Government By Systematic Institutionalized Assassination

  Government By Systematic Institutionalized Assassination

"The assassination of President Kennedy was a coup d'etat." - Dr. Cyril Wecht 

"I have always believed and argued that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to 'a few people,' but to the institutional and para-political arrangements which contribute to the way we are systematically governed." - Peter Dale Scott 

 

Professor Peter Dale Scott said that at the end of our inquiry we won't find renegade assassins, but rather an institutionalized assassination system, and if he and Dr. Wecht are correct in these conclusions, then our suspects are limited to those who took over the government, hated the President with a passion and had the power to kill him and get away with it. They also had approvals from the highest authorities other than the President, and cooperative co-conspirator necessary for the scheme to succeed.

Im sure there were other official CIA and military assassination projects  that we know about besides the CIA's ZR/RIFLE and the military's Zeta-Dioginese, as we know the MK/ULTRA project tried to developed programed assassins and Navy Lt. Com. Thomas Narut told a London Sunday Times reporter that the Navy had a similar program that recruited special soldiers for training as assassins and placed them in embassies abroad.

As the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says in the movie Seven Days in May, the operation must be “deep and dark” – and that’s how such covert ops are described – black ops, deep and dar,k and if murder is involved, it is a “wet" operation.

The mechanism for murder was put into place, and designed, like all covert inteligence operaions, on a need to know basis using standard covert op tradecraft, beginning with a code name.

Now I have heard a number of code names said to have been used to kill JFK, Zipper, was one, “The Big Event” was another, and while I am sure there was one, I just call it The Dealey Plaza Operation (DPO), and if it was a coup, it had approvals from the highest authroities, who ensured the cover-up.

If a coup, as I suspect, then all of the major branches of government had to be either compromised or were “in on it.”

We know certain people were not “in on it,” but were compromised, such as RFK, CIA director John McCone, and most likely Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The mechanism of murder was already in place to kill Fidel Castro – and while the others are possibile, William Harvey and the ZR/RIFlE team are the most plausible, as it centered around JMWAVE, where most of the anti-Castro action and training took place.

The covert ops run out of JMWAVE were all approved at the highest level – by the National Security Council’s Special Group and with the addition of RFK. Special Groip Augumented. And those who planned the assassination of Castro did their best to convince the Special Group Augumented and RFK to approve the plans – especially Valkyrie that developed into Dr. Rolando Cubella (AMLASH) and Pathfinder, the Carl Jenkins’ plan to have snipers shoot Castro as he rode by in an open jeep. They were the plans to kill Castro that I believe were redirectd to JFK in Dallas.

While a number of plans to have Cubans kill Castro were apparently approved, we still don't know who approved the redirection of these plans from Castro to JFK. People very high in the government had to.

Besides the National Security Council Special Group (Augumented) there were two other groups with knowledge of CIA covert operations – the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (FIAB) and the Execuive Committee (ExCom), the small group that was formed during the Cuban Missile Crisis to form a consensus as to what action to take, and it stayed together and met informaly afterwards to consult the president.

For me, I am focusing on William Harvey, ZRRIFLE and the JMWAVE Pathfinders, as well as the two known plans to kill Castro that were developed – Valkyrie and Pathfinder.

But before putting names into the sliots of  assassination team members, it’s necessary to understand how the mechanism of death was triggered, and for that we go to  Maj. Ralph Ganis, USAF(R), a military officer and intelligence analyst who purchsed the private papers of Nazi commando leader Otto Skorzeny on line. He followed them to Texas, where some of Skorzeny’s businesses were located, fronted by his wife. Ganis recognized the connections between Skorzeny’s Texas enterprises as an intelligence network, not necessarily established to earn money, with a special association with Col. Jack Crichton, head of the 488th Intelligence unit of the US Army Reserves.

In his book, The Skorzeny Papers, Ganis explains how the government’s institutionalized the mechanism of murder and how it was was triggered – a very strict and rigerous process.

Ganis says the procedure for incompascitating a president was similar to the process of instigating a nuclear war, 

Unlike the regualar contintunity of government line of succession from President to Vice President to Speaker of the House, the lines of authority tl pull the nuclear trigger were the same for the use of nuclear weapons – President, to Secretary of Defense to Assistant Secretary of Defense to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

As Ganis puts it: “The correct way to say it is this - there was an assassination capability inherent and located within one office of the CIA – that was highly compartmented and highly controlled. So, it’s not like the entire CIA was involved. It was literally only one office, and even then, within the office it was probably on a need to know basis… The capability itself, the Executive Action capability itself, I equate in the book to the use of Atomic Weapons. The only way to launch this capability would have been by Executive Order – by the President, or the National Command authority – that level, - the Secretary of Defense, at that level. It was a presidential, national command authority level capability. Somebody at the CIA couldn’t use it. It would even have been impossible for even rogue use. This was a Command and Control situation. A target would be designated. But in other words, to use this capability would have required Executive Approval.”

“So this small office within the CIA – called Staff D. And the guy who ran it was a man named William K. Harvey, during that time period. He managed the program. He managed that program – much like maintaining a nuclear bomber. There are US Air Force personal who man the bomber, and there’s people who maintain the bomber, but they can’t launch the bomber. That comes from the President. The same with this capability.”

And this capability – that can only be activated from the highest executive levels of government, coincides with my thesis that elements of the Valkyrie plan to kill Hiltler were used, especially the aspect of that plan that had the victim sign off and actually approve the plan and the operation, as Hitler approved Valkyrie as an emergency measure to call out the Home Guard, and with the CIA seeking JFK’s approval of their plans to kill Castro, especially AMLASH and the Pathfinder Operation.

The official approval of the Dealey Plaza Operation by those at the highest level of government had to be given, though it wasn’t by the President or the Attorney General or even the NSC Special Group, but by those in the contintunity of goverenment – LBJ, those in the law enforcment – J. E. Hoover, and those with the authority to go to war – Secretary of Defense McNamara, Assst. Secretary of Defense Gilpatrick and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and conducted in part by the Pentagon's intelligence arm, the office of Assistant Chief of Staff for Intellugence (ACSI).

It was not unlike Dr. Strangelove, where a Group Commander sends his nuclear bombers off  to atack Russia based on Wing Attack Plan R – which is activated when the normal chain of command, the president, is incapacitated or otherwise unable to function.

In his book The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Jim Bishop interviewed some of the White House Communications Agency (WHCA) radiomen, one of who told him that the power was being distributed through the war lines rather than the regular continunity of government lines, and that at one point, it was broadcast on the secure Secret Service “Charlie” channel that “The Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the president.”

