John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY YOUSSEF EL-GINGIHY IN THE INDEPENDENT

JFK files: As Donald Trump looks to release classified documents, last living link to assassination drops bombshell
Antonio Veciana, 88, has authored a memoir that promises to shed light on one of the greatest mysteries of our time

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/john-f-kennedy-assassination-cuba-cia-lee-harvey-oswald-antonio-veciana-a7957481.html

This is one of the best summary articles to appear in any newspaper on the subject of the assassination.

I have a life-long interest in the assassination, have read most of the important literature on it, have written published essays on the subject, and have always been a skeptic on the Warren Report.

Indeed, “skeptic” is too tame a word. I have always treated the Warren Report as a shameful compilation of lies since its publication.

One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell, after reading an advanced copy of the report back in the 1960s, said:

“If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?”

That profound question has never been answered.

Readers may enjoy;

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/1544/

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Response to another reader who said: “The key to what happened centres on Kennedy’s sacking of John Foster Dulles in November 1962”

Yes, that and one or two other important events, but I think you mean his brother, Allen Dulles, Director of CIA.

The outcome of the Cuban Missile crisis, including Kennedy’s backchannel communication with Khrushchev, was another.

Kennedy opposed both Pentagon and CIA advice during the Crisis, and thank God that he did. They would have launched WWIII by landing troops to destroy the Soviet installations.

The CIA and Pentagon were ignorant of the fact that the Soviets had many thousands of troops in Cuba working on and guarding their medium-range missile installations.

The Soviet troops were equipped with a number of short-range Luna nuclear-armed missiles ready to be fired at any landing force.

I think perhaps the final spur for the assassins, if any were needed, was Kennedy’s romantic affair with Mary Pinchot (Meyer), a well-connected society type who had a project for world peace. She introduced Kennedy to marijuana in the White House and may well have introduced him to LSD.

She had a bit of a hare-brained scheme for getting eight high Washington society women to turn on their husbands to LSD and somehow manipulate them for world peace. The list of names does not come down to us, but they were all wives of major figures in Washington.

One can just imagine the mandarins at Langley listening to recordings of the Kennedy-Pinchot pillow-talk in 1963. And with Kennedy’s proved independent-mind set, I think they decided he was a danger to their idea of the United States.

Mary was assassinated less than a year after Kennedy, and her diary was stolen. She had got up a head of steam concerning what may have really happened to Kennedy while working on her own investigation, and being so well-connected, her investigation might well have been fruitful. After all, her ex-husband, Cord Meyer, was a high-ranking CIA operator.

She was completely aware of the things the CIA did and knew well many people like James Angleton and the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, almost certainly a covert CIA man.

By the way, many well-informed people believe Angleton himself ran the program of fake American defectors to the Soviet Union in the late-1950s, the one for which Oswald was recruited as a young Marine. Here was a young Marine in the late-1950s suddenly receiving communist literature in the mail at his base and who somehow mysteriously learned to speak Russian.

He was obviously being “sheep-dipped” for his “defection” to the Soviet Union. He then went to live in the Soviet Union for a couple of years, coming back to the United States with a Soviet bride, both of them admitted with relatively little trouble considering the harsh political climate then. They ended-up living among, and being assisted by, a community of Russian-speakers in Dallas, a truly remarkable connection.

The defection program was just the kind of goofy, elaborate scheme that that dangerous man, Angleton, was fond of. Years later, he was dismissed from the CIA, having caused a great many serious internal problems.

But he was still regarded as a demi-god in intelligence circles in the early 1960s, and his name comes up several times in key events around the assassination, especially for some years afterward. He was involved in retrieving secret files from Mexico City after the assassination, he was involved in events around Mary Pinchot’s murder, and he became embroiled in the infamous Nosenko affair at CIA during the 1970s, an affair with some connections to the assassination.

Having been part of the (secret) defector program and having returned to the US made Oswald a perfect candidate for patsy, being vulnerable to being described as a far-out communist, something he most certainly was not. We know Oswald was working as a paid FBI informant at the time (his informant number actually was discovered long ago), and he must have stumbled across the plotters in New Orleans who, in turn, saw his potential as a patsy.

The Kennedys were leaning hard in those last days on all the CIA-established Cuban refugee terror camps in an effort to improve American-Russian and American-Cuban relations. The CIA operations had been huge and made anything Osama bin-Laden later had in the mountains of Afghanistan look like scout camps. And, of course, the Kennedys well knew that the CIA often ignored or misinterpreted presidential directives with which its management disagreed, as they still do today. So, the FBI, undoubtedly against J Edgar Hoover’s personal wishes, was ordered to become involved in discovering and breaking-up facilities. Oswald was just one of their informants. He obviously hit the jackpot and paid with his life.

John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SPUTNIK

US National Archives Reveals the Story of KGB Agent Linked to JFK Assassination

Anyone who knows some modern American history knows Soviet KGB defector, Yuri Nosenko, was an extremely controversial figure. They know also that claims he made about the Kennedy assassination were no more reliable than other claims he made. Indeed, he was controversial in part because he could not, under CIA interrogation, supply details about KGB methods and operations which his rank of Colonel meant he should have known.

There probably never has been a defector who generated such fights and hostilities and disagreements inside a major intelligence agency the way Nosenko did inside the CIA, and it went on for years.

He practically tore the CIA apart internally during his defection with one faction regarding him as a KGB plant sent to “poison the well.”

The validity of any of his claims has never been established. And we knew the general line of his claims years and years ago.

