FTR #1047 Interview #16 with Jim DiEugenio about “Destiny Betrayed”

This is the six­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

The pro­gram opens with con­tin­u­a­tion of dis­cus­sion of an unfor­tu­nate piece from The Huff­in­g­ton Post about Clay Shaw. In addi­tion to par­rot­ing canards about Gar­rison’s case being base­less, Clay Shaw being a “Wilsonian/FDR lib­er­al” and Gar­rison’s nonex­is­tent stance that the JFK assas­si­na­tion was a “homo­sex­u­al thrill killing” by Clay Shaw & com­pa­ny, the HP piece men­tioned an appear­ance by Jim Gar­ri­son on John­ny Car­son­’s “Tonight Show.”

The actu­al sto­ry of Gar­rison’s appear­ance on Car­son is impor­tant and inter­est­ing. When the bril­liant come­di­an Mort Sahl was on Car­son­’s show, the sub­ject of the Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion came up. Sahl asked the audi­ence if they would like to have Gar­ri­son come on the show, and they respond­ed with over­whelm­ing enthu­si­asm.

Even­tu­al­ly, Gar­ri­son did appear on the show and Car­son engaged in an open­ly con­fronta­tion­al dis­cus­sion. Car­son was so out­raged that he told Mort Sahl that he would nev­er appear on the pro­gram again. Mort did not appear on the “Tonight” show until Jay Leno suc­ceed­ed Car­son as the host.

In this regard, it is worth not­ing that NBC–the net­work that aired Wal­ter Sheri­dan’s hit piece on Garrison–has pro­found con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, as dis­cussed in FTR #1045.

Jim also relates that, when in Los Ange­les, Robert Kennedy was query­ing Chi­na Lee–Mort’s wife at the time–about what Gar­ri­son was doing in New Orleans. As we have seen in past programs–including FTR #‘s 809, 892, 1005–Robert Kennedy was wait­ing until he got elect­ed Pres­i­dent before open­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion into his broth­er’s mur­der. Of course, he, too was killed before he could become Pres­i­dent.

The pro­gram then turns to James Kirk­wood, anoth­er of the des­ig­nat­ed media hatch­et men who pil­lo­ried Gar­ri­son. Net­worked with James Phe­lan, he helped mint the canard that Gar­ri­son pros­e­cut­ed Shaw in the con­text of what the DA sup­pos­ed­ly saw as a “homo­sex­u­al thrill killing.” Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this non­sense has endured, as a Huff­in­g­ton Post arti­cle makes clear.

Anoth­er of the media hit men who defamed Gar­ri­son was David Chan­dler:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 276.

. . . . But Chandler’s most seri­ous blast against Gar­ri­son and his inquiry was a two-part arti­cle writ­ten for Life in the fall of 1967. This appeared in the Sep­tem­ber 1 and Sep­tem­ber 8 issues of the mag­a­zine. The pieces mas­quer­ad­ed as an expose of Mafia influ­ence in large cities in Amer­i­ca at the time. But the real tar­get of the piece was not the mob, but Gar­ri­son. The idea was to depict him as a cor­rupt New Orleans DA who had some kind of neb­u­lous ties to the Mafia and Car­los Mar­cel­lo. There were four prin­ci­pal par­tic­i­pants in the pieces: Chan­dler, Sandy Smith, Dick Billings, and Robert Blakey. Smith was the actu­al billed writer. And since Smith was a long-time asset of the FBI, it is very like­ly that the Bureau was the Bureau was the orig­i­nat­ing force behind the mag­a­zine run­ning the piece. . . .

. . . . It was the work of Chan­dler, a friend of both Clay Shaw and Ker­ry Thorn­ley, which was the basis of the com­plete­ly pho­ny con­cept that Gar­ri­son was some­how in bed with the Mafia and his func­tion was to steer atten­tion from their killing of Kennedy. . . .

The sub­ject then turns to Clay Shaw’s defense team. It should nev­er be for­got­ten that Shaw’s attor­neys net­worked with: the infil­tra­tors into Gar­rison’s office, the CIA and the media hatch­et men who helped destroy Gar­rison’s pub­lic image.

We return briefly to Guy John­son, ini­tial­ly a mem­ber of Shaw’s defense team. In this con­text, it is worth remem­ber­ing what Ban­is­ter inves­ti­ga­tor Tom­my Baum­ler said:

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 274.

. . . . In the spring of 1968, Harold Weis­berg inter­viewed Tom­my Baum­ler. Baum­ler had for­mer­ly worked for Guy Ban­is­ter as part of his corps of stu­dent infil­tra­tors in the New Orleans area. Because of that expe­ri­ence, Baum­ler knew a lot about Banister’s oper­a­tion. For instance, that Banister’s files were cod­ed, and that Ban­is­ter had black­mail mate­r­i­al on the sub­jects he kept files on. He also knew the intel­li­gence net­work in New Orleans was con­struct­ed through Ban­is­ter, Clay Shaw, and Guy John­son; how close Shaw and Ban­is­ter were; and that “Oswald worked for Ban­is­ter.” In Weisberg’s inter­view with Tom­my, he would occa­sion­al­ly ask to go off the record by telling him to turn the tape recorder off. Clear­ly, there were things going on in New Orleans that Baum­ler con­sid­ered too hot to be attrib­uted to him.

At this time, April of 1968, Weis­berg con­sid­ered Baum­ler to be an “unabashed fas­cist.” He explained this fur­ther by say­ing that Baum­ler was ‘aware of the mean­ing of his beliefs and con­sid­ers what he describes as his beliefs as prop­er.” He then explained to Weis­berg the fol­low­ing, “that what­ev­er hap­pens, the Shaw case will end with­out pun­ish­ment for him [Shaw], because fed­er­al pow­er will see to that.” He fur­ther said that this would also hap­pen to any­one else charged by Gar­ri­son. . . .

In addi­tion to John­son, Irv Dymond, anoth­er Shaw attor­ney, net­worked with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, Wal­ter Sheri­dan and the spook infil­tra­tors into Gar­rion’s office. In FTR #1045, we not­ed that Fred Lee­mans claimed he was coerced, in part, direct­ly by Irv Dymond in Dymond’s law office. Dymond worked direct­ly with Hunter Leake of the CIA’s New Orleans office.

Shaw attor­neys Edward and William Weg­mann also net­worked with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, employ­ing Wack­en­hut, for­mer­ly South­ern Research, an intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed pri­vate secu­ri­ty out­fit to mon­i­tor Gar­rison’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Anoth­er Shaw attorney–Sal Panzeca–received a list of Gar­ri­son wit­ness­es from Gar­ri­son office infil­tra­tor Tom Bethell.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 290.

. . . . Tom Bethell had been one of the DA’s key inves­ti­ga­tors and researchers . . . . Since Gar­ri­son had des­ig­nat­ed him as his chief archivist, he had access to and con­trol of both Gar­rison’s files and his most recent wit­ness list. . . . Secret­ly, he met with Sal Panze­ca, one of Shaw’s attor­neys, and gave him a wit­ness list he had pre­pared, with sum­maries of each wit­ness’s expect­ed tes­ti­mo­ny for the pros­e­cu­tion. . . .

The pro­gram con­cludes with the obstruc­tive efforts of then Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ram­sey Clark.

Clark tried to dis­miss Clay Shaw’s involve­ment inthe assas­si­na­tion by claim­ing that the FBI had cleared him back in 1963.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 261.

. . . . One point man for the John­son Admin­is­tra­tion in dam­ag­ing Gar­rison’s case was Ram­sey Clark. In March of 1867, right after his con­fir­ma­tion as Attor­ney Gen­er­al by the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, Clark made an extra­or­di­nary inter­ven­tion into the case: he told a group of reporters Gar­rison’s case was base­less. The FBI, he said, had already inves­ti­gat­ed Shaw in 1963 and found no con­nec­tion between him and the events in Dal­las. . . .

Clark also assist­ed with the quash­ing of sub­poe­nas that Gar­ri­son served.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 272–273.

. . . . At around this time, Gar­ri­son issued sub­poe­nas for both Richard Helms and any pho­tographs of Oswald in Mex­i­co City that the CIA held. . . . [CIA Gen­er­al Coun­sel Lawrence] Hous­ton then wrote a let­ter to New Orleans judge Bernard Bagert who had signed the sub­poe­na. He denied there were pho­tos of Oswald in Mex­i­co City. This reply was run by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ram­sey Clark and White House advis­er Har­ry MacPher­son. . . .

Final­ly, Clark denied Gar­ri­son prop­er access to autop­sy pho­tos and infor­ma­tion about the assas­si­na­tion.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 287.

. . . . After the Attor­ney Gen­er­al had bun­gled his first attempt to dis­cred­it Gar­rison’s case, he secret­ly tried anoth­er method. Gar­ri­son had been try­ing to secure the orig­i­nal JFK autop­sy pho­tos and X‑rays to exhib­it at the tri­al. They would form an impor­tant part of his case, since, to prove a con­spir­a­cy, he had to present evi­dence against the War­ren Report, which main­tained there was no con­spir­a­cy and that Oswald had act­ed alone. In 1968, Clark con­vened a pan­el of experts–which did not include any of the doc­tors who had per­formed the orig­i­nal examinations–to review the autop­sy pho­tos and X‑rays. In ear­ly 1969, just a few days before he left office and on the eve of the tri­al, Clark announced that this pan­el had endorsed the find­ings of the War­ren Report. The pan­el released its find­ings, but none of the orig­i­nal evi­dence on which it was based. This was clear­ly meant to influ­ence pub­lic opin­ion before Shaw’s tri­al began. . . .

FTR #1046 Interview #15 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”

CIA’s Expert on the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Ray Roc­ca: ” . . . . Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy. . . .”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

 This is the fif­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This inter­view begins with an excerpt from the book that encap­su­lates the syn­the­sis of the intel­li­gence agen­cies, infil­tra­tors into Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion, media hatch­et men des­ig­nat­ed to destroy Gar­rison’s rep­u­ta­tion and Clay Shaw’s defense team.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 228–229.

. . . . About Oswald, [Bernar­do] DeTor­res said he knew he had not killed Kennedy because DeTor­res knew the peo­ple who were actu­al­ly involved–and they were talk­ing about it before it hap­pened.

I have detailed the DeTor­res pen­e­tra­tion at length since it is impor­tant in order to under­stand what real­ly hap­pened to Jim Gar­ri­son. And also to reveal just how much was at stake for sus­pects like Bernar­do DeTor­res and his allies. As [HSCA inves­ti­ga­tor Gae­ton] Fonzi notes in his book, as the author found out from an inter­view, when Vic­tor Mar­che­t­ti was exec­u­tive assis­tant to CIA Direc­tor Richard Helms, Helms would run staff meet­ings about Agency oper­a­tions. Dur­ing these meet­ings, Mar­che­t­ti would take the offi­cial notes. At times, Helms would indi­cate he want­ed cer­tain things not tak­en down. At oth­er times, some­thing would come up, and Helms would cut off any fol­low-up by wav­ing his hand. He then would add that this sub­ject would be pur­sued fur­ther in his office, with Mar­che­t­ti not there to take notes. Mar­che­t­ti said that the Gar­ri­son inquiry and the Shaw tri­al came up more than once. Each time, Helms would ask what they were doing to help the defense. Fonzi lat­er found out that DeTorres’s pen­e­tra­tion was only the incep­tion of the CIA’s effort to tor­pe­do Gar­ri­son. For the HSCA lat­er dis­cov­ered through CIA doc­u­ments that there were nine under­cov­er agents at one time or anoth­er in Garrrison’s office. So, in addi­tion to what Mr. King had warned Gar­ri­son about, that is the neg­a­tiv­i­ty of the media which would now plague him until the end, there was some­thing that King left unsaid. But after he left, assis­tant Andrew Sci­ambra not­ed it to Gar­ri­son. He said, “Well, they offered you the car­rot, and you turned it down. You know what’s com­ing next don’t you?”

