Shortly before he died in July 1988, former CIA officer David Atlee Phillips said that “My final take on the assassination [of JFK] is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” He left an unpublished book which was supposed to be fictional in which he wrote “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald… We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba… I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.” For those who think the CIA played a part in the assassination of JFK, David Atlee Phillips has long been one of the prime suspects, but you don’t have to subscribe to such conspiracy theories to understand that no leader of any country will lightly take on their own intelligence agencies and hold them accountable for actions they may have taken with a prior executive’s approval.
These type of considerations, more than the self-serving motivations attributed to President Obama by Conor Friedersdorf, probably explain why John Brennan isn’t being fired. Without question, John Brennan should be fired. That he isn’t being fired shows that the president is simply afraid to fire him. Friedersdorf explains this fear as trepidation that Brennan will spill damaging secrets that make Obama look like some kind of war criminal himself. I think the fear is more related to the kind of murderous rage than might ensue if the CIA is held to account for their performance in the aftermath of 9/11. Whether this fear is well-founded or not, it is not irrational. Just look at what the CIA has already done to try to cover its tracks.
CIA officer Jose Rodriguez ordered the destruction of 92 video tapes of the CIA torturing people in their custody and at their mercy. He says he did it to prevent retaliation from al-Qaeda, but we all know that he was primarily motivated by his desire to keep himself and his guilty colleagues out of prison.
After this, they stonewalled an investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and even went so far as to break into the committee’s computers and read their emails. They not only lied about having done this, but they filed phony charges with the Department of Justice accusing these staffers of doing their own hacking. Finally, they redacted the hell out of the committee’s report on their torturing activities in a final effort to prevent accountability.
Throughout this process, the Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, has lied over and over again.
“As far as the allegations of the CIA hacking into Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth,” Brennan told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in March. “We wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s just beyond the, you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we do.”
Earlier, he had castigated “some members of the Senate” for making “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.” He called for an end to “outbursts that do a disservice to the important relationship that needs to be maintained between intelligence officials and Congressional overseers.”
The administration defends John Brennan’s actions by correctly pointing out that he was the one who asked the Inspector General to investigate this matter, and it’s true that he did that and that he is allowing the investigation to go forward. But he also obstructed the investigation, leveled false charges at the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, filed those charges with Department of Justice, and oversees a process that has overly redacted their report.
By any normal standard, John Brennan would be prosecuted for his actions. But he is being protected by the administration. I don’t think this is best explained by the idea that Brennan is doing a good job in other respects. He’s a major embarrassment to the administration and protecting him makes them look extremely bad. From the very beginning of his administration, I think President Obama has simply been afraid to take on the Intelligence Community. And his official rationale is morally bankrupt.
Even before I came into office, I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the twin towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And, you know, it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots, but having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects.
This is how the president rebukes these unnamed CIA officers for acting contrary to our values without daring to hold them accountable despite what the law and our treaties say. It would be overly “sanctimonious” to hold them accountable. In actuality, it would be dangerous to hold them accountable. If anything is “sanctimonious,” it is the failure to recognize that danger.
I always thought that Obama chose Leon Panetta as CIA head as a way of quietly cleaning house, reining in the worst excesses without pissing off an agency capable of some very nasty pushback. But Petraeus? Brennan??
He went with Panetta in 2009 because there was too much opposition to Brennan who he then appointed to an executive position not requiring Senate confirmation.
Should be obvious to all us rubes that he’s been Obama’s guy throughout his presidency.
As Marcy Wheeler has documented, Brennan knows all about the worst excesses of C+ Augustus. He was right in the middle of it. And obviously Obama knows this.
So what now?
It is equally sanctimonious to insist on people voting when the deep state controls foreign policy and Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers control domestic policy.
The Congress created this monster. The Congress hid this monster from oversight by the people. The Congress hid this monster from oversight by the oversight committees.
The current President has upped the ante on leaking information by aggressively prosecuting even minor leaks as espionage and sending leakers to jail for over-proportionate sentences. That has fed the monster.
