Tim Gratz Posted October 11, 2007 Share Posted October 11, 2007 (edited) First, I agree with John's analysis that the CIA was considered leftist in orientation during the 1950s particularly as contrasted with Hoover and the FBI. The CIA was essentially part of the "Eastern Establishment" with its Ivy League schools and Nixon simply did not fit in. But I disagree that JFK had abandoned the principles of his Inaugural Address by the time of his death. John wrote: In April, 1962, Kennedy told McGeorge Bundy to “seize upon any favourable moment to reduce our involvement” in Vietnam. (Memorandum written by McGeorge Bundy’s aide, Michael Y. Forrestal, dated 26th April, 1962) Apparently, in the 827,310 moments between April 27, 1962 and 12:30 p.m. on November 12, 1963, Kennedy was not able to find a single "fabourable moment" to remove a single American adviser from Vietnam. The fact remains that JFK increased American presence in Vietnam by close to 17,000 men. And on November 1, 1963 the Kennedy administration (over the wise objections of RFK, by the way) supported a coup in Saigon that inevitably increased our commitment to that country. As I recall, RFK in his oral history stated that JFK would NOT have abandoned South Vietnan. Certainly no one was closer to JFK than his brother. It is indisputable that it was JFK that really got us in to Vietnam. Whether he would have reversed his course had he lived remains a great debate among historians. One can also consider Cuba. The US continued aggressive acts of war and sabotage against Cuba during the final days of JFK's administration. And RFK personally approved an escalation of those tactics in mid-November. It is easy of course for Kennedy acolytes to view him, in retrospect, as some sort of a peacenik but the actions of his administration speak louder than any words they may write. Edited October 11, 2007 by Tim Gratz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Antti Hynonen Posted October 11, 2007 Share Posted October 11, 2007 Teresa Mauro: ************************************************************************ Why was this post of Peter's edited by Antti Hynonen? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk about disinformation. This piece by DeEugenio, who used to be a friend of mine is full of it. I will detail them later, I must teach now...but I almost threw up, and wanted people to know a qucik take on this excrement about me and Cryil Wecht - is almost all false or twisted beyond recognition. I never gave that con artist 100,000 dollars. I will read more carefully, and respond later. This is the kind of backstabbing and unresearched bull**** that goes on in the research community all too often. Sad, becuase Jim was a good researcher and not on the 'opposing' side, but once he takes a dislike or a suspicion about someone......and I'm obviously now on his 'XXX list'. Edited: language. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pat Speer Posted October 11, 2007 Share Posted October 11, 2007 Tim, if you read up on this you'll see that the U.S. backed the coup in hopes that the new regime would be more stable, and that this would allow the U.S. to leave. You'll also see that JFK, after seeing what happened to the French, and after having had talks with MacArthur, was 100% committed to keeping ground troops out of Nam. (The RFK oral history is clear on this point.) Trying to blame JFK for Viet Nam is like blaming Clinton for Iraq. That dog don't hunt. In both cases we had a cautious president, aware of a sinkhole, followed by a gullible (and or vicious) believer in U.S. supremacy, naively thinking he could bomb a country into submission, and then have it be our friend. When one thinks about it, perhaps the success of that tactic in WW2 Germany and Japan, was more a curse than a blessing. First, I agree with John's analysis that the CIA was considered leftist in orientation during the 1950s particularly as contrasted with Hoover and the FBI.The CIA was essentially part of the "Eastern Establishment" with its Ivy League schools and Nixon simply did not fit in. But I disagree that JFK had abandoned the principles of his Inaugural Address by the time of his death. John wrote: In April, 1962, Kennedy told McGeorge Bundy to “seize upon any favourable moment to reduce our involvement” in Vietnam. (Memorandum written by McGeorge Bundy’s aide, Michael Y. Forrestal, dated 26th April, 1962) Apparently, in the 827,310 moments between April 27, 1962 and 12:30 p.m. on November 12, 1963, Kennedy was not able to find a single "fabourable moment" to remove a single American adviser from Vietnam. The fact remains that JFK increased American presence in Vietnam by close to 17,000 men. And on November 1, 1963 the Kennedy administration (over the wise objections of RFK, by the way) supported a coup in Saigon that inevitably increased our commitment to that country. As I recall, RFK in his oral history stated that JFK would NOT have abandoned South Vietnan. Certainly no one was closer to JFK than his brother. It is indisputable that it was JFK that really got us in to Vietnam. Whether he would have reversed his course had he lived remains a great debate among historians. One can also consider Cuba. The US continued aggressive acts of war and sabotage against Cuba during the final days of JFK's administration. And RFK personally approved an escalation of those tactics in mid-November. It is easy of course for Kennedy acolytes to view him, in retrospect, as some sort of a peacenik but the actions of his administration speak louder than any words they may write. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Mauro Posted October 12, 2007 Share Posted October 12, 2007 Beware: The Douglas/Janney/Simkin Silver Bullets By James DiEugenio One of the reasons I do not post on JFK forums anymore is due to an experience I had on Rich Della Rosa's site, JFK Research.com. One of my pet peeves about the JFK field is the spreading of disinformation disguised as insider dope that is meant to "solve the case". After posting at Rich's site for a few weeks, I began to do a series on the book Farewell America, which -- as I shall explain later -- I have come to believe falls into this category. I also posted about a similar fatuous tome, The Torbitt Document. I was surprised at the reaction. I learned the hard way that some people have a difficult time accepting the fact that other authors or investigators could have less than honorable goals. One poster said that by criticizing Farewell America I was defiling Fletcher Prouty's name, since he liked that book. It got so heated that, although I liked Rich personally, I decided to sign off. I have not been back. I don't think my vigilance about this subject is unwarranted. There have been several of these slick -- and not so slick -- poseurs who have attempted to supply both the research community and the public a silver bullet in the JFK case: a theatrical deus ex machina, which would finally and magically explain the events of 11/22/63. For example, the late Joe West was involved in two of them: Ricky White's late discovered treasure trove/footlocker and James Files' taped "confession". Another example: at the first ASK Conference in Dallas, a panel of "authorities" attempted to explain who the three tramps really were -- and how one of them was a killer who had previously murdered his family. Perhaps the most memorable silver bullet is detailed in the first chapter of Cyril Wecht's 1993 book, Cause of Death. In 1988 a man named Robert Russell got into contact with the eminent pathologist after seeing him discuss the JFK case with Dan Rather. He was a convict turned mob informant who was in a California prison. He began a long correspondence with Wecht and in 1990 sent him a letter in which he linked himself to Jimmy Hoffa. He wrote Wecht that he had access to evidence in the JFK case, namely the JFK autopsy materials: negatives, photos, x-rays, blood and tissue slides -- and also Kennedy's long lost brain. (Wecht, pgs. 48-50) Wecht asked Russell for more details. Russell obliged by saying that in 1967 he met a woman who knew an associate of Jack Ruby's named Ralph Paul. The woman, whose name was Cindy, claimed that on the day of Kennedy's murder, she drove Paul to the parking lot behind the grassy knoll. Paul carried a violin case. When he returned to the car, they proceeded to an apartment where they met both Jack Ruby and a Secret Service agent. After the two others departed, Cindy looked inside the violin case and found a rifle, ten bullets, a map of the motorcade route, and a check for a hundred grand made out to Ruby. Cindy said she stashed the evidence in a container and drove to New Orleans, which is where Russell met her. While living with the woman, Russell discovered these items, which were hidden in a small room. Since it was RFK who had been hunting down Hoffa, Russell got in contact with him. Bobby told him to keep the evidence hidden and secret. Russell learned through RFK that Kennedy had taken the autopsy materials to a small church in upstate New York. Kennedy told the residing priest that if anything should happen to him he should call Russell and give the evidence to him. When RFK was killed in 1968, this is what happened. Wecht had reservations about this part of the story. As he writes, why would RFK "confide all this to a low-life snitch?" (p. 67) Sensing the impending doubt, Russell sent Wecht a home movie on VHS. Filmed in a swampland that looked like Louisiana or Florida, it showed Russell digging up one of the rifles used in the assassination that he had gotten from Cindy. At this point, and after Russell had asked for a loan, Wecht terminated the correspondence. But Russell got in contact with others in the JFK research community who were more easily convinced. One was Peter Lemkin. Lemkin talked to Wecht about Russell and asked him if he would at least examine the swampland rifles. Why? Because Lemkin actually paid the ex-convict a hundred thousand dollars for the two rifles. Wecht relates in his book (pgs. 68-69) how Lemkin sadly wrote to him in December of 1991: Russell had turned out to be a fraud and he had lost a fortune in the scam. When Wecht got in contact with Russell's parole officer, he said, "We traced the guns and found out he bought them from a pawnshop just last year..." Wecht concludes the Russell section of his book by saying that people like Russell are one reason the JFK case may never be solved: "They are true wackos who are not interested in truth or justice, but are greedy con men ... " who "muddy the waters". I agree. This is why I did what I did with Farewell America and the Torbitt Document. To remind people that you have to be on your guard about such things. Especially because the phenomenon has spread to related areas, like the Lex Cusack hoax that Seymour Hersh, and others, fell for concerning Marilyn Monroe. Cusack grossed seven million on that bit of forgery. Or the phony fables of the late Judith Exner, which she sold to People Weekly and Vanity Fair for six figures. Another one of these related areas I had written about was Mary Meyer. And I thought that because of the essay I had done on her (The Assassinations. pgs 338-345), plus the work Nina Burleigh did on her murder, that the controversy swirling around the deceased woman would finally quiet down. But then David Talbot's book came out. When I read it, I noted that he had a few pages on the JFK/Mary Meyer episode. And he used people who I thought I had discredited, like Timothy Leary. And also the notoriously unreliable David Heymann -- who I will have more to say about later. There was another JFK book of recent vintage that discussed the Mary Meyer case. And the more I found out about why Talbot had used this material, the more curious I got about this other book. But to explain why, I have to go back in time to describe how I first met Kristina Borjesson. II Kristina Borjesson is one of the true heroines of contemporary journalism. A veteran and award-winning producer for both CNN and CBS, she was assigned to report on the famous and mysterious 1996 explosion of TWA 800. It was this career altering experience that forms the basis of her intriguing book Into the Buzzsaw (2002). The book is a collection of essays dealing with the problems mainstream media has in telling the truth about sensitive and controversial stories. I met Kristina in 2003. The Assassinations had just come out, and coincidentally we happened to have the same book publicist. As we were going to a gathering in Brentwood on a Sunday afternoon, she asked me about a web site called TBR News. I said I had not heard of it. She said the man who runs it, a guy named Walter Storch, had displayed some of the famous Fox News memos. If the reader recalls, in 2003 a Fox insider had released some company memos showing how higher-ups at the network told staffers how to slant stories. Storch said he had original copies of these memos. Kristina asked to see them. And she e-mailed him that request. He then called her and they discussed the memos. But Kristina told me that there was just something about him that did not inspire confidence in her -- something calculating and cagey. So she did not give him her address. But Storch did recommend to her a book he had been involved with. It was about the John Kennedy assassination. The title was Regicide. Kristina asked around about it and she told me there was something weird about Storch's involvement with the book. Namely, his name is not on it or in it. Kristina is correct. The billed author of Regicide is a man named Gregory Douglas. The book was released in 2002. At the time it was published, it was actually highly acclaimed by some in the research community e.g. Jim Fetzer. The subtitle of the book is "The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy." Why is it called that? Because it purports to reveal the actual conspirators in the assassination and how they worked together to pull it off. There are four main parts of the book: 1.) A Soviet Intelligence Study of the JFK assassination 2.) A DIA analysis of the Soviet Study called The Driscoll Report (title based upon the actual author of the analysis) 3.) Interpolated commentary by Gregory Douglas 4.) The Zipper Documents. The most sensational part of the book is the last. These documents are supposed to be a record of actual meetings held by the conspirators from March to November of 1963. It was quite an extensive meeting. If one believes Douglas, the plot encompassed the CIA, FBI, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Lyndon Johnson, the American Mafia, Corsican hit men, and the Mossad. Talk about a grand conspiracy. And these were all involved before the actual assassination. So we are not just talking about the cover up. The grand master of the conspiracy is allegedly James Angleton, counter-intelligence chief of the CIA. If you know anything about Angleton, you realize how strained the Zipper documentation part of the book is. To believe that someone as secretive as Angleton would recruit all these people into the plot, and then keep an official record of it goes against everything we know about him. But according to Douglas, that is precisely what happened. Angleton kept a log of all meetings he had with his co-conspirators. The log is organized by date, time, and subject matter. And the log is not just of actual meetings. Even the phone calls Angleton made in furtherance of the plot are recorded. For instance, on April 10, 1963 Angleton's assistant called Sam Giancana about the Mafia Don's payments in aid of the plot. On October 24th, there was a phone call between Angleton and Giancana about the arrival of the Corsican assassins in Montreal. Angleton even included dates and times when he got reports from Sam Cummings of Interarmco on weaponry to be used in the shooting. Besides the incredible thesis, there are other problems with this careless creation. For instance, Lyman Lemnitzer is listed as still being a member of the Joint Chiefs in April of 1963 (p. 92). He was not. Kennedy had replaced him with Maxwell Taylor several months before. If Hoover and the FBI were kept fully informed of the plot, then why was the FBI Director so puzzled by the Oswald machinations going on in Mexico City? To the point where, shortly after the assassination, he told President Johnson that there seemed to be an imposter for Oswald in Mexico. About the Mexico City