Black Propaganda and the JFK Assassination

 Black Propaganda & the JFK Assassination

Real Disinformation at Dealey Plaza 

[BK Notes: this  article was written in 2010 when I had a wordpress blog, so I thought I would transfer it over here since I am answering Tim Weiner's Rolling Stone hack job on Oliver Stone's JFK Revisited - Through the Looking Glass. Weiner falsely claims that all conspiracy theories, especially Jim Garrison's and Oliver Stone's are a result of Russian disinformation. Well there certainly is a lot of disinformation being thrown about Dealey Plaza, but most of it doesn't stem from Russia, but the CIA - the false attempt to blame the Dealey Plaza Operation on Castro and Cuba.]

 https://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/black-propaganda-the-jfk-assassination/

THE PROOF IN THE PROPAGANDA – Black Prop Ops and the Assassination of JFK

            Actually there were two conspiracies associated with the assassination of President Kennedy – the first was the arrangement of his murder, the second concerns the cover-up and thwarting of justice. The second conspiracy continues today.

            The evidence in both cases is in the form of fingerprints – what Senator Richard Schweiker called the fingerprints of distinct intelligence techniques at work. Evidence of the first conspiracy comes in the form of foreknowledge, individuals who had knowledge of the assassination before it occurred and expressed this knowledge to others.

            Fifth century Chinese philosopher and author of the classic manual “The Art of War” said that foreknowledge cannot be elicited by spirits or obtained by magic but rather can only be acquired from an operational network of spies. “Foreknowledge,” he said, “is the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move.”

            Proof of the second conspiracy stems from the fact that black propaganda operations were utilized before the assassination, and continue to operate today to maintain security and protect those responsible for the first conspiracy.

            That people had foreknowledge of the assassination before it occurred and black propaganda operations were conducted in concert with the murder indicates that the assassination was carried out by trained covert intelligence operatives and not by a lone, deranged nut case or the Mafia. This does not preclude however, members of organized crime or crazy people from being involved in the operation.

            That Fidel Castro and Cuba were behind the assassination is disinformation and the deception plan behind the black propaganda operation conducted in concert with the President’s murder. Over a dozen incidents, most if not all of which can be traced back to the same source, attempt to portray the assassination as the work of Castro or his G2.

            Tracing the deceptive disinformation back to its source should also give us the source of the operation that resulted in what happened at Dealey Plaza.

            Since disinformation, propaganda and psychological warfare operations utilize explicit techniques, they can be identified, isolated and studied as to their content, intention and source, and thus provide a window into the nest of the responsible party.

            According to Ladislas Farago such, “Black Propaganda is a fundamental intelligence operation,…because it never identifies its real source and pretends to originate within or close to the enemy.”

            Paul Linebarger, a professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins University, also taught the black arts of propaganda and psychological warfare operations at his Washington D.C. home. Every Friday evening student spies would take round-a-bout means to unobtrusively get to his house where they learned the secret techniques of propaganda and deception.

            One of his students, Joseph Burkholder Smith (“Portrait of a Cold Warrior” G. Putnam/s Sons, N.Y., 1976), relates how Linebarger explained that Black Propaganda is “carefully labeled to be acts of the enemy.” 

            Not a subject found in the curriculum of most colleges, the textbook is rare, Linebarger’s “Psychological Warfare – International Propaganda and Communications” (Arno Press, 1948, 1952, 1972, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, N.Y.) is a still used by today’s psychological warriors.

            According to Linebarger, “Psychological warfare, in the broad sense, consists of the application of parts of the science called psychology to the conduct of war; psychological warfare comprises the use of propaganda against the enemy, together with such military operational measures as may supplement the propaganda. Propaganda may be described in turn, as organized persuasion by non-violent means. War itself may be considered to be, among other things, a violent form of persuasion. War is waged against the minds, not the bodies of the enemy.”

            The term propaganda stems from the name of the department of the Vatican which had the duty of propagating the faith.

            Specifically defined, propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of public or mass produced communication designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given group for a specific public purpose, whether military, economic or political. Military propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communications designed to affect the minds and emotions of a given enemy, neutral or friendly foreign group for a specific strategic or tactical purpose.

            Note that if the communication is not planned, it cannot be called propaganda, and that if does not originate from an intelligence agency or service, it is not disinformation.

            Linebarger developed the STASM formula for spot analysis, in which propaganda can be distinguished by the consideration of five elements – 1) Source, 2) Time, 3) Audience, 4) Subject, 5) Mission. According to Linebarger, this formula works best in the treatment of monitored materials of which the source is known. First point to note is the character of the source – the true source (who really got it out?), the ostensible source (whose name is signed to it?); also the first use source (who used it the first time?) and the second source (who claims merely to be using it as a quotation?).