Either the Democrats in Congress collectively do something that starts to unwind this (a substantial cut in intelligence community funding and disallowal of contractors would be a start; or repealing the authorization of black budgets and hidden accountability made in 1949; or a collective insertion of the full report into the Congressional Record so that only one member of Congress does not take the fall) or our government as an institution worthy of the support of the people is gone and we become the dictatorship that we have sought to avoid.
The failure here is not the President’s alone; sixty-seven years of romanticism about intelligence has also played a part; the failure of the Democratic Congress to fully deal with the abuses when it had a chance with the Church Committee. The continued pumping of tens of billions of dollars year after year into making the monster bigger, without any accountability.
What has galled DFHs from the beginning about Obama has been his sanctimonious fight against sanctimony. Which exalts moral expediency as practicality even as the corruption deepens and metastasizes. And serious problems are neglected and fester.
And all the liberal diehard Obama supporters loved it when he did his DFH punching and practiced it as often as possible themselves.
Tarheeel…
I started a reply to this comment and it grew.
Now a standalone post.
Is U.S. Inc. still worthy of the support of the people?
AG
If it is legitimately dangerous to take on the CIA then what would folks have the President do? Is it worth the risk? What would the ideal response be taking into account the backlash?
Sorry Booman, I think your logic is a little…ahem…tortured.
The President most certainly can have any person or persons in the CIA disciplined, fired or prosecuted.
When it comes to the President of the United States no one in the CIA or NSA or FDA is untouchable.
The CIA is under the President’s command, whether that President is Obama, Bush, Eisenhower, Johnson or their respective successors.
That’s why Presidents protect them.
The theoretical problem is that the CIA knows where his family lives, I suppose.
Earlier, I just posted a video to make my point, but I want to make the point explicit. To do this, I am going to quote extensively from H.R. Haldeman’s 1978 book The Ends of Power.
You can read more at the link. The point being, here, that Dick Nixon did not feel that he had the luxury of firing Dick Helms even for rank insubordination. He couldn’t even compel him to turn over certain documents.
It should be noted, too, that Dick Nixon was Eisenhower’s point man on the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was asking for information on an operation that he was responsible for organizing, at least until Kennedy won the election. And he still couldn’t pry the information out of the CIA.
So, in what sense was Dick Nixon at liberty to fire or discipline the CIA?
That seems a long winded way of saying “I don’t know why the President made the decision he did.”
Let me expand a bit on what I mean, you seem to be asserting that the DCI told the President he possessed information the President already knew and if the President did not stop asking for information he already knew, the DCI would…what? Send it to the White House?
My impression from your post is the DCI had information the President did not know and it probably did not involve President Nixon but another President and that’s why the DCI wanted to keep it secret and why President Nixon dropped the whole matter and told his aides to do the same after the DCI told him what it was.
My conjecture my impression.
This is interesting:
Works well for all that is known about Oswald. Leaves open the question if he went rogue, the mission was changed, or he became useful as a patsy by a faction in the agency or an outside cabal that knew of Oswald’s grooming.
Actually, it doesn’t.
http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Harvey_And_Lee.pdf
The book was privately published outside of the US and could have used a proofreader, but it provides the best information about the multiple Lee Harvey Oswalds’ lives. About a thousand pages, but well worth the read.
The faux Oswald prancing in front of CIA surveillance cameras in front of the Soviet embassy and Cuban consulate and talking over CIA-tapped lines six weeks or so before the assassination is the key to understanding who and why. LBJ and J Edgar talked about it around 10am the day after the assassination. By then everyone was on the same page.
The “two Harveys” is an incoherent narrative when combined with all the other solid information that both Russ Baker and Vincent Bugliosi have collected and reported. It’s also a much too long-term, overarching covert operation to be plausible.