episode, Douglas can actually write, "In point of fact, it matters not what Oswald did while in Mexico because this trip had no possible bearing on the allegations of assassination heaped onto a dead Oswald." (p. 99) In light of what we know today, this is incredible. It is clear now that Mexico City was meant to cinch the "Oswald in league with the Communists" angle of the conspiracy. That Johnson and Hoover a.) Did not buy it, and b.) Did not like it -- since it risked a war with either Russia or Cuba. And as commentators like John Newman have noted, this is where the fallback position of Oswald as the warped sociopath entered the scenario. And this is what the Warren Commission ended up running with. Just on the above grounds, the book seems a dubious concoction. But there is more. The book says that "one of the assassins, the man who fired at Kennedy from nearly point blank range ... ". (p. 100) Who can this possibly be referring to? With the present copies of the Zapruder film, it is obvious that no one fired at Kennedy from anywhere near point blank range. According to Douglas, Oswald actually told the Russians he was an intelligence agent and gave them documents purloined by the ONI from the CIA (p. 173). Douglas also knows about documents that show the FBI paid Oswald as an informant. (p. 174) These are documents that no researcher has ever seen. In his description of the DIA analysis of the Soviet report, he has the DIA saying that there were three shots fired that day. And that all three hit either JFK or John Connally, thereby ignoring the hit to James Tague (pgs. 28-29). Yet, the Tague hit was something even the Warren Report was forced to admit. In another howler, Douglas has the Bay of Pigs invasion occurring in April of 1962! In the book's index, the middle name of Allen Dulles is listed incorrectly as "Welch", instead of "Welsh". The book also says that the reason that the Russians moved missiles into Cuba was that they found out about the assassination plots against Castro. (This makes absolutely no sense. Talk about killing a mosquito with an elephant gun.) I could go on and on. But the point is made. The book is almost certainly a fabrication. But there is another angle running through the concoction that needs to be pointed out: Its reliance on what I have called elsewhere the posthumous assassination of President Kennedy. That is, the attempt to blacken his character and therefore his historical image. This explains why Regicide names only five Kennedy books in the acknowledgements section. And two of them have nothing to do with the actual murder of JFK. But they have a lot to do with his posthumous assassination. They are Thomas Reeves' A Question of Character, and Sy Hersh's infamous and atrocious The Dark Side of Camelot. Early in the book, this angle is clearly pronounced: " ... it was the personality, actions, and family background of John Kennedy that led to his death." (p. 67) In other words, Kennedy's assassination was not really an extension of politics by other means: a veto by assassination. Kennedy's fault was in himself. He egged it on by his irresponsible acts in office. In short, this book tries to blame the victim. In more than one way. First, Angleton arranges the whole grand conspiracy because he believes that Kennedy and his brother are giving away state secrets to the Soviets. This is clearly based on the famous Anatoly Golitsyn inspired "mole hunt" conducted by Angleton. The problem with Douglas using this is that it did not start until September of 1963. Which is six months too late for the conspiracy timetable laid out in Regicide. Further, the Russian defector Golitsyn actually met with Bobby Kennedy in 1962. He gave no hint at the time that RFK or his brother was in league with the Soviets. (See Cold Warrior by Tom Mangold, p. 88) Finally, when Golitsyn did make the allegations about a mole, he placed him inside the CIA's Soviet Division. Not in the White House. (Ibid, p. 108). Second, the Zipper documents are supposed to contain professionally done pictures of Kennedy and his adulterous conquests. (p. 83) The CIA got hold of these photos and they were included in the file. And President Kennedy was aware "that a number of these pictures were in Soviet hands ... " The Soviet report also says that Kennedy was a "heavy user of illegal narcotics." (p. 178) In no book on the Cold War have I ever read anything like this. (Douglas appears to have borrowed the latter charge from the Mary Meyer tale. A point I will refer to later.) Third, consistent with the Hersh/Reeves revisionism, Douglas goes after Joseph Kennedy hard. The DIA report says that Joe Kennedy was heavily involved with bootlegging during Prohibition and had been involved with the Capone mob in Chicago. Kennedy and Capone had a falling out over a hijacked liquor shipment. Capone had threatened Kennedy's life over this and Joe Kennedy had to "pay off the Mob to nullify a murder contract" on himself. (p. 59) Further, RFK started his attack on the Mob at his father's request to revenge himself for this (p. 60) Need I add that Douglas bases this fantastic charge on Chicago police records that no one but him has seen. So not only does the book seem to be an invention, it is also an invention with a not so hidden revisionist agenda. That traitor and libertine Kennedy got what he deserved. III As I said earlier, one of the things Kristina Borjesson was puzzled about was that Storch was pushing a book that his name was not on or in. That is not really puzzling. Because it appears that Storch is actually Douglas. Another pseudonym for Douglas is Peter Stahl. And this is where the story gets quite interesting. For it appears that, if anyone in the JFK community would have done any digging into the person, they would have found that Douglas/Stahl/Storch has spent a lifetime as a confidence man. He has been reported by some as counterfeiting such exotic items of art as Rodin statuettes. Another of his specialties seems to be faking documents about the Third Reich, which sometimes relate to the Holocaust. In fact, he wrote a four-volume set on Hitler's Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller. Some believe the entire set is highly dubious. In fact, a group of people Douglas/Stahl has long been associated with are the Holocaust revisionists at Institute of Historical Review. They are so familiar with him and his past antics that one of them has set up a site detailing many of them. It makes quite an interesting read. And it is a puzzle to me how someone like Fetzer, who originally bought into Regicide -- and actually talked to Douglas/Stahl -- never found out about his past. One of the reasons Douglas was associated with these people is that he had a prior association with Willis Carto. Carto will be familiar to those who have read Mark Lane's book Plausible Denial (1991). Carto ran a small media conglomerate called the Liberty Lobby for a number of years. But there was a split in the ranks and the dissidents founded the IHR, while Carto's main publication was The Barnes Review. This is important because the TRB in TRB News, stands for The Barnes Review. As one commentator has noted about the site, although its archives contain some Holocaust revisionist material, a lot of the other stuff comes off as anti-Bush liberalism. But here is the problem. A lot of the material appears to be about as genuine as Regicide. Further, as that book was aimed at a target audience, and the Muller book also appeared aimed at a target audience, some of the "stories" on the site seem aimed at the growing resentment towards President Bush. To the point of making up false stories which are picked up by legitimate outlets but are later discredited. For instance, there was a story there saying that the Pentagon is grossly underreporting the number of casualties in Iraq. The story's by-line was by one Brian Harring who was supposed to have found a PDF file with the real numbers on them. And this story then spread to places like the liberal Huffington Post. Well, there is a Brian Harring, but as one can see by reading this entry (scroll down to the section entitled "Riots in the Streets"), he had nothing to do with this story and it appears that Stahl/Douglas is using his name against his will. I could continue in this vein , but the point is that not only does Stahl/Storch/Douglas partake in what seem to be fraudulent books and stories, but -- like a classic confidence man -- he seems to aim them at certain audiences he knows will be predisposed to accept them. The latter stories I mentioned seem to be targeted at left/liberal sites in order to fool and then discredit them by the eventual exposure of false information. To stretch a parallel, in intelligence realms, this concept is called "blowback". IV What gave Douglas/Stahl/Storch the impetus to write Regicide at the time he did? And what made him think anyone would take it seriously? The apparent pretext for the book is billed on the cover. It says the "documentation" for the work comes from files "compiled by Robert T. Crowley, former Assistant Deputy Director for Clandestine Operations of the CIA." There was such a person. He passed away in the year 2000. Douglas says that, although he never met him in the flesh, he talked to him many times. And when he died, Crowley went ahead and gave him many documents he had. In the appendix to the book, Douglas inserts a very long list of "intelligence sources" he found in the Crowley papers, which he says was "most likely compiled in the mid-1990's" (p. 125) The alphabetical list goes on for over forty pages and lists addresses and zip codes. How and why the CIA would list addresses and zip codes in its documents is a question Douglas never addresses. And for good reason. Daniel Brandt of Namebase looked at the list and came to the conclusion that it is almost entirely composed of the publicly available member list of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. The other problem with the alleged "documentation" is even worse. Crowley worked in a small circle of friends which included William Corson, James Angleton, and journalist Joe Trento. When the news got out in 2002 about Regicide being based on files left behind by Crowley, Trento did a double take. How could Douglas be in possession of the Crowley files when Crowley had given those files to him? Further, Trento had published a book in 2001, The Secret History of the CIA, which was largely based on his longtime association with Crowley. And, unlike the long distance telephone relationship Douglas alleged, Trento's was an in-person relationship. Further, the content of Trento's book, based on interviews and materials given him by that trio, was also different -- especially on the Kennedy assassination. (In that book, Angleton clings to his cover story of Oswald as a Russian agent.) When I called Trento to ask him why Crowley would give his files to two different writers, he replied quite strongly that Douglas was "A complete xxxx." And he didn't "have anything". (Interview with Trento, 8/14/07) So it would appear that Regicide is a concoction from A-Z. But before leaving it, I would like to point out something that struck me as odd about Douglas' commentary in the book. As many know, there have been several strange and untimely deaths related to the Kennedy assassination. I agree that some people have exaggerated the number of these, but still there are more than several that will not go away. Douglas had the entire spectrum to choose from in this regard. I found his choice rather weird. On pages 100-101 of his confection, he quotes from the DIA Report, "The hit team was flown away in an aircraft piloted by a CIA contract pilot named David Ferrie from New Orleans. They subsequently vanished without a trace. Rumors of the survival of one of the team are persistent but not proven." Right after this juicily phrased quote, Douglas writes that there was another murder "that bears directly on the Kennedy assassination." He could have picked from over a dozen documented cases. A few that I find particularly interesting are Gary Underhill, David Ferrie, Eladio Del Valle, John Roselli, Sam Giancana, George DeMohrenschildt, and William Sullivan. Douglas picked none of them. He chose Mary Meyer. And then he writes almost two action-packed and lurid pages about her death. Including this: Crowley saw her mythological diary. It contained "references to her connection with Kennedy, the use of drugs at White House sex parties, and some very bitter comments about the role of her former husband's agency in the death of her lover the year before." And this is not the only place Storch/Douglas pushes the "mystery" about Meyer. V There is someone else who is relentlessly pushing the Meyer-as-mysterious-death story. Jon Simkin runs a web site with a JFK forum on it. It is hard to figure out his basic ideas about President Kennedy's assassination. But if you look at some of his longer and more esoteric posts, they seem to suggest some vast, polyglot Grand Conspiracy. He calls it the Suite 8F Group -- which resembles the Texas based "Committee" from Farewell America. And when he discusses it, he actually uses the Torbitt Document as a reference. In a long post he made on 1/28/05 (4:51 PM) he offers an interpretation of Operation Mockingbird that can only be called bizarre. He actually tries to say that people like Frank Wisner, Joe Alsop, and Paul Nitze (who he calls members of the Georgetown Crowd), were both intellectuals and lefties who thought that -- get this -- FDR did not go far enough with his New Deal policies. (One step further, and the USA would have been a socialist country.) At another point, he writes " ... the Georgetown Group were idealists who really believed in freedom and democracy." This is right after he has described their work in the brutal Guatemala coup of 1954, which featured the famous CIA "death lists". He then says that Eisenhower had been a "great disappointment" to them. This is the man who made "Mr. Georgetown" i.e. Allen Dulles the CIA director and gave him a blank check, and his brother John Foster Dulles Sec. of State and allowed him to advocate things like brinksmanship and rollback. He then claims that JFK, not Nixon, was the Georgetown Crowd's candidate in 1960. Allegedly, this is based on his foreign policy and his anti-communism. Kennedy is the man who warned against helping French colonialism in Algeria in 1957. Who said -- in 1954 -- that the French could never win in Vietnam, and we should not aid them. Who railed against a concept that the Dulles brothers advocated, that is using atomic weapons to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu. (Kennedy actually called this idea an act of lunacy). The notion is even more ridiculous when one considers the fact that, according to Howard Hunt, Nixon was the Action Officer in the White House for the CIA's next big covert operation: the Cuban exile invasion of Cuba. Which Kennedy aborted to their great dismay. Further, if Kennedy was the Georgetown Crowd's candidate for years, why did the CIA put together a dossier analysis, including a psychological profile of JFK, after he was elected? As Jim Garrison writes, "Its purpose ... was to predict the likely positions Kennedy would take if particular sets of conditions arose." (On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 60) Yet, according to Simkin, they already knew that. That's why they backed him. At the end of this breathtaking post, he advocates for a Suite 8F Group and Georgetown Crowd Grand Conspiracy (i.e. somewhat like Torbitt), or a lower level CIA plot with people like Dave Morales, Howard Hunt, and Rip Robertson (a rogue operation). Mockingbird was unleashed on 11/22/63 not because the CIA was involved in the assassination -- oh no -- but to cover up for the Georgetown/Suite 8F guys, or a renegade type conspiracy. When I reviewed David Talbot's book Brothers, I criticized his section on Mary Meyer. Someone posted a link to my review on Simkin's forum. Simkin went after my critique of Talbot's Meyer section tooth and nail. (I should add here that Simkin has a long history of doing this. He goes after people who disagree with him on Meyer with a Bill O'Reilly type intensity. Almost as if he is trying to beat down any further public disagreement about his view of what happened to her.) In my review I simply stated that Talbot had taken at face value people who did