[ BK NOTES: While this article was written a few decades ago, in collaboration with my former and late colleague John Judge, it still holds true and suddenly became relevant with the recent death of Priscilla Johnson McMillan. I had previously posted this at my backup blog JFKCountercoup2, where I usually post articles and links that I mention and source in my own work. But with new interest in these issues I am brining it over to my main blog.]
Previously posted at: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2018/02/bottlefed-by-oswalds-nana.html
BOTTLEFED
BY OSWALD’S NANA – By Bill Kelly & John Judge
[Updated July 25, 2021]
OSS Col. David Bruce and Ernest Hemingway in Paris 1944
“Not
even Marina knows why I went to Russia” – Lee Harvey Oswald
FROM RUSSIA,
WITH LOVE
With the
intent of returning to the United States, ex-Marine and American defector
Lee Harvey Oswald wrote a letter from Russia to former Secretary of
the Navy John Connally whom he was later accused of shooting, trying to get his
Marine discharge corrected.
After
more than a year without communication, Oswald’s mother wrote to tell him that
his discharge had been downgraded from honorable to undesirable. Oswald drafted
the letter to Secretary of the Navy Connally, attempting to appeal his status.
Oswald
had defected to Russia shortly after being discharged from the Marines in 1959.
He had a good record in the military, held a top-level security clearance,
monitored the U-2 spy plane as a radar operator in Japan, and had good grades
in a Russian language test after taking accelerated courses, apparently at the
Monterey Language Institute (Now the Defense Language Institute).
The
circumstances of his discharge from the Marines were unusual. A letter
documenting an injury his mother had sustained (nasopharyngitis from a blow to
her nose), used as a basis for his early dismissal, arrived several days after
he was granted a “hardship discharge.” It had been a fully honorable discharge
at the time, ostensibly allowing him to return home to support his injured
mother.
Oswald
returned home, however he shortly afterward boarded a tramp steamer
for Europe on the first leg of a journey that would take him behind
the Iron Curtain.
From France and England to Helsinki and Moscow,
where he turned over his passport to the US Embassy officer Richard Snyder,
announcing his defection. After his defection received press attention in
the United States, the Marines held a court-martial in Oswald’s absence,
changing his discharge to undesirable. It was illegal to hold such a court
martial “in absentia,” and improper to base the grade of discharge on events
that occurred after his military service ended.
Oswald
later assumed an infamous position in American history as the alleged assassin
of President John F. Kennedy, and is also alleged to have shot then Texas
Governor John Connally and Dallas police officer J. D. Tippit. But
whether the victim is the President of the United States or a bum in
the street, in every homicide investigation, the approach to solving the murder
must address the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime.
Determining
Oswald’s motive would prove to be a key to implicating him in any role in the
assassination, other than what he claimed to be – “a patsy.”
The
actual motives and real behavior of Lee Harvey Oswald were never ascertained.
In this
context, Oswald’s letter to Connally is revealing, especially as it pertains to
his motive in going to Russia after leaving the Marines, and may be a critical
clue to his real historical role. Although cryptic, it can be deciphered.
Oswald wrote to Connally:
“I wish
to call your attention to a case about which you may have personal knowledge
since you are a resident of Ft. Worth as I am. In November of 1959, an event
was well puplicated in Ft. Worth newspapers concerning a person who had gone to
the Soviet Union to reside for a short time (much in the same way E. Hemingway
resided in Paris).”
“This
person, in answers to questions put to him by reporters in Moscow, criticized
certain facets of American life. The story was blown up into another “turncoat”
sensation, with the result being the Navy department gave this person a belated
dishonorable discharge, although he had received an honorable discharge after
three years of service on September 11, 1959 at El Toro Marine Corps base in
California.”
“These
are the basic facts of my case. I have always had the full sanction of the U.S
Embassy, Moscow, USSR, and hence the U.S. Government.”
By the
time Oswald wrote this letter, Connally had been replaced as Secretary of the
Navy by Fred Korth, a Fort Worth attorney. Oswald was not unknown to Korth,
since Korth had represented Oswald’s stepfather in his divorce from his mother,
Marguerite. Korth became embroiled in a scandal as Secretary of Navy in regards
to the controversial TFX fighter, and had to resign a few weeks
before the assassination.
OSWALD
THE WRITER
One of
the reporters Oswald complained about in his letter to Connally was Priscilla
Johnson McMillan.
In her
book “Lee & Marina,” Priscilla
Johnson McMillan notes that Oswald “went so far as to compare his sojourn in
Russia with that of Hemingway in Paris in the 20’s.”