But as one of the plots to assassinate Castro that was put on and off the shelf over several years, this sucker resonates for me. In part because it ties together sore thumbs that others can’t explain. The timeline fits and there’s no need to postulate that Oswald was a CIA agent. He was much too erratic, uneducated, and unintelligent for such a job. He would have been no more than a dumb cog to run if or as needed.
The thing to remember about David Atlee Phillips is that his own brother was so convinced of his culpability that he basically disowned him, even on his death bed.
Now, the version of events told by Shawn Phillips (the nephew of David) has to be wrong in certain respects, but that’s to be expected considering he was reconstructing things he didn’t know much about.
The meeting that he describes took place in 1976, I think, and it wasn’t six year later but twelve years later that David died.
Phillips gives a version of the story in declassified testimony which [starts here https://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=49338&relPageId=6%5D. I have no idea how far into that you have to go to find it, but my recollection is that it comes in the afternoon session, not the morning session. He was supposed to be identified as a Maurice Bishop or a Morris Bishop, not a Raul Salcedo. I’ve never been able to figure out who Raul Salcedo is supposed to have been. The man who was there to identify David was named Antonio Veciana. Veciana has since confirmed that David Atlee Phillips was Maurice Bishop and that he met with him and Lee Harvey Oswald in a Dallas hotel in September 1963.
Another thing you can discover in the testimony of Phillips is that he was caught have lied and having lied rather elaborately about actions he took in early October related to Oswald’s trips to the consulates. In reality, he was listed not as being in Mexico City at that time, but at headquarters in Langley. Yet, he had previously testified and testified again in the morning session that he had been in Mexico City at the time that they sent a request to headquarters for information on Oswald.
This is interesting, and may explain that the day that David’s brother was talking about him being in Dallas was not November 22nd, but a day in September.
There’s so much “noise” surrounding the assassination event that I try not to think through that muddle.
The suggestion that the CIA might have been working Oswald to bump off Castro instantly put a large number of pieces about him into new places for me. But that would have come later. First he was a psychologically unstable and dumb kid with delusions of grandeur and a fascination with the USSR. That last point would have brought him to the attention of internal security/military intelligence and with his service record he would have been bounced from the marines. But as bait, without Oswald’s awareness that he was being fed information to make his way to the USSR, to see how sophisticated the USSR was in embracing a US defector, he was perfect. That fills in a lot of the unexplained gaps in how it was so easy for him to get there. The Russians didn’t bite and whatever agency was running him seemed to lose interest as well.
He was ready to return fifteen months into his defection, 2/61. Not a high priority for the US. The process was likely slowed down when he married Marina that April. All the paperwork and approvals weren’t completed until 6/62 and the State Dept. loaned him the money to get to NYC. His brother loaned him the money to get him back to Fort Worth. As bleak for him as the USSR had been.
While he always denied it, George de Mohrenschildt may have been the one to have seen that Oswald could be useful in the Agency anti-Castro activities that were hot at that time. (de Mohrenschildt was an opportunist and wouldn’t have passed on one to ingratiate himself again with the CIA.) But, once again, his usefulness didn’t go further than his willingness to make a lot of noise and draw attention to himself. Huge leaps away from 1) getting him in physically close proximity to Castro and 2) then getting him to assassinate Castro. But the perfect patsy if #1 could be accomplished.
Our government never for a moment lost interest in Oswald.
You have a lot to learn.
Start there.
You’re didn’t hear what I said. Although the review that you linked to made mention of it:
The author rarely tries to fill out the story or the personage.
Then moved on without focusing on it either. Absent a serious psych profile of Lee Oswald at the age of seventeen it’s easy to make up implausible shit about him. Raised by a very odd and erratic mother, rarely living any place for more than a year and often less, usually in conditions at or near poverty, sporadic school attendance at numerous schools, both coddled and neglected, of average intelligence but poorly educated for his age, undisciplined and unfocused, devious which can appear to be clever, … He carries all that baggage with him when he enlists in the Marines where he doesn’t perform well in, including fraternizing with colleagues, and is quickly seen as weird.
