Thomas Graves

Jim, With all due respect, don't you have anything to say about your "Harvey's" amazing facility with SPOKEN ENGLISH? You know, seein' as how his command of SPOKEN ENGLISH was better than most college graduates? You know, as far as syntax, grammar, and vocabulary is concerned? -- Tommy

Sandy, With all due respect, you disappoint me. Did I say accent-free? I bet you a quarter your wife didn't speak English so perfectly that she would have said, "I didn't appreciate HIS giving my sandwich away," instead of "I didn't appreciate HIM giving my sandwich away." Oswald would have spoken the former, not the latter. "The gerund takes the possessive," Sandy. That's my acid test for Oswald's grammar, and anyone else's for that matter. That and maybe some of the more difficult verb tenses, like the Future Perfect Continuous, for example. (Believe it or not, there are something like twenty-three verb tenses in the English language. I don't know how many the Slavic language Russian has, but Czech has five ... uhh ... kinda.) Very, very few American college graduates know that rule, but your "Harvey" apparently did. And your wife, too, right? (sarcasm) -- Tommy

Dear Mr Simkin, Thank you very much, indeed, for posting this list of illuminating questions from Tennent H. Bagley's excellent book, "Spy Wars". -- Tommy

Sure looks fake to me, Sandy. "RX" LOL -- Tommy Sure it wasn't ZEPP? Regardless, Hargrove's and your silence regarding "Harvey's" amazing ability to SPEAK grammatically correct English ... well ... it speaks volumes.

Larry, How about the idea that those "passport photos" were taken of the one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald while same was still in the USSR? Could the Ruskies have been trying to frame Fidel Castro for the assassination? -- Tommy

James, With all due respect, it WILL help you to at least appear to be a highly-educated writer. "A word to the wise is sufficient," as my mother used to say ... -- Tommy PS. Pretty amazing that a guy whose mother-tongue was allegedly Hungarian, and who THEN allegedly learned Russian BEFORE he learned English, spoke English better than you (and most U.S. college graduates), isn't it? Regardless, like Paul Brancato, I really liked "Post". You?

James, With all due respect, please try to remember the English language grammar rule (as the one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald did), "the gerund takes the possessive." Look it up, if you must. -- Tommy (Sorry, James. It was ... like ... THE PERFECT TEACHING MOMENT ... on more than one level.)

Michael, My whole point (which seems to have escaped you) is that Hargrove's "Harvey," whom you and I and a few other rational people know to have been one-and-the-same as the one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald, did not only "speak English," as you put it, but could speak it better than most U.S.-born college students! In my humble opinion. (But what do I know? I only scored in the 98th percentile on the SAT's "verbal intelligence" portion, about 53 years ago ...) -- Tommy

Jim, With all due respect, you never did respond to my recent jump-starting-of-this-thread statement that your "Harvey" (also known as "Lee") SPOKE English very well, indeed, as regards all-important syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. He even used *gerunds* correctly when he was writing (I haven't heard him use the rarely occurring and difficult *gerund with a personal pronoun* while speaking) which I'm guessing only about 5% of Americans do. Use correctly, that is. Capiche? -- Tommy

CIA counterintelligence officer Edward Clare Petty believed, based on some VENONA decrypts, that George de Mohrenschildt was probably a long-term KGB "illegal". -- Tommy

And let us not forget that CIA counterintelligence officer Edward Clare Petty thought, based on some VENONA decrypts, that George de Mohrenschildt (born in what is now Byelorussia), was probably a long-term KGB "illegal". -- Tommy

Larry, I agree with you that both FBI and CIA knew (or assumed) that Kosty was KGB. But knowing (or assuming) that he was KGB Second Chief Department Department 13 is another animal altogether, imho. -- Tommy PS For more on Kulak/"Fedora," see Mark Riebling's book "Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA."

