Preview of John Newman's Uncovering Popov's Mole

 JOHN NEWMAN’S UNCOVERING POPOV’S MOLE

John Newman’s new book Uncovering Popov’s Mole is in the can, at the publisher, and should be available on Amazon by late August or early September.

Volume IV, Uncovering Popov’s Mole, is one of a multi-series of books on the assassination of President Kennedy and follows Where Angels Tread Lightly, Countdown to Darkness, and Into the Storm.  All are chockfull of new information, documents and convincing evidence that once again reinforces the fact that Dr.- Professor Newman is the best independent researcher working full time on this case today. I define researcher as someone who has read all of the books, read all of the documentary records, and takes what we know further.

Newman learned how to read and decode government documents from his role as a military intelligence officer and analyst, who worked closely with General William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the military’s Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI), the ubiquitous  agency that’s all over Dealey Plaza.  

[    https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/big-con-at-dealey-plaza.html   ] 

THE CIA HUNT FOR POPOV’S MOLE AND LEE HARVEY OSWALD’S DEFECTION

Newman writes: “The purpose of this folder, [ https://jfkjmn.com/new-page-5/   ] is to give some examples of how records on Lee Harvey Oswald arriving at CIA from other U.S. government agencies were handled in the weeks and months immediately following his defection to the USSR in October 1959.  This effort is made difficult due to the extreme sensitivity of where these records were originally placed and where they were NOT placed, and by the fact that some important documents concerning this problem which were originally in the NARA JFK collection have now gone missing.”

“I first explored this subject in my Oswald and the CIA (1995, 2008), and have updated this study in considerably more detail on Countdown to Darkness, Volume II.The strategy was to 1) subvert the normal distribution of incoming Oswald documents to the CIA by not allowing them to go to the Soviet Russia Division (SRD) and instead buttonhole them in the Office of Security, Security Research Staff (OS/SRS); 2) at the same time dangling Oswald as U-2 flypaper in front of the KGB in the USSR; 3) hoping that this would prompt the KGB to contact their mole in SRD; and 4) surfacing the mole by leading the mole to initiate a request for information on Oswald.”

As he explains in a Facebook post, when he started out on this project Newman didn’t expect to write this book, it sort of grew out of the research and took on a life of its own. , Volume IV, "Uncovering Popov's Mole" was delivered to the publisher. This is not a book that I saw coming. It hit like a comet. The effects of its impact never let up. We were dealing with new breakthroughs as recently as two days ago. Like the end of Volume III (Into the Storm), the curtain had to come down at some point. The decision was made today to reveal the bulk of what has been uncovered thus far. The publisher estimates approximately five weeks of work (give or take a week) will be needed before it can be sent to Amazon. While we wait for that to happen, all of the chapters of Volume V--Armageddon-- (which is about two thirds completed) will be reassessed, and we will choose the right platform for a zoom conference soon after publication.”

Pyotr Semyonovich Popov, a high ranking Soviet military intelligence officer, came in out of the blue in the 1950s, but instead of defecting, he was convinced to remain in place as a more significant native double agent.

We first learned the details of Popov’s role in the 1980s when William Hood published his book Mole. Hood was one of the CIA agents involved in the Popov case and after Popov was caught, tried and executed, convinced his superiors to allow the story to be told.

While some of the reviews of Mole say that William Hood is a nom de plume, it is his real name, the name we find attached as being CC’d on some of Oswald’s pre-assassination documents that were closely held by James Jesus Angleton’s CIA Security Office. It’s also the name he was buried under –

[   https://www.easthamptonstar.com/archive/william-j-hood-92-novelist-cia-officer       ]

Among the items Popov passed on to the CIA was the fact that there was a deeply entrenched mole within the CIA, whose identity became an obsession with Angleton, who himself was suspected to be the mole by some of his associates. This was so because Angleton learned all about Counter-intelligence and the spy game during World War II when he served in the OSS under General Bill Donovan. His primary mentor was none other than Kim Philby – probably the most famous KGB-MI5-6 Double Agent of all time.