This is during the era of heightened anti-Soviet sensitivity. This weird, poorly performing Marine who spouts pro-Soviet nonsense is assigned to a highly classified facility and given a tech job? GMAFB. He wasn’t an Edward Snowden. He was also a screw-up. IOW a problem that normally would have led to a recruit like him being booted out of the Marines. But his official military record was much worse than that — two court-martials, a demotion, and a period of imprisonment in the brig. It’s possible his record was doctored to make him appear even worse than he was, but he was still trouble. His only distinguishing characteristic was his infatuation with the USSR.
It’s only a huge stretch that he could have managed to make his way to the USSR all on his own. But there is a tell — on his own there is no way that he could have learned of the Albert Schweitzer College and also applied for admission.
From your link:
Contrary to their canards, there was a lot of interest in Oswald from the time he defected to Russia until the assassination.
I’m saying that some agency (my guess military intelligence) identified him as a cog that would make for a plausible defector (it’s what he wanted to do) and they could watch and learn what the USSR did with such a person. He wasn’t a security risk because he had no useful knowledge or intelligence. However, acting as if he was in the press was to make him look like a catch for the USSR.
What was learned by the US is that the USSR quickly determined that there was no “there there” and treated him like an ordinary civilian immigrant from the US and not tipping their hand that they were aware of the false defector program. It was at that point that he was of no interest.
Recall that Oswald had applied to return to the US in February. Marina was added to the equation in April. So, yes, there was curiosity as to how the USSR would treat a defector returning to the US with a Soviet wife. But it was mild curiosity and neither the US nor USSR moved quickly on the request.
The remainder of section III of your link is a variation of what I said — Newman’s claim is that the CIA was tasked DeMohrenschildt to run Oswald and I think it’s possible that that’s backwards. After returning from the USSR Oswald looked for some way to use his Russian language skills in employment. That’s how he connected to Fort Worth Russian immigrants. And one of them in turn introduced them to the DeMohrenschildts. (All of those Fort Worth/Dallas Russian acquaintances of the Oswald’s testified in the Warren Commission and most probably told the truth. Peter Paul Gregory seemed to me to be the most astute observer.)
The clumsy impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City was intentional; it was a feature not a bug.
Please explain. The evidence that Oswald went to Mexico City seems solid enough. Why would an imposter in real time or after the fact be of any use?
See my reply below.
That Oswald was a CIA agent is not a postulate, it’s long since been proven.
http://www.amazon.com/Oswald-CIA-John-Newman/dp/0786701315
Actually it hasn’t. But if he were, why would the Agency not provide any financial assistance to Lee and Marina? They barely had enough money for food — and then not much food. A few of those in the Russian immigrant community felt so bad for them that they helped them out with money for food and a few things for the baby.
“Actually it hasn’t.”
Not if your main source is Bugliosi, but if you read the actual evidence (mainly US government documents) you will find that Oswald was working for the CIA, as is traced in meticulous detail by Newman in the book cited.
In addition, you might want to look at the testimony of James B. Wilcott, a CIA accountant who disbursed CIA station funds in Tokyo, Japan.
http://harveyandlee.net/Wilcott/Wilcott.htm
After his return to the US, Oswald was not well paid, true, but he was paid. You write, “A few of those in the Russian immigrant community felt so bad for them that they helped them out with money for food and a few things for the baby.”
The people you refer to, Ruth and Michael Paine, and George de Mohrenschildt, were also CIA assets or agents who were “baby sitting” Lee and Marina, respectively.
Again, people who work undercover are literally “under cover”, which represents an obstacle to identifying their CIA ties — as it is meant to do. Under cover means they are “officially” employed by somebody else as “cover”. Oswald, as we know, was employed in various low-paying and fairly menial jobs. He was moved around these jobs like a pawn on a chessboard. Inlcuding, of course, the Book Depository job, which he was directed to by Ruth Paine.
Oswald was also an FBI asset.