Of course we know that wasn’t true because the Joint Chiefs of Staff, minus AF Chief of Staff LeMay, were meeting with the German High Command counterparts are the Pentagon, and chairman Gen. Maxwell Taylor was taking a nap.

But the approval for triggering the assassination mechanism to kill JFK might have been sent down the line from the same powers that provide for the launching of nuclear weapons, which means that Defense Secretary MacNamara, and his assistant Rosewell Gilpatrick were certainly in the loop.

MacNamara, McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk were three of the men who were recommended to President elect Kennedy by Harry Truman’s Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett.

  [https://harvardpolitics.com/presidents-wise-men-president-kennedy-decline-eastern-establishment/ ]

While much is known about MacNamara, few know much about Gilpatrick, who played a major role in the Kennedy administration’s defense department, especially in regards to Cuba and the awarding of the TFX-fighter-bomber contract to General Dynamics over Boing.

Gilpatrick’s law firm had represented General Dynamics and there are a number of characters in the JFK story with ties to General Dynamics – one of the major defense contractors in Texas that included former Nazis in its ranks.

When the CIA’s Project Paperclip brought hundreds of former Nazi scientists to America to work on the Saturn V rocket that would take men to the moon and also sere as the nuclear missile for decades, they got the major defense contractors to hire them, and they all did, including Collins Radio, Bell Helicopter and General Dynamics, who hired former Nazi rocket man General Dornberger as a security consultant, who worked alongside former FBI agent I.F. Hale.

Hale had twin sons – who attended Arlington Heights high school with Lee Harvey Oswald, until Oswald dropped out and enlisted in the Marines. When FBI agents were on a stake out surveillance of the Las Vegas apartment of mob moll Judyth Campbell Exner, who was a paramour of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana and President Kennedy at the same time, the FBI agents observed the Hale twins break into her apartment. But then because of their father’s association with the FBI, they did nothing but report it.

And their mother Virginia, who worked for the Texas Employment Commission, helped Oswald get the job at Jaggers-Chiles-Stoval, the graphics arts firm that put arrows and captions on U2 photos of Russia and Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

Besides the major defense contractors assisting the CIA on Project Paperclip, they are also associated together with the Defense Industrical Secruity Command – an association of defense contractors based I Columbus, Ohio, of all places.

The only reference I know of that associates this defense contractor security association with the assassiantion of President Kennedy is an unpublished manuscript that is now probably available over the internet – known as the Torbett Document, that was said to have been written by a high placed lawyer who has since been identified.

A Note on Skorzeny, who was not one of the Nazi military officers involved in the Valkyrie coup and July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. At the time Skorzeny was leading a glider raid on the Italian alps castle where deposed fascist dictator Beneito Musellini was being held prisoner.Skorzeny freed him and delivered him to Hitler in time for lunch the day after the assassination attempt. Skorzeny then participated in the rounding up of others who opposed Hitler for imprisonment and essecution.

For more on Skorzeny and Ganis see:

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-skorzeny-papers-evidence-for-plot.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2023/04/skorzeny.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-skorzeny-network-in-dallas.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2021/11/hank-albarelli-jrs-coup-in-dallas.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-us-air-force-at-dealey-plaza.html

Nuclear Lines of Command

 

Nuclear Lines of Command 

The case of the missing code books on the SAC bombers and the Executive Air Fleet at the time of the assassination sparked my interest in the subject of the nuclear war lines of command, and I have learned a lot. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 President Kennedy was upset, as exhibited in the movie 13 Days, that a regional Air Force general elevated the DEFCON status to 2, one step away from war, without his approval, as he said it sent a message to the Soviets he didn't want to send. The President himself also personally telephoned military officers in Nebraska responsible for launching the nuclear armed missiles, making sure they knew such an order required presidential authority. 

After the Cuban Missile Crisis President Kennedy took an interest in it too, and established the telephone hot line to Moscow and ordered a review of the nuclear warfare lines of command and process, code named Drop Kick, that resulted in the creation of the "football" case with the nuclear codes and the military officer called "Bag Man," who carried it where ever the President went. It was officially called the President's Emergency Satchel. 

In the film Seven Days in May you can see the Bag Man sitting outside the Oval Office and at the swimming pool, following the President where ever he goes. 

I wrote extensively and in more detail about the BagMan and the nuclear football in a blogpost in 2019 that can be read here: JFKcountercoup: BAGMAN, THE NUCLEAR FOOTBALL AND THE STAR NETWORK

The Bag Man at the time of the assassination was Warrant Officer Ira Gearheart, who had the nuclear football bag handcuffed to his wrist. Gearheart was sitting in the backseat of the last car in the motorcade with technicians from the White House Communications Agency (WHCA), who monitored radios in the Pilot car, the lead car, the President's limo, the SS Big Bertha behind it, LBJ's car and the WHCA car at the end of the motorcade. The pilot of AF one was also entuned to the motorcade's security "Charlie" channel, and he remained in his seat listening in while most of the crew went to lunch at Love Field, including WHCA Colonel George McNally, whose code name was STAR. The communications radio and telephone network he ran was known as the STAR network. 

WHCA technicians went everywhere the President was known to be going and set up a secure land line to the STAR network, as they did at all of the hotels on the agenda and at the luncheon site where JFK was due to be at the end of the motorcade. Their base of operations in Dallas was set up at a suite of rooms at the Sheraton Hotel, where George H. W. Bush stayed the night before, where Oswald applied for a job with deMohrenschildt's friend Sam Ballen and was said to have met Maurice Bishop-David A. Phillips in the lobby with Antonio Veciana, where Robert and Marina Oswald's lawyers office was located, and where a reporter left suspicious notes in the wastebasket that sparked an investigation of what he knew. The Sheraton is also part of the Southland Center, where the headquarters of the Haliburton company is listed as 3211 Southland Center. It was certainly a beehive of assassination related activities. 

As the motorcade turned onto Elm Street in front of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) and the first shot rang out, Will Greer the driver slowed down rather than speed up as he was trained to do, and the lead SS agent Kellerman picked up the radio microphone, squeezed the button and began to talk as the fatal head shot was fired, and was caught on the WHCA tape recording of Charlie Channel, certainly much clearer than the dubious Dallas PD dictabelt recording. But the Charlie Channel recording has never been acknowledged let alone released. 

\When they raced to Parkland hospital LBJ was separated from the Bag Man for the first time and when the WHCA car with the Bag Man finally arrived, the WHCA technicians took control of two of the row of pay phones in the emergency room for linking land lines to the STAR network. 

