James Bond, LHO and JFK
Previously posted in part: https://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012/05/007-lho-jfk.html
In the course of reading Nicholas Shakespeare’s new
800 page biography - Ian Flaming: The Complete Man I noticed or recalled a
number of associations with JFK that are relevant to his
assassination and are worth mentioning,
Peter Dale Scott first turned me on to Robin
Ramsay’s UK based Lobster Journal “that looks at the impact of the intelligence
and security services on history and politics, from espionage to dirty tricks.”
Some years ago Ramsey ran my review of Phil
Shenon’s JFK assassination book “A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History
of the Kennedy Assassination,” that’s primarily devoted to the Mexico City
“Twist Party,” and I tracked down the two American Gringos who were ostensibly
with the accused assassin of the President and Cuban embassy officials.
For more on Shenon and the Twist Party::
JFKcountercoup:
A Cruel and Shocking Twist
With the impending release of Shakespeare’s new
biography “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man,” ( Penguin, 2022) https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/441629/ian-fleming-by-shakespeare-nicholas/9781787302419 )
Robin Ramsey arranged for me to get an advanced copy to read and r
While many back issues are available to read free, I recommend you subscribe to Lobster, ( https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/issue/88/ ), where you can also read my review in Issue 88, ( https://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/article/issue/88/oo7s-real-mission-continues/ ).
As I write at Lobster – There are three things that
I thought should be rectified about Fleming that his previous biographies
got wrong: why Fleming began the first 007 novel Casino
Royale, an accurate portrait of the real James Bond – the Philadelphia ornithologist
and author of the book Birds of the West Indies, and the real persons
known to Fleming that he used as characters in his stories.
As Shakespeare finally acknowledges Fleming began
his first 007 novel Casino Royale because of what they called at the
time - The case of the missing diplomats – Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean. The
revelations about the Cambridge spy ring was what instigated Fleming to write
“the spy story to end all spy stories,” which leads me to the associations
with JFK and his assassination.
With the disappearance of Burgess and MacLean,
Fleming sent Mercury News correspondent Richard Hughes to Moscow where it was
arranged for Hughes to meet Burgess and MacLean, confirming their defection.
Shakespeare quotes Christopher Moran as saying “Mercury looks like a spy
operation. It smells like a spy operation, ergo, I think it is a spy
operation.”
Though Shakespeare describes the Mercury news
syndicate as a virtual spy network, he doesn’t do the same for the North
American Newspaper Alliance (NANA), owned by Fleming’s close friends and
wartime associates Ivor Bryce (SIS) and Ernest Cuneo (OSS), whose names are
also portrayed as characters in 007 novels. They hired Fleming as a
foreign editor, and one of their correspondents Priscilla Johnson (McMillan)
interviewed former US Marine defector Lee Harvey Oswald in Moscow.
John Judge and I wrote about this in more detail in
an essay Bottlefed by Oswald’s NANA –
https:/archive.politicalassassinations.net/2012/07/was-oswald-bottlefed-by-nana/
Shakespeare mentions Priscilla Johnson as the author
of Lee and Marina, a book that portrays accused assassin Lee Oswald
as a lone nut, but one who was an avid reader of Ian Fleming’s James Bond
books, as was President Kennedy.
Shakespeare writes: “It was not
merely John F. Kennedy who was overly influenced by Ian
Fleming’s novels and engaged in secret plots. Another Bond fan was the
emotionally disturbed young man who killed him. At 9 p.m. on Thursday 21
November 1963, a private screening of “From Russia with Love” was
held for fifty guests in the White House projection room….”
It was Fleming’s novel “From Russia with
Love,” that President Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln added to the list
of books the President read because she thought the list was all boring
history. When the list was published in Life magazine it boosted the sales of
Fleming’s 007 series. It was also one of the books found among Lee Harvey Oswald’s
effects in his boarding house room.