So new stuff regarding him is not new and is of virtually no value.

If this release of material about Nosenko represents the quality of the newly-released Archives material as a whole, then we have made no advance at all on the Kennedy assassination.

But I would not expect anything else. The key material, if files ever existed and if they still exist, has never been released.

Those are the files that would tell us why the CIA has always lied about the assassination, there being a number of instances, even with our very limited information, where the lying is just obvious, as in the completely wrong Cuban Embassy surveillance photo taken during Oswald’s supposed trip to Mexico City. And as in the phony excuse about embassy telephone recordings being routinely recycled. Also, files on people in Dallas, Russian speakers, who befriended Oswald and are known to have had connections to the CIA, people like George de Mohrenschildt and Ruth Paine.

We might like information on the CIA’s James Angleton and his relationship to the program which saw Oswald and several other American servicemen temporarily defect to Russia in the 1950s. Angleton, by the way, was chief of one of the two warring factions in CIA over Yuri Nosenko’s credibility years later. Angleton also had other roles to play. After the mysterious murder of Mary Pinchot, Kennedy’s lover and closest friend, he was discovered rummaging around in her studio for papers.

Those are also the files that would tell us why the FBI, led from the very top, J. Edgar himself, rushed to the judgment of a man who had absolutely no motive, and no aptitude either, and virtually instantly identified him as the assassin. All with no evidence. And the files that would explain the FBI’s relationship with Oswald because we know from a number of snippets that there was indeed a relationship, at the very least as a paid informant, which by the way is hardly what a genuine communist, as Oswald was made out to be, of that day would do. And the files that would explain why the chief of the local FBI office destroyed key evidence immediately after the assassination. He burned a letter from Oswald and then lied about its contents.

That is the evidence that would explain the utterly mysterious behavior of the Dallas police investigation in everything from mishandling evidence to allowing Jack Ruby, a known gangster, to hang around the headquarters frequently. It was close to total incompetence from beginning to end, and I just cannot believe that record does not cover much darker matters. The policeman, Tippet, said to have been killed by Oswald, a claim contradicted by better witnesses who were ignored, we know was up to some pretty dark activities, ultra-right wing stuff, but we have never had any details.

But the key evidence remains that which would tell us why, if the simple official story of Oswald’s responsibility is true, that a murder by a quite ordinary man generated immense secrecy which endures to this day. There simply is no national security matter involved in one misfit suddenly buying a gun and shooting someone, even a President. No documents should ever have been classified, and the insipid and vague nature of much that has been de-classified in several releases only adds force to the point. Why were the FBI and CIA ever even involved?

Also, why it is that not one piece of conclusive evidence has ever been provided of Oswald’s guilt. All of the so-called evidence is weak, circumstantial, and even in some cases fraudulent, starting with the true purchase and shipping and ownership of the inadequate gun which from all circumstances appears to have been a planted decoy for police. And even ownership of the postal box involved is quite blurry.

While general facts of Oswald’s background were released, they simply do not add up to what we were told they add up to. Nothing has ever been explained about how a man, a man with a security clearance for special radar work, learns Russian in the Marines, pulls an obviously phony defection to Russia, stays a while and then returns to the United States (with a Russian bride!) at the height of the Cold War, is never put on a security watch-list, is able to readily obtain documents like a passport, and quickly comes to have a circle of quite well-off and well-connected Russian speakers as friends in Dallas. If you think the anti-Russian stupidity in Washington is bad today, you should look back at what it was like in the late-1950s and early-1960s, Oswald’s time for all of this activity. It was a howling madhouse in the United States, but it never really affected Oswald.

No, the new Archives release will yield nothing really worth having. That could almost have been forecast. I don’t know where the dark agencies of government put their most damning documents or how they file them in impenetrable filing systems or even if they indeed keep such material at all (there being, after all, the discouraging historical precedent of the Nazis who kept meticulous files on their crimes), but none of the documents released in Bill Clinton’s time and others, including these, explain either the crime or the need to have ever kept such stuff secret in the first place.

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE GUARDIAN

 

Well, there are photos showing a man who appears to be Cruz Senior handing out pro-Cuba leaflets with Oswald in New Orleans.

Those who’ve studied the assassination in some depth know that Oswald was put up to this provocative work by still unknown parties.

The best guess is that this was just one of many gimmicks to collect names of Castro sympathizers – those who would write in response to the phony pamphlet.

The people who put Oswald on this task and some others are almost certainly the ones who assassinated Kennedy.

Now, it so happens, that Cruz Senior was a Cuban refugee, and it has been said he had some rather unpleasant connections in the refugee community. There are also accusations of shady family doings. All in all, the kind of stuff that makes you a good possible tool for people with really bad intentions.

I don’t know. His name never came up in the past regarding the assassination, but the photo is pretty startling and not just something to dismiss.

My own view has long been the CIA-trained and -supplied and -paid Cuban fighter refugees were the ones who killed Kennedy, almost certainly with the cooperation of their immediate CIA handlers.

They literally hated Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs and the settlement of the Cuban Missile Crisis. They had motive, opportunity, and means which Oswald most certainly did not.

Oswald was just what he said he was, a patsy. He likely crossed paths quite innocently with the killers when he worked as an FBI informant, something we know he did, and we even have his FBI informant number. The Kennedy brothers put some pressure on the FBI to keep informed about continuing anti-Castro activities, even conducting some raids, following the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s promise not to again invade Cuba.