John Judge and Mae Brussell

John Judge and Mae Brussell


 Mae Brussell and John Judge 

John Judge and Mae Brussell were major influences in my life and research, John for directing my attention to the assassination of President Kennedy and Mae for inspiring a well read and rounded knowledge of all the players in the Great Game and how they are all inter-connected.

While Mae focused on the Nazi connections, John was more attracted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as primary culprits in the assassination, and while I was very skeptical of both while they were alive, my current research is confirming them. And I wish they were alive so I could tell them.

After recently re-reading Mae’s Rebel article on the Nazi connections – I could almost hear her voice as she writes the same way she talks – like a machine gun rattling off names and their associations – beginning with Nazi General Gehlen and Allen Dulles and the Nazi Paper clip scientists who augmented the CIA and American scientific programs after World War II.

The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination by Mae Brussell

Far from me to correct the late, great Mae Brussell, but in her Nazi article in Larry Flint’s Rebel magazine, she mentions Volkmar Schmidt, but in the wrong context. She says that Volkmar Schmidt worked for General Walker, when that was Larry Schmidt, same last name but no relation.

And it was Volkmar Schmidt, in a telephone interview, who first called my attention to the importance of the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and it’s multiple connections to the assassination of President Kennedy.

In our conversation I asked Schmidt about the party at his house that was arranged by George deMohrenschildt for Ruth and Michael Paine to meet Lee and Marina Oswald. While Michael Paine didn’t show, Schmidt had a lenghly talk with Oswald and Marina and Ruth became fast friends, and remained so until the assassination.

In his conversation with Oswald, Schmidt admitted to using a “reverse psychology” technique taught to him by a Heildeberg professor who knew some of the participants in the failed Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, that Schmidt specifically mentioned to Oswald, suggesting that right wing General Walker should be killed like Hitler should have been. Schmidt said he later felt guilty about planting the seed in Oswald’s mind to take a shot at Walker, and kill the President.

Former New York Times reporter Phil Shenon wrote an entire book around a “Twist Party” in Mexico City where he claims Oswald could have been encouraged to kill Kennedy, a party that Oswald didn’t attend, while no one seems interested in the real party that Oswald did attend where he was encouraged to assassinate General Walker, and apparently tried.

Schmidt’s conversation with Oswald was only the tip of the Nazi iceberg, as other associations piled up, aking me focus on the Valkyrie plot as a key to understanding what occurred at Dealey Plaza.

John Judge on the other hand, always said that the bullets that killed JFK came from the Pentagon, and in fact there’s a document that traces the bullet and shells found there to a batch of bullets sold to the US Marine Corps in the 1950s, even though the Marines didn’t have a weapon that could fire those rounds.

John always said, both privately and in public, that his suspicions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff originated, not from books, but from his mother, who worked at the Pentagon estimating manpower requirements for the military.

She told John that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination she was told to revise her statistics for Vietnam and Southeast Asia from a less significant amount to 500,000 casualties and  50,000 deaths over a ten year period. She couldn’t believe what she was told and reaffirmed them directly from the J\int Chiefs.

John told that story to me and others over dinner a few times, and publicly, the first time I know of at an American University Media and Politics forum that was carried over C-SPAN TV.  John said he was only asked to fill in for someone who couldn’t make it, and made some good points, but after Dan Moldea tried to pin the tail on the Mobsers, John responded with a broadside that put Moldea in his place, saying the mob didn’t control the autopsy, the military did, and didn’t run covert intelligence operations, and then he told the story about this mother and the manpower estimates being changed a few days after the assassination.

John and I had formed the Committee for an Open Archives a few years earlier, and suddenly, after the AU Media and Politics forum was cablecast over C-SPAN, we received an unbelievable response in memberships, donations and inquiries. One check John got in the mail was made out to the Committee for Open Assassinations.

American U. is a special place in regards to the assassination for a number of reasons. Oliver Stone worked with a professor there on a special series on the Secret History of the USA, Max Holland’s wife teaches there, and it’s where President Kennedy gave his June 10, 1963 Peace Speech.

When Senator Ed Kennedy asked people not to celebrate JFK on the day he died, but for what he accomplished, John and I decided to hold a special vigil at the monument at American U. where JFK gave his famous speech on June 10, and for over a decade we met there, read portions of JFK speeches, and then went to lunch.

After John’s presentation at the American U.  Media and Politics forum, National Public Radio show host Diane Rehm asked John to be on her nationally broadcast show to talk about Oliver Stone’s then new movie “JFK.” 