Now that you have read Bugliosi, you might want to read Jim DiEugenio’s Reclaiming Parkland, where you will see in great, documented detail exactly why Bugliosi is not even close to authoritative, Reclaiming History is nothing but a hugely expanded version of a tendentious lawyer’s brief that Bugliosi originally concocted for a fictional television “trial”.
The questions this morning are all good.
This country is now being run on values defined by Dick Cheney because of massive cowardice on the part of its citizens and leaders.
Letting sociopathic, congenital lying losers in the intelligence community continually get away with crimes against humanity should be disturbing to a normal people of conscience.
But as we can see after 9/11 and now with calls from some of our fellow citizens to repulse innocent children at the border and conduct systematic extermination in Gaza, America has lost both its mind and its conscience.
This is the best ignored quote, by Jim Garrison, from his Playboy interview in 1967 during his investigation into JFK’s murder:
I was with the artillery supporting the division that took Dachau; I arrived there the day after it was taken, when bulldozers were making pyramids of human bodies outside the camp. What I saw there has haunted me ever since. Because the law is my profession, I’ve always wondered about the judges throughout Germany who sentenced men to jail for picking pockets at a time when their own government was jerking gold from the teeth of men murdered in gas chambers. I’m concerned about all of this because it isn’t a German phenomenon; it’s a human phenomenon. It can happen here, because there has been no change and there has been no progress and there has been no increase of understanding on the part of men for their fellow man.
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity.
But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.
Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
I’ve learned enough about the machinations of the CIA in the past year to know that this is no longer the dreamworld America I once believed in. The imperatives of the population explosion, which almost inevitably will lessen our belief in the sanctity of the individual human life, combined with the awesome power of the CIA and the defense establishment, seem destined to seal the fate of the America I knew as a child and bring us into a new Orwellian world where the citizen exists for the state and where raw power justifies any and every immoral act. I’ve always had a kind of knee-jerk trust in my Government’s basic integrity, whatever political blunders it may make.
But I’ve come to realize that in Washington, deceiving and manipulating the public are viewed by some as the natural prerogatives of office. Huey Long once said, “Fascism will come to America in the name of anti-fascism.” I’m afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.
+++
1967.
“Fascism
willhas come to America in the name of anti-fascismterrorism.”What else would you call crony capitalism?
So, let me get this straight: the head spy lied?
yeah, to his congressional overseers who he also spied on.
As my old friend Angelo used to say about various felons, “That don’t make him a bad guy.”
Under oath as well. Which under some circumstances when the lying is by some people, it’s considered perjury and a crime. As Bill Clinton discovered. (That’s the only issue on which I’ll defend the guy.) And lying to the FBI is always a crime — as Martha Stewart learned, but unlike all the DC weenie pols and officials, she served her time in a pen. She’s one tough cookie.
He’s not paid to lie to absolutely everybody.
Not by us, at least.
What Obama basically said was “when the going gets tough, we shred the constitution!”
But what Obama didn’t mention is that America had a President who was telling people to go shopping, and a Vice-President who gleefully set up his own CIA to run the country, and a National Security Adviser who never gave a second’s thought to national security (“nobody would have expected…”)and a Secretary of Defense who was hellbent on starting wars.
In those awful years from 2001 to 2008, it was profoundly disappointing to see how quickly and easily so many American leaders abandoned their oath to defend the constitution.
So I guess its no wonder Americans were scared.
We have this idea that the POTUS is the most powerful man in the world. Have you seen any evidence of this being true in the last five years? The President has been blocked at every turn. But the intelligence community has acted freely. We’re always telling Republicans that they overestimate the President’s power. Maybe we are as well. I see no evidence that he controls them, and not the other way around.
Oh, dear. Heaven forbid anyone get that idea. Since it’s, uh, true. Obama is a war criminal. In the last 70 years, it’s been part of the POTUS job description. Not a month has gone by in that entire period when the U.S. president wasn’t overseeing multiple crimes against humanity.
