Five Fingerprints of Intelligence

Fingerprints of Intelligence

“Everywhere you look with him (Oswald), there are fingerprints of Intelligence” – Sen. Richard Schweiker (R. Pa.) Village Voice, 1975 –

As a member of the Schweiker-(Gary) Hart Subcommittee of the  (Frank) Church Intelligence Committee of the US Senate, assigned to investigate the intelligence connections to the assassination of President Kennedy, Sen. Richard Schweiker was not your typical conspiracy buff, but he knew what he was talking about.

While there are many such intelligence associations to the assassination, I thought I would put them into the context of five types of fingerprint evidence, and came up with the following.

1) Foreknowledge – Allen Dulles, Sun Tzu and The Art of War –

When Allen Dulles arrived at the very first meeting of the Warren Commission he brought along an advance copy of a recently published book – The Assassins, by Robert J. Donovan, who was also the author of the book PT 109, about John F. Kennedy’s experiences as a PT boat Captain in the South Pacific during World War II that was made into a popular movie.

Donovan’s book argues that unlike most European assassinations that are politically motivated, American assassins are basically deranged lone nut cases without ties to a conspiracy.

Commissioner John J. McCloy disagreed and pointed to the assassination of President Lincoln where there were a number of people hung for cooperating with the assassin John Wilkes Booth.

Instead of The Assassins, Dulles should have brought along a copy of his own book, published in 1963 that was probably read by Lee Harvey Oswald entitled The Craft of Intelligence, ostensibly ghost written by prolific author E. Howard Hunt. In that book Dulles is quick to mention Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, one of the oldest books known to man, circa 400 B.C., in which he calls attention to the chapter on The Use of Secret Agents.

One of the hallmarks and “fingerprints of intelligence” that makes the assassination of President Kennedy a covert intelligence operation is the foreknowledge certain people had of the event, and expressing it to others before it occurred.

For a list of those who expressed foreknowledge of the assassination see: https://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2023/02/foreknowledge-and-jfk-assassination.html

After appearing on Len Osanic's Black Op Radio program on Nov. 22, 2022, I received an email from the grandson of Sonny McCullough of Atlantic City, a close associate of Nucky Johnson, Hap Farley and Skinny D'Amato. He said that his family knew a week before the assassination that it would occur and talked about it, and we can trace that foreknowledge directly to Skinny D'Amato, who took a leave from his 500 Club, where Sinatra frequntly performed, to run the casino at the Cal-Neva Lodge when Sinatra and Sam Giancana took it over. Giancana being involved in the early stages of the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and whose right hand man John Rosselli was in the thick of things at the CIA's JMWAVE station where they trained the Cuban commandos as snipers. 

2) Disinformation and Black Propaganda  

Disinformation is defined as - false information which is intended to mislead, propaganda issued by a government organization to a rival power or the media in support of a covert intelligence operation.

So if it isn’t intentionally  false and issued by a government intelligence agency in support of a covert operation, it isn’t disinformation, but merely misinformation.

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, wrote the US Army text book on Propaganda and Psychological Warfare  during the Korean War and worked for the CIA afterwards. He 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.), but I obtained a copy through an inter-library loan, and it 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.

 While Dizinformation comes from the Soviet’s use of such techniques, 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.”

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/11/black-propaganda-and-jfk-assassination.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2015/06/disinformation-at-dealey-plazq.html

As Peter Dale Scott has observed, the original Phase One cover-story for the Dealey Plaza operation was to blame Castro Cuban Commies, an active CIA measure that continues today. But when LBJ rejected that as it could lead to nuclear war, the Phase Two cover-story of the deranged lone nut took hold and was propagated, even though LBJ himself knew that wasn't true either. 

What was true was that the assassination was a covert intelligence operation by a domestic anti-Communist intelligence network that was designed to deceive, and it succeeded. 

) Crafts of Intelligence - Covert Operational Procedures - Thomas Powers - Gen. William Odom and The Sting.  Linebarger and David Maurer - The Big Con - slang, lingo, language, and covert op lingo.

Besides Allen Dulles’ book The Craft of Intelligence, that describes how intelligence agencies and agents operate, there’s a whole slew of important books that should be read before trying to understand how what occurred at Dealey Plaza was a covet intelligence operation.

Thomas Powers in his book Intelligence Wars, describes a retirement party he attended for a long standing CIA officer, where he met General William Odom, former head of the Pentagon’s intelligence agency, the generally unknown Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and the National Security Agency (NSA), where his assistant was John Newman.

Powers asked Odom the question – what makes a good intelligence case officer who runs other spies?

After thinking for a moment Odom responded: “The Sting – the Robert Redford – Paul Newman movie.”

While Powers didn’t get it, that told me that Odom was a student of Paul Linebarger, as another student Joseph Smith described the class.

