Douglas Caddy

Teen mistress addresses relationship, pol's Cold War fears in memoir New York Post By CYNTHIA R. FAGEN Last Updated: 12:08 PM, February 5, 2012 Posted: 1:49 AM, February 5, 2012 http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/inside_my_teen_affair_with_jfk_FGF4aS7OdoQozP4tyySsmK#ixzz1lX1xaVNY She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless. She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments. In her explosive new tell-all, “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath,” Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail. The book, out Wednesday was bought by The Post at a Manhattan bookstore. In the summer of 1962, Alford was a slender, golden-haired 19-year-old debutante whose finishing-school polish and blueblood connections had landed her a job in the White House press office. Four days into her internship, she was invited by an aide to go for a midday swim in the White House pool, where the handsome, 45-year-old president swam daily to ease chronic back pain. JFK slid into the pool and floated up to her. “It’s Mimi, isn’t it?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” she said. “And you’re in the press office this summer, right?” “Yes, sir, I am,” she replied. Lightning had struck. Later that day, Mimi was invited by Dave Powers, the president’s “first friend” and later the longtime curator of the Kennedy Library in Boston, to an after-work party. When she arrived at the White House residence, Powers and two other young female staffers were waiting. Powers poured, and frequently refilled, her glass with daiquiris until the commander-in-chief arrived. The president invited her for a personal tour. She got up, expecting the rest of the group to follow. They didn’t. He took her to “Mrs. Kennedy’s room.” “I noticed he was moving closer and closer. I could feel his breath on my neck. He put his hand on my shoulder,” she recounts. The next thing she knew, he was standing above her, looking directly into her eyes and guiding her to the edge of the bed. “Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts. “Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear. “I finished unbuttoning my shirtdress and let it fall off my shoulders.” Kennedy pulled down his pants but, with his shirt still on, hovered above her on the bed. He smelled of his cologne, 4711. He paused when he noticed her resisting. “Haven’t you done this before?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Are you OK?” he asked. “Yes,” she said. So he kept going, this time a little more gently. “After he finished, he hitched up his pants and smiled at me” and pointed her to the bathroom. When she was finished, he was outside in the West Sitting Hall, where their evening had begun. “I was in shock,” she writes. “He, on the other hand, was matter-of-fact, and acted as if what had just occurred was the most natural thing in the world.” “Would you like something to eat?” he asked. “The kitchen’s right here.” “No, thank you, Mr. President.” He called a car to come pick her up and take her home. On the ride home, it “kept echoing in my head: I’m not a virgin anymore.” The next week, she was again invited to go swimming. “He barely acknowledged my arrival, betraying no hint of what had happened between us just a few days before. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him in the eye,” she writes. Later, he led her into a different bedroom. “This was the beginning of our affair,” she writes. In a moment of reflection, Alford wonders “if I could have resisted him. “The fact that I was being desired by the most famous and powerful man in America only amplified my feelings to the point where resistance was out of the question. That’s why I didn’t say no to the president. It’s the best answer I can give.” She would swim with the president at noon or at the end of the workday, race back to her desk and wait for a call to visit him upstairs. “The governing factor behind these calls, of course, was the presence — or, more accurately, the absence — of Mrs. Kennedy.” They never returned to Jackie’s bedroom but stayed in his, which was cluttered with piles of books, magazines and newspapers. Kennedy could be playful and tried to extract naughty things that she did as a schoolgirl. “What did all you girls do locked up in that boarding school?” he would ask. Ironically, she had attended Miss Porter’s, Jacqueline’s alma mater. Their sex was “varied and fun.” He could be seductive and playful and sometimes “acted like he had all the time in the world. Other times, he was in no mood to linger.” They spent an “inordinate amount of time taking baths.” Kennedy changed his shirt six times a day because he hated feeling “sweaty or grimy.” They lined the bathtub with rubber ducks given to him as a gag gift; they named the ducks after his family members, made up back stories for them and raced them in the tub. He taught her how to scramble eggs. He loved popular music, especially Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. They shared a love for the musical “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and would sing along to it together. Sometimes, she would spend the night with him, and he would outfit her with his own soft-blue cotton nightshirts. But there was also distance. “There was always a layer of reserve between us, which may explain why we never kissed,” she writes. “The wide gulf between us — the age, the power, the experience — guaranteed that our affair wouldn’t evolve into anything more serious.” She never once ran into Jackie during these flings and admits to not feeling guilty. He sometimes invited her aboard the Sequoia, the presidential yacht, for a Potomac cruise. On a trip to Yosemite National Park, she noticed a pattern, which she called “the Waiting Game.” She was told to stay put in her hotel until the president called for her, which meant sitting around for hours. Often, he would only call her at night On one excursion, she met Vice President Lyndon Johnson. When she told the president about the introduction, he lost his composure. “Stay away from him,” he commanded, likely worried that Johnson could use knowledge of the affair against him. At the end of the summer, she told the president that she had to return to college, at Wheaton, an all-girls school in Massachusetts. He promised that he would call under the pseudonym “Michael Carter.” And then he played a recording of Nat King Cole’s “Autumn Leaves.” He made her concentrate on the lyrics, “But I miss you most of all, my darling, when autumn leaves start to fall.” As a parting gift, she gave him a copy of the record and trimmed the cover with leaves she had collected. “You’re trying to make me cry,” he told her. “I’m not trying to make you cry, Mr. President,” she said. “I’m trying to make sure you remember me.” Within a week of her return to college, she got a call from Michael Carter. He asked her dozens of questions: What courses was she taking? Did she like the teachers? Were the girls interesting? What did she have for dinner? He then invited her to Washington when Jackie was away. A car service would pick her up and drive her to the airport, where a paid ticket to DC would be waiting for her. Upon arrival, a chauffeur holding up a sign for Michael Carter would take her to the White House. On one visit, Kennedy was embroiled in one of the most defining moments of his presidency, the Cuban Missile Crisis. For 13 days in October 1962, the United States and the Soviets were at a nuclear standoff. Although historians have dissected Kennedy’s actions, none was privy to what he confided to Mimi. “I’d rather my children red than dead,” he told her. It was a chilling insight. When the president wasn’t keeping the world from descending into war, there was plenty of wild partying. One instance was a raucous Hollywood bash at Bing Crosby’s desert ranch. “I was sitting next to him in the living room when a handful of yellow capsules — most likely amyl nitrate, commonly known as poppers — was offered up by one of the guests. The president asked me if I wanted to try the drug, which stimulated the heart but also purportedly enhanced sex. I said no, but he just went ahead and popped the capsule and held it under my nose.” He didn’t try it himself. “This was a new sensation, and it frightened me,” Mimi recalls. “I panicked and ran crying from the room.” It wasn’t her first glimpse of Kennedy’s dark side. “He had been guilty of an even more callous and unforgivable episode at the White House” during a noon swim. Powers had rolled up his pants to cool his feet in the water. “The president swam over and whispered in my ear. ‘Mr. Powers looks a little tense,’ he said. ‘Would you take care of it?’ “It was a dare, but I knew exactly what he meant. This was a challenge to give Dave Powers oral sex. I don’t think the president thought I’d do it, but I’m ashamed to say that I did . . . The president silently watched.” Alford, then Mimi Beardsley, says that later the president apologized to them both. Another time, she writes, while back at Wheaton, she thought she was pregnant and told Powers. Obviously, this could explode into scandal. Abortion was illegal in 1962. Powers put her in touch with a woman who had a contact for a doctor. In the end, it was a false alarm. There were tender moments, too. Kennedy, alone and grieving the death of his infant child, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, reached out for his young confidante. “I had never seen real grief in my relatively short life,” she writes. While Jackie was still recovering in Cape Cod, Kennedy was back at the White House. “He invited me upstairs, and we sat outside on the balcony in the soft summer evening air. There was a stack of condolence letters on the floor next to his chair, and he picked each one up and read it aloud to me. Some were from friends and others from strangers, but they were all heartfelt and deeply moving. Occasionally, tears rolling down his cheeks, he would write something on one of the letters, probably notes for a reply. But mostly he just read them and cried. I did, too.” One of their last times together was at a Boston Democratic fund-raiser. Ted Kennedy, the president’s baby brother, was in the room with them. “I could see that mischievous look come into his eye. ‘Mimi, why don’t you take care of my baby brother? He could stand a little relaxation.’ “You’ve got to be kidding me,” she replied firmly. “Absolutely not, Mr. President.” About to be married to her college sweetheart, Tony Fahnestock, she met Kennedy for the last time at The Carlyle hotel in Manhattan on Nov. 15, 1963, just seven days before his assassination in Dallas. “He took me in his arms for a long embrace and said, ‘I wish you were coming with me to Texas.’ And then he added, ‘I’ll call you when I get back.’ I was overcome with sudden sadness. ‘Remember, Mr. President, I’m getting married.’ “ ‘I know that,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘But I’ll call you anyway.’ ” cynthia.fagen@nypost.com Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/inside_my_teen_affair_with_jfk_FGF4aS7OdoQozP4tyySsmK#ixzz1lX1xaVNY

“Is it irrational to suggest that the American and Soviet intelligences cooperated in the American governmental game of killing the president?” This is the concluding sentence in a prior article that I posted in this forum four days ago. Its title is “The Soviet Sojourn of Citizen Oswald” and its author is Richard Snyder, the U.S. senior consular official in Moscow who dealt with Oswald upon the latter’s arrival in the Soviet Union with the intent of renouncing his American citizenship. A link to the article follows: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18720

The interview took place in 1961. Eleanor Roosevelt died the next year.

