More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When Egerter was asked the purpose of Counterintelligence’s Special Investigations Group (CI/SIG), she said, “We were charged with the investigation of Agency personnel who were suspected one way or another.”[58]
Researcher Lisa Pease concluded from Ann Egerter’s testimony that Oswald’s 201 file in CI/SIG “implies strongly that either Oswald was indeed a member of the CIA or was being used in an operation involving members of the CIA, which for my money is essentially the same thing.”[61] In either case, Oswald was a CIA asset.
Egerter also indicated by her testimony that Oswald was a particular kind of CIA asset, an Agency employee who was suspected of being a security risk. That would have been the reason for opening a 201 file on him specifically in Angleton’s
Ann Egerter’s testimony points toward Oswald having been a CIA employee who by December 1960 had come under suspicion by the Agency. He was to be carefully watched. As a security risk, he was also the ideal kind of person for the CIA to offer up three years later as a scapegoat in the assassination of a president who some believed had become a much greater security risk.
Former CIA finance officer Jim Wilcott confirmed the implications of Egerter’s deposition. In his own HSCA testimony, Wilcott said Oswald served the CIA specifically as a double agent in the Soviet Union who afterwards came under suspicion by the Agency.
didn’t believe him until he told me the cryptonym under which Oswald had drawn funds when he returned from Russia to the U.S.”[68]
cryptonym.
“It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency.”
In an article based on what he learned at the Tokyo Station, Jim Wilcott wrote: “[Oswald] had been trained [by the CIA] at Atsugi Naval Air Station, a plush super secret cover base for Tokyo Station special operations
Oswald’s anger, while he was trying to arrange his return to the United States in late 1960, would have been reason enough for James Jesus Angleton to order his Special Investigations Group to keep a security watch on the CIA’s double agent. Thus, Ann Egerter opened his 201 SIG file on December 9, 1960.
In the decade following his HSCA testimony, Jim Wilcott joined Vietnam veteran Brian Willson and the Nuremberg Actions community outside the Concord Naval Weapons Station in nonviolent resistance to weapons shipments to the CIA-sponsored Contra war in Nicaragua. While sitting on the railroad tracks, Willson was run over by a weapons train, which severed both his legs. Undeterred, Jim Wilcott was arrested for blocking a later train.[75]
On June 3, 1963, ignoring evidence that implicated itself, the CIA reported in Washington “the weight of evidence indicating that government cannon-fire caused the deaths in Hue” on May 8 that had ignited the Buddhist crisis in South Vietnam.[78] Ngo Dinh Diem, on the other hand, insisted the deaths “were due to a Viet Cong terrorist grenade.”[79] However, as we have seen, neither the Saigon government nor the Viet Cong possessed the kind of powerful plastic explosives that decapitated the victims at Hue on May 8. It was only the CIA that had such an explosive, as admitted later by Captain
...more
We saw earlier how Lee Harvey Oswald was continually impersonated in Mexico City in September 1963. Oswald disappeared down a black hole. His CIA-alleged visits and phone calls to the Cuban and Soviet consulates ended up revealing more about the CIA than they ever did about Oswald. In preparation for his patsy role in Dallas, Oswald was being given a false identity in Mexico City as a communist conspirator by an unknown impersonator. CIA transcripts of fraudulent Oswald
phone calls to the Soviet Consulate “documented” the future scapegoat’s supposed communications with a Soviet assassination expert. As William Harvey had written in his notes for the ZR/RIFLE assassination program, “planning should include provisions for blaming Sovs . . .”[104] The Mexico City scenario highlighted the CIA’s plan to blame the Soviets and the Cubans for the president’s murder.