Indeed,
Hemingway lived in Paris in the ‘20s as an expatriate writer, and later
described the experience in his book A Moveable Feast, and perhaps he did
have pretensions of becoming a writer in the Soviet Union. He did write
voraciously, kept notes and a journal, took photographs and wrote a short story
titled “The Collective.”
According
to Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Oswald wrote in the style of one of his favorite
authors, George Orwell, keeping a typewriter wrapped in a blanket so that the
noise would not alert suspicions, and he went to great lengths to smuggle out
manuscripts when he left the Soviet Union. She also notes that Oswald also took
a fancy to Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy thrillers.
This
rather romantic view of Oswald as a dissident writer may have more to do with
Priscilla’s imagination than his own. She is also the author of “Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of
Soviet Culture 1962-1964,” which presents embellished profiles of some
Soviet writers as dissidents.
But
Oswald never specified the 20’s in his analogy, and Priscilla Johnson
McMillan’s conjecture on this point is speculative. A more convincing argument
could be made that Oswald was referring to Hemingway’s stay
in Paris in the 1940’s instead.
HEMINGWAY with ONI, OSS and NANA
In 1944
Hemingway was in France, not just as a journalist, but as a war
correspondent attached to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and a
comparison of Oswald’s experiences and Hemingway’s later activities is even
more revealing.
Out
of Key West, Florida and Havana, Cuba, early in the
war Hemingway served as a special agent for the U.S. Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI), using his fishing boat “the Pilar,” to patrol for Nazi
submarines.
While
working as a war correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance
(NANA), Hemingway wrote about the war and life on the front lines, and
sometimes behind the lines.
Hemingway’s
son was a member of the JEDBERGs, a joint UK-USA detachment trained as
commandos in England and parachuted behind the lines to organize
resistance to the occupying Nazi armies. Hemingway’s son was captured by the
Germans and spent the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp.
Hemingway
himself organized and led a loose band of French resistance fighters and, along
with OSS Col. David Bruce, participated in the liberation of Paris.
Bruce
was the senior OSS officer on the ground in the European theater of
operations. Bruce would later serve as best man at Hemingway’s wedding and
JFK’s Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Riding a jeep at the head of a
convoy of trucks of armed partisans, while French General LeClerc accepted the
surrender of the German general at the train station, Hemingway and Bruce
liberated the bar at the Hotel Ritz, where Hemingway also lived on occasion.
Today, the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz is named in his honor.
Placing
his gun on the bar, when the bartender asked what he wanted to drink; Hemingway
looked around, counted heads and said, “Sixty vodka martinis.” Of course that
would be “shaken,’ not stirred,” as a strong case can be made that Oswald went
behind the Iron Curtain in the same way as Hemingway went to Paris in 1944,
when it was still “behind the lines,” and not as a writer, but as an
intelligence agent.
A
MOCKINGBIRD SINGS ON RED SQUARE
In his
letter to Connally, Oswald complained that his story became another “turncoat
sensation” at the hands of journalists who interviewed him in Moscow. He had
good reason to believe that the Hotel Metropole rooms where he stayed were bugged
for sound, and that what he told the reporters would also be reaching the ears
of Soviet authorities. Soviet intelligence was quite suspicious of his
“defection.”
The
Warren Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to investigate and
report on the assassination of President Kennedy, automatically assumed that
the Soviet journalists who interviewed Oswald in Russia were KGB agents, but
they never voiced a similar suspicion that the American journalists who
interviewed him had U.S. intelligence connections as well.
The idea
of journalists being used as spies or intelligence agents posing as journalists
is not a new one. The British circle of W. Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward,
Malcolm Muggeridge, Kim Philby, Cyril Connally and Peter and Ian Fleming serves
as a good example, especially because it comes into play here.
When
information about the CIA’s “Family Jewels” was released in the late
1970s, the agency’s use of journalists as spies was exposed, along with other
nefarious activities, such as behavior modification, MKULTRA drug experiments
and the attempted assassination of foreign leaders.
Carl
Bernstein, in Rolling Stone
Magazine, reported over 400 cases of such CIA journalist-spies
working in the printed media alone, and the CIA’s network of media agents
and assets, which covert action chief Frank Wisner said could be played like a
Wurlwizter organ, has been referred to as “Operation Mockingbird.”
During
World War II there was a popular song, “A Mockingbird Sang on Berkley
Square,” which was near the then secret British code-breaking detachment.
