Coming up with Kennedy's secret intelligence network

Coming up with Kennedy’s secret intelligence network.

While he was President, John F. Kennedy liked to go outside the chain of command to get intelligence, especially after the Bay of Pigs debacle, where he felt the CIA let him down. This I learned from the various Kennedy books I read for research before writing my latest novel, ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964, where the President survives Dallas and lives to run for re-election. This info was of real use to me when I was plotting out my book since much of the action takes place behind closed doors and in secret meetings where plots are hatched and deals are struck between various individuals, not all of whom possess noble motives. From representatives of the Administration meeting with the Mafia to plan Castro’s assassination to Bobby Kennedy meeting with a Soviet diplomat at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a real “secret history” of the Kennedy years, most of which saw the light of day only years later. In my story, these clandestine activities continued into the election year as the Kennedy brothers go for broke with a plan to take out Castro and win a resounding re-election in November. One of my principle witnesses to all these machinations is Colonel Martin Maddox, a Marine officer on the staff of the National Security Council who impresses the President with his keen intelligence analysis on the day of the assassination attempt. When he gets a promotion, and an office in the basement of the White House; in the excerpt below, Colonel Maddox learns some interesting things about how JFK operated.

Excerpt:



This new position came without a standard job description and list of duties written down in black and white; no problem, I just jumped in with both feet when I walked into my new office in the basement and discovered four cardboard boxes filled with papers, some of them handwritten, sitting in the middle of the floor, having been delivered on the Attorney General’s order the night before. These boxes came with the request that a report on their contents be ready for the President no later than 2:00 p.m. The first thing I picked up was from Paris Stafford, an old Harvard classmate of the President’s who owned a dozen car dealerships, and who did a large amount of business in Europe, some of it on the other side of the Iron Curtain, where there was a small, but lucrative, market for American-made farm equipment. There were other opportunities as well, for it seemed there were members of the Soviet elite who had an appetite for the finer things of American life like Hi-Fi stereos, Coca-Cola, bedroom furniture, Kentucky Bourbon, paperback novels and Playboy magazine - all of which came into the Worker’s Paradise by way of crates marked Medical Supplies and shipped from Stafford’s warehouse in Atlanta, Georgia. All of this was kept far from Khrushchev’s eyes and those of the more orthodox Marxists in the Kremlin, who had no idea how many of their comrades were enjoying the evil fruits of capitalism. The Russian end was handled by Vladimir Roykov, the #2 man to Leonid Brezhnev, a high-ranking member of the Politburo, who was fattening his wallet every time a crate from Stafford off-loaded at the airport in Moscow and passed through customs without being inspected. By the fall of 1963, they were working on a deal by which certain Soviet bigwigs could indulge their passion for high-end Ford and Chevy automobiles while keeping fat old Nikita in the dark about it.

Stafford found a reason to fly to Moscow at least once a month, always meeting Roykov while he was there; and as soon as he got back stateside, a detailed hand written note on what he‘d learned while there would be delivered to the President’s desk. Most of what was in those notes could be called gossip, but after reading a half dozen of them, it was crystal clear much of it was better than anything the CIA station chief in Moscow reported. Now I had a year’s worth of such reports to read over and see if I could find anything in retrospect which might lead back to Oswald.

My book, BIG CRIMSON 1: THERE'S A NEW VAMPIRE IN TOWN, can be found on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/3GsBh2E
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My alternate history novel ALL THE WAY WITH JFK: AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF 1964 can be found on Amazon at: http://amzn.to/2jVkW9m
and on Smashwords at: http://bit.ly/2kAoiAH

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