One of the most exhaustively researched books on President Kennedy’s assassination, Dick Russell’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, tells the story of a U.S. counterintelligence agent hired by the Soviets to kill Lee Harvey Oswald and thereby prevent JFK’s assassination.
assassination for the CIA, moved him to a desperate act. Richard Case Nagell, “the man who knew too much,” walked into a bank in El Paso, Texas, on September 20, 1963, and calmly fired two shots from a Colt .45 pistol into a plaster wall just below the bank’s ceiling. He then went outside and waited in his car until a police officer came to arrest him. When questioned by the FBI, Nagell made only one statement: “I would rather be arrested than commit murder and treason.”[105]
In the late fifties while stationed in Japan, Nagell began his Army/CIA role as a double agent in liaison with Soviet intelligence. In Tokyo, Nagell’s path converged with that of counterintelligence agent Lee Harvey Oswald. Both men worked
in a counterintelligence operation with the code name “Hidell,” which Oswald later used as part of his alias, “Alek James Hidell.” Nagell’s biographer Dick Russell believes it was Nagell who actually assigned the “Hidell” alias to Oswald.[108] As a continuing double agent in 1963, Nagell was working with Soviet intelligence in Mexico City. He was reporting back to the CIA, in an operation directed by the chief of the CIA’s Cuban Task Force, Desmond FitzGerald. Assigned by the KGB to monitor Lee Harvey Oswald in the United States after Oswald returned from Russia, Nagell became involved in New
...more
was in jail. But before putting himself there, he tried to preempt the plot to kill Kennedy (and to put his effort on record) by sending his registered letter to J. Edgar Hoover exposing the plot. The FBI would always claim, however, in denying it had any foreknowledge of the assassination, that it knew nothing of Nagell’s letter. Nagell was again left out in the cold—for the rest of his life.
Hoover wrote a letter to head Warren Commission counsel J. Lee Rankin on October 23, 1964, urging him not to release certain FBI “reports and memoranda dealing with Michael and Ruth Paine and George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt.” Hoover warned Rankin: “Making the contents of such documents available to the public could cause serious repercussions to the Commission.”[202]
His stepfather, Arthur Young, with whom he worked previously, was the inventor of the Bell Helicopter—a fact discovered by researchers thirty years after the Kennedy assassination.[205] By heritage Michael Paine was well connected in the military-industrial complex.
Michael Paine’s mother, Ruth Forbes Paine Young, was connected to Allen Dulles. Descended from the blueblood Forbes family of Boston, Ruth Forbes Paine Young was a lifelong friend of Mary Bancroft, who worked side by side with Allen Dulles
Allen Dulles had ample reason not to ask follow-up questions about Arthur Young. Such queries might have surfaced Michael’s stepfather’s fame in the military-industrial complex as the inventor of the Bell Helicopter.
Michael Paine’s mother was even more dangerous territory for Dulles. He asked nothing at all about her. Least of all did Allen Dulles want it to emerge that the mother of the Oswald sponsor they were questioning lightly was a very good friend of his wartime mistress, with whom he maintained close contact.[209]
In October 1964, right after the publication of the Warren
Report featuring his daughter Ruth as the government’s key witness (other than Marina Oswald) to the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald in murdering John Kennedy, William Avery Hyde received a three-year government contract from AID (Agency for International Development). From October 1964 to August 1967, William Avery Hyde was AID’s Regional Insurance Adviser for all of Latin America.[211] Hyde’s job description was to provide technical assistance from the U.S. State Department to insurance cooperatives being launched throughout the region. At the same time, the reports Hyde filed from his time in
...more
“At one time, many AID field offices [under the auspices of the State Department] were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. It was pretty well known in the agency who they were and what they were up to . . . The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”[212] If William Avery Hyde was acting as a CIA “executive agent,”[213] then his expertise in helping to provide lower-cost insurance in Latin American countries was his cover for gathering information on people the CIA was watching carefully in the ferment
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
noted explicitly on its cover page, Hyde’s report went to th...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The CIA memorandum noted that Sylvia Hoke was identified as a CIA employee in the 1961 issue of the Falls Church, Virginia, City Directory. The memorandum warned: “Since it is known that opposition intelligence services have in the past checked similar publications, it should be presumed that the indicated employment of Subject by CIA is known to other intelligence organizations.”[215]
However, Sylvia’s CIA employment—in its eighth year in 1963[216]—was not known to her sister Ruth, at least according to Ruth’s later testimony.
