Two: The plot was designed to make it appear that the Kennedy brothers’ plan to overthrow Castro had been successfully turned by Fidel, resulting in the assassination of President Kennedy.....

John Newman posted this on Facebook.: 

In Volume III (“Into the Storm”) I deconstructed CIA officer Samuel Halpern’s four-decades long campaign to convince the world that Attorney General Robert Kennedy ran a super-secret operation (unknown to Harvey and the rest of the CIA leadership) to use the Mafia to murder Fidel Castro—and that RFK used another CIA officer, Charles Ford, as his liaison to the mob to achieve that nefarious objective.

Halpern’s RFK-Mafia myth has played a significant role in the continuing use of the old canard that Castro (with a KGB assist) was responsible for the Kennedy assassination. That canard lies at the heart at the successful cover-up of the murder of JFK. For these reasons, Chapter Seven of Volume III opens with an essay addressing the strategy and tactics of the cover-up.

THE JFK ASSASSINATION—A TAXONOMY OF THE COVER-UP

The cover-up of the president’s murder was carefully prepared well before the event itself. In the days immediately following the shooting in Dealey Plaza, both overt and covert components of the cover-up were put into play.

Overt is what the public sees; covert is what people with appropriate security clearances see. The overt component created a calming public spectacle by framing Oswald as a crazy lone nut with communist sympathies but no direct connection to a larger conspiracy. The covert component created a threatening top-secret crisis by framing Oswald as a witting agent of an international communist conspiracy. 

The overt component was a messy but straight-forward public exhibition of fabricated evidence in Dealey Plaza. The covert component was an intricate secret “need-to-know” exhibition of fabricated evidence in Oswald’s top-secret government files. The fabricated top-secret evidence was weaponized to create a frightening impression of an impending crisis: The U.S. was facing a possible nuclear war with the USSR because the FBI and CIA had failed to connect the dots in their secret files on Oswald. In this manner, our national security institutions were incentivized to cooperate in the unfolding cover-up. 

The symbiotic relationship of these false conspiracies in the overt and covert components of the cover-up was an ingenious fit. The calming effect of the lone nut non-conspiratorial overt scenario  —itself part of the true conspiracy — was the antidote for the false conspiratorial crisis scenario unfolding inside of the government. The key to the long-term success of the cover-up was the continuing survival of the covert component of the plan. As long as the covert communist conspiratorial scenario remained viable, the feasibility of the overt lone nut (apparently) non-conspiratorial component became less important over time. 

The importance of the role that these discrete conspiracies played in the hierarchy of false conspiracies cannot be overemphasized. In the long run, it didn’t matter how many holes were poked in the Dealey Plaza scenario. The cover-up of the true conspiracy—the Wizard of Oz cabal behind the curtain—was dependent on a continuing staunch defense of the covertly engineered false conspiracy: especially the RFK-Mafia myth. The permanence of that covert false conspiracy permitted the dismissal of the less important fabricated evidence in Dealey Plaza as a benign conspiracy to save America. 

How that plan was accomplished is the subject of this chapter and Chapters Nine, Ten, and Fifteen. In a nutshell, this was the plan: An international communist conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy was the result of the Kennedy brothers’ collusion in a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. The key element in the plan was this ominous false scenario: Robert Kennedy got his brother killed and almost started World War III. A secret RFK-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro was turned around by Fidel and—with an assist by the KGB—used to assassinate President Kennedy instead. 

The alleged involvement of the Kennedy brothers’ collusion in Castro assassination plotting is the indispensable and inseparable foundation for the false international communist conspiracy scenario. To prevent the deaths of forty million Americans in a thermonuclear war, the apparent Castro-Kremlin role in the Kennedy assassination had to be suppressed by Chief Justice Earl Warren at the secret level. Today, this permits the CIA to characterize that suppression by the Warren Commission as a benign but necessary conspiracy to save us all. 

Therefore, as these complicated components of the hierarchy of false conspiracies evolved over the last fifty years, it is not at all surprising that the Kennedy brothers’ alleged participation in Castro assassination plotting has become even more important than the issue of whether the manufactured evidence in Dealey Plaza points to a conspiracy. 

So, in recent years, a peculiar new paradigm of benign conspiracy has emerged. That paradigm goes something like this: If the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, then the Kennedy brothers were themselves to blame. And so, today, many mainstream observers, researchers, and authors have become inescapably attracted to the view that a Kennedy involvement in Castro assassination plots is the reason that President Kennedy was assassinated. 