Sure, John said, do you want me to bring along Fletcher Prouty, the real “Mr. X,” portrayed in the movie by Donald Sutherland? And so John Judge and Col. Fletcher Prouty, who worked in the Pentagon, and was the first person to mention the significance of General Krulak, had an office just down the hall from Prouty and the Joint Chiefs.

John was fond of saying that he started from the ground up while Prouty started from the top down, and they met at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Both Marine General Krulak and Colonel Prouty believed they recognized US Air Force General Lansdale, the counter-insurgency and asymetrical warfare expert walking through Dealey Plaza shortly after the assassination in one of the Tramp photos. They were wondering what he was doing there?

At the time Krulak was responsible for the US military support for CIA covert operations, especially those against Cuba, and it was Krulak’s adjunct Colonel Walter Higgins who attended and took detailed notes of the September 25, 1963 briefing of the Joint Chiefs by CIA Cuban Operations officer Desmond FitzGerald. According to Higgins’ notes, released under the JFK Act, FitzGerald informed the Joint Chiefs, then temporarily chaired by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay (because General Taylor was in Vietnam) about a number of significant items, though one stood out to me.

FitzGerald, who took over the Cuban Operational Task Force W post from William Harvey, and informed the Joint Chiefs that among the psychological operations the CIA was conducting was a “detailed study” of the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler that they were adapting for use against Castro.

When DC FOIA attorney Jim Lesar recently asked the CIA for any and all records about that study, the CIA responded saying they had nothing – zilch, which for me confirms Peter Dale Scott’s “negative template” thesis that the most significant records no longer exist.

That the CIA was conducting a detailed study of the German military plans to kill and depose Hitler and was informing the Joint Chiefs of their intentions certainly brings both Mae’s Nazi connections together with John’s Joint Chiefs suspicions.  And for me this intersection is a major key to understanding what happened at Dealey Plaza that day.

Joshia Tink Thompson once said that in all of his hundreds of investigations as a private detective there came a point where a new clue led to the resolution of each crime, except the assassination of President Kennedy. Well after fifty years of doing this I am experiencing that sensation now, as by following these leads, they are panning out, and I am deciphering exacatly how JFK was killed, and that will lead to those responsible.

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John Judge - Six Years Gone

John Patrick Judge

December 14, 1947 – April 15, 2014

It is with a heavy heart that I write this. 

I guess it was just an ironic coincidence that I came across an academic tribute to my longtime college mate, friend and associate John Judge on the eve of the sixth anniversary of his death. It is a beautiful and heart felt tribute that was written by former Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney (D..Ga.) while John was still alive. It captures his basic background, traces much of the journey he made – some of which we made together, and most clearly defines his vision of what he wanted in the future and what  he was striving for. It made me sad, and then mad. Sad that John is no longer here to keep up the good fight to see that vision realized, and mad because those he entrusted with his archives and legacy have hijacked it and trashed it.

To read John Judge – Transformational Servant Leader – an Academic Tribute by Cynthia McKinney see:

https://www.academia.edu/19645193/John_Judge_Transformational_Servant_Leader 

According to Amir Levy, “transformational leadership” is ‘capable of providing new vision, aligning members with its vision, and mobilizing energy and commitment to the realization of this vision.”

I met John Judge in the fall of 1969 in the hall in front of the University of Dayton JFK Student Union, which is named after President Kennedy and there’s a lifesized statue of him out front on the steps. There were tables lining the hall in front of the basement cafeteria, some recruiting frats, one manned by two Army recruiters, and next to them was John Judge’s table, advocating conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam and full of leaflets promoting those ideals. I said hello to John, and he handed me a copy of Playboy magazine, of all things, the one that contained an interview New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. I took it home and read it and returned it to John the next day, and began helping him man the table, as the previous summer I had been a student volunteer coordinator for Gene McCarthy for President, the anti-war candidate, and was radicalized by the Chicago riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

While I was a freshman John had graduated the year before, but stuck around the campus just to irritate the administration, who he had previously fought successfully to eleminate manditory ROTC for incoming male freshman.

Although I have many stories to tell about John, as we remained friends and associates over the years, I will only add my thoughts and my humble two cents to the ones Cynthia McKinney mentions in her paper.

I stuck around campus after most of the students left in the spring of 1972 and was with John in a nearly deserted cafeteria over breakfast, drinking coffee and reading the Dayton Daily News when I noticed a small, one column two or three inch story announcing the Watergate break –in and showed it to John.

As Cynthia quotes John:  “In 1972, the day after the Watergate break-in, I saw the five names of those arrested on site and they were all known to me because they had been part of the Bay of Pigs and the history of the assassination of President Kennedy….”