What we are about to describe in this chap­ter and the next is some­thing that nei­ther Gar­ri­son nor Sci­ambra could have like­ly imag­ined at the time. But with the aid of exten­sive inter­views, plus declas­si­fied doc­u­ments, for the first time we will now out­line a three stage pro­gram to decon­struct Garrison’s case and to make sure Shaw would be acquit­ted. This first stage began very ear­ly with DeTor­res, a man who–while work­ing with Mitch Werbell–may have been involved with Kennedy’s mur­der. But it will con­tin­ue with cer­tain oth­er “sin­gle­ton” pen­e­tra­tions by peo­ple like William Gur­vich and Gor­don Nov­el. The sec­ond stage of the effort will cen­ter around the wider efforts of for­mer Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency offi­cer Wal­ter Sheri­dan in alliance with the CIA and NBC. That effort was cou­pled with the work of intel­li­gence assets/journalists James Phe­lan and Hugh Aynesworth. When Gar­ri­son would still not give up, a third phase set in with two prongs to it. James Angleton’s office took over in Sep­tem­ber of 1967, and, as we have pre­viewed, Angleton’s endeav­or was then allied to, and expand­ed all the way up to Direc­tor Richard Helms in 1968 and 1969. With oper­a­tions that could even be dis­cussed in pub­lic or for the record. But which, as we shall see, HSCA Deputy Coun­sel Bob Tanen­baum saw cer­tain doc­u­ments about. . . .

Con­tin­u­ing and over­lap­ping analy­sis from the last pro­gram, we return to the sub­ject of vet­er­an intel­li­gence oper­a­tive Gor­don Nov­el, whom we have spo­ken of in past inter­views. In FTR #1044, we syn­op­sized Nov­el­’s activ­i­ties as a spook and as an infil­tra­tor into Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion: “One of the most impor­tant infil­tra­tors was Gor­don Nov­el, a vet­er­an CIA offi­cer, bril­liant elec­tron­ics expert and oper­a­tional asso­ciate of many of the peo­ple involved in Gar­rison’s probe. Nov­el had been involved with the Bay of Pigs and an arms bur­glary at a Schlum­berg­er facil­i­ty, some of the loot from which was stored at a rac­ing busi­ness owned in part by Nov­el. Oper­at­ing at the direc­tion of Allen Dulles, he infil­trat­ed Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion and bugged his office for the Agency. He also net­worked with the FBI to mon­i­tor Gar­rison’s probe. Nov­el also used his posi­tion inside Gar­rison’s probe to smear Gar­ri­son in pub­lic state­ments to the media. Nov­el was able to draw on large finan­cial reserves, the source of which is–technically speaking–opaque. At one point, he had five attor­neys work­ing on his behalf. That, in and of itself, would have required more mon­ey than Nov­el appeared to have at his dis­pos­al. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Nov­el worked in tan­dem with Wal­ter Sheri­dan, a vet­er­an intel­li­gence oper­a­tive who pro­duced an alto­geth­er “spe­cial” for NBC about the Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion. . . .”

In this pro­gram, we not­ed Nov­el­’s work with the FBI, as well as CIA. Not­ing a bunch of appar­ent “hang­ers-on” around his res­i­dence, Nov­el real­ized that they were FBI. They were inter­est­ed in hav­ing him mon­i­tor Gar­ri­son for the bureau, which he did. Jim notes that the Wack­en­hut Cor­po­ra­tion (for­mer­ly South­ern Research) was also mon­i­tor­ing Gar­rison’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions. It was an out­growth of the FBI.

Sup­ple­ment­ing analy­sis of CIA Gar­ri­son infil­tra­tor William Mar­tin (also high­light­ed in FTR #1044), we set forth Mar­t­in’s work for Guy Ban­is­ter.

An impor­tant part of the dis­cus­sion fea­tures expand­ed analy­sis of both Hugh Aynesworth and James Phe­lan, both of whom were promi­nent media hatch­et men who helped defame Gar­ri­son.  (They, too, were high­light­ed in FTR #1044.)

Key points of dis­cus­sion about Aynesworth.

1.–Prior to the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy, Aynesworth had net­worked with J. Wal­ton Moore, in charge of CIA oper­a­tions in Dal­las, Texas. Aynesworth was apply­ing for mem­ber­ship in the assas­si­na­tion.
2.-He was involved with attempt­ed sale of Oswald’s “diary.”
3.–Was net­worked with Mari­na Oswald, help­ing to dis­sem­i­nate the offi­cial lie about the assas­si­na­tion, and con­coct­ing a pre­pos­ter­ous sto­ry about Mari­na say­ing Oswald had planned to kill Nixon.
4.–Worked with peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with CIA’s anti-Cas­tro Cuban milieu in con­junc­tion with Life Mag­a­zine’s “re-inves­ti­ga­tion” of the JFK assas­si­na­tion. Hen­ry Luce’s Life and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions had a his­to­ry of work­ing with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.
5.–Disseminated dis­in­for­ma­tion about Garrison/JFK for “Newsweek.”
6.–He informed for both the FBI and Lyn­don John­son about Gar­rison’s inquest.
7.–Disseminated dis­in­for­ma­tion about David Fer­rie’s asso­ciate Alvin Beauboeuf. This dis­in­for­ma­tion ran par­al­lel to Wal­ter Sheri­dan’s dis­in­for­ma­tion efforts in this regard.
8.–Was instru­men­tal in frus­trat­ing Gar­rison’s attempts at inter­view­ing CIA Cuban oper­a­tive Ser­gio Arcacha Smith.
9.–Aynesworth net­worked with Clay Shaw’s defense team.

Key points of dis­cus­sion about Phe­lan include:

1.–Review of his hit piece on Gar­ri­son pub­lished by The Sat­ur­day Evening Post.
2.–His net­work­ing with intel­li­gence agen­cies in con­junc­tion with his jour­nal­is­tic activ­i­ties.
3.–His pro­fes­sion­al asso­ci­a­tion with Robert Loomis, who had a long career pub­lish­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion books cov­er­ing-up this coun­try’s major assas­si­na­tions. (Ger­ald Pos­ner’s noto­ri­ous “Case Closed” is a promi­nent exam­ple.
4.–Phelan also net­worked with Clay Shaw’s defense team, help­ing to intro­duce into the tri­al tes­ti­mo­ny the pre­pos­ter­ous “jet effect” syn­drome with regard to the head shot that sealed Kennedy’s fate. This pre­pos­ter­ous con­coc­tion main­tains that the vio­lent toss­ing of JFK’s body to the back and to the left by the fatal head shot was because the shot (sup­pos­ed­ly from behind) cre­at­ed a tun­nel in JFK’s head which, when it chan­neled the blood and flesh torn from Kennedy by the bul­let, cre­at­ed a “jet” that pro­pelled Kennedy back­ward.

The pro­gram con­cludes with a par­tial read­ing of a 2016 Huff­in­g­ton Post sto­ry based, in part on Phe­lan’s disin­gen­u­ous report­ing on the JFK assas­si­na­tion. One of the fea­tures of the arti­cle is that it casu­al­ly dis­miss­es Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion as base­less, and sug­gests that Gar­ri­son felt the homo­sex­u­al Shaw was involved with the assas­si­na­tion as part of a “homo­sex­u­al thrill killing.”

FTR #1045 Interview #14 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”

CIA’s Expert on the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Ray Roc­ca: ” . . . . Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy. . . .”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the four­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

In this pro­gram, we high­light the media hatch­et men who worked hand in glove with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty infil­tra­tors set forth in our pre­vi­ous inter­view. Many of the hatch­et men also worked with each oth­er, as well as the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, both the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty infil­tra­tors and the media hatch­et men worked with Clay Shaw’s coun­sel and freely broke the law.

In addi­tion to a CBS spe­cial that aired at the same time (1967), NBC broad­cast an out­right hatch­et job on Gar­ri­son presided over by Wal­ter Sheri­dan. A vet­er­an of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, Sheri­dan had worked for the FBI, the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence (ONI) and was a prin­ci­pal fig­ure in counter-intel­li­gence for the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency. As will be seen below, Sheri­dan reput­ed­ly had strong, deep con­nec­tions to CIA itself.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 255.

. . . . The con­ven­tion­al wis­dom about Wal­ter Sheri­dan places him as a for­mer FBI man; report­ed­ly he worked at the Bureau for about four years. . . .

. . . . Sheri­dan’s ties to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty, beyond the FBI, were wide, deep, and com­plex. He him­self said that, like Guy Ban­is­ter, he had been with the Office of Naval Intel­li­gence. Then, after he left the bureau, Sheri­dan did not go direct­ly to the Jus­tice Depart­ment. He moved over to the new­ly estab­lished Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency. This was a super-secret body cre­at­ed by Pres­i­dent Tru­man in 1952 both to pro­tect domes­tic codes and com­mu­ni­ca­tions and to gath­er intel­li­gence through crack­ing for­eign codes. It was so clan­des­tine that, for a time, the gov­ern­ment a tempt­ed to deny its exis­tence. There­fore, for along time, it oper­at­ed inal­most total secre­cy. Nei­ther the Con­gress nor any fedreal agency had the effec­tive over­sight to reg­u­late it. . . .

It is worth not­ing that–in addi­tion to Sheri­dan’s deep intel­li­gence background–NBC itself had strong, deep con­nec­tions to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. . . . .

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 255.

. . . . It is rel­e­vant to note here that Gen­er­al David Sarnoff, founder of NBC, worked for the Sig­nal Corps dur­ing World War II as a reserve offi­cer. In 1944, Sarnoff worked for the com­plete restora­tion of the Nazi destroyed Radio France sta­tion in Paris until its sig­nal was able to reach through­out Europe. It was then reti­tled Radio Free Europe. He lat­er lob­bied the White House to expand the range and reach of Radio Free Europe. At about this point, Radio Free Europe became a pet project of Allen Dulles. Sarnoff’s com­pa­ny, Radio Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­i­ca, became a large part of the tech­no­log­i­cal core of the NSA. Dur­ing the war, David’s son Robert worked in the broad­cast arm of the Office of Strate­gic Ser­vices (OSS), the fore­run­ner of the CIA. Robert was pres­i­dent of RCA, NBC’s par­ent com­pa­ny, at the time Sheridan’s spe­cial aired. David was chair­man. . .

