Monday, October 26, 2015

Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza Re-visited

Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza Re-visited - Bill Kelly

Image result for Valkyrie Hitler


David Talbot's new book "The Devil's. Chessboard" mentions the role Allen Dulles and his agent-mistress Mary Bancroft played in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

The significance of this has yet to be fully drawn out but the recurring Valkyrie theme that runs through the JFK assassination narrative certainly merits further scrutiny.


As I mention in my review of  "Devil's Chessboard" [http://JFKCountercoup.blogspot.com], [1] when it comes to killing Castro the CIA-Mafia plots get the most attention while the Valkyrie plot has been ignored despite its numerous direct ties to what happened at Dealey Plaza, beginning with Lee Harvey Oswald and Volkmar Schmidt.

It was at a party at Schmidt's Dallas home in February 1963 that George deMohrenschildts set up specifically for Oswald to meet Michael Paine when Schmidt says he talked privately with Oswald and first brought up the subject of the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.

In a phone conversation Schmidt told me that while talking with Oswald he used a reverse psychology technique he learned from a German doctor who knew some of those involved in the Valkyrie plot, and Schmidt actually mentioned the Valkyrie plot to Oswald.[2]

While discussing right-wing general Walker, Schmidt said he compared Walker to Hitler and asked if Hitler had been assassinated how different the world would be? Schmidt implied Walker should be killed before he became another Hitler.

Born in Germany and raised in his formative years by the German doctor, Schmidt was - like George  deMohrenschilts, an oil geologist. Schmidt was was recruited in Germany by Magnolia Oil company of Dallas - the company that used the red Pegasus sign as its logo and later merged with major conglomerates.

Schmidt told me that when he learned that Oswald had taken a shot at Walker and killed JFK he felt terribly guilty, especially every time he drove through Dealey Plaza, as he believed he was responsible for planting the assassination seed in Oswald's mind.


Schmidt told me that he felt responsible saying, "naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry because, you know. But I exonerate myself completely because I had the best intent, embarrassed Kennedy...I may have triggered it. Actually, a few days after I talked with him, he bought his weapons."

Shortly after the Walker incident Oswald packed up all his family belongings, including the rifle said to have been used to shoot at Walker, and was about to suddenly and unexpectedly move his family to his home town of New Orleans. But Mrs. Paine, who was driving them to the bus station, suggested Marina and the daughter should stay with her in Texas while Oswald went on alone to New Orleans, find a job and apartment and then she would drive them there when he was settled in.[3]

And that he did, getting a job at Riely Coffee and an apartment on Magazine Street while reconnecting with his mother's sister aunt Muriel and uncle Dutz Murret.

Ruth Paine then drove Marina, the daughter and the Oswald's belongings, including the rifle, to New Orleans.

After an interesting and eventful summer in the Crescent City, the Oswalds considered returning to Texas. Ruth Paine wrote to the pregnant Marina and invited her to come and live with her in Texas until she had the baby. If she agreed, Ruth Paine wrote, Marina should write her a letter in care of Arthur Young, Paoli, Pennsylvania, where she would be visiting her husband's mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young. [4]

Ruth Paine was on a summer station wagon vacation with her kids driving to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C.  and Ohio visiting friends and family. Ruth wrote to Marina saying if she agreed to move in with her in the return letter she would pick Marina up in New Orleans and take her to Texas while Oswald went to look for work in Philadelphia.

One of the places Ruth Paine visited on the trip was the Forbes family Island off Massachusetts before driving to the suburban Philadelphia farm of her husband Michael's mother.[5]

An eccentric heiress and humanitarian member of Cord Meyer's World Federalists - Ruth Forbes Paine had married the equally eccentric Arthur Young, genius inventor of the Bell Helicopter 47A - the MASH helicopter with glass bubble and girders.[6]

Arthur Young got his son-in-law Michael Paine a job at Bell Helicopter in Texas,  and it was in care of Arthur Young that Marina wrote to Ruth Hyde Paine agreeing to the new arrangements - she would go to Texas to have the baby and wait for Ruth Paine to pick her up in New Orleans.

Most significant however is Michael's mom Ruth Forbes Paine Young's association with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles's agent and mistress who was intimately involved in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler.[7]

In the late 1930s Ruth Forbes Paine traveled with Mary Bancroft on a steamship to Europe when Bancroft met a Swiss businessman who she would marry, putting her in position, when the Second World War broke out, to meet and work with Allen Dulles.

While working with Dulles, the top OSS chef in Europe, Bancroft met Hans B. Gisevius, a Nazi officer who was involved in the Valkyrie plot.

Years in the making the Valkyrie assassination and coup plan stemmed mainly from disgruntled military officers and it fell to Claus Von Stauffenberg to carry out, leaving a briefcase bomb under a map table next to Hitler in the Wolfsschanze Eagles Lair bunker in Bavaria.

Dulles and Gisevius had opposed the use of a bomb, preferring a pistol up close or a sniper in a motorcade ambush as more likely to succeed and their fears proved true. 
Gisevius  supported the coup but was against the bomb plot. He told Von Stauffenberg "I just I have the feeling we'll never succeed. I'm not speaking through fear. But I have a feeling very few of us will be alive this time next year, regardless of what happens with your bomb.">The bomb failed to kill Hitler and hundreds, some say thousands were subsequently rounded up and executed, but Gisevius escaped with the assistance of Bancroft and Dulles, who provided him with fake credentials.