Former CIA director
Richard Helms worked as a reporter for UPI in Germany before World
War II, managed an exclusive interview with Adolph Hitler, and is one of the
few people who can’t remember wheree he was when John F. Kennedy was killed.
Penthouse magazine
revealed that the Copley News Service out of San Diego, California, was run by
former OSS spies and was actively used to promote CIA propaganda and
disinformation. It has since been learned that dozens of similar operations
existed.
The
University Of Missouri School Of Journalism produced “Soviet Affairs Expert”
and “KGB” author John Barron, who
worked with U.S. Naval Intelligence before joining Readers Digest. That
firm also published his book, and supported the research of Edward J. Epstein,
author of “Legend: The Secret Life of Lee
Harvey Oswald,” which makes the case that Oswald was more than just a
crazed lone-nut. Readers Digest also supported Henry Hurt’s research
for a book on the assassination of President Kennedy, but after it took a
conspiratorial bent he had to find another publisher.
The
first American reporter to interview Oswald in Moscow, Aline Mosby, was
also a graduate of the University Of Missouri School Of Journalism and worked
as a correspondent for UPI. Oswald and Mosby talked for two hours, while Oswald
explained his reasons for defecting to her, and the listening Soviet ears.
Priscilla
Johnson McMillan was another reporter who met Oswald in Moscow. She interviewed
Oswald for five hours in a hotel room at the Metropole. Years later she wrote
that, “Lee looked and sounded like Joe College, with a slight southern drawl.
But his life hadn’t been that of a typical college boy…As we sat in my hotel
room that evening and into the early hours of the morning, he talked quietly
about his plans to defect to Russia. I soon came to feel this boy was the stuff
of which fanatics are made.”
Following
the interview Priscilla said she, “asked him to please come back to see me
before he became a Soviet citizen, or whatever was going to happen, just so
that he would know somebody. It wasn’t very journalistic, I know, but I felt
sorry for him.
On the
same day Priscilla Johnson spoke with Oswald in Moscow, his fingerprints were
pulled from FBI files in Washington.
Priscilla
later admitted that she sought Oswald out “on the advice of an American
colleague in Moscow.” The colleague turned out to be John McVicker, an Embassy
officer and assistant to Richard Snyder, Oswald’s primary contact at the US
Embassy. Snyder had connections to the CIA, and his intelligence
background was later exposed at the spy trial of Oleg Penkovsky, an American
double-agent during the Cuban missile crisis, who was executed. If Snyder was
an intelligence officer, then so was McVicker, and if McVicker was Priscilla
Johnson’s “colleague,” it is likely so was she. In fact, the files released
under the JFK Assassination Records Act reveal that Johnson was a “witting
informant” and valuable asset if not an agent of the CIA.
When
Oswald renounced his citizenship he handed over his passport to Snyder, a
passport that said Oswald was in the “import-export” business, just as Ian
Fleming’s fictional 007 had the cover job of working for “Universal Export.”
Actually Oswald did work in the “import-export” business shortly before he
enlisted in the Marines. When he was only sixteen years old, Oswald worked as a
messenger for Leon Trujague & Company, a New Orleans import-export company.
Trujague was on the board of directors of the Friends for Democratic Cuba, an
anti-Castro Cuban organization that used Oswald’s name, while he was in Russia,
to purchase jeeps to be used for covert operations against Cuba.
When he
handed over his passport to Snyder, Oswald threatened to apply for permanent
citizenship in the Soviet Union. But when his “stateless persons” permit
expired, Oswald only applied to extend it. Snyder kept Oswald’s passport handy,
in his desk drawer, and handed it back to him when Oswald told Snyder he was
ready to return home with his Russian wife Marin. Snyder also assisted in
getting them clearance and travel funds from the State Department.
After
Priscilla Johnson interviewed Oswald, and told him to contact her before
obtaining Soviet citizenship, she dined with Snyder’s assistant, McVickers, who
later told the Warren Commission that he thought Oswald “followed a pattern of
behavior which indicated that he had been tutored by person or persons unknown,
and that he had been in contact with others before or during his Marine Corps
tour who had guided him in his actions.”
In an
amazing coincidence, Oliver Hallett, the Navy attaché at the US Embassy
in Moscow – notified the military that Oswald intended to give secrets
to the Soviets. Hallet was apparently in the room at the time Oswald handed
over his passport and announced his defection. Hallet was also the Navy officer
in the White House Situation Room on November 22, 1963. Hallet relayed the
wire service reports to the Cabinet Plane and Air Force One that Oswald had
been arrested as a suspect in the assassination. Hallett’s wife, a receptionist
at the Embassy, also met Oswald in Moscow, and escorted him to Snyder’s office.