not deserve to be trusted. And I specifically named Timothy Leary, James Truitt, James Angleton, and David Heymann. And I was quite clear about why they were not credible. At this time, I was not aware of an important fact: it was Simkin who had lobbied Talbot to place the Mary Meyer stuff in the book. Further, that he got Talbot in contact with a guy who he was also about to use to counter me. His name is Peter Janney. Janney has been trying to get a screenplay made on the Meyer case for a while. He advocates the work of the late Leo Damore. Damore was working on a book about Meyer at the time of his death by self-inflicted gunshot wound. Janney says he has recovered a lot of the research notes and manuscripts that Damore left behind. Damore had previously written a book about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick called Senatorial Privelege. That book used a collection of highly dubious means to paint Kennedy in the worst light. For instance, Damore misquoted the law to try and imply that the judge at the inquest was covering up for Kennedy. He used Kennedy's cousin Joe Gargan as a self-serving witness against him, even though Gargan had had a bitter falling out with the senator over an unrelated matter. He concocted a half-baked theory about an air pocket in the car to make it look like the victim survived for hours after the crash. This idea was discredited at length by author James Lange in Chappaquiddick: The Real Story (pgs. 82-89) In other words, Damore went out of his way to depict Kennedy's behavior as not just being under the influence, or even manslaughter, but tantamount to murder. The book's combination of extreme indictment with specious prosecutorial brief resulted in its ultimate rejection by its original publisher, Random House. They demanded their $150, 000 advance back. When Damore refused, the publisher sued. The judge in the case decided that, contrary to rumor, there were no extenuating circumstances: that is, the Kennedy family exerted no pressure. He ruled the publisher had acted in good faith in rejecting the manuscript. (In addition to the above, it was well over a thousand pages long. See NY Times 11/5/87) There were also charges that the author had practiced checkbook journalism. But Damore then picked up an interesting (and suitable) book agent: former political espionage operative and current rightwing hack Lucianna Goldberg. The nutty and fanatical Goldberg has made a career out of targeting progressives with any influence e.g. George McGovern, Bill Clinton, the Kennedys. So she made sure Damore's dubious inquiry got printed. And sure enough, Goldberg got that rightwing sausage factory Regnery to publish Senatorial Privelege. Damore's book on Meyer appeared to be headed in a similar direction. In a brief mention in the New York Post Damore said, "She [Meyer] had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, "It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court." If you are not familiar with ancient Roman history, Caligula was the demented emperor who, among other things, seduced his sister, slept with a horse, and later made the horse a senator. Which sounds made to order for Goldberg and Regnery. I can just see the split picture cover: JFK and Meyer on one side with Caligula and his horse on the other. In his research, Damore interviewed drug guru Tim Leary and apparently believed everything he told him. As I noted in my review of Brothers, for specific reasons, Leary is simply not credible on this subject. But the fact that Damore was going to use him would connote he had an agenda. For instance, in the new biography of Leary by Robert Greenfield, the author concludes that Leary fabricated the whole story about Meyer getting LSD from him to give to JFK in order to spice up the sales for his 1983 book Flashbacks. Which is the first time Leary mentioned it in 21 years, even though he had many opportunities to do so previously. Further, Greenfield notes that Leary made up other stories for that book, like having an affair with Marilyn Monroe, in order to make it more marketable for his press agent. And he told the agent to use the Meyer/Kennedy story to get him more exposure. Leary understood that sex, drugs, and a dead Kennedy sells. Apparently, so did Damore. VI As I said, Peter Janney entered the picture after Damore died. His father had worked for the CIA, and he had been friends with Michael Meyer, a son of Mary and her husband, Cord Meyer. He has in recent years put together Damore's research and is now marketing s script called Lost Light based on Meyer's life and death. From what I have read about it, it should be a real doozy, right up there with Robert Slatzer's Marilyn and Me. In addition to promoting it in his book Regicide, Douglas/Storch has also pushed it on his web site, TBR News. In fact, there seems to be a kind of strange symbiosis between the two. For instance, when Trento contested Douglas ever having Crowley's files, Douglas accused Trento of trying to cover up the "Zipper documents". A post of April 2, 2007 by (the disputed) "Brian Harring" said that Trento and a "Washington fix-lawyer" actually burned the original documents. But somehow, Janney "discovered the original Zipper file and began the lengthy and time-consuming process of authentication." Which, as I have proved above, would be impossible. Asked about this rather bizarre statement, Storch/Douglas backtracked by saying that Janney had uncovered similar evidence and documents in his inquiry. Whether this is all true or not -- and with Douglas you never know -- I find it interesting that Douglas finds Janney's efforts bracing and attractive. What Janney is postulating makes the ersatz claims of Tim Leary look staid and conservative. According to him, Mary Meyer had more influence in the Kennedy administration than Hilary Clinton had in her husband's. Various histories of the Kennedy administration will have to be revised and/or rewritten. According to Janney, Mary was such a powerful force guiding Kennedy that presidential aides feared her because of her influence with him. According to Janney/Damore, Kennedy was so smitten with her that he was going to divorce Jackie after he left office and marry his LSD lovechild guru. (Since Judith Exner also peddled this tale, Kennedy's agenda after the White House was pretty busy.) What were some of the things Mary's acid love had guided JFK to? Well, apparently we were all wrong about Kennedy's ultimate disenchantment with Operation Mongoose and the subsequent role of Lisa Howard and others in the Castro back channel of 1963. Mary will have to be written into future versions of how that all started. And no, it was not the nightmare experience of the Missile Crisis that provoked Kennedy into the Soviet hotline and the 1963 test ban treaty. Somehow, historians missed Meyer's role in all that. Ditto for the American University speech. Plus poor John Newman will now have to revise JFK and Vietnam per Mary's role in the withdrawal plan. And finally -- drum roll please -- there is what Janney calls "the crown jewel of American intelligence": space aliens and UFO's. Yep. Kennedy was aware of the Pentagon's suppression of proof we had been visited by alien civilizations. And Kennedy -- guided by Mary the Muse -- wanted to tell the entire world about it. (Leary on acid would have never dreamt that one up.) But this is only a warm-up for Janney/Simkin/Damore. The actual circumstances surrounding her death are even more fantastic. Here it begins to resemble Ricky White's long lost "foot locker" story. If you don't recall, in the White affair a late discovered journal revealed that Ricky's father Roscoe, a Dallas policeman in 1963, did not just shoot JFK. He was also part of a hit squad to eliminate a list of dangerous witnesses who could blow the lid off the Warren Report. (For a summary of the White debacle, see "I was Mandarin" at the Texas Monthly Archives.) Well, if you buy Simkin and Janney, Mary was killed as part of a planned and precise execution plot that was lucky enough to have a nearby fall guy in hand. Since she was one of those dangerous witnesses, the hit team had been monitoring Mary for months and knew her jogging routine. A man and woman walking her path that day were not really a couple. They were actually spotters to let the actual assassin know she was coming. This all comes from an alleged call Damore got from one William Mitchell -- except that is not his real name. He was really a CIA hit man with multiple identities. He spilled this all out to Damore after Damore wrote him a letter at his last known address. Which according to the tale was really a CIA safe house. (Why a CIA safe house would forward a letter from a writer to an assassin is not explained.) Damore told all this to a lawyer who made notes on it. Later, Damore killed himself. And no one can find Mitchell because of his multiple identities. In other words, the guy who heard the story is dead and the guy who told the story is nowhere to be found. A jaded person might conclude that it all sounds kind of convenient. I should note, it is never explained why the hit man would spill his guts out to Damore thirty years after the fact. After all, Damore was just a writer. He had no legal standing to compel information. People usually do not confess to things like being the triggerman in a murder plot unless they have to. Between facing a writer researching a cold case and a lethal, living, breathing organization like the CIA, I think I would just bamboozle or hang up on the writer. Especially when the Agency can do things like tap my phone and find out if I am leaking dark Company secrets. And then dispose of me if I was. But since Simkin and Janney say this is the key to the case, we aren't supposed to ask things like that. When I criticized the sourcing of Talbot's book on the Meyer episode, Simkin commented that in two cases I was discounting the sources on insubstantial grounds. The two sources were David Heymann and James Angleton. In this day and age, I would have thought that discrediting these two men would be kind of redundant. In my review, I compared the sleazy Heymann to Kitty Kelley -- which on second thought is being unfair to Kelley. To go through his two books on the Kennedys -- A Woman Called Jackie, and RFK: A Candid Biography -- and point out all the errors of fact and attribution, the questionable interview subjects, the haphazard sourcing, the unrelenting appetite for sleaze that emits from almost every page, and the important things he leaves out -- to do all that would literally take a hundred pages. But since Simkin and Janney like him, and since Talbot sourced him, I will point out several things as a sampling of why he cannot be used or trusted. In the first book, Heymann writes that JFK's messy autopsy was orchestrated by Robert Kennedy and some other members of the family. (p. 410) This has been proven wrong by too many sources to be listed here. When describing the assassination of JFK, Heymann lists three shots: two into JFK and one into Connally. Although he is kind of hazy on the issue, he leans toward the Krazy Kid Oswald scenario. He can keep to that myth since he does not tell the reader about the hit to James Tague. (p. 399) Which would mean four shots and a conspiracy. Incredibly, Heymann tries to say that when Jackie was leaning out the back of the car she really was not trying to recover parts of Kennedy's blown out skull. What she was actually doing was trying to escape the fusillade! (p. 400) One might ask then: How did she end up with the tissue and skin, which she turned over to the doctors at Parkland? Predictably, Heymann leaves that out of his hatchet job. The book on RFK is more of the same. Heymann discovered something about RFK that no one else did. Between his time on Joe McCarthy's committee and the McClellan Committee RFK moonlighted with the Bureau of Narcotics and Drugs. What did he do there? Well on their raids, he would switch from mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll to wild man Mr. Hyde. He seized bags of cocaine and distributed it among his buddies. If the drug suspects were female he would make them serve him sexually before busting them. He would watch idly as some of his cohorts threw drug runners out of windows. (p. 100) Now that he knew about drugs, when Ethel's parents died in a plane crash, Bobby sent her to a Canadian facility in order to get LSD treatments to cure her grief. (pgs 104-105) Did you know that RFK was secretly a bisexual who both made out and shared a homosexual lover with Rudolf Nureyev? (p. 419) According to Heymann (p. 361), Jim Garrison called RFK up in 1964 to discuss his JFK assassination ideas but RFK hung up on him. (Since Garrison had stopped investigating the case by 1964, this call has to be mythological.) About RFK's assassination, those who try and explain the many oddities that abound over the crime scene are quickly dismissed as "looking for a complex explanation to what seems a simple story." (p. 501) Therefore, he puts terms like the Manchurian Candidate, and the girl in the polka dot dress in belittling quotes. (He actually prefaces the latter with the term "so-called", like she doesn't really exist in that form.) Unbelievably, Heymann mentions the name of pathologist Thomas Noguchi in regard to his case shattering work on RFK exactly once. (p. 508) And this is in a note at the bottom of the page. In other words with Heymann, Oswald shot JFK, and Sirhan killed RFK. And if they didn't, it doesn't really matter. Some of the things Heymann's interview subjects tell him are just plain risible -- to everyone except him. Jeanne Carmen was exposed years ago by Marilyn Monroe biographer Donald Spoto (see p. 472) as very likely not even knowing her. Heymann acts as if this never happened. So he lets her now expand on the dubious things she said before. Apparently she forgot to tell Anthony Summers that she herself also had an affair with JFK, "And he wasn't even good in bed." (p. 313) Carmen also now miraculously recalls that Bobby, Marilyn and her, actually used to go nude bathing at Malibu. (p. 314) The whole myth about Bernard Spindel wiretapping Monroe's phone has also been exposed for years. But Heymann ignores that, and adds that it wasn't just Spindel and Hoffa but also the FBI and CIA who were wiretapping Marilyn's phone. The whole chapter on Monroe had me rocking in my chair with laughter. It concludes with Carmen saying that the cover up of Monroe's murder was so extensive that the perpetrators broke into her home too! (p. 324) One of the things Heymann relies on in this Saturday Night Live chapter is an interview he says Peter Lawford gave him. Which is kind of weird. For two reasons. Apparently Lawford told him things he never told anyone else. Second, Heymann says he interviewed Lawford in 1983, which is the year before the actor died. It actually had to be that year. Why? Because Heymann's book on Barbara Hutton came out in 1983. And there was no point in interviewing Lawford for that book. When it came out, Heymann got into trouble and was actually investigated for charges of fraud. The original publisher had to shred 58, 000 copies of the book. It got so bad Heymann fled the country to Israel and reportedly joined the Mossad. But, amid all this hurly burly he somehow was prescient enough to know that he should interview Lawford before he left since he knew he would eventually be writing about the Kennedys. And Lawford trusted this writer under suspicion with sensational disclosures he never duplicated for anyone else. Or did he? One of the many problems with Heymann is his very loose footnoting. Very often he quotes generic sources like "FBI files", without naming the series number, the office of origination, or even the date on the document. So an interested reader cannot check them for accuracy. This is fortunate for Heymann, since, like with his interviews, he finds things in government files that apparently no one else has -- like Secret Service agents writing about the sexual details of JFK's affairs. In his book on Robert Kennedy, again, people say things that they have said nowhere else. He writes that in 1997 Gerald Ford admitted that, as president, he had suppressed FBI and CIA surveillance files which indicated President Kennedy was caught in a crossfire in Dealey Plaza and that John Roselli and Carlos Marcello had orchestrated it. (p. 361) In 1997 Ford