After the war Bancroft translated Gisevius' account of the Third Reich and after Gisevius testified against the Nazi leadership at Nuremberg, Dulles brought him to Washington as a CIA consultant. In Washington Dulles arranged for the ex-Nazi officer to stay with his deputy Tom Braden, who lived with his wife and their eight kids in a big house next to RFK's Hickory Hill. Braden would write a book Eight Is Enough that would be made into a popular family TV show and pattern for The Brady Bunch, and an episode on the ex-Nazi living with all those kids would certainly be entertaining. As Talbot notes, Braden also interviewed Allen Dulles for the Kennedy Library. [9]

So after visiting Michael's mother, Mary Bancroft's good friend in Philadelphia, where Ruth Paine got Marina's letter, she drove to DC and visited her sister, who worked at the CIA, and then went on to Ohio to see her father before picking up Marina in New Orleans. [10]

Arriving in New Orleans in late September Ruth Paine stayed the night and the next day took Marina, the daughter and the Oswald's belongings including the rifle and drove them to Texas. Early the following morning Oswald slipped out  town and went to Mexico City to visit the Cuban and Soviet embassies.

The same September 25th day in Washington DC CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  temporarily chaired by Air Force Chief Gen. Curtis LeMay while Gen. Taylor was in Vietnam.

Fitzgerald reported to the Joint Chiefs on the CIA's Cuban covert operations with emphasis on how the military could support them, an assignment given USMC Gen. Krulak, whose aide Colonel Higgins was in attendance. Higgins' memo of the meeting, released under the JFK Act, includes the bullet point that Fitzgerald mentioned the CIA was studying the Valkyrie plot and adapting it to use against Castro.[11]

September 24-25, 1963 was a busy time on the Devil's Chessboard as there were many moves by key players besides Ruth Paine moving Marina and the rifle to Texas, Oswald leaving for Mexico and Fitzgerald briefing the Joint Chiefs.

JFK signed National Security Action Memo approving "Project Four Leaves," a military communications order that remains classified. [12]


JFK then he left on a "Conservation Tour," first stop in northeast Pennsylvania to visit Mary Pinchot Meyer's mother in Milford, Pennsylvania. Mary Pinchot had met JFK thru his college schoolmate William Attwood, who would later become an intermediary between JFK and Castro, before she married Cord Meyer.  Meyer was an ex-Marine who founded the World Federalists in support of a strong United Nations, an organization that included Philadelphia college student Priscilla Johnson and Ruth Forbes Paine Young, Michael's mom and Mary Bancroft's good friend. [13]

Cord Meyer joined the CIA in 1951 and became one of Dulles' top deputies, eventually replacing Tom Braden as chief of the International Organizations Division.

While Mary Meyer had separated from Cord Meyer, she maintained her friendship with JFK and she accompanied him on the first leg of the September Conservation Tour that took JFK to her mother's house. Then JFK moved on to the Mid-West during which the details of the president's November trip to Texas were announced.

When Oswald returned to Texas from Mexico Ruth Paine helped arrange for him to get a job at the Texas School Book Depository, a building owned by D.H. Byrd, a founder of the Civil Air Patrol in Texas, an organization Oswald was affiliated with in New Orleans.

Byrd was good friends with Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis LeMay, and at the time of the assassination, when Oswald was allegedly shooting at president Kennedy from his building, Byrd was on an African Safari with a German Barron whose father (same name), according to one OSS document source, was an assassination expert after WWI and the son an avid supporter of the Valkyrie plot who wrote a manifesto on the plot after it failed. [14]

There are a half dozen references to the Valkyrie plot in the natural course of the JFK assassination narrative, which requires further, more in-depth analysis as it relates to what happened at Dealey Plaza.

Washington attorney Jim Lesar, director of the Assassinations Archive and Research Center, filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CIA documents related to the CIA study of the Valkyrie plot that was to be used against Castro, as mentioned in the Higgins Memo.

Until we get these records however, we can see for our selves how the CIA tried to adapt the Valkyrie plan to be used against Castro, as they did try to recruit some disenchanted Cuban military officers who were close to Castro including Rolando Cubella (AMLASH) and Gen. Almeida, both of whom have been extensively reviewed and analyzed elsewhere.

Among the differences in the Valkyrie plan and the post-Mafia plots to kill Castro we find that the idea of using a bomb was discarded in favor of a sniper attack on Castro while he was riding in an open Jeep, a common situation.

Other aspects of the Valkyrie plan that were adopted besides the murder of Castro and the take over of the Cuban government was the Northwoods style psych-war media campaign to blame the assassination on communists.

When news of the CIA's plans to kill Castro were made public it was at first suggested that Castro retaliated and killed JFK before the CIA could kill him, but others claimed it was more likely that one of the CIA plans to kill Castro was redirected to kill JFK instead. If that was the case then it must have been a CIA plan that utilized a sniper attack on an open car motorcade, one of a number the CIA had on the shelf ready to go, waiting for the right situation to present itself.

Among the CIA plans to kill Castro that utilized snipers attacking an open car in a motorcade were the Hemingway House affair - discussions after the fact, and the Pathfinder plan to shoot Castro when he visited a north shore resort he was known to frequent.

Both required accurate high powered rifles with scopes, similar to the ones they attempted to infiltrate into Cuba on October 31, 1963 when the CIA raider ship The Rex deposited anti-Castro commandos with high powered rifles with scopes who were captured and paraded on Cuban TV the next day.  The story made the front page of the November 1, 1963 New York Times, and the names of the captured commandos are mentioned in Red Friday, the book written by Carlos Bringuier, the DRE Cuban Oswald was arrested with in New Orleans. [15]

One important aspect of the Valkyrie plan was a psych war operation to blame the assassination of Hitler on the SS, and monitor and control the media reports, just as the Dealey Plaza operation included blaming the assassination on Castro, a psych war campaign using media assets that continues today.