Sheri­dan also presided over an osten­si­bly “pri­vate” inves­tiga­tive insti­tu­tion which was, in fact, a CIA front. It is worth not­ing that Beurt Ser Vas–an alum­nus of the Three Eyes–purchased The Sat­ur­day Evening Post, which pub­lished an anti-Gar­ri­son hit piece by James Phe­lan. (This is high­light­ed below.)

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; p. 256.

. . . The com­pa­ny was Inter­na­tion­al Inves­ti­ga­tors Incor­po­rat­ed, nick­named “Three Eyes.” Accord­ing to a Sen­ate inves­ti­ga­tor, “it was owned lock, stock, and bar­rel by the CIA.” Two of the orig­i­nal prin­ci­pals, George Miller and George Ryan, were, like Ban­is­ter, for­mer G‑men who lat­er went to work for CIA cov­er out­fits. Accord­ing to anoth­er source, not only was Sheri­dan the liai­son to Three Eyes, he “dis­posed over the per­son­nel and cur­ren­cy of whole units of the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency out of the White House.” By 1965 . . . Three Eyes was tak­en over by two for­mer CIA offi­cers. One of them, Beurt Ser Vaas, lat­er pur­chased the Sat­ur­day Evening Post. . . .

Exem­pli­fy­ing Sheri­dan’s method­ol­o­gy was the treat­ment met­ed out to Fred Lee­mans, who was the cli­mac­tic per­son inter­viewed by Sheri­dan in his spe­cial. Note the open intim­i­da­tion of Lee­mans and his fam­i­ly, threat­en­ing them if they did not per­jure them­selves, betray Gar­ri­son, and coop­er­ate with both Sheri­dan and Clay Shaw’s coun­sel!

This is rem­i­nis­cent of the treat­ment of Mar­lene Man­cu­so detailed in our pre­vi­ous inter­view.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse Pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 240–241.

. . . . One of the more star­tling dec­la­ra­tions that the ARRB uncov­ered was an affi­davit by a man named Fred Lee­mans. Lee­mans was a Turk­ish bath own­er who orig­i­nal­ly told gar­ri­son that a man named Clay Bertrand had fre­quent­ed his estab­lish­ment. Lee­mans was the cli­mac­tic inter­view for Sheri­dan’s spe­cial. He tes­ti­fied on the show that the DA’s office had actu­al­ly approached him first, that he nev­er knew that Shaw used the alias Bertrand, that every­thing he had pre­vi­ous­ly said to the DA’s office were things he was led to say by them, and that they had offered to pay him 2,500 dol­lars for his affi­davit in which in which he would now say that Shaw was Bertrand and that Shaw came into his estab­lish­ment once with Oswald. In oth­er words, all the things Nov­el had been say­ing in his pub­lic dec­la­ra­tions about Gar­ri­son were accu­rate. At the end of his inter­view, Lee­mans told Sheri­dan and the pub­lic that every­thing he had just revealed on cam­era was giv­en to NBC freely and vol­un­tar­i­ly. Lee­mans even said that he had actu­al­ly asked Sheri­dan for some mon­e­tary help but Sheri­dan had said he did not do things like that.

In Jan­u­ary of 1969, Lee­mans signed an affi­davit in which he declared the fol­low­ing as the true chain of events:

“I would like to state the rea­sons for which I appeared on the NBC show and lied about my con­tacts with the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office. First, I received numer­ous anony­mous threat­en­ing phone calls rel­a­tive to the infor­ma­tion I had giv­en to Mr. Gar­ri­son. The gist of these calls was to the effect that if I did not change my state­ment and state that I had been bribed by Jim Gar­rison’s office, I and my fam­i­ly would be in phys­i­cal dan­ger. In addi­tion to the anony­mous phone calls, I was vis­it­ed by a man who exhib­it­ed a badge and stat­ed that he was a gov­ern­ment agent. This man informed me that the gov­ern­ment was present­ly check­ing the bar own­ers in the Slidell area for pos­si­ble income tax vio­la­tions. This man then inquired whether I was the Mr. Lee­mans involved in the Clay Shaw case. When I informed him that I was, he said that it was not smart to be involved because a lot of peo­ple that had been got hurt and that peo­ple in pow­er­ful places would see to it that I was tak­en care of. One of the anony­mous callers sug­gest­ed that I change my state­ment and state that I had been bribed by Gar­rison’s office to give him the infor­ma­tion about Clay Shaw. He sug­gest­ed that I con­tact Mr. Irvin Dymond, attor­ney for Clay L. Shaw and tell him that I gave Mr. Gar­ri­son the state­ment about Shaw only after Mr. Lee [Gar­rison’s assis­tant DA] offered me 2,500 dol­lars. After con­sult­ing with Mr. Dymond by tele­phone and in per­son, I was intro­duced to Wal­ter Sheri­dan, inves­tiga­tive reporter for NBC, who was then in the process of prepar­ing the NBC show. Mr. Dymond and Mr. Sheri­dan sug­gest­ed that I appear on the show and state what I had orig­i­nal­ly told Mr. Dymond about the bribe offer by the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office. I was informed by Mr. Dymond that should the Dis­trict Attor­ney’s office charge me with giv­ing false infor­ma­tion as a result of the state­ment I had orig­i­nal­ly giv­en them, he would see to it that I had an attor­ney and that a bond would be post­ed for me. In this con­nec­tion, Mr. Dymond gave me his home and office tele­phone num­bers and and advised me that I could con­tact him at any time of day or night should I be charged by Gar­rison’s office as a result of my appear­ing on the NBC show. My actu­al appear­ance on the show was taped in the office of Aaron Kohn, Man­ag­ing Direc­tor of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Crime Com­mis­sion, in the pres­ence of Wal­ter Sheri­dan and Irvin Dymond.”

This is one of the most reveal­ing doc­u­ments por­tray­ing the lengths to which Sheri­dan would go in tam­per­ing with wit­ness­es. It also demon­strates that Shaw’s lawyers—Bill and Ed Weg­mann, Irvin Dymond, and Sal Panzeca—knew almost no bound­ary in what kind of help they would accept to win their case. Third, it reveals that Shaw’s lawyers had access to a net­work of attor­neys that they could hire at any time for any wit­ness they could pry loose from Gar­ri­son. Because, as the declas­si­fied ARRB doc­u­ments reveal, there was a CIA cleared attor­ney’s pan­el that was at work in New Orleans. Attor­neys that the Agency vet­ted in advance so they would be suit­able for their covert use and could be trust­ed in their aims. The fact that Shaw’s lawyers were privy to such CIA secret knowl­edge, and wee uti­liz­ing it, shows just how will­ing and eager they were to indulge them­selves in covert help—and then lie about it. . . .

In addi­tion to Sheri­dan, James Phe­lan and Hugh Aynesworth joined the media cho­rus attack­ing Gar­ri­son, and both of them net­worked with the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty as well. Phe­lan’s hit piece was pub­lished in the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, which was even­tu­al­ly bought by CIA vet­er­an Beurt Ser Vas, an alum­nus of the Sheri­dan-linked Three Eyes intel­li­gence front.

FTR #1044 Interview #13 with Jim DiEugenio About “Destiny Betrayed”

CIA’s Expert on the JFK Assas­si­na­tion Ray Roc­ca: ” . . . . Gar­ri­son would indeed obtain a con­vic­tion of Shaw for con­spir­ing to assas­si­nate Pres­i­dent Kennedy. . . .”

House Select Com­mit­tee on Assas­si­na­tions Assis­tant Coun­sel Jonathan Black­mer: “. . . . ‘We have rea­son to believe Shaw was heav­i­ly involved in the Anti-Cas­tro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and [was] pos­si­bly one of the high lev­el plan­ners or ‘cut out’ to the plan­ners of the assas­si­na­tion.’ . . . .”

This is the thir­teenth of a planned long series of inter­views with Jim DiEu­ge­nio about his tri­umphal analy­sis of Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and New Orleans Dis­trict Attor­ney Jim Gar­rison’s hero­ic inves­ti­ga­tion of the killing.

This broad­cast high­lights the infil­tra­tors into Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion: how they sub­vert­ed his inquest, net­worked with intel­li­gence ele­ments impli­cat­ed in the assas­si­na­tion, net­worked with media hatch­et men who lam­bast­ed Gar­ri­son pub­licly and also Clay Shaw’s defense team.

Dis­cus­sion begins with a Den­ver oil man named John King, who made an oblique offer of an appoint­ment to the Fed­er­al Bench, an appar­ent car­rot to per­suade Gar­ri­son to drop his probe into the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion. As a Gar­ri­son aide not­ed, the stick would fol­low.

A syn­op­tic overview of the infil­tra­tors, what they did and with and for whom:

1.–William Mar­tin, who infil­trat­ed Gar­rison’s team, appar­ent­ly on behalf of CIA.
2.–Bernardo DeTor­res, a Bay of Pigs vet­er­an and CIA oper­a­tive with con­nec­tions to Mitchell Wer­bell, a silenced weapons expert best known as the inven­tor of the Ingram Mac 10 and Mac 11 silenced machine pis­tols. DeTor­res was fil­ing reports on Gar­ri­son with the CIA’s JM/Wave sta­tion in Mia­mi and was appar­ent­ly in Dealey Plaza on 11/22/1963. CIA oper­a­tive Ela­dio Del Valle–David Fer­rie’s case offi­cer on some missions–was found dead short­ly after Fer­rie. Del Valle was found tor­tured, shot through the heart and with his head split open with a machete. The corpse was a short dis­tance from DeTor­res’ apart­ment. DeTor­res was also alleged­ly involved with the assas­si­na­tion of Orlan­do Lete­lier.
3.–William and Louis Gur­vich, two “pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tors” who infil­trat­ed Gar­rison’s office and, among oth­er things, began chan­nel­ing infor­ma­tion about Gar­rison’s probe to Wal­ter Sheri­dan, about whom we will have more to say lat­er. William stole Gar­rison’s inves­tiga­tive file and gave it to Clay Shaw’s defense team. William Gur­vich con­tin­ued to work with Clay Shaw’s defense through 1971 (Shaw was charged with per­jury). Gur­vich may well have worked for CIA. His work with Shaw is in keep­ing with a Richard Helms direc­tive sum­ma­rized in item #6 below.
4.–Bill Box­ley worked to steer Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion into dubi­ous areas. When Gar­rison’s team vis­it­ed Box­ley’s appar­ent place of res­i­dence, it appeared not to have ever been occu­pied by Box­ley. Box­ley car­ried a num­ber of brief­cas­es with him when work­ing with Gar­ri­son, grow­ing larg­er with time. It appeared that he was pur­loin­ing doc­u­ments from Gar­rison’s office. Even­tu­al­ly, he called Gar­ri­son, warn­ing that “we” are com­ing to get you.
5.–Tom Bethell, an Eng­lish­man and an assas­si­na­tion expert, met with Sal Panze­ca, one of Clay Shaw’s attor­neys and gave him a list of Gar­rison’s wit­ness­es and sum­maries of what each was expect­ed to say.
6.–Pershing Ger­vais was recruit­ed to ensnare Gar­ri­son in a pur­port­ed scan­dal after the Clay Shaw tri­al, in keep­ing with Richard Helms’ direc­tive that the CIA take steps to neu­tral­ize Gar­ri­son and any effect that he might have before, dur­ing and after the Clay Shaw tri­al. He decamped to Cana­da, to be beyond Gar­rison’s legal reach, work­ing at a job at Gen­er­al Motors secured for him by The Pow­ers That Be. Lat­er, he admit­ted his per­fidy.
7.–One of the most impor­tant infil­tra­tors was Gor­don Nov­el, a vet­er­an CIA offi­cer, bril­liant elec­tron­ics expert and oper­a­tional asso­ciate of many of the peo­ple involved in Gar­rison’s probe. Nov­el had been involved with the Bay of Pigs and an arms bur­glary at a Schlum­berg­er facil­i­ty, some of the loot from which was stored at a rac­ing busi­ness owned in part by Nov­el. Oper­at­ing at the direc­tion of Allen Dulles, he infil­trat­ed Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion and bugged his office for the Agency. He also net­worked with the FBI to mon­i­tor Gar­rison’s probe. Nov­el also used his posi­tion inside Gar­rison’s probe to smear Gar­ri­son in pub­lic state­ments to the media. Nov­el was able to draw on large finan­cial reserves, the source of which is–technically speaking–opaque. At one point, he had five attor­neys work­ing on his behalf. That, in and of itself, would have required more mon­ey than Nov­el appeared to have at his dis­pos­al. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Nov­el worked in tan­dem with Wal­ter Sheri­dan, a vet­er­an intel­li­gence oper­a­tive who pro­duced an alto­geth­er “spe­cial” for NBC about the Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion. We will dis­cuss Sheri­dan at greater length in our next inter­view.