was saying what he always said. That Oswald did it and there was no cover up. He did have to defend against evidence he had moved up the wound in Kennedy's back to his neck. But during that controversy he never came close to saying what Heymann attributes to him. But it gets worse. Apparently either Heymann is clairvoyant, or like the boy in The Sixth Sense he is so attuned to the spirit world that he can speak with the dead. In his RFK book he of course wants to place Bobby amid the plots to kill Castro. And it would be more convincing if he actually got that information from RFK's friends and trusted associates. So he goes to people like JFK's lifelong pal Lem Billings and White House counselor Ken O'Donnell. Naturally, they both tell Heymann that RFK was hot to off Fidel. There is a big time sequence problem with both these interviews. Now if you look in his chapter notes, Heymann simply lists people he says he interviewed for a chapter -- with no dates for the interview. This is shrewd of him. The RFK book was published in 1998. Lem Billings died in 1981. So we are to believe that while working on a book about Barbara Hutton, Heymann just happened to run into Billings and asked him about RFK and Castro. Even though Bobby Kennedy is never even mentioned in the Hutton book! Further, in Jack and Lem, a full length biography of Billings published this year, there is not even a hint of this disclosure. The O'Donnell instance is even worse. He died in 1977. At that time Heymann was working on a book about the literary Lowell family. Why on earth would he interview O'Donnell for that? Did he know that 20 years later he would be writing a book about RFK? But Heymann has been accused of faking interviews as far back as 1976 for his book on Ezra Pound. (For more evidence of Heymann's penchant for fabrication, click here.) This is the author who Janney has sat and talked with many times. Whom Simkin vouched for as a source for their Mary Meyer/JFK construction. All I can say is that if I ever met Heymann, the last thing I would do is sit and talk with him. I'd leave the room. The fact that Janney and Simkin appear to be ignorant about the appalling history of this dreadful and ludicrous hack says a good deal about their work. But if they did know, and endorsed him anyway, it says a lot more. VII One of the things that Simkin uses to add intrigue to the tale is the famous Meyer "diary" story. In fact he names the number of people involved in the search for Meyer's diary as proof that a.) It must be true and b.) The diary must have been valuable. In my essay on Meyer in The Assassinations I minutely examined this whole instance and the various shapes and forms it has taken through the years. I concluded that clearly the people involved have been lying about what happened in this Arthurian quest, and also about the result of it. This, of course, touches on the credibility of the story itself and also shows that there were splits between the parties involved. Most notably James Truitt had an early falling out with Ben Bradlee. The Angletons and Truitts stayed chummy through the years. In fact I concluded that it was Angleton who had alerted Truitt to Meyer's death in the first place -- since he was in Japan -- and got him to go along with entrusting the legendary diary to him. (The Assassinations, p. 343) At that time, I wrote that no one knew what was in the diary and that if it contained what it allegedly did, Kennedy's enemy Angleton would have found a way to get it into the press. At that time I had not read Heymann's book on Jackie Kennedy. Although it is unadulterated trash, there is one interesting passage in it. It is an interview with James Angleton. Now, as I have warned, Heymann likes to disguise fiction as non-fiction, down to quoting dubious interviews. But this one might be genuine. Angleton died in 1987. The book was published in 1989, so the time frame is possible. Also, unlike with Billings, Lawford, and O'Donnell, the stuff he says sounds like Angleton. (Even though Heymann gets Angleton's CIA title wrong.) Angleton (perhaps) says that Meyer told Leary that she and a number of Washington women had concocted a plot to "turn on" political leaders to make them more peace loving and less militaristic. Leary helped her in this mission. In July of 1962, Mary took Kennedy into one of the White House bedrooms and shared a box of six joints with him. Kennedy told her laughingly that they were having a White House conference on narcotics in a couple of weeks. Kennedy refused a fourth joint with, "Suppose the Russians drop a bomb." He admitted to having done coke and hash thanks to Peter Lawford. Mary claimed they smoked pot two other times and took an acid trip together, during which they had sex. Angleton (perhaps) continues with Toni Bradlee finding the diary. But she gave it to Angleton who destroyed it at Langley. He says, "In my opinion, there was nothing to be gained by keeping it around. It was in no way meant to protect Kennedy. I had little sympathy for the president. The Bay of Pigs fiasco, which he tried to hang on the CIA and which led to the resignation of CIA Director Allen Dulles, was his own doing. I think the decision to withdraw air support of the invasion colored Kennedy's entire career and impacted on everything that followed." (pgs 375-376) Heymann says that Angleton garnered the details about the affair from Mary's "art diary". Yet the details are quite personal in nature, and would seemingly be out of place in a sketchbook. And again, why, if Mary had turned against the CIA, would she entrust these personal notations with Angleton, of all people? Nothing about the diary story makes any sense. But if this interview is genuine, then it would confirm my idea that the diary was apocryphal, or was actually an "art diary", and that Angleton himself inserted the whole drug angle of the story through his friend and partner in Kennedy animus, Jim Truitt. (Truitt surfaced the drug angle in 1976 with an interview in The National Enquirer.) For Truitt, it was a twofer: he not only urinates on JFK -- which he had been trying to do for over a decade -- but he also gets to nail Bradlee, who had fired him. In 1976, when this all started, the revelations of the Church Committee were leading to the creation of the House Select Committee to investigate Kennedy's murder. So it would be helpful for Angleton to get this tall tale started since he had a lot to lose if the truth about Kennedy's death ever came out. Why? As John Newman has shown, Oswald's pre-assassination 201 files were held in a special mole-hunting unit inside Angleton's counter intelligence domain. This unit, called SIG, was the only unit Angleton had that had access to the Office of Security, which by coincidence, also held pre-assassination files on Oswald. Angleton staffer Ann Egerter once said that SIG would investigate CIA employees who were under suspicion of being security risks. (The Assassinations, pgs. 145-146). When Oswald "defects" to the Soviet Union, it just happens that Angleton is in charge of the Soviet Division within the CIA. When Oswald returns, he is befriended by George DeMohrenschildt, a man who Angleton has an intense interest in. As Lisa Pease pointed out, shortly before the assassination, Oswald's SIG file was transferred to the Mexico City HQ desk. (Ibid, p. 173) While there, members of Angleton's staff drafted two memos: one that describes Oswald accurately, and one that does not. The first goes to the CIA; the other goes to the State Department, FBI and Navy. Ann Goodpasture, who seems to have cooperated with David Phillips on the CIA's charade with Oswald in Mexico City, had worked with Angleton as a CI officer. After the assassination, Angleton was in charge of the Agency's part of the Warren Commission cover up. One of the things he did was to conspire with William Sullivan to conceal any evidence that Oswald was an intelligence agent. (Ibid. p. 158) He then imprisoned and tortured Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko because he stated that the Russians had no interest in Oswald, and Angleton's cover story was that Oswald had been recruited as a Russian agent. During the Garrison investigation, the CIA set up a Garrison desk, which was helmed by Angleton's assistant Ray Rocca. (Ibid p. 45) Garrison investigated the origins of the book Farewell America, which he came to believe was a disinformation tract. He discovered it was an off the shelf operation by an agent of Angleton. When Clay Shaw's trial was prepping, Angleton did name traces on prospective jurors. (Ibid p. 46) When Angleton was forced out of the CIA in early 1975, he made the infamous self-exculpatory statement, "A mansion has many rooms ... I was not privy to who struck John." Many have presumed that this was a warning that, now that he was unprotected, Angleton would not take the rap for the Kennedy case alone. Especially since, at that time -- in 1975 -- congress was about to investigate the case seriously for the first time. While the HSCA was ongoing, Angleton was involved in two exceedingly interesting episodes: one that seemed to extend the cover up of his activities with Oswald, and one aimed at furthering his not so veiled threat about being a fall guy. The first concerns the creation of the book Legend by Angleton's friend and admirer Edward Epstein. Written exactly at he time of the HSCA inquiry, this book was meant to confuse the public about who Oswald really was. If anything, it was meant to portray him as a Russian agent being controlled by DeMohrenschildt. At the same time, DeMohrenschildt was being hounded by Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans to "confess" his role in the Kennedy assassination -- which he refused to do. Right after he was subpoenaed by the HSCA, DeMohrenschildt was either murdered or shot himself. The last person who saw him was reportedly Epstein. Angleton's other suspicious action was the1978 article by Victor Marchetti about the famous "Hunt Memorandum". This was an alleged 1966 CIA memo from Angleton to Richard Helms that said no cover story had been put in place to disguise Howard Hunt's presence in Dallas on 11/22/63. Trento later revealed that Angleton had shown him the memo. The release of the article through former CIA officer Marchetti was meant to implicate the Office of Plans, run by Helms in 1963. Hunt worked out of that domain. This could be construed as a warning: if Angleton was going down, he was taking Helms and Hunt with him. Looking at the line of cover up and subterfuge above poses an obvious question: Why would one spend so much time confusing and concealing something if one was not involved in it? (Or, as Harry Truman noted in another context: How many times do you have to get knocked down before you realize who's hitting you?) In my view, the Meyer story fits perfectly into the above framework. Angleton started it through his friend Truitt in 1976. And then either he had Leary extend it, or Leary did that on his own for pecuniary measures in 1983. Angleton meant it as a character assassination device. But now, luckily for him, Simkin and Janney extend it to the actual assassination itself: The Suite 8F Group meets Mary and the UFO's. James Angleton was good at his job, much of which consisted of camouflaging the JFK assassination. He doesn't need anyone today giving him posthumous help. Talk about disinformation. This piece by DeEugenio, who used to be a friend of mine is full of it. I will detail them later, I must teach now...but I almost threw up, and wanted people to know a qucik take on this excrement about me and Cryil Wecht - is almost all false or twisted beyond recognition. I never gave that con artist 100,000 dollars. I will read more carefully, and respond later. This is the kind of backstabbing and unresearched bull**** that goes on in the research community all too often. Sad, becuase Jim was a good researcher and not on the 'opposing' side, but once he takes a dislike or a suspicion about someone......and I'm obviously now on his 'XXX list'. The details are all lies or such gross distortions, as to constitute lies, and backstabs, to boot. I will detail. I'm sure Cryil will also have his own reponses to this crud..[but due to his legal problems, may not feel he can respond]. I will for him, to the best of my knowlege. As the 'info' about Cyril is not entirely correct either. Jim needs a lesson in putting out poison suppositories, and not preaching about silver bullets! Sorry Jim - You have defamed me and Cyril, and no doubt others. Thanks [not!] for not checking the facts first. A sad piece. Full of false facts and character assassination. Jim, stick to the facts.....I see few about me or Cryil in this. More shortly. Now I see why DiEugenio doesn't post on the Forums..... Sadly, I once considered him a good friend. It is also the work of the Mockingbirdees/provacateurs to divide us and make the researchers fight by passing on false info about us to the others....I don't know if that was involved here...but somewhere the facts got lost in the part about me! NB- As I don't have Wecht's book at hand, would someone on the Forum with it be so kind as to send me by private email with the pages from Wecht's book on Russell and myself. Thanks. I want this to be as accurate as possible. ************************************************************************ Why was this post of Peter's edited by Antti Hynonen? Because I used one of the seven words the FCC bans on American broadcasts and the EF finds offensive....I find death and war and genocide and false-flag operations and assassinations infinitely more offensive than these words, but I don't set the rules. Is there a specific list of words or when they can be used and not. If I were to post verbatum statements of importance by LBJ or RMN or many others would someone cut those words out? While overuse or gratuitous use should not be encouraged, when one is of strong emotion, strong words are used in real life. We are talking about real world situations here and I was reacting to a post that is probably all over the internet now with a false fact about me. I'm darn/dang upset. ********************************************************************** All of this is very saddening, to me. I suppose everyone has a cross to bear now. It's like someone said, "Why can't we all just get along?" Too much back-stabbing and one-up-man-ship seems to be the rule of the day for whatever reason. I only hope we all haven't been lied to for so long that we actually are ready to jump on the nearest bandwagon that suits our comfort zone in this never-ending search down consistently dead end trails. I believe it's a matter of closure that will never be afforded the American people. It truly is a royal scam. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Mauro Posted October 12, 2007 Share Posted October 12, 2007 Teresa Mauro:************************************************************************ Why was this post of Peter's edited by Antti Hynonen? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Talk about disinformation. This piece by DeEugenio, who used to be a friend of mine is full of it. I will detail them later, I must teach now...but I almost threw up, and wanted people to know a qucik take on this excrement about me and Cryil Wecht - is almost all false or twisted beyond recognition. I never gave that con artist 100,000 dollars. I will read more carefully, and respond later. This is the kind of backstabbing and unresearched bull**** that goes on in the research community all too often. Sad, becuase Jim was a good researcher and not on the 'opposing' side, but once he takes a dislike or a suspicion about someone......and I'm obviously now on his 'XXX list'. Edited: language. *************************************************************** Thank you for the clarification, Antti. I am truly sorry for everyone. And, I also think that no matter how cordial and congenial we try to temper our discourse, the fact will remain that there will always be those who will continually try to sneak on board and cause disruption and flame wars. It will be up to the moderators, as well as John and Andy to adopt some sort of bloodhound or watchdog attitude to be able to sniff out the perpetrators and perform damage control before it gets too out of hand. That's a pretty labor intensive stance to have to take, but it has to be done. I don't envy your positions. I do wish you luck, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Simkin Posted October 12, 2007 Author Share Posted October 12, 2007 Part III When I reviewed David Talbot's book Brothers, I criticized his section on Mary Meyer. Someone posted a link to my review on Simkin's forum. Simkin went after my critique of Talbot's Meyer section tooth and nail. (I should add here that Simkin has a long history of doing this. He goes after people who disagree with him on Meyer with a Bill O'Reilly type intensity. Almost as if he is trying to beat down any further public disagreement about his view of what happened to her.) (James DiEugenio) Maybe he could give me some more examples of this long history of going “after people who disagree with him on Meyer with a Bill O’Reilly type intensity”. To claim that I do this to “beat down any further public disagreement about his view of what happened to her” is absurd. I cannot see how I am any different in trying to get at the truth about these matters than James when he posts on the CTKA website. The only difference is that on this website, people who want to disagree with you are free to do so. That is not true of the CTKA website. In fact, it his treatment of Joan Mellon and Lamar Waldron on CTKA that is more accurately described as being like that of Bill O’Reilly. In my review I simply stated that Talbot had taken at face value people who did not deserve to be trusted. And I specifically named Timothy Leary, James Truitt, James Angleton, and David Heymann. And I was quite clear about why they were not credible. At this time, I was not aware of an important fact: it was Simkin who had lobbied Talbot to place the Mary Meyer stuff in the book. (James DiEugenio) It is true that I did pass on information to the Mary Pinchot Meyer case to David Talbot. That included information that appeared in David Heymann’s book. He also sought advice about a whole range of different topics relating to the assassination. Sometimes he accepted this advice, sometimes he rejected it. For example, he chose to believe the testimony of Angel Murgado whereas I am of the opinion that he was sent to researchers by Gerry Hemming as a disinformation agent. On the other hand, David decided to reject the testimony of people like Gene Wheaton that implicated Carl E. Jenkins and Chi Chi Quintero in the assassination. One of the most important aspects of writing about the JFK assassination is deciding on who is a reliable source of information. This is illustrated by DiEugenio’s article where he takes a very hard-line view on reliable sources. According to DiEugenio, if you fall into that category, then nothing you say can be trusted. For example, he does not like the work of David Heymann. The main reason seems to be because his work has tarnished the reputation of the Kennedy brothers. I have not read the books DiEugenio refers to. The only book of his that I have read is The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club. I thought it was a very well researched look at a much neglected subject. The book looks at the lives of Katharine Graham (the wife of Philip Graham), Evangeline Bruce (the wife of David Bruce), Lorraine Cooper (the wife of John S. Cooper), Pamela Harriman (the wife of Averell Harriman), Mary Pinchot Meyer (the wife of Cord Meyer) and Sally Quinn (the wife of Ben Bradlee). Heymann only spends a short time on the death of Meyer and does not argue very strongly that her death was connected to the assassination of JFK. However, the book does include the following passage that I have quoted on this forum and my webpage on Mary Pinchot Meyer: Cord Meyer gave expression to his support of Angleton in, "Facing Reality," an autobiography subtitled, "From World Federalism to the CIA." In the same volume, he comments briefly on the murder of his wife: "I was satisfied by the conclusions of the police investigation that Mary had been the victim of a sexually motivated assault by a single individual and that she had been killed in her struggle to escape." Carol Delaney, a family friend and longtime personal assistant to Cord Meyer, observed that, "Mr. Meyer didn't for a minute think that Ray Crump had murdered his wife or that it had been an attempted rape. But, being an Agency man, he couldn't very well accuse the CIA of the crime, although the murder had all the markings of an in-house rubout." Asked to comment on the case, by the current author (C. David Heymann), Cord Meyer held court at the beginning of February 2001 - six weeks before his death - in the barren dining room of a Washington nursing home. Propped up in a chair, his glass eye bulging, he struggled to hold his head aloft. Although he was no longer able to read, the nurses supplied him with a daily copy of The Washington Post, which he carried with him wherever he went. "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed," he whispered. "It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy." For some reason DiEugenio objects to this passage from Heymann’s book. As he claims that Heymann is unreliable source I assume DiEugenio is suggesting that Carol Delaney never told him this or this interview with Cord Meyer never took place. Is Heymann so unreliable that he would have made up the contents of an interview? Why would he do this? He does not develop points raised in the interview. As I said before, the book is not about the assassination of JFK. Unless you knew a great deal about the case, you would not be aware of the significance of Cord Meyer’s comments. Even so, it is only Cord Meyer speculating about the death of his wife. Nor does he name the people who carried out the crime. However, if he is indeed referring to the CIA as being behind the deaths of JFK and Mary Meyer, this comment is very interesting. He is one of the few individuals within the CIA who might have known about the people behind the plot to kill JFK. Meyer knew that the CIA would not hesitate to arrange the death of someone if it suited their overall strategy. In Nina Burleigh’s biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer she claims that the couple suspected that the CIA might have been behind the death of their son. At the time, Cord Meyer was very disillusioned with the work he was doing with the CIA and was trying to get a job in publishing. He discovered that the CIA was stopping him from getting another job. As he was the main figure running Operation Mockingbird at the time, the CIA was extremely worried about this proposed job change. After the death of his son he stopped looking for another job. It also marked the beginning of the end in their marriage. Cord and Mary shared the same political ideals when they met during the Second World War. By continuing to work for the CIA, Cord Meyer revealed to his wife he had sold out. Given this background, I think it is highly likely that Cord Meyer made these comments to Heymann and that it tells us something very important about the deaths of JFK and Mary Pinchot Meyer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nathaniel Heidenheimer Posted October 12, 2007 Share Posted October 12, 2007 (edited) Peter, thanks for that wrenching narrative. I can't imaginine how frustrating it must be to be accused by someone who will themselves never have to answer questions. I think it goes beyond personal interest, because it suggests the deep involvement of high level volk in establishing false leads to muddy the waters. This is very important in refuting the "someone would have talked" type of argument that many people present to refute a consipiracy. With such advanced and well-funded projects of disinformation as the one that ensnared you, the fact that someone might talk is no longer a that big a deal. If a witness talks in the forest, it can still be drowned out or lost in a cacophany of rustling leaves and pages from The Nation. Edited October 12, 2007 by Nathaniel Heidenheimer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Simkin Posted October 13, 2007 Author Share Posted October 13, 2007 Part IV And I specifically named Timothy Leary, James Truitt, James Angleton, and David Heymann. And I was quite clear about why they were not credible. (James DiEugenio) The main thrust of James DiEugenio’s article concerns the reliability of sources. It is true that most sources that come forward with information on the JFK assassination have their own agenda. For example, Heymann is keen to sell copies of his books. However, it is a strong claim to suggest that he is a completely unreliable source. Even DiEugenio would have to admit that he tells the truth most of the time. I find it difficult to believe that Heymann would go as far as making up a story about his interview with Cord Meyer. This could of course be checked with the people who ran the nursing home. If it could be proved that Heymann invented this story, his reputation would be in tatters and he would have difficulty finding a publisher in the future. Anyway, why would he lie about this interview? is not a central part of his book and only has real meaning for assassination buffs. It is unclear to me why DiEugenio feels the need to protect the CIA over the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKmeyerM.htm DiEugenio includes James Angleton in his list of unreliable sources. Of course, I would agree with him about Angleton. That is why I have not used him as a reliable source on the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. In fact, my point is that Angleton has consistently lied about the issue of the Meyer diary. Then there is the case of Timothy Leary. James DiEugenio explains why he does not trust Leary’s account of Mary Pinchot Meyer in his article: The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy (2003): As noted earlier, Jim Truitt gave this curious tale its first public airing in 1976, on the heels of the Church Committee. From there, the Washington Post (under Bradlee) picked it up. There had been an apparent falling out between Truitt and Bradlee, and Truitt said that he wanted to show that Bradlee was not the crusader for truth that Watergate or his book on Kennedy had made him out to be. In the National Enquirer, Truitt stated that Mary had revealed her affair with Kennedy while she was alive to he and his wife. He then went further. In one of their romps in the White House, Mary had offered Kennedy a couple of marijuana joints, but coke-sniffer Kennedy said, "This isn't like cocaine. I'll get you some of that." The chemical addition to the story was later picked up by drug guru Tim Leary in his book, Flashbacks. Exner-like, the angle grew appendages. Leary went beyond grass and cocaine. According to Leary, Mary Meyer was consulting with him about how to conduct acid sessions and how to get psychedelic drugs in 1962. Leary met her on several occasions and she said that she and a small circle of friends had turned on several times. She also had one other friend who was "a very important man" whom she also wanted to turn on. After Kennedy's assassination, Mary called Leary and met with him. She was cryptic but she did say, "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast. He was learning too much." The implication being that a "turned on" JFK was behind the moves toward peace in 1963. Leary learned about Meyer's murder in 1965, but did not pull it all together until the 1976 Jim Truitt disclosure. With Leary, the end (for now) of the Meyer story paints JFK as the total '60s swinger: pot, coke, acid, women, and unbeknownst to Kennedy, Leary has fulfilled his own fantasy by being Kennedy's guide on his magical mystery tour toward peace. But there is a big problem with Leary, his story, and those who use it (like biographers David Horowitz and Peter Collier). Leary did not mention Mary in any of his books until Flashbacks in 1983, more than two decades after he met Mary. It's not like he did not have the opportunity to do so. Leary was a prolific author who got almost anything he wanted published. He appears to have published over 40 books. Of those, at least 25 were published between 1962, when he says he met Mary, and 1983, when he first mentions her. Some of these books are month-to-month chronicles, e.g., High Priest. I could not find Mary mentioned, even vaguely, in any of the books. This is improbable considering the vivid, unforgettable portrait that Leary drew in 1983. This striking-looking woman walks in unannounced, mentions her powerful friends in Washington, and later starts dumping out the CIA's secret operations to control American elections to him. Leary, who mentioned many of those he turned on throughout his books, and thanks those who believed in him, deemed this unimportant. That is, until the 20th anniversary of JFK's death. (Which is when Rosenbaum wrote his ugly satire on the Kennedy research community for Texas Monthly, which in turn got him a guest spot on Nightline.) This is also when Leary began hooking up with Gordon Liddy, doing carnival-type debates across college campuses, an act which managed to rehabilitate both of them and put them back in the public eye. It is clearly true that Leary did not first raise the issue of Mary Pinchot Meyer until 1983. However, that in itself does not mean that the story is untrue. Leary was probably concerned about the power of the CIA. If the CIA were willing to kill JFK and Mary Meyer, they would also be willing to hurt Leary if he was seen as a dangerous witness. Leary was no doubt hoping that the CIA did not know about his relationship with Meyer. As Gene Wheaton pointed out when he provided information about the involvement of Carl E. Jenkins and Chi Chi Quintero in the assassination of JFK, the CIA do not always kill witnesses. First they try to intimidate them into silence. They do this is a variety of ways but as Jenkins warned Wheaton, a common way is to completely discredit the witness. That is of course what happened when Leary published his story about Meyer in 1983. In his book Flashbacks, Leary explains why he included the story of Meyer’s relationship with JFK: One evening while lying in my cell in the Federal Prison in San Diego reading the paper a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle caught my eye: NEW JFK STORY - SEX, POT WITH ARTIST James Truitt, the source for this sensational story, was identified as a former assistant to Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post. In interviews with "The National Enquirer, Associated Press and The Washington Post Truitt revealed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer had conducted a two-year love affair with President John Kennedy and had smoked marijuana with him in a White House bedroom. A confident of Mary Meyer, Truitt told a Post correspondent that she and Kennedy met about 30 times between January 1962 and November 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. Mary Meyer told Truitt that JFK had remarked, "This isn't like cocaine, I'll get you some of that." Truitt claimed that Mary Meyer kept a diary of her affair with the president, which was found after her death by her sister Toni Bradlee and turned over to James Angleton, chief of CIA counter-intelligence who took the diary to CIA headquarters and destroyed it. According to the Post another source confirmed that Mary Meyer's diary was destroyed. This source said the diary contained a few hundred words of vague reference to an un-named friend. Mary Meyer's sister was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "I knew nothing about it when Mary was alive." The article also revealed that the former husband of Mary Pinchot Meyer was Cord Meyer Jr. one of the most influential officials in the CIA- the only agent who had been awarded the Distinguished Intelligence Medal three times. I lit a Camel cigarette and walked across my cell to the window and looked through the bars out to San Diego Bay. My mind was reeling with questions. Why was the fact that Cord Meyer Jr. was a top CIA agent covered up in the first stories about Mary's assassination? How come Ben Bradlee, publisher of the Post, brother-in-law of Mary gave her diary to the CIA? Why did James Truitt, top official of the Post break his silence after all these years? What did Mary mean when she said, after Jack Kennedy's assassination, that he knew too much, that he was changing too fast? It was of course James Truitt who first broke the story about James Angleton and Ben Bradlee’s search and discovery