I have a lovely reprint of this article from 1975 in the flesh. Gallery Magazine — a girly book.
But here it is on the web. Very much worth reading.
See Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth.
Why does the Pentagon want a Command for the homeland?
Interesting that the Pentagon asked the President.
Congress (the people’s house)? Â Apparently none of their damned business.
 It’s almost four years since journalist Gary Webb was suicided.
Here he speaks.
Webb in the mid 90s had re-broken in a big way the big story of the CIA’s involvement in the international drug trade — updating old tales from Vietnam by documenting CIA-NSC responsibility for the Crack explosion in American cities during the Reagan years.
Webb’s serial newspaper reportage in 1996 bore the name Dark Alliance, and was republished in a book of the same name.
Those were the Clinton years; the stories not only got published, but drew widespread attention from the major media.
But Webb himself was soon and suddenly fired by his San Jose newspaper — which also destroyed its web archive of the Dark Alliance story. Soon it was clear that the author had been blacklisted out of the business.
A month after Bush-Cheney were re-installed in 2004, Webb was shot twice in the head and died. Suicide, the coroner reported. Neither Little Jimmy Grimaldi nor Webb’s friends believe that.
Read his book.
And think about Daniel Moynihan in 1991 …
“The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of thinking,” Moynihan said. “Can we muster the will to redefine ourselves?”
And then tell YourObama to purge and reform the National Security Apparat.
The Strong Man, a biography of John Mitchell, Nixon’s atty general and campaign manager, and one of the first and largest bodies to fall from the heavens as the Watergate scandal unfolded, came out earlier this year.
Jim Hougan (author of two important books, Spooks and Secret Agenda, the latter about Watergate) and others commented on the new Mitchell book at the Education Forum, which across the years has housed perhaps the best discussion of inter alia the JFK murder.
I posted a comment in response to Hougan’s overview of the book, and asked him three questions. He replied. All visible here.
The discussion may not be entirely rooted in nostalgia. There is a tenuous Bush family connection that reaches, yet alive, into the present day. If looking for a quicky — here.
I don’t know how old this tape is. Kinda interesting.
And here’s a good montage of early reportage re explosions in the buildings that eventually fell.
Bonus Clip: Michael Scheuer, former CIA bin Laden hunter and author of Imperial Hubris and Marching Toward Hell, faces off with Bill Maher.
I didn’t know this doc from 1976 was on the web.Â
It features a lengthy interview with hero Roger Craig, a Deputy Sheriff in Dallas who, among other things:
– was on the trail of a Grassy Knoll assassin within moments of the murder, and
– was present when the rifle of the Book Depository was discovered and found to be a sharpshooter’s Mauser (not the old Italian soldier’s rifle that the Warren Commission reported and attributed to Lee Oswald).
Pressing these differences across the years seems to have cost Mr Craig his life. From the excellent Spartacus vault run by John Simkin in England:
In 1973 a car forced Craig’s car off a mountain road. He was badly injured but he survived the accident.
In 1974 he surviving another shooting in Waxahachie, Texas.
The following year he was seriously wounded when his car engine exploded. Craig told friends that the Mafia had decided to kill him.
Roger Craig was found dead on 15th May, 1975. It was later decided he had died as a result of self-inflicted gunshot wounds.
Craig’s suiciding prompted another hero, the attorney Mark Lane, author of two of the most important books on the subject, to put together this documentary, based on a filmed interview conducted with Craig in 1974.
Very much worth watching. Five parts, all there on YouTube.
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It’s hard to always look away …
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In May the UK’s Ministry of Defense released files on UFOs through 1987.
Last week they released files for ’87 through ’92.
Bonus clip! Art Bell radio show call-in: Pilot supposedly invades Area 51 in Nevada and gets shot down … (?)
ED NOTE: See comments below to follow the question of Bin Laden’s existence into May 2011, when the americans announce that bin Laden has been killed. I for one do not yet believe them.
The sudden heat in Pakistan has McCain and Obama stomping and swearing to get Osama next year.
But it seems most likely that Osama died around the time of the Tora Bora bombings in late 2001, when this video was released:
Around the same time, the CIA said it found on a Jalalabad computer another video of Osama.
But the blubbery fellow therein was probably somebody else.
True, this Fatty Osama (left above, right below), as he’s generally called, has appeared twice (if memory serves). He just doesn’t seem to be bin Laden. His nose, to begin. His jocular manner. His jewelry. Supposedly he’s writing with the wrong hand …
Moreover, he neither sounds like nor uses language like Osama, who, acccording to arabist Bruce Lawrence, speaks in an elevated, pious and poetic style most distinct. Neither Fatty Osama’s vulgar gloating over the attacks in his first video, nor the voice on recent tapes discussing world affairs like Wolf Blitzer, come close.
Lawrence has published a book of Osama’s messages and is one of Uncle Sam’s experts on his language, diction, and their meanings. During 2006 he came to think something was fishy. Then went on radio in 2007 to spread the news:
Lawrence, citing informants in the US intelligence apparatus’s Bin Laden units, told [radio host] Kevin Barrett that everyone knows the tape is fake, adding that the hoax has been kept alive because it is politically useful to those who wish to bolster the official 9/11 conspiracy that 19 hijackers directed by Bin Laden from a cave carried out the attacks.
Here’s another arabist, once employed in the 90s to translate and analyze a real Osama tape. He agrees with Lawrence, and is good to recall that shortly after the attacks in 2001 Osama told a Pakistan paper that he had nothing to do with them.