Do I really need to go through a sampling of the list under Obama? War crimes are such a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy that they’re rarely even noticed here at home, much less named as such. In the rest of the world, of course, it’s a different story, especially outside U.S. allies and client states.
The most significant thing that, as a policy matter, distinguished Obama as a presidential candidate from Hillary Clinton was his statements in 2007 advocating a fundamental reexamination of the USA’s imperial foreign policy. That was seven long years ago. Such rhetoric disappeared long before the Iowa caucuses; Obama became president knowing perfectly well what that aspect of his new job would entail.
Statements that Obama “is afraid” of the intelligence community, and especially irrelevant citations of the Kennedy assassination over 50 years ago, serve to absolve Obama of moral culpability for crimes that he signed up to commit. That’s bullshit. The CIA and other intel agencies are only a part, and not the largest one, of an entire criminal aspect to US policies that has been a bipartisan consensus in Washington for generations. Calling for Brennan to be fired because he lied to the wrong people – when lying (and murder) are central to his job description – assumes that Brennan, and the agency he runs, are somehow in fundamental opposition to Obama. They’re not.
Obama signed up to run the CIA, and the US military, and to implement the preferred policies of the economic and ideological interests they serve. He is now defending Brennan vigorously, just as he has overseen a dramatic expansion of the CIA’s mission and budget (as well as those of the DIA, NSA, and countless lesser agencies), and just as he has undertaken unprecedented steps to silence their internal critics. Calling him powerless, or even constrained by the people he oversees, is to make excuses for his very active role in ordering some of the worst crimes human beings can commit.
I like this interview with Russ Bellant because it states how easily evil was embedded in our political system after WWII:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/179057/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-
secret
Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, and Bernie Sanders all just voted to strongly support the Israeli attack on Gaza. Either they’re not really the decent people they appear to be, or some organizations are simply too powerful to take on. I do not know if that is the situation with Obama and the intelligence community, but I don’t believe it’s BS to suggest it as a possibility. We can’t find the truth if we assume we know the answers.
this is the rankest left-wing bullshit, Geov.
That’s why I keep arguing that the legislative authorization of the institutions, made in 1947-1949 must be repealed. If Congress is too powerless to repeal those and restore Constitutional government, then we should at least be honest that we live in a military dictatorship and start asking James Clapper questions in press conferences.
If we are not to that point, we need some positive action from the President and Congress instead of interminable bureaucratic evasions and lame excuses.
The silence of the Republican Party on this is very interesting, puzzling, and concerning.
— from “captain america: the winter soldier” (2014)
Also fiction.
Yet Petraeus resigned over an affair? Which was an open secret until another agency accidentally intercepted incriminating emails? Uh-huh…
The president is the CIA’s boss but not knowing the true balance of power it is hard to call a winner. Yet it seems the executive is largely helpless to assess foreign policy decisions without the CIA, and the rest, on board; there are plenty of ways the CIA could hobble a president’s choices, especially where opinions differ on some policy. I’m guessing this happens to a greater or lesser degree fairly often; things not mentioned, intelligence that turns out to be unreliable and so forth.
So don’t expect the president to grab them by the shorties when he knows he’ll need them for the next crisis du jour, even at best of times. Eisenhower gave the military-industrial complex speech at the end of his presidency.
And yet it also seems abundantly clear that the competition for power from within the intelligence community is incessant and its means covert and ruthless. This is not a healthy prospect, especially when alarming doubts have been raised about the civic probity of many of our fellow voters.
Effective constraint of the intelligence establishment has always come from Congress; the same place the money comes from. If the CIA is hacking the staff of the very Senate Committee tasked with investigating them, and then lying about it, what chances do we have? It is ironic that the divided legislature, thanks to a bunch of Republican yahoos, has basically given the intelligence establishment carte blanche. As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, “What a country!”
“We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba… I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro.”