       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.

David Maurer was a professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky, where he specialized in the slang of underworld – pick pockets, thieves, con artists and confidence men. In compiling his lists of slang, Maurer got to know some of the best confidence men who considered themselves above thieves, as they didn’t use violence or steal, but rather convinced the mark to give them their money for what was clearly a dishonest scheme, which emphasizes the point, “You can’t cheat an honest man.”

To Maurer they explained the details of the Big Con, and how it worked, which Maurer detailed in his book The Big Con, that was used as a basis for the movie The Sting. After reading Maurer’s book and realizing this I called Maurer's office in Kentucky and talked to Maurer’s former assistant, as Maurer had recently passed away.

Yes, he said, Maurer did recognize his work was used in The Sting and got a lawyer and sued the production company, but they decided to fight it as the screenwriter said he never read Maurer’s book. But in court, when the screenwriter and production company could come up with one other published source for name Gondorf, the lead character in the movie played by Paul Newman, the judge ruled in Maurer’s favor.

And just as Maurer had to study the slang and lingo of the confidence men in order to learn the details of the Big Con, we have to learn the slang and lingo of covert intelligence operators in order to learn how such covert intelligence operations work.

The SPYSCAPE Glossary of Spy Terms

Language of Espionage | International Spy Museum  - BK NOTES: The first director of the DC International Spy Museum was a former Marine who served with Oswald at Atsugi. 

List of Espionage Terms | Dr. Hugh Fox III

CI-glossary.pdf

4) Covert Operational Personality (COP) Profiles.

In 1999 the Secret Service commissioned a psychological study of all known assassins or assailants of presidents through out history in order to determine if there were any patterns that could be identified. When I read the study I noticed they left out an important category of assassins – the professional, trained assassin, like Gerry Patrick Heming, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi Quintero, Antonio Veciana, Michael Townly, David Morales, William Harvey, Lee Harvey Oswald, et al.

So I decided to develop and name my own category that fits these characters – and I call it the Covert Operational Personality Profile and list their attributes.

COVERT OPERATOR – Either state sponsored/controlled or possible renegade with official support.

Can be an Official, Officer, Case Officer, Agent, Sub-Agent, Operator, or Asset (willing or unknowing) 

Anyone connected to an intelligence agency or network is given a code name and every operation they are associated with is also given a code name, and everyone operates on a need-to-know basis. 

SEX: Male.
[Note on sexuality of political assassins: historically, there is no known example of a female sniper-assassin, and few others besides Sara Jane Moore (an FBI informant), Squeaky Fromme (a Charlie Manson disciple) and the Pennsylvania Mall Commando spree killer, though there is one female sniper in fiction (Ian Fleming’s Soviet Russian cello-assassin in “From a View to a Kill”].

RACE: Caucasian, or possibly Latin.

NATIONALITY: American, or possibly foreign national, Cuban-Latin American, with U.S. military training and control.

AGE: 22-32 years old.

MARITAL STATUS: Single or separated/divorced; maintains private apartment.

EDUCATION: High School, some college, technical training; fluent in at least one foreign language, with on-site experience and training in covert intelligence crafts and procedures.

FAMILY: Dominant mother, very strong or no father figure, brothers in military.

IQ – 110-130- above average; tests “Passive-Aggressive” on The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), and among the 20% of population that is easily responsive to hypnosis.

MILITARY: USMC or USN (Sub/SEAL), possible Active Reserve Status; trained in codes, ciphers, interrogation techniques, languages, technical, electronic communications, familiar with all types of weapons, expert marksman. If Army, special ops training at Fort Bragg or Fort Bennington.

CHARACTER: Independent personality but disciplined, doesn’t talk unnecessarily, followers orders, is “organized” and focused, doesn’t smoke or drink to excess, and blends in nicely in any environment.

EMPLOYMENT: Civilian blue collar worker; trained technician.

MOTIVE: Ideologically motivated, believes in operational goals.

MODUS OPERANDI: Covert Operative, utilizes intelligence tradecraft, maintains Post Office box, valid passport, uses aliases, dead drops, codes and ciphers, maintains confidential and clandestine communications, fluent in foreign language, and operates on need-to-know basis, under command of case officer; military superior.

KNOWLEDGE: Of military and government procedures, lines of authority and communications.

SPECIALITY – Expert marksman, rifleman, sniper. Special Detachment; primary overseas duty.

STATUS: Contract agent, not a salaried line officer; but possible active duty or active reserve military.

TYPE: Fits Serial Killer profile as a repeat offender, organized personality, involved in three or more separate events, premeditated, select type of victim, thinks he will never be caught (and is usually correct), controls events.