And here’s an overview of the question, including what purports to be a facsimile of an Egyptian newspaper that on December 26, 2001 reported bin Laden’s death. The next day what seems like the last genuine video (first photo above) was released.
If indeed he’s long gone, then who’s pulling our leg?
Both sides have reason to keep the hero alive.
If Al Qaeda’s behind the curtain, then …
It’s El Cid. Charlton Heston, as the legendary spanish hero in the wars with the Moors.
He dies one night, recall, in a besieged fortress, the battle far from won. So his people prop the corpse on his horse. Tie a cross to his arms and back Jesus style. Then as dawn breaks they open the gates, slap the horse’s ass …
And El Cid rides again.
But if it’s Uncle Sam behind the scam, then …
It’s Goldstein, from 1984:Â the phantom jewish bolshevik terrorist on every telescreen noon and night, whose (non) existence grounds the propaganda of the police state and its perpetual war:
“We are at war with Eurasia and have always been at war with Eurasia.”
But then, a month later:
“We are at war with East Asia and have always been at war with East Asia.”
El Cid. Goldstein. But not bin Laden. He probly dead.
So one wishes Obama would stop talking about Osama.
Talk about what is and will be.
Has everyone already seen this?
At attempt to deconstruct powers at war with humanity.
Seems the work of Libertarians (just a guess), with whom I never quite agree.
Nevertheless worth chewing on.
Smaller bits of the whole are available on YouTube.
Here is an “intelligence briefing” delivered by american Herbert Meyer at the Davos gathering this past spring.
Much of what he has to say is familiar Likud Lobby fare. Europe-bashing. Certitude that the war in Iraq was a good idea. Straussian insistence that Myth (religious) must underlie successful politics.
Also seems gung ho on oil as the key to the future. Not much hope there, seems to me.
Nevertheless it’s certainly worth reading.
Comments perhaps to come when time permits.
Steve Alten, the author of a fictional novel about the attacks, The Shell Game, apparently made some progress on CBS radio.
The fellow writing this up also says that Bob Kerrey (former 9/11 Commission member) is moving to set up a permanent commission to deal with the continual inflow of evidence and the like. ??
Noticed this in passing, re Mossad involvement in 9/11. Worth chewing.
Here’s a clip of the tip of the wing of a trundling 737-700 knocking over a truck without pause, and with hardly any damage to the wing (see closeup late in the clip).
Recall that the wings of the 757-200 — a heftier jet (255,000 lbs vs 155,000) — that supposedly flew into the Pentagon on 9/11 supposedly folded up like closing scissors upon hitting the concrete walls and disappeared into a 16-20 foot wide hole (there to disintegrate), with little damage to the walls where the length of the wings and the engines made contact.
Wing span 124 feet.
I had heard about this Lone Gunmen episode before but never saw any of it until today. It was actually the series pilot, and aired March 4, 2001.
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The story was about terrorists seizing control of an airliner with remote avionics, and flying it into the World Trade Center.
And it turned out that the terrorists were native: a “faction” within the U.S. national security apparat.
Their motive: to restart the cold war arms merchandizing. This seems (IMHO) the only element of the forecast to have been a bit off.
Recall Rice’s statement while testifying before the 9/11 Commission that no one in U.S. intel had anticipated terrorists flying jetliners into buildings. Seems the Octopus doesn’t watch television.
The series was an X-Files spinoff featuring the cool nerds (known to friends as the Lone Gunmen) who’d occasionally hack computers to aid the X-Files FBI paranormal team.
The X-Files (for those even less familiar with TV than me) was mostly about aliens in league, since Roswell, with certain Washington powers.
Here’s something: Journal of 9/11 Studies
These rather unknown but fine films are all about people on the rack of life post 9/11, sliding down into their seats as they enter the Terrordrome.
The first two, however, are gentle things that work toward healing.
The last — like most mental illnesses you’ll find in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — runs a chronic course.
1. Land of Plenty — by Wim Wenders — is a low-key gem about a young woman (Michelle Williams — wonderful) returning from Israel to find her last known relative: a Vietnam-vet uncle on a self-appointed mission to secure Los Angeles County from terror.
Note: It was shot with a Panasonic DVX-100, an inexpensive digital video camera that I used in a filmmaking course this summer. Looks great; end of debate.
Wim has made two of my favorite films, Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World.
Bonus: His recent Don’t Come Knocking got creamed by critics — but having just seen it I don’t see why. Sam Shepard as an aging Western star who flees the set to find what’s missing. Tim Roth as the completion-bond bounty hunter sent to track him down. They wind up in Butte, Montana, where Jessica Lange and others are waiting.
2. Fay Grim is a superior sequel — by Hal Hartley — to his odd success Henry Fool. The story takes a turn into the 21st century when it turns out Henry was not a mad drunk after all, but a CIA fool once tight with the charismatic leader of the mujahadin in Afghanistan during the 80s, and now on the run from his employers, in the person of Jeff Goldblum.
Parker Posey plays Henry’s honeypie wife, Fay. Sweetly stimulating.
And James Urbaniak is great as a garbageman turned poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature who defines a cool New Jersey state of mind.
3. Sorry, Haters stars Robin Wright Penn as a NYker who works for a reality TV show — Sorry, Haters! — that showcases the lives of the rich and famous of Hip Hop and what not. No wonder she’s going mad, and daydreams while jamming forks into her palms about fixing 9/11. She seems to have a plan — but needs a nice Arab cab driver to carry it out.
For the first time the anniversary falls on a Tuesday.
Tuesday six years ago was a crisp, clear day in New York. Today the pall of Mordor has issued forth, oppressing the city, and one daydreams of the Shire.
