The Divine Skein at Dealey Plaza

 PART ONE – THE DIVINE SKEIN AT DEALEY PLAZA

Former CIA director Allen Dulles brought a book with him to the first meeting of the Warren Commission.

"American Assassins" by Robert Donovan, portrayed most American political assassins as deranged lone nuts, as opposed to the more rational and ideological European assassins.

Donovan had previously wrote "PT 109," about President Kennedy's World War II exploits in the South Pacific that was made into a major motion picture, and his book on American assassins was popular at the time.

But Warren Commissioner John McCloy took exception to Dulles' suggestion that American assassins were all lone nut cases, pointing out the fact that Lincoln was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, and a number of people were tried and hanged for their roles.

If Dulles was more interested in the truth rather than promoting the false suggestion that JFK was a victim of a deranged lone nut case, he would have passed around copies of his own then recently published book - "The Crafts of Intelligence," reportedly ghost written by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.

In his own book, Dulles details the means and methods used by intelligence networks, crafts that have been used for thousands of years, and as he explains, were first described in one of the oldest books known to man - Sun Tzu's "The Art of War."

In a chapter of "The Art of War" Sun Tzu describes the five different types of spies and secret agents - inside, native, living, double and expendable, each with a different role in the "skein," or net, a network of spies.

According to Sun Tzu, when all five types of agents are working in tandem together, they are "the treasure of the sovereign," and known as "The Divine Skein," - the Divine Net, as what they accomplish appears to be divine intervention and an act of God, unrecognizable by ordinary mortals who don’t know the trick or how the game is played.

Before JFK was killed a pamphlet was distributed in the Cuban community of Florida that said that an "Act of God" would put a Texan in the White House, a Texan who was friends of the Cuban people, one of dozens of black propaganda incidents that confirm the fact that whatever it is you believe as to what happened at Dealey Plaza, it was the result of a covert intelligence operation that utilized standard disinformation tactics to protect those actually responsible.

As Max Holland, in his book "The Assassination Tapes," quotes LBJ as saying that the assassination of JFK was "divine," implying it was an act of God, and LBJ was called the "accidental" president, as his murder was the result of a divine coincidence.

The head of French Intelligence once said that the assassination of President Kennedy was like a magic trick, complete with smoke and mirrors.

“President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and false mirrors, and when the curtain fell the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionist but professionals, artists in their own right.”     -    Attributed to French Intelligence officers – Philippe de Vosjoli or M. Andre Ducret –in “Fairwell America”

THE STING AT DEALEY PLAZA

General William Odom, the former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and previously the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) of the US Army, said that the best covert operators are like the movie "The Sting."

In his book “Intelligence Wars – American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda,” Thomas Powers relates a story of how met General Odom, at a birthday party for retired intelligence officer Haviland Smith. As Smith's mentor General Odom was the former Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and later the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdroppers, where he worked with former Army intelligence analyst John Newman.

Odom asked Powers, “Should the Army be trying to run agents at all?”

Well, since the CIA is not legally permitted to operate domestically in the United States, and the Army does, especially the National Guard, the Army was especially active running intelligence and undercover agents during the Civil Rights riots and against anti-Vietnam War activists. Since the Army does so, it’s a mute question of whether they should be doing it.

In the course of the party Thomas Powers asked Odom another question - “What makes a good case officer?”

Odom thought for a second and then answered the question with a question of his own: “Did you see that movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman – The Sting?”“That's it!” said Odom, “the con!”

 

The Big Con

Which clearly indicates that Odom took classes in covert intelligence operations with Paul Linebarger at the Center for International Studies.

The assassination of President Kennedy at Dealey Plaza was not an accident, not the act of a deranged loner nor a magic trick or an act of God, but rather was a very distinct and successfully executed covert intelligence operation, and pulling off a Big Con is how they did it.

The idea of the intelligence network - the means, methods and mechanisms of covert operations and the crafts of intelligence are now well known, though they weren't in 1963. Though people were aware of complex confidence games and how con artists work, and were leery of them, even though, as they say, “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

In fact such intelligence networks and covert operations are patterned on the Big Con confidence games of the early 20th century, as portrayed, as Odom suggests, in the movie "The Sting.”

In his book - “Portrait of a Cold Warrior,” Joseph Smith writes about the part of his training as a CIA agent that included taking classes with Professor Paul Linebarger, of the Center for International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. The classes on covert operational methods and techniques were taught at Linebarger’s home in Washington D.C.

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 though 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 issued by one side in a conflict extolling its successes, of course, or other material just as clearly designed to serve the purposes of its identifiable authors….the United States was faced everywhere with an enemy that was using an untold array of black propaganda operations to undermine the nations of the world in order to present us with a fait accompli one fine morning when we would wake up to find all these countries under Communist control. Hence, it was vital to understand all about such operations from a defense standpoint if nothing else.

Paul Linebarger’s was a seminar in black propaganda only. 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. To be called black it had to be something more…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.

Not only was the attribution given the source of the propaganda activity used as a criterion for defining what kind of propaganda it was, but equally important was the kind of message used…Black propaganda operations, being attributed to the enemy, naturally did not (support US policies). In fact, black propaganda, to be believable, supported the enemy’s positions and openly opposed those of the United States….

Besides classes in propaganda, Linebarger also had his students read David Maurer’s book “The Big Con,” also published as “The American Confidence Man,” that 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.

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.

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.”