Leaving the JFK Student Union John and I walked over to the new UD Library and went straight to the Research section where we found copies of Who’s Who in Washington and found Hunt, Liddy and maybe McCord. And we avidly followed the Watergate caper in the news and on TV, which led John to Mae Brussell.

When John lived in Philadelphia in the mid-1970s, working for the Quakers, I would give him rides to his home, a large mansion near Germantown that was owned by two of John’s University of Dayton friends, who were never there when I was, but I remembered them from Dayton. We would go into a side sun room and John would play cassette tape recordings of Mae Brussell’s radio show for hours.  

Around that time John took me to one of the first conferences on the JFK assassination at NYU Law School in New York City, where I sat in on a class on covert operational procdures taught by Col. Fletcher Prouty, and John introduced me to the irrascable Penn Jones and Mae Brussell. Both John and Mae always had a big pouch full of books and papers they always carried around.

I drove a huge U-Haul Truck full of books and papers from John’s apartment in Washington D.C. to Santa Cruz, drove the whole way with John ridding shotgun, and we unloaded it all in a three bedroom rancher a block from the beach. You could hear the sea lions bark from the front door. We added Mae’s collection that filled up the house with books and the garage with filing cabinets full of news clips.

In regards to the late, great Mae Brussell John said, “Mae wanted me to continue her work at a Research Center in Santa Cruz, but others prevented me from realizing that wish and forced me to abandon her collection of 6,000 books, 42 clip filing cabinets and hundreds of folders and tapes.”

Yes, Mae’s daughter decided she wanted her mother’s collection so she forced John “to abandon” the collection, much to our dismay, as we had envisioned the Mae Brussell Research Center to be a permanent institution. The collection remains stored in a warehouse today.

After that happened John often talked about other such collections. He said that Jochem Joestein’s widow sold off his collection piecemeal, while Penn Jones’ ex-wife sold his collection at a garage sale, breaking up his 24 volumes of Warren Commission books, selling them separately for a few dollars each, thus relegating the collection useless as a research tool. He said he was determined not to let that happen to his collection, but it has.

John continues: “I had co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives (COA) in the 1980s to push for the release of classified records in the JFK case. At the final JFK ASK conference, I organized a panel to call for the creation of a national coalition of groups and researchers who wanted to work for a solution to the case and to combine our efforts to push for both media and government responses.”

When he says co-founded, I was the other co-founder for COA and COPA. At the ASK conference we held our first meeting at the now defunct West End Café around the corner from Dealey Plaza, with about a dozen people present, including former FBI Agent Bill Turner, who would be a major player in our activities.

We agreed to regroup in Washington, where we did over a two day weekend at the Quaker Meeting House on Capitol Hill, deciding on the name Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA), and uniting three organizations with similar goals – COA, Jim DiEugenio’s California organization (Now Kennedys and King), and Jim Lesar’s Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC). Peter Dale Scott and Dr. Cyril West were also significant players, and attorney Dan Alcorn drew up the COPA non-profit papers.

John continues: “In 1994, I co-founded the Coalition on Political Assassinations (COPA) to facilitate the search for and release of Warren Report, HSCA and other records, combining the efforts of hundreds of independent researches, medical and forensic experts, historians and academics and the Assassination Archives and Research Center and Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassinations. COPA is a 501-© 4 non-profit, which allows us to lobby and endorse candidates, but does not allow tax-deductible donations.”

John Judge: “Prior to the release of the film ‘JFK’ I had co-founded the Committee for an Open Archives to effect the release of the Warren Commission files locked up by Lyndon Johnson in 1964 for 75 years. We got legislation proposed by several members of Congress, but they did not move in Congress. Once the Stone film came out and ended with a note about the records still being classified, a huge wave of letters and calls came into Congress calling for full release. This led to the JFK Assassinations Records Act of 1992, finally implemented between 1994 and 1998 by the Assassinations Records Review Board. (ARRB)”

COPA played a major role in monitoring the activities of the ARRB and is mentioned in their Final Report.

As Cynthia McKinney outlined John’s vision for the future: “John has done that through his selfless work with COPA…John’s next project is a Museum of Hidden History to house all of the volumes of government documents, books, manuscripts, and historic collections that the researchers have compiled over these last 40 years. He envisions the Museum would act as a library, a tourist attraction, a place for students to intern and learn about an alternative historical analysis, and a place for the community to gather to discuss strategies for policy change. He is currently working with other libraries and archives to digitilize COPA’s holdings so that information can be more easily disseminated. Once again, John’s future plans involve giving truth to the interested community – service in the truest sense of the word.”