It seems that September 11 has supplanted July 4 as our national day.
What then has supplanted the Declaration of Independence?
The Patriot Act?
Has the country been born again?
What does its future look like, when the hearts & minds stray from the day the Declaration was signed to embrace a martial defeat that breeds ever more momentous defeats?
The remainder of this rather lengthy piece, enhanced with many a curious link, has been filed elsewhere – click here to read.
And then please feel happy to post comments below.
robert fisk of course is the independent’s mideast correspondent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-even-i-question-the-truth-about-911-462904.html
partial:
I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93′s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Ed Note: The original bit of Conversation posted here in mid 2007 after a quick reading of Hunt’s new memoir is currently undergoing renovation, and is somewhat in pieces, like Frankenstein’s monster on the surgery table. (I’m trying to incorporate a few other recent books containing useful bits … )
A much enhanced draft will appear before Hell freezes on the main newcombat.net page.
E. Howard Hunt, prolific pulp novelist and career CIA agent, political and psychological operations his metier, and a leader of the Watergate break-in gang (which consisted entirely of CIA officers or assets with the exception of goofy pawn G. Gordon Liddy), had a book published earlier this year, shortly after his death.
American Spy updates his 1975 autobiography Undercover — and offers for the first time Hunt’s dubious offerings as to who killed President John F. Kennedy.
Hunt’s chapter on the murder proceeds like a drunk in the dark along familiar pot-holed streets. Readers new to the neighborhood trying to follow will likely stumble.
Without protest Hunt entertains the notion that the murder was managed by CIA brethren, working freelance, as oft was their wont. But precisely which ones he professes to remain unable to say certainly.
Nevertheless, the weight of his discussion falls foremost on wild Bill Harvey, and then on Cord Meyer, as the likely top conspirators within the Company.
He also rehearses, without endorsement, increasingly public suspicions of David Morales, “rumored,” Hunt intones, “to be a cold-blooded killer, the go-to guy in black ops situations where the government needed to have someone neutralized.”
And some people say, Hunt reports with a shrug, that maybe his old Psy Ops confrere Dave Phillips was involved.
But when he turns to Frank Sturgis, a well known mob and CIA goon with whom he shared a bunk in prison for deeds done at the Watergate, things seems clear:
He was a congenial guy who would follow orders but had a room-temperature IQ. He was also very discretionally challenged …. I don’t think Sturgis was part of a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy simply because nobody who was intelligent enough to concoct such a wide-ranging plot would have trusted him.
At this point a reader begins to feel memoir morphing to pulp fiction.
Fortunately, however, American Spy is not the only account of the murder that Howard Hunt left behind.
Zap some popcorn ….
Part One
(a) Cord Meyer 
, born to an eastern blue-blood family, lost an eye and his twin brother in the second war. He came home in 1944 transformed, and soon was an activist peacenik and celebrity.
In 1946 he won the prestigious O. Henry Short Story Prize, and the Jaycees named him one of the top ten most promising young Americans. (Richard Nixon was also on the list.) See David Talbot’s Brothers.
A year later Meyer was elected president of the United World Federalists, and would go on to draft with Robert Maynard Hutchins a constitution for world government.
Young Cord Meyer, then, was a genuine pheenom, a crusading phoenix of youthful idealism rising from the ashes of the war, whose poster came to commonly adorn the walls of co-ed dormitory rooms.
Then, somehow, in 1951, he was recruited by CIA Director Allen Dulles to organize Operation Mockingbird, under which hundreds of national journalists were put on the CIA payroll in exchange for cooperation on national security matters.
He also seems to have become LSD guru Timothy Leary’s contact at CIA, where the drug was manufactured and curiously tested.
But then in 1954 Meyer left the Company, or so it seemed, disenchanted. A critic of the nuclear arms race, a preacher of pacifism during the Korean war, a proponent of world government, member of the National Council on the Arts …
Little wonder Senator Joe McCarthy accused him of being a communist. Despite cover from CIA chiefs, Hoover’s FBI was soon on Cord’s case.
Across months he successfully defended himself against the charge, but in the process seems to have lost all his picnic spirit. After going through some public motions of quitting the Company, he went looking for publishing work in New York.
Spiritually speaking, Cord Meyer so far seems an unlikely candidate for JFK’s murderer.
But Hunt runs his name up the flag pole nevertheless because in 1961 Meyer’s first wife (divorced in 1958), a lovely Age of Aquarius dreamer named Mary Pinchot, began a serious affair with JFK that lasted until his death.
In 1945 Cord Meyer, newly wed, met journalist and fellow veteran John F. Kennedy at the San Francisco conference where the United Nations were born. Reports are that the two disagreed about the limits of internationalism (Kennedy the more conservative) — and that Cord was dismayed to discover that Mary and Kennedy had first met many years before as prep students.
White House logs show their last meeting there was November 1, 1963, the day President Diem of Vietnam was murdered in a CIA-backed coup.
The plan had been to merely remove Diem and his brother. Instead at the last moment they fled the CIA plane that would have taken them to Paris, returned to the presidential palace, where they found the coup in progress, and were shot by the local rivals whom Washington had endorsed. Or so writes Fletcher Prouty.
Kennedy was distraught, called Mary, and she visited the White House for several hours that afternoon. Three weeks later he was dead.
Jealousy, then, is the motive that Hunt repeats and endorses as to why Cord Meyer might have led the plot.