Larry, Well, in that case just take my word for it. Triple agent "Fedora" (Kulak) told FBI that the KGB guy with whom "Tumbleweed" (Guenter Schultz) had met at the U.N., shortly after meeting with Kostikov in Mexico City, Oleg Brykin , was Department 13. -- Tommy Something Tim Gratz posted back in 2005. I get the impression from Tim's lead-in that maybe you originally posted the excerpt? FROM MR. NEWMAN'S PRESENTATION: So you can see here. 'Kostikov,' this is the story, 'is an identified KGB officer. He was a case officer in an operation that is evidently sponsored by the KGB's 13th department that is responsible for sabotage and assassination...' "But it gets better. 'The operation which is controlled by the FBI under the cryptonym TUMBLEWEED involved a German national resident of,' and there's the right amount of letters here for New York, 'who was recruited in Europe...' "In other words, we doubled a KGB guy. The CIA recruited him in Europe. 'And met this year with Kostikov in Mexico City and shortly thereafter with a known 13th department officer Oleg Brykin in New York. "And because he's doing it in New York, who's that going to involve? What federal agency? The FBI, they have jurisdiction over these things, once it's inside U.S. borders. 'The instructions given TUMBLEWEED...,' TUMBLEWEED, meaning the guy that we doubled 'by Kostikov,' by the two officers, meaning Kostikov and Brykin 'pinpointed objectives for sabotage and the circumstances of their involvement in the case left no doubt that both of them,' meaning Kostikov and Brykin, 'were working for the same KGB component, the 13th.' "I'm going to put this in plain English. We doubled a guy that was working for the KGB. He was receiving orders from the 13th department. And the two guys that were giving him orders were Brykin and Kostikov. And it was going on in 1963. And the FBI was the U.S. agency in control of monitoring, and using, and exploiting TUMBLEWEED because it was happening in New York City. Brykin worked in the United Nations undercover as a Soviet something or other up there. "And I found another document, that explains it even better, just a little better, that has another little paragraph. And this is what's being uncovered on the 23rd. It's not just that Kostikov is some kind of loosely, known to be associated with the KGB 13th department. WE'VE GOT HIM! There is a guy that he's instructing. HE'S OURS! And every time he (Kostikov) instructs him (TUMBLEWEED) to do something he, (TUMBLEWEED) he comes and tells us what his instructions are. SO WE ARE EXPLOITING THE WHOLE THING, through this guy TUMBLEWEED. "So, where are we going here? It's only hours after the assassination. They just found out that that is not Oswald in the photographs, his voice isn't even on the tapes, but whoever impersonates him, whoever is on the phone saying, 'I'm Oswald' links Oswald to TUMBLEWEED, to the whole TUMBLEWEED thing that the FBI is in charge of which involves Kostikov, and through Kostikov. "So, I want you to imagine being at the top of the FBI on Saturday when the CIA passes this along to them. Kostikov has been an active case. The TUMBLEWEED program has been an active case all year long. 'You've been watching. You've been watching Oswald. He's an active case. And that it's worse than that, you've got the two meeting. And it's in your files. And you haven't done anything.' "This is another document I found. That's my handwriting up there because I found 3 copies of this document. This is Kostikov's 201 number up here. (201-305052) Anyway, here's the paragraph, 'Physical description of Kostikov quite accurately is...we had from a year ago in Mexico, and FBI... "Here, 'He met in Mexico an FBI controlled double agent...' This is the rest of the story I'm telling you. 'The double agent's Soviet case officer in the U.S. has been Oleg Brykin of the 13 department KGB occupying the overt position of translator/transcriber to U.S. Secretary, New York City. "Now this is blacked out here, you see this is actually redacted. But, I found like I told you I found 3 or 4 copies of this and guess what? I found another copy that they had neglected to redact. And it has not only TUMBLEWEED, but it has TUMBLEWEED'S CIA cryptonym that goes along with it. "And of course it's an AE crypt. Those of you who are into collecting these cryptonyms like Nosenko, all of those guys were AE/______, whatever. And this guy is an AE crypt. "And this here is passing, the whole, all of their stuff along. Bagley from the CIA, he passes it along to the FBI. It's on the 23rd. It's in the afternoon and it's pretty bad news. "I'm not really certain of what's missing out here but this whole memo here, this is an FBI memo from Brennan to Sullivan referencing a call they just got from Bagley. "This is the other copy I found. I blew it up and you can see the TUMBLEWEED, AE/_________. Now you figure it out. What do you think? Looks like DURBILL. That's been my guess. AE/DURBILL. We just got a new crypt.. "It's the TUMBLEWEED project which is an FBI controlled program where we have got the inside line on Valery Kostikov, and had him all year, and that would be the guy that Oswald went down there and met with, and whoever impersonated him, made damn sure was inside U.S. intelligence files the day Kennedy was shot. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: The problem I'm trying to point out now in January 2018 is that the "inside line" was provided to FBI by a Soviet triple agent that the FBI, (thinking he was only a double agent) had given the code name "Fedora" to. Whom JEH finally realized, many years later, was working for KGB all along. -- Tommy