Besides the assassination, coup and psych-war aspects of the Valkyrie plot that could have been adapted to use against Castro and may have been redirected to JFK at Dealey Plaza, there was one other important part of the Valkyrie plan that could have been used - getting the victim to sign off on the operation.

Von Stauffenberg drew up the Valkyrie plan as a response to a possible revolt by slave laborers by mobilizing the home guard to quell the revolt and seize key government buildings and communications facilities.  Hitler approved and signed off on the plan without knowing the secret Phase that required his elimination. [16]

I don't know if this part of the Valkyrie plan was adapted for use against Castro, but the National Security Council and JFK did approve a number of violent covert operations against targets in Cuba, but JFK rejected the assassination plans. RFK however, did pressure Des Fitzgerald and others to step up their Cuban ops against Castro and RFK was personally introduced to some of the anti-Castro commandos who were being sent to Cuba to attack strategic installations and infiltrate rifle teams.[17]

The National Security Action memo authorizing a special military communications project Four Leaves could also be revealing once it is declassified.

The use of Phase One and Phase Two parts of the plan is another interesting parallel between Valkyrie and Dealey Plaza as they are the same terms used by Von Stauffenberg for Valkyrie and professor Peter Dale Scott to describe the official response to the assassination of JFK. According to Scott's analysis the original Phase One is the disinformation cover story to blame the assassination of JFK on Castro, that could have instigated a full scale US military attack on Cuba, that was subsequently superseded by the Phase Two promotion of the of the deranged lone assassin being responsible for the act.

In conclusion, if the CIA plans to kill Fidel Castro had anything to do with the assassination of JFK at Dealey Plaza then the CIA's proposed adaption of the Valkyrie plot to be used against Castro should be explored in detail.

Bill Kelly

bilkelly3@gmail.com 


Notes –  Valkyrie at Dealey Plaza Revisited - “The conspiracy alone must speak.”

1)      Talbot, David. “The Devil’s Chessboard” (HarperCollins, 2015) Re: Valkyrie, p. 134. “Dulles arranged for Mary….to work with the tall, imperious double agent Hans Bernd Gisevious….(who) became involved in the July 20, 1944 bomb plot against Hitler, barely fleeing with is life to Switzerland when it failed.”

2)      Kelly, William. January 1995 Telephone conversation with Volkmar Schmidt.
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01/volkmar-schmidt-interview.html. Schmidt said that Dr. Wilhelm Keutemeyer of Heidelberg served as a foster father whose associates Frederick von Halen and Von Trott were directly involved in the Valkyrie plot. Schmidt: “….naturally it was a terrible responsibility, and for years when I drove past the underpass I literally had to cry because, you know. But I exonerate myself completely because I had the best intent, embarrassed Kennedy, and I certainly didn’t tell him to take a pot shot at him.”

3)      Warren Report, p. 730. Ruth Paine drove Oswald’s family and belongings to New Orleans and back to Texas in late September.

4)      Ford, Gerald, with John Stiles “Portrait of the Assassin” Re: Marina’s letter to Ruth Paine in care of Arthur Young, Paoli, Pa. (BK: The only place I have seen this letter).

5)      Bancroft, Mary. “Autobiography of a Spy” (Wm. Morrow, 1983) p. 55, for Ruth Paine Forbes’ association with Mary Bancroft.

6)      Young, Arthur. Inventor of the Bell Helicopter 47A. http://www.arthuryoung.com/about.html (BK: I also have an extensive three hour tape recorded interview with Young in his library.)

7)      Bancroft, Mary. “Autobiography of a Spy” (Wm. Morrow, 1983) p. 202-240 for the roles Dulles, Bancroft and Gisevius played in the July 20, 1944 Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler.

8)      Forman, James. “Code Name Valkyrie – Count Von Staufenberg and the plot to kill Hitler,” who quotes Gisevius: “I just have the feeling we’l never succeed. I’m not speaing through fear. But I have a feeling very few of us wil be alive this time next year, regardless of what happens with your bomb.”

9)      Braden, Tom.  Talbot, David."Devil's Chessboard" p. 369, p.547 (JFK Library interview), p. 553 (Rockefeller financial support for covert ops). 

10)  Ruth Paine’s Summer Vacation – Paper by Barbara Lamonica, Steve Jones and Carol Hewett, Esq. presented at 1995 COPA Conference, Washington D.C. and Steve Jones – The Confessions of Ruth Paine - DPQ  http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2015/10/steve-jones-confessions-of-ruth-paine.html   /

11)  Higgins Memo: http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2014/04/higgins-memo-numbered-w-bullet-points.htm  - “He commented that there was nothing new in the propaganda field. However, he felt that there had been great success in getting closer to the military personnel who might break with Castro, and stated that there were at least ten high-level military personnel who are talking with CIA but as yet are not talking to each other, since that degree of confidence has not yet developed. He considers it as a parallel in history; i.e., the plot to kill Hitler; and this plot is being studied in detail to develop an approach.”