[Note: Because Lee Harvey Oswald fits the profile in more than one category, if he had anything at all to do with the assassination, the motive is elimination and motus operandi for the assassination is that of a covert intelligence operation; but because Oswald was not an expert marksman, and too unreliable a shot to be placed in that position, and the circumstances of the crime scene suggest he has an alibi, it is doubtful his role was that of a shooter.

Also note that if Oswald was responsible for both the assassination of JFK, wounding of Connally and murder of Tippit, the classification of the crimes would be that of spree killer, as well as an assassin and serial killer].

EXAMPLES: John W. Booth; Leon Czoigosz; Byron DeLa Beckwith; Lee Harvey Oswald; Luis Angel Castillo; Frank Sturgis; Felix Rodriguez, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Kerry Thornley, David Morales, Angel Murgado, James Earl Ray; Charles Whitman; Michael Townly; Timothy McVeigh; Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi.

TYPE II American assassin: (disorganized personality) psychologically motivated, mentally deranged, though conditioned and controlled by a handler. Examples include Charles J. Guiteau; Luis Angel Castillo, John Hinkley; Mark David Chapman; Siran B. Siran;

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2009/08/covert-operational-profile.html

https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/2020-04/ecsp1.pdf

5) Intelligence network connected associates. 

Covert operatives don't act on their own or independently, but are assigned a case officer who controls their actions. 

In the case of Oswald, while we don't know who was his case officer who controlled his actions, we do know who he associated with and who they were affiliated with. 

When he was in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) Oswald knew David Ferrie, a connected Captain and pilot. 

In the USMC Oswald had numerous occasions when he could have been recruited into a agency or covert network operation, and one of his USMC buddies recall him being chosen to work on a Cuban project. At one time he was known to have met a civilian at the base gate and had a private conversation with him. Who was that? 

When Oswald decided to defect to the Soviet Union, it was noted that someone must have told him that Helsinki was the easiest way to USSR and quickest way to get a tourist visa. Who was that? 

In Moscow, Oswald handed his passport over to Embassy officer Snyder, who kept it in his top desk drawer until Oswald returned a few years later to go home. 

When Oswald was in Snyder's office there were a few others present, including his assistant John McVicker, his secretary and her husband, the Navy attace Oliver Hallet. 

McVicker said that it seemed to him that Oswald's actions appeared to be "guided by others" who "encouraged him in his actions." Who were they? 

It was McVicker who asked reporter Priscilla Johnson to try to interview Oswald, and she did, for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a shadowy outfit owned by former OSS officer Ernest Cuneo and former British MI6 officer Ivor Brice, while Ian Fleming of 007 fame was the European Editor. Other NARA reporters included Ernest Hemingway, who entered Paris with OSS Col. David Bruce, beauty queen Ingrid Avid, who bedded JFK when he worked for ONI before being sent to the South Pacific, and Virginia Prewett,  one of David Phillips' media assets who said she knew both Phillips and Maurice Bishop. 

NANA was certainly a hotbed of spies, that you can read more about in an article I wrote with John Judge many years ago - Bottlefed by Oswald's NANA. 

JFKcountercoup: Bottlefed By Oswald's NANA - By Bill Kelly and John Judge

When he returned to Texas Oswald was met by George deMohrenschildts who first arrived at Oswald's apartment with White Russian Army Col. Lawrence Orlov. First deMornschilldts got the okay to visit the Oswalds from the head of the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division in Dallas J. Walton Moore. DeMornschilts often had dinner with Moore, while Orlov played racket ball with Moore frequently.

Also in the mix was George Bouhe, who kept the files on new arrivals.  Who did he keep files for? 

Before leaving for Haiti, deMornschildts arranged for a house party at the home of Volkmar Schmidt for the purpose of introducing the Oswalds to Ruth and Michael Paine. Michael Paine obtained his job at Bell Helicopter through the inventor of the Bell helicopter Arthur Young, who married his mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young. His mother was a close personal friend and European traveling companion to Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles' OSS secretary, assistant and paramour in Switzerland during WWII. 

Before leaving for Haiti, deMohrenschilts stopped in New York City where he went to the offices of CIA officer John Train, who ran the CIA's propriety companies, like airlines. 

DeMohrenschildts then went to DC where he met with Dorothie Matlack and a US Army Colonel Sam Kail, who were agents of the Pentagon's obscure intelligence agency ACSI - the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, that also included Col. Jack Crichton in Dallas and Col. Brandy Bransetter, who ran the Havana Hilton where Castro stayed when he first took over Cuba. 

In the end Oswald didn't have to be run or controlled by a case officer, they just had to know where he was and what he was doing in order to set him up as a fall guy in the Dealey Plaza operation. 

In any case, the bottom line is Schweiker was right in that there are fingerprints of intelligence all over Oswald and this case, and there wouldn't be any if the president was killed by a deranged lone nut. 

Billkelly3 @gmail.com 

BK Notes: I will complete this ASAP.