By
another amazing coincidence, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, one of the first
reporters to interview Oswald at the time of his defection in Moscow, was
the only writer permitted to speak to Oswald’s wife Marina after the assassination.
Over the years, Priscilla Johnson would write periodic pieces on the
assassination, always portraying Oswald as the archetypical “lone nut.” In a
piece for the New York Times, she even suggested that by killing Kennedy,
Oswald was fulfilling the “primal wish to kill the father.” More recently she
wrote an article that questioned whether or not “assassination is contagious.”
In book
reviews for the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Review of Books she
consistently praised those who support the Warren Commission’s conclusions,
such as David Belin’s “You Are the Jury,” while
criticizing those who suggest there is evidence of conspiracy, like “The Fish Is Red” by William Turner
& Warren Hinckle.
In a
televised appearance on Tom Snyder’s TV show in the 1970s, Priscilla Johnson
repeated her constant theme in relation to any belief in a conspiracy to kill
Kennedy. “It’s hard for people to accept,” she claimed, “the idea that one
person who is not so different from themselves, went off and did a thing like
that. It threatens people’s sense of order about history.”
“You
think that the President’s elected by the whole country,” she said, “and when
one man can step up there and nullify the will of an entire country, it makes
life seem meaningless and without order, and I think conspiracy theorists want
to give life an order and coherence that it lacks. It’s terribly upsetting to
think that Oswald could do that.”
Of
course, if Oswald was the assassin, and not the patsy, and he was in fact a
deranged lone-nut case who was acting on his own perverted, psychological
motives, then there would be no meaning to what happened at Dealey Plaza.
But if
Oswald was set up as the patsy, or was one of the snipers who was part of a
well planned and executed covert intelligence operation, then the
assassination, whatever you believe happened at Dealey Plaza, is infused with
meaning and makes political and historic sense when placed in the proper
context. If Oswald was a patsy, it also means that Oswald was innocent of the
crimes attributed to him, and others have gotten away with murder.
The task
of the posthumous reconstruction of Oswald’s real background resembles peeling
the layers of an onion. Oswald has been variously portrayed as an agent of
Cuban or Russian intelligence, a ‘lone nut’ and a Mafia hit man, but none of
these portraits explains his defection and subsequent activities in New Orleans
and Dallas, his association with both the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC)
and Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE), or his conduct and statements on
the day and day after the assassination. In reality, Oswald, the alleged
assassin, as a pawn in a much larger game, played only a small but critical
role in the covert operation that left the President dead and a new government
in power
The
framing of Oswald was a critical part of the cover-up. Establishing possible
false motives for his actions, especially after he was dead, became the primary
occupation of the Warren Commission and the media, while subsequent
psychological profiles of Oswald, assuming he was the killer, ignore the
political power plays and the broader context in which he moved. Some of these
“studies,” especially those that maintain Oswald was the lone assassin and
acted on psychological motives are deliberately deceptive; and journalists who
played more than a passive role in this endeavor must be held suspect and
accountable.
Oswald
seemed doomed to a succession of negative characterizations from supposed
friends and seemingly sympathetic acquaintances that were later to denigrate
him and implicate him in the murder of Kennedy. Priscilla Johnson McMillan was
merely one of the first.
Priscilla
Johnson was a Russian major at Bryn Mawr College, on the Main Line in
Philadelphia, and was intimately entwined with the US intelligence community.
While a college student she was a World Federalist, an organization that tried
to persuade the nations of the world to form a “world government” and
strengthen the United Nations. Cord Meyer, Jr., one of the founders of the
World Federalists, and a former New York neighbor of Johnson, went on to become
a deputy to CIA director Allen Dulles and the head of the CIA’s
International Organizations Division.
After
Johnson applied for employment with the CIA, she was at first rejected
because of her World Federalist associations. She worked for awhile for Senator
John F. Kennedy while he was recuperating from a back operation and writing Profiles
in Courage, which would win him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1991, Priscilla Johnson
appeared on a television program with former CIA director William
Colby, who also continued to portray Oswald as the lone assassin and lone nut
while she played up her association with both Oswald and Kennedy. She also
intimated that Kennedy flirted with her during her short period she was with
him, playing up on his “womanizing.”
While
Kennedy went on to become President, Priscilla Johnson worked as a translator
for the State Department and the New York Times. She has threatened libel suits
against publications that claim she worked for the CIA, but has never
followed up on these threats.