Then when the SS suddenly took LBJ out of Parkland to AF1 at Love Field, the Bag Man was left behind once again, and had to force his way onto the lap of a policeman to catch up. 

At AF1, there were land lines already set up, and LBJ used it to call the Federal Judge he had appointed who recommended he take the oath of office as soon as possible, and was asked to go to Love Field to administer the oath. LBJ then called Attorney General RFK to obtain the exact wording of the oath of office. And finally he called his personal attorney G. Waddy Bullion, whose inner office conference call phone was listened in to by another attorney in the office who later reported that LBJ instructed Bullion to sell his Haliburton stocks. 

Now this may seem like an insignificant instruction, and I had never heard of Haliburton before former VP Dick Chaney took a job there after leaving the White House, and included Governor John B. Connally on its board of directors.

I have since learned that Haliburton is the Texas company that actually manufactured the Executive Satche - the nuclear football, the metal case that was used to contain the nuclear codes. 

In the meantime there was considerable uncertainty as to who was really in charge of the government, as Secretary of State Dean Rusk wondered out loud aboard the Cabinet Plane that was missing its code book.

I first read veteran reporter Jim Bishop's book The Day Lincoln Was Shot while in grade school, and his 1968 book The Day Kennedy Was Shot in high school but it didn't spark my interest in the case, though when I later re-read it I found some interesting tidbits. One was the fact that Bishop had interviewed some of the WHCA technicians who ran Charlie channel in the motorcade and the STAR network from the Sheraton WHCA switchboard, command and control post.

One of them told Bishop that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, "Officials at the Pentagon were calling the WHCA switchboard at the Dallas Sheraton asking who was not in command. An officer grabbed the phone and assured the Pentagon that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are now the President." 

While the constitutional lines of authority are well known, and go from President to Vice President to the Speaker of the House, the authority to release nuclear weapons and go to war is different and goes from the President to the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatrick. 

So the WHCA in Dallas was giving the Pentagon the lines of authority to go to war, not the constitutional continuity of government chain of succession. 

We know however that McNamara and the Joint Chiefs were not exercising the war powers of the presidency in those uncertain moments. While I don't know where McNamara was or what he was doing, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were meeting with their West German High Command counterparts. Two of them were involved in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler, and were very familiar with how such assassinationss, coups and continuity of government plans went. They were perplexed however when Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor continued their meeting after being informed the President had been shot. Aind then after being told he had been killed, Taylor took a nap. So they were not in charge of anything, though Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay was not present at that meeting but on a hunting and fishing vacation in north Michigan and Canada. 

As LBJ wondered aloud on AF1 during the flight back, "I wonder if the missiles were flying?" we know from the existing AF1 radio transmission tapes and the reports of those who were on board, and as Larry Hancock has pointed out, that LBJ didn't bother to consult with any of his military advisors even when he arrived back at Andrews in Washington D.C. 

The late Daniel Ellsberg has written in one of his books that the nuclear chain of command was not secure, and after John Hinkley shot President Reagan, the Bag Man with the nuclear football was left behind once again, and had to walk the half-mile back to the White House. 

That's when Secretary of State Gen. Al Hague went on live national TV from the White House and announced " I'm in control here," when he really had no authority and was out of the Presidential line of succession or the power to go to war. 

Things were so chaotic in the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination as to who had the power, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was passed to detail the continuity of government authorities. 

[ Who’s in Charge? The 25th Amendment and the Attempted Assassination of President Reagan – The Reagan Library Education Blog ]

Which brings up the case of the missing Code Books, something that had to be intentional and done by someone with the power to remove them from the safes of SAC bombers and the Executive Fleet planes, and why it was done. 

It ahs been suggested to me by a military man familiar with such things, that the code books were removed in order to short circuit the line of command to go to nuclear war, mainly because it was such an opportunity with the president assassinated and the possibility such radical Pentagon war mongers like Generals LeMay, Powers and Leimeitzer would take advantage of, as they wanted to instigate a first strike against the Soviets and believed they could win such a nuclear war. 

Those planning the assassination operation were aware of this, and removed the code books in order to prevent that from happening, although they did want to blame Fidel Castro for the assassination operation, and have LBJ invade Cuba and remove him, they didn't want to kill 200 million people, including themselves, in the process. 

While I don't know if that is true, it sounds reasonable enough to me, and is at least a valid reason for the removal of the code books at the time of the assassination, 

In addition, as I will elaborate on next, it has been suggested by USAF Major Ralph Ganis (Retired), that the nuclear chain of command was possibly used to authorize the pulling of the assassination trigger in the officially, institutionalized mechanics of murder - ZRRIFLE and/or Zeta-Diogenese, set up by the CIA and the military to kill Fidel Castro. 

To comment on this or anything else - Billkelly3@gmail.com 

The Missing Code Books

The Missing Code Books 

I first learned of the code books being missing from from Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers at the time of the assassination from John Judge, my University of Dayton  (UD), Ohio college mate. He gave Conscientious Objector consultations to military men stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB who objected to the war in Vietnam. 

Wright-Pat has millions of dollars in engineering contracts with UD and the two largest institutions in Dayton are joined at the hip.

While at this social event, Judge said he met some B-52 bomber pilots, who told them about their experiences on 11/22/63 when John asked. 

They - there was more than one, but he talked mostly with one pilot, who said that he was in the air at the time, his leg of the routine 24-7 shift that kept bombers in the air at all times, ala Dr. Strangelove.

When they learned about the assassination - from commercial radio news, the pilot said he went to the plane's safe, much like Slim Pickens does in Dr. Strangelove, to get the code books to decode any messages or orders they would get. 

But the code book was missing! 

And they didn't get any special orders and returned to base on their regular schedule, where he learned other pilots had discovered the same thing. The code books were missing from the safes of all SAC bombers in the air at the time of the assassination. 

Well I didn't think much of it until a few years later when I read Pierre Salinger's book about his time in the White House as President Kennedy's Press Secretary. In it, he recalled being with the rest of the key cabinet members on an Executive plane flying to Japan for a conference on Vietnam when they learned about the assassination - from commercial radio news. 

When the senior officer on board, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, learned of the news of the assassination, he had Salinger, code name WAYSIDE, make a radio call to the White House - designated CROWN, informing them they were flying to Dallas. Salinger returned and reported that they were to return to Andrews AFB in Washington rather than go to Dallas. Rusk then asked who at the White House gave them those instructions, Salinger returned to the radio and talked with STRANGER in the Situation Room in the White House basement. 