However, the Kennedy collusion subterfuge brought an element of risk with it. Baking Kennedy collusion into Castro assassination plotting left this otherwise cunning cover-up with an Achilles heel: The demonstrably false RFK narrative had to be left in the open.

Take it away and the role of both brothers vanishes with it, the nakedness of the emperor is exposed, and the light of truth illuminates one of the worst disasters ever to befall the American republic.

Book Jacket Notes and Blurbs for John Newman and "Into the Storm."

BOOK JACKET NOTES and BLURBS for John Newman and "Into the Storm," that I am currently reading and am preparing a review I will post here soon. - BK 

“Major John Newman has crafted a groundbreaking work that finally illuminates the dark places where democracy goes to die. Using formerly classified CIA and Military Intelligence documents, Newman -- a twenty-year veteran intelligence officer -- here exposes the now undeniable involvement of high-level military and intelligence officials in the assassination of my uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Major Newman is a brilliant and meticulous historian and sleuth from whom secrets cannot seem to hide. Newman is the ultimate patriot; devoting his life to righting the treacherous wrongs committed by clandestine spy agencies against our country and revealing existential truths about our national values. By patient parsing, he here exposes the momentous official lies that for fifty years have been corroding the heart of American idealism.” 

—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President, Waterkeeper Alliance, author of American Values, Lessons I Learned from My Family.

“Using analytic techniques from his days in Army Intelligence, Newman collates and overlays disparate covert narratives to provide an unmatched overview of his explosive topic: how interagency intrigues have helped obscure our understanding of the JFK assassination. The result is a fresh perspective on many other major events of Kennedy’s curtailed presidency. I have to say that I was so deeply moved by Chapter One, about the Blue Bomb and the 1960 election, that I am almost shaking. The events themselves are very powerful, but so is Newman’s narration (including the last line) -- all wonderful! Future serious historians will have to deal with this masterful book.”  

—Peter Dale Scott is the author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, The War Conspiracy, The Road to 9/11, American War Machine, The American Deep State. Dallas ’63, and Poetry and Terror.

“If we are going to make America great again, we need to start by understanding our own history.  John Newman is uniquely qualified, as a distinguished historian and a highly experienced intelligence analyst, to illuminate that history.  His research is an order of magnitude ahead of all others in the field.  This book is the deepest dive yet into the secret story of the Kennedy years and the dark forces that led up to his assassination.  Into the Storm is epic and cinematic in its sweep and scope.” 

—Eric Hamburg, Producer of Nixon film, and former aide to Senator John Kerry and Representative Lee Hamilton.

“Dr. Newman’s review and analysis of the now available documents is insightful and well-documented, shedding new light as well as testing things we thought we knew about the history of early 1960’s America. Every serious student of this era should carefully consider this work.  I highly recommend it.” 

—Dan Hardway, former HSCA investigator.

“By centering his third book—Into the Storm—on the repeated misstatements of three men—Yuri Nosenko, Antonio Veciana, and Sam Halpern—Newman puts the roles of David Phillips, Bobby Kennedy, and the U.S. intelligence community into sharp focus.  Now our work can continue on sure footing.” 

—Bill Simpich, author of State Secret

“Into the Storm turns so-called “settled history” inside out.  Major Newman once again challenges the prevailing orthodoxy and forces us to question, with much greater focus, “facts” previously taken for granted.”   —Malcolm Blunt, British Researcher

Is Litwin a Disinformationist?

.?IS LITWIN DISINFORMATIONIST?

I thought I was done with Fred Litwin and his nonsense, but Jimmy D at Kennedys and King - brought me back into this fray so we can nail the lid on this coffin and the ability for any rational person to claim that one man alone killed JFK.

In his review of Litwin's chapter on Jim Garrison, Jimmy D got me interested in this whole bizarre story by calling Litwin a "disinformationist," something I at first took exception to, as that is a very specific word, as opposed to someone being merely misinformed.

The word dizinformation stems from the dizinformation branch of the Soviet KGB, much like "propaganda" comes from the Vatican's ministry of propagation of the faith.

If it isn't a part of a psychological warfare operation promoted by a government intelligence service then it just isn't 'disinformation,' but something else, though some people have been brandishing the word about to refer to anyone they tend to disagree with.