Priscilla
Johnson claimed that because she couldn’t get a security clearance for
government work, she went to Moscow as a correspondent for the North
American Newspaper Alliance (NANA).
NANA – The North American Newspaper Alliance
NANA was
a large and prominent American news and feature service syndicate that once
competed with Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) wire
services, and included Ernest Hemingway as one of its correspondents.
Another NANA correspondent, Inga Maria Peterson Arvad, was said to have been recruited by NANA editor Ernest Cuneo. A Danish beauty queen, she managed interviews with Herman Goering’s fiancé and Hitler himself. In January 1942 Walter Winchell broke the story that a young naval officer, the son of a former ambassador, was dating young women who many suspected of being a Nazi spy. The naval officer, John F. Kennedy, had met Arvad through his sister, and the two went on a holiday to a Charleston, South Carolina resort hotel, where their lovemaking was said to have been recorded by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, just as 007 was filmed in bed in “From Russia with Love."
Ingra Avid and JFK
Although
an officer assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) at the time,
Kennedy was quickly reassigned to the South Pacific.
In the
mid-nineteen fifties, NANA was purchased by former British Intelligence officer
Ivor Bryce and his American associate Ernest Cuneo, who served in the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS). The funds for the purchase of NANA reportedly came
from the proceeds of the sale of one of Bryce’s Texas oil wells.
Ivor
Bryce, an independently wealthy millionaire, and Cuneo, were both close
friends and associates of Ian Fleming, so after the war, when they purchased
NANA, they hired Fleming to be the European Editor.
During
the war, Ian Fleming served as assistant to the chief of British Naval
Intelligence. Fleming came to America and met Cuneo while
visiting Sir William Stephenson at his New York apartment.
Stephenson, a Canadian industrialist, had replaced Sir. William Wiseman as the
representative of British Intelligence in the United States.
While on
a wartime mission to the United States, Fleming wrote out an outline for
the establishment of a permanent American intelligence agency, based on the
British model, and was given a gun, a .38 Police Positive revolver from Donovan
for his efforts.
Donovan’s OSS was
patterned on the British Military Intelligence 6 – MI6 organization, and its
officers learned their spy tradecraft techniques from their British mentors. The
director of MI6, Sir Stewart Menzies, was known as “C.”
Ernest
Cuneo, a New York attorney, had served as an aide to New York mayor
LaGuardia and as a wartime assistant to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with
an officer’s rank in the OSS. Cuneo was one of the main liaisons
between President Roosevelt, William “Big Bill” Donovan, chief of the OSS,
and William “Little Bill” Stephenson, aka “a man called INTREPID,” the
representative of British Intelligence in the United States.
The
names of both Fleming’s associates at NANA were to appear in the 007 novels,
Cuneo as a Las Vegas cab driver in “Diamonds
Are Forever” and Bryce as an alias for James Bond in “Dr. No.”
During
World War II, Ian Fleming had helped organize Operation Goldeneye, a plan for
the defense of Gibraltar, and parachuted into France during the Nazi blitzkrieg
on a mission to convince French Admiral Darlan to move his fleet to a neutral
or English port. Fleming was unsuccessful, and Darlan’s fleet fought the Allied
armies in North Africa and Darlan himself was assassinated, probably by British
agents.
Fleming
was more successful in helping Yugoslavian King Zog to escape the Nazis. His
brother, Peter Fleming outranked him in the Naval Intelligence services and was
part of Operation Sea Lion.
Fleming
had accompanied Ivor Bryce to Jamaica for a wartime conference on U-boat
warfare in the Atlantic, and after the war, Fleming became Jamaican neighbors
with others who maintained vacation homes along Jamaica’s north shore,
including Bryce, Stephenson and Noel Coward. Fleming’s house there was called
Goldeneye.
So when
Priscilla Johnson went to Moscow as a correspondent for NANA, when
she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald at the time of his defection, Ian Fleming was
NANA’s European Editor and Ivor Bryce and Ernest Cuneo signed her checks.
THROUGH THE WRINGER
After
leaving NANA, Priscilla Johnson became an associate at the Harvard University
Russian Research Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center
for International Studies. The Russian Research Center itself was bankrolled
by CIA funds through the Ford Foundation, whose board of directors
included McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security advisor, and
John McCone, President Kennedy’s director of the CIA. The Russian Research
Center was set up to “carry out interdisciplinary study of Russian
institutions, behavior and related subjects.”
