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