The Great Game - An Act of Man, God or Magic?

  

 

AN ACT OF MAN, GOD OR MAGIC?

“The day they blew the brains of the king
Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing
It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise
Right there in front of everyone’s eyes
Greatest magic trick ever under the sun
Perfectly executed, skillfully done…..”

                 – Bob Dylan – “Murder Most Foul”

I’d like to rephrase the argument from simply conspiracy or not, to whether the president was murdered as the result of the spontaneous actions of a deranged lone-nut without any discernable motive, or was he killed by a well planned, practiced and successfully executed covert intelligence operation that was designed to decieve?

Instead of pointing fingers at suspects or trying to identify the actual killers of President Kennedy, forget the names of the shooter(s) or even the mastermind of the operation, although their names will eventually emerge in this study, we will assume for the sake of argument, that the assassination was an act of espionage, and try to describe how the murder took place by identifying and outlining the intelligence network that was behind the assassination and responsible for the murder.  

In order to understand what really occurred at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas at 12:30 pm CST on November 22, 1963, you must understand other, similar Deep Political events, (as Peter Dale Scott describes them)  and it is easy to assimulate aspects of the Kennedy assassination with Watergate and Iran-Contra, since some of the characters participated in all of them.

To add to related deep political events I would like to include uncovering the identity of the Third Man - Kim Philby and the Cambridge Spy Ring among those deep political events.. While it may seem like a step away from Dealey Plaza, some of the characters are also involved in the assassination drama, and the gradual revelations in the unfolding of that drama provides a means of understanding the assassination and how it should be understood.

One of the best things about looking in hindsight at such deep political events as Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9-11 and the Cambridge Spy Ring is that the rear view mirror clearly illustrates the Crafts of Intelligence – how covert operations work – the gears in the mechanism,  the tricks of the trade.  These crafts, trade secrets  of espionage, can and should be applied to the assassination of President Kennedy as they certainly fit.

Most of the general public only know of such things, not from reading Allen Dulles’ “Craft of Intelligence,”  Sun Tzu’s “Art of War,” or Edward Litwack’s “Coup d’etat – A Practical Handbook,” but from reading spy fiction of Ian Fleming, John LeClare, and now Ben MacIntyrie author of Spy Among Friends, and seeing the major motion pictures that are based on them.

In comparing the fairy tales of the films to the real life adventures of spys we can see how the real things actually work, and that has been done for us by Frederick P. Hitz in his book “The Great Game – The Myths and Reality of Espionage.” (Vintage,2005).

As Hitz points out, the bizarre fantasies portrayed in the 007 films are actually overshadowed  by the real, though still secret events.

You should get college credit for reading Hitz’s book, and indeed, it began as a freshman seminar at Princeton, where Hitz is a professor.

Hitz begins his study of spy fiction with Rudyard Kipling’s "Kim," - the boy-spy, as I do, with the quote – “When he comes to the Great Game he must go alone – alone, .... at peril of his head…. a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news – ….These....ì are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best….We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book…When everyone is dead the Great Game is finished. Not before.”

As Kim Philby, probably the greatest and best known spy after James Bond, was named after Kipling’s Kim, so it is appropriate to use Philby's defination of espionage - "the collection of, secret information from foreign countries by illegal means.”

What is “secret information” or secret intelligence," as it os now caklled? Well, it could be anything, but Sherman Kent, of the CIA’s Board of National Estimates says, “it ought to be information requiring ‘action!’”

So to be of value, secret intelligence must be “actionable,” and requiring a move on the Chessboard of what is called the Great Game.

To Kipling’s Kim it was secret knowledge of the enemy’s plan, on which the destiny of a battle would be determined.

To those who arranged the killing of the president it was no secret, simply that he would be traveling in an open vehicle and a suitable target for snipers.

But for real secret intelligence – and it’s a BIG but, you have to recognize it when you see, hear or stumble upon it, even if it is just a tidbit of information deep in a story.

In his CIA lectures to prospective secret agents David Atlee Phillips describes recognizing such intelligence, by telling a joke – “Grandmother’s on the Roof.”  It’s the story of two brothers, one of whom comes to America as an immigrant and receives a letter from his brother telling him his beloved cat went up on the roof, fell off and died. Writing  back he says not to tell him such bad news all at once but gradually break it to him. The next letter merely said, “Grandmother’s on the roof.”

And that’s what it’s like to recognize key secret intelligence.

In this light, the details of the president’s assassination are espionage secrets that must be kept, and the only way of discerning them, other than being informed by a participant, is to utilize the Counter-Intelligence procedures that uncovered the Third Man, the Cambridge Spy Ring, Watergate, Iran-Contra, etc. 

As Hitz points out, “In the popular mind, espionage most often connotes human source intelligence, or HUMINT,….it is information obtained from human agents, or spies, usually under an arrangement in with the agents participate wittingly or unwittingly.”

Today, in addition to HUMIT intelligence there is SIGNET intelligence, or information picked up from wiretaps, phone taps, satellites, etc., and photo and film intelligence, that the CIA ran from the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) but is now referred to as the Geospatial intelligence.

The Great Game is often called the second oldest profession.  As Allen Dulles mentions in the very beginning of his book “Craft of Intelligence,” such crafts are not new, but have been used for centuries, and quotes Sun Tzu from his book, “The Art of War,” in which five types of secret agents are defined.

There are native, inside, living, expendable and double agents, each with its own style. Native being someone of the area you are working in, living being an agent who goes there and comes back with intelligence, expendable is one who is given false information to give to the enemy and may not come back, and double agents work for both sides.  I will name individual characters in the JFK assassination story that fits each of these roles.

Sun Tzu says that when all are working together at the same time it is known as “The Divine Skein,” with skein being a net, and the agents forming a network, a term that is still used today.  And it is “divine,” because to those not involved, and sometimes including those involved, it appears to be an act of God.

And there was distributed in the Cuban community of Florida shortly before the assassination that said “an Act of God” would be good for the Cubans.

Some countries did conduct counter-intelligence investigations into the assassination of President Kennedy, and all of them, except in the USA, discarded the notion of the deranged lone nut.

In their book Fairwell America, French Intelligence officers Philippe de Vosjoli, M. Andre Ducret wrote, “President Kennedy’s assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick complete with actor’s accessories and props. And when the curtain fell the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionists, but professionals, artists in their own right.”