FPCC

[Stephen Roy]

I recall reading in one of the Church Committee volumes about the CIA telling the FBI that it was considering countering the activities of the FPCC, right around the time of the Oswald affair, and it raised my eyebrows. I recently stumbled upon the actual document on the Ferrell site, unredacted with a name included.

http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=135052&relPageId=2

Has anyone ever heard of this John Tilton?

[John Navin]

Oh yeah: http://bit.ly/QqsOxV

[John Navin]

The man was a snappy dresser. Wonder if he and David Atlee Phillips knew of any real good secrets?

[Stephen Roy]

Since posting above, a Google search shows that Tilton has been discussed online, including in this very forum. Sorry!

John, was he in Bolivia in 1963? Is that the "area where [FPCC] has some support"?

[Larry Hancock]

Stephen, actually there was a very successful joint FBI/CIA project going on against the FPCC including sending FPCC members into Cuba for intelligence collection. You will find AM/SANTA discussed in some detail in the more recent editions of SWHT. I've also discussed it and

Oswald's probable connection in some of my blog posts. There is extensive research being done on Tilton and a number of other folks

not generally heard of in the JFK literature and hopefully you will see it in print within the next year or so - not from me. I think it will become clear that much of the intelligence activity going on around Oswald in the summer and fall had to do with projects targeting the FPCC- that would be in both New Orleans, a new program targeting Latin America and an operation against the Cuban embassy in Mexico City - which was issuing Cuban entry visa's based on FPCC recommendation. Thoughtfully, Oswald took his own FPCC credentials to Mexico to assist in his attempt - turned out not to be good enough since a recommendation from the national organization was required but hey, you do the best you can with what you've got...they might have taken the bait.

-- Larry

[Michael Hogan]

John Tilton was one bad man and a big-time player, in my opinion.

Researcher Bill Simpich wrote:

When Lee Harvey Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for "forty or fifty" free copies of a 40 page pamphlet.

In a remarkable turn of events many years later, the author of the pamphlets turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Vicente was a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI’s New York branch.

After mailing the pamphlets, Vicente provided Oswald’s letter to the FBI New York office as part of a “black bag job”, where he let FBI agents into the FPCC office so they could photograph the documents.

During the summer of 1963, the CIA sent Victor Vicente to Mexico City, then known as the “spy capital of the world”, and then to Havana to meet directly with Castro and Che Guevara and to film his travels for review upon his return to New York.

On September 16, 1963, John Tilton of the CIA’s maritime operations branch sent a memo to the FBI asking for help in an operation designed to make the Fair Play for Cuba Committee look bad. He asked the FBI to provide FPCC stationery and an FPCC mailing list. Again, Victor Vicente took care of that request during the next month, and included in his package correspondence from Oswald.

Another request made by Tilton was to plant “deceptive information” to embarrass the FPCC in areas where it had support. This may have been the reason for Oswald’s trip to Mexico, whether he knew it or not. Oswald got in line to get a Mexican visa the day after Tilton’s letter. Standing right in front of Oswald in line was William Gaudet, an editor of Latin American Reports, who worked with both the CIA and the FBI.

http://www.indybay.o...26/18630570.php

Tilton went on to become CIA Station Chief in Bolivia in April, 1967:

http://books.google....bolivia&f=false

The Phoenix Program was next for Tilton:

http://books.google....phoenix&f=false

Doug Valentine wrote:

8) The age of anti-terrorism can be traced to September 1972, when the last Phoenix coordinator, John Tilton, crossed off the phrase “Phung Hoang Program” (Vietnamese for Phoenix) in an evaluation report, and substituted the phrase “anti-terrorism program” throughout the report.

http://www.counterpu...1/08/footnotes/

In his later years, Tilton moved to Orlando and some of his writings would appear in the Orlando Sentinel. One example:

"Furthermore, coordination of the operations of a new agency with those of the CIA would be nightmarish. In the early '50s we had a strange organization euphemistically called the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). Its job was covert operations. OPC, which employed some brilliant people and also some strange people, was housed in the CIA, but its operations were conducted with imaginative independence. For a while we had OPC agents amd CIA intelligence agents bumping into one another, creating chaos in some parts of the world. That doesn't happen today because covert operations are firmly under the CIA. And it shouldn't happen again."

http://pqasb.pqarchi...TE&pqatl=google

John Tilton wrote his memoir, but it remained unpublished.

_____________________________________________________

Tilton's son did okay: http://www.usatoday....9-17-tilton.htm

http://www.nytimes.c...al-s-chief.html

His company has had its problems:

http://investorplace...rlines-in-july/

[Stephen Roy]

Fascinating info. Thanks Larry, Michael and John.

[Michael Clark]

There is an interesting thread over on ROKC regarding the FPCC. I am surprised that there is almost no mention of James McCord Jr''s involvement with the FPCC at the time of the JFKA, anywhere in the JFK assassination  investigative community.. Wikipedia puts it out here, and it has not been deleted. I have also asked Harry Dean about it and he confirms the Wikipedia claims.

To the passing reader, James McCord Jr. was a CIA agent at the time of the JFK assassination and one of the Watergate burglars. As a CIA agent he was in charge of "infiltration" of the FPCC in 1963.

ROKC thread. https://reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net/t1680-was-the-fpcc-cia-operation-under-the-direction-of-gibson

Wikipedia Link and quote:. " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_W._McCord_Jr.    ".... then-Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles once introduced McCord to an Air Force colonel as "the best man we have".^[9] In 1961, and under his direction, a counter-intelligence program was launched against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

James McCord Jr. Is still alive.

 

 

Edited December 31, 2017 by Michael Clark