The heavy hand­ed­ness of the pres­sure placed on those who coop­er­at­ed with Gar­ri­son is illus­trat­ed by the expe­ri­ence of Mar­lene Man­cu­so, Nov­el­’s estranged wife. Note the coor­di­na­tion of oper­a­tions between CIA offi­cer Nov­el and peo­ple work­ing with Wal­ter Sheri­dan, as well as Sheri­dan him­self.

Des­tiny Betrayed by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; Sky­horse pub­lish­ing [SC]; Copy­right 1992, 2012 by Jim DiEu­ge­nio; ISBN 978–1‑62087–056‑3; pp. 239–240.

. . . . Mar­lene Man­cu­so was Novel’s estranged wife. She had been talk­ing to Gar­ri­son. He had detailed knowl­edge of Gordon’s Agency activ­i­ties with peo­ple like Fer­rie and Ser­gio Arcacha Smith. Plus she was ful­ly informed about the trans­fer of arms from the Schlum­berg­er bunker for the Bay of Pigs. In May of 1967, [Rick] Town­ley found her work­ing as a cashier in the [French] Quar­ter at a place called Lucky Pierre’s. Town­ley told her blunt­ly that Gar­ri­son was going down. They want­ed her to say, on cam­era, that the DA had coerced her into giv­ing him tes­ti­mo­ny about the Schlum­berg­er muni­tions trans­fer. When that did not work, a friend of Gordon’s called and warned her about fac­ing fed­er­al per­jury charges if she did not turn on Gar­ri­son. Final­ly, Sheri­dan showed up in per­son. He also said that Gar­ri­son was going down the drain, and she was going with him. But if she would talk to him, he would get her a job at NBC. This also failed. So Sheri­dan start­ed fol­low­ing her around. Once he fol­lowed her to church. His excuse was that he want­ed to say a prayer inside. One day, both Sheri­dan and Town­ley showed up at her front door. They said they were look­ing for Gor­don. The net day, Town­ley called her and said if she did not get away from Gar­ri­son, she could get killed. Man­cu­so did not turn on Gar­ri­son. She signed a state­ment for the DA reveal­ing the threats and extor­tion by Town­ley and Sheri­dan. . . .

FTR #1039 Miscellaneous Articles and Updates

In FTR #718, we warned [back in 2010] that Face­book was not the cud­dly lit­tle enti­ty it was per­ceived to be but a poten­tial engine of fas­cism enabling. Momen­tum for the remark­ably timed immi­grant car­a­van that became a focal point for Trump/GOP/Fox News pro­pa­gan­da dur­ing the recent­ly-con­clud­ed midterm elec­tions was gen­er­at­ed by a fake Face­book account, which mim­ic­ked a Hon­duran politician/human rights activist, Bar­to­lo Fuentes. Sig­nif­i­cant aspects of the event:

1.–” . . . . Face­book has admit­ted the account was an imposter account imper­son­at­ing a promi­nent Hon­duran politi­cian. But it is refus­ing to release infor­ma­tion about the account, who may have set it up or what coun­try it orig­i­nat­ed from. . . .”
2.–” . . . . In response to a query from Buz­zFeed News, a Face­book spokesper­son said the pho­ny account ‘was removed for vio­lat­ing [the company’s] mis­rep­re­sen­ta­tion pol­i­cy,’ but declined to share any fur­ther infor­ma­tion, such as what coun­try it orig­i­nat­ed from, what email address was used to open it, or any oth­er details that might reveal who was behind it. Face­book added that, bar­ring a sub­poe­na or request from law enforce­ment, it does not share such infor­ma­tion out of respect for the pri­va­cy of its users. Fuentes said he believes it’s impor­tant to find out who was behind the rogue account — but hasn’t got­ten any answers from Face­book. ‘Who knows how many mes­sages could have been sent and who received them?’ . . . .”
3.–” . . . . Fuentes has been unable to get any infor­ma­tion from Face­book about the account, but one small detail stood out. Who­ev­er cre­at­ed it list­ed the Hon­duran cap­i­tal of Tegu­ci­gal­pa as Fuentes’s home­town, rather than the San Pedro Sula sub­urb of El Pro­gre­so. That might seem like a minor error, but it’s the sort of mis­take a for­eign­er — not a Hon­duran — would make about the well-known for­mer law­mak­er, whose left-wing par­ty stands in oppo­si­tion to the cur­rent president’s admin­is­tra­tion. . . . ”
4.–” . . . . It oper­at­ed entire­ly in Span­ish and pre­cise­ly tar­get­ed influ­encers with­in the migrant rights com­mu­ni­ty. And rather than crit­i­cize or under­mine the car­a­van — as oth­er online cam­paigns would lat­er attempt to do — it was used to legit­imize the event, mak­ing a loose­ly struc­tured grass­roots event appear to be a well-orga­nized effort by an estab­lished migrant group with a proven track record of suc­cess­ful­ly bring­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­can peo­ple to the US bor­der. . . .”
5.–” . . . . before the account got start­ed not many peo­ple seemed to be join­ing. Only after the account kicked into gear did enthu­si­asm and par­tic­i­pa­tion spike. The account also claimed false­ly that the car­a­van was being led by a migrant rights orga­ni­za­tion called Pueblo Sin Fron­teras. Lat­er, once the car­a­van swelled to a mas­sive scale, the Pueblo Sin Fron­teras did get involved, though in a sup­port rather than lead­er­ship role. . . .”
6.–” . . . . It appears that this account helped the car­a­van gain key momen­tum to the point where its size became a self-ful­fill­ing prophe­cy, spurring even more to join and groups which hadn’t been sup­port­ive to get involved. . . .”
7.–” . . . . It’s hard to believe one Face­book account could play that deci­sive a role. But the account seems to have been sophis­ti­cat­ed. And it is equal­ly dif­fi­cult to believe that a sophis­ti­ca­tor oper­a­tor or orga­ni­za­tion would have gone to such trou­ble and lim­it­ed their efforts to a sin­gle imposter account. . . .”

Christo­pher Wylie–the for­mer head of research at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca who became one of the key insid­er whis­tle-blow­ers about how Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca oper­at­ed and the extent of Facebook’s knowl­edge about it–gave an inter­view last month to Cam­paign Mag­a­zine. (We dealt with Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca in FTR #‘s 946, 1021.)

Wylie recounts how, as direc­tor of research at Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca, his orig­i­nal role was to deter­mine how the com­pa­ny could use the infor­ma­tion war­fare tech­niques used by SCL Group – Cam­bridge Analytica’s par­ent com­pa­ny and a defense con­trac­tor pro­vid­ing psy op ser­vices for the British mil­i­tary. Wylie’s job was to adapt the psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare strate­gies that SCL had been using on the bat­tle­field to the online space. As Wylie put it:

“ . . . . When you are work­ing in infor­ma­tion oper­a­tions projects, where your tar­get is a com­bat­ant, the auton­o­my or agency of your tar­gets is not your pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion. It is fair game to deny and manip­u­late infor­ma­tion, coerce and exploit any men­tal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties a per­son has, and to bring out the very worst char­ac­ter­is­tics in that per­son because they are an enemy…But if you port that over to a demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem, if you run cam­paigns designed to under­mine people’s abil­i­ty to make free choic­es and to under­stand what is real and not real, you are under­min­ing democ­ra­cy and treat­ing vot­ers in the same way as you are treat­ing ter­ror­ists. . . . .”

Wylie also draws par­al­lels between the psy­cho­log­i­cal oper­a­tions used on demo­c­ra­t­ic audi­ences and the bat­tle­field tech­niques used to be build an insur­gency. It starts with tar­get­ing peo­ple more prone to hav­ing errat­ic traits, para­noia or con­spir­a­to­r­i­al think­ing, and get them to “like” a group on social media. The infor­ma­tion you’re feed­ing this tar­get audi­ence may or may not be real. The impor­tant thing is that it’s con­tent that they already agree with so that “it feels good to see that infor­ma­tion.” Keep in mind that one of the goals of the ‘psy­cho­graph­ic pro­fil­ing’ that Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca was to iden­ti­fy traits like neu­roti­cism.

Wylie goes on to describe the next step in this insur­gency-build­ing tech­nique: keep build­ing up the inter­est in the social media group that you’re direct­ing this tar­get audi­ence towards until it hits around 1,000–2,000 peo­ple. Then set up a real life event ded­i­cat­ed to the cho­sen dis­in­for­ma­tion top­ic in some local area and try to get as many of your tar­get audi­ence to show up. Even if only 5 per­cent of them show up, that’s still 50–100 peo­ple con­verg­ing on some local cof­fee shop or what­ev­er. The peo­ple meet each oth­er in real life and start talk­ing about about “all these things that you’ve been see­ing online in the depths of your den and get­ting angry about”. This tar­get audi­ence starts believ­ing that no one else is talk­ing about this stuff because “they don’t want you to know what the truth is”. As Wylie puts it, “What start­ed out as a fan­ta­sy online gets port­ed into the tem­po­ral world and becomes real to you because you see all these peo­ple around you.”