CBS News Report February 2, 2012 http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7397371n

FAREWELL DOSSIER February 3, 2012 By Joseph P. Farrell http://gizadeathstar.com/2012/02/some-more-things-to-make-you-go-hmmm-inslaw-and-the-farewell-dossier/ A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the Inslaw Affair and the mysterious death of Gus Weiss and a little known espionage episode called the Farewell Dossier: DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW Read more: DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW – Giza Death Star Community A LITTLE UPDATE ON THE INSLAW MATTER Recently I finished reading a fascinating fascinating book on The Farewell Dossier by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud, documenting this little-known triumph of French counter-intelligence running one of the most successful moles in intelligence history, Col. Vladimir Ippolitovich Vetrov, inside the KGB during the early years of the administration of Ronald Reagan and the government of French President Francois Mitterand. The book, Farewell: the Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century, reads like a Robert Ludlum or John Le Carre espionage thriller, save for the fact that it is all true. Vetrov, a disenchanted KGB officer disillusioned with the failures of the Soviet system as a whole, and with what he perceived as KGB dysfunctionality in particular, approached French counter-intelligence with the offer to give them extremely sensitive KGB information, including files documenting the devastating extent of Soviet industrial-technological espionage within the West, espionage that essentially provided the Soviet Union with the technology it needed to maintain technological parity with the West which it could not otherwise have done on its own.French counter-intelligence, which had no experience or even human agents within the Soviet Union, readily appreciated the plum that had fallen into its lap, and counter-intelligence chief Marcel Chalet quickly agreed to run the mole, to whom he assigned the codename “Farewell”. As the book makes clear, Mitterand requested a private meeting with Reagan, and shared the good news, and eventually the French cache of information Vetrov was supplying was shared with American intelligence and the Pentagon. At this point, one of Reagan’s key advisers, Gus Weiss, conceived the idea to use the KGB’s own “shopping list” for advanced computer programs against it, and thus software intended to monitor and regulate a key gas pipeline was infected with a virus. At first, the software worked perfectly, but later the virus was activated, which led to a 3 kiloton explosion in the pipeline.(Farewell, The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century, p. 283). Of course, the implication here is that this was not the only infected software that was either sold to the Soviet Union, or which the West allowed to be “stolen” by the KGB. The book even strongly suggests that the whole Red Mercury scare of the 1990s may have begun as a CIA deception connected with the Farewell dossier (pp. 286-287). What this whole story implies is something deep and profound, for it is a story of doctored software that was being done at precisely the same time that similar allegations surfaced surrounding Inslaw Corporation’s database management software, PROMIS, so to my mind, there is a high probability that the Farewell matter and the Inslaw matter are deeply connected. But there is an even deeper implication and I hope it’s apparent: such sophisticated software management programs with backdoors and viruses brought down an entire system – Soviet Communism – without firing a single shot, and that software is/was in the hands of the US government and its various intelligence agencies. Now imagine similar such software – in the control of these government agencies and possibly any “rogue group” or faction within them – being installed in, say, banks like Chase Manhattan, the Bank of International Settlements, or – just for kicks – the Rothschild Nemrod Fund, or the Bank of Crooks and Criminals…er…I meant, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, Nugan Hand, Barings (names I’m sure some of you will recognize), or the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, Credite Suisse, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transer (SWIFT) and you get the idea… …. maybe, just maybe, the banksters aren’t in as much control as they’d like to think? Maybe it’s more of a two-way street between the government and the high financial elite than the banksters would have us believe? Read more: SOME MORE THINGS TO MAKE YOU GO "HMMM...": INSLAW AND THE FAREWELL DOSSIER - Giza Death Star Community

DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW January 2, 2012 By Joseph P. Farrell http://gizadeathstar.com/2012/01/dave-martin-and-the-mysterious-death-of-gus-weiss/ As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, on Dec. 28th I was on the Jeff Rense radio show, immediately after another guest of his, Dave Martin, who spoke about three likely assassinations: Josef Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, and a former Reagan era national security adviser, Gus Weiss, who is our focus here. First, Martin’s article(scroll down to the section on Gus Weiss): Three Important Assassinations? Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Gus Weiss OK…now that you’ve read his thoughts on Gus Weiss, the Farewell Dossier, Vetrov, and so on, let’s recall some other things, not mentioned by Martin, and do some dot-connecting. You may remember the other great scandal of the Reagan era, the INSLAW scandal. Briefly stated, INSLAW was a company founded by Bill Hamilton to develop a database software for the Department of Justice, then under Attorney General Ed Meese. To make a very long story very short, Hamilton eventually brought suit against the DOJ for stealing his software, named PROMIS, and hired investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, to investigate. Casolaro did so, and began uncovering evidence that suggested that PROMIS was modified by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to contain a “back door” that would allow them to spy on other countries to whom they sold the software, which eventually included Egypt, among others. These modifications were, according to Casolaro, carried out by Wackenhut and other contractors. As Casolaro pressed his investigations, he discovered links to the Mossad, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and a host of bizarre characters. Then he told family members he was going to meet with someone in the then Senior Senate Robert Byrd’s staff, which would blow open the whole case. Casolaro never returned from that meeting alive. He was found dead in his motel room in Martinsburg, WV, in a bathtub full of watery blood, with several cuts on his wrists, the latest in a series of deaths connected with the INSLAW Affair. His family to this day believes Casolaro was murdered, in spite of a ruling that it was a suicide. Ok…back to Gus Weiss. Notably, Weiss was apparently involved in the modification of software on the KGB’s “shopping list,’ which modifications were made and duly exported to the Soviet Union, to disastrous interference of with the Soviet infrastructure, including, as you read, the explosive rupture of a trans-Siberian gas pipeline. As Martin points out, some aspects of the Farewell Dossier are still classified. Now to my mind, Weiss and the software modification are part and parcel of the INSLAW affair, and in fact, dovetail quite neatly into it. What interests me is that Martin makes it clear that this whole operation was done by a select few within the intelligence community, bypassing those who would have objected. In short, we are looking once again at tangible evidence that “rogue factions” can arise within American intelligence, fashion policy and technology according to their own agendas, and actually execute it. All this raises the specter of badly compromised operating systems within the USA, and that, once again, puts “the Drone affair” into a very interesting light. Perhaps the Cold War scam has come home to roost in our own backyard. Read more: DAVE MARTIN, THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF GUS WEISS, AND INSLAW - Giza Death Star Community

