Spy Among Friends III - More JFK Connections

 Spy Among Friends - III

As this six part series plays out, it is more like a soap opera that a spy thriller, but still there’s the techniques of CI – Counter-Intelligence that are presented that are use full in uncovering the JFK assassination secrets.

We still must be aware of the disclaimer in the beginning that clearly notes that this story is from the “imagination” of Ben MacIntyre, and one of the principle characters Lily Thomas – is entirely made up or a composite of a number of characters, though she is most interesting. As a matronly grandmotherly type of older women who should be knitting rather than feeding goldfish to man eating piranhas in a tank like Ian Fleming’s Blowfield, she was assigned by MI-5 CI chief Roger Hollis, to the case of Nicholas Elliott and charged with learning what Kim Philby told him before suddenly leaving for Moscow.

While the men of MI5 ask if Lily, the elderly matron, is up to the task, it is mentioned that because of who she is, she will be “underestimated,” just as they have had done.

To me Lily is reminiscent of the JFK assassination matrons – Mae Brussell, Mary Ferrell, Sylvia Meagher and Jean Davidson. 

Everything is recorded, and Lily plays the reel to reel tapes back over and over, as I have often done to transcribe my own interviews and the Air Force One radio transmission recordings, a tedious task, but one that must be done to fully understand the case.

While there are others who are questioned – Philby’s protégé James Jesus Angleton, Miles Copeland and Michael Straight, in Spy Among Friends it comes down to two keyinterrogations – that of Philby by the Russians in Moscow, and Elliott in London by Lily Thomas.

Both Philby and Elliott are tough to question, and like Oswald, had been trained in the art of counter-interrogation, as a number of Oswald’s interrogators have noted.

Then there is the men verses the myths, reality and what’s in the books and movies.

As I new Nicholas Elliott was a close personal friend of the 007 James Bond books Ian Fleming, I was wondering where he would come in and Fleming makes a casual cameo appearance when Elliott and Philby visit Fleming at a large indoor swimming pool where there is a scuba diver at the bottom of the tank. When he emerges, and takes off his equipment and wet suit, he is attired in a wrinkle free tuxedo, ala the scene in Goldfinger.

It is then explained that it is a joint Elliott – Fleming operation, and the tuxedoed spy will be infiltrated into a waterside party of Germans, even though the scuba tank would not be invented until 1945 and played no role in World War II on either side. But we get the idea – Philby’s close friend Nicholas Elliott and Ian Fleming were very close associates and friends, as Fleming’s official biographies attest to.

And Elliott was responsible for the loss of the British SIS scuba diver who went missing under the Soviet ship visiting London for an official parlay, which has never been explained.

Ian Fleming comes into the JFK assassination story when reporter Priscilla Johnson interviews then recent defector Lee Harvey Oswald in his Moscow hotel room. Johnson was encouraged to visit with Oswald by US embassy official John McVicker, who testified that he because of the way Oswald acted he believed Oswald’s actions were encouraged by unknown others. It has never been explained how Oswald arrived in Helsinki, Finland, or how he knew that Helsinki was the easiest route for tourists to get to Moscow.

At the time Priscilla Johnson was working for the North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), a major news syndicate then on par with Associated Press and United Press International. The owners of NANA were American Ernest Cueno, who had worked in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II, and Ivor Bryce, who had been with British Intelligence.

Because of Bryce’s close association with Fleming, Fleming was named European Editor and oversaw the reports that flowed from the reporters, including Priscilla Johnson. Other reporters who worked for NANA include Inga Avid, the Swedish model who attended the 1938 Berlin Olympics as a personal guest of Hitler, and later was the school room mate of JFK’s sister and JFK’s paramour when he worked in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) before being sent to the South Pacific.

While holed up in a seaside hotel room on vacation JFK and Avid were secretly recorded and filmed by J. E. Hover’s FBI, much like Fleming’s Sean Connery as 007 is filmed in bed in From Russia with Love.

Other NANA reporters, as I have noted in the article I wrote with John Judge – “Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA” (  https://archive.politicalassassinations.net/2012/07/was-oswald-bottlefed-by-nana/                      ), were Ernest Hemingway, who also worked for ONI out of Havana and liberated the bar at the Ritz Hotel in Paris with OSS Col. David Bruce, later Hemingway’s best man and JFK’s ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Also among NANA’s consort of reporters was Virginia Prewett, who covered the Caribbean for NANA and was one of David Atlee Phillips media assets and said she also knew the elusive “Maurice Bishop,” who was ostensibly in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald and anti-Castro Cuban assassin Antonio Veciana.

Then there’s Luciana Goldberg, whose husband, who I talked to, also worked for NANA under Fleming, and who encouraged Linda Tripp to illegally tape record Monaca Lowenski when they tried to nail President Clinton for having his sperm on Lowenski’s dress.

NANA was, at the time, essentially an independent intelligence network affiliated with both the CIA and British SIS, and a hotbed of espionage and spies, one that included Priscilla Johnson and Oswald.

Spy Among Friends also gives some insight into the art of counter-surveillance, best described in  - Mole, where Soviet agents betrayed by CIA’s double-agent Popov, are followed by FBI “watchers,” but manage to disappear.

In the hour after the assassination Lee Harvey Oswald practices the art of counter-surveillance three times – once by walking five blocks east on Elm, then getting on a bus going back in the same direction. Caught in traffic, Oswald got off the bus and got a cab, after offering it to an old lady, and took the cab eight blocks past his rooming house in Oak Cliff, and then walked back to it. Then as he is accused of walking down 10^th street, according to those who feel him guilty of killing Tiippit, he sees Tippit’s police car at the corner, and abruptly reverses course, a furtive move that got Tippit’s attention and led to his murder.

Once in Moscow, Philby is set up to meet an old friend in a hotel lobby, Guy Burgess, who he immediately asks why he fled with McLean, when he was only supposed to pass on the message to McLean that he was in trouble. By leaving with him when he himself wasn’t suspected, Burgess put Philby in the line of fire that lasted another decade. When they are alone in the bathroom, Philby gives Burgess a punch in the face.

Then , as he returns to his seat, he is secretly given a message in a brush off pass by a young women, ostensibly working for Angleton’s CIA office.

The women and a man have set up an observation post across the street from Philby’s apartment, and when he gives them up to the KGB, they immediately raid the apartment, kill the women and torture the man. When Philby observes this, he bitterly complains that, “You are supposed to watch them, give them false information – disinformation – not kill them!”

Which is why the KGB were so suspicious of Philby showing up suddenly after his cover was blown – and why other, similar double-agent cases must be considered equally suspect – those of Penkovsky, Nosenko, Golitizen, Popov and the Cambridge ring of spies, all of whom play a role in the JFK assassination story. 

BK Notes; The final Part VI of the Spy Among Friends saga will be released in the USA on Sunday.