What this actually shows is that Phillips was covering his ass right up to his dying day. But in good CIA tradition, he left us with a “limited hangout”, because it does at least seem to be true that the plan, or rather one of the many plans, that the CIA had devised against Castro, was modified and used against Kennedy.
Since he himself had been LHO’s handler, Phillips knew better than anyone that Oswald was neither given the mission of killing Castro in Cuba, nor did he kill Kennedy. Oswald was utterly incapable, either morally or technically, of either of those things.
Oswald was the carefully set-up patsy for the JFK hit. Philips knew this because he played a major role in doing it, probably was in charge of it in fact. Perhaps what he is really saying is that Oswald would have been the patsy for the Castro hit had they actually been able to pull it off.
To clear up ambiguity:
By “played a major role in doing it, orobably was in charge of it himself”, I refer to the positioning of Oswald as patsy, not the JFK hit as such.
It’s really not possible to figure the whole thing out.
One thing I have concluded is that something went awry. Something went completely against the plan.
When you look at the contacts that “Oswald” made down in Mexico City, you have these phone calls to the Cuban and Russian consulates that were intercepted and transcribed. In two of them, you have a person who can barely speak Russian, and two more of them you have a person conversing in Spanish which Oswald did not speak. And then the woman who death with Oswald in the Cuban consulate, Sylvia Duran, who allegedly slept with Oswald while he was down there and took him to a “twist” party, gave a completely different physical description of him. And the one photo of Oswald down there that was released is definitely not Oswald.
So, for whatever reason, someone was down there in September and early October who was impersonating Oswald and trying to get a visa to go to Cuba and then on to Russia.
Not only were they doing a lousy job of this, but the idea would have to be to implicate Cuba in the murder of the president. But as soon as the murder happened, the whole apparatus of the government went into overdrive to kill that exact kind of speculation.
Now, if David Atlee Phillips’ fictional story is to be believed, the purpose of Oswald going to Mexico City to get a visa to enter Cuba would have been so he could get in position to murder Castro. But, in that case, Oswald’s inept effort to get a visa would be Phillips’ inept effort to get a visa. Not only that, but Phillips knew that the consulates were under photographic surveillance and that their phones were tapped. He would have wanted that evidence to surface, but the photographic evidence never did.
It’s possible that someone was impersonating Oswald for some other reason entirely, but it’s still mystifying that the person or people doing it spoke in Spanish and mangled Russian. That is not the right way to implicate a person who speaks fluent Russian and no Spanish.
No, but it gets easier to see the outlines when one ceases to see the CIA as monolithic.
There were some very disgruntled people after the Bay of Pigs who wielded autonomy if not authority and they intentionally visited the mother of all damage control crises on their own agency, not to mention the Navy, the FBI, the State Department and the Russians. Anyone, in fact, who had ever looked at Oswald. He was, as they say, ‘sheep dipped.’
That’s the suspicious thing; Oswald was kryptonite to most of the most powerful institutions in the land. Why him? There’s only one simple answer.
Well, it is still clear that what they were trying to do didn’t work.
I agree with both of you: something went wrong.
One thing I have noticed in considering the course of the story, and this becomes especially clear at the end, and above all with the formation and activities of the Warren Commission, is that there was a huge and growing tension between those who wanted to blame a conspiacy of Cuba/USSR for the assassination, which I believe was the original plan, and those who wanted the assassin to be an unconnected “Lone Nut”.
Many factions were united in the deep desire to get rid of JFK, but I think the really big guns, or internationalists, within and behind the CIA, realized that it would be at the risk of nuclear war to blame the commies for the hit. And this was clearly the rationale for the Warren commission, stated in so many words to Pres. Johnson and to Warren himself.
But there were others, which for convenience if not complete accuracy I will refer to as Bircher types, also including several members of a right-wing group called the Shickshinny Knights of Malta — who did not get the memo and continued blaming the Cubans and Russians. To take just one example, a disinformation book published in 1978, Appointment in Dallas, by one Hugh C. MacDonald, whose main source was Herman Kimsey, Total BS, but designed to blame the Russians. These folks were connected with European fascist networks. This is still going on. Only yesterday I saw a supermarket tabloid claiming “new evidence” that Oswald killed JFK for the Russians.