of Mary Pinchot Meyer’s diary in October 1964. In March, 1976, James Truitt, a former senior member of staff at the Washington Post, gave an interview to the National Enquirer. Truitt told the newspaper that Meyer was having an affair with JFK when he was assassinated. He also claimed that Meyer had told his wife, Ann Truitt, that she was keeping an account of this relationship in her diary. Meyer asked Truitt to take possession of a private diary "if anything ever happened to me". Ann Truitt was living in Tokyo at the time that Meyer was murdered on 12th October, 1964. She phoned Bradlee at his home and asked him if he had found the diary. Bradlee, who claimed he was unaware of his sister-in-law's affair with Kennedy, knew nothing about the diary. Leo Damore claimed in an article that appeared in the New York Post that the reason Angleton and Bradlee were looking for the diary was that: "She (Meyer) had access to the highest levels. She was involved in illegal drug activity. What do you think it would do to the beatification of Kennedy if this woman said, 'It wasn't Camelot, it was Caligula's court'?" Damore also said that a figure close to the CIA had told him that Mary's death had been a professional "hit". There is another possible reason why both Angleton and Bradlee were searching for documents in Meyer's house. Meyer had been married to Cord Meyer, a leading CIA operative involved in a variety of covert operations in the early 1950s. This included running Mockingbird, an operation that involved controlling the American press. Phil Graham, another former OSS officer, who owned the Washington Post, was brought into this operation by Frank Wisner, Meyer's boss. Graham committed suicide just before the death of JFK. Was the CIA worried that Meyer had kept a record of these activities? We do know that Mary disapproved of her husband’s covert activities and this was a major factor in the break-up of the marriage. Was this why Mary Pinochet Meyer had been murdered? DiEugenio dismisses James Truitt as a unreliable source and cites the fact that he was upset with Ben Bradlee over his sacking in 1969. As part of his settlement he took $35,000 on the written condition that he did not write anything for publication about his experiences at the Washington Post that was "in any way derogatory" of the company. He clearly upset Bradlee by breaking that agreement with his story about how he and Angleton searched and found Meyer’s diary. At first Bradlee and Angleton denied the story. Some of Mary's friends knew that the two men were lying about the diary and some spoke anonymously to other newspapers and magazines. Later that month Time Magazine published an article confirming Truitt's story. Antoinette Bradlee, who was now living apart from Ben Bradlee, admitted that her sister had been having an affair with JFK. Antoinette claimed she found the diary and letters a few days after her sister's death. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to James Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Bradlee and Angleton were now forced to admit that Truitt's story was accurate. Bradlee later recalled what he did after Truitt's phone-call: "We didn't start looking until the next morning, when Tony and I walked around the corner a few blocks to Mary's house. It was locked, as we had expected, but when we got inside, we found Jim Angleton, and to our complete surprise he told us he, too, was looking for Mary's diary." James Angleton, CIA counterintelligence chief, admitted that he knew of Mary's relationship with JFK and was searching her home looking for her diary and any letters that would reveal details of the affair. According to Ben Bradlee, it was Mary's sister, Antoinette Bradlee, who found the diary and letters a few days later. It was claimed that the diary was in a metal box in Mary's studio. The contents of the box were given to Angleton who claimed he burnt the diary. Angleton later admitted that Mary recorded in her diary that she had taken LSD with Kennedy before "they made love". These confessions were very embarrassing for both Bradlee and Angleton. They were guilty of hiding importance evidence from police who were investigating a murder case. What is more, Angleton admitted destroying this evidence so we now only have his account of what this diary contained. I am not sure what it is about Truitts’ account that James does not believe. In 1981 James Truitt committed suicide. According to Nina Burleigh (A Very Private Woman) Truitt's wife, Evelyn Patterson Truitt, claimed that her husband's papers, including copies of Mary's diary, had been stolen from the home by an CIA agent called Herbert Burrows. Leo Damore, who worked on the Mary Pinchot Meyer story after Truitt’s story was published, committed suicide in 1995. Ben Bradlee is still alive but I am sure he has no desire to talk about this story. Nor is he very keen to talk about his work for the CIA in the 1950s when he worked as assistant press attaché in the American embassy in Paris. In 1952 Bradlee joined the staff of the Office of U.S. Information and Educational Exchange (USIE), the embassy's propaganda unit. USIE produced films, magazines, research, speeches, and news items for use by the CIA throughout Europe. USIE (later known as USIA) also controlled the Voice of America, a means of disseminating pro-American "cultural information" worldwide. While at the USIE Bradlee worked with E. Howard Hunt. According to a Justice Department memo from a assistant U.S. attorney in the Rosenberg Trial Bradlee was helping the CIA to manage European propaganda regarding the spying conviction and the execution of Ethel Rosenberg and Julius Rosenberg on 19th June, 1953. Bradlee was officially employed by USIE until 1953, when he began working for Newsweek. While based in France, Bradlee divorced his first wife and married Antoinette Pinchot. At the time of the marriage, Antoinette's sister, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was married to Cord Meyer. Antoinette Bradlee was also a close friend of Cicely d'Autremont, who was married to James Angleton. Bradlee worked closely with Angleton in Paris. At the time Angleton was liaison for all Allied intelligence in Europe. His deputy was Richard Ober, a fellow student of Bradlee's at Harvard University. Bradlee was very angry when this information appeared in Deborah Davis' book "Katharine the Great". Bradlee managed to persuade the publisher to withdraw the book. Another claim made by Davies was that Richard Ober, Bradlee’s CIA buddy, was “Deep Throat”. If that is the case, the Watergate story pushed by the Washington Post was nothing more than a CIA “limited hangout” operation. DiEugenio chooses to believe Nina Burleigh’s account of the death of Mary Pinchot Meyer. In 1998 Burleigh published “A Very Private Woman” about the Meyer murder. In August, 2005, Burleigh agreed to discuss her book on the forum. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=4641 It included the following exchange: John Simkin: Do you believe Timothy Leary’s account of his relationship with Mary Meyer? Nina Burleigh: Up to a point, yes. I think he knew her and possibly did drugs with her or shared his drugs with her or talked to her about them. LSD was a very trendy drug with the artsy edgy people then. My problem is that he had no corroborating evidence - not a single eyewitness, not a hotel bill, no contemporaneous notes, to back up his claims. Given his lifetime drug use, I felt I needed that to be certain of his memories. John Simkin: Did you find any evidence that the killing was a CIA operation? Nina Burleigh: No. I can't say I disproved that theory though. There remains, in my mind, a ten percent chance that someone besides Crump did it. John Simkin: Did you read Leo Damore’s manuscript on Mary Meyer? Nina Burleigh: An assistant of his shared his papers, and notes with me, I have since learned that he did not share everything however. John Simkin: What do you make of this passage in C. David Heymann’s book, The Georgetown Ladies' Social Club (2003): "Asked to comment on the case, by the current author (C. David Heymann), Cord Meyer held court at the beginning of February 2001 - six weeks before his death - in the barren dining room of a Washington nursing home. Propped up in a chair, his glass eye bulging, he struggled to hold his head aloft. Although he was no longer able to read, the nurses supplied him with a daily copy of The Washington Post, which he carried with him wherever he went. "My father died of a heart attack the same year Mary was killed , " he whispered. "It was a bad time." And what could he say about Mary Meyer? Who had committed such a heinous crime? "The same sons of bitches," he hissed, "that killed John F. Kennedy." Nina Burleigh: Absolute utter hogwash. Cord Meyer was apparently enraged at my well-researched book, and I cannot believe he would sit down with Heymann, no matter how near death. At the end of his life, Cord had a very disfigured visage from mouth and jaw cancer - you would think Heymann would have mentioned that fact if he had seen him in the flesh. One needs to ask if Nina Burleigh is a completely objective witness. After all, she worked for Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post. Was this another example of a “limited hangout”. And why was Burleigh so selective in the use of information that Peter Janney gave here? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dawn Meredith Posted October 13, 2007 Share Posted October 13, 2007 Thanks Nathaniel, I think I already regret posting it, though it is the truth. There is an expression: Tell the truth, then run like hell!.... I'm already thinking of taking it down beyond the Russell part.......I didn't mean to go on about myself. Once I started on Russell, it just came out. It is a scar I bear, I admit. I once had a real life. But I danced with the devil, for trying to tell some truth. It was a very strange and sobering experience. I was 'out of circulation' for well over ten years. Someday, perhaps, I'll write a book on the whole 'thing'. There are many other parts yet untold. 'From Hempstead to Hell'. When I hear the LN and official version folks going on and on, I just hear the voice on the phone many nights at 2am with his threats, and the 'funny' things that happened to all my money, things, and standing in society. My bankruptcy was, itself, a subject for a book. A black Sherriff 'saved' me (to the extent anything physical I owned and had been confiscated, could be saved) when he found out I'd been on King's March on Washington. He risked his job, as he felt I was being set-up. Another tale for another time. I feel this [internet] is sometimes a bit too exposed a setting. Say hello to NYC for me. I miss it and hope I may yet see her again. The Rocky Mts too. Peter It was hard to read this and not feel shame and outrage. I know that lives have been ruined due to work on this case. It has happened to friends of mine. I would like to hear this entire story. You hint at several things here, but stop short. The work you did with Tosh would be very interesting to read about, but we also don't know if he is even alive. (?) Hang in there. Writing your story may be the cathartic experience that helps you recover from this trauma. Dawn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Terry Mauro Posted October 15, 2007 Share Posted October 15, 2007 I am waiting until someone can send me the relevant pages scanned from Wecht’s book before I make my final statement on who got what wrong. But Jim D. had taken a negative ‘take’ on me prior. I had been in regular contact with Dr. Wecht for a long time, but just when he and his son were writing the book, I had just been relieved of all my money, possessions and was on the move and homeless, and they had no way [and don’t know if they even tried] to contact me to verify if the Russell material was correct. It seems not completely correct. Again, I will await to get those pages from Wecht’s book to make a final assessment. I’m sure if Wecht and his son got it wrong, they didn’t try to/mean to; I was much more in contact with Russell than they. Dr. Wecht is the most honorable man I know.Robert Russell was a very bright self-made con-man his whole life and had underworld connections that went to low-medium level, but he could ‘play’ the game that they went higher. He got the clever idea in prison to read everything he could on the JFK Assassination and make that his next con. He was in the N. CA area and I as in San Diego working on JFK research. A very reputable and capable researcher and friend of mine somehow came across Russell and was impressed with his story. He suggested I contact him and follow up on his story as JFK was my expertise and not his. I will spare this researcher the embarrassment of mentioning his name, but can if need be. He was trying to help, but when he learned how much trouble he had caused me and Dr. Wecht, took to drink and even self-institutionalized himself for a while. I see he is back on track now and I forgive you...should you read this. Russell was a real pro. He got a little money from me, but only a little – nothing close to the sum cited - not even close! Wecht never was asked to, nor looked at any rifles or other evidence, and many other parts of the story as related by Jim D. are NOT correct. Unless Russell contacted Wecht privately, without my knowledge. I had the rifles and other faux evidence. Russell had a tale, constructed out of his real criminal past associations and all his reading about the assassination. He knew the literature as well as any of us. He had a female companion who would act as his shill, verifying meetings and events I was not privy to and that his pieces of evidence were in fact available. I flew to Miami to meet his ‘Cindy’. There was a woman playing the role of ‘Cindy’ who claimed to know Ruby, and who even resembled one of Ruby’s dancers and was of the right age…but she was clearly a fraud, and knew nothing. All his other evidence: maps, guns, and lots of other evidence was [expletive self-deleted] and I soon contacted his parole officer, told him that Russell was in violation of his parole by purchase and possession of weapons [a M-C and two Mauser rifles] and had him put away back into prison. I just learned that he died in prison only a few months ago. He even persisted writing me from prison, ever creating new ways to explain that all was real. All were fakes. I lost a few thousand. Dr. Wecht was also done dirt and a huge run-around. There is more to that story, but somethings are best not said at this time and place. Recently, Russell's female companion, who interestingly lives near Montreal, contacted me trying once again to say the story was real, notifying me he had died, and asked if I wanted to write his story. I said NO, and suggested she write it herself, about a great con artist who used the JFK Assassination as his con game. She contacted me here in Europe via Dr. Wecht. More disturbing by far, however, was evidence that the REAL big players in the JFK Assassination cover-up knew about Russell, and while he was not IMO [but who knows?!] a creation of theirs, they just loved him and did a few things to allow him to have some free-reign to play his games on the research community – as it suited their purposes perfectly. It was even hard to get him back into jail…but I eventually did. He, and others like him, have done much damage. The greater damage comes from the pros behind the cover-up, however. The greatest harm to myself, Wecht, the un-named researcher who referred Russell, was to our reputations, no matter that we soon discovered and exposed the lies, and in this case the con. Jim D's little piece doesn't do anything to help our reputations.....nor was it meant to, or the others he mentions in his piece. I guess only Jim D is without blemish and can cast the first stone. Jim DiEugenio and I were good friends and in regular contact for a while. He was in LA and I in San Diego at the time. He is a rather emotional type and easy to raise a flag of the traitor over someone with the weakest of evidence and without fully investigating, IMO and sadly. I remember I was on my way to fly to Dallas and my flight was via LAX. Jim and the others in the then newly-found CTKA knew I was en route and took the ‘trouble’ to physically meet my connecting flight check-in desk and confront me [in the MOST uncivil fashion!] as a possible intelligence mole in their organization. From that day to this, Jim has never been in contact with me. I can’t even remember what flimsy piece of non-information they had, but they had heard something and confronted me with it. It was false…..as false as Russell’s bull, but Jim put me on his [self-censored]list, and apparently, there I remain there to this day, along with many others. He never allowed me the opportunity to clear my name nor refute the info. I had moments between flights then, and they cut me off in those moments – never allowing further discussion or explanation. Sad, how the research community is all too often its own worst enemy. However, I believe there are also little professional ‘gremlins’ at work, who exploit this type of thing, and even sometimes plant false information and start/fuel these feuds, etc. I spent well over a million of my own dollars on investigating this case, and when I lost all my money, home, and even way to make a living or survive, only a few researchers were kind enough to help out with letters of support [needed in court]. One, who had been paid by me for research help tens of thousands of dollars, wouldn't even loan me a few hundred.....so it goes. I spent longer than I care to mention virtualy broke and broken. Some things I can't [or care not to] post as publicly as is this Forum, as I believe there are entities who would take advantage of that information to harm me further. Another, and an intereresting side story, was a multi-millionaire high-tech industrialist who came to one of the Dallas Conventions and befriended me. I was often at his home and we were friends and had concocted together a very clever plan to get some important information on the case, using his fame. When my **** hit the fan, he faked that he had to leave to Argentina because of his connections to me. It was not so, just his way to distance himself. He today has the highest-level security clearances and makes parts for the military and intelligence community for their spy missions. I asked him for a loan of a few thousand when I had not a penny and was homeless and hungry.....but he cut all ties.....His name will be mentioned at a later date, and is a most famous one at that! [He came to Dallas under a false name!]