Rusk wanted to know who STRANGER was, and had the safe opened, but the code book was missing! 

Now this is the second time I have heard about missing code books on USAF planes at the time of the assassination, and began to take interest and look into it more closely, as did Philadelphia lawyer Vince Salandria, who discovered that Salinger, in his book, quotes directly from the Air Force One radio transcripts, things that aren't on the existing tape, as released by the LBJ Library in Texas. 

The radio in CROWN the Situation Room was answered by US Navy officer Oliver Hallett, who gave Salinger all the information he had on the President. 

When Oliver Hallett learned from commercial radio news-wire service tickers, like Salinger and Rusk, of the name and background of the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, he must have been quite surprised to actually know Oswald from their time in Moscow. When Oswald was in the embassy turning over his passport and announcing his defection, Hallett was the Naval attache and in the room, as was his wife, the secretary. Now that to me seems pretty coincidental that the Navy attache in the Situation Room at the White House at the time of the assassination had personal knowledge of the accused assassin.   

And Salandria noticed Salanger, like two other journalists who had read the transcript in the White House (T. White, wm. Manchester), used quotes from the AF1 radio tape transcript that aren't on the existing tape. 

So Salandria wrote to Salinger, asking him about the quotes, and Salinger replied that he obtained a transcript from the JFK Library in Boston and returned it to them after he finished the book. Salandria contacted the JFK Library and they replied that they no longer had the transcript. It too was missing. 

In his account Salinger recalled Dean Rusk as saying, "We have to know who STRANGER is. We don't know what is happening in Dallas. Who the government is now." 

When news of Oswald's arrest came across the news wire, and his background described, Rusk said, "If this is true, this is going to have repercussions around the world for years to come." 

And indeed we are still having repercussions. 

After I transcribed the existing AF1 Radio cassette tapes released by the LBJ Library in the mid-70s, I was surprised to learn years later that a newer, longer reel to reel tape, actually two of them, were found among the effects of General Clifton, the President' military aide. One copy of the tape was auctioned off while the other was released on line by the National Archives (NARA), that I copied and made a transcript of, taking particular note of new conversations that aren't on the LBJ Library cassettes. 

One of the conversations concerns Col. Dorman trying to get an important message to his boss Air Force Chief of Staff General LeMay, who was flying aboard an AF Executive jet from Canada to Washington. 

Another conversation is from WAYSIDE - Salinger, to CROWN - the Situation Room, requesting that they break secure radio communications and identify the name of STRANGER, because the code book aboard the Cabinet plane was missing. 

After a few minutes, CROWN - Oliver Hallett, reports that STRANGER is Major Harold Patterson, a person Salinger knew personally from working with him at the White House, and reported that to Rusk. 

When I first heard the name Major Harold Patterson, I immediately did an internet search, as I had previously done with LeMay's aide Col. Dorman, and found Patterson living in Virginia. I got a phone number for him, and called him on the phone, and he answered and acknowledged he was the Harold Patterson who was STRANGER and assigned to the Situation Room at the time of the assassination,. 

I told him I was listening to him on the Clifton AF1 tape, and heard his conversation with Pierre Salinger, that he distinctly recalled. Patterson confirmed that the code book on the Cabinet plane was missing and they had to break security protocol to identify themselves. 

We talked for about a half hour, and he was very congenial and recalled what it was like to work in the Situation Room at such a time. 

I passed on Patterson's information and phone number to Jefferson Morley, who called a few days after I did, but Patterson clamed up, somebody had gotten to him and told him not to talk. 

In any case, I believe that the missing code books aboard SAC bombers and the Executive fleet was not an accident, but intentional.

It is now clear that the nuclear war chain of command was disrupted at the time of the assassination. 

When JFK was killed and LBJ became president, LBJ was separated from the Bag Man with the "football," and its nuclear codes. And he didn't seem to care. 

Aboard AF1 LBJ wondered aloud if "the missiles were flying." 

In addition, for a short time the powers of the government were not passed by the normal Continuity of Government succession - President, VP, Speaker of the House, but the nuclear command chain - President-Sec. of Defense- MacNamara, -  Asst. Sec. of Defrnse Roswell Gilpatrick. 

I will continue with this line of inquiry and explain why there was an intentional short circuit in the military command at the time of the assassination. 

Billkelly3@gmail.com 

New Orleans Grand Jury Transcripts Digitalized

 New Orleans Grand Jury Transcripts Digitalized 

One of the main problems in JFK research today is the fact that there is no legal venue to take new evidence or witness testimony, except the court of public opinion, as the Landis episode shows. I made a COPA Conference presentation in Dallas over a decade ago calling for the empanelment of a JFK Grand Jury that would be able to receive evidence and witnesses, as a Grand Jury is the first stop before a murder trial, and the only Grand Jury established for the JFK assassination was empaneled by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and it did take some amazing testimony. 

So amazing in fact that Garrison's successor Harry Connick, Sr. ordered the transcripts destroyed. 

I awarded the first JFK Elizabeth Ray Award for Historic Preservation to Gary Raymond, for preserving the NO Grand Jury transcripts, and to Andrews Air Force Base janitor Charles Chuck Holmes for salvaging the Andrews Log for 11/22/63, finding it in the trash and to both men for turning over what they saved to the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB). 

Elizabeth Ray was the custodian of the Walt Whitman House in Camden, N.J., my hometown, when the race riots of the late 60s and 70s engulfed the city. During such nights of rioting, Ray stood in front of the house she cared for and swung a broomstick at any rioter who came near her, thus preserving the Whitman House and a few nearby buildings that now stand out in a neighborhood of vacant lots. So I named the historic preservation award after her. 

Grand Jury records are normally routinely destroyed after they either indict someone or refuse to indict someone, or the prosecutor refuses to indict, but the New Orleans Grand Jury records are most certainly historic JFK assassination records that the man Harry Conack, Sr. ordered to destroy them instead preserved them. He turned them over to a media friend Richard Angelico, who arranged for them to be given to the ARRB, who refused Connock's order to return them to be destroyed. 

We all know what happened, as David Ferrie and Guy Banister died, and only Clay Shaw was left standing when Garrison got around to indictments, and he was found not-guilty by a jury. But the Grand Jury records include many witnesses that were not called to testify at the trial, and the transcripts of their testimony is extremely important. 