The complete list as published in Life Magazine:
http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Favorite-Books.aspx
Lord Melbourne by David Cecil
Montrose by John Buchan
Marlborough by Sir Winston Churchill
John Quincy Adams by Samuel Flagg Bemis
The Emergence of Lincoln by Allan Nevins
The Price of Union by Herbert Agar
John C. Calhoun by Margaret L. Coit
Talleyrand by Duff Cooper
Byron in Italy by Peter Quennell
The Red and the Black by M. de Stendhal
From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
Pilgrim's Way by John Buchan
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Writing and Speeches of Daniel Webster
Andre Malraux
The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
Henry Clay by Carl Schurz
As noted: Dave Powers later added a few titles to
the list, and Kennedy’s secretary Mrs. Lincoln later acknowledged she
added “From Russia with Love” to the list of otherwise dull and
academic books to give it a human touch with a book she knew Kennedy had read
that ordinary people could identify with.
The “From Russia with Love” story concerns
the theft of a Russian Lector cipher machine from their embassy in Istanbul,
which reflects on the theft of the real German Nazi Enigma cipher machine that
was successfully broken by the British during WWII, a secret that was kept for
thirty years after the war. And Shakespeare tells us that both Ian and his brother
Peter Fleming were among the small Bigot List of those who had access to the
secrets revealed by the codebreakers.
The story also has Russian assassin Donovan Grant
attempting to kill James Bond and retrive the cipher machine. Shakespeare says
that Fleming named the SMERSH assassin Donovan Grant after Gen. William
Donovan, head of the OSS, and that “Since August, Oswald had used the pseudonym
‘Alik James Hidell.’"
While everyone speculates that "Hidell"
was meant to match Fidel, Shakespeare tells us, "The middle name ‘may have
been taken from James Bond,’ according to his biographer, Priscilla Johnson
McMillan, who, who had interviewed Oswald in Moscow after his defection in
October 1959,” But Shakespeare fails to note that at the time McMillan interviewed
Oswald the defector in Moscow she was working for Bryce, Cuneo and Fleming at
NANA.
“It is not unreasonable to suppose,” writes
Shakespeare, “that once Oswald returned to America in June 1962, tail between
his legs, and learned of the President’s widely publicized reading habits,
the fictional career of Donovan as ‘the chief executioner’ of SMERSH offered an
alternative vision of how his defection was to have played
out. Kennedy saw himself as Bond, and Oswald, in a warped version, as
example of Bond’s would-be assassin, Donovan Grant – only successful….” That
may be a stretch, but one that is made by Priscilla Johnaon and Shakespiere,
not me.
Fleming did meet JFK. As recounted in all three of
Fleming biographies, Fleming met and had dinner with Senator John F. Kennedy at
his home, when he was visiting his close friend Oatsie Leiter, a Georgetown
neighbor of JFK and Jamaican neighbor of Fleming. Over dinner, JFK asked
Fleming what James Bond would do about Fidel Castro, to which Fleming replied,
“ridicule, chiefly.”
Shakespeare fails to mention that Fleming anoits
007’s CIA sidekick with the name Felix Leiter, and that the family of Oatsie
Leiter’s husband John once owned the Virginia land that the CIA headquarters
was built on.
Soon after becoming President JFK requested
that the CIA send over “America’s James Bond” and the portly, pear shaped
William Harvey showed up at the oval office, leaving his pistols with the
Secret Service at the door. While Harvey didn’t look like James Bond, he was
just as lethal, and is now even considered a suspect in the murder of the
President. Harvey also was one of the first to claim, after attending a party
at Philby’s apartment, that Philby and Burgess were Soviet spies,
and JFK did play an unintentional role in the exposure of the
Cambridge spy ring.
President JFK appointed Michael Straight
to head a new arts commission, but when Straight found his background was to be
closely vetted by the FBI, he confessed that there was an attempt to recruit
him into the Cambridge spy ring while he was a student there. Besides Philby,
Burgess, McClean, Straight threw another name into the spy ring – Sir Anthony
Blunt, the surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. It was Straight's confession that
led Philby to flee to Moscow himself.