In FTR #1028, we high­light­ed the killing of Mol­lie Tib­betts not­ing that:

1.–The killing may have been a provo­ca­tion, direct­ed at focus­ing the elec­torate’s ire toward ille­gal immi­grants and away from Don­ald Trump.
2.–The announce­ment about the loca­tion and arrest of the sus­pect­ed perpetrator–Christhian Rivera–came on the same day that Michael Cohen copped a plea and Paul Man­afort was found guilty. Was River­a’s arrest timed as a dis­trac­tion?
3.–There are super­fi­cial indi­ca­tions that Christhi­an Rivera may have been sub­ject­ed to mind con­trol, a la Sirhan Sirhan.
4.–Rivera worked at a dairy facil­i­ty con­trolled by the Lang fam­i­ly, promi­nent Iowa Repub­li­cans.

Now, we learn that Eric Lang, Craig Lang’s brother–is mar­ried to Nicole Schlinger, a promi­nent GOP fundrais­er with strong oper­a­tional and his­tor­i­cal links to the Koch broth­ers’ net­works and oth­er GOP post-Cit­i­zens Unit­ed dark mon­ey net­works.

High-tech may be the future of Trump’s much-bal­ly­hooed wall with Mex­i­co, with a tech­nol­o­gy dubbed AVATAR seen by some as the future of bor­der secu­ri­ty: “A vir­tu­al bor­der agent kiosk was devel­oped to inter­view trav­el­ers at air­ports and bor­der cross­ings and it can detect decep­tion to flag human secu­ri­ty agents. The U.S., Cana­da and Euro­pean Union have test­ed the tech­nol­o­gy, and one researcher says it has a decep­tion detec­tion suc­cess rate of up to 80 per­cent — bet­ter than human agents. The tech­nol­o­gy relies on sen­sors and bio­met­rics, and its lie-detec­tion capa­bil­i­ties are based on eye move­ments or changes in voice, pos­ture and facial ges­tures. . . .”

Futur­ist philoso­pher and author Yuval Noah Harari appears to be a dystopi­an futur­ist, envi­sion­ing a future where democ­ra­cy is seen as obso­lete and a tech­no-elite rul­ing class run com­pa­nies with the capac­i­ty to essen­tial­ly con­trol the minds of mass­es. Those mass­es that will increas­ing­ly be seen obso­lete and use­less. Harari even gave a recent TED Talk called “Why fas­cism is so tempt­ing — and how your data could pow­er it. So how do Sil­i­con Valley’s CEO view Mr. Harari’s views? They appar­ent­ly can’t get enough of him:

We con­clude with a look at how the SCL/Cambridge Ana­lyt­i­ca dynam­ic has man­i­fest­ed in the Rus­sia-gate Psy-Op.

Adding fur­ther per­spec­tive to the utter­ly fan­tas­tic nature of the Rus­sia-Gate “psy-op” is analy­sis of a recent New York Times pro­pa­gan­da piece hyp­ing Rus­si­a’s manip­u­la­tion of Face­book to influ­ence the U.S. elec­tion. “. . . . The fur­ther research into an ear­li­er Con­sor­tium News arti­cle shows that a rel­a­tive­ly pal­try 80,000 posts from the pri­vate Russ­ian com­pa­ny Inter­net Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in lit­er­al­ly tril­lions of posts on Face­book over a two-year peri­od before and after the 2016 vote. [Just HOW a post gen­er­at­ed after the elec­tion was sup­posed to influ­ence the elec­tion was not explained by The Gray Lady–D.E.]. . . . The news­pa­per [The New York Times] failed to tell their read­ers that Face­book account hold­ers in the Unit­ed States had been “served” 33 tril­lion Face­book posts dur­ing that same peri­od — 413 mil­lion times more than the 80,000 posts from the Russ­ian com­pa­ny. . . .”

FTR #963 Watergate and the Assassination of President Kennedy, Part 3

As com­par­isons between the Water­gate scan­dal and “Rus­sia-gate” sat­u­rate the media (in the sum­mer of 2017), the pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion about con­nec­tions between the Water­gate scan­dal and the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. Nixon told aides that he did­n’t want to release the White House tape record­ings because he was afraid “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” might come out. Nixon aide H.R. Halde­man said in his book “The Ends of Pow­er” that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was a code word in the Nixon White House for the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. (It should be remem­bered that Nixon was in Dal­las on 11/22/63, yet he told the FBI in Feb­ru­ary of 1964 that he had left Dal­las two days pri­or to Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion.)

When inter­viewed by the War­ren Com­mis­sion, Jack Ruby indi­cat­ed that he had been part of a con­spir­a­cy to kill Kennedy and that he feared for his life. The War­ren Com­mis­sion turned a deaf ear to his desire to go to Wash­ing­ton and “spill the beans.” Ger­ald Ford (who suc­ceed­ed Nixon as Pres­i­dent and par­doned him of all crimes com­mit­ted), Leon Jawors­ki (a War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel who was a direc­tor of a CIA domes­tic fund­ing con­duit and who was select­ed by Nixon to be Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor) and Arlen Specter (anoth­er War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel who was Nixon’s first choice as his per­son­al defense attor­ney in the Water­gate affair) were present at Ruby’s de fac­to con­fes­sion.

War­ren Com­mis­sion Coun­sel J. Lee Rankin is also present at this inter­view. Nixon first select­ed J. Lee Rankin to serve as Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor. Rankin was sub­se­quent­ly tabbed to review the Water­gate tapes and deter­mine which would be released. Rankin was the War­ren Com­mis­sion’s liai­son between the com­mis­sion and both the CIA and the FBI. Rankin was a key pro­po­nent of the so-called “Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.”

It is inter­est­ing to con­tem­plate the text of a let­ter that Jack Ruby smug­gled out of prison. In the let­ter, Ruby hints that Nazis and Japan­ese fas­cists par­tic­i­pat­ed in the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. Cer­tain­ly, ele­ments of what were to become the World Anti-Com­mu­nist League (includ­ing the Asian Peo­ples Anti-Com­mu­nist League) were involved.

” . . . Don’t believe the War­ren [Com­mis­sion] Report, that was only put out to make me look inno­cent. . . . I’m going to die a hor­ri­ble death any­way, so what would I have to gain by writ­ing all this. So you must believe me. . . . that [sic] is only one kind of peo­ple that would do such a thing, that would have to be the Naz­i’s [sic], and that is who is in pow­er in this coun­try right now. . . . Japan is also in on the deal, but the old war lords are going to come back. South Amer­i­ca is also full of these Naz­i’s [sic]. . . . if those peo­ple were so deter­mined to frame me then you must be con­vinced that they had an ulte­ri­or motive for doing same. There is only one kind of peo­ple that would go to such extremes, and that would be the Mas­ter Race. . . .”

The late inves­tiga­tive reporter and “What’s My Line” pan­elist Dorothy Kil­gallen pub­lished Ruby’s War­ren Com­mis­sion Tes­ti­mo­ny and had told asso­ciates she would “break this case wide open.” Short­ly after­ward, she was found dead of alco­hol and bar­bi­tu­rate poisoning–suicide and acci­den­tal death have both been put for­ward as rea­sons for her demise. Her wid­ow­er refused pub­lic com­men­tary on her death and even­tu­al­ly “com­mit­ted sui­cide” him­self.

We excerpt The Guns of Novem­ber, Part 2, high­light­ing Kil­gal­len’s death. Inter­est­ing­ly and sig­nif­i­cant­ly, “What’s My Line” host and mod­er­a­tor John Charles Daly was Earl War­ren’s son-in-law, as dis­cussed in FTR #190. Did Daly pur­pose­ful­ly or inad­ver­tent­ly con­vey infor­ma­tion to War­ren about Kil­gal­len’s inves­ti­ga­tion? Was that in any way con­nect­ed with her death?

On the Daly/Warren in-law relationship–note that Daly worked as a White House cor­re­spon­dent and globe-trav­el­ing reporter for CBS radio news, a vice-pres­i­den­cy at ABC in charge of news and also head­ed the Voice of Amer­i­ca, which had strong links to the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. Those jour­nal­is­tic posi­tions, as well as his role as direc­tor of VOA may well have brought him into the fold of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty.

The late inves­tiga­tive reporter and “What’s My Line” pan­elist Dorothy Kil­gallen pub­lished Ruby’s War­ren Com­mis­sion Tes­ti­mo­ny and had told asso­ciates she would “break this case wide open.” Short­ly after­ward, she was found dead of alco­hol and bar­bi­tu­rate poisoning–suicide and acci­den­tal death have both been put for­ward as rea­sons for her demise. Her wid­ow­er refused pub­lic com­men­tary on her death and even­tu­al­ly “com­mit­ted sui­cide” him­self.

Next, the pro­gram excerpts FTR #253, fea­tur­ing an intrigu­ing com­men­tary by the late, vet­er­an CIA offi­cer Gor­don Nov­el. High­lights of that pro­gram include:

1. The broad­cast high­lights the con­tro­ver­sy sur­round­ing Richard Nixon’s White House tapes. These tape record­ings were, ulti­mate­ly, the vehi­cle for forc­ing his exit from the White House. That event was the cul­mi­na­tion of the Water­gate affair. There was dis­cus­sion in the fall of 2000 among elec­tron­ics experts con­cern­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of uti­liz­ing advanced, high-tech equip­ment to recov­er mate­r­i­al from a famous 18 ½ minute era­sure on one of the tapes.
(The San Fran­cis­co Exam­in­er; 9/22/2000; p. A2.)
2. The sub­ject of whether or not the era­sure had been delib­er­ate was a sig­nif­i­cant ele­ment of con­tro­ver­sy dur­ing the Water­gate affair. (Nixon’s sec­re­tary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed that she “acci­den­tal­ly” erased the tape. Most experts reject­ed her ver­sion of events. Inter­est­ing­ly, the tape that was erased was a record­ing of a con­ver­sa­tion between White House aide H.R. Halde­man and Nixon. In an auto­bi­og­ra­phy about the Water­gate affair, Halde­man wrote that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” was a code word with­in the Nixon White House for the JFK assas­si­na­tion. Nixon refused to release the Water­gate tapes for fear that release would lead to expo­sure of “the whole Bay of Pigs thing.”
3. Much of the pro­gram con­sists of excerpts from oth­er broad­casts. In an excerpt from G‑3, the broad­cast high­lights a vet­er­an covert intel­li­gence oper­a­tive and pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor named Gor­don Nov­el. Among Novel’s many tal­ents is elec­tron­ic coun­ter­in­tel­li­gence. His name crops up in the con­text of both the JFK case and the Water­gate scan­dal. Nov­el was the source for an impor­tant piece of infor­ma­tion that fig­ured in the Jim Gar­ri­son inves­ti­ga­tion. That report con­cerned a raid on a muni­tions cache to obtain arms for anti-Cas­tro activ­i­ties, the CIA’s Bay of Pigs inva­sion, in par­tic­u­lar.
(“Coin­ci­dence or Con­spir­a­cy?”; Bernard Fen­ster­wald and the Com­mit­tee to Inves­ti­gate Assas­si­na­tions; copy­right 1976 by Zebra Books, a divi­sion of Kens­ing­ton Pub­lish­ers.)
4. This oper­a­tion alleged­ly involved David Fer­rie and Guy Ban­nis­ter, two of the key fig­ures in Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion. Nov­el was lat­er con­sult­ed by White House aide Charles Col­son con­cern­ing the fea­si­bil­i­ty of elec­tron­i­cal­ly eras­ing the tapes. (Coin­ci­dence or Con­spir­a­cy?)
5. Novel’s tan­gen­tial involve­ment in the Water­gate inves­ti­ga­tion sur­faced in a mag­a­zine called Tech­nol­o­gy Illus­trat­ed. In 1983, the mag­a­zine ran an arti­cle about Novel’s pres­ence at a gath­er­ing of vet­er­an covert intel­li­gence oper­a­tives, includ­ing con­vict­ed Water­gate bur­glar G. Gor­don Lid­dy.
(“Tech­nol­o­gy Illus­trat­ed”; 4/83.)
6. In a let­ter to the edi­tor, Mr. Nov­el took issue to some of the com­ments about him in the April issue.
(Tech­nol­o­gy Illus­trat­ed; 7/83.)
7. In that let­ter, Nov­el made ref­er­ence to his ultra high tech­nol­o­gy role “to erase the Water­gate tapes.” (Idem.)
In 1984, Mr. Emory was a guest on a late-night com­mer­cial talk show and Mr. Nov­el phoned in, tak­ing issue with Mr. Emory’s descrip­tion of his posi­tion in Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion.
(The Express Way show with Lar­ry John­son on KOME-FM in San Jose, Cal­i­for­nia; 10/29/1984.)
8. Most of the sec­ond side of this pro­gram con­sists of an excerpt­ing of the con­ver­sa­tion with the late, for­mi­da­ble Nov­el. In his con­ver­sa­tion with Mr. Emory, Nov­el denied any involve­ment in Kennedy’s assas­si­na­tion and crit­i­cized Garrison’s inves­ti­ga­tion. (Idem.)
9. When the sub­ject of Water­gate came up, Mr. Emory asked Mr. Nov­el if he denied actu­al­ly hav­ing erased the Water­gate tapes. Nov­el replied “only because they didn’t pay me.” (Idem.)
When pressed fur­ther, Nov­el clar­i­fied his state­ment, say­ing he didn’t erase any por­tions of the Water­gate tapes. He did state that he was one of a pan­el of experts who ana­lyzed the 18 ½‑minute gap and stat­ed that it could have been made acci­den­tal­ly. (Idem.)
10. Intrigu­ing­ly, Nov­el added that he was also on the pan­el of elec­tron­ics experts that tes­ti­fied that the Dic­ta­phone record­ing from a Dal­las police motor­cy­cle was accu­rate in its reveal­ing of a fourth shot–which neu­tral­ized the sin­gle bul­let the­o­ry.
11. In FTR #190, Nov­el con­firmed his role in the bur­glary of the Schlum­berg­er facil­i­ty and main­tained that he was involved with a plan to give anti-Cas­tro Cubans [Cas­tro] army uni­forms to wear while attack­ing the U.S. Marines at Guan­tanamo, there­by trig­ger­ing a U.S. inva­sion of Cuba.
12. After Mr. Nov­el­’s death, it emerged that he was serv­ing as a mole in Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion, fun­nel­ing infor­ma­tion to Allen Dulles.

FTR #962 Watergate and the Assassination of President Kennedy, Part 2

This broad­cast con­tin­ues our review of the pro­found con­nec­tions between the Water­gate scan­dal and the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy. For pur­pos­es of con­ve­nience and con­ti­nu­ity, we recap an overview of some of these links from the descrip­tion of FTR #961:

With Water­gate being bruit­ed about by our media in con­junc­tion with the “inves­ti­ga­tions” into Trump and “Rus­sia-gate,” we are tak­ing time to dig into the archives and recap infor­ma­tion about one of the fac­tors that under­lay the Water­gate scandal–the Assas­si­na­tion of JFK.

The first of these pro­grams excerpts The Guns of Novem­ber, Part 3 (record­ed on 11/15/1983) at length. From the descrip­tion for that pro­gram:

Richard Nixon’s polit­i­cal demise came through the Water­gate scan­dal. Nixon ini­ti­at­ed the Water­gate cov­er-up because he feared that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” would come out. In his polit­i­cal mem­oir The Ends of Pow­er, Nixon aide H.R. Halde­man wrote that the phrase “Bay of Pigs” was a code-word with­in the Nixon White House for the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion.

The pro­gram doc­u­ments many of the areas of over­lap between the Water­gate and Kennedy inves­ti­ga­tions.

Nixon him­self was in Dal­las on Novem­ber 22, 1963, as a lawyer for Pep­si­co (the par­ent com­pa­ny of Pep­si Cola.) Fly­ing out of Dal­las rough­ly two hours before Kennedy was slain, Nixon told the FBI in Feb­ru­ary of 1964 that the only time he had been in Dal­las in 1963 had been “two days pri­or to the assas­si­na­tion.” This bla­tant lie is negat­ed by a wire ser­vice inter­view Nixon gave in Dal­las on Novem­ber 21. Text of the inter­view ran in the New York Times and oth­er major news­pa­pers.

(A Pep­si Cola exec­u­tive said that Nixon was present in Dal­las at a com­pa­ny meet­ing when the announce­ment came that Pres­i­dent Kennedy had been killed.)

Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor Leon Jawors­ki was select­ed by Nixon to replace the ille­gal­ly fired Archibald Cox. Jawors­ki had pre­vi­ous­ly served as a War­ren Com­mis­sion Coun­sel, while at the same time serv­ing as direc­tor of a CIA domes­tic fund­ing con­duit.

Nixon named for­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion mem­ber Ger­ald Ford to replace Vice Pres­i­dent Agnew. Ford then replaced Nixon as Pres­i­dent and par­doned him of all crimes he may have com­mit­ted. . . .

. . . . The pro­gram dis­cuss­es evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries con­nect­ing numer­ous oth­er fig­ures to the both inves­ti­ga­tions, includ­ing Water­gate Judge John Sir­i­ca and Water­gate bur­glar Frank Stur­gis.

To attempt selec­tive era­sure of the all-impor­tant Water­gate tapes, Nixon sought the assis­tance of Gor­don Nov­el, a vet­er­an intel­li­gence agent, elec­tron­ics expert, anti-Cas­tro vet­er­an and a fig­ure in Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion in New Orleans. At least one key tape was par­tial­ly erased (the famous 18 1/2 minute gap), though no cul­prit was ever iden­ti­fied.

In this sec­ond broad­cast of the series, we draw on Mis­cel­la­neous Archive Show M59–Richard Nixon’s Great­est Hits: High­lights of Richard Nixon’s Polit­i­cal Career. In that pro­gram (record­ed on 5/1/1994), we reviewed an adden­dum to the orig­i­nal The Guns of Novem­ber, Part 3. That addendum–recorded in June of 1972 (the 20th anniver­sary of the orig­i­nal Water­gate break-in)–builds on the infor­ma­tion from FTR #961.

After review­ing infor­ma­tion about Nixon’s pres­ence in Dal­las, Texas on 11/22/1963, the pro­gram presents research by the late Penn Jones that main­tains that Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, among oth­ers, were present at a gath­er­ing at oil­man Clint Muchison’s home the evening before the assassination–a meet­ing Jones felt was a plan­ning ses­sion for the JFK assas­si­na­tion.

The bulk of this pro­gram is gleaned from Bernard J. Fen­ster­wald’s Coin­ci­dence or Con­spir­a­cy. (Fen­ster­wald was Water­gate Bur­glar James McCord’s chief defense attor­ney.)

Among the many links between Water­gate and the JFK assas­si­na­tion are the War­ren Com­mis­sion mem­bers and coun­sels who were tabbed by Nixon and/or oth­er fig­ures in the inves­ti­ga­tion to serve in var­i­ous capac­i­ties:

a) Nixon first select­ed J. Lee Rankin to serve as Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor. Rankin was sub­se­quent­ly tabbed to review the Water­gate tapes and deter­mine which would be released. Rankin was the War­ren Com­mis­sion’s liai­son between the com­mis­sion and both the CIA and the FBI. Rankin was a key pro­po­nent of the so-called “Mag­ic Bul­let The­o­ry.”
b) War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Arlen Specter, the author of the “Mag­ic Bul­let Theory”–was Nixon’s first choice as his per­son­al defense attor­ney in the Water­gate case.
c) Nixon also attempt­ed to req­ui­si­tion War­ren Com­mis­sion mem­ber John J. McCloy as Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor.
d) For­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Albert Jen­ner was Nixon’s first choice to serve as the GOP’s minor­i­ty coun­sel before the Sen­ate Judi­cia­ry Com­mit­tee. Jen­ner lat­er with­drew from that posi­tion.
e) John Dean select­ed for­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Charles Shaf­fer as his attor­ney.
f) White House aide John Ehrlich­mann tabbed for­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Joseph Ball to rep­re­sent him.
g) Nixon’s sec­re­tary Rose Marie Woods select­ed for­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion coun­sel Charles Rhyne to rep­re­sent her in a pos­si­ble inves­ti­ga­tion of the famous 18 1/2 minute gap in one of the tapes.
h) Nixon Trea­sury Sec­re­tary John Con­nal­ly’s obstruc­tion of Jim Gar­rison’s extra­di­tion request for Ser­gio Archacha Smith.

Pro­gram High­lights Include:

1.The Nixon White House­’s inter­est in the assas­si­na­tion attempt on George Wal­lace, which elim­i­nat­ed the Alaba­ma Gov­er­nor as a pos­si­ble third-par­ty threat to Nixon’s so-called “South­ern Strat­e­gy.” Exact­ly who shot Wal­lace remains a mys­tery, but it was most assured­ly NOT Arthur Bre­mer.
2. Two long-time Nixon friends and polit­i­cal asso­ciates’ spon­sor­ship of the fam­i­ly of Sirhan Sirhan into the Unit­ed States. Sirhan did NOT kill Robert F. Kennedy, how­ev­er the cre­ation of the false cov­er sto­ry to set up the pat­sy is impor­tant. Nixon, of course, won the 1968 elec­tion, after Robert Kennedy’s mur­der elim­i­nat­ed him as a front run­ner.
3. The role of for­mer Lock­heed direc­tor of secu­ri­ty James Gold­en as chief of secu­ri­ty for Nixon’s 1968 cam­paign. Many researchers of the RFK assas­si­na­tion believe that the actu­al shoot­er of Robert Kennedy was Amer­i­can Nazi Thane Eugene Cae­sar, who was employed at Lock­heed’s Bur­bank facil­i­ty, in an area involved with the U‑2 spy plane project. (Oswald was also involved with the U‑2.)
4. A ver­i­ta­ble trove of War­ren Com­mis­sion let­ter and mem­o­ran­da per­tain­ing to the above fig­ures involved in the War­ren Com­mis­sion and tabbed by the Nixon team for roles in Water­gate that were miss­ing from the Nation­al Archives.

FTR #961 Watergate and the Assassination of President Kennedy, Part 1

With Water­gate being bruit­ed about by our media in con­junc­tion with the “inves­ti­ga­tions” into Trump and “Rus­sia-gate,” we are tak­ing time to dig into the archives and recap infor­ma­tion about one of the fac­tors that under­lay the Water­gate scandal–the Assas­si­na­tion of JFK.