One of
the most important operations at the Center was the CIA sponsored refugee
interview project, which “debriefed” émigrés from Communist Russia, Poland,
Yugoslavia, Hungry, Rumania and East Germany, code-named Operation WRINGER. The
Harvard Center worked closely with the West German Intelligence (BND), which
was directed by former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen. It was Gehlen who established
and supervised WRINGER, attempting to penetrate the Soviet Union and
reinforce his spy network inside Russia. Gehlen had been Hitler’s
intelligence chief for the Nazi German “Armies East,” the Russian front. His
files and network, turned over to the Americans at the end of the war, served
as the foundation for the American CIA files and operations against
the Soviets.
Priscilla
Johnson began her book publishing career while at the Russian Research Center.
Her first book, about the persecution of Russian writers, was published by MIT
Press with the assistance of the Center for International Studies. In their
book, The CIA and the Cult
of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John Marks reveal that, “…in
1951, CIA money was used to set up the Center for International
Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Max F.
Millikan, then the Center’s director said, “The Center is a remarkable
institution devoted to inquiry into current affairs of man, especially of
American man and the multitude of new affairs that have pressed so hard and
swiftly in upon him in these years.” Marchetti and Marks also note that, “In
1952, Max Millikan, who had been Director of the CIA’s Office of National
Estimates, became the head of the Center….in 1953 the MIT Center published “The Dynamics of Soviet Society”…but
there was no indication to the reader that the work had been financed
by CIA funds.”
The
Center actually published two versions of “Dynamics,”
written by Walt Rostow. One version of Rostow’s book was for government policy
makers and CIA readers and the other for the general public.
According to “Cult of
Intelligence,” the MIT Center also assisted Rostow in other ways.
Rostow was a political scientist with intelligence ties that date back to his
OSS service during World War II. Rostow went on to become an assistant for
national security affairs under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It is also
interesting to note that Walt Rostow first recommended that he appoint a
commission to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.
In
addition to Priscilla Johnson’s affiliation with the MIT CIS, Oswald’s cousin
Dorothy Murret had a curious connection to the Institute. According to some
Warren Commission and FBI documents Murret, “was linked in some manner with the
…. Apparatus of Professor Harold Isaacs.” Issacs was an MIT professor and CIS
associate who had resided in China from 1931 to 1936 where he edited a local
English language newspaper, The
China Forum, and contributed to Newsweek
and the Christian Science Monitor on Far Eastern affairs.
Much of his work took him away from MIT, and it is possible he met Murret
during the course of her travels.
Cult of Intelligence notes that
the CIA “also used defectors from communist governments for
propaganda purposes. These defectors…are immediately taken under the CIA’s
control and subjected to extensive secret debriefings. The Agency encourages
and will help the defector write articles and books about their past life.”
Even
Priscilla’s family seems to have been involved in the tangle of Soviet émigrés,
American spies and intelligence agency-run publishing efforts. One of the most
important keys to the real history of Soviet leadership, Svetlana Stalin, the
daughter of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, defected to the United States
through India with the assistance of the CIA. Stalin had died mysteriously
of a blood clot to the brain after being given drugs by his new doctors, drugs
that were supplied by outside interests, possibly even the CIA.
When
Stalin’s daughter arrived in the United States, she was a prime candidate for
debriefing and funneling through Operation WRINGER, and soon after her
defection she was taken to the home of Stewart H. Johnson of Locust Valley, New
York, Priscilla Johnson’s father. Priscilla then returned home and helped to
translate Svetlana’s memoirs and two other books, including “Twenty Letters to a Friend,”which
the CIA helped to publish.
After
the murder of Oswald, Priscilla Johnson McMillan was one of the only writers
allowed to have access to Oswald’s wife Marina, and she obtained the exclusive
contract to write Marina’s story, for which they both got paid. That book,
fifteen years in the making, was eventually published as Lee and Marina. As
Marina’s friend, advisor and ghost writer, Priscilla communicated with and
coached Marina’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations
(HSCA) in 1978.
OSWALD
THE RED HERRING
Both the
Warren Commission and Priscilla Johnson McMillan suggest, in their portrayals
of Oswald, that he held the personal political beliefs of a communist, while
actually associating with rich, right wing oil executives like George Bouhe,
George DeMohrenschildt and Paul Ragoridsky in Dallas, and fanatic anti-Communists
like Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Carlos Bringuier in New Orleans.
From a
military family, Oswald was determined to become a Marine like his older
brother Robert. Another half-brother, Edward Pic served in the Coast Guard
at New York harbor before enlisting in the Air Force.