While Straight claimed not to have provided them
with any useful information, as publisher of his family’s liberal New
Republic magazine, he did print some of Philby’s articles and in London
Fleming visited the American millionaire Whitney Straight, brother of Michael
Straight in order to discuss Burgess and MacLean, who Straight also knew at
Cambridge.
The former assistant to the chief of British Naval
Intelligence christened his secret agent Double-Oh Seven - 007 - James Bond,
who was licensed to kill on behalf of her majesty’s secret service, while
having the cover job of an import-export agent for Universal Export. A few
years later, Lee Harvey Oswald, just out of the US Marine Corps, boarded a
tramp steamer in New Orleans and sailed for Europe on the
first leg of a journey that would take him behind the Iron Curtain as a
“defector” to the Soviet Union. The passport that Oswald turned over to
the US Embassy in Moscow when he announced his defection indicated
that his profession was “Import-Export” agent.
In fact, Oswald, before enlisting in the US Marines,
did work at an import and export firm in New Orleans. As explained by his
brother Robert (Lee – A Portrait of Lee, Coward-McCann, 1967, p. 74),
“In November (1955) he (Lee) went to work as a messenger and office boy for a
shipping company, Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. He made only $130 a month, but it
must have seemed like a lot of money to him, since it was his first full-time
job. Mother said he was generous with his money…Feeling prosperous, now that he
had a regular income, Lee bought other things, too. Mother said he paid $35 for
a coat for her, bought a bow and arrow set – and gun…I remember that gun…Lee
really seemed to enjoy his work at Tujague’s for a while. He felt more
independent than ever before, and he liked the idea of working for a shipping
company. When he first told me about it, he was eager, animated and genuinely
enthusiastic. ‘We’re sending an order to Portugal this week,’ he’d
tell me. Or, ‘I received a shipment from Hong Kong, just this morning.’ It
was a big adventure to him – as if all the company’s ships were his and he
could go to any of the places named on the order blanks he carried from one
desk to another. It made him feel important, just to be on the fringes of
something as exciting as foreign trade.”
Tujague later came back on the record as a leading
member of the Friends of a Democratic Cuba in New Orleans and was said to be on
the board of directors of a bank that also included John Mecom, who employed
George DeMohrenschildt and sent him to Europe, which led to him being
debriefed by the CIA. So both Oswald and DeMohrenschildt, although their
lives wouldn’t entwine until years later, were both employed by directors of
the same bank, an indication they were both working for the same economic interests
years earlier.
Gerald F. Tujague (10 HSCA, 134, note 64;
CE2227, 25 H 128) Owner of a New Orleans shipping company that
sixteen year old Oswald worked for from November 10,
1955 to January 14 1956, shortly before he enlisted in the USMC.
Trujague was Vice President of Friends of
Democratic Cuba, an anti-Castro Cuban group incorporated in New
Orleans on January 6, 1961, which also included Guy Banister on its
board of directors. On January 20, 1061, when Oswald was in
the USSR, two men visited the Bolton Ford dealership in New
Orleans and inquired about the purchase of trucks for their organization,
the Friends of Democratic Cuba, using Oswald’s name.
Was there a reason for Oswald to list his occupation
as “import-export agent” on the passport he used to defect to Russia, and
was it in any way associated with import-export agency he worked for
in New Orleans shortly before enlisting in the Marines? Or was it
some kind of inside joke, tongue in cheek reference to James Bond’s occupation
as an import-export agent for Universal Export?
In JFK & 007, Less Sanger Golden (alias
Author337) perpetuates the myths and takes note of the mutual associations of
007 and Camelot, as well the Oswald connection. Golden wrote: “Meanwhile, the
James Bond novels were having a huge impact on another young man, Lee Harvey
Oswald. He too was a fan of the novel From Russia with Love, a story
of political defection that oddly mirrors Oswald’s own defection to
the Soviet Union. In the story, James Bond wisps the young Russian Tatiana
Romonvav across the iron curtain with promises of decadent western luxuries.
While in Russia, Lee Oswald similarly swept young Marina Prusakova off of
her feet and brought her to America with promises of a better life.
But when things started going badly, Tatiana and Marina realized that perhaps
they were in for more than they had bargained for.”