“Your job and the confidence man’s are almost identical…Of course, your motives and those of the confidence men are different. He wants to fleece his mark out of his money. You want to convince a Chinese, Filipino,…a Thai, that what you want him to believe or do for the good of the U.S. government is what he thinks he himself really believes and wants to do.”

“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,' 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.” 

He had two leading operational heroes whose activities formed the basis for lessons he wished us to learn and whose examples he thought we should follow. One was Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, the OPC station chief in Manila, and the other was E. Howard Hunt, the OPC station chief in Mexico City. Both of them had what is called “black minds,” and the daring to defy bureaucratic restraints in thinking up and executing operations. He had a number of stories to tell about the exploits of both….

 A note of caution that Linebarger added to these discussions of black operations sounds like a bell down the years. He would explain, after someone had come up with an especially clever plan for getting the Communists completely incriminated in an exceedingly offensive act, that there should be limits to black activities.

“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 tricks were used before Watergate, including what happened at Dealey Plaza, and the whole system came apart.

The Argot of Dealey Plaza - How to define and talk about what happened there.

It now should be established and accepted as a fact that the Modus Operandi (MO) of the assassination of President Kennedy was not that of a deranged loner, but rather that of a covert intelligence operation.

According to the U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert operation (covert ops) is "an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor."

Just as David Maurer learned the peculiar language of the confidence men and con artists before he understood the inter working mechanisms of the Big Con "Sting," we have to decipher and learn the intelligence terminology of the covert action operators to come to an understanding of the Dealey Plaza Operation.

 

David Maurer: “Over a period of years I have explored the secret and semi-secret communications system of professional criminals…Very early I discovered that the technical language of criminals, which is called ‘argot,’ cannot be studied in terms of language alone. These speech-systems have to be viewed in light of the subcultures which produced them….In other words, before one can write about criminal argot, he must learn how professional criminals live…”

One of the unique attributes of covert intelligence tradecraft is to give the mission an operational code name - the 1954 Guatemalan coup was Operation Success, and while those few who planned it used another name, I refer to it as the Dealey Plaza Operation (DPO).

Because, as we have learned from Joseph Smith and Paul Linebarger, some of the psych war and covert intelligence operational techniques developed by the Army and CIA came from the criminal underworld, whose argot was chronicled by linguist David Maurer, some of the terminology as well as techniques are interchangeable.

Just as the Big Con games had the Inside Man, the star of the show, the covert operators had their Inside Men, Outside Men, Spotters, Ropers, Fixers and the Big Store itself.

As in the Big Con Sting, the Inside Men are the best of the lot and run the show. CIA men such as Allen Dulles, Ted Shackley, Desmond Fitzgerald and Richard Helms were the best Inside Men, and they had their Big Store - JMWAVE.

The largest CIA station in the world at the time - at the University of Miami, went by the cover of Zenith Technological Enterprises, as US Army Ranger Bradley Ayers describes in his books "The War that Never Was" and "The Zenith Secret."

As Ayers describes it, they set it up just like the Big Con artists set up a Big Store as a fake gambling joint or stock broker's office.

 "Monday morning we met the station chief, Ted Shackley," Ayers wrote. "As we sat in his outer office, waiting a little nervously, I saw they had missed no detail in setting up the false front of Zenith Technological Enterprises. There were phony sales and production charts on the walls and business licenses from the state and federal governments. A notice to salesman, pinned near the door, advised them of the calling hours for various departments. The crowning touch was a certificate of award from the United Givers' Fund to Zenith for outstanding participation in the annual fund drive."

The Inside Man, like Paul Newman's Gondorf in "The Sting," must be a good actor and polished professional with charisma, as Ted Shackley and Desmond Fitzgerald clearly fit that persona.

The Inside Men seldom leave the office, and handle administrative and bureaucratic affairs as well as devising the game plans and pulling the strings of the street operators, that he does through his Outside Men - the covert operators, case officers and their agents and assets.

Gordon Campbell, the mysterious JMWAVE chief of Maritime activities (until he died), once told Ayers, "The fewer people out there (at a remote training base) the better....My Outside Man Karl will help you with logistics..."

The Outside Men are a bit more crude and street wise than the prim and polished Inside Men. Guys like William Harvey, David Morrales and George Joanedes dealt directly with the Cubans and mobsters, and utilized many of the same techniques as well as the lingo of Con artists. 

Codes, ciphers, false flags, black propaganda and putting in the fix are utilized by both the con artists and covert operators, so an understanding of one gives insight into the other, as Paul Linebarger taught his psych war students.

Acronyms, aliases, pseudonyms, code names and ciphers are all keys that must be deciphered and understood before you can even begin to read many of the CIA cables and memos that use them.

Lists of such items that have been deciphered by veteran researchers like John Newman, Bill Simpich, Malcolm Blunt, Larry Hancock, Jerry Shinley and Rex Bradford are filed at the Mary Farrell web site where many of the released records are also posted on line for easy access.

As Malcolm Blunt recently noted: “Better we should look at the documents being released and work on what I’m sure to most is irrelevant minutiae. Although most of these releases are going to be absolutely meaningless to Post and Times reporters, really we are being given missing pages from an incomplete dictionary. Agency cryptonyms, pseudonyms, internal systems and management. Very valuable.”

CIA Cryptonyms at Mary Ferrell:  https://www.maryferrell.org/php/cryptdb.php

Glossary and Acronyms: Glossary and Acronyms — Central Intelligence Agency

Spy Museum Language of Espionage: Language of Espionage · International Spy Museum