Days after Kennedy’s murder, Mary told friend Timothy Leary (so he writes in Flashbacks), “They couldn’t control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much. … They’ll cover everything up. I gotta come see you. I’m scared. I’m afraid. Be careful.”
She was murdered eleven months later. October 1964. Two shots, to the head and chest, the weapon never recovered.
A black man found hiding nearby was tried but not convicted. The case remains cold to this day.
Mary had a sister, Toni, who happened to be married to Ben Bradlee, the future famous editor of The Washington Post.
Bradlee and JFK had been friends since 1957, when they each bought houses on the same block in Georgetown. Bradlee was the local Newsweek man. Senator Kennedy was eyeing the White House. Mary, Toni and Jacqueline Kennedy became friends.
Bradlee writes that the morning after Mary’s murder he found James Jesus Angleton — the legendary and some say cracked-pot chief of CIA counterintelligence — inside Mary’s locked house, looking, he told Bradlee plainly, for her diary.
Together they searched and found nothing.
That afternoon, Bradlee and Toni thought to look through Mary’s studio, where she had painted large canvases with fading colors in the manner of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler.
They came upon Angleton picking the lock of the studio door.
“He would have been red-faced,” Bradlee writes, “if his face could have gotten red, and he left almost without a word.”
Mary’s prime biographer Nina Burleigh, writes that Cord Meyer “wept uncontrollably” at her funeral — and that Angleton and Richard Helms (“his two closest friends in the CIA”) sat directly beside him in the pew.
It also happens that Angleton was married to one of Mary’s closest friends, Cicely D’Autremont.
It’s perhaps, then, understandable that after Toni found Mary’s diary, and with husband Bradlee read it — finding to their shock (Bradlee says) that it detailed a deep affair with the dead President — they gave the book to Angleton, asking him to burn it.
In the CIA book-burning machine.
“It was naive of us,” Bradlee writes, “but we figured they were state of the art …”
Instead Angleton held the diary for three years, then returned it to Toni, who finally sent it up in flames.
It’s a curious story, but perhaps without public interest.
Then again: Years later, having been bounced in some disgrace from CIA, Angleton told reporters that he had bugged Mary’s house and studio early on — and thus followed her daring affair as it unfolded.
The most startling product of this operation was the revelation that Mary, with the help of Leary, tried to Give Peace a Chance by turning the President on during their trysts with marijuana and LSD. (The latter just once, Angleton reports.)
Indeed, Mary — no less a crusader than her ex-husband once had been — had organized a cell in D.C. of “eight intelligent women” (she told Leary), each involved with a power player whose consciousness she tried to raise with flower-power chemicals.
A friend of Mary’s told biographer Burleigh that once, after Jack and she had smoked three joints, he wondered aloud, “Suppose the Russians did something now?”
It’s not yet clear (in my reading) if Angleton was listening.
Toni (left), Mary, and their mom, a stern Goldwater girl
Note that journalist Joseph Trento, as late as 2001, published The Secret History of the CIA, which relates an account of Mary’s diary much more flattering to Angleton than Bradlee’s. Time has told that Angleton and Trento had a long standing relationship — source and mouthpiece — that for the most part seems to have mutually beneficial.
Hunt, for his part, seems in 2007 to go out of his way to tell Mary’s tale, and then, with a nod to the LSD tryst, concludes that her murder “was probably a professional hit by someone trying to protect the Kennedy legacy.”
Yet when he rehearses Bradlee’s version of the diary story, labelling the “interesting fact” of Angleton’s appearance “mysterious” — he follows up immediately, in an apparent non-sequitur, with “I don’t think that Cord Meyer killed his ex-wife, and I don’t think it was Angleton either.”
The comment may startle less when taken with the fact that in 1975 — the year across which Angleton was painfully pried out of CIA by new director William Colby — Hunt in a rare moment of public candor told reporter Seymour Hersh (a well established mouthpiece of the NS apparat) about “a small assassination team” within CIA, headed by a certain Colonel Boris Pash, that dealt with “suspected double-agents and low-ranking officials.”
Three years later, in 1978, journalist Trento reported, based on CIA sources, that the manager of Colonel Pash’s team was Angleton, his golden goose source.
Trento’s famous story (as we shall see) also reported the existence of an inhouse CIA memo from 1966, in which Angleton as housekeeper warns new director Helms that the Company has a problem: Hunt was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.
Throughout the history we are reading, threads almost hidden connect Angleton and Hunt. Best, perhaps, to begin looking for them now.
In the late 50s, after his divorce from Mary, Cord Meyer began working with the CIA again, probably having never really left, but overseas this time, in the clandestine service, and became (it is said) a hardliner on communism.
This would seem more the man whom Hunt has now proffered as a Kennedy killer.
Stateside again, Meyer rose to Deputy Director of Plans (covert ops), and resumed his close friendship Angleton.
But it seems he had indeed lost his picnic spirit:
Meyer fell increasingly under the spell of the gloomy, Byzantine views of his his CIA mentor Angleton. “Cord entered the agency as a fresh idealist and left a wizened tool of Angleton,” observed Tom Braden, Meyer’s boss early in his intelligence career. “Angleton was a master of the black arts. He bugged everything in town, including me. Whatever Angleton thought, Cord thought.
He ran the London station for a while, then seems to have quit for good, in 1977, as the investigations of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were heating up and the old guard were put out to pasture. He wrote a syndicated column thereafter for many years.
Shortly before death, in 2001, Meyer was asked by writer C. David Heymann whom he thought had murdered Mary. Heymann reports that Meyer replied:
“The same sons of bitches that killed John F. Kennedy.”