            It is soon evident that the mere attribution of source is a job of high magnitude. A systematic breakdown of the STASM formula produces the following analysis outline: applicable to any single propaganda item, civil or military, in war or peace, spoken, visual or printed. There are five kinds of propaganda: Defense – maintains an accepted form of social action; Offensive – interrupts social action not desired; Conversionary – change allegiance; Divisive – split apart enemy components; Consolidation – insure compliance of occupied civilians; Counterpropaganda – refutes.

            Security is designed to keep useful information from reaching the enemy, while propaganda operations are designed to get information to him.

            According to Smith, “Linebarger’s two leading operational heroes whose activities formed the basis for lessons he wished us to learn and whose examples he thought we should follow were Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale and E. Howard Hunt,” who had what Linebarger called “black minds.”

            Besides his own textbook, Linebarger used another book in his classes, “The Big Con” by David W. Maurer (Pocket Books, N.Y., 1949), which is the story used as the basis for the screenplay of the movie “The Sting.” Maurer, a Kentucky linguistics professor, began to study the unique slang of confidence men, but developed that interest into a unique analysis of the Big Con confidence games that proliferated during the early part of the last century. 

            That book, “gives 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.” As Linebarger concluded, “Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all,” as David A. Phillips learned with Antonio Vechina.

            “The big time confidence games are in reality, only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly,” wrote Maurer.

            “Propaganda is directed to the subtle niceties of thought by which people maintain their personal orientation in an unstable interpersonal world,” wrote Linebarger. “Propaganda must use the language of the mother, the schoolteacher, the lover, the bully, the policeman, the actor, the ecclesiastic, the buddy, the newspaperman, all of them in turn. And propaganda analysis, in weighing and evaluating propaganda, must be even more discriminating whether the propaganda is apt to hit its mark or not.”

Black Propaganda Operations affiliated with the Assassination of JFK:

1)      A leaflet was distributed to the Florida Cuban community in November, 1963 that warned of an “Act of God” that would put a “Texan in the White House.”

2)      Lee Harvey Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba Committee activities in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.

3)      Oswald’s visit to the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City in Sept., 1963.

4)      The photographs of Oswald brandishing a rifle and pistol and copies of two leftest but contradictory magazines in his back yard.

5)      The last two issues President Kennedy dealt with before leaving the White House for Texas concerned his backchannel negotiations with Fidel Castro at the UN and the discovery of a cache of weapons in Venezuela that appeared to have come from Cuba. The weapons story was later discovered to be over a year old and planted by the CIA to falsely implicate Cuba.

6)      Julio Fernandez, one of three anti-Castro Cubans whose boat was financially supported by Clair Booth Luce, called Luce, wife of the publisher of Time-Life on the evening of the assassination to report information on Oswald’s activities in New Orleans.  Fernandez, a former Cuban publisher, was married to an attorney who worked for Catholic Welfare Services in Miami.

7)      In Miami, shortly after the assassination, Dr. Jose Ignorzio, the chief of clinical psychology for the Catholic Welfare Services, contacted the White House to inform the new administration that Oswald had met directly with Cuban ambassador Armas in Mexico. 

8)      In Mexico City, David Atlee Philips of the CIA debriefed a Nicaraguan intelligence officer, code named “D,” who claimed to have seen Oswald take money from a Cuban at the Cuban embassy.

9)       In New Zealand, U.S.A.F. Col. Fletcher Prouty read complete biographies of Oswald in the local papers hours after the assassination, indicating to him that a bio of Oswald was pre-prepared.

10)  Brothers Jerry and James Buchanan, CIA propaganda assets, began promoting the Castro-did-it theme immediately. According to Donald Freed and Jeff Cohen (See: “Castro on the Grassy Knoll” in Liberation Magazine), the source of the Buchanan’s tales was the leader of the CIA supported International Anti-Communist Brigade (IAB). “Back in Miami,” they wrote, “a high powered propaganda machine was cranking out stories that Oswald was a Cuban agent…” Sturgis is quoted in the Pampara Beach Sun-Sentinel as saying that Oswald had talked with Cuban G-2 agents and fracassed with IAB members in Miami in 1962

11)  Jack Anderson used Sturgis and mobster John Rosselli to keep the Castro plot propaganda story going well into the 1970s.