When the ARRB passed on these records to the National Archives and released to the public, the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) made scanned PDF copies of each page, and some testimony ran into the hundreds of pages, and they are posted on line. But you have to click each page to continue reading and it gets tiresome, but now Michael Capass from JFKAssassinationBoards.net  [ Home | JFK Boards ] has digitalized 48 of the transcripts so they can be read more easily read. 

[  Index of Grand Jury Transcripts | JFK Boards ]

While there are a lot of big names here - Dean Andrews, Layton Martins, Perry Russo, Mark Lane, Harold Weisberg, William Turner, Kerry Thornley, Marina Oswald, Ruth Paine, Lee Crisman, et al., that people will be interested in what they had to say, one name stands out for me - Thomas Beckham. 

Now that's not a familiar name to most JFK assassination buffs, but Beckham was a former Marine who had a bolt action rifle he liked to cold cock and shoot without bullets, and as an associate of Guy Bannister he was in on the Houma Bunker raid. That raid to obtain arms, explosives and ammunition from a bunker on the former Houma Navy base, is portrayed in Oliver Stone's JFK movie. 

It included  David Ferrie, Sergio Aracha Smith, Gordon Novel, Novel's beauty queen wife, Thomas Beckham and a few Cubans, who used a laundry truck supplied by one of the Cubans that some say can be seen in photos of Dealey Plaza at the time of the assassination. It was the Houma Bunker raid that convinced me that these Big Easy Bozos did not pull off the clean and precise military style ambush at Dealey Plaza. 

Who takes their wife along on a mission? Novel did. And Beckham, on the ride back to Bannister's office, where they stashed the goods, threw lit sticks of dynamite out the window, thinking that was funny. 

But Beckham caught my attention when Garrison reported that he had a pass to get on a Strategic Air Command (SAC) Air Force base, that he explained away by saying he obtained it from his business partner, a Colonel Lowry. 

When he testified before the Grand Jury - he also testified before the HSCA, Beckham was asked about the pass and said it was for "Alford, AFB," though that must have been a typing-spelling mistake because there is no Alford AFB. I believe he was referring to Olffutt AF base in Nebraska. 

But its hard to believe Col. Lowry would give Beckham a pass to a base in Nebraska when he was in Louisiana. Was there a SAC base near New Orleans in 1963? Or was it Barksdale, La., where the head of the New Orleans Secret Service office was at the time of the assassination? 

Lowry, Beckham explained, tried to help him by becoming a partner in a used Thrift Shop, though that didn't explain why he had to go on to the base. 

At one point the Grand Jury almost became a runaway grand jury when the jurors themselves began to ask the witness questions, but when Garrison's lawyer asked Beckham about Colonel Lowry, all he said was Lowry was "the operations officer of the planning division of SAC," and pilot of Silver Dollar-Looking Glass - a command and control plane.

When pressed for details, Beckham said that "it's a long story," and the lawyer questioning him said, never mind.. 

But it is important, as the Silver Dollar-Looking Glass Command and Control Plane was over Dallas at the very time of the assassination - as is demonstrated in this article by Larry Haapanen and Alan Rogers. 

[ Kennedy Assassination Chronicles, Volume 8, Issue 2 ]

In any case, Beckham is only one example, the guy I want to know more about and he's in these New Orleans Grand Jury transcripts, and we have Michael Capass to thank for digitalizing them and making them more easy to read. 

And it's a shame we don't have an active Grand Jury today where witnesses and evidence can be presented, especially in regards to the destruction and theft of records from the Archives. 

To comment on this story: Billkelly3@gmail.com 

My Take on Landis

 My Take on Landis 

People want to know what my take on the recent revelations by 88 year old, retired Secret Service agent Paul Landis that is creating something of a media-storm. 

Landis now says that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination he found a full, intact bullet on the back seat of the limo where the President had been sitting. 

He picked it up, put it in his pocket and then walked into the Emergency Room and left the bullet on President Kennedy's stretcher. 

For some of those knowledgeable about the case this is just another link in the broken chain of custody of CE399, the nearly perfect bullet found on an Emergency Room gurney ostensibly used by Texas Governor John Connally. The true provenance of this piece of evidence has always been a matter of speculation and debate - and the subject of many essays - a good one by Dr. Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson [ The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical than We Knew  ] .

Though the Single-Bullet-Theory (SBT) has been the subject of much debate, it is one of a number of linchpins that Warren Commission adherents must cling to for their only suspect to have killed the President alone for not apparent reason. 

The alleged convoluted path of CE399 goes from the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) into the back of the president, exits his throat, enters John Connally, breaks a few ribs, exits Connally, passes through his wrist, breaking more bones and leaving fragments, then lodges in his thigh. 

Though the SBT is attributed to Warren Commission attorney and later Senator Arlen Specter, it was really put forth to him by another WC attorney Joe Ball, but Specter made it famous and almost convincing. 

While the SBT was accepted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) forensic panel, there was one dissent - Dr. Cyril Wecht, the distinguished president of the American Association of Forensic Pathologists, who challenged his colleagues to come up with one other case study of a gunshot wound bullet doing as much damage yet remain in nearly pristine condition. None of them could, and still can't.

And ironically, Wecht and Specter were always and remained good friends, something most disagreeing people just can't do. 

From what I understand Landis will make a presentation at the Wecht conference in Pittsburgh this November. 

For my part, the case for conspiracy doesn't rely on disproving the SBT. After all it didn't kill the President, that was accomplished by the bullet that hit JFK in the head, blowing his scull apart, and shattering into many pieces. 

Secret Service Agent Clint Hill, the closest witness, says this is the entrance wound, though he himself describes it as a "grapefruit size" hole in the right rear of the head, an obvious blowout exit wound, as Forensic Pathology 101 says that entrance wounds are small - the diameter of the bullet, while the exit wound is large, as Hill and the Parkland doctors saw it. 

So the whole SBT charade is a floating l- straw man argument, sit it up, blow it down, it really only matters to those who insist on the deranged lone gunman theory, as it is a mandatory requirement of it, but it really doesn't make any difference when it comes to understanding what really occurred. 

What's most interesting about the whole still developing Landis saga, are the responses of the officials and media, and ho-hum reactions of those most knowledgeable about the case. 

For them, the most knowledgeable, there are many outstanding questions - why did he put it on Kennedy's stretcher and not turn it over to a attending doctor or a nearby superior? 

Do you believe Landis or not? 

Many don't, not only for Landis not to have followed basic trained procedures for handling evidence, but some conspiracy buffs point out that Landis was one of the Secret Service agents who stayed up most of the night at The Cellar in Fort Worth, where they serve 190#poof Everclear in their mixed drink cocktails. Though he claimed not to have been drinking, some speculate he did and that influenced his judgement, as it certainly did for most of the Presidential Protection detail. 