Three Important Assassinations? Joseph Stalin, Leonid Brezhnev, Gus Weiss By David Martin http://www.dcdave.com/article5/111220.htm The book is At the Abyss: An Insider’s History of the Cold War by Thomas C. Reed (Ballantine Books 2004). From Reed we learn that the deaths of Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, which were officially from natural causes, were, in fact, quite suspicious in nature. That these two men were important historical figures as longtime leaders of the Soviet Union is not in question. Gus W. Weiss, we learn from Reed as well, was also very important historically, probably the most important virtually unknown political figure of the late 20th century. The reasons why Weiss’s November 2003 death, ruled a suicide by an unnamed Washington, DC, medical examiner, is suspicious must be supplied by this writer. Reed is sparing with his references, but he writes with an air of authority. Considering his background, one would expect that he would. In addition to having been close to President Ronald Reagan for a long time, he served as Secretary of the Air Force, Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, consultant to Director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories which is responsible for much of U.S. research on nuclear weapons, and was Special Assistant to President Reagan for National Security Policy, to mention just a few of his very responsible positions. Reed, whose book’s introduction is written by former President George H.W. Bush, establishes his anti-Communist credentials early, relating how strongly he was influenced in his youth by Witness, the 1952 tell-all book by the famous defector from the Reds, Whittaker Chambers. His first chapter, entitled “Communist Takeovers and Makeovers,” is a recitation of the horrors that they have inflicted upon the human race. The second chapter, entitled “The Fifties Unfold,” begins with Stalin’s end. The Death of Joseph Stalin By early 1953, Stalin at 73 years old was beginning to fail a bit both mentally and physically. It had never been safe to be a Stalin subordinate, and as the always paranoid Stalin grew understandably more suspicious of those below him maneuvering for position as his replacement, the dangers for subordinates increased. Stalin had a history of executing the most powerful man below him, the head of the KGB. In 1953 that was the fearsome Laventi Beria. [stalin] and Beria were like two scorpions in a bottle. Both were men of enormous power, no scruples, and extreme cruelty. Both were the epitome of evil. And both knew that each would not tolerate the other’s survival much longer. Beria may well have decided to strike first, to knock off Stalin before Stalin got him…. The details of what happened during that last week of Stalin’s life emerge from the notes taken at a reunion of his death-bed guards held on March 5, 1977, and from a more recent examination of Soviet archives by Vladimir Naumov and Jonathan Brent. On Saturday night, February 28, 1953, the Politburo Four—[Georgi] Malenkov, Beria, [Nikita] Khrushchev, and [Nikolai] Bulganin—watched a movie at the Kremlin. Then they were driven out to Stalin’s Nearer Dacha, located in Kuntsevo, about ten miles west of Red Square. They remained there until 4:00 A.M. Sunday, March 1, dining and consuming large quantities of Madzhari, a light Georgian wine. During that gathering, Beria apparently added an extra ingredient to Stalin’s wineglass—a hefty, or repeated, dose of warfarin, which is a tasteless and odorless blood thinner that can induce severe intestinal hemorrhaging. Fittingly, in large doses it is used to kill rats. When Stalin’s four guests left, the leader allegedly told a guard named Khrustalev: “I am going to bed. I shan’t be wanting you, you can go to bed too….” Stalin had never given an order like that before. He expected at least two armed guards on duty at all times. But Khrustalev was the only one to hear this supposed order. He passed it on to the watch commander, who promptly and happily dismissed the other guards for the evening, leaving only Khrustalev on duty—as the warfarin did its work. At 10:00 A.M. that Sunday morning, the guards reassembled in the dacha kitchen. They observed no activity from Stalin’s quarters. At 6:00 P.M. one guard saw a light go on, confirming that things must be all right and thus it would be unwise to enter. By 10:00 P.M., however, when there was still no movement inside, guard Lozgachev was elected by his peers to enter Stalin’s quarters. He found Stalin on the floor, conscious but mostly paralyzed, with one arm raised in the air. Lozgachev assumed a stroke had felled the Soviet leader; a broken pocket watch on the floor had stopped at 6:30, suggesting that Stalin had lain there for three and a half hours, unattended. Lozgachev called the other guards, who entered the suite along with the housekeeper. The four of them lifted Stalin onto a sofa and then put in calls to Beria and Malenkov. They first connected with Malenkov, but he referred the matter to Beria, who called back a half hour later to tell the guards, “Don’t tell anybody about Comrade Stalin’s illness.” No medical help was requested. Five hours later, at 3:00 A.M. on Monday, March 2, Beria and Malenkov showed up at the dacha. The guards told them the whole story. Beria said, “Don’t cause a panic, don’t bother us. And don’t disturb Comrade Stalin.” The two then left, again leaving Stalin without any medical help. At 8:00 A.M. the doctors finally arrived, fourteen hours after the dictator’s collapse to the dacha floor. At 9:50 P.M. on Thursday, March 5, four days after the alleged “stroke,” Dr. A. L. Myasnikov pronounced Stalin dead of a cerebral hemorrhage. But a first draft of the autopsy report, only recently unearthed, describes a major stomach hemorrhage as the most likely cause of Stalin’s death. During his death throes, on March 4, the attending physicians noted that Stalin was vomiting blood. As usual, the Soviet News Agency Tass misinformed the world, announcing that Stalin had died in his Kremlin apartment. Beria was there at the Nearer Dacha at the time of death. According to Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, Beria “called out in a loud and undisguisedly triumphant voice, ‘Khrustalev, the car!’ ” Note that Khrustalev was the one called, and Beria was the first to leave. And it was Khrustalev who was on hand for the embalming of Stalin’s remains. Strangely, he fell ill and died shortly afterward. Stalin’s remains were embalmed by the special laboratory at the Lenin Mausoleum. They were interred next to the body of Lenin in the red marble mausoleum that protrudes out from the Kremlin’s walls and into Red Square. Stalin was to be immortalized, buried in his uniform with shoulder boards, buttons, and hero’s stars made of gold. Later that spring Beria said to Molotov: “I took him out.” (pp. 24-26) The Death of Leonid Brezhnev Reed’s account of Brezhnev’s demise, which he describes as “…another mysterious death of an aging Soviet dictator, unwitnessed by any members of his family,” is much sketchier: At 7:30 A.M. on November 10 [1982], the elderly [75] and infirm Brezhnev took breakfast and read the morning newspaper in his private Kremlin dining room. Twenty minutes later he headed upstairs to his bedroom, accompanied by his two KGB guards. All three entered the bedroom together and closed the door behind them. Brezhnev was never again seen alive. At about 8:00 A.M. the two guards emerged and went downstairs to advise Mrs. Brezhnev that her husband had just died. She was not allowed upstairs into the bedroom, nor were any doctors called, nor was any autopsy performed. She never even saw her husband’s body until the state ceremonies in the Hall of Columns two days later. Until her dying day, Victoria Petrovna Brezhnev remained convinced that her husband met with foul play. That conclusion is understandable, given that Brezhnev’s successor was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, the man who personally selected those two guards. (p. 239) Gus W. Weiss The published facts about the November 25, 2003, death of the national security heavyweight, Weiss, are even sketchier. They are especially so for the supposedly much more open society of the United States. So under-reported was Weiss’s violent end, ostensibly from a fall from the Watergate building where he lived, Reed, his admirer and former colleague on Reagan’s National Security Council, seems to have been slow in learning about it. Reed writes the following in the acknowledgments section of his book: “Richard Childress, Gennady Gorelik, John MacLucas, Michael Warner, and Gus Weiss all granted access to their Cold War files, while Stu Spencer (who never took a note in his life) opened a treasure trove of insight into Ronald Reagan’s thoughts at key moments in history.” Reed signs the acknowledgment page, “Healdsburg, CA January 2004.” One would think that if he had known of Weiss’s recent death, he would have referred to him here as “the late Gus Weiss.” Most readers of Reed’s book will discover that not only should Weiss’s death have been known about by an old colleague, it should have been national news. As you might expect a Reagan insider and political partisan to do, Reed gives a great deal of credit to Reagan’s actions for the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Reagan’s most significant act, one gathers from Reed, was signing off on the brainchild of Gus Weiss. In popular Republican history, the straw that broke the economic back of the Soviet Union was Reagan’s decision to go ahead with the implementation of an anti-strategic-missile system for the United States, the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) or Star Wars program. The Soviets, it is said, bankrupted themselves trying to counter it. If that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, Weiss’s economic sabotage program was more like a tree falling on the camel. On July 19, 1981, at an economic summit meeting in Ottawa, the inveterate anti-Communist Reagan received a gift from a most unexpected quarter. The newly elected socialist president of France, François Mitterrand, called him aside and told him that France had a KGB informant in Moscow who was responsible for evaluating the fruits of a massive Soviet program to acquire Western technology by any means necessary, including theft. The informant, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov, had been an international spy who, while posted in Paris, had made good friends among France’s counterpart of the FBI, the DST. It was through those DST contacts, not France’s own espionage service, that Vetrov was leaking an absolute treasure trove of documents. What those documents revealed, most importantly to the hardliners in the Reagan inner circle, was that the state of the Soviet economy was much worse than even they had suspected. The Soviet bloc had fallen hopelessly behind in technological innovation and the only thing keeping it within shouting distance of the West was its massive program of industrial espionage, the so-called “Line X” collection network. The French had given their informant Vetrov the code name “Farewell.” An English name (which Reed italicizes) was chosen, the French said later, to throw the Russians off. If they should run across it in one of their intercepts, they might think it referred to an American or English agent. The specific word was chosen to imply that it was something in the past, a no longer active operation. As a bonus, divided into two words the word becomes an expression of good wishes for the agent, “fare well.” The cornucopia of information divulged by Vetrov, which included the identities of hundreds of case officers, contracted agents, and other suppliers of information around the world, became known as the “Farewell dossier.” Aside from agent identification, the most useful information in the Farewell dossier was the KGB’s shopping list: its targets for technology acquisition and theft during the coming few years. When the Farewell dossier arrived in Washington, Reagan asked Director of Central Intelligence Bill Casey to come up with a clandestine operational use for the material. During the fall of 1981, one of my NSC associates, Dr. Gus Weiss, was cleared to read the material. He devised a remarkable plan: “Why not help the Soviets with their shopping? Now that we know what they want, we can help them get it.” There would be just one catch: the CIA would add “extra ingredients” to the software and hardware on the KGB’s shopping list. Weiss presented the plan to Casey in December 1981 and Casey took it to the President in January 1982. Notably absent from their meeting were any of the White House’s strong believers in détente. Reagan received the plan enthusiastically; Casey was given a “go.” There are no written memoranda reflecting that meeting, or for that matter, the whole project, for many in the intelligence community were concerned about the security of the new, computerized, internal NSC communication system.* Within a few months the shipments began. The Weiss project targeted the Soviet military-industrial needs as set forth in the Farewell dossier. “Improved”—that is to say, erratic—computer chips were designed to pass quality acceptance tests before entry into Soviet service. Only later would they sporadically fail, frazzling the nerves of harried users. Pseudosoftware disrupted factory output. Flawed but convincing ideas on stealth, attack aircraft, and space defense made their way into Soviet ministries. The production and transportation of oil and gas was at the top of the Soviet wish list. A new trans-Siberian pipeline was to deliver natural gas from the Urengoi gas fields in Siberia across Kazakhstan, Russia, and Eastern Europe, into the hard currency markets of the West. To automate the operation of valves, compressors, and storage facilities in such an immense undertaking, the Soviets needed sophisticated control systems. They bought early model computers on the open market, but when Russian pipeline authorities approached the U.S. for the necessary software, they were turned down. Undaunted, the Soviets looked elsewhere; a KGB operative was sent to penetrate a Canadian software supplier in an attempt to steal the needed codes. U.S. Intelligence, tipped by Farewell, responded and—in cooperation with some outraged Canadians—“improved” the software before sending it on. Once in the Soviet Union, computers and software, working together, ran the pipeline beautifully—for a while. But that tranquility was deceptive. Buried in the stolen Canadian goods—the software operating this whole new pipeline system—was a Trojan horse. (Note: “Trojan horse” is an expression describing a few lines of software, buried in the normal operating system, that will cause that system to go berserk at some future date [Halloween?] or upon the receipt of some outside message.) In order to disrupt the Soviet gas supply, its hard currency earnings from the West, and the internal Russian economy, the pipeline software that was to run the pumps, turbines, and valves was programmed to go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to the pipeline joints and welds. The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event out in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was the detonation of a small nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at three kilotons, but he was puzzled by the silence of the Vela satellites. They had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another twenty years to tell me why. The Farewell countermeasures campaign was cold-eyed economic warfare, put in place to inflict a price on the Soviet Union for corrupting the lofty ideals of détente. While there were no physical casualties from the pipeline explosion, there was significant damage to the Soviet economy. Its ultimate bankruptcy, not a bloody battle of nuclear exchange, is what brought the Cold War to an end. In time the Soviets came to understand that they had been stealing bogus technology, but now what were they to do? By implication, every cell of the Soviet technical leviathan might be infected. They had no way of knowing which equipment was sound, which was bogus. All was suspect, which was the intended endgame of the entire operation. As a grand finale, in 1984-85 the U.S. and its NATO allies rolled up the entire Line X collection network, both in the U.S. and overseas. This effectively extinguished the KGB’s technology collection capabilities at a time when Moscow was being sandwiched between a failing economy on one hand and an American President—intent on prevailing and ending the Cold War—on the other. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Gus Weiss, from Thomas C. Reed’s perspective, was a major hero in the winning of the Cold War. That view was shared by the late William Safire, the famous New York Times columnist and speechwriter for President Richard Nixon, who drew heavily on the passage above to tout Reed’s work on February 2, 2004, the eve of Reed’s book’s publication: Intelligence shortcomings, as we see, have a thousand fathers; secret intelligence triumphs are orphans. Here is the unremarked story of ''the Farewell dossier'': how a C.I.A. campaign of computer sabotage resulting in a huge explosion in Siberia -- all engineered by a mild-mannered economist named Gus Weiss -- helped us win the cold war. That was how Safire began his column; this is how he ended it: Gus Weiss died from a fall a few months ago. Now is a time to remember that sometimes our spooks get it right in a big way. Please note that Safire did not say that his former White House colleague committed suicide, only that he “died from a fall.” You’d think that you were reading the Willcutts Report on James Forrestal’s death, which also concluded that Forrestal died from his fall without saying what caused the fall, when all the media have told us that he committed suicide. The Death of Gus Weiss Since the world had been told of Weiss’s major contribution toward the winning of the Cold War in its own pages, not to mention the fact that he had held high level positions under four presidents, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan, one might have thought that his death would have been rather big news for the vaunted “newspaper of record,” The New York Times. It was not. In fact, here is how The Times informed the public of his death, in a notice buried deep in its alphabetical list of paid notices a full six days after the death, on December 1, 2003: WEISS--Gus W. Of Washington, D.C. on November 25, 2003 at age 72. Beloved son of the late Gus and Natalie Weiss. Loving nephew of Lillian Weiss and dear cousin of Joan Poorvu and Claire Weisman. Services at Frank E. Campbell, 1076 Madison Ave. at 81 St. Monday, December 1st at 1 PM. Interment Beth El Cemetery. Contributions in his memory may be made to a charity of your choice. Not only are there no details on his death, there’s nothing about his extraordinary life, either. You can be certain that they knew who he was, but The New York Times, this pillar of the U.S. establishment, this important organ of what some have referred to as our “permanent government,” in their death notice treated Gus Weiss as a mere nobody. It is so reminiscent of one of those purged Politburo members airbrushed out of the photographs of the Red Square reviewing stand for the May Day parade! Another measure of Weiss’s continued undeserved obscurity can be found with a Google search of the name, “Gus Weiss.” As of the date of the writing of this article, the first thing that comes up is “Top Secret Adviser to 4 Presidents Dies ‘Violently’ in DC,” which is the title that Jeff Rense gave to this writer’s December 7, 2003, article, “Connected Iraq War Opponent a ‘Suicide’.” (The penultimate paragraph about the unlikelihood that a DC policeman would have been the person to find the body was added after Rense picked up the article. It appears as a postscript in the revised version reprinted later on the UK web site, The Truthseeker.) As I understand it, Google arranges its links in order of the number of hits that a Web address receives. What this Google search outcome tells us is not so much that the Rense.com page and my article are so popular but that the life and death of Gus Weiss continue to be blacked out news in America’s mainstream press. I will be the first to admit that the Weiss blackout had done its work on me. What caught a friend’s eye on the obituary page of the local house organ of the permanent government, The Washington Post, was that the death of this former high level but relatively unknown government official had been reported 12 days late and with no explanation for the conclusion that the death had been a suicide other than that the medical examiner had said so.** A quick Google search revealed that the Nashville Tennessean had beaten The Post to the punch by six days in reporting the death. From the article there I learned that Weiss’s friends had been “shocked” at the news of this death, that he had been a vocal opponent of the Iraq War, and that as of December 1 the Tennesseean had not learned anything about the nature Weiss’s death. I dashed off my article on the same day the Post obituary appeared, remaining ignorant of the puny little Weiss obituary in The Times and of the hugely important Farewell dossier and Weiss’s role in its exploitation. Now there are Wikipedia pages for both the Farewell dossier and for Gus W. Weiss. A click on their “View history” tabs at the top reveals, however, that both are of very recent vintage. The “Farewell dossier” page did not begin until January 12, 2010. This was in the year after the French had produced a major movie, L’affaire Farewell, on the subject and thirteen years after the French publication of the book, Bonjour Farewell. The “Gus W. Weiss” Wikipedia page didn’t get started until July 19, 2011. The original poster of the page ended it with a section entitled “Death & Suspicions,” with a reference to this writer’s article as it appeared on Rense.com. One must wonder if this person would have ever heard of Gus Weiss had it not been for my article on Rense. At any rate, the reference to that article lasted all of two minutes for the reason given that “rense.com is a notoriously bad source.” (Never mind that it is I, not Rense, who is the ultimate source and that virtually all that is in my article is a recitation of the known facts in the case with my conclusion that it seems suspicious. The reader is free to conclude for himself that it doesn’t seem suspicious if he so chooses.) The day after the original posting the entire “Death & Suspicions” section was removed from the page. From July 20, 2011, until November 18, 2011, when a new “Death” section was put up, readers of the “Gus W. Weiss” Wikipedia page would have been given the impression that Weiss was still alive. At the risk of sounding repetitious, I must say that all this avoidance of the subject of Gus Weiss’s death looks awfully suspicious. The avoidance began with the long delay in even reporting it and then with the failure of the police and the press to give us any useful details about it. Who last saw the man alive? Did anyone witness his supposed fall?*** Did anyone hear anything? What time of the day or night did it occur? What brought the policeman who supposedly discovered the body to the Watergate complex in the first place? What is his name? The most fundamental question of all: On what basis did the police rule out other causes of death such as homicide or accident? Did they search his apartment? Did they find anything relevant to his death there such as a suicide note or signs of a forced entry? The Explanation What in the world is going on here? The country’s news media, led by its most prominent and powerful newspapers, could hardly have done more to discredit themselves with their Weiss coverage if they had tried. One gets the distinct impression that The Washington Post would never even have told us that Weiss had died if his hometown newspaper had not gotten wind of it and broken the silence almost a week late. For its part, The New York Times is yet to run its own story about the death. One needn’t bother asking anyone at either newspaper for an explanation. There simply can’t be an innocent one. Only one conclusion is possible. Something deeply sinister is going on. For starters, we are virtually forced to conclude that Weiss was the victim of foul play. Considering who he was and who is doing the covering up, it had to have been very high level foul play. The more important question is who was behind it, and what is their purpose? If we can answer that one perhaps we could answer the most important one of all: Who really rules us and what is their purpose? Some important clues might be found in Reed’s book and in the revised and translated version of the French book previously referred to, Farewell: The Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century by Sergei Kostin and Eric Raynaud (AmazonCrossing, 2011). The story of the Farewell dossier constitutes only a subplot in Reed’s extraordinary chapter 17, entitled “The Queen of Hearts.” The title character of the chapter is Reagan’s wife, Nancy. From this insider’s account of the Reagan White House we learn that the Reagans’ was every bit as much a “co-presidency” as was that of the Clintons, if not more so. Reagan supplied the ideology grounded in his experience with Communist infiltration of Hollywood and the affable actor’s exterior while Nancy supplied the drive and ambition and, surprisingly, a good bit of the “people skills.” According to Reed, it was an uneasy alliance. To an ambitious but essentially apolitical person like Nancy, achieving the White House was an end in itself. To her husband it was his great opportunity to slay the dragon of Communism once and for all. With their different concerns, the co-presidents assembled competing teams within the White House, which Reed calls the “Old Shoes” for Ronald’s crowd who went back a long way with him in California and the “Pragmatists,” for the ambitious operatives who were as lacking in any particular guiding political principles as was Nancy herself. Reed belonged solidly to the first group. From his description of the respective groups’ actions, Reed might have chosen more apt names like the “Ideologues” and the “Careerists.” The leaders of the Old Shoes, chosen by the president, were Judge William Clark and Edwin Meese. Nancy’s crowd was headed up by Michael Deaver and James Baker III. The deep rift between them is revealed by the concluding paragraph of Reed’s section on the Farewell dossier: Through all of this, the White House Pragmatists also remained in the dark. If Nancy Reagan, Jim Baker, or Mike Deaver had known that the U.S. government was blowing up Soviet pipelines, infiltrating Soviet computers, bollixing their software, or spoofing electronic equipment—even though done with the President’s approval—they would have had a fit. As it was, they remained ignorant while the President played his trump card: SDI/Star Wars. He knew the Soviets could not compete in that league because he knew the Soviet electronics industry was infected with bugs, viruses, and Trojan horses placed there by the U.S. intelligence community. (p. 270) Two paragraphs near the beginning of the chapter capture well what Nancy was all about: The leaders of permanent Washington are very good at cultivating the court of whatever new ruler arrives from outside the Beltway. That establishment bends the wills of senators and congressmen with their sophistication. They urge new appointees to the Supreme Court to re-orient their moral compasses to the mother lode of Washington wisdom. They welcome new Presidents and their assistants with open arms, buffet tables, and bars. The dean of the establishment was Katharine Graham, a personally delightful lady who was publisher of the Washington Post. Rather than attempting to dethrone her, Nancy spent enormous time and effort cultivating Mrs. Graham, and vice versa. On December 11, 1980, even before the Reagan inauguration, the first-family-to-be were guests at Mrs. Graham’s home for dinner; that, despite the deadly opposition of the Post and the rest of the mainstream media to virtually everything Ronald Reagan stood for. Nancy had selected her route to glory. It ran through Georgetown, not across the icy tundra of the Cold War. (p. 262) The basic political infighting technique employed by Nancy’s troops is well summed up by the concluding paragraph of the section of the “Queen of Hearts” chapter entitled, “The 1983 Struggle for Control of the White House.” Within days of the President’s return to Washington after the 1982 year-end holidays, Baker, Deaver, and their allies unleashed the furies of the media on all the Old Shoes. The Pragmatists had courted that media assiduously for two years. Leaks of the most sensitive inside information had been laid onto favored journalists in anticipation of paybacks when the time came. The Old Shoes were hopelessly outgunned; one by one we drifted away. Near the conclusion of the chapter Reed reveals that Nancy, in the middle of the second term, even had a long-term California acquaintance and his wife deleted from the White House guest list to be “replaced by détente activist Armand Hammer, a now-documented Soviet agent.” Hammer, it should be pointed out, was also a long-term financial supporter of Senator Albert Gore, Sr., Democrat of Tennessee who never made it quite as far as his son in pursuit of the presidency. Reflecting further on the insufficiently descriptive names Reed uses for the two factions in the Reagan White House, some other possibilities come to mind. How about “Outsiders” and “Establishment” or, even more descriptively, “Patriots” and, uh, “Permanent Government?” Unfortunately, the second term in each case remains insufficiently descriptive. That’s because the agenda of this group remains insufficiently clear. One thing is clear. The major news media, led by The Washington Post, are at the very heart of it. We have also demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that this same crowd is at the heart of some sort of cover-up in the death of Gus Weiss, who, according to Thomas C. Reed, was very much a member of the first group. The Washington Post also seems to have a very cozy relationship to the C.I.A. That fact is relevant to our story because of something we find in the Kostin-Reynaud book. Vladimir “Volodia” Vetrov set in motion his eventual exposure and execution when he seemed to go berserk and attempted to stab to death his KGB mistress, Ludmila Ochikina. No one knows why he did it, but one theory is that he was overcome by paranoia: Incidentally, the hypothesis of Vetrov going through an attack of paranoia is corroborated by other reliable sources. Among them Igor Prelin, who also believes the tension Vetrov was under at the time could have made him misinterpret a word from Ludmila, throwing him into a criminal panic. The other source is Jacques Prévost. The Thomson representative assured us that, “according to one of his sources,” Volodia was convinced Ludmila worked for the CIA, and Vetrov believed that the Americans were about to “finger” him to the KGB because the intelligence documents produced by the Farewell operation were so sensational they were becoming an embarrassment for top U.S. officials. What captures the attention in this fantastic scenario is not the unlikely theory of Ludmila being a CIA agent, but rather the paranoid state Vetrov must have been in to construct such an absurd story. (p. 246) And what captures our attention is the question of what might be in the Farewell dossier beyond what we have been told. What was it that could have been so problematic for “top U.S. officials” that Vetrov could have feared that they might shut down their own extremely valuable gusher of information? Might it tell us some truly shocking things about our ruling establishment, our Permanent Government? Have they been following an “internationalist” agenda all along that some might interpret as “selling out the people of the United States?” Was his knowledge of this fact and undisguised disgust over it what eventually got Gus Weiss killed? These questions are enough to make us take a more serious look at the experience and the conclusions of the defector from Communist Poland, Andrzej Suda. Was the Cold War and were the players in it somewhat different from what we think they were? Did we really win the Cold War after all, and who, exactly, is “we” in this case? See Suda’s personal testimonial at http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/User:Andrzej and Greg Szymaski’s story about it at http://www.rense.com/general69/iron.htm. David Martin December 20, 2011 *At the beginning of the section, Reed has the following note: “The tale that follows is extracted, and in some cases quoted, from unpublished notes by Gus Weiss: ‘The Farewell Dossier: Strategic Deception and Economic Warfare in the Cold War,’ 2003.” It bears a different subtitle but from the material covered one may assume that this is essentially the same as the Weiss article, “The Farewell Dossier: Duping the Soviets,” posted on the C.I.A. web site a little more than three years after its author’s death. **We should have noticed even at the time that the obituary was a decidedly puny one for almost anyone who had been engaged in the spook business. As a longtime Post reader, I have noticed how elaborate the obituaries tend to be for deceased C.I.A. employees, in particular. It is in great disproportion to those from any other federal department. The Post generally treats them like celebrities, as though they were movie stars, politicians, or journalists. If you Google “Washington Post obituary C.I.A.” you will get some idea of what I am talking about. ***We can’t help but notice here some peculiar parallels with the reporting on the death of the “queen” of the information arm of the permanent government, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham. Graham reportedly fell on a walkway outside a condominium in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 14, 2001, and died from head wounds suffered in the fall in a hospital in Boise three days later. Absolutely no details about the fall have ever been reported. We don’t know if anyone was with her when she fell or if anyone witnessed the fall. If she was alone, we have never been told who found her after the fall. Rocky Barker of the Idaho Statesman, to my knowledge, is the only one to report that "Doctors at Saint Alphonsus Regional Medical Center (Boise) performed a series of surgeries to repair extensive intracranial injuries." It is difficult to imagine how anything but a spectacular slippage on ice (in mid-July?) could have caused such injuries, but in this case, as with Weiss’s fall, our press is apparently content to leave us to our imagination. The parallels between the two deaths end, of course, when it comes to the post-mortal encomiums. No one in this century so far, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs, has been more roundly eulogized than Kay Graham. Addendum On January 7, 2012, I received an email from Catherine Cauvin-Higgins, the translator of Farewell, the previously mentioned book by Kostin and Raynaud. She had been surprised by the fact that the book had been ignored by the big reviewers like The New York Times and The Washington Post after it came out in August of 2011, but after reading this article she felt she had a better understanding of why that might have been so. The publisher had also sent the book to the International Spy Museum and to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. The former is yet to list it in its bookstore and the latter has not yet included a review of this “Greatest Spy Story of the Twentieth Century” among its very extensive list of book reviews. Also, she said, “The Reagan Library had a major public event in Nov. on the occasion of newly declassified material by the CIA (very little on the dossier, and what they published about the Urengoi-Uzhgorod pipeline shows how much they did not know about this deal)….Although the Title of the event was ‘Reagan, Intelligence and the Cold War’, not a word or line about Farewell. Amazon sent the book, no feedback.” National Public Radio, Cauvin-Higgins told me, did broadcast an interview with former Reagan National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen in late August of 2011 concerning Farewell and the pipeline sabotage. Of the 25-minute interview that was conducted, however, only three minutes were aired, and those three minutes contained no mention of the just-published Farewell book, even though Allen had written its foreword. Gus Weiss does get mentioned in the interview, but, of course, there is no mention of his mysterious demise. That the book is available in English for American readers at all is apparently entirely the result of the initiative of Cauvin-Higgins. Her fascinating first-person account of how it happened can be found on the translation blog, Intralingo.com. January 16, 2012