12)  Four Leaves http://whd.jfklibrary.org/Diary/  - White House Diary - For Monday September 23 1963 – SUBJECT: Assignment of Highest National Security Priority to Project FOUR LEAVES. In response to a recommendation by the Secretary of Defense, the president, under the authority granted by the Defense Production Act of 1950, today established the program listed below as being in the highest national security priority category for development and production. “President Kennedy assigns the highest national security priority to Project FOUR LEAVES to develop and produce a military communications system.” FOUR LEAVES McGeorge Bundy THE WHITE HOUSE DIARY SEPTEMBER 23 1963
http://www.jfklibrary.org/White%2BHouse%2B...eptember/23.htm

13)  Meyer, Cord. “Facing Reality: From World Federalism to the CIA”

14)  Talbot, David. Re: LeMay and Byrd. “The Devil’s Chessboard” p. 512, 524, 539-40. “D.H. Byrd received scant attention after the Kennedy assassination, despite his buildings role in the crime. He Warren Commission never questioned him – even after the millionaire took the odd step of removing the eight-plane window from which Oswald allegedly fired his shots at Kenedy’s limousine and hanging it in his Dallas mansion. Byrd said he feared that souvenir hunters might steal Oswald’s so-called sniper’s perch from the book warehouse, but he displayed the infamous window in his own home like a trophy. …The owner of the Texas School Book Depository was closely associated with a number of passionate Kennedy adversaries, including Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief…who bestowed a glowing Air Force commendation on Byrd in May 1963…” Re:  D. H. Byrd on safari 11/22/63 with German Baron Werner von Alvensleben, WWII double-agent and son of “assassination expert.” See: Dallas Morning News December 1963 and 1945 OSS X2 Report  http://jfkcountercoup2.blogspot.com/2015/10/oss-x-2-report-on-werner-von-alvensleben.html   "Hunting history is rife with the tales of derring-do with 6.5mm cartridges. W.D.M. Bell whacked many elephants and Werner von Alvensleben slew hundreds of buffalo with what they termed a “small-bore rifle,” namely, the 6.5×54 Mannlicher-Schönauer."  Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/08/12/gun-test-alexander-arms-6-5-grendel-hunter/#ixzz3qMkGtu2F and see "The Baron in Africa," which says that Von Alvensleben's favorite rifle was the 9.3 x 62 mm Manlicher-Schonauer.

15) New York Times, November 1, 1963 p. 1. Re: The Rex. 

16)  Forman, James. "Code Name Valkyrie - Count Von Stauffenberg and the plot to kill Hitler" http://hub-e.com/content/james-d-forman-fb2-ebook-get-code-name-valkyrie-count-von-stauffenberg-and-plot-kill-hitler. "The plan had a code name Valkyrie, and it would be developed at two levels with two sets of orders. Officially Valkyrie was a scheme to activate units of the Home Army to seize population centers in case of a rebellion by the foreign slave laborer sin Germany. Behind this facade the plan was to evolve into a complete takeover of the government by the Army. Phase One - plan for mobilizing the Reserve Army. Purpose: to crush mutiny of slave laborers.This part of the plan was submitted through channels and approved by Hitler himself. Phase Two - the second, secret plan: Item 1- Disposal of Hitler. Item 2 - Preparation of orders upon Hitler's death...Direct the Reserve Army to undertake the following - Occupy first the city of Berlin...Principle objectives: Imprisonment of key Nazi and SS officials, occupation of vital government buildings, railroad stations and other government centers, especially broadcast stations. Immediate command of the mass media, newspapers, wireless radio - cannot be over stressed. The conspiracy alone must speak. Orders from Hitler's East Prussian HQ must be entirely isolated and contained. The conspiracy alone must speak." For Peter Dale Scott's "Phase One" - "Phase Two" analysis see: Deep Politics series. 

17) Re: Pathfinder records - ARRB interviews with NPIC employes stationed at JMWAVE, where the CIA officers kept the Pathfinder documents filed separately from regular station files by keeping them in the NPIC section.














Tuesday, October 13, 2015

The Devil's Chessboard and the New Political Landscape

David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard – Allen Dulles, the CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government” (Harper-Collins, NY, 2015)

A Preview of the New Political Landscape 

Image result for The The Devils chessboard

By Bill Kelly

David Talbot’s “The Devil’s Chessboard” turns the table on the traditional journalists and historians who have uniformly portrayed Allen Dulles as the pipe smoking gentleman spy who fought for America’s righteous causes through two world wars and the Cold War and helped calm America’s anxiety in the wake of the Kennedy assassination by honorably serving on the Warren Commission.

Not so fast. By focusing on the one man at the epicenter of both World War II and the Cold War as well as the assassination – Allen Welsh Dulles, Talbot puts his finger on the pulse of power, and without promoting any conspiracy theory in regards to the assassination, he sets the stage for rational discussion and historic acceptance of such theories, for certainly one of them must be true.

Rather than the crusading knight, in retrospect we can now see Dulles for what he actually was – a shrewd lawyer who looked after the interests of his family, friends and corporate clients, a man who harnessed the secrets of the black arts of espionage and helped establish the secret intelligence state that has pretty much run things since the end of World War II.

The game of chess and the chessboard is a fitting matrix model that can help make complex issues simple or easier to understand and some of the main characters – E. Howard Hunt and David Atlee Phillips considered themselves Knights and Bishops, major players in the Great Game that Dulles played, though Dulles himself was not so much a player on the board but one of the master gamers who moved the pieces around.

From representing German industrial giants before the war and promoting a separate peace with the Nazis against the president’s stated policy to instigating coups against democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran, Talbot portrays Allen Dulles as a man who not only made his own foreign policy, but was often at odds with the presidents he served – Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson.

With his brother John Foster Dulles as Eisenhower’s Secretary of State and serving as head of the then relatively unknown Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles was a king maker in a strategic position to design and call the plays and make the moves that made American and world history for over a decade.

Dulles’ downfall – the Bay of Pigs, was a major blunder, conceived during the Eisenhower administration and carried out shortly after Kennedy took office. While JFK approved the relocation of the invasion beach, refused to permit a second and necessary air strike, and took responsibility for the failure of the operation, he privately blamed Dulles for conceiving, approving and convincing him such a harebrained scheme would work.