Unfortunately, with the death of John in April 2014, those who inherited John’s personal belongings, disbanded COPA, without consulting the chairman or Advisory Board, wrongfully co-mingled the funds with the Hidden History Museum, obtained John’s five figure life insurance and took it all to York, Pennsylvania, where the collection is housed in a strip mall storefront that a local newspaper reporter called “The Boondocks.” 

Now it’s really Hidden History.

While some of the former COPA members reformed under the Citizens Against Political Assassination (CAPA) banner, with Dr. Cyril Wecht as our chairman, and there is a new movement to have John Judge’s COPA Archives digitalized and placed on line, that should and may happen.

But I want to see John Judge’s original vision established: a permanent institute based in the District of Columbia not owned by any one person but one that will continue on after we are gone. As John described it, “the Museum would act as a library, a tourist attraction, a place for students to intern and learn about an alternative historical analysis, and a place for the community to gather to discuss strategies for policy change.”

And that’s what makes me sad, and mad.

 “The tragedy of it is that I can’t do a damn thing about it. The only thing we can do is to keep hammering and pounding at the door. It’s not going to happen in my lifetime.” – Dr. Cyril Wecht 

The Greatest Magic Trick Ever Under the Sun - Explained

THE GREATEST MAGIC TRICK EVER UNDER THE SUN - EXPLAINED

Dylan Reading Chrystal Magic

By William E. Kelly (billkelly3@gmail.com) 

“The day they blew the brains of the king

Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing

It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise

Right there in front of everyone’s eyes

Greatest magic trick ever under the sun

Perfectly executed, skillfully done…..”

                 – Bob Dylan – “Murder Most Foul”

“President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick complete with actor’s accessories and props. And when the curtain fell the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionists, but professionals, artists in their own right.”

-          Fairwell America by French Intelligence officers Philippe de Vosjoli, M. Andre Ducret

One line of Bob Dylan’s Number One Pandemic Hit song about the assassination of President Kennedy says it was “The Greatest magic trick ever under the sun – Perfectly executed, skillfully done…”

That the President was killed by his enemies in Washington, rather than a deranged lone nut, and they got away with it, certainly appears to be like a magic trick, but it is one that can be understood, if you try.

As Gene Wheaton – the Ultimate Whistleblower said, “it was convoluted, but not complicated,” and it was a well developed plan, not a plot.

While the Great Wizzard appears to be almighty, when you pull back the curtains you see there’s only a man there pulling the puppet strings, a fortune teller, the seller of potions, a con artist and confidence man, and as John Kennedy himself said, problems created by man can be solved by men, and this is one of them.

One approach the English have adapted to certain crimes is the Modus Operandi – MO – and in this case the MO of the assassination of President Kennedy must be viewed as a covert intelligence operation.

As former CIA Chief of Station in Moscow Rolf Larrson said at the CAPA conference in Dallas last November, only a few men were capable of pulling off such a covert operation – and he named five – Allen Dulles, William Harvey, Desmond FitzGerald, James Jesus Angleton and Jacob Easterline.

But before beginning to try to put a name behind the mastermind of the Dealey Plaza Operation how such things work must be fully understood.

General William Odom, the former Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and head of the National Security Agency (NSA) was once asked what makes a good intelligence operator, Odom thought for a second and replied “The Sting.”

The movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford?

“That’s it!” said Odom, “the con!” Actually The Big Con.

[Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars – American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda]

When I saw the movie “The Sting,” I immediately recognized that it was based on a book I had picked up at a garage sale and read – David Maurer’s “The Big Con,” about the unique slang and lingo of confidence men. Maurer was Kentucky linguist and based his book on his study of their slang. Maurer’s assistant confirmed to me that Maurer had the same reaction as I did when he saw the movie, and sued the producers for not giving him credit. The screenwriters claimed they never even read his book, but they had to admit they had when they couldn’t come up with any other published source for the name of “Gondorf,” the character played by Paul Newman which was based on a real confidence man mentioned only in Maurer's book "The Big Con."

Odom’s response clearly indicates he was once a student of Paul Linebarger at the Center for International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where Linebarger taught psychological warfare and covert intelligence operational procedures.

Other students of Linebargers included Ed Lansdale, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, who Linebarger said, “had black minds.”

In his book “Portrait of a Cold Warrior” Joseph Smith writes about taking Linebarger’s classes.\

Smith relates how Linebarger not only used his own classic text book “Psychological Warfare,” that delineates various levels of propaganda from white to black, with black being clearly and falsely identified as originating from the opposition.