A book published in 2010 by Trineday titled, “A Certain Arrogance: The sacrificing of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Cold War Manipulation of Religious Groups by the U.S. Intelligence”, written by George Michael Evica with an Introduction by Charles Robert Drago, has the following on its back cover: “In the predetermined drive to portray Lee Harvey Oswald as a disaffected loser who acted alone, one of the many issues surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy which the Warren Commission glossed over was the ‘dirty rumor’ about Oswald’s ties to U.S. Intelligence. “In eight interrelated essays, the late George Michael Evica begins with the spectacle of Earl Warren deflecting and quickly burying an inconvenient FBI report on Oswald, then launches the reader into a world of lies, deception and cynical manipulation, where spymasters of the U.S. and Soviet Union actually worked together when their espionage industry was threatened by peace initiatives.” President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev had quietly begun laying the groundwork for mutual cooperation in some areas, such as outer space. Kennedy was killed in 1963 and Khrushchev was removed from power in 1964. Both leaders paid a high price for defying the Intelligence establishments in their respective countries, which valued their power and money more than ending the Cold War and establishing world peace. From Wikipedia: Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (April 15 [O.S. April 3] 1894 – September 11, 1971) led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for several relatively liberal reforms in areas of domestic policy. Khrushchev's party colleagues removed him from power in 1964, replacing him with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary and Alexei Kosygin as Premier.

