Magic at Dealey Plaza

 Magic at Dealey Plaza

“I have his brains in my hand. I love you Jack, I love you Jack,....the magic is gone…Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along….”   - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

“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”

 “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.-  Fairwell America by James Hepburn – aka French Intelligence officers Philippe de Vosjoli, M. Andre Ducret

While the assassination may have appeared to be magic to some, it was actually a trick, a trick devised, practiced and conducted by men, and as President Kennedy said,  “problems created by men can be solved by mem,” and the murderous trick can be deciphered and understood.

I’d like to rephrase the JFK assassination argument from whether it was a 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.

As Gene Wheaton – the Ultimate Whistleblower said of the assassination: “it was convoluted, but not complicated,” and it was a well developed plan, not a plot.

Most of those who propose the assassination was a conspiracy also portray a plot, as in the movies Executive Action and JFK, men sit around drining and smoking and talking about how to wack JFK, when in reality, it was a well conceived, practiced and execuited plan – starting out as a contingency plan in case it was needed. And when properly execuited, appears to be magic, or as Sun Tzu put it – a Divine Skein, as God would have it.

While the Great Wizzard appears to be almighty, when you pull back the curtains you see there’s only a man there pulling the puppet strings, a fortune teller, the seller of potions, a con artist and confidence man, and as John Kennedy himself said, problems created by man can be solved by men, and this is one of them.

There are a few basic principles to most magic tricks – and the key word is tricks because the magic is only in appearance. Two of the basic principles are slight of hand – and misdirection or deception.

The assassination of a president in broad daylight in front of his wife, the Secret Service and hundreds of witnesses is more than just a magic trick, it’s a Big Con.

General William Odom, the former Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and head of the National Security Agency (NSA) was once asked what makes a good intelligence case officer, Odom thought for a second and replied “The Sting.”

The movie with Paul Newman and Robert Redford?

“That’s it!” said Odom, “the con!” Actually The Big Con.

[Thomas Powers, Intelligence Wars – American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda]

And like witch crafts, the crafts of intelligence can be read in books, but only conveyed by a master, in a master-apprentice relationship – the tricks of the trade.

When Allen Dulles arrived at the first meeting of the Warren Commission he brought along a copy of a book American Assassins by Robert Donovan, the same guy who wrote PT-109. This book, as Dulles explained, makes the case that American assassins, unlike their European counterparts, are lone nut cases rather than connspirators, though it was pointed out that a half-dozen people were hung for their participation in the assassination of President Lincoln.

Rather than Donovan’s book, Dulles should have passed around copies of his own, then recently published book, The Crafts of Intelligence, believe to have been ghost written by E. Howard Hunt, that explains some of the tricks of the intelligence trade.

When I saw the movie “The Sting,” I immediately recognized that it was based on a book I had picked up at a garage sale and read – David Maurer’s “The Big Con,” about the unique slang and lingo of confidence men. Maurer was Kentucky linguist and based his book on his study of their slang. Maurer’s assistant confirmed to me that Maurer had the same reaction as I did when he saw the movie, and sued the producers for not giving him credit. The screenwriters claimed they never even read his book, but they had to admit they had when they couldn’t come up with any other published source for the name of “Gondorf,” the character played by Paul Newman which was based on a real confidence man mentioned only in Maurer's book "The Big Con."

Odom’s response clearly indicates he was once a student of Paul Linebarger at the Center for International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where Linebarger taught psychological warfare and covert intelligence operational procedures.

Other students of Linebargers included Ed Lansdale, David Atlee Phillips and E. Howard Hunt, who Linebarger said, “had black minds.”

One approach the English have adapted to certain crimes is the Modus Operandi – MO – and in this case the MO of the assassination of President Kennedy must be viewed as a covert intelligence operation.

As former CIA Chief of Station in Moscow Rolf Larrson said at the CAPA conference in Dallas November, 2021, only a few men were capable of pulling off such a covert operation – and he named five – Allen Dulles, William Harvey, Desmond FitzGerald, James Jesus Angleton and Jacob Easterline.

In his book “Portrait of a Cold Warrior” Joseph Smith writes about taking Linebarger’s classes.\

Smith relates how Linebarger not only used his own classic text book “Psychological Warfare,” that delineates various levels of propaganda from white to black, with black being clearly and falsely identified as originating from the opposition.

Smith wrote: “Black propaganda operations, by definition, are operations in which the source of the propaganda is disguised or misrepresented in one way or another so as not to be attributable to the people who really put it out. This distinguishes black from white propaganda, such as news bulletins and similar statements…”

“Paul Linebarger’s was a seminar in black propaganda only,” writes Smith. “He loved black propaganda operations probably because they involved the wit-sharpening he loved to talk about. Also, he was so good at them that his was one of the inventive minds that refined the entire black operations field into shades of blackness. Linebarger and his disciples decided that propaganda that was merely not attributable to the United States was not really black, only gray…This left the term black propaganda for a very special kind of propaganda activity. Black propaganda operations were operations done to look like, and carefully labeled to be, acts of the Communist enemy….”

According to Smith, besides classes in propaganda, Linebarger also had his students read David Maurer’s book “The Big Con,” also published as “The American Confidence Man,” which gave good insight into how case officers could run operatives and conduct successful covert operations.

David Maurer’s book, originally a linguistic text on the unique language and slang of thieves, con artists and confidence men, led Maurer to uncover and detail the inner workings of the Big Con, and that was the basis of the script for the movie “The Sting,” as referenced by Odom.

As Smith wrote: “I want you all to go out and get a copy of David Maurer’s classic on the confidence man. It’s called ‘The Big Con,’ and its available now in a paperback edition,” Paul continued. “That little book will teach you more about the art of covert operations than anything else I know.”

Smith quotes Linebarger as saying, “Maurer’s book will give you a lot of 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. Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all.”

"We were all soon reading 'The Big Con,'” Smith wrote. “The tales it told did, indeed, contain a lot of hints on how to do our jobs. For me one sentence seemed to sum it all up beautifully, ‘The big-time confidence games,’ wrote Maurer, ‘are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly.’”

 “A note of caution that Linebarger added to these discussions of black operations sounds like a bell down the years,” wrote Smith, quoting Linebarger as saying, “I hate to think what would ever happen,” he once said with a prophet’s voice, “if any of you ever got out of this business and got involved in U.S. politics. These kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole system would come apart.” 

Well these kinds of dirty "magic" tricks were used before Watergate, including what happened at Dealey Plaza, and the whole system did come apart.

Just as linguist David Maurer learned the secrets of the Big Con through the study of the unique language of the con artists, we can only learn the means and methods of the covert operators by learning the terminology they use in crafting their covert operations - the Lingo of Dealey Plaza.

Some key words are mutually used by the Big Con con-artists as well as the covert operators – such as Inside Man and Outside Man to distiguish those who work in an office  (such as JMWAVE), and those who go out on the street and recruit agents and operators that the confidence men called “Ropers.” Then there are “cut-outs” to keep operators apart, case officers to direct the operators, team leaders to run crews, and the use of codes and ciphers to prevent others from learning the process……..

MORE TO COME

Related Liks

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-greatest-magic-trick-ever-under-sun.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2015/04/the-sting-at-dealey-plaza.html

https://www.jfk-online.com/farewell.html

https://www.jfk-online.com/farewellhinckle.html

https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-great-game-act-of-man-god-or-magic.html?m=1