As Golden also noted other similarities when he
wrote: “If JFK represents all the most charming aspects of James Bond, then
perhaps Lee Oswald is a reflection of his dark side. His rages, his wrath. The
irony inherent in any substantive comparison of JFK and 007 is inescapable. For
while James Bond is a timeless figure, JFK was a figure taken before his time.
And while James Bond is unkillable, we all that the same cannot be said of Jack
Kennedy.”
After Oswald living in New
Orleans in the summer of 1963, Oswald took a number of books out of the
local New Orleans library. A Warren Commission memorandum included
the list of the books that Oswald checked out of the New Orleans Library. First
on the list is “Goldfinger,’ and it officially notes that the author is IAN
FLEMING, the book was checked out – 9/19/63 (Sept. 19) and the return
date is indicated as 10/3/63 (October 3). “Goldfinger” wasn’t
the first 007 novel that Oswald checked out, as the records show that he had
previously taken out “Thunderball” and “From Russia With
Love.” Another 007 book “Moonraker” was also checked out on the same
date as “Goldfinger,” both of which were returned on October 3. For
assassination investigators the problem with Oswald’s “Goldfinger” is
that, according to the records of the New Orleans Library, the book was
returned on October 3, 1963, a full week after Oswald, the friendless
loner had left New Orleans. If Oswald was on a bus from Mexico to Texas on
that day, who returned the book to the New Orleans library?
Of course if Lee Harvey Oswald was the real assassin
of the President of the United States, these books would have been given a
through going over and psychoanalysts would have given their interpretation of
the assassin’s state of mind at the time, but since Oswald was a patsy, and
framed for the crimes, just as he claimed, there has been no real attempt to
even try to understand the psychological makeup of the patsy. If he had been
the actual triggerman and assassin, then it would be a different story. In any
case, Oswald is one of the most thoroughly analyzed patsies in history, so we
know a lot about him, much more than we know about the actual assassins. One of
the things we know is that he read a lot, and we know what he read from the
library records.
Oswald did take an literary interest in the subject
of espionage, as another book he checked out was, “Five Spy Novels.”
The President’s wife Jackie was as well-read as her husband, and later became a
book editor and publisher. She also took notice of Ian Fleming’s novels, though
she may not have gotten the joke, but she is credited with recommending
Fleming’s books to CIA director Alan Dulles. Dulles also enjoyed
Fleming’s stories and tried to cultivate a similar genre
of CIA themed literature that would do for the agency what Fleming’s
books did for the British spy agencies. Both E. Howard Hunt and David Attle
Phillips wrote a number of officially approved fictional pulp paperback novels
that were similar to Fleming’s 007 stories in style and content.
While “Casino Royale” was the first 007 novel,
the story had been adapted to an American television show, so the first 007
major motion picture was “Dr. No,” which Oswald could have and probably did
see.
In 1961, Kennedy watched the first James Bond film, Dr. No, in a
private White House screening, and in part to Kennedy’s influence, the next
movie was based on “From Russia, With Love,” and according to William
Manchester, it would be the last movie that the president saw,
on November 20, 1963, the evening before he left for Texas.
Vincent Canby made the observation: “Whether
accurately or not, the first films made from the Bond novels came to
characterize a number of aspects of the Kennedy Administration with its
reputation for glamour, wit and sophistication, and its real-life dram and
melodrama. Indeed, the President himself could be seen as a kind of Bond
figure, and the 1962 Cuban missile crisis as a real-life Bond situation.”
Any cursory review of the books we know Oswald read
should begin with “Goldfinger,” which opens with a quote above the table
of contents that reads: “Goldfinger said, ‘Mr. Bond, they have a
saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third
time it’s enemy action.’”
While some of these incidents are speculative, some
are coincidences and other perhaps hapenstance, if the happenstances and
coincidences are added up, one must come to the conclusion that it is neither
happenstance nor coincidence but intentional covert action.
As David Atlee Phillips said, “The intelligence
profession does not encourge one to believe in coincidence as an explanation
for events.”