Hacking Inquiry Widens to Times of London By SARAH LYALL and ALAN COWELL The New York Times February 2, 2012 LONDON — The hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers took a new turn on Thursday when a lawmaker said police investigations had spread to the flagship Times of London. The revelation came a day after lawyers said an e-mail referring to “a nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions from widespread phone hacking at the News of the World tabloid was deleted from James Murdoch’s computer less than two weeks before the police opened investigations. The lawmaker, Tom Watson, from the opposition Labour Party, who has been a central figure in the inquiries into phone hacking, said in a message on Twitter that Scotland Yard had “confirmed to me they are investigating” The Times “over e-mail hacking.” A spokesman for Scotland Yard, who spoke in return for anonymity under departmental rules, said officers investigating hacking were “in contact with Mr. Watson in relation to specific issues he wishes to raise” after he sent the police a letter on Jan. 23. But the spokesman declined to confirm specifically that The Times was under investigation. News International, the British newspaper arm of the Murdoch media empire, said it had no immediate comment on Mr. Watson’s message. The development was significant in two regards: it focused attention on e-mail hacking rather than the illicit voice mail interception at the center of inquiries so far, and it suggested that the most august of the Murdoch publications in Britain was not immune from scrutiny. The case apparently was related to an episode in 2009 when a reporter who has since left The Times of London exposed the identity of a police officer who blogged under the pseudonym Nightjack, according to British news reports. James Harding, the editor of The Times of London, said in written testimony to a formal inquiry into press conduct last month that “there was an incident where the newsroom was concerned that a reporter had gained unauthorized access to an e-mail account.” The reporter “was issued with a formal written warning for professional misconduct,” Mr. Harding said. The incident led to a court case in which the police officer tried and failed to keep his identity secret. In his letter to Scotland Yard on Jan. 23, Mr. Watson said it was “almost certain that a judge was misled” in that court case and it was “clear that a crime has been committed — illicit hacking of personal e-mails,” The Press Association news agency said. The hacking scandal has triggered several separate inquiries. Mr. Watson is part of a House of Commons panel, while Mr. Harding testified at a judicial investigation led by Lord Justice Brian Leveson. Scotland Yard is conducting its own criminal investigations into illicit phone and e-mail intercepts and into bribery of the police. The newest twist came less than 24 hours after Linklaters, a law firm representing News International said the deletion from James Murdoch’s computer was part of an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program” in which accounts were “being prepared for the migration to a new e-mail system.” The e-mail was a chain of messages sent June 7, 2008, to James Murdoch — Rupert Murdoch’s son who is head of News Corporation’s European and Asian operations — warning that the potential legal fallout from hacking at The News of the World was “as bad as we feared.” Linklaters disclosed the existence of the e-mail to the House of Commons committee investigating phone hacking in December. Mr. Murdoch said that while he received and answered the e-mail, he did not scroll all the way down through the chain and so did not read everything in it. The disclosure of the deletion came in a letter from Linklaters to the Commons committee. The letter says that the deletion occurred on Jan. 15, 2011. Operation Weeting, the police inquiry into phone hacking at The News of the World, began 11 days later. The letter also disclosed that the e-mail’s existence became known only because investigators unearthed a hard copy from a storage crate filled with material left behind last summer when The News of the World was closed. A News International spokeswoman said the company had no comment and would not discuss what other e-mails might have been deleted at the same time. The e-mail has become significant in the hacking case as possible evidence of what the younger Mr. Murdoch knew and when he learned it. Two company officials — Tom Crone, then a News International lawyer, and Colin Myler, then the News of the World editor — have said they informed James Murdoch at the time that phone hacking was endemic at the newspaper. The younger Mr. Murdoch has always maintained that they never told him and that he knew nothing about it until much later. Three days after the June 7 e-mail, the younger Mr. Murdoch met with Mr. Crone and Mr. Myler and decided to pay more than $1.4 million to settle a hacking lawsuit. The details of the suit were kept secret, and until December 2010, News International maintained that hacking at the newspaper was limited to a “rogue reporter.” The Linklaters’ letter said the crate in which the hard copy of the e-mail was found “had a sticker on it which suggested the contents were originally held in Mr. Myler’s office.” Electronic copies were then found in two of Mr. Murdoch’s laptops, and one from an assistant’s desktop computer, Linklaters said. Mr. Myler’s copy, though, was “lost from the e-mail archive system in a hardware failure which occurred on 18 March 2010,” the law firm added. News International has given varying accounts about what e-mails it has, where they are and why it did not immediately make them available to investigators. At one point, it said that its e-mail archive had been lost on the way to storage in Mumbai, India; at another, it said it could only retrieve e-mails that were less than six months old. But new intimations that the company may have purposely destroyed evidence are raising questions about whether the company might be investigated for obstruction of justice. A judge accused News International last month of destroying possibly relevant e-mails. And The Guardian reported Tuesday that the police were examining “an enormous reservoir of material from News International’s central computer services” that was “deliberately deleted from News International’s servers.”