Sandy, With all due respect, does that mean it must be true? -- Tommy

Larry, Was Fedora (Aleksy Kulak) still "informing" the FBI or the CIA at the time? He's the KGB false defector (maybe triple agent is a more applicable term) who misled the FBI and CIA for 15 years until JEH finally wised up. For what it's worth, he's the guy who indirectly led CIA to believe that Kostikov was Department 13 ... -- Tommy

Steve, Well, I'm sure de Mohrenschildt monitored her for the KGB, if not outright "handled" her ... -- Tommy

Douglas, I cannot help but concur, Counselor. -- Tommy

B. A., These two guys are not to be confused. As you can see, Ernesto Miller had a squarish face. Nikolai Leonov, on the other hand, had a very thin face. Ernesto Lehfield Miller on the left, Nikolai Leonov (as photographed on 10/02/63 near the Soviet embassy in Mexico City) on the right: Another photo of Leonov from the same day: Nikolai Leonov is the blond guy in this photo: -- Tommy

Jim, With all due respect ..... So what? Now, would you care to challenge my statement that the guy who was killed by Jack Ruby on 11/24/63 (your "Harvey" and my one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald) spoke English very, very well, indeed? -- Tommy

Jim, With all due respect, you're severely confused, Jim. There was only one Oswald. He was born in New Orleans, as a child and as an adult, he liked to read. Probably as a result of his relatively high IQ (118) and all his reading, as an adult he spoke English very, very well, indeed. He taught himself the rudiments of the Russian language before he defected to the USSR, and he improved his ability to speak and write it during the 2.5 years he lived in Minsk. -- Tommy

B. A,, With all due respect, did Ernesto Miller have a "very thin face"? -- Tommy

Regarding Yazbeck, dude's first name was Hanna. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=12277#relPageId=5&tab=page https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=12277 found in this list at MFF: https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1136&sort=nara&page=5 -- Tommy

Jim, With all due respect, did I say anything in my bumped post, above, about your Harvey's alleged Russian language fluency, or was I talking about his documented and truly impressive ability to speak the English language correctly? I'm talking about the one-and-only Lee Harvey Oswald's spoken English here, Jim, and specifically about his excellent command of syntax, grammar, and vocabulary. "Absolutely incredible" for a guy whose first two languages, you claim, were non-Indo-European Hungarian, and Indo-European (but highly inflected) Russian! LOL! -- Tommy

Sandy, The English language is very difficult to spell correctly, for the simple reason that many words aren't spelled the way they sound. Czech (and I suppose Russian, too, because it, too, is a Slavic language) is the exact opposite -- easy to spell because all of its words ARE spelled exactly the way they sound. Unless, of course, Oswald was sending coded messages that way to his KGB handlers. LOL -- Tommy I know that Oswald made a lot of punctuation errors, too, but I'd chalk that up (pardon the pun) to his relative lack of formal larnin'.

Paul, With all due respect, I'm trying to work you through it, backwards. -- Tommy But I must say, having read "Spy Wars" and "Ghosts of Spy Wars" and "Legend" and, and, and ..., well, I rather like my theory? You? Or do you prefer to remain ignorant (by not reading those things) and go along with the (in my humble opinion) thoroughly hoodwinked "The Evil Evil CIA Did It!!!" / "The Cold War Ended in 1991!!!" crowd? You do realize, don't you, that there's no sense in our continuing to "debate" each other until you've read those things?