The first of the pro­grams excerpts The Guns of Novem­ber, Part 3 (record­ed on 11/15/1983) at length. From the descrip­tion for the pro­gram:

“Richard Nixon’s polit­i­cal demise came through the Water­gate scan­dal. Nixon ini­ti­at­ed the Water­gate cov­er-up because he feared that “the whole Bay of Pigs thing” would come out. In his polit­i­cal mem­oir “The Ends of Pow­er,” Nixon aide H.R. Halde­man wrote that the phrase “Bay of Pigs” was a code-word with­in the Nixon White House for the Kennedy assas­si­na­tion.

The pro­gram doc­u­ments many of the areas of over­lap between the Water­gate and Kennedy inves­ti­ga­tions.

Nixon him­self was in Dal­las on Novem­ber 22, 1963, as a lawyer for Pep­si­co (the par­ent com­pa­ny of Pep­si Cola.) Fly­ing out of Dal­las rough­ly two hours before Kennedy was slain, Nixon told the FBI in Feb­ru­ary of 1964 that the only time he had been in Dal­las in 1963 had been “two days pri­or to the assas­si­na­tion.” This bla­tant lie is negat­ed by a wire ser­vice inter­view Nixon gave in Dal­las on Novem­ber 21. Text of the inter­view ran in the New York Times and oth­er major news­pa­pers.

Water­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor Leon Jawors­ki was select­ed by Nixon to replace the ille­gal­ly fired Archibald Cox. Jawors­ki had pre­vi­ous­ly served as a War­ren Com­mis­sion Coun­sel, while at the same time serv­ing as direc­tor of a CIA domes­tic fund­ing con­duit.

Nixon named for­mer War­ren Com­mis­sion mem­ber Ger­ald Ford to replace Vice Pres­i­dent Agnew. Ford then replaced Nixon as Pres­i­dent and par­doned him of all crimes he may have com­mit­ted. . . .

. . . . The pro­gram dis­cuss­es evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries con­nect­ing numer­ous oth­er fig­ures to the both inves­ti­ga­tions, includ­ing Water­gate Judge John Sir­i­ca and Water­gate bur­glar Frank Stur­gis (aka Frank Fior­i­ni).

To attempt selec­tive era­sure of the all-impor­tant Water­gate tapes, Nixon sought the assis­tance of Gor­don Nov­el, a vet­er­an intel­li­gencer, elec­tron­ics expert, anti-Cas­tro vet­er­an and a fig­ure in Jim Gar­rison’s inves­ti­ga­tion in New Orleans. At least one key tape was par­tial­ly erased (the famous 18 1/2 minute gap), though no cul­prit was ever iden­ti­fied.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Leon Jaworski’s role as Kore­a­gate Spe­cial Pros­e­cu­tor, which per­mit­ted the eclips­ing of the Moon orga­ni­za­tion’s links to the CIA; the role of the Uni­fi­ca­tion Church–the Moon organization–in gen­er­at­ing sup­port for Nixon dur­ing Water­gate; Jude Sarah Hugh­es’s involve­ment with a CIA domes­tic fund­ing con­duit; Hugh­es’s admin­is­tra­tion of the oath of office to LBJ on the plane fly­ing back to Wash­ing­ton DC; Judge Sir­i­ca’s elec­toral sup­port for Richard Nixon (“Max­i­mum John” Sir­i­ca was the Judge in the Water­gate case); the fact that the suit by JFK researcher Harold Weis­berg and attor­ney James Lesar sought infor­ma­tion from the War­ren Com­mis­sion, part of the exec­u­tive branch of gov­ern­ment; that body was a Pres­i­den­tial fact-find­ing com­mis­sion with no legal sta­tus what­so­ev­er; Sir­i­ca’s rul­ing against the plain­tiffs was a con­tra­ven­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion; Jaworski’s role as one of two heads of the Texas Court of Inquiry, the body formed by the state of Texas in order to inves­ti­gate the assassination;“ex” CIA offi­cer James McCord’s deci­sive role in both betray­ing the Water­gate bur­glars and in see­ing to it that the inves­ti­ga­tion would go for­ward; Frank Stur­gis and his role (as Frank Fior­i­ni) in run­ning the Mob’s casi­nos in Cuba pre-Cas­tro; Stur­gis’s role in gen­er­at­ing dis­in­for­ma­tion point­ing toward Cas­tro as the archi­tect of the assas­si­na­tion; an arti­cle from a 1983 tech­nol­o­gy pub­li­ca­tion in which Gor­don Nov­el dis­cuss­es his ultra high-tech­nol­o­gy role “to erase the Water­gate tapes” (this will be dis­cussed at greater length in future pro­grams.)

FTR #960 Update on the High Profile Hacks

As indi­cat­ed by the title, this broad­cast updates the high-pro­file hacks, at the epi­cen­ter of “Rus­sia Gate,” the bru­tal polit­i­cal fan­ta­sy that is at the core of Amer­i­can New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da and that may well lead to World War III.

(Oth­er pro­grams deal­ing with this sub­ject include: FTR #‘s 917, 923, 924, 940, 943, 958, 959.)

As we have not­ed in many pre­vi­ous broad­casts and posts, cyber attacks are eas­i­ly dis­guised. Per­pe­trat­ing a “cyber false flag” oper­a­tion is dis­turbing­ly easy to do. In a world where the ver­i­fi­ably false and phys­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble “con­trolled demolition”/Truther non­sense has gained trac­tion, cyber false flag ops are all the more threat­en­ing and sin­is­ter.

Now, we learn that the CIA’s hack­ing tools are specif­i­cal­ly craft­ed to mask CIA author­ship of the attacks. Most sig­nif­i­cant­ly, for our pur­pos­es, is the fact that the Agen­cy’s hack­ing tools are engi­neered in such a way as to per­mit the authors of the event to rep­re­sent them­selves as Russ­ian.

This is of para­mount sig­nif­i­cance in eval­u­at­ing the increas­ing­ly neo-McCarthyite New Cold War pro­pa­gan­da about “Russ­ian inter­fer­ence” in the U.S. elec­tion.

We then high­light the recent con­clu­sions of the French cyber­in­tel­li­gence chief (Guil­laume Poupard) and his warn­ings about the incred­i­ble dan­gers of cyber-misattribution–the ease with which any ran­dom hack­er could car­ry­ing out a spear-phish­ing attack, and his baf­fle­ment at the NSA’s recent Russ­ian attri­bu­tion to the spear-phish­ing French elec­tion hacks.

Char­ac­ter­is­tic of the disin­gen­u­ous, pro­pa­gan­dis­tic spin of Amer­i­can news media on Putin/Russia/the high pro­file hacks is a New York Times arti­cle that accus­es Putin of lay­ing down a pro­pa­gan­da veil to cov­er for alleged Russ­ian hack­ing, omit­ting his remarks that–correctly–note that con­tem­po­rary tech­nol­o­gy eas­i­ly per­mits the mis­at­tri­bu­tion of cyber espionage/hacking.

We then review the grotesque­ly dark com­ic nature of the Macron hacks (sup­pos­ed­ly done by “Russ­ian intel­li­gence”.)

Those “Russ­ian gov­ern­ment hack­ers” real­ly need an OPSEC refresh­er course. The hacked doc­u­ments in the “Macron hack” not only con­tained Cyril­lic text in the meta­da­ta, but also con­tained the name of the last per­son to mod­i­fy the doc­u­ments. That name, “Rosh­ka Georgiy Petro­vichan”, is an employ­ee at Evri­ka, a large IT com­pa­ny that does work for the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, includ­ing the FSB (Russ­ian intel­li­gence.)

Also found in the meta­da­ta is the email of the per­son who uploaded the files to “archive.org”, and that email address, frankmacher1@gmx.de, is reg­is­tered with a Ger­man free web­mail provider used pre­vi­ous­ly in 2016 phish­ing attacks against the CDU in Ger­many that have been attrib­uted to APT28. It would appear that the “Russ­ian hack­ers” not only left clues sug­gest­ing it was Russ­ian hack­ers behind the hack, but they decid­ed name names this time–their own names.

In relat­ed news, a group of cyber­se­cu­ri­ty researchers study­ing the Macron hack has con­clud­ed that the mod­i­fied doc­u­ments were doc­tored by some­one asso­ci­at­ed with The Dai­ly Stormer neo-Nazi web­site and Andrew “the weev” Auern­heimer.

Aueren­heimer was a guest at Glenn Green­wald and Lau­ra Poitras’s par­ty cel­e­brat­ing their receipt of the Polk award.

“ ‘We strong­ly believe that the fake off­shore doc­u­ments were cre­at­ed by some­one with con­trol of the Dai­ly Stormer serv­er,” said Tord Lund­ström, a com­put­er foren­sics inves­ti­ga­tor at Virtualroad.org.’ . . .”

The pub­lic face, site pub­lish­er of The Dai­ly Stormer is Andrew Anglin. But look who the site is reg­is­tered to: Andrew Auern­heimer (the site archi­tect) who appar­ent­ly resided in Ukraine as of the start of this year.

The analy­sis from the web-secu­ri­ty firm Virtualroad.org. indi­cates that some­one asso­ci­at­ed with the Dai­ly Stormer mod­i­fied those faked documents–very pos­si­bly a high­ly skilled neo-Nazi hack­er like “the weev”.

Based on analy­sis of how the doc­u­ment dump unfold­ed, it’s look­ing like the inex­plic­a­bly self-incrim­i­nat­ing “Russ­ian hack­ers” may have been a bunch of Amer­i­can neo-Nazis. Imag­ine that.

In FTR #917, we under­scored the gen­e­sis of the Seth Rich mur­der con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry with Wik­iLeaks and Julian Assange, who was in touch with Roger Stone dur­ing the 2016 cam­paign. (Stone func­tioned as the unof­fi­cial dirty tricks spe­cial­ist for the Trump cam­paign, a role he has played–with relish–since Water­gate.

The far-right Seth Rich mur­der con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry acquired new grav­i­tas, thanks in part to Kim Schmitz, aka “Kim Dot­com.” We exam­ined Schmitz at length in FTR #812. A syn­op­tic overview of the polit­i­cal and pro­fes­sion­al ori­en­ta­tion of Kim Dot­com is excerpt­ed from that broad­cast’s descrip­tion: “A col­league of Eddie the Friend­ly Spook [Snow­den], Julian Assange and Glenn Green­wald, Kim Schmitz, aka “Kim Dot­com”] espous­es the same libertarian/free mar­ket ide­ol­o­gy under­ly­ing the “cor­po­ratism” of Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni. With an exten­sive crim­i­nal record in Ger­many and else­where, “Der Dot­com­man­dant” has elud­ed seri­ous pun­ish­ment for his offens­es, includ­ing exe­cut­ing the largest insid­er trad­ing scheme in Ger­man his­to­ry.