Times editor recalled to Leveson inquiry Daily Telegraph 11:50AM GMT 02 Feb 2012 James Harding, the editor of The Times, has been recalled to the Leveson Inquiry following fresh revelations about alleged email hacking at the newspaper. Mr Harding will appear before the inquiry into press standards for a second time on Tuesday, when he is expected to be asked to clarify how much he and senior executives at News International knew about the hacking of an anonymous police blogger's emails in 2009. When Mr Harding gave evidence to the inquiry last month he and News International chief executive Tom Mockridge acknowledged that a reporter had admitted hacking an email, but did not name him or give any details about what story it related to. Following his evidence however The Times published an article naming the reporter as 27-year-old Patrick Foster and confirming he had admitted hacking the email account of Richard Horton, a police officer who blogged under the name of Nightjack. Mr Horton was outed in 2009 after The Times fought an injunction in the High Court in order to reveal his identity. Mr Foster was later dismissed from the newspaper for an unrelated matter. Last week Mr Harding wrote to Leveson Inquiry admitting for the first time that the newspaper had failed to tell the High Court they new about the hacking before challenging the injunction. News of Mr Harding's recall came as it was confirmed that the police have launched an investigation into the hacking allegations. The police investigation follows a complaint by Labour MP Tom Watson, who wrote to Deputy Assistant Commissioner Sue Akers urging Scotland Yard to look into allegations of hacking. Mr Watson’s letter to the Metropolitan Police, which was also sent to the Attorney General, said: “It is clear that a crime has been committed – illicit hacking of personal emails. “A journalist and unnamed managers failed to report the crime to their proprietor or the police. I must ask that you investigate computer hacking at The Times. In so doing you will also be able to establish whether perjury or conspiracy to pervert the course of justice have also occurred.” A Met spokesman said: "We can confirm that a letter was received on Monday January 23 from MP Tom Watson. "Officers from Operation Tuleta are in contact with Mr Watson in relation to specific issues he wishes to raise and we are not prepared to give a running commentary on the Tuleta investigation." The Metropolitan Police set up Operation Tuleta to examine allegations of email hacking by journalists. The investigation is separate to Operation Weeting which is looking into allegations of phone hacking.

Police to investigate alleged email hacking at the Times MP Tom Watson writes to officers at Operation Tuleta over accusation against News International title By John Plunkett guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 February 2012 03.56 EST The Metropolitan police is investigating alleged email hacking at the Times, in response to a letter from the Labour MP Tom Watson. Officers from Operation Tuleta, which is investigating breaches of privacy involving computers, are in contact with the MP in relation to "specific issues" he wishes to raise, Scotland Yard confirmed on Thursday. Watson wrote to the Met's deputy assistant commissioner, Sue Akers, on 23 January asking the force to investigate allegations of email hacking at the News International paper. The Met said in a statement: "We can confirm that a letter was received on Monday 23 January, from MP Tom Watson. "Officers from Operation Tuleta are in contact with Mr Watson in relation to specific issues he wishes to raise. We are not prepared to give a running commentary on the Operation Tuleta investigation." Watson said on Twitter on Thursday: "The Met police have confirmed to me they are investigating @rupertmurdoch's newspaper The Times over email