Mary and Cord on their wedding day, April 1945
(b) WILLIAM KING HARVEY, Wild Bill, receives Hunt’s harshest treatment in 2007.
Hunt’s tipsy peripatetic rhetoric in American Spy is Aristotelian two fold, in that he rigorously prefaces each topic with “Some people say …” or similar. And rarely retracts it.
The result, when boiled down to bare logic, is little more than a review of the bad things people have been saying about the CIA since the first strong challenge of the Warren Commission Report — Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment — was published in 1966, soon to be followed by the first and only criminal case in the matter, brought in New Orleans in 1967 by District Attorney Jim Garrison (whose On the Trail of the Assassins is wonderfully written and remains a must read).
Of the five CIAists Hunt discusses as candidates, only with Harvey does he step out from behind the “Some people say” to assert
[("vaguely possible," "possible", "the most likely suspect"),
Harvey worked in West Berlin in the 50s -- Cold War Central -- where he famously dug a tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy to plant bugs. All for naught, however: the Reds were wise thanks to Brit turncoat George Blake and fed the tunnel barium meals for many years.
HUNT's VIEW
Harvey had once worked for the FBI and brought streetwise manners to CIA which Hunt, who fancied himself a gentleman, was known to have found vile. Even from the distance of 2007 he recalls Harvey as
a drunk who had been kicked out of the FBI. Balding, with loose jowls and rolls of fat jiggling under his chin and bulging out of a tight collar, he sported a short pencil-thin moustache, trying to give his face some aspect of personality.
Harvey had found an easy spot in which to nest under the CIA's counterintelligence director, James Angleton, a very odd couple, I thought. While I never had any reason to deal with him, I thought he was a strange man who should not be representing the CIA, much less the United States. His supply chief worked for me for a time in Washington....
"The guy is awful," he complained. "You should see what he's up to [in Rome]. Havery’s wife is a WAC officer who looks more masculine than a lot of men I know. ” He implied that there was some kind of strange sex going on.
A reader feels the pulp artist protests too much.
Violent and a vocal Kennedy-hater, Harvey has often been floated as a party to the murder, and has always seemed a decent guess.
ANGLETON AND HARVEY
Stateside again after Berlin, Harvey became Angleton’s deputy and the two seem to have been rather inseparable. Many sources echo Hunt’s remark on this curious friendship — Angleton the ascetic orchid-breeding poet, Harvey the brash and blubbery foul-mouthed roughneck. Alcoholism they shared, but that was unremarkable at Langley prior to Watergate.
Harvey is CI Deputy, each asked to write a brief on the question of Kim Philby — was he or was he not working for the Russians, as Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean and Anthony Blunt were. Harvey said yes, with a tightly argued paper. Angleton said no with little more than reports of dinner table chat.
Peter Wright, of Britain’s MI5 writes in Spycatcher (must read) of several wild meetings with Angleton and Harvey at large in Washington — and that during one, in 1961, the duo pressed him for help in assembling an assassination team.
QUOTE WRIGHT
Around the same time, the King came to the CIA’s Miami station — a nexus of the JFK murder mystery — where he headed for a time the loony Castro hit squad managed by mobster Johnny Rosselli. Exploding conch shells, poisoned scuba suits and cigars …
(During the mid 70s, between the Senate’s Church hearings on CIA misdeeds and the investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, sawed off pieces of the flamboyant Rosselli, who had testified to the Church committee, were found in a 55-gallon drum floating in Miami’s Dumfounding Bay.)
most broadly and recently: The two people Hunt now fingers most emphatically for the JFK job — Harvey and Meyer — were two of Angleton’s closest CIA confreres outside his hermetically sealed counterintel staff.
MOVE TO CODA: Both Lane and Garrison fingered the CIA, rejecting the notion (as does Hunt) that the Mob had the capacity to do all the things that had to be done to successfully complete the mission in Dallas.
===
(c) As to the CIAists’ principal(s), Hunt in his book surmises — offering little argument and no evidence — that the motive force behind the murder was Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson: the hayseed New Dealer from Texas back country who rose to command the Senate during the Eisenhower years, then swallowed a Kennedy gambit by accepting the surprise offer of the vice presidency in 1960.
It seems Hunt intended, in so writing, to support recent underdetermined theories about LBJ that rely chiefly on a palm print supposedly found on the Book Depository rifle and discovered decades later to belong to an LBJ hatchetman named Max Wallace.
The LBJ idea got a big boost in 2003 from a book by Barr McClellan, a lawyer who says that during years of working for Johnson he sniffed out his complicity.
These arguments, putting Johnson atop a narrow and rather homespun conspiracy, have not yet struck home here persuasively.
But it seems possible he may have been a witting and willing affiliate of a professional project managed by people we train to do such things. See, for one, Noel Twyman’s Bloody Treason (1997).
The middle ground re LBJ’s possible involvement has long been staked out by one of his Dallas girlfriends, who across the decades wrote and told cameras that the Vice President was told (warned?) of the plot the evening before, at a dinner party at the ranch of Texas billionaire 
Clint Murchinson, owner of the Dallas Cowboys among other big things.
The woman says that Johnson emerged from behind a closed door that evening and told her with a growl that his days of taking guff from them Kennedys was over.
But of course there are debunkers who say the woman is crazy — some who claim to prove she invented the Murchinson dinner from whole cloth.
No opinion here. But the woman seems slightly more credible than her detractors. That she may have confused a dozen details across the years, even the date, don’t seem to signify one way or the other.