Embraced by the file-shar­ing com­mu­ni­ty and ele­ments of the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor, Dot­com actu­al­ly allied him­self with John Banks and his far-right ACT Par­ty in New Zealand. His embrace of the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor came lat­er and is viewed as hav­ing dam­aged left-lean­ing par­ties at the polls. Dot­com is enam­ored of Nazi mem­o­ra­bil­ia and owns a rare, author-auto­graphed copy of ‘Mein Kampf.’ . . .”

Pro­gram High­lights Include: dis­sem­i­na­tion of the Seth Rich dis­in­for­ma­tion by Fox News and Rush Lim­baugh, gen­er­at­ed by Wik­iLeaks, Roger Stone and Kim Dot­com; Kim Dot­com’s tweet­ing of an admit­ted­ly pho­ny doc­u­ment about the Seth Rich BS; Dot­com’s refusal to retract his tweet of the pho­ny doc­u­ment; review of the Shad­ow Bro­kers non-hack of the NSA; review of the Shad­ow Bro­kers use of white suprema­cist pro­pa­gan­da; review of the role of Crowd­strike’s Dim­itri Alper­ovitch in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of the “Rus­sia did it” pro­pa­gan­da; review of the role of Ukrain­ian fas­cist Alexan­dra Chalu­pa in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of the “Rus­sia did it” pro­pa­gan­da.

FTR #955 Syrian Chemical Weapons Attack? Not So Fast, Part 2

Sup­ple­ment­ing FTR #954, this broad­cast con­tin­ues analy­sis of the alleged Assad gov­ern­ment chem­i­cal weapons attack. Key points of dis­cus­sion include:

1. Fur­ther analy­sis by MIT expert Theodore Pos­tol, who sees the pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence alleged to sup­port the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s alle­ga­tions as ques­tion­able. ” . . . ‘This adden­dum pro­vides data that unam­bigu­ous­ly shows that the assump­tion in the WHR that there was no tam­per­ing with the alleged site of the sarin release is not cor­rect. This egre­gious error rais­es ques­tions about every oth­er claim in the WHR. … The impli­ca­tion of this obser­va­tion is clear – the WHR was not reviewed and released by any com­pe­tent intel­li­gence expert unless they were moti­vat­ed by fac­tors oth­er than con­cerns about the accu­ra­cy of the report. . . .”

2. Par­tic­u­lar­ly sus­pi­cious (laugh­able?) is a pic­ture show­ing per­son­nel exam­in­ing the pur­port­ed sarin attack site with woe­ful­ly inad­e­quate pro­tec­tive cloth­ing. ” . . . . ‘If there were any sarin present at this loca­tion when this pho­to­graph was tak­en every­body in the pho­to­graph would have received a lethal or debil­i­tat­ing dose of sarin. The fact that these peo­ple were dressed so inad­e­quate­ly either sug­gests a com­plete igno­rance of the basic mea­sures need­ed to pro­tect an indi­vid­ual from sarin poi­son­ing, or that they knew that the site was not seri­ous­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed. This is the crater that is the cen­ter­piece evi­dence pro­vid­ed in the WHR for a sarin attack deliv­ered by a Syr­i­an air­craft.’ . . . . ”

3. Ques­tion­able analy­sis in the alleged chlo­rine gas attacks also attrib­uted to the al-Assad regime. ” . . . In one of the chlo­rine cas­es, how­ev­er, Syr­i­an eye­wit­ness­es came for­ward to tes­ti­fy that the rebels had staged the alleged attack so it could be blamed on the gov­ern­ment. In that inci­dent, the U.N. team reached no con­clu­sion as to what had real­ly hap­pened, but nei­ther did the inves­ti­ga­tors – now alert­ed to the rebels’ tac­tic of stag­ing chem­i­cal attacks – apply any addi­tion­al skep­ti­cism to the oth­er cas­es. In one case, the rebels and their sup­port­ers also claimed to know that an alleged ‘bar­rel bomb’ con­tained a can­is­ter of chlo­rine because of the sound that it made while descend­ing. There was no expla­na­tion for how that sort of detec­tion was even pos­si­ble. . . .”

4. A British doc­tor who was a focal point of PR cov­er­age of the alleged sarin attack has a jihadist back­ground. ” . . . . A British doc­tor who doc­u­ment­ed a sus­pect­ed chem­i­cal weapons attack in Syr­ia was con­sid­ered a ‘com­mit­ted jihadist’ by MI6 and was struck off the Gen­er­al Med­ical Coun­cil in 2016. Sha­jul Islam, 31, post­ed sev­er­al videos on Twit­ter in the after­math of the Tues­day’s (4 April) attack where he appeared to be treat­ing patients in Khan Sheikhoun. He appeared on sev­er­al tele­vi­sion net­works such as NBC to dis­cuss what he saw, but it has now emerged Islam was pre­vi­ous­ly charged on ter­ror offences in the UK. . . .”

4. The under­ly­ing strate­gic rea­son for some of the Trump/Russian inter­face, one that dove­tails with the Syr­i­an provocation/escalation: ” . . . . The Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates arranged a secret meet­ing in Jan­u­ary between Black­wa­ter founder Erik Prince and a Russ­ian close to Pres­i­dent Vladi­mir Putin as part of an appar­ent effort to estab­lish a back-chan­nel line of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between Moscow and Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump, accord­ing to U.S., Euro­pean and Arab offi­cials. The meet­ing took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion — in the Sey­chelles islands in the Indi­an Ocean, offi­cials said. Though the full agen­da remains unclear, the UAE agreed to bro­ker the meet­ing in part to explore whether Rus­sia could be per­suad­ed to cur­tail its rela­tion­ship with Iran, includ­ing in Syr­ia, a Trump admin­is­tra­tion objec­tive . . . .”

5. George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials are con­fi­dent anoth­er ter­ror­ist attack is com­ing appear to be con­cerned that the Trump could use ter­ror to grab and abuse exec­u­tive pow­ers. We present some of their thoughts against the back­ground of our dis­cus­sion in FTR #953 about Bernie Sanders’ paving the way for Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-linked ele­ments: ” . . . . ‘We can assume there will be anoth­er ter­ror­ist attack in the U.S. If the exec­u­tive order is in place, he will point to the attack as sup­port for the exec­u­tive order and the need to expand it to oth­er coun­tries with bad dudes (Mus­lims). If the exec­u­tive order has been struck down, Trump will blame judges and Democ­rats for the attack. . . .‘We both whol­ly believe that Trump needs a bogey­man. But, more impor­tant­ly, he needs dis­trac­tion and a blame source. In ter­ror­ists, he has his bogey­man. In his con­trol of the pre­vail­ing press nar­ra­tive via tweet, he has dis­trac­tion. And, in the judi­cia­ry, he has a source of blame for why his way was right from the begin­ning.’ . . . . ‘I am ful­ly con­fi­dent that an attack is exact­ly what he wants and needs.’ . . . .”

Where­as the Syr­i­an alleged sarin inci­dent appears to have been effect­ed by some of the West­’s al-Qae­da sur­ro­gates in the con­flict, past provo­ca­tions have involved more direct involve­ment by ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­ni­ty. In May of 1963, with then South Viet­namese pres­i­dent Diem push­ing for a reduc­tion in U.S. forces in Viet­nam (against Amer­i­can wish­es), a bomb­ing occurred at a Hue radio sta­tion that was the focal point of Bud­dhist protests of the gov­ern­men­t’s pol­i­cy toward Bud­dhists. The author­ship of that attack and a 1952 Saigon bomb­ing, was not the Viet­cong.

Key points of analy­sis:

1. The May, 1963 attack in Hue: “ . . . . As Dang Sy and his secu­ri­ty offi­cers were approach­ing the area in armored cars about fifty meters away, two pow­er­ful explo­sions blast­ed the peo­ple on the veran­da of the sta­tion, killing sev­en on the spot and fatal­ly wound­ing a child. At least fif­teen oth­ers were injured. . . .”

2. Foren­sic analy­sis of the wounds of the vic­tims: “ . . . Dr. Le Khac Quyen, the hos­pi­tal direc­tor at Hue, said after exam­in­ing the vic­tims’ bod­ies that he had nev­er seen such injuries. The bod­ies had been decap­i­tat­ed. He found no met­al in the corpses, only holes. There were no wounds below the chest. In his offi­cial find­ing, Dr. Quyen ruled that ‘the death of the peo­ple was caused by an explo­sion which took place in mid-air, blow­ing off their heads and muti­lat­ing their bod­ies.’ . . . ”

3. Dr. Quyen’s con­clu­sions about the source of the vic­tims’ wounds in the 1963 attack: “ . . . . The absence of any met­al in the bod­ies or on the radio sta­tion’s veran­da point­ed to pow­er­ful plas­tic bombs as the source of the explo­sions. . . .”

4. Analy­sis of the 1952 bomb­ing in Saigon: “ . . . . Who did pos­sess such pow­er­ful plas­tic bombs? An answer is pro­vid­ed by Gra­ham Greene’s prophet­ic nov­el The Qui­et Amer­i­can, based on his­tor­i­cal events that occurred in Saigon eleven years before the bomb­ing in Hue. Greene was in Saigon on Jan­u­ary 9, 1952, when two bombs explod­ed in the city’s cen­ter, killing ten and injur­ing many more. A pic­ture of the scene, show­ing a man with his legs blown off, appeared in Life mag­a­zine as the ‘Pic­ture of the Week.’ The Life cap­tion said the Saigon bombs had been ‘plant­ed by Viet Minh Com­mu­nists’ and ‘sig­naled gen­er­al inten­si­fi­ca­tion of the Viet Minh vio­lence.’ In like man­ner, the New York Times head­lined: ‘Reds’ Time Bombs Rip Saigon Cen­ter.’ . . .”

5. In the 1952 bomb­ing, the oper­a­tional coor­di­na­tion between U.S. media out­lets and the per­pe­tra­tors of the attack is note­wor­thy for our pur­pos­es: “ . . . . Gen­er­al The’s bomb­ing mate­r­i­al, a U.S. plas­tic, had been sup­plied to him by his spon­sor, the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. Greene observed in his mem­oir, Ways of Escape, it was no coin­ci­dence that ‘the Life pho­tog­ra­ph­er at the moment of the explo­sion was so well placed that he was able to take an aston­ish­ing and hor­ri­fy­ing pho­to­graph which showed the body of a trishaw dri­ver still upright after his legs had been blown off.’ The CIA had set the scene, alert­ing the Life pho­tog­ra­ph­er and Times reporter so they could con­vey the ter­ror­ist bomb­ing as the work of ‘Viet Minh Com­mu­nists’ to a mass audi­ence. . . .”

6. South Viet­namese inves­ti­ga­tion of the May, 1963 attack, arrived at a con­clu­sion sim­i­lar to Gra­ham Greene’s dis­cov­ery in the 1952 attack: “ . . . . Accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion car­ried by the Catholic news­pa­per Hoa Binh. . . . a Cap­tain Scott . . . . had come to Hue from Da Nang on May 7, 1963. He admit­ted he was the Amer­i­can agent respon­si­ble for the bomb­ing at the radio sta­tion the next day. He said he used ‘an explo­sive that was still secret and known only to cer­tain peo­ple in the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency, a charge no larg­er than a match­box with a tim­ing device.’. . . .”