The Warren Report states that on October 14, 1963, “at the suggestion of a neighbor, Mrs. Paine phoned the Texas School Book Depository and was told that there was a job opening. She informed Oswald who was interviewed the following day at the Depository and started to work there on October 16, 1963.”[221]
However, the Warren Commission also knew that on October 15, the day before Oswald began work at the Texas School Book Depository, Robert Adams of the Texas Employment Commission phoned the Paine residence with a much better job prospect for Oswald. Adams spoke with someone at the Paines’ number about his being prepared to give Oswald a referral for permanent employment as a baggage or cargo handler at Trans
Texas Airways, for a salary $100 per month higher than that offered by the Book Depository’s only temporary job. Adams told the Warren Commission, “I learned from the person who answered the phone that Oswald was not there. I left a message with ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Commission lawyer, Albert Jenner, about this more promising job possibility. She first denied knowing anything about it, then recalled it vaguely, and finally said she knew about it from Lee himself:
It was at Allen Dulles’s repeated suggestion in the 1960s that Mary Bancroft wrote her Autobiography of a Spy, memorializing their covert work together in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Bancroft’s book was based on her OSS reports written specifically for Dulles, her spy mentor and lover in Switzerland during the war. When Dulles was fired as CIA director by Kennedy
“If the situation continues much longer, the President is not sure that the military will not overthrow him and seize power.”[4]
joint expedition to the moon, a project that could involve not only the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. “but the representatives of all our countries.”[9] However, neither American nor Soviet military leaders, jealous of their rocket secrets, would look on his idea with enthusiasm. Kennedy was pushing the generals and scientists on both sides of the East–West struggle. He knew that merging their missile technologies in a peaceful project would help to defuse the Cold War. It was part of his day-by-day
strategy of peace.
More broadly, he proposed that their rival nations transform the Cold War into its moral equivalent: “a desire not to ‘bury’ one’s adversary, but to compete in a host of peaceful arenas, in ideas, in production, and ultimately in service to all mankind . . . An...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment, to end thirst and hunger, to conquer poverty and disease, to banish illiteracy and massive human misery. We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history of the world—or to make it the last.”[12]
“My fellow inhabitants of this planet: Let us take our stand here in this Assembly of nations. And let us see if we, in our own time, can move the world to a just and lasting peace.”[13]
“to make discreet contact” with Cuba’s UN ambassador Carlos Lechuga.[14] Was Fidel Castro interested in a dialogue with John Kennedy? A strongly affirmative answer would come back from Castro, who had been urged by Khrushchev to begin trusting Kennedy. Although Kennedy specified that the CIA not be told of his Cuban initiative, Attwood later wrote, “the CIA must have had an inkling of what was happening from phone taps and surveillance of Lechuga.”[15] Attwood also said, “There is no doubt in my mind.
On October 9, 1963, one week before Lee Harvey Oswald began his job at a site overlooking the president’s future parade route, an FBI official in Washington, D.C., disconnected Oswald from a federal alarm system that was about to identify him as a threat to national security. The FBI man’s name was Marvin Gheesling. He was a supervisor in the Soviet espionage section at FBI headquarters.[17] His timing was remarkable. As author John Newman remarked in an analysis of this phenomenon, Gheesling “turned off the alarm switch on Oswald literally an instant before it would have gone off.”[18]
the FBI issued a FLASH on Oswald.
That watch was abolished on October 9, 1963, for no apparent reason, only hours before the FBI received critical information on Oswald. When Marvin Gheesling canceled Oswald’s FLASH,[20] he effectively silenced the national security alarm that was just about to sound from an incoming CIA report on Oswald’s (or an impostor’s) activities in Mexico.
Had the FBI alarm sounded, Oswald would have been placed on the Security Index, drawing critical law enforcement attention to him prior to Kennedy’s visit to Dallas. That much pre-Dallas focus on the patsy would have made it impossible to play out the assassination scenario. The FBI watch on Oswald had to be revoked immediately. It was.
What would have sounded the alarm on Oswald was the CIA’s October 10, 1963, message to the FBI about Oswald contacting the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City.[21] Because Oswald’s security watch had just been lifted, the CIA’s October 10 message managed to document his latest Soviet connection in a
way that would become explosive after the assassination, while at the same time avoiding a security alert on ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
It was a brilliant tactic in manipulating the FBI that demonstrated just how sophisticated the plotters’ knowledge and control was of their national security bureaucracy. John Kennedy was killed by people who knew their national securit...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Marvin Gheesling in the FBI’s Soviet Espionage section had canceled the security watch on Oswald, he imposed censure and