12)   The same “propaganda machine” was still pumping out the same lines in 1976 when Gaeton Fonzi interviewed Sturgis, who said that he had recently ran into a friend who worked for the “company” who reminded him of an incident he had completely forgotten about. Sturgis suddenly recalled, “that he had heard about a meeting in Havana about two months before the Kennedy assassination. At the meeting there were a number of high-ranking men, including Castro, hs brother Raul, Ramiro Valdez, the chief of Cuban intelligence, Che Guevara and his secretary Tanya, another Cuban officer, an American known as ‘El Mexicano,’ and,…oh, yea; Jack Ruby. And the meeting dealt with plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.”

13)   Seith Kantor, a Scripps-Howard News Service Reporter in Dallas during the assassination, couldn’t understand why his telephone call records from Parkland Hospital were being withheld because “disclosure would reveal confidential source of information.” When Kantor checked his own records he discovered his editor had told him to call another reporter in Florida or some deep background on Oswald. The reporter in Florida had everything on Oswald, FPFCC, Russian defection, New Orleans radio debate, etc., but instead of using it himself, fed it to Kantor. The reporter was Hal “the Spook” Hendrix, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis and earned his nickname when he “reported” on the Dominican Republic Coup on September 24, 1963, the day before it happened. His CIA affiliations became better known when he went to work for ITT in Chile and was found guilty of withholding information from a Congressional committee concerning his role in the Chilean coup. 

14)   While other major news organizations have been exposed as CIA media assets, such as CBS News, Life Magazine, the North American Newspaper Alliance and the Copley Newspaper chain, the Scripps-Howard News Service (SHNS) stands out not only because of the Kantor-Hendrix connection, but because of the March 12 news report out of Washington. An obvious black propaganda operation that stems from NSA intercepts (note that the NSA does not issue press releases), and continues to implicate Castro in not only the assassination of President Kennedy, but in the planning of an assassination on President Reagan. 

This story is remarkably similar to the one that Sturgis tells [in #12] and includes many of the same conspirators. [See: SHNS Story below]. Also please note that two weeks after this obvious piece of black propaganda disinformation was published, President Reagan was shot in front of the Washington Hilton by John Hinkley.

Example of Black Prop Op and JFK Assassination.

Why weren’t the records of this incident released by the NSA under the JFK Act?

Scripps-Howard News Service – By R. H. Boyce. Thursday, March 12, 1981

Washington – The National Security Agency has alerted the CIA, the White House and State Department to a Latin American newspaper report saying Cuban President Fidel Castro is plotting the assassination of President Reagan, Scripps-Howard News Service has learned.

            The NSA, which monitors published and broadcast information around the globe, does not makes such “alert” messages available to the press. But SHNS obtained a copy, which was marked “for official use only.” It included the text of the newspaper report as well as a garbled message about the news story directed to the head of Castro’s controlled news agency, Presna Latina.

            Without revealing its sources, the news report, published yesterday in the Caracas, Venezuela, newspaper El Mundo, asserted the assassination plot called for the slaying to be carried out by Illich Ramirez Sancho, an international terrorists known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos is said to have organized the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany, and has been involved in dozens of terrorists acts.

            U.S. officials said the NSA’s action in alerting the U.S. intelligence community “suggests that while they are not necessarily ready to believe the report of an assassination plot, nevertheless they (NSA) find it at least worthy of looking into.”

            The Caracas newspaper story said the assassination plan, “was discussed in a meeting of the International Trust of Crime in Cojimar, an exclusive beach club east of Havana, with the participants of Montonero and Tupamaro thugs, Illich Ramirez, Ramiro Valdez, Cuban Police Minister Carlos Rafael Rodriguez and Fidel Castro.” 

            No identification was found of Ramiro Valdez. Montonero “thugs” are terrorists operating primarily in Argentina while Tupumaros thugs operate in Uruguay. The article said Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir Arafat also participated in the plan.

            Presna Latina (Latin Press) often has been used by Castro for political ends. The Pressa Latina correspondent in Caracas, at 9:47 a.m. EST yesterday, began transmitting the El Mundo article by cable to Prensa Latina headquarters in Havana. NSA monitored it. At the close of the text, Prensa Latina Caracas began adding what appears to be commentary on the El Mundo report. It reads:

 

            “Everything seems to indicate that Fidel Castro is planning the assassination of U.S. President Ronald Reagan in the same way that he previously ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy and whose participation the high-ranking U.S. government circles hid…”

            There the Prensa Latina cable transmission stopped. Had it been ordered broken off by the Venezuela government, say U.S. officials, NSA would have added the words: “transmission interrupted,” to show Venezuela’s action. There was no such NSA notation. Officials provided no explanation of why the transmission ended in mid-sentence.

END of STORY