William Harvey, who comes into this story on many levels, was one of the first to uncover Philby, and his Trinity College Cambridge school mate, the obnoxious, gay, drunkard Guy Burgess, who Philby harbored in Washington D.C. when Philby served as the representative of MI6. Most of the Cambridge Soviet spy cell were recruited by a Catholic priest, and were members of the exclusive private club known as the Apostles.

But Burgess was a member of the Pitt Club, as was James Bond, the American ornithologist and author of The Birds of the West Indies, from whom Ian Fleming appropriated the name for his secret agent 007. Bond comes into the story through CIA bursar Cummins Catherwood, whose ostensibly philantropic foundation was used by the CIA to distribute funds for covert operations.  Bond himself just happened to be birdwatching at the Bahia de cochinos, Cuba – the Bay of Pigs, shortly before the invasion.

[   https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/catherwood-fund.html     ]

Popov, Angleton and Oswald come together with Oswald’s pre-assassination file, held by Angleton’s security office, and as speculated by professor Peter Dale Scott, was used as a “barium meal” or “marked card,” used as a trap to try to catch Popov’s mole.

As Scott writes in the introduction to this book, “An unexpected consequence of the John F. Kennedy assassination and cover-up has been an unprecedented exposure of previously secret CIA and FBI records. In the resulting new field of serious scholarly research, John Newman, with an intelligence background of his own, has emerged as a preeminent master. For his latest volume, Uncovering Popov's Mole, Newman has perused thousands of conflicting documents, and distilled them into a coherent answer to a problem that CIA professionals were unable to resolve: who was the Soviet mole in the CIA. Newman’s arguments will, I am sure, dominate all future discussions of this surprisingly important political question.”

The idea was that the KGB, after Oswald’s defection, would want to know if Oswald was a real or fake defector, and have their mole check out Oswald’s CIA file.

Was there a mole? Did he bite Angleton’s trap? And if so, who was he?

Newman says he identified Popov’s mole, and we will learn his identity when the book is published. We know Popov was highly regarded in the CIA, we know he was eventually caught and executed, and we know Hood speculates on how his cover was blown,  possibly by the mole, but more likely by slack FBI stakeout and surveillance techniques.

One of the things Popov passed on to the CIA was that a well trained man and wife duo were being sent to New York City to be entrenched, possibly for years, as the Cambridge spy ring was, and then activated when they were in a position to do serious damage. The CIA had to pass the information on to the FBI, legally responsible for Counter-Intelligence, and despite the requests of the CIA to back off, they put a full court press on the couple from their arrival at the airport.

The FBI stakeout and surveillance teams followed the couple around New York City, into department stores, in and out of elevators and taxies, and the KGB were quickly aware of the FBI’s presence, but it later turned out that the KGB were following the FBI surveillance teams radio communications.

Some of the counter-surveillance techniques Hood describes in his book can be seen in action shortly after the assassination, as Oswald uses them three times in the hour after the assassination. At first he walks eight blocks east on Elm then gets in a bus heading back in the opposite direction. Then getting into a cab he has it drive six blocks past his rooming house and walks back to ensure he wasn’t being followed. Then, according to Dale Meyers, when he saw Tippit’s patrol car he quickly turned around, a furtive move that could have caught Tippit’s attention and the reason whey he was stopped.

Among those who interrogated Oswald after his arrest some of them said they believed that Oswald was trained in counter-interrogation techniques. So he practiced counter-surveillance techniques and was trained in counter-interrogation techniques, what Allen Dulles called the Crafts of Intelligence.  And it clearly indicates that Oswald was not just some schmuck, but was a small pawn in a much bigger game of power politics.

While we await Newman’s book, I will be reading Jeff Morley’s Scorpion’s Dance, and will post a review as soon as I am done.

Billkelly3@gmail.com