Talbot correctly assumes the contemporary consensus that the Bay of Pigs operation was designed to fail and force the president to order a large scale American military intervention, as LBJ would do in the Dominican Republic shortly after assuming office, but JFK balked and refused to do what the CIA and military leaders assumed he would.

A genuine story teller with a narrative flair, Talbot begins with Allen Dulles walking around his Georgetown neighborhood past Dumbarton Oaks with the editor of Harpers Magazine, trying to explain his side of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Dulles would write an article on the subject for Harpers that was never published but Talbot found it among Dulles’ papers.

In reading this book I found that Talbot presents many of the basic facts but leaves a lot of supporting details out, details that will eventually come out and fill some of the missing pieces of the puzzle, such as the fact that the Harvard Research Center at Dumbarton Oaks was run for many years by a Harvard Russian associate who just happened to be present in the American Embassy office in Moscow when former Marine Lee Harvey Oswald presented his passport and announced his “defection.”

On the Devil’s Chessboard Oswald is a mere pawn whose movements were closely monitored by the CIA as well as the Soviets, but Talbot doesn’t give him credit for the dastardly deed most mainstream historians attribute to him - killing JFK all by himself. Rather, Talbot portrays Oswald as a political pawn in Dulles’ orbit and caught up in the intelligence network web that was responsible for the Dealey Plaza operation and implies that he was framed for the crime.

In a real game of chess, it is highly unlikely if not impossible for a pawn to take out a King, but that’s exactly what Oswald is supposed to have done, and he was certainly maneuvered into position to do so.

“In the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination, Oswald was moved here and there with the calculation of a master chess player,” writes Talbot, noting that “He staged public scenes in New Orleans and Mexico City that called attention to himself as a hotheaded militant, as he had done at the embassy in Moscow. There were invisible wires attached to Oswald – and some of the more intriguing ones led to Allen Dulles.”

In all of the two thousand and some books that have been written about the assassination few call attention to certain key facts that Talbot draws out, such as JFK’s bitter enemy Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay was a close personal friend of D. H. Byrd. Byrd was the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, from where Oswald is supposed to have fired the shots that killed Kennedy. 

Talbot also calls attention to the fact that Dulles’ mistress and agent Mary Bancroft was a close friend and overseas traveling companion of Michael Paine’s mother Ruth Forbes Paine Young.

While Talbot doesn’t mention Ruth Forbes Paine Young by name, he refers to her as “Ruth Paine’s mother-in-law,” reporting that: “It was another striking ‘coincidence’ in the endlessly enigmatic Oswald story. The housewife who took the Oswald’s under her wing had married into a family whose foibles and weaknesses were well known to Dulles and his mistress. Ruth Paine was aware of her mother-in-law’s connection to Bancroft and Dulles. Her mother-in-law, in fact, had told her that she invited the couple to enjoy a get-away on the family island. But with typical obstinacy, Ruth refused to see any particular significance to this Dulles link to her family.”

“Dulles himself,” writes Talbot, “acknowledged that the flat-out weirdness of these curious facts and, in his own characteristic fashion, simply laughed it off. The conspiracy-minded would have a field day, he chuckled, if they knew that he had visited Dallas three weeks before the assassination and that he had a personal connection to the women whom he identified as Marina Oswald’s ‘landlady.’”

As Talbot points out, Ruth and Michael Paine were more than Marina Oswald’s “landlady,” who charged no rent, they were Oswald’s benefactors and sponsors, giving him rides, providing food and clothing for his family and obtaining him the job at the Byrd’s Texas School Book Depository, from where shots were said to have been fired at the president.

“In their immaculate innocence, the Paines played right into the hands of those who were manipulating Oswald,” Talbot concludes.

That the mother of the accused assassin’s chief sponsor was a close personal friend and traveling companion of Allen Dulles’ mistress and agent is not six degrees of separation but two, and not a coincidence any more than the fact that the mistress – Mary Bancroft, was Dulles’ intermediary with Hans Bernd Gisevius, the Nazi officer and principle agent in the July 1944 Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. Talbot mentions this, but doesn’t include the fact that in late September 1963 CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the CIA’s attempt to adapt aspects of the Valkyrie plot to use against Castro in Cuba.

There was a lot of movement on the chessboard that September day as the CIA briefed the Joint Chiefs, temporarily chaired by Gen. LeMay, JFK signed a National Security Action Memo authorizing “Project Four Leaves,” a military communication order that is still classified, and left on a Conservation Tour of the mid-west, when the details of the November visit to Texas were officially announced. It was the same September day that Lee Harvey Oswald slipped out of New Orleans for Mexico City.

The day before, the Oswald’s main benefactor Ruth Paine, had picked up the pregnant Marina, her daughter and their belongings, including the rifle said to have been used to kill JFK, and drove them to Texas after staying at the Naushon island off Massachusetts that Mary Bancroft had invited them to visit and then stayed with her husband’s mother – Mary Bancrofts’s good friend in Philadelphia.

As Talbot notes, “Bancroft reminded Dulles that she had known Michael’s mother ‘extremely well’ for over forty years and had spent summers with her on Naushon Island,” so Bancroft recognized the significance of their relationship and conveyed it to Dulles, who laughed it off.

Unlke John Wilkes Booth’s landlady, who was executed, and those who assist assassins and terrorists today, who are violently interrogated and vigorously prosecuted, Ruth and Michael Paine were treated with kid’s gloves by the Warren Commissioners, who were never informed that Michael’s mom was a friend and agent of the former head of the CIA and Warren Commissioner Dulles.