If you don't believe Landis why bother taking this any further than the Vanity Fair article? 

If you do, is the bullet he found what we have in evidence as CE399, or was it a different bullet that's not in-evidence? 

For the Warren Commission adherents it must be CE399, as Gerald Posner is promoting it, saying that he now knows how the bullet got on the gurney, so it reaffirms his close minded position, but that's the route he's taking. 

But then where did it come from - Connally's thigh, or JFK's back, that was not known to the Parkland doctors or probed by the Bethesda pathologists, but Dr. Fink, the only one of the three autopsy doctors with any gunshot experience, said the back wound only knuckle deep. 

If it came from JFK's back wound then the SBT is once again out the window. 

So the bullet ballistics don't take us very far without degenerating into the same old arguments. 

While I haven't seen a formal Secret Service response yet, they did parade SS Agent Hill out to talk on NBC News on September 10th, that I haven't seen yet but know that he will denounce Landis, much like they did to Chicago SS agent Abraham Bolden. 

Bolden and Landis are not the only SS agents to come forward with evidence of conspiracy, or at least their beliefs that it was a conspiracy. 

And the media fascination with the Landis story is totally out-of-wack with their failure to pay attention to Jim diEugenio's recent article in his blog Kennedys and King that discusses SS Agent James Mastrovito , who acknowledged to the Assassinations Records Review Board (ARRB)that he was ordered to "cull" JFK assassination documents in his custody, and he believed that meant to destroy them. 

  [ The Mystery of Kennedy’s Brain Deepens ]

In addition, and possibly even more significant, Mastrovito had a vial labeled "JFK's brain matter - Armed Forces Institute of Pathology" - that he flushed into a food processor. 

Now how come nobody in the mainstream media aren't interested in that fascinating fact that I first reported in 2014?  [ JFKcountercoup: JFK's Brain at Armed Forces Institute of Pathology ]  

Or that Mastrovito was head of the Protective Services Department that kept track of all the threats to the president, one of their most closely guarded files, but one that was finally released in one of the last batches, but went pretty much unnoticed. 

And where were the mainstream media when we heard from Rolf Molf Larrson, or from Felix Rodriguez, Gene Wheaton and Carl Jenkins, three primary witnesses and suspects in the assassination, though people don't even know their names? 

As Jefferson Morley over at JFKFacts put it, maybe this whole Landis thing is a sort of limited hangout for the mainstream media and officials to adopt, even though its pretty late in the game. 

Since this is a still developing story, I'll put off writing any more about it until we see how this plays out. 

Billkelly3@gmail.com 

Institutional and Parapolitical Arrangements

 "I have always believed and argued that a true understanding of the Kennedy assassination will lead not to 'a few people,' but to the institutional and para-political arrangements which contribute to the way we are systematically governed." - Peter Dale Scott 

"What cost Kennedy his life wasn't his attempt to impose the limits of Camelot Atlanticism on a Frontier-minded defense and security state." - Carl Oglesby 

As we come to the 60th anniversary of the assassination, it is quite clear that Justice will never be served, though we have figured out how it was done and eventually, if the JFK Act of 1992 is fully enforced, learn the identities of those responsible for both the strategic planning and the tactical execution of the President. 

And as PDS has observed years ago, it was not the names of those involved that in the every end, if there ever an end, we were learn that that those actually responsible were protected because it was not carried out by individuals but by the institutional system that functioned as it was designed. 

If President Kennedy was not killed by a deranged lone nut for unknown reasons, but by his enemies in Washington D.C., and in fact the assassination was not only a conspiracy, but a covert intelligence operation and coup d'etat, then our suspects are limited to those covert operators who hated JFK and those with the power to kill him and get away with it. 

LBJ got it right when he recognized that "We were running a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean," but unlike the Church Committee attorney who wrote the book, "Murder, Inc." (2022), the  CIA's attempts to kill Fidel Castro were not retaliation, but the actual mechanism of death set up for Castro was redirected to JFK in Dallas. 

This is not my theory that I came up with, but the conclusion of former FBI agent Bill Turner, and former military investigator Gene Wheaton, and the acknowledgements of some of those anti-Castro Cubans and their CIA trainers who carried out the operation. 

As the still living Warren Commission attorney Sam Stern  told the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), the two things that were kept from them that would have changed their investigation considerably was the FBI's destruction of the Hosty Note and the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro. 

So following those two lines of inquiry, the FBI cannot be trusted, and the CIA-Mafia plots are the very key to what occurred at Dealey Plaza. 

In following the history of those plots, we quickly learn that they weren't really plots at all. Not plots like those depicted in the Hollywood movies "Executive Action" and "JFK," where men sit around drinking and smoking and talking about how they could wack Kennedy. 

They made plans - always had a contingency plan for whatever action that could be proposed. There were contingency plans to invade Cuba, contingency plans to kill Castro, and contingency plans for anything the National Security Council, Executive Committee (Augumented) would approve. Plans were submitted to them - the NSC ECA and were either approved or not. 

The ability to kill - assassinate a foreign leader, anyone, was an assignment tasked to a small, very specific group - ZRRIFLE - was one code name for the program set up and run by the CIA's William Harvey. Another program Zeta-Diogines - was a military version with different levels of involvement. Both were operated on a standard covert operational need-to-know basis with those giving the orders - ie approval of plans, being "buffered" from those actually doing the job by the doctrine of "plausible deniability." 

The Bay of Pigs invasion began as a plausibly deniable operation, but was so blatant that JFK had to take full responsibility for it even though he was kept in the dark about key elements and the final aspect of the plan called for direct US military air support, something he refused to do. 

When Senator and President elect Kennedy attended a diner party at the home of his Georgetown neighbor Mrs. Leiter, her friend British writer and news editor Ian Fleming was another diner guest. Mrs. Leiter's millionaire husband had sold the CIA the Langley, Va. land that the CIA's new headquarters was built on. 

Over diner, JFK asked Fleming what Secret Agent 007 James Bond would do about Fidel Castro, and after some brief thought replied, "Ridicule." He would make fun of him. 

When JFK got to the White House one of the first things he did was to ask the CIA to send him over "America's James Bond," who was licensed to kill, and they sent William Harvey, head of the ZRRIFLE assassination squad. Harvey checked his pistols at the door with the Secret Service, and the pear shaped, rotund looking Harvey did not look like the tall, dark and handsome British agent at all. But it's what we had. 