Both Kennedy and Johnson recorded White House conversations. (Nixon inherited LBJ’s equipment.) On extant tapes we hear LBJ in the days after the murder intently asking investigators if the assassins had been shooting at him as well. Some argue this proves his innocence. From here it don’t seem to help either way.
Max Wallace does seem to have been an LBJ Man Friday, and a murderer, and good with a rifle. If the palm print story is true, one may imagine that he was invited to the hunting party without LBJ’s knowledge. Wallace would thereby preserve the boss’s deniability, while the professionals would plant an inconvenient truth by which the new president might on occasion be persuaded of reason.
It is clear from Captain John Newman’s ground-breaking book — JFK and Vietnam (1992) — that Johnson was working a back channel in the years before the murder with generals and their friends who were demanding intervention first in Laos and then Vietnam, as a means of provoking China back into the war that Eisenhower had stalled with an armistice in Korea.
These generals — Air Force’s LeMay (model for Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Doctor Strangelove), Navy’s Burke and Army’s Lemnitzer (JFK’s first chairman of the Joint Chiefs and sponsor of the now notorious Operation Northwoods program) — were damn sure war with China was in the cards and intended to nuke’m on their own timetable, and sooner than later.
They plied Kennedy with memos arguing same from day one. Soon he called them “nuts” and stopped inviting them for tea. Thereafter their man in the White House was Johnson.
LBJ changed Vietnam policy within days of taking office, turning back JFK’s first instructions for withdrawal of the advisors then in country. (1,000 before Christmas, of 16,000 total, all of whom were under CIA auspices.) Johnson then pushed forward with Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the prime invasion coming in 1965, shortly after his stunning defeat of Barry Goldwater in the ’64 election.
So LBJ was affiliated with the war camp, and did their bidding in southeast Asia. And the war camp, almost certainly, is where high pay-grade coupsters resided.
Yet, from this armchair, it seems odd that professionals would taint the prime figurehead of the world that they intended to create with the murder.
What, practically speaking, might LBJ have contributed to the plot’s execution? And if nothing (as it seems here), what need to know would have prompted the professionals to involve him?
Why compromise the new president? He was already in camp, and would prove malleable. Several times in the Oval Office he spoke of the gunshots of Dallas, echoing between his ears.
As did Nixon.
Note that Captain Bradley E. Ayers, an Army Ranger who trained anti-Castro cubans for the CIA in the early 60s to aid their hapless attacks on their homeland, spent fifteen years investigating the JFK murder, and has just this year published his thoughts.
The Zenith Secret is not an “update” of Ayers’ The War that Never Was (1976). That book, to begin, was a fictionalized account — phony names and places — of the CIA Miami station in the early 60s.
Further: it was edited by none other than CIA cowboy Wild Bill Harvey (Hunt’s prime suspect), whom Ayers knew from Miami, but who had retired (unbeknownst) and gone to work for publisher Bobbs-Merrill.
Even funnier: Harvey’s boss at Bobbs-Merrill, Managing Editor Tom Gervasi, confessed late in life that he was an Operation Mockingbird team player and as such had sanitized many a manuscript.
Poor Bradley Ayers knew none of this when he submitted to Bobbs-Merrill what he thought a rather clever roman a clef. Nor did he soon understand how and why the text had been reworked so badly in-house as to render it useless as history.
The Zenith Secret now tells all as Ayers saw it in Miami, using real names. Then moves on with the entirely new account of his investigation of the murder.
Ayers claims with some power to have uncovered complicity of David Morales (also on Hunt’s list). Morales was hired by the CIA in the late 40s to be trained as an assassin 
and was head of covert ops at the Miami station when Harvey and Rosselli were there trying to kill Castro and Ayers was teaching Cubans how to launch rubber dinghies and kill with their hands. Ayers and Morales knew each other fairly well.
Ayers also presents evidence of complicity in the murder plot of Morales’s patron and mentor. The man who rescued him from poverty and put him through college. The leading militarist in the Senate of the day. The hero of today’s so-called Neo-conservatives. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The Republican front-runner for 1964.
Morales is now a person of interest in both Kennedy murders, and Ayers is his primary biographer, whom other writers have relied upon for years. The Zenith Secret brings this and other source material for the first time to light.
Unfortunately it is printed in seven-point type.
Nevertheless it must be read.
No one said this would be easy.
Part Two
Howard Hunt died in January 2007. Soon thereafter his eldest son, St John Hunt, came forward with some memos and cassette tapes that his father had given him circa 2005, as followups to conversations about his hidden life.
See Rolling Stone’s piece about all this.
St John says that Hunt’s second wife (his first had died in a mysterious plane crash during the early months of Watergate) soon broke off the forbidden conversations and banished him from his father’s Miami house.
Sometime soon after Hunt began writing American Spy — during which he asked his son to return the confessional memos and tapes. St John did so, after making copies.
These memos and tapes importantly contradict the book that Hunt wrote during his last year.
In the book, for example, Hunt casts heaviest aspersions on Harvey and Meyer, discusses theories about Phillips and Morales without endorsing them, and goes out of his way to nix the notion that his pal Frank Sturgis was involved in the murder.
In life, however, Hunt wrote for his son a two-page memo that explicitly implicates goons Sturgis and Morales along with the high-ranking Harvey, Meyer and Phillips:
Cord Meyer discusses a plot with Phillips who brings in Wm. Harvey and Antonio Veciana. He meets with Oswald in Mexico City. . . . Then Veciana meets w/ Frank Sturgis in Miami and enlists David Morales in anticipation of killing JFK there. But LBJ changes itinerary to Dallas, citing personal reasons.