Oswald’s
favorite book and TV program, “I Led
Three Lives,” by Herbert Philbrick, concerned an undercover FBI agent
who infiltrated communist groups for a decade before exposing his true beliefs
when testifying against his former friends in court.
It is
possible that Oswald was recruited and trained for counter-intelligence work
while serving as a Marine in Japan and California, possibly by
the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the American intelligence agency that
was reportedly responsible for a fake Soviet defector program that Oswald may
have been a part of.
The
circumstances of Oswald’s “defection” clearly suggest that he was sent as a
military intelligence agent to penetrate the Soviet Union and test and monitor
their response to his defection. In Russia, he became affiliated with
another anti-communist network that included a similar “defector,” his factory
foreman Alexander Ziegler and his family.
Ziegler,
a Jewish émigré during World War II, left Argentina, where he had worked for an
American company, and resettled in Byelorussia. Ziegler was Oswald’s nominal
boss at the radio factory where they worked in Minsk, and he encouraged Oswald
to marry Marina. When Oswald was ready to leave Russia, Ziegler reportedly
gave him an envelope to smuggle to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, which was
addressed to CIA director Allen Dulles. Ziegler and his family
returned to Argentina in 1969.
Oswald
once traveled to Moscow alone and met some American tourists, two young women
and an older lady who had lost their official Intourist guide and were
traveling unescorted around Russia. A few weeks later Oswald met the same trio
in Minsk, and can be seen in a photo of them together, a photo that ended up in
the files of the CIA.
Oswald
applied to the US Embassy to leave the USSR in the same month that many other
Office of Naval Intelligence “defectors” also returned. Marina Oswald, in her
testimony to the Warren Commission about how Oswald came to Russia and where he
lived gave the details of another ONI false defector instead, Robert Webster.
Eventually
arriving in New York with his Russian wife and child, Oswald and his
family were met by Spas T. Raiken of Traveler’s Aid. Raiken was also the
secretary-treasurer of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshvik Block of
Nations, a CIA front group, part of the World Anti-Communist League
and an arm of Operation WRINGER.
VIRGINIA PREWETT
In the
summer of ’63 Oswald became involved with both the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
(FPCC) and the DRE – an anti-Castro Cuban student group, both of
which were subjects covered by NARA reporter Virginia Prewett and
monitored if not controlled by David Atlee Phillips, a CIA officer
from Oswald’s old Fort Worth neighborhood.
Oswald
was seen meeting with Phillips shortly before Oswald ostensibly went
to Mexico City visiting the Cuban and Russian embassies monitored by
Phillips’ surveillance teams.
Virginia
Prewett was one of Phillips’ media assets who often wrote news articles in
support of CIA operations. Prewett was interviewed by author Anthony
Summers and British journalist David Leigh, and although Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post commissioned Leigh to write an article about Phillips and
Prewett, Bradlee refused to publish it.
Summers
reported that Prewett confirmed the existence of “Maurice Bishop” and his
association with both David A. Phillips and Tony Veciana, one of the leaders of
the anti-Castro Cuban Alpha 66 terrorist group, who had seen Oswald and
“Bishop” together in Dallas. Prewett was also one of the founders of the
Friends of Democratic Cuba, along with other associates and media assets of
David Atlee Phillips. Many researchers believe that Maurice Bishop was a
pseudonym used by David Phillips, and at least one
former CIA operative has confirmed it.
SYDNEY AND LUCI
GOLDBERG
“Goldberg”
is one of the names Oswald wrote in his notebook while in the Soviet
Union, and was ostensibly a Moscow correspondent he had met, and not
either Sidney or Luci Goldberg, who worked for NANA.
One
protagonist in George Orwell’s 1984, a favorite novel of Oswald’s, is Emmanuel
Goldberg, the supposed Party traitor who writes the Book of Revolution.
When Bill
Kelly talked with Sidney Goldberg on the phone, he said he knew Ian Fleming
from working at NANA but that Fleming left the organization around the time
[Goldberg] became affiliated with it in 1963.
“Alongside
Goldberg’s possible acquaintance with confirmed CIA agent Seymour
Freidin, her 1972 claim to be affiliated with the North American Newspaper
Alliance takes on additional significance. NANA actually existed, but it
was infested with CIA connections, as JFK assassination researchers
eventually discovered. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who had
numerous CIA and State Department links, was working for NANA when
she interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow in 1959.