This book will spark and put to rest many debates, such as the fable that RFK asked LBJ to appoint Dulles and John J. McCloy to the Warren Commission, whether the CIA engaged in a cover-up of the truth behind the assassination and the veracity of some of the sources of information. To his credit, Talbot resurrects Col. Fletcher Prouty, who worked in the Pentagon at the time of the assassination, and weathered attempts to discredit him for his beliefs, and David Lifton, a conspiracy theorist who had an interesting man to man conversation with Dulles about the assassination at a public event.

At the time of the Bay of Pigs Allen Dulles was on a trip to South America. At the time of the assassination, D. H. Byrd, the owner of the Texas School Book Depository, was on a safari in Africa with a German Barron whose father was an assassination expert and supporter of the Valkyrie plot.

In the two months before the assassination Dulles met with top CIA officials including Desmond Fitzgerald, the CIA officer who briefed the Joint Chiefs on the adaption of the Valkyrie Plot, David Atlee Philips, the "Mr. Bishop" who met with Oswald before he went to Mexico City, Cord Meyer, James J. Angleton and Thomas Karamessines, all bishops, knights and rooks who made key moves and played major roles in the assassination drama.

Other previous biographies of Dulles say that at the time of the assassination he was in New York at the venerable Council on Foreign Relations, but Talbot places him back in D.C. at his Georgetown home and then moving to the CIA’s special facility near Quantico, Virginia known as “The Farm,” where he monitored the unfolding assassination drama. 

After the failure of the Valkyrie plot Dulles and Bancroft assisted Hans B. Gisevious in getting out of the country by providing fake credentials, and after the war, Bancroft translated Gisevious’ manuscript to English while Dulles brought him to Washington as a CIA consultant. In Washington Gisevious lived at the home of one of Dulles’ chief assistants Tom Braden, who interviewed Dulles for the JFK Library.

As Talbot writes, “While serving on the Warren Commission, Dulles told Braden, he had the opportunity to examine the assassination in exquisite detail. He talked about the events of that day as if he were inspecting the intricate meshing of synchronicities that had to occur in order for Kennedy to die that day. His description made it sound like the operation of a lifetime.”

“If the employees of the Book Depository had eaten their lunch in a little different place,” said Dulles, “if somebody had been at one place where he might easily have been instead of another at one particular time – the ‘ifs’ just stand out all over it. And if any one of these ‘ifs’ been changed, it might have been prevented…It was so tantalizing to go over the record [of events], as we did, trying to find out every fact connected with the assassination, and then to say if any one of the chess pieces that were entered into the game had been moved differently, at any one time, the whole thing might have been different.”

Indeed, instead of an accident of history, in which a deranged lone gunman kills the President seemingly on a whim, it has become increasingly apparent that regardless of the role Oswald played - patsy or pawn, what occurred at Dealey Plaza was a well planned and executed covert intelligence operation that was timed to the second. And without endorsing any particular conspiracy theory, The Devil’s Chessboard sets the stage for what really happened to be understood and generally believed.

While this book is important on many levels, it is the first to call attention to the significance of the Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler and its numerous connections to Dealey Plaza so now we can look forward to the development of more information on this subject as Washington D.C. attorney Jim Lesar has already filed an FOIA request for the records related to the CIA’s adaption of the Valkyrie plot to get rid of Castro.

The associations between the CIA plots to kill Castro and the assassination of JFK, known to Dulles but kept from the other Warren Commissioners, have previously focused almost exclusively on the CIA-Mafia plots, and it has been surmised that one of those plots to kill Castro was redirected to kill JFK. The Valkyrie plot is now in the forefront of assassination plans that were on the CIA’s drawing board, and as we learn more about it, and how it was adapted to be used against Castro, we can also see how it was possibly redirected against JFK at Dallas.

One of the key elements of the German military’s Valkyrie Plot to kill Hitler was to blame the assassination on the SS, just as there was and still is today a functioning psych war campaign to blame the Dealey Plaza operation on Oswald and Castro.

As we await the CIA’s response to Lesar’s FOIA request for the Valkyrie Plot documents, Lesar has suggested that Talbot’s book might “change the political landscape” of Washington if not America, and in exposing new facts, presenting a more honest portrait of Dulles and a new perspective of the Cold War, David Talbot flips the game board table and opens the door to a more honest and accurate assessment of what happened at Dealey Plaza so we can accept the probability that the President was killed not by a deranged loner but by his powerful political enemies.


Without endorsing any particular conspiracy theory the “new political landscape” allows for the assassination of the President to be viewed more honestly and elevates the discussions and debates to a new level, one that requires the national security state to give up its assassination secrets so that what happened at Dealey Plaza can be more fully understood. 

Bill Kelly 

Saturday, July 11, 2015

Bill's Best Books on the JFK Assassination

Bills Best Books – on the JFK Assassination

Bill Kelly's Best Books on the Assassination of President Kennedy

The best book on the JFK Assassination has yet to be written – the one that solves the crime to a legal and moral certainty.

In the meantime we have hundreds of books that stand out from the estimated over two thousand books that have been published on the subject of the president's assassination, of which I have selected a dozen or so for each of three categories – the official version of events and mainstream interpretations, critical conspiracy theories, which comprise most of the books familiar to anyone who has an interest in the topic.

There's no particular order, though I would like to see an complete bibliography - the closest I've come across was the House Select Committee's duel bibliographies - one chronologically from the date of publication and the other by author, but that only goes up to 1978, and someone with time on their hands should update those lists to make them worthwhile to researchers. 