The Soviet sojourn of Citizen Oswald Washington Post By Richard E. Snyder, Published: January 31,2012 http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/2012/01/31/gIQAWijIgQ_story.html What does an American diplomat do about a 20-year-old boy who wants to defect? After all the conspiracy theories and speculations, our man in Moscow in 1959 now tells his side. First published April 1, 1979. “Oswald appeared at the office of Richard E. Snyder, the senior consular official. . . well and favorably known to me . . . ‘I had a traitor on my hands!’ said Snyder, ‘and his arrogance was unbelievable.’ — Henry J. Taylor, syndicated columnist “Richard E. Snyder, who had joined the CIA in June 1949 as an intelligence operative, then had served in Tokyo under State Department cover and was now acting as senior consular official in Moscow, recalled that Oswald banged his passport down on snyder’s desk.” — Edward J. Epsstein, “Legend” The House Select Committee on Assassinations has just released its findings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Will we be the better off for it, as is the report destined to be new grist for the mills of the conspiracy industry? The above quotations from the recent literature illustrate why I pose the question: in each we are given not the author’s own opinion, to which he is entitled, but the author’s own facts, to which he is not entitled. In fact, columnist Taylor’s conversation is fanciful; I never met Taylor or communicated with him. In fact, though I did meet Epstein, he did not ask me about his “facts,” most of which are untrue. Facts alone, for that matter, will not resolve all the questions about the at matter, will not resolve all the questions about the Kennedy assassination; for some questions there simply aren’t enough facts to go around. But where we have them, they can be helpful. My purpose in this article is to help the reader rescue facts from fiction in an important corner of the Oswald mystery-his sojourn as a defector in the Soviet Union. As the senior American consul in Moscow during much of the 32 months Lee Harvey Oswald was in the Soviet Union, I dealt with him, made the official decisions concerning him, and wrote most of the record in his case. The American Embassy in Moscow is a graceless converted apartment building facing a broad, treeless boulevard, Ulitsa Chaikovskovo, on the fringes of downtown. My assignment there as a second secretary in charge of the consular operation began in July 1959. It was there, in my ground-floor office with its high ceiling and large, frosted storefront windows that I first encountered Lee Harvey Oswald on the forenoon of Saturday, Oct. 31, 1959. Oswald’s own later written account of his arrival appears to me credible enough. “12:30 arrive in ‘Bolga’ type taxi, two Russian policemen stand at the embassy, one salutes as I approach the entrance of the embassy and says ‘passport.’ I smile and show my passport. He motions me to pass inside as I wish. There can be little doubt I’m sure in his mind that I’m an American. . . . Entering, I find the office of ‘consular’ sign. Opening the door I go in. A secretary busy typing looks up. ‘Yes?’ she says. ‘I’d like to see the consular,’ I say . . . laying my passport on her desk . . . I’m here to dissolve my American citizenship. She rises and taking my passport goes into the open inner office, where she lays the passport on a man’s desk, saying, ‘there is a Mr. Oswald outside, who says he’s here to dissolve his U.S. citizenship.’ . . . ‘Thanks,’ he says . . . without looking up from his typing. She . . . invites me into the inner office to sit down. I do so, selecting an armchair to the front left side of Snyder’s desk.” Nothing in particular distinguished the young man before me from any proper American tourist, unless it was perhaps a certain determined pursing of his lips. I recall him as of medium height and slender build. A clean-shaven face was set off by neatly groomed dark-brown hair. By his own account he wore a light coat against the late October chill. A buttondown collar shirt and a pair of gloves which he carried reinforced an image of prim conventionality. He had come, he said in an assertive tone, to give up his American citizenship. So saying, he thrust at me a note written in a scrawling hand on a sheet of stationery of Moscow’s aging Metropole Hotel. “I Lee Oswald do hereby request that my present citizenship in the United States of America be revoked. “I have entered the Soviet Union for the express purpose of appling (sic) for citizenship in the Soviet Union, through the means of naturalization. “My request for citizenship is now pending before the Surprem (sic) Soviet of the USSR. “I take these steps for political reasons. My request for the revoking of my American citizenship is made only after the longest and most serious considerations. “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” Taking up his passport from where it lay on the edge of my desk, I read: Lee Harvey Oswald, shipping export agent, born New Orleans, October 18, 1939. I noted that he had just turned 20. The young man’s demeanor was an invitation to confrontation. He let me know in a determined manner that he did not need or want advice, but desired only to renounce his citizenship and leave. When I offered to explain to him the provisions of law on the subject, Oswald declined, saying that he knew all about that and needed no lecture on the seriousness of the step. But the speaker’s high-pitched, reedy voice poised on coils of tension undercut the cocksureness that his words asserted. Oswald was insistent at first that he would not answer questions about his personal affairs. But I would need, I said, at least his home address in order to prepare the document for his renunciation. His home addressm he reluctantly conceded, was Fort Worth, Texas. Did he have a wife there? No, he was not married, that was his mother’s address. Gradually the defenses slipped. Oswald revealed that he had gotten out of the Marine Corps on early discharge in September on the grounds that his mother needed his supoort. But he had barely stopped by to see her before taking ship at New Orleans for Europe and the defection he told me he had planned for two years. If the deceit bothered him he gave no sign of it. What were his reasons for wanting to live in the Soviet Union? “I am a Marxist,” he said stiffly. He also referred to himself several times as a “worker,” but admitted that he had never held a civilian job. But he had “seen American militaristic imperialism in action in Okinawa” while in the Marine Corps. His eyes had been opened; he had read books, had learned about “socialism.” Toward the end, probing for a new lead, I stumbled onto a revealing sensitivity on Oswald’s part. I asked what grade he had held in the Marine Corps. He was a corporal, he said. (In fact, Oswald had only made private first class during his three years of service, and had been demoted once from that.) Did he feel that he should have had a higher grade? His reply took me by surprise. Oswald said that he had been a radar operator in the Marines.Then, almost casually, he added that he had told Soviet officials that as a Soviet citizen he would make known to them whatever he knew about the Marine Corps and his specialty in radar. He intimated that he might know something of special interest. What caused Oswald to flaunt disloyalty in so gratuitous a manner can only be guessed at. My consular colleague John McVickar, a witness from his desk across the room, thought Oswald was trying to goad me. Or was he “getting even” with the Marine Corps for the corporal he never became? He might also, as it turned out later, have thought he was establishing credibility with Russian ears-in-the-wall, his offer to be made good “when I become a Soviet citizen.” Was Oswsald, in fact, alluding to the then-secret U-2 operation? In May 1960, Francis Gary Powers was shot down over Sverdlovsk in the Ural Mountains while piloting a U-2 high-altitude aircraft on a spy mission for the CIA. The incident gave Premier Nikita Khrushchev reason to cancel his scheduled summitt meeting with President Eisenhower. The following August I attended Powers’ show trial in Moscow as an official embassy observer. Not until later, however, was th question raised of a possible link between Oswald and Powers. As for Oswald’s request, I could not in good conscience make up on the spot the simple legal form by which he with my witness could renounce his American citizenship. Although I judged that Oswald was competent and intelligent, and appeared to be acting in a deliberate manner, still, he was only 20 and about to make a serious mistake. I also had an unsettling sense of deja-vu. Within a matter of weeks I had already handled two similar cases of American defectors. (The loaded word “defector” has become attached to all such persons; I won’t try to fight it.) One had already returned home; the other would do so about the same time Oswald did. These experiences had prompted me to write some thoughts on the handling of such cases in an informal letter to the officer in charge of Soviet affairs in the State Department. I proposed, in effect, to be guided in my handling of defector cases by a bit of Talleyrand’s dictum of “surtout pas de zele” (above all, no zeal). Among the humanitarian and political considerations in such cases was the naivete of the principals. A common characteristic of those who chose the Soviet Union as the place to work out their problems was that they knew nothing about it. The thoughtful reply, which I received several weeks after the Oswald case had opened, had little to add to the subject, but sensibly left it up to me to “consider every case on its merits and follow through in accordance with your own best judgment, keeping, however, the Passport Office thoroughly informed so they can interpose other instructions if they think this is necessary.” One limitation was imposed on me by law: I had no authority to refuse to accept a renunciation. I could, however, delay. I first suggested to Oswald that he wait until he received Soviet citizenship; he would then automatically lose his American citizenship.By renouncing his citizenship now he would be left stateless. Failing in that approach, I told him I would have the legal form prepared if he came back on a workday when I had clerical help. It was by then afternoon on Saturday. Oswald would have at least a day and a half to think it over. Oswald left frustrated over my refusal to take legal steps for his renunciation on the spot. I did not know that 10 days earlier Oswald had been admitted to Moscow’s Botkin Hospital for attempting suicide by slashing his wrist with a razor. He had done so because the Soviet authorities had denied his request to remain in the Soviet Union. His visit to the embassy was evidently a second desperate bid to get them to change their minds. I placed Oswald’s passport in my file cabinet. Should he change his mind and decide to go home, he could have it back. If not, he would not be in a position to use it or dispose of it. The youthful defector did not return on Monday. Instead, on Nov. 3 he wrote to Ambassador Llewellyn Thompson again requesting that his citizenship be “revoked,” and protesting the earlier refusal to do so. I answered the letter for the ambassador, assuring Oswald of his legal right to renounce his citizenship, and telling him he was free to come to the embassy any time during business hours. Privately I took his letter as a sign of waffling, a resort to rhetoric instead of action. Finally, on Oct. 16 — he had been in Moscow now one month — Oswald received word from the Soviet authorities that he had been granted immigrant status. The Minsk in which Soviet authorities resettled Oswald in 1959 was a drab industrial city of 509,000. The provincial capital of White Russia, Minsk lies in that great expanse of wooded marshland called the Pripet Marshes, on the Napoleonic invasion route between Poland and Russia. Repeatedly devastated by marauding armies, Minsk was again all but obliterated in World War II after heroic resistance. It was in the process of rebuilding in 1959. The Svisloch River, a distant tributary of the Dnieper, meanders sluggishly through the city. On the right embankment where the Svisloch passes under Leninsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of Minsk, stands one of the miles of prefabricated five-story apartment houses built after the war. Oswald lived for two and a half years on the fourth floor of one of these buildings, No. 4 Kalinin Street (renamed Communist Street). During five days I spent in Minsk in the spring of 1978, as escort officer for an American orchestra, I was able to walk the streets, shop the markets, chat with local people, and savor the half-peasant ambiance. The apartment house in which Oswald lived belonged to the Minsk Radio and TV Factory where he was assigned to work. The two-story red brick factory building was an eight-minute walk from the apartment, around the corner on Krasnaya Ulitsa. Oswald’s apartment was one of those with a balcony. He wrote of how he enjoyed it, legs propped up on the rail, during the city’s brief summer. From it he could observe the comings and goings on Leninsky Prospekt (but not the “ships winding up the river,” of Epstein’s Legend — the Svisloch is not navigable at Minsk). In April 1961, Oswald married Marina Prusakova, a pharmacist who lived with her aunt and uncle just up the street. From Marina in particular we know of the Oswald apartment. Although not in a class with the privileged three-room quarters which her uncle enjoyed as a comfortable functionary and high-ranking Party member, the simple, functional Oswald apartment was a luxury by Soviet standards for a newly married couple. It was not long, however, before Oswald found doubt and disillusionment setting in. He wrote in his after-the-fact “diary” of being homesick, of hating the long, cold winters. He chafed at the demands of a collective society and the restrictions of Soviet life. Once the novelty of the new life, the initial attention, the ego-satisfying sense of privilege faded, the expatriate faced the drabness and the monotony of an obscure existence in a land not his own. Familiarity bred discontent. The syndrome is a familiar one in the annals of Moscow consular practice. On Feb. 5, 1961, after a year and a month in Minsk, Oswald wrote to the embassy asking for his passport back. “I desire to return to the United States,” he wrote, “that is if we could come to some agreement concerning the dropping of any legal proceedings against me.” Reading Oswald’s letter, I could not help noticing the contrast between its concluding sentence — ”I hope that in recalling the responsibility I have to Maerica that you remember yours in doing everything you can to help me since I am an American citizen” — with the close of his parting letter of Nov. 3, 1959, to Ambassador Thompson: “My application requesting that I be considered for citizenship in the Soviet Union is now pending before the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In the event of acceptance, I will request my (the Soviet) government to lodge a formal protest regarding this incident.” Oswald’s letter was the first word I had had of him in the 15 months since my last news of him in Moscow. I did not know whether he was still an Amierican citizen. I invited him accordingly to come to the embassy for a personal interview. At the same time, I asked the State Department if Oswald would be subject to prosecution should he enter the jurisdiction of the United States. I also supplied Oswald’s Minsk address for his mother, Marguerite Oswald, who had inquired about the whereabouts of her son in March, 1960, and again at the State Department in January 1961. Oswald’s next letter must have been written immediately on receipt of my reply. It was postmarked Minsk, March 5 though I didn’t get it until almost two weeks later. In it he said he could not come to Moscow for an interview because he was not allowed to leave Minsk without permission, and he suggested I put preliminary questions to him by mail: “I understand that personal interviews undoubtedly make the work of the Embassy staff lighter than written correspondence, however in some cases other means must be employed,” he commented rather tartly. Reading between the lines I surmised he might already have been rebuffed by the Minsk police in an effort to secure travel permission. My correspondence with Oswald, and I presumed his with me, was written with one eye to the Soviet authorities: all mail and telephone communications with foreign embassies in Moscow were monitored by Soviet intelligence. The next time I wrote him I quoted almost exactly from official Soviet Foreign Ministry language that “it is the position of the Soviet Government that they interpose no objection or obstacle to visits to the embassy by American citizens in the Soviet Union.” I suggested to Oswald that if necessary he show the letter to the proper authorities in Minsk in connection with his request for travel permission. But I insisted he come to the embassy so that I could take his statements under oath. Two months later, on May 24, a third Oswald letter arrived. Again he appeared to be bargaining with me: “In regard to your letter of March 24, I understand the reasons for the necessity of a personal interview at the embassy, however, I wish to make it clear that I am asking not only for the right to return to the United States, but also for full guarantees that I shall not, under any circumstances, be persecuted (sic) for any act pertaining to this case . . . “As for coming to Moscow, this would have to be on my own initiative and I do not care to take the risk of getting into an awkward situation unles I think it worthwhile. Also since my last letter I have gotten married.” Overblown language, it had appeared to me, was a mask with which Oswald concealed his anxiety. I surmised that the “awkward situation” he feared was burning his bridges to the front and to the rear. By his correspondence with the embassy he had jeopardized his future in Minsk. Suppose in the end he should be unable to go back to the United States? I delayed replying to Oswald to give Washington a chance to respond with any thoughts or instructions they might have. Oswald did not wait; taking his two-week vacation from the factory, he flew to Moscow. Saturaday afternoon, July 8, 1961: In three days I and my family — wife Ann and younger daughter Gail, 14 — would leave Moscow for home leave and transfer to Tokyo. In the immediate offing was a much-needed vacation: a five-day sail from Leningrad to London aboard the Soviet ship Baltika and a reunion in London with our other daughter, Dianne, 18, who was in school in Switzerland. Two years as consul in Moscow had taught me that the telephone in our apartment just above my office was rarely a bearer of glad tidings. This time it was Lee Harvey Oswald calling from the house phone in the embassy vestibule below. I headed for the door leaving my wife Ann with the packing; experience had taught her that she ended up with it anyway. Oswald was waiting as I came out of the elevator into the gloomy, high-ceilinged box-like space that served as reception room both for the consular offices and for the chancery upstairs. Once again Oswald had chosen to arrive unannounced on a Saturday afternoon.The meeting was brief and matter-of-fact. There was little I could accomplish on the spot, and I wanted to refresh myself on the details of his case before getting down to matters of substance. He accepted amicably my invitation that he return during office hours. Once Oswald had not come back on Monday and thereby had preserved his American citizenship. This Monday 20 months later he did come back to claim the fruit of his original omission. Awaiting him in the foyer was another person who stood to benefit from that omission, his wife Marina. Reassured by his reception on Saturday, he had called her to join him. Marina was two months pregnant with their first child, June Lee Oswald, who would be born an American citizen thanks again to her father’s omission. But I never saw Marina; Oswald did not tell me she was there. Apart from looking a little older, Oswald appeared not to have changed greatly. He sat in the same chair he had occupied on his first visit. My room, however, was smaller and more private as the result of a partition that now separated my office from the rest of the large room. The visitor’s boyish face was cleanshaven as before, the short dark hair neatly groomed but showing signs of thinning where part and forehead met on the left. The most noticeable difference was the absence of the tension he had displayed at our first meeting. After 20 months of life in Russia he had, he said, “learned a hard lesson the hard way.” Speaking guardedly without letting his stiff pride down, Oswald admitted to being relieved of his illuisions about the Soviet Union. He had, he said, acquired a new understanding and appreciation of the United States and the meaning of freedom. Oswald spoke without prompt of lead from me. I felt that these statements had the ring of sincerity. It took no act of faith to accept the objective reality behind Oswaldhs words. Furthermore, they were uttered without particular emotion and with no evident effort to impress me. It was quickly evident that he was most worried about what might happen to him if he went home; would he face possible “lengthy imprisonment”? I presumed that what was on his mind was his statement to me about passing information to the Soviet authorities. As I noted earlier, I had queried Washington on the subject. Drawing on the reply I had received, I now told Oswald that I could give him no official assurance as to whether he might face criminal charges. However, I said informally that I did not see on what grounds he might be open to the sort of severe penalty he seemed to have in mind. Neither leaving one’s country nor condemning it is an offense against law in the American democracy. As for Oswald’s statement of intent to pass on information, he did not dispute it when I reminded him of it. He denied, however, that he had passed on any information. As a matter of fact, he said, he had never been questioned by the Soviets about his life before coming to the Soviet Union. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1950 provides that an American citizen may lose his nationality by committing certain acts. Those acts likely to apply in Oswald’s circumstances were (1) renouncing, (2) acquiring Soviet citizenship and (3) indicating formal allegiance to the Soviet state by such acts as voting, registering as a citizen, accepting employment in the government, and the like. It was in the researching of this article that I first encountered conspiracy buffs’ fascination with Oswald’s recovery of his passport. Suspicions of dark doings abound. Some writers like Epstein hint at CIA interest under cover of consul Snyder. (To digress for the record, I was employed by the CIA from October 1949 to September 1950 while awaiting appointment to the foreign service. The job was secured through the Department of State, which had arranged interim employment with other agencies for candidates facing the financial stringencies of a protracted wait for appointment. I ended all connection with the CIA when I became a foreign service officer in September 1950. I had no intelligence function in the foreign service.) Syslvia Meagher wrote darkly of benefits accorded the “undeserving Oswald.” Gerald Ford saw it in prodiagal son terms: “So Oswald had learned his lesson? . . . Well, technically it might be said that he had not renounced his citizenship. They would return his passport.” The facts are more prosaic. I had to determine from the facts available whether Oswald had done anything which could lead to loss of his American citizenship under the law. In such matters the consul’s writ does not run to the dispensing of rewards and punishments; the consul is to serve, not to judge. As a first step in determining citizenhip status I had Oswald fill out a sworn questionnarie covering each of the expatriating acts specified in the law. (Oswald admitted to none of them.) I then questioned him in greater detail. I knew that Oswald had not lost his citizenship by renunciation. This could only be done under law by formal declaration “before a diplomatic of consular officer . . . in such form as may be prescribed by the Secretary of State.” It was that form which I had refused to make up for him on his first visit. I was also satisfied that Oswald had not acquired Soviet citizenship. The fact that his Soviet identity document was of a type issued to foreigners was prima facie evidence that the Soviet government did not regard Oswald as a Soviet citizen. He had applied (and been turned down, it was later learned, but only accepting is an ex-patriating act). Finally, my questioning of Oswald produced no evidence that he had done anything that might constitute a formal declaration of allegiance to the Soviet Union. Although he had written in the first note he left with me, “I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” this, like his “renunciation,” had no legal meaning. Oswald was, I was sure, acutely aware of what was at stake in his replies to my questions. I had no reason to suppose that he would be unfailingly candid in his statements. I was bound to question him as thoroughly as I could, and to take official notice of anything he might tell me; beyond that I could not go. Lee Harvey Oswald was, I concluded, still an American citizen. As my last official act as consul in Moscow I returned his passport to him. I did not, however, renew it (its current validity expired in 60 days). This would give my successor a freer hand in taking over the case, and give the department a chance to go over any questions with me when I returned to Washington. In returning the passport to Oswald I had acted contrary to an instruction from the Passport Office in Washington that he be given his passport only after he was ready to depart for the United States. I noted in my report to the department that I had done so because I knew that Oswald would have to display a passport in order to get an exit visa from the Soviet authorities. At one minute to midnight the following day, July 11, 1961, one consul with his wife, daughter and baggage departed from Moscow’s Leningrad Station aboard a “soft” sleeper of the Red Arrow express for Leningrad, London and home. Lee Harvey Oswald was relegated to a forgotten corner of my mind until just before dawn of Nov. 23, 1963, when I was summoned urgently by phone from my Tokyo apartment to the embassy. President John F. Kennedy had been shot; suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was in the custody of the Dallas police. I found myself shortly in charge of the embassy arrangements for a memorial ceremony for the Tokyo diplomatic corps. Why, an qcquaintance once asked me, did we let a guy like Oswald back into the country? The answer is that an American doesn’t need permission to return to his own country. Unlike some, the American state has no power to banish those it thinks unworthy. But more important than the answer is the question itself; it contains within it the germ of suspicion of quite ordinary things, a suspicion which bedevils public understanding of Oswald the defector as distinct from Oswald the assassin. Some suggest, for example, that much was done to “facilitate” Oswald’s return. Nothing was, to my knowledge, beyond what should be expected. True, I delayed acting on his renunciation. But I had done that in similar cases, including one a few weeks before Oswald. Was advancing him funds as was done later to help meet his transportation costs home a special favor? Consuls commonly do that all over the world; “worthiness” is not a consideration. But isn’t it suspicious, some ask, that the Russians let the Oswalds out? Actually, the Soviets had stepped up their granting of exit permits for persons with relatives abroad following Vice President Nixon’s visit in July 1959.Based on my experience I assumed that the couple would sooner or later get permission also. Was Oswald’s defection arranged by the Soviet Union? The only faintly plausible argument I have seen advanced for this thesis is that Oswald had access to information about the U-2 and was recruited by Soviet intelligence in Japan for that reason. But if so, his value was as a penetration agent in Japan. This does not rule out the possibility that at some point some element of Soviet intelligence may have attempted to use Oswald before, during of after his defection. The question is beyond proving or disproving. More probable is that Oswald’s defection was an administrative nuisance to the Soviet authorities. Finally, was Oswald working for the CIA as a “defector” in the Soviet Union? The implausibilities here are mountainous, but the question is at least susceptible to rational inquiry. I know of nothing, however, supportive of the thesis that Oswald’s travel to or return from the Soviet Union had some official sanction. Healthy skepticism is one thing; national paranoia is another. One powers a drive to know, the other feeds on artful invention. It may turn out, as has been said, that the American people are the only jury that Lee harvey Oswald will ever have. If so, the verdict may depend ultimately on how many of us insist on our own facts. “Oswald’s apartment . . . was one of the finest in Minsk . . . He had his own apartment with a separate living room gaily decorated with flowered wallpaper, tiled floors and modern furniture. It also had a magnificent view of the bend of the Svisloch River, and two private balconies form which to observe the ships winding up the river through the city of Minsk.” — Edward Epstein, “Legend” “Decision after decision, the (State) Department removed every obstacle before Oswald . . . self-proclaimed discloser of classified information . . . on his path from Minsk to Dallas . . . including grant and renewal of Oswald’s passport despite cause for negative action.” — Sylvia Meagher, “Accessories After the Fact” “Historians may well ask the question of how any one could have made the fatal mistake of readmitting a defector who . . . would murder the president of the United States.” — Gerald Ford, “Portrait of an Assassin” “Oswald had worked with the Marines at Atsugi air base in Japan, where he had access to information about the altitude of the U-2, and where he was quite probably recruited to defect to the Soviet Union.” — Susanna Duncan, “Oswald the Secret Agent,” New York (March 6, 1978) “The burden of evidence in fact lends considerable credence to Marguerite Oswald’s constant thesis that her son had gone to the Soviet Union on clandestine assignment for his own government. — Sylvia Meagher, “Accessories After the Fact” Is it irrational to suggest that the American and Soviet intelligences cooperated in the American governmental game of killing the president?