And in the end, it's what I think killed him - the ZRRIFLE squad set up originally to kill Castro, as can and will be convincingly demonstrated. 

Books on the Assassination of President Kennedy

 Books on the Assassination of President Kennedy

Books are just one source of information on the assassination, as documents, interviews, sworn official testimony, conference presentations (and their films and transcripts), news reports and magazine feature articles all provide pieces to the big picture puzzle, but since most people get their information from books, they are an extremely important aspect of the assassination story. 

Loyal reader Bob Daugherty, a school teacher, wrote to me asking about a list of books on the assassination that I compiled some years ago, that I think needs updating. 

Book Corner: Board Selections - ASSASSINATION ARCHIVES

Thanks to Rex Bradford and the good folks at Mary Ferrell for posting this, and I will update it as we go along. 

For starters, the HSCA published a 1979 bibliography of books, one chronological and the other by author and it seems that others have published and posted more updated bibliographies, that wander into the range of over 2,000 books.

IBK Notes - I will provide links to the most up to date bibliographies on JFK assassination books ASAP. 

While I haven't read them all, I have read everything that I could come across that appeared interesting, and usually find new and sometimes significant information in most books, even counter-conspiracy books like those by Gerald Posner and Vincent Bigulosi. 

Almost all counter-conspiracy enthusiasts aren't really interested in the learning the total truth about the assassination but rather are consumed with silly conspiracy theories, and spend most if not all of their time trying to debunk them, and instituting a new philosophical field of the study of the mind of conspiracy theorists.

And counter-conspiracy theorists universally divide all books on the JFK assassination into two simple categories - conspiracy and non-conspiracy, and they usually don't bother to read any conspiracy books and disparage the silly CT books they haven't bothered to read. 

As Peter Dale Scott once said, there are those who support the Warren Commission's Lone Nut thesis, and those who promote Conspiracy Theories, but there is emerging a new third type of researcher, those who keep an open mind, are independent, read all the books and documents, and don't know who killed JFK, but are trying to learn the full truth by interviewing obscure witnesses and taking the investigative leads to as far as can be taken. 

I like to consider myself among those third type of researchers, and there are others like me I work closely with - Rex Bradford, Jefferson Morley, Bill Simpich, and others.

There are books by serious independent journalists like Tony Summers misnamed "Conspiracy" and "Not In Your Lifetime," that epitomizes a real intent to determine the truth, though both books are now a bit outdated, and deserve an new edition if Tony has it in him to do it and a publisher will back him. Highly unlikely. 

But Summers also did an amazing BBC TV documentary on the assassination (circa 1979) that includes much of the significant information the HSCA uncovered, and calls specific attention to the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro and focuses on important aspects of the assassination that should be followed up on -  as I am trying to do. 

As I sit here, 60 years after the assassination, and 50 some years since I began to closely study the case, I still don't know who killed JFK, but have figured out how it was accomplished - a covert intelligence operation conducted by a domestic anti-Communist intelligence network, which certainly limits the suspects. 

It is also important to note that I didn't come to this conclusion by reading any silly conspiracy books, but rather a whole other category of books - books that I consider instrumental in understanding HOW JFK was killed, which in the end, will lead you to the actual killers, all or most now dead. 

I recently sturred up a crap storm over at the JFK - Truth Be Told - Lone Nut Administrated Facebook Group - when I mentioned that Allen Dulles took a book Assassins - by Robert Donovan, (also author of PT-109) to the first meeting of the Warren Commission and tried to get across the idea that American assassins, unlike their European counterparts, were deranged lone nuts and not part of a political conspiracy. Commissioner John McCloy disagreed with this assessment saying that a number of people were hung for being part of the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. 

One deranged lone nutter, a guy named Vinnie, admitted not having read the official records or conspiracy books on the assassination, said that sounded like something a "paranoid conspiracy theorists would say." 

And even after with being showed the facts that supported what I said, refused to retract his attack on me, and the administration let him slide because they are all back slapping friends who are convinced that one man alone killed the President for no apparent reason. 

Well, as I have said before, Dulles should have taken his own then recently published book The Crafts of Intelligence, that the accused assassin may have even read, and is reported to have been ghost written by E. Howard Hunt, as that book would have  set the stage for a real investigation of the assassination, rather than the fake inquiry and false report they produced. 

In his own book, Dulles makes note of Sun Tzu's ancient text "The Art of War," in which he details the ingredients of an intelligence network - consisting of five different types of agents-spies, Native, Double, Inside, Living and Expendable, all of which Lee Harvey Oswald experienced in his short life. 

Sun Tzu called his network a "Skein" - a fishermen's net - and when they were all working together, a "Divine Skein," as the results they accomplished appeared to be "Divine" - acts of God. 

A NEW LIST 

So in devising a new list of books that need to be read in order to understand what really occurred at Dealey Plaza, Allen Dulles' book "The Crafts of Intelligence" is number one, and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" is number 2. 

Then there's Dulles' 0SS assistant and paramour Mary Bancroft, whose book Autobiography of a Spy, details her relationship not only with Dulles, Valkyrie plotter Hans B. Gisivious, but also Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Michael Paine's mother. 

Other books on the CIA are also significant, most notably The Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross, Joseph Smith's Portrait of a Cold Warrior, and books Smith calls attention to - Paul Linebarger's Psychological Warfare and Black Propaganda as well as David Maurer's The Big Con.

As others have also observed, Larry Hancock's relatively recent The Tipping Point is probably the most important new book on the assassination, especially his focus on witnesses a d suspects of my own - Gene Wheaton, Carl Jenkins and the Pathfinders. Larry is always a step ahead of me.

Books however, even as they go to press, are always about rwo years behind the state of research. 

There are others, that I will try to summarize to emphasize their significance as we go along. 

MORE TO COME - STAY TUNED. BK 

Art C. Lundahl and Paul LInebarger

 ART C. LUNDAHL AND PAUL LINEBARGER 

Art Lundahl and Paul Linebarger are two people who are major players in the JFK assassination drama that few people have ever heard of, but are necessary to understanding how the assassination took place. 

 Lundahl was the founder of the Navy Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) - interpretation being the "action of explaining the meaning of something." 

While the Army Air Force during WWII developed photo interpretation as a science in evaluating photos of bombing targets in the European theater, Lundahl's Navy unit responded to a number of 8mm films of UFOs-flying saucers taken by US Navy personnel in the 50s, concluding that they couldn't be explained. 