Hunt in his book repeatedly denies any personal involvement in the plot or finite knowledge of it, and insists he never met Sturgis until they were introduced in 1972 by mutual cubano friend Bernard Barker as the Watergate break-ins were being planned.But the memo Hunt gave his son tells of a day in 1963 when pal Sturgis had tried to recruit him to the JFK hit team. Hunt writes that he refused the invitation, because he distrusted Harvey as a lunatic drunk.
Furthermore, and even more to the contrary: On tape, Hunt tells his son he was merely “a benchwarmer” on the hit team.
The tape can be heard at the son’s website: www.saintjohnhunt.com.
And here is a Black Op Radio interview with the son, talking about all this.
Note that Black Op Radio is run by Len Osanic, who is the great curator of Colonel Fletcher Prouty‘s writings 
and interviews, which probe these matters with much first-hand experience.
Bradley Ayers seems to have much in common with Fletch. More about him later, perhaps.
So then.
Given Hunt’s hedged admission of complicity — “benchwarmer” — it seems a good guess that two now-obscure items out of the past linking him to the JFK murder are indeed what they have always seemed, and that a third rather famous speculation perhaps had basis:
(A) J.J. Angleton, as CIA housekeeper, wrote a famous memorandum to career CIA spook 
Richard Helms as the latter assumed control of the CIA in 1966.
The Memo informed incoming Director Helms that CIA had a problem: Howard Hunt was in Dallas the day Kennedy was shot.
The Memo was obtained by the investigating staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, precisely how still a mystery (unless I’ve missed something recent). Thoughts across the years have been that Angleton — who had recently been bounced with extreme prejudice from the agency by the then new director William Colby — may have been the leaker.
Or maybe it was old-timer Cleveland Cram, who was heading an internal CIA hunt for moles and assassins in the agency. The fallen Angleton was apparently a suspect on each count.
In any case, former CIA analyst Victor Marchetti 
, author of a landmark insider book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, quickly caught wind of the Memo, and wrote about it in a magazine article that stated that the CIA leadership was about to throw Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and perhaps others to the HSCA wolves, in a “limited hangout” confession, painting the former agents as rogues who participated in the murder as freelancers.
The Memo was also leaked — by Angleton for sure — to journalist Joseph Trento, who wrote a newspaper story about it and other aspects of the assassination.
The two articles, published within days of each other by minor organs, were ignored by the mainstream media and the law, while, shortly after, the avid HSCA staff was fired by the Congressmen who had convened the Committee, under pressure from their FBI and CIA liaisons, and replaced with duds who promptly produced a toothless report and closed up shop. See The Last Investigation by staff investigator Gaeton Fonzi.
However. Marchetti’s article provoked a legal action that produced noteworthy results.
(B) CIA contract agent and Fidel Castro lover Marita Lorenz implicated Howard Hunt in JFK’s murder twenty years ago, first in a deposition and then on the 
witness stand during the Hunt vs Liberty Lobby trial of 1985, in which Hunt sued the publishers of Marchetti’s article about the Memo for libel.
Attorney Mark Lane used Lorenz’s testimony to successfully defend the publisher in the trial. Jury members afterward told the press that the defense had demonstrated to their satisfaction CIA complicity in Kennedy’s murder. 
See Lane’s important book about all this: Plausible Denial. Must reading.
Lorenz testified that she drove from Miami to Dallas with mob and CIA goon Frank Sturgis (also on Hunt’s verbal JFK list, and his Watergate team) 
, CIA drug-runner and contract assassin Gerald Patrick Hemming and a bunch of anti-Castro cubans, and delivered, the night before JFK’s murder, two trunkloads of guns to a Dallas motel — where, Lorenz testified, benchwarmer Howard Hunt paid for the guns with cash.
Note that Bradley Ayers presents evidence in The Zenith Secret that a senior member of Senator Goldwater’s staff delivered, on the Senator’s instruction, two suitcases of cash to New Orleans and Dallas the day before the murder.
According to Ayers’ source — the daughter of the Goldwater staffer — the suitcases came to Goldwater as contributions to his 1964 presidential campaign. The donors: intel octopus mystery man Robert Maheu (then Howard Hughes’s top exec) and mobster Joe Bananno.
The staffer received the cash in Las Vegas, then drove to Texas and gave one suitcase to a man in a Dallas motel using the name Gordon. Then drove on to New Orleans, where he gave the second case to David Morales, whom he knew from meetings in Goldwater’s Senate office.
(C) The famous bit of speculation involving Hunt and JFK’s murder was found in the diaries of Nixon’s right-hand H.R. Haldeman, which were published posthumously.
The scene: June 1972. Two days after the Watergate arrests. Haldeman, working with John Ehrlichman, proposes to Nixon that they ask the CIA to use to shut down the FBI’s investigation of the break-in on grounds it might compromise national security.
The heat was on because a Nixon campaign contribution check had already been traced to a burglar’s bank account by FBI Miami.
But to ask CIA for a favor was difficult. Vice President Nixon had been Eisenhower’s point man on the CIA, and in 1958 had made an enemy of the Company by cashiering legendary spook Frank Wisner after the botched CIA invasion of Indonesia (one of the great blackouts in the history of the US media — see Prouty interviews).
But upon returning to the White House eleven years later, Nixon had tried to bury the hatchet by allowing Richard Helms (a Wisner loyalist) to remain on as CIA Director. Nevertheless they loathed each other.