Poster's note: This is truly significant evidence in a future criminal prosecution of James Murdoch. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Phone hacking: email to James Murdoch was deleted Daily Telegraph 6:30AM GMT 01 Feb 2012 An email in which James Murdoch was told of allegations that phone hacking was “rife” at the News of the World was deleted from his personal account days before Scotland Yard opened a new investigation into the company. The chairman of News International was forwarded a chain of emails suggesting that hacking was not restricted to a single rogue reporter. They included one from Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World at the time, after it emerged that a second journalist had sent an email with details of a hacked conversation. He warned Mr Murdoch that “it is as bad as we feared”. Mr Murdoch claims he did not read the email in full and was unaware of the suggestion that hacking went beyond one “rogue reporter”. Yesterday, however, it was disclosed that the email was deleted from his account by an IT worker at News International 11 days before Scotland Yard launched Operation Weeting. Mr Myler’s copy of the message was also lost from the email server that held News International emails following a “hardware failure”. The deletions meant that the email did not form part of the initial evidence sent by News International to the Metropolitan Police. It was not discovered until last year when a hard copy was found in a box containing material taken from Mr Myler’s office following the closure of the News of the World. The evidence handed over by News International in January 2011 prompted a new investigation into phone hacking that led to 17 arrests. Many of the arrests include current or former News International employees who have been arrested on the strength of emails and evidence handed to police by the company. Mr Murdoch was sent the email detailing a hacking claim by Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, on June 7, 2008. Mr Myler describes Mr Taylor’s case against the paper and requests a meeting with Mr Murdoch. The News International chairman replies two minutes later agreeing to the meeting, but has subsequently claimed he had not had time to read the email in full. Linklaters, a law firm representing News International, has written to the Commons culture, media and sport committee saying that the email was deleted on Jan 15 2011. Operation Weeting began 11 days later. The deletion is thought to have happened during or shortly after News International’s internal trawl of emails, the results of which were passed to the police. In a letter to the committee, John Turnbull of Linklaters said: “Mr Murdoch’s copy of the email was deleted from his mailbox by a member of News International’s IT department on Jan 15 2011 as part of [an] email stabilisation and modernisation programme. “Mr Myler’s copy of the email was lost from the email archive system in a hardware failure that occurred on Mar 18 2010. The email archive system was subject to many such incidents.” A spokesman for News International declined to comment. In a separate letter to the committee, Mr Murdoch said: “I wish to confirm again that I was not aware of evidence of widespread wrongdoing and did not seek to conceal it.” Last month, News International was accused of a “cover-up” of phone hacking evidence by a High Court judge after lawyers for phone hacking victims said the company had deleted emails. Mr Justice Vos told the company he had seen evidence that raised “compelling questions about whether you concealed, told lies, actively tried to get off scot free.” Statutory regulation of newspapers could stifle free speech, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission told the Leveson Inquiry yesterday. Lord Hunt of Wirral said many parliamentary colleagues told him they would try to use any new legislation to tame the media. Instead, he suggested a new self-regulatory body with more powers than the PCC that would act as both ombudsman and enforcer whenever newspapers stepped out of line. The Conservative peer, who became PCC chairman in October, said his 35 years in Parliament had taught him to oppose any attempt at statutory regulation of the media. Asked if he thought that parliamentarians might seek to use any form of legislation as a way of controlling the press, he replied: “Yes, and they have told me so, many of them, in both Houses.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2094405/Chilling-tape-Air-Force-One-day-JFK-shot-finally-released.html

I wish I knew the answer to your question but do not. Here is a link that highlights the program: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/

Poster's note: Las Vegas TV reporter George Knapp, who was the host on coasttocoastam last night, placed the following article on today's coasttocoast web site. Click on the link to the Daily Mail article to view the documents referred to therein: --------------------------------- Was JFK killed because of his interest in aliens? Secret memo shows president demanded UFO files 10 days before death Daily Mail By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 8:21 AM on 19th April 2011 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378284/Secret-memo-shows-JFK-demanded-UFO-files-10-days-assassination.html An uncovered letter written by John F Kennedy to the head of the CIA shows that the president demanded to be shown highly confidential documents about UFOs 10 days before his assassination. The secret memo is one of two letters written by JFK asking for information about the paranormal on November 12 1963, which have been released by the CIA for the first time. Author William Lester said the CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book 'A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.' The president’s interest in UFOs shortly before his death is likely to fuel conspiracy theories about his assassination, according to AOL News. Alien researchers say the latest documents, released to Mr Lester by the CIA, add weight to the suggestion that the president could have been shot to stop him discovering the truth about UFOs. In one of the secret documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, JFK writes to the director asking for the UFO files. Released: Letter from JFK to CIA director asking for access to UFO files, which has been released to an author under the Freedom of Information Act In the second memo, sent to the NASA administrator, the president expresses a desire for cooperation with the former