It's easy for people like Litwin to be misinformed, as he isn't a real researcher, he's just read a few books and fancies himself an expert on such matters as political assassination and homosexuality. But in retrospect, a case can be made for Litwin to be brandishing disinformation, since he has lied on Canadian TV by saying the government's JFK assassination records have been released and there's nothing there. He says this much like Gerald Posner the Plagerist said the same thing in 1992 when the JFK Act was passed, though neither Posner nor Litwin have actually spent time reading the records, and for them, it isn't necessary as they are just promoting a false fact.

But Litwin can be called a "disinforatminst" - either wittingly or unwittingly, since he quotes and promotes the work of Max Holland, a certified CIA asset whose fake article claiming Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw was based on a KGB disinformation ploy - an article the CIA published in their in-house magazine.

As Jimmy D also points out, Litwin and Holland are both wrong in claiming that the "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter was manufactured by the KGB to implicated E. Howard Hunt in the assassination. While handwriting experts all agree it was penned by Lee Harvey Oswald, and the first copy of the letter was found in the files of Dallas oil man H. L. Hunt. The source used by both Litwin and Holland is one Soviet KGB archivist and defector named Valary Mitrokin.

Though neither Litwin nor Holland have actually read anything by Mitrokin, when he defected to the British he had to establish his bonifides, and was who he said he was, so he had to give up something. And that something was a former National Security Agency clerk who had left the NSA years before Mitrokin defected, but was a doubleagent who almost got away. Mitrokin gave up this clerk, who was arrested by the FBI.

At his first court hearing in Philadelphia, the clerk admitted working for the NSA, where he copied documents and sold them to the KGB. Among the NSA documents that passed through his hands he said was one, "that named the real assassin of President Kennedy."

That got the attention of a Philadelphia reporter in the room who, as the clerk was being escorted out of the courtroom to jail, asked him the name of JFK's "real assassin."

"Louis Angel Castillo," - was the response, and Castillo is a suspect who was arrested for attempting to kill the president of the Philippines, and who was, like Sirhan B. Sirhan, subjected to MKULTRA hypnosis and mind control techniques. The whole Castillo saga is a rabbit's hole that can't be rationally evaluated without the relevant government records, some of which are still being withheld.

So there is some real dizinormation being thrown around here, but it isn't that the KGB fooled Jim Garrison or the origin of the "Dear Mr. Hunt" letter, it's a lot more complicated than that.

And while Litwin, probably because of his own inclinations, takes peculiar interest in the gay lifestyles of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, they aren't the only homosexuals who are tied up in these sorad affairs.

There's also Don Norton, one of three Don Nortons involved in this case. This Don Norton is an Oswald imposter, one who says he met Oswald in Mexico, who says he was recruited by Army Intelligence when he played piano in an officer's club, informing on those officers who were gay.

Now there was a particular interest in gays at the time - for a number of reasons. For one the Cambridge spy ring of Philby, Burgiss and McLean included a few gays, and as Paul Hoch has pointed out, those who were closet gays at the time already had a secret sect going and fit well into the spy game - the Greatest Game, as they call it. Oswald's game.

Then there were Martin and Mitchell, two other NSA clerks who worked for the same agency as the guy Mitrokin dropped a dime on, an agency so secret that it's initials were even secret in the Sixties, when Martin and Mitchell defected - via the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, Cuba and then Moscow, the same route that Oswald tried to take in the fall of 1963.

While Martin and Mitchell were thought to be homosexuals, among the recently released JFK assassination records is one document from a still secret source in Russia who reported that once they were behind the Iron Curtain, Martin and Mitchell split up, and even married Russian women, and weren't homosexuals after all.

In any case, while I don't like brandishing about descriptions like "disinformationist" without foundation, Litwin is promoting the cover story for the Dealey Plaza operation, that Oswald was responsible, that his motive was connected to Castro and Cuba, and his unabashed propagation of the real disinformation being sprouted by the likes of Max Holland, certainly classifies Litwin as in Holland's camp.

It isn't Litwin who is a threat - it is the false facts that he and Holland try to promote, and they must be called out on it, and for what it is - disinformation.

And while on the subject - there is some real disinformation being promoted - that Oswald and Castro were behind teh Dealey Plaza operation - the part of the plan to kill JFK that failed, and one that gives us some clear insight into the conspiracy.