The CIA liked Lundahl's analysis so much they hired him to create the CIA's National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC), that would be responsible for evaluating U2 photos and later satellite photos. 

In the fall of 1962 a number of President Kennedy's enemies, including Sen. Keating and Clare Booth Luce in her Life Magazine columns, were claiming JFK was ignoring the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, that local Cubans were reporting on. 

But JFK thought it was just his enemies bad mouthing him, until Art Lundahl came to the White House with posters blown up of the missile sites in Cuba and gave a presentation to the president that convinced him, thus beginning the Cuban Missile Crisis, that took us to the brink of nuclear world war. 

Kennedy was so impressed with Lundahl's briefing he sent Lundahl and his photo poster evidence to England, where he briefed the US Ambassador and then went on to Paris where he briefed French president Charles deGaul, gaining their support for whatever action he would take.

And Lundahl became known as "the Briefer." 

Despite the unanimous recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to immediately bomb the missile sites and invade Cuba, JFK instead established a naval blockade and using backchannels to Khruschev, negotiated a peaceful diplomatic resolution to the crisis, with the death of only one person - a U2 pilot shot down over Cuba. 

After the crisis was over, JFK and RFK visited Lundahl's NPIC offices on the second and third floors of a Ford car dealership in a bad part of downtown Washington DC. They were impressed with Lundahl's operations and arranged for him to move to an unused building on the Navy base on Capitol Hill. 

That's where the Zapruder film of the assassination of JFK was taken on two occasions on the weekend of the assassination. The first time it was taken to Lundahl's chief assistant Dino Brugioni, who made blowups of individual frames that were mounted on poster boards that Lundahl used to brief CIA director John McCone. 

Afterwards Lundahl thanked Brugioni and his technicians and said the briefing went well, although there is no official documented report on it. We do know however, that when Arthur Schlesinger asked RFK about the assassination, Schlesinger wrote in his journal that RFK replied that the FBI believed it was one man alone, but the CIA thought there were two gunman, which to me means that's what Lundahl's analysis of the Z-film concluded. 

-We don't know who the second set of briefing boards were made from a copy of the Z-film that was brought back from Hawkeye Works - the North New York State Kodak plant used to process U2 films. But I suspect it was for a briefing of LBJ. 

Larry Haapanen, who was light years ahead of me on focusing on military aspects of the assassination and other things, let me know that he visited Lundahl at his home in DC and after the interview was over, as he was leaving, noticed a library with a lot of UFO books, that he commented on, and Lundahl acknowledged his interest in the subject. 

This comes into play as the Congressmen who introduced the JFK Act of 2023, has also taken up the cause of those who want all of the government records on UFOs released. 

So I am suggesting a permanent subcommittee be established - a Classified Records Review Board (CRRB) to review government records that are secret but should be released to the public. 

PAUL LINEBARGER 

Paul Linebarger is another relatively unknown but major player in the JFK assassination story, who is better known to avid science fiction readers, possibly including Lee Harvey Oswald, by his pen name Caldwalder Smith, though he also wrote the US Army manual on Psychological Warfare. 

As a lecturer at the John Hopkins University DC based Center for International Studies, Linebarger taught small groups of CIA agents and officers at his DC home, including David Atlee Phillips, Ed Lansdale, E. Howard Hunt and Joseph Smith, who devotes a large part of his book Portrait of a Cold Warrior to Linebarger's lectures, especially those on Black Propaganda. 

I obtained a copy of Linebarger's book on Psychological Warfare and Propaganda, and how he breaks down propaganda in to shades - from White to Black, with Black being a very particular type of propaganda - one that is used in support of other covert intelligence operations and is a deception in that it blames the operation on the opposition, usually communists. 

According to Smith, Linebarger said that the two best black operators who had "black minds"  were Lansdale and E. Howard Hunt. 

When Lansdale was sent to the Phillipines to help their government defeat the Huk guerillas, he sent for Linebarger to teach them the arts of psychological warfare and black propaganda, including Napoleon Valentine, who Landsale brought with him to Guatemala to help train the anti-Castro Cubans who would become the Bay of Pigs brigade. 

Their original plan was to infiltrate them into Cuba in small groups who would become commandos based in the Sierra mountains, much like Castro himself had done. But when Lansdale was replaced as primary trainer and planner, the plan was changed from the use of small guerilla groups to a full scale mechanized invasion at the Baya de Conchos swamp - the Bay of Pigs. I sill haven't figured out how this change was made or who made it but it was a decisive mistake, because it was no longer a deniable covert operation. 

Joseph Smith, in his book, also notes that besides his own textbook on Psychological Warfare and Black Propaganda, Linebarger also had his students read another book - David Maurer's The Big Con. 

Maurer was a linguistics professor at the University of Kentucky and specialized in the unique lingo - slang of petty thieves, criminal gangs and confidence men, with the con men standing out as not using violence but rather convincing their "marks" to give them money in the course of a scam that appeared to be a sure thing. 

Maurer got to know the confidence men very well, and they explained how there are levels of con games - from street cons like three card monte, carnival shell games, with the Big Con being the hardest and best, that only real good actors could play successfully. 

There were three main big cons - a stock scam, a fixed boxing match and the Wire, in which the mark thinks that a bookie has an inside wire service delay of horse race results that allows them to place bets on a sure winner. 

The Wire of course, is the basis of the movie The Sting, so I called Maurer's University office, and talked with his assistant who informed me that Mauer had recently died, but yes, he did take the producers and screenwriters of The Sting to court over the theft of his intellectual property without credit. While the screenwriter claimed he never read Maurer's book The Big Con, they couldn't come up with any other published source that mentions Harry Gondorf, a real person that Maurer mentions in his book. So the judge ruled in Maurer's favor. 

Smith says that Linebarger used Maurer's book The Big Con because it explains a lot about how covert intelligence operations are conducted, and offers many tips on how to make them successful. 

General William Odom is another little known figure but is a major player as a former head of the Pentagon's intelligence office - Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and the National Security Agency, where John Newman was his adjunct for awhile. 

At a private party, Thomas Powers met Odom and asked him about how successful case officers get their agents to operate successfully - and Odom, after thinking about it for a few moments, said - "The Sting!" - mentioning the Paul Newman - Robert Redford movie that used Maurer's The Big Con as its basis. 

Which told me that Odom had also been one of Linebarger's students. 

And just as Murer studied the unique slang language of the confidence men in order to understand how the Big Confidence game worked, we too must understand the language that covert intelligence operatives use, as it gives us a better understanding of how JFK was assassinated and how they got away with it. 

Billkelly3@gmail.com