Another
NANA reporter, Virginia Prewett, was an anti-Castro activist recruited
by NANA founder Ernest Cuneo, a high-ranking OSS veteran. In the
mid-1960s, NANA was acquired by a partnership between Leonard Marks, Drew
Pearson, and Fortune Pope. In 1952, Fortune Pope’s brother, Generoso
Pope, Jr., bought the National
Enquirer. The previous year Generoso was a CIA officer (according
to Generoso’s listing in Who’s Who
in America, 1984-85). Marks and Pearson were also friendly with
the CIA.”
According
to Frank Greve and Rod Hutcheson (Knight-Ridder/Tribute Information Service),
Luci and Syd Goldberg were close personal friends and NANA colleagues with
Victor Lasky.
“Victor
Lasky, who died on February 22, 1990, was more than a simple right-wing
columnist. From 1956-1960 he was a public relations executive for Radio
Liberty, which was one of the CIA’s two largest propaganda operations at
the time (the other was Radio Free Europe). Starting just two years later and
continuing until 1980, the North American Newspaper Alliance distributed his
syndicated column. It was revealed during Watergate testimony that Lasky was
secretly paid $20,000 by Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President while he
was writing his column. CREEP included a number of CIA operatives. In
the mid-1980s, Lasky was close to CIA director William Casey.”
Lucianne
and Sidney Goldberg were not only associated with NANA in regards to Oswald in
the Soviet Union. Luci later posed as a reporter covering the McGovern
campaign, while actually working as a “dirty trickster” for the Republicans.
The Goldbergs were also mentioned in regards to the Eagleton scandal, which
exposed the vice presidential candidate has having had psychological
counseling.
From the
San Francisco Chronicle, January 23,
1998: “In 1972, ([Lucianne]) Goldberg told the McGovern campaign that she
worked for the North American Newspaper Alliance and later for Women’s News
Service. The addresses she listed for both agencies then are the same as her
current residence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.”
Then
Luci became entangled in the Monica Lewinski affair. It was Luci Goldberg who
encouraged the Pentagon secretary Linda Tripp to secretly and illegally tape
record Lewinski detailing her relationship with President Clinton. Lucianne
Goldberg still identified herself as associated with NANA at that time. Her
son, Jonah Goldberg continues in the tradition as a vehement right-wing
propagandist, and somehow recently secured an exclusive interview with Fidel
Castro.
CONCLUSION
With
editors and correspondents like Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Cueno Ivor Bryce, Ian
Fleming, and Syd Goldberg, and a bevy of young and beautiful correspondents
like Inga Avid, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Virginia Prewett and Luci Goldberg,
the North American Newspaper Alliance – NANA was a fully functioning
intelligence network closely associated with the CIA’s Operation
Mockingbird.
As
exemplified by the North American Newspaper Alliance (NASA), the corporate
connection between the CIA and the US media is at the heart of the
psychological warfare campaign that has portrayed Oswald variously as a Cuban
or Soviet agent, deranged lone-nut or mob hit-man, rather than what he clearly
was – an expendable agent for a domestic military-intelligence network. Oswald
was an American spy and what ever his role in it, the assassination was not a
foreign attack but “an inside job,” a coup.
Oswald
used aliases, forged identity papers, post office boxes, pay phones, dead
letter drops, and micro-dot photography. He was multi-lingual in Russian and English,
and could converse in basic Japanese and Spanish. He traveled widely, primarily
using public transportation, and was educated by a specialist in the crafts of
intelligence practices and techniques. As they used to say in the fifties, if
it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
Oswald was a covert intelligence operator and agent for some domestic
anti-communist network.
Lee
Harvey Oswald went to Russia like Hemingway went
to Paris in 1944 – not as a writer but as a war-time penetration
agent operating behind the lines.
Set up
as a patsy, Oswald’s presence at the scene of the murder of President Kennedy
served as a message – that the murder of the President was not only a
conspiracy, but a more specific covert intelligence operation designed to
shield those actually responsible. It was a plot that originated within the
heart of the federal government itself and showed that those who killed the
President can get away with anything.
At a
COPA conference on the assassination in Dallas in October 1992, a workshop
panel on the role of the media in the assassination concluded that the most
significant facts have not been the subject of news stories because of
negligence on the part of the media.
Rather
than negligence however, it is clear the mainstream media response to the
assassination of President Kennedy can be shown to have been influenced if not
entirely controlled by the CIA from the very moment of the
assassination, and they did this through the utilization of their media assets,
particularly those at Time-Life, CBS News and NANA – the North American
Newspaper Alliance.