. Another mystery friend or a mole? Elsewhere, I've mentioned that Gus Russo penetrated my investigative efforts and caused a lot of havoc. I still have a hard time trying to understand how he knew what he knew to intercept at an airport two persons I had paid to fly and interview a significant supect in the events [the possible Col. Bishop]. Gus told them I'd OK'd his participation [i'd not, and not told Gus of the flights, nor the interviews to happen! - he's pychic or gets good intelligence]. Yet another story, of which there are many others. Another matter happend to me to fleese me of some money and I needed the help of a PI [who turned on me when he found what I was working on] and the San Diego District Attorney [who told me "I only work for the 'good' people of San Diego" - and obviously my political slant was not included in that rubric....so I got no help - despite the fact I'd done my own detective work and all he had to do was arrest someone. [He was convicted of fraud and malfeasance some years later, but of no comfort to me.] Everything in America of today is political...and right-wing politics the norm in San Diego. I know other researchers have not had such problems and often wonder why me? I think I have a clue, but again, decline to mention so publicly. Part may also just be bad luck. Others have also had stranger experiences and a few met with death....so maybe I was in the end 'lucky'. So, those of you who find the research of JFK just an intellectual hobby, some of us have real scars, and it was a bit more than what would call a 'hobby' - that Mr. Oswald sure can do more from his grave than most can from life........ After the Russell episode, I continued my research, and some of it involved work with William Robert [Tosh] Plumlee. That is another story I’ve never told in full. It involved many interesting and strange incidents, all of its own….electronic bugs on cars; wiretaps; trumped-up court cases; death-threat phone calls; and much more….I’ll save most of it for another time, but at a certain point Tosh told me that he had misled me that all others on his flight were dead and two were willing to meet me, with certain pre-conditions. I talked to one on the phone, and a meeting was arranged. At about that time Tosh was contacted by one Mr. Theodore H. Shackley, formerly (sic) of the CIA and warned [politely (sic)] that it would be best to not continue his work towards a book with me. Tosh was during our work together shot at [bullet just missed his head at home] and had IRS ‘troubles’. I had a host of legal ‘problems’ made out of complete fabrications, but lost every time. Once I was not allowed to produce in court the very ONE thing that would have shown I should prevail. The judge ruled it inadmissible, though it was the very essence of the case/debate/contested facts. Then when I tried to appeal the case, I was told I could not, as the transcripts of the first trial no longer existed….etc. A bench warrant was issued for me for refusing to say who was a partial financial backer of my research, when the case [on the surface] was a dispute between my landlord and me over a [supposed] non-payment of 1/8th of the rent from about ten months prior. [The judge would not allow as evidence the cancelled rent check – when the fix is in, the fix is in, and certain judges can be used to put in a fix!]. This same judge said at trial that the landlord 'wouldn't have filed suit against me had I not done something wrong'....a nice, unbaised judge - but typical of our legal system today. He also had the case ordered shortened, so he wouldn't miss his golf appointment. My timid attorney refused to object or speak up, so I did, and was told 'one more word and its contempt of court'. I've seen it all. I've had it all....so if I sometimes seem 'short', I hope people understand a little.....just a little. I have little faith left in the 'legal' system, in fact the system as a whole. All my property was confiscated by the Sheriff, and all my JFK files gone through - as well as the 'movers' helping themselves to my personal items of interest. My bank accounts were seized and never returned. I went from oceanside San Diego in a hugely expensive place, to life in my car…..and worse and much more I'll omit. Another time, but I’ve never fully recovered, and never really will. Even my financial backer in another country spent a day in jail, on a false charge - he got the 'message'. Strange things can happen when one tries to work on this case. Indeed. So, what is happening to Wecht now doesn’t surprise me. His JFK files have also been confiscated, though they have NO relationship to the current charges - also trumped-up. Both he and I were, at the time, in contact with Tom Wilson...who died not long after. Tom Wilson did very important computer analysis of the Dallas photos [copies some of which the FBI now have]. Someday, I'll tell the full story of my investigation, work and 'personal hell' for working with Plumlee, and on this case. Researching this case and related matters has shattered my life...yet I persist, to get out the truth. This may explain, in part, my iow tolerance to those who I perceive as trolls. I'm even apparently on the low-level 'no-fly' list [complete search every flight of baggage], thank you very much America. After being a millionaire, self-earned, I spent a long time semi-homeless [tent and car] and at times hungry [even denied foodstamps, on occasion - social services in the USA are a joke.], unable to get work for what TIA computer systems, disguised as 'credit/employment records', now are used in the USA to control 'questioners' of the state from getting work, at times. One grocery store refused to hire me as the vegetable stocker as one of these companies that employers use to vet new employees had me as having poor credit and some derrogatory comments [i'd just filled for bankruptcy!]. Even though they were to pay me, and not me pay them, I didn't get that, or many other jobs....America of today. Posting this truth will, of course, cause me nothing but new problems and loose me some future jobs. The world of today. So be it. I survived all this only due to my companion canine, who just died recently, after a horrible year's battle with cancer, and I'm crushed and bitter, I admit. [An aside: One day, when I was in Pittsburg visiting Wecht, we were driving in his car in the downtown area early on a Sunday morning. Passing the City Hall there were perhaps 15-20 neo-Nazis in full uniform and with enourmous swastika flags on the steps of the city hall...and a few police watching them from a distance. Cryil and I are both of Jewish heritage, and I remember how he silently stopped, we looked at each other as if to do a reality check - were we dreaming?....Here we are working on the JFK Assassination case and its related fascist elements, and here are some Nazis seemingly unchallenged/unoppossed on the steps of a major city's City Hall....... a prophetic moment to what America has become since, IMHO.] I'd also like to add that while I can't say who or where, I find it significant that someone possibly 'involved or a witness to' some events or persons 'connected or pertaining to' JFKs Assassination in Dallas 11/22/63, recently requested and was granted political asylum somewhere. Interesting indeed. If and when I have [and not until I have] their permission to discuss this, I will. ******************************************************************** My God in heaven, Peter. It's a wonder you're still alive to talk about this. I am so truly, truly sorry for you. I see this happening to so many friends these days, it really gives me pause to wonder whose turn will be next. In any event, I hope you find this article interesting, as I've always admired Lewis Lapham, especially for all the years he headed up Harper's Magazine, as editor-in-chief. From my recent issue of HARPER'S MAGAZINE/NOVEMBER 2007 NOTEBOOK Blowing Bubbles By Lewis H. Lapham Men have a indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough, all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing, but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts, "All aboard!" when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over, - and it will be called, and will be, "A melancholy accident." - Henry David Thoreau - Reading the reports from the scene of August's melancholy accident in the country's credit markets - the bursting of the home-mortgage bubble, banks sinking into the sand of subprime loans, hedge funds losing 100 percent of their imagined value in a matter of days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping 250 points in the space of half an hour - I was struck by the resemblances between the speculation floated on the guarantee of easy money on Wall Street and the one puffed up on the promise of certain victory in Iraq. To buyers of highly leveraged debt the promoters of the "All aboard!" money schemes issue PowerPoints similar to those concocted in the White House and circulated with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's proviso that "there are know unknowns... But there are also unknown unknowns." A surplus of both commodities was found in the luggage of the travelers run over in August on the road to El Dorado. A number of them deserve to be renered as military acronyms. The "NINJA Loan" - Extended to borrowers possessed of no income, no job, no assets - comparable to the predatory lending of the United States Army to the freedom-loving sheikhs of Iraq. The "Neutron Loan" - Designed to remove the occupants but leave the property intact. Within the next year over a million American home mortgages are due to foreclose. in August 80,000 people were "displaced by violence" from their houses and neighborhoods in Iraq; another 2.2 million Iraqis have been obliged to flee the country. The "Teaser Loan" - An adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) sometimes requiring no-money-down or up-front but in all variants offered at a low introductory rate that adjusts only in an upward direction. The American liberation of Iraq was originally priced at $50 billion over a span of seven months; the expenses now run to 2 billion a week. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, estimates the eventual cost of the Iraqi investment at $2 trillion. The "xxxx Loan" - Requiring no documentation attesting to the borrower's net worth, annual income, or intention to repay - the same terms on which the CIA accepted the story about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi detector code-named "Curveball." SIV - "Structured Investment Vehicle" that "securitizes" subprime loans, thus creating credit with "access to liabilities." Soon after the invasion of Iraq the infatuation with a similar method of transforming loss into gain prompted the Pentagon to welcome terrorists arriving in Baghdad and Anbar province from everywhere in the Middle East. The bundling of America's enemies into one target supported the notion that the war on terror could be won at a single blow. Rush Limbaugh delivered the good news to his radio audience in the summer of 2003: "We don't have to go anywhere to find them! They've fielded a jihad all-star team." "Toxic Waste" - Degraded financial material added as ballast to higher-quality assets contained in a mortgage-backed bond or security. AAA - Bond rating affixed by Moody's and Standard & Poor's to SIVs [structured Investment Vehicles] transporting "toxic waste." The certifications correspond to former CIA Director George Tenet's assuring president Bush that finding WMDs in Iraq was a "slam dunk." Risk Assessment Models - Systems of stock-market trading quantified as mathematical algorithms and engineered to guarantee the perpetual motion of profit. They bear comparison to the Pentagon's arsenal of high-technology weapons - the ones incapable of losing a war. Model Misbehavior - In explicable displays of insubordination on the part of the algorithms, believed to account for the August loss of $5.5 trillion in the global stock markets. The Bush Administration attributes its failures in Iraq to model misbehavior on the part of the think-tank construct (computer-generated, ideologically enhanced) of a constitutional democracy in Iraq. CDO - Collateralized debt obligation. A coalition of the willing assembled with debt instruments of a strength equivalent to the armed forces sent to Iraq from Albania. Bubble - Employed as a verb in Eighteenth-Century London. "To Bubble" - i.e., to cheat, swindle, perpetrate a fraud. In contemporary American military parlance, a noun - the "surge" of liquidity in the form of 30,000 troops restoring calm to the Baghdad market in civil obedience. August's misfortunes in the credit markets produced a good deal of collateral damage elsewhere in the economy - severe losses in the construction and retail trades, to school and sewer districts, in the hotel and travel industries, to the 1.7 million families forced to flee their homes - but the proofs of Wall Street's stupefied greed didn't rouse the news media or the season's presidential candidates to exclamations of anger and disgust. [my emphasis, TM] Throughout the whole of its history, the American commonwealth has been subject to the depredations of what George Washington knew to be "a corrupt squadron of paper-dealers"; a hundred or even fifty years ago the brokers of the fast shuffle might have been seen in savage cartoons like those drawn by Thomas Nast (top-hatted dancing pigs) or pilloried in the language once voiced by Walt Whitman ("canker'd, crude, superstitious and rotten...") and E.L. Godkin ("a gaudy stream of be-spangled, be-laced, and be-ruffled barbarians"). Once upon a time in galaxies far, far away we recognized the character of the risk in what was known to the first Dutch settlers in Seventeenth-century New Amsterdam, many of them participants in land or stock-jobbing ventures, as "The Feast of Fools." It wasn't that the new arrivals on the American shore didn't believe or delight in the expectation and promise of fairy gold. Understood as the most demotic of economic activities, expressive of a yearning for freedom, the game