Smith wrote: “Black propaganda operations, by definition, are operations in which the source of the propaganda is disguised or misrepresented in one way or another so as not to be attributable to the people who really put it out. This distinguishes black from white propaganda, such as news bulletins and similar statements…”

“Paul Linebarger’s was a seminar in black propaganda only,” writes Smith. “He loved black propaganda operations probably because they involved the wit-sharpening he loved to talk about. Also, he was so good at them that his was one of the inventive minds that refined the entire black operations field into shades of blackness. Linebarger and his disciples decided that propaganda that was merely not attributable to the United States was not really black, only gray…This left the term black propaganda for a very special kind of propaganda activity. Black propaganda operations were operations done to look like, and carefully labeled to be, acts of the Communist enemy….”

According to Smith, besides classes in propaganda, Linebarger also had his students read David Maurer’s book “The Big Con,” also published as “The American Confidence Man,” which gave good insight into how case officers could run operatives and conduct successful covert operations.

David Maurer’s book, originally a linguistic text on the unique language and slang of thieves, con artists and confidence men, led Maurer to uncover and detail the inner workings of the Big Con, and that was the basis of the script for the movie “The Sting,” as referenced by Odom.

As Smith wrote: “I want you all to go out and get a copy of David Maurer’s classic on the confidence man. It’s called ‘The Big Con,’ and its available now in a paperback edition,” Paul continued. “That little book will teach you more about the art of covert operations than anything else I know.”

Smith quotes Linebarger as saying, “Maurer’s book will give you a lot of 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. Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all.”

"We were all soon reading 'The Big Con,'” Smith wrote. “The tales it told did, indeed, contain a lot of hints on how to do our jobs. For me one sentence seemed to sum it all up beautifully, ‘The big-time confidence games,’ wrote Maurer, ‘are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly.’”

 “A note of caution that Linebarger added to these discussions of black operations sounds like a bell down the years,” wrote Smith, quoting Linebarger as saying, “I hate to think what would ever happen,” he once said with a prophet’s voice, “if any of you ever got out of this business and got involved in U.S. politics. These kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole system would come apart.” 

Well these kinds of dirty "magic" tricks were used before Watergate, including what happened at Dealey Plaza, and the whole system did come apart.

Just as linguist David Maurer learned the secrets of the Big Con through the study of the unique language of the con artists, we can only learn the means and methods of the covert operators by learning the terminology they use in crafting their covert operations - the Lingo of Dealey Plaza.

Some key words are mutually used by the Big Con con-artists as well as the covert operators – such as Inside Man and Outside Man to distiguish those who work in an office  (such as JMWAVE), and those who go out on the street and recruit agents and operators that the confidence men called “Ropers.” Then there are “cut-outs” to keep operators apart, case officers to direct the operators, team leaders to run crews, and the use of codes and ciphers to prevent others from learning the process.

Paul Linebarger’s psychological warfare techniques were successfully used in 1954 in Operation Success, run by Jake Easterline, a Guatemalan coup that had David Atlee Phillips’ radio stations broadcast false stories of an army descending on the capitol, forcing the president to resign and flee.

Then Ed Lansdale had Linebarger accompany his to the Phillipines where he taught the military there the secrets of Linebarger’s psych war “magic” techniques for use against the Huk guerillas. Then Lansale took some of those who Linebarger trained in the Phillipines to Guatemala where they began to train the anti-Castro Cubans as commandos as they prepared for the Bay of Pigs. Again Easterline was to run the operation and Phillips handle the radio aspects, though it failed as a major disaster.

These same men then began a detailed study of the July 20, 1944 German military plot to kill Hitler, code named “Valkyrie,” that Desmond FitzGerald told the Joint Chiefs of Staff was to be used as a strategy against Fidel Casto. They also developed a more tactical plan to shoot Castro as he rode by in an open jeep, a plan called “Pathfinder,” that the JMWAVE commandos practiced, but according to the official records, was “disapproved by higher authority” (JFK and RFK).

When they couldn’t get the Cuban military officers to stage a coup and kill Castro as the Germans tried to do with Hitler, there was no problem getting the American military brass, especially the Joint Chiefs, to go with the Valkyrie and Pathfinder plans.

There are five aspects of the Valkyrie plan that were used at Dealey Plaza, including the use of standard covert intlligence operational procedures, getting the Mark – JFK to approve the plan, having the Home Guard (National Guard ) to carry out the boots on the ground missions, controlling communications and the media, and blaming the action on communists.

It was a Big Con Sting, using plans developed by the German military to kill Hitler that was to be used against Castro but redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza.

While we still don’t know who was the “mastermind” or who carried out the Dealey Plaza Operation, we know how it was done, and that only a few men could have conducted such a convoluted scenario. It is no longer a magic trick that we can’t understand and will soon be able to identify the magicians of Dealey Plaza. 

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