So. Woodward and Bernstein are burning shoe leather. Sturgis, James McCord (a senior CIA “internal affairs” officer) and three of Hunt’s Bay of Pigs Cubanos are cooling heels in the hoosegow. Hunt and Liddy ( not yet nabbed) are hitting up Haldeman, Ehrlichman & Dean for bail money. And Director of Central Intelligence Helms is waiting in the West Wing to speak with the President’s men.
Nixon doesn’t want to speak with Helms directly, however, and so is coaching Haldeman on what to say and how to say it. From the tape transcript:
PRESIDENT: How do you call him in, I mean you just, well, we protected Helms from one hell of a lot of things.
HALDEMAN: That’s what Ehrlichman says.
PRESIDENT: Of course, this is a, this is a Hunt, you will — that will uncover a lot of things. You open that scab there’s a hell of a lot of things and that we just feel that it would be very detrimental to have this thing go any further. This involves these Cubans, Hunt, and a lot of hanky-panky that we have nothing to do with ourselves. …
When you get in these people when you … get these people in, say Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details… don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. And, ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!
Haldeman wrote that he delivered the message as instructed. And that at the mention of Bay of Pigs the urbane, highly disciplined Helms blew his top, shouting that the Bay of Pigs had nothing to do with Watergate.
Haldeman then wrote, in his diary, that he believed Nixon intended “the Bay of Pigs” as a code phrase for JFK’s murder.
(To better understand what seems a stretched inference, see this passage in Haldeman’s memoirs, which were published during his life.)
Gerry Hemming (the assassin fellow Marita Lorenz says drove with her and Sturgis to Dallas with the guns) happens to have been Lee Harvey Oswald’s commanding Marine sergeant when they were stationed at the CIA’s U-2 base in Japan. And he has talked at some length about these matters.
He said (see Plausible Denial) that his assassination firm was approached regarding the JFK job, but declined it. (Rather like Hunt telling his son that he refused Sturgis’s offer to join the team.)
And while being prosecuted on drug charges in the 70s, Hemming this to say:
All of a sudden they’re accusing me of conspiracy to import marijuana and cocaine. Hey, what about all the other things I’ve been into for the last 15 years, lets talk about them. Let’s talk about the Martin Luther King thing, let’s talk about Don Freed, Le Coubre, nigger-killers in bed with the Mafia, the Mafia in bed with the FBI, and the goddamn CIA in bed with all of them. Let’s talk about all the people I dirtied up for them over the years. Spartacus U.K.
HUNT rejects Mob hit theory.
BRADLEE reprise The Washington Post was home base for Operation Mockingbird. It’s flamboyant socialite publisher, Phillip Graham, was a CIA confidante throughout his career, until one day he began to spill some beans and was quickly institutionalized by his wife, and soon after, the story goes, blew his brains out.
WP continued with Lardner etc. Talbot’s question re why didn’t BB pursue the story. BB: too young there in the 60s, came to WP in 65. Acks lack of courage. Follow up queestion never asked. Why not in 1975, with Rock Comm and Church and as most powerful and celebrated journalist in the country? Friendship? Mockingbird? Co-opted and in no position to throw stones in the wilderness of mirrors.
HUnt said sturgis couldn’t keep his mouth shut — he didn’t. Lorenz account of them in NY, threats, etc
David Atlee Phillips was recruited into the CIA by Hunt in the early 50s. Together they were Political Action (Hunt) and Psy Ops (Phillips) chiefs for the CIA overthrow of the Arbenz government of Guatemala in 1954. Then again for the Bay of Pigs fiasco seven years later, during which Phillips was known in Miami as Maurice Bishop.
Phillips was head of the CIA station in Mexico City during the latter half of 1963, and has been at the center of the JFK murder mystery ever since he confessed at a public forum in 1977 (see Plausible Denial) that evidence CIA had supplied to the FBI and the Warren Commission that Lee Harvey Oswald had visited the Soviet embassy in Mexico City was false, and that there was no reason to think he had.
Worries that Oswald was a Soviet assassin (That would mean war!) were used to throttle the investigations by the Warren Commission, the FBI and the CIA’s impressive portfolio of Mockingbird press assets. Today no evidence remains standing that Oswald was ever in Mexico during 1963.
Hunt says now of Harvey: “Never had any reason to deal with him …” Not in Dallas?
In 1975, as the revelations of the Church hearings were thundering, Hunt, in the hoosegow for Watergate, told the New York Times that he knew of a “small” CIA assassination team headed by a certain Colonel Boris Pash.
Three years later Joseph Trento (in his story about the Memo placing Hunt in Dallas) reported that CIA sources had confirmed Hunt’s claim — and furthermore that Angleton was the controller of Colonel Pash’s team. See Plausible Denial.
Trento in subsequent years published a major defense of Angleton (whom he had served as a mouthpiece for so many years). In The Secret History of the CIA (2001) Trento writes that it was Director Allen Dulles, not Angleton and Harvey, who introduced assassination to CIA practice. That Angleton was right about the Golitsyn/Nosenko controversy within CIA. And that the KGB killed JFK.
Angleton was undermined and finally cashiered by CIA Director William Colby in an Augean Stables operation that began on Christmas Eve 1974 with a leak to Seymour Hersh of the NY Times of Angleton’s domestic spying activities.
Around the same time Angleton gave the Times an interview, and when asked about theories linking the Agency to JFK’s murder, replied that the CIA was “a mansion of many rooms” and “I’m not privy to who struck John.”
Reader now ready to pick a way through this discussion, in which Joseph Trento and Gerry Hemming participate among others. Fare thee well.
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=3375
Well then. What is one to think?