of speculative finance aligns with the American passion for gambling, and matches the spirit of the bet placed by the Declaration of Independence on the wheel of fortune set up with the slots marked "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." But we used to know that sometimes the numbers crap out. The knowledge began to disappear from the American consciousness and vocabulary during the dawn of the new "Morning in America" that Ronald Reagan perceived on the horizon of the 1980's when he set up his rose-colored telescope on the White House roof. [My emphasis. TM.] Convinced that "the difference between an American and any other kind of person is that an American lives in anticipation of the future because he knows it will be a great place," Reagan brought with him the preferred attitude that the dealers in rainbows seek to instill in the minds of the customers shopping for financial salvation and political romance. Everybody a winner; the flowers never die. The attitude has been sustained over the past twenty-five years by the corporate news media's increasingly messianic testimonies to the wonder and wisdom of the free market (Alan Greenspan as infallible as the Pope), by the entertainment industry's loudly applauding the miraculous transformations of frogs into princes (Donald Trump, the hero of our time), by the government's policy of providing the banks with infusions of cheap credit on which to float speculative bubble baths (in 1987, 1998, 2001, again in 2007), by a steadily multiplying herd of eager buyers, their number now estimated at one in every two Americans acting either as independent agents or as participants in mutual and pension funds, seeking to acquire, at steadily rising prices, beachfront property on the coast of Utopia. [My emphasis. TM.] Together with the promises of an always brighter tomorrow (available on the Internet, delivered within twenty-four hours), the widely distributed faith in the philosophers' stone (i.e., the one with which medieval alchemists supposedly turned lead into gold) accords with the revelation bestowed on a correspondent for the New York Times in the autumn of 2004 by a White House sage identified at the time as "a senior adviser to Bush" but now generally assumed to have been Karl Rove, President Bush's recently retired man-for-all-seasons. Disdainful of the meager and obsolete truths that informed the think-tanks of "the reality-based community," the sage opened a wider-angle lens on the vision beheld by Ronald Reagan. Guys like you, he said, "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." [My emphasis. TM] Which didn't mean that the study would be easy to pursue. The Bush Administration's obsessive hiding of its actions and motives (from itself as well as from a public audit) rules against the handing-out of brochures illustrated with the four-color posters of imperial fantasies decorating the walls at the White House, the Pentagon, the Office of the Attorney General. On Wall Street the hedge against having to tell the truth is formed with exemptions from state and federal regulation that yield the elixir of "opacity." Highly valued by the speculators in the Nineteenth-century stock swindles engineered by Commodore Vanderbilt and Daniel Drew, opacity allows the private-equity operations to bubble both the government and their clients, empowering the dealers in SIVs in the same way that it serves the creators of new realities in Mesopotamia and assists the poker players in the Las Vegas casinos. Unfortunately, as with the water in the tale of the sorcerer's apprentice, too much opacity sloshing around on the trading floors makes it impossible not only to see what cards the other players hold in their hands but also to know how much money is on the table. The government in March stopped publishing the figure that measures the extent of America's money supply, possibly because by some estimates the financial risk exposure in the global markets for leveraged derivatives now stands at a sum somewhere in the vicinity of $60 trillion, four times the size of the American economy. [My emphasis. TM.] When the smoke was blowing away and the vapor being condensed at the scene of the August wreckage, the fear of ghosts in the Wall Street attic precluded any movement in the markets for social conscience. The headlines flowed from the springs of panic, not from the wellheads of rage, the concern expressed for the concentrations of America's wealth (its safety, comfort, and good grooming) rather than for the health and well-being of the American citizenry. [My emphasis. TM] Together with most everybody else in the society, the big-ticket print and electronic media are heavily invested in the virtual realities that not only sustain the opulence of the country's rentier classes but also shape the course of the country's politics, sponsor its shows of conspicuous consumption, control the disposition of its armies. God forbid that the emperors of ice cream should be seen standing around naked on the reefs of destruction. The financial press rounded up expert witnesses to cite the canonical distinction between risk ("present when future events occur with measurable probability") and uncertainty ("present when the likelihood of future events in indefinite or incalculable"), to implore the Federal Reserve for a surge of more money (Jim Cramer shouting into the camera a CNBC, "We have Armageddon!... This is not the time to be complacent!") [My emphasis. TM.], to say of the SIVs destroyed by the financial equivalents of improvised roadside bombs, "It is not the corpses at the surface that are scary, it is the unknown corpses below the surface that may pop up unexpectedly." "Corpse" in its Wall Street usage refers to a non-performing financial instrument, not to a dead human being. In the context of the war in Iraq, the word refers to a non-performing geopolitical instrument. If over the past four years Wall Street's deployment of lethal paper has increased the country's mortgage debt to $9.5 trillion, the Bush Administration's deployment of lethal weapons has outsourced or exhausted much of the country's military capacity, meanwhile reducing the credit rating of the All Aboard! American superpower scheme from an investment-grade security to that of a junk bond. [My emphasis. TM.] By the end of August both speculations (the liberalization of America's capital markets, the liberation of the Islamic Middle East) were losing "tactical momentum" in the reality-based community. The Washington politicians faced difficulties similar to those faced by Wall Street's squadron of paper dealers - how to "securitize" the subprime loans backing the Iraqi civil war, where to find leverage in the imaginary numbers attesting to the soundness of the Anbar province ARM, what degree of protection was left in the hedge of opacity. The preoccupation with derivatives forecloses debate about the worth of the underlying investment - the value or non-value of the war as a thing in itself - and shifts the discussion to the positioning of the political risk. Process, not product. Not why or to what end do we continue to kill our own soldiers (the known unknowns) as well as Iraqi civilians (the unknown unknowns), but which artful dodge stands the best chance of beguiling the voters in next year's elections while at the same time preserving the bubble floated on the belief that America's invincible military power serves as collateral for the $2.5 trillion debt to foreign central banks that America has neither the means nor the intention to repay. [My emphasis. TM.] Among speculators in the commodity pits trading geopolitical futures, the rumors speak, as the do among the speculators following the play in the stock markets, to the coming of "the next big thing." Soon after the Labor Day weekend the financial press was unanimous in the opinion that the Federal Reserve was bound to step up the flows of liquidity to the Wall Street banks in order to sustain the world's faith in the American dollar. Informed sources in Washington were predicting a preemptive military strike against Iran. Three Navy battle groups were known to be present in the Persian Gulf, the president was casting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in an increasingly evil light (terrorists, enemies of civilization), and how better to replenish the credit lost in Iraq than with a weapons-grade CDO spreading the risk to investors everywhere within range of a melancholy nuclear accident. With us or against us; buy American or lose the chance of a lifetime. Lewis H. Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harper's Magazine and the editor of Lapham's Quarterly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Simkin Posted October 17, 2007 Author Share Posted October 17, 2007 Part V As I said, Peter Janney entered the picture after Damore died. His father had worked for the CIA, and he had been friends with Michael Meyer, a son of Mary and her husband, Cord Meyer. He has in recent years put together Damore's research and is now marketing s script called Lost Light based on Meyer's life and death. From what I have read about it, it should be a real doozy, right up there with Robert Slatzer's Marilyn and Me. (James DiEugenio) I have actually read Peter Janney’s script and consider it will make a great film. Once again James DiEugenio is making judgements about something he has not seen. Why? Is it just because the film includes the idea that JFK had affairs and took drugs? When I criticized the sourcing of Talbot's book on the Meyer episode, Simkin commented that in two cases I was discounting the sources on insubstantial grounds. The two sources were David Heymann and James Angleton. In this day and age, I would have thought that discrediting these two men would be kind of redundant. (James DiEugenio) As I have pointed out earlier, the only evidence that I got from Heymann was the interview with Cord Meyer. It is a travesty to say that I rely on Angleton’s testimony. In fact, I have always argued that like Ben Bradlee, he kept quiet about his involvement in searching and finding Mary Meyer’s diary until exposed by James Truitt in March, 1976. Bradlee and Angleton first denied the story. Some of Mary's friends knew that the two men were lying about the diary and some spoke anonymously to other newspapers and magazines. Later that month Time Magazine published an article confirming Truitt's story. It was only then that Bradlee and Angleton admitted that Truitt was telling the truth. Well, if you buy Simkin and Janney, Mary was killed as part of a planned and precise execution plot that was lucky enough to have a nearby fall guy in hand. (James DiEugenio) I am surprised that DiEugenio finds it so difficult to believe that the CIA would create a patsy for one of their hits. Has he not heard of Lee Harvey Oswald? Raymond Crump, a black man, was found not far from the murder scene. He was arrested and charged with Mary's murder. Police tests were unable to show that Crump had fired the .38 caliber Smith and Wesson gun. There were no trace of nitrates on his hands or clothes. Despite an extensive search of the area no gun could be found. This included a two day search of the tow path by 40 police officers. The police also drained the canal near to the murder scene. Police scuba divers searched the waters away from where Mary was killed. However, no gun could be found. Nor could the prosecution find any link between Crump and any Smith and Wesson gun. Crump’s lawyer, Dovey Roundtree, was convinced of his innocence. A civil rights lawyer who defended him for free, she argued that Crump was so timid and feeble-minded that if he had been guilty he would have confessed everything while being interrogated by the police. In court she argued that the reason no gun was found was because the murderer took it with him. No newspaper reports identified the true work of her former husband, Cord Meyer. He was described as a government official or an author. A large number of journalists knew that Meyer had been married to a senior CIA officer. They also knew that she had been having an affair with JFK. None of this was reported. In fact, the judge, ruled that the private life of Mary Meyer could not be mentioned in court. The trial judge was Howard Corcoran. He was the brother of Tommy Corcoran, a close friend of Lyndon B. Johnson. Corcoran had been appointed by Johnson soon after he became president. It is generally acknowledged that Corcoran was under Johnson’s control. His decision to insist that Mary’s private life should not be mentioned in court was very important in disguising the possible motive for the murder. This information was also kept from Crump’s lawyer, Dovey Roundtree. Although she attempted to investigate Mary's background she found little information about her: "It was as if she existed only on the towpath on the day she was murdered." During the trial Henry Wiggins was unable to positively identify Raymond Crump as the man standing over Meyer's body. The prosecution was also handicapped by the fact that the police had been unable to find the murder weapon at the scene of the crime or to provide a credible motive for the crime. On 29th July, 1965, Crump was rightly acquitted of murdering Mary Meyer. In my view, the Meyer story fits perfectly into the above framework. Angleton started it through his friend Truitt in 1976. And then either he had Leary extend it, or Leary did that on his own for pecuniary measures in 1983. Angleton meant it as a character assassination device. But now, luckily for him, Simkin and Janney extend it to the actual assassination itself: The Suite 8F Group meets Mary and the UFO's. (James DiEugenio) Why does DiEugenio link the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer and the Suite 8F Group and UFO’s? The suggestion is that in the past I have made some sort of connection between these topics. In fact, I have been in the past highly critical of JFK researchers who have linked these events together. I have even gone as far as arguing that these researchers have been fooled by forged documents that have been leaked by the CIA (see the forged documents that links Dorothy Kilgallen, UFO’s and the Marilyn Monroe’s diary). I would like to put it on record that I do not believe in the existence of UFO’s. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack White Posted October 18, 2007 Share Posted October 18, 2007 John wrote: I would like to put it on record that I do not believe in the existence of UFO’s. ........ For the sake of accuracy, perhaps John would like to rephrase that statement. It is a fact that thousands of people worldwide have seen FLYING OBJECTS which are UNIDENTIFIED. Unidentified means NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE. Many may have reasonable explanations. Some have gone many years without identification. As his statement reads, he states that he does not believe people who have seen objects in the air which they cannot identify. Clarification? Jack Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Gratz Posted October 18, 2007 Share Posted October 18, 2007 (edited) Jack's point is well-taken IMO but only in a technical sense. There certainly have been flying objects that have not been identified. But the lack of identification does not mean such objects were from "outer space". But in common vernacular, a "UFO" is indeed a vehicle from another planet or solar system and I think everyone understood what John meant. Edited October 18, 2007 by Tim Gratz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Gratz Posted October 18, 2007 Share Posted October 18, 2007 The real question is whether John believes in USOs. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Simkin Posted October 18, 2007 Author Share Posted October 18, 2007 The real question is whether John believes in USOs. James DiEugenio was obviously trying to smear Peter Lemkin, Peter Janney and myself with the reference to UFOs. It is true that some researchers believe everything is a conspiracy, including the idea that the US government have been covering-up evidence that we have been visited by aliens. I do not fall into that category. I believe that Armstrong did visit the moon and that 9/11 was a terrorist attack. However, I would hate to see this thread move too far away from the murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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