A – Official Version
  1. – Warren Report
  2. - Inquest by Edward J. Epstein
  3. - Phil Shennon's A Cruel and Shocking Act 
  4. - Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi
  5. - Lee – by Robert Oswald
  6. - Lee and Marina – Priscilla Johnson McMillan
  7. - Real Answers – Gary Cornwell
  8. - Oswald's Politics – By Gary W. O'Brien
  9. - First Day Evidence - Chief Curry 
  10. - Oswald's Game - Jean Davison  
  11. - Mrs. Paine's Garage - Thomas Mallon 
  12. - Gerald Posner's Case Closed
  13. - Carlos Bringuier - Red Friday 

B – Critical and Conspiratorial

I put Tony Summers' books first because I do think they are the best and most "definitive," and I enjoyed working with him at the Assassination Archives and Research Center when he was researching the Vanity Fair article and updating "Conspiracy" for "Not In Your Lifetime."

The others are in no particular order, though I have grouped together all the Mafia books that I will comment on in more depth later. 
  1. – Anthony Summers' “Conspiracy” and “Not In Your Lifetime”
  2. - Church Committee Reports 
  3. - HSCA Reports 
  4. - Joshia Thompson's - “Six Seconds”
  5. - James Douglas' - “JFK and the Unspeakable”
  6. - David Talbot - “Brothers”
  7. - Jeff Morley - “Our Man in Mexico”
  8. - John Newman - “Oswald and the CIA”
  9. - Larry Hancock - “Someone Would Have Talked”
  10. - Robert Groden - “Absolute Proof”
  11. - Bill Turner – Fish is Red/Rearview Mirror/
  12. - Lamar Waldron and the Mafia Crowd
  13. - Joan Mellen - “Our Man in Haiti”
  14. - Phil Melanson - “Spy Saga”
  15. - Phil Nelson and LBJ “The Mastermind”
  16. - Jim DiEugenio – Lisa Pease's book 
  17. - Dick Russell – On the Trail of the JFK Assassins/ The Man Who Knew Too Much
  18. - Howard Roffman's Presumed Guilty 
  19. - Penn Jones - Forgive My Grief 
  20. - Howard Weisberg - Whitewash 

While both of these categories contain books that go in depth and detail on who they propose killed JFK and why they did it, I have devised a third category of books that are required reading if you want to know how – that's HOW JFK was killed.

At the very first meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles brought with him a copy of a book “The Assassins of American Presidents” (Elek Books, London, 1956) by James Donovan,  who later was the author of PT-109.

In a conversation with other commissioners Dulles called attention to the book and the idea it expressed – that American assassins were, unlike European and Asian assassins, uniquely deranged loners rather than part of a political conspiracy.

As this idea sunk in, Commissioner John J. McCloy, himself a party to many political conspiracies, disagreed and called attention to the fact that others besides John Wilkes Booth were hung for their role in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln, but Dulles persisted in propagating the idea of the deranged lone assassin. Dulles has firmly embraced the alternative Deranged Lone-Nut cover-story even though many in his former agency – the CIA, were still entertaining and promoting the original cover story that pro-Castro Cuban Communists were behind the Dealey Plaza operation.

In Peter Dale Scott's terms, LBJ rejected the “Phase-One” Castro Cuban Committee cover story and instead went with the Deranged Lone Nut alternative in order to avoid war with the Cubans and Soviets, a nuclear war that would cost the lives of millions, an argument he used to enlist Earl Warren and the Warren Commissioners.

Dulles, following LBJ's lead, rejected the original cover story, not because as LBJ put it – it would lead to war, but because what happened at Dealey Plaza, in Dulles' view, could not even be perceived as a covert intelligence operation at all, and had to be viewed as the spontaneous actions of a deranged loner nut - or all of the other on going historical covert operations would be exposed.

Now, a half-century later, those historic covert operations been exposed – Operation Success in Guatemala, the U2, Bay of Pigs, Watergate, MKULTRA, Iran-Contra, etc., and now whatever happened at Dealey Plaza must also be universally viewed as a covert intelligence operation even if it was carried out by one lone wolf assassin.

The book that Dulles should have taken to the first meeting of the Warren Commission is the Sun Tzu, the book that he promotes in his book “The Craft of Intelligence,” even if only to read the chapter on “The Employment of Secret Agents.”

Sun Tzu was a fourth century BC military strategist whose book “The Art of War” emphasized the idea that the army “was the instrument that delivered the coup de grace to an enemy previously made vulnerable. Prior to hostilities, secret agents separated the enemy's allies from him and conducted a variety of clandestine subversive activities. Among their missions were to spread false rumors and misleading information, to corrupt and subvert officials, to create and exacerbate internal discord, and to nurture Fifth Columns. Meanwhile, spies, active at all levels, ascertained the enemy situation.”

Sun Tzu said:

What is called 'foreknowledge' cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from Gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations. It must be obtained from those who know the situation.

Now there are five sorts of secret agents to be employed. There are native, inside, double, expendable and living.

When those five types of agents are all working simultaneously and no one knows their method of operations they are called 'The Divine Skein' and are the treasure of the sovereign.

(Note: The idea is that information may be gathered in as fish are by pulling on a single cord and so drawing together the various threads of a net.) [And hence the concept of an intelligence network]

    A. Native Agents are those of the enemy country people whom we employ.
    B. Inside Agents are enemy officials whom we employ.
    C. Doubled Agents are enemy agents whom we employ.
    D. Expendable Agents are those of our own spies who are deliberately given fabricated information to pass on to the enemy.
    E. Living Agents are those who return from enemy territory with information.
    If plans relating to secret operations are prematurely divulged the agent and all those to whom he spoke shall be put to death.