The Oswald in Mexico City thing was such a fuckup, and so peppered with ridiculous ambiguities and mistakes (it has not even been possible to establish definitively whether or not the real Oswald was actually in Mexico City!), that it’s hard to believe this confusion was not deliberate.
In other words, the whole “Oswald in Mexico” thing was on the one hand designed to derail any SERIOUS credibility of the idea that the Russians or the Cubans were really behind Oswald, while at the same time raising the spectre that the right wing masses, who were far less fastidious about evidence, would believe it, and thus pressure Johnson into a serious political and indeed world crisis. The Warren Commission was the solution. As the WC was under the real control of the CIA, and as many of the extreme RW actually hated the CIA (though often unwittingly manipulated by them), that tells you somthing right there.
What the real forces behind the assassination wanted was not nuclear war, but prolonged non-nuclear war in SE Asia. Which of course they got.
I believe that “what went wrong” had something to do with this disagreement about ultimate goals.
Another thought along the same lines: It is possible that “Oswald in Mexico City” was actually pulled off by the Russians in order to throw a monkey wrench into a key part of the plot, and that the CIA disinformation (such as pictures supposedly of Oswald that were not Oswald) was designed to cover their ass for the fact that the Russians outwitted them on this particular front.
The whole carefully built up dossier of Oswald as a “defector” and head of a nonexistent Fair Play for Cuba Branch would have been enough to blame Russia and Cuba. There’s no evidence whatsoever of Oswald being GENUINELY involved in Castro assasination attempts, though he was at some points hanging out with people who were (DRE, coordinated by the CIA).
It is known (see Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, 2d edition) that Russian intelligence was well aware of Oswald beforehand and the fact that he was the designated patsy for the coming JFK hit, and that there was a plan to blame them. Undercover agent Richard Case Nagell even tried to explain this to Oswald, but Oswald didn’t believe him.
If you haven;t read the Russell book, I urge you to do so. It is one of the most important ever written on the JFK assassination.
‘…it’s hard to believe this confusion was not deliberate.’ Agreed, and it immediately convinced the rest of the agency and the intelligence community that they would never be able to explain what actually happened to the American public. That’s why all the fuss about the tapes in the immediate aftermath; whomever conspired to kill JFK the whole CIA was in on the whitewash from day one.
Their fingerprints were all over Oswald. That it would cause World War III was a lame excuse for all the above-mentioned agencies to conspire to write themselves out of the Oswald timeline in the hollowed out Warren Commission Report.
Exactly.
Well, JFK was killed, so there’s that. I think we agree about most of this, actually; your link to the review of the Newman book, Oswald and the CIA is spot-on. I’ve read my copy twice through and it’s both a lengthy, demanding read and a ripping yarn; it’s all in there for anyone to see if one connects the dots.
Incidentally, your fascinating quote from Haldeman’s book above supports, albeit tenuously, the theory of a connection between the JFK assassination and the Watergate impeachment.
The ‘right-wing’ faction in the CIA that was sympathetic to the rogue assassination in 1963 is outmanoeuvred by the ‘civic duty’ faction when Nixon starts to get a firm executive grip on the national security apparatus. A tale of two coups; it has been downhill ever since.
In the ‘grand bargain between the citizenry and the state‘ the scales tilted away from the citizenry from the time of the Manhattan project; Vietnam was the last dance on the card. The existential contract between industrialised states and their citizens has changed irrevocably and the JFK assassination was just another of several milestones on the way.
Agreed. And there is no evidence that Nixon actually ordered the Watergate burglaries or know about them beforehand, and they seem to have been deliberately sabotaged by one of the burglars, James McCord, who, along with Howard Hunt, were close to Richard Helms.
http://www.salon.com/2012/05/05/watergates_final_mystery/