    Generally, in the case of armies, you wish to strike, cities you wish to attack, and people you wish to assassinate, you must know the names of the garrison commander, the staff officer, the ushers, gate keepers and body guards. You must instruct your agents to inquire into those matters in minute detail.

So Allen Dulles' “The Crafts of Intelligence” and Sun Tzu's “The Art of War” are two of the books that are required reading to understand how the assassination of JFK was conducted and carried out. 

In his book Dulles' explains how the basic concepts on the employment of secret agents as expressed by Sun Tzu over two thousand years ago are still utilized today, although they have been enhanced and refined, especially by developing technology. 

Dulles also stresses the idea the “crafts” employed by intelligence agents are not unique to the CIA but are utilized by every nation's intelligence agency in the world.

While secret operations pretty much escaped historical and news media attention until recent times, one of the first and best books on the subject is “The Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross, that the CIA tried but failed to suppress, and touches on the CIA in Guatemala, Cuba and Iran, and blew the cover of dozens of CIA fronts and assets.
  1. “The Crafts of Intelligence” by Allen Dulles
  2. “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu
  3. “The Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross
Then there are a number of books by CIA insiders who give us a remarkably clear view of what they were doing, like David Atlee Phillips' “Nightwatch” - subtitled “Twenty Years of Peculiar Service,” and peculiar it is for giving out so much despite being officially approved by CIA censors.
  1. “Nightwatch” - David Atlee Philolips
Among the non-approved books are Phil Agee “Inside the Company,” Kim Philby's “My Silent War” and Donald Baine's “Candy Jones,” the last of which gives a good account of “Expendable Agents.” Brad Ayers' “The War that Never Was” and “The Zenith Secret.” Since Ayers' was an US Army Ranger captain assigned to the CIA's JMWAVE station to train Cuban commandos in small arms and maritime tactics, he hadn't signed the CIA's employee contract to have all writings for publication approved by the CIA.
  1. Phil Agee -
  2. Kim Philby - “My Silent War”
  3. Donald Baine - “Candy Jones.”
  4. Bradley Ayers - “War that Never Was” and “The Zenith Secret.”
So how convenient was it for the CIA when Ayers' first publisher – Bobbs-Merrell, of Indiana, who maintained an office and had employes at the Texas School Book Depository, hired William Harvey as their legal counsel and had Ayers' book run past legal before they published it. According to Ayers, he didn't know that Harvey, former chief of operations at JMWAVE, left the CIA to work for Bobbs-Merrell and Harvey proof-read his manuscript, but he did notice some major changes – like the elimination of any mention of some of the CIA officers he worked with on the Cuban operations.

Once Ayers learned of Harvey's treachery, he re-wrote the book as “The Zenith Secret” and got a obscure Brooklyn corner store to publish it before retreating back to his remote hunters cabin in the wilderness.

The best of the lot of those books officially approved by the CIA is Joseph Smith's “Portrait of a Cold Warrior,” that details some of the Catherwood's CIA cover activities in the Philippines, the CIA's Cuban operations, the exposure of the Venezuelan Arms Cache as a possible North woods type provocation, and the formal education of a Cold Warrior by Paul Linebarger, the CIA's master propagandist and psych-warrior.

Smith tells us that Linebarger, who trained three generations of Cold Warriors in the crafts of the black arts, as he called them, not only used his own textbook on Propaganda and Psychological Warfare, but also used David Maurer's “The Big Con” as a key reference book.

Maurer was a Kentucky linguist whose study of street slang led him to uncover an underground network of big time confidence men who practiced the type of deception employed in the movie The Sting,
  1. Joseph Smith - “Portrait of a Cold Warrior”
  2. Paul Linebarger - “Propaganda”
  3. David Maurer - “The Big Con”
Maurer's book underlines the importance of language, the words we use and the names we ascribe to things, and how its necessary to understand the unique slang and codes used among those committing criminal enterprises to communicate yet to conceal their activities..

How the CIA does this and how the Big Con confidence men did it are remarkably similar – as both the Big Con and the officers at JMWAVE both utilized “Inside” and “Outside” operators, and each person n the Big Con game had a specific job and purpose.

Even the fake storefronts were employed, like the fake betting joint in the Sting and the false Zenith Technical Services front used at JMWAVE.

And just as David Maurer had to learn the lingo used by the con artists before he could understand the nature of the Big Con and how it works, those who want to understand how the Dealey Plaza operation was planned and conducted must learn the covert language and lingo used by intelligence agents and operatives, and its not that difficult.

“Our Man in Acapulco” is the 12th and final book you must read to understand how JFK was killed a the authorized biography of Col. Frank M. “Brandy” Brandstetter not only shows you how one link in the intelligence net is connected to all of the others, and how all of the good fish are collected together and processed at one place where the intelligence is analyzed.

Brandy, a Dallas Texan, was at the epicenter of things as the manager of the Havana Hilton when Castro made it his headquarters in the early days of the regime.

But Brandy reported not to the CIA, but to Col. William B. Rose at the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence for the US Army Reserves at the Pentagon -  https://jfkcountercoup.wordpress.com/2010/12/29/614/ 

That just happens to be the same place where other relevant Colonels also reported, including Sam Kail of Havana embassy fame, Jack Crichton, who ran the Dallas CD Shelter and controlled Marina's early testimony, Lawrence Orlov, who visited Oswald with George deMohrenschildt, and Col. George L. Whitmeyer, who led the motorcade in the Pilot Car.

So there you have it – the top dozen books you have on the official version of the assassination, the top twelve critics and conspiracy theories that tell you who killed JFK and why, and the twelve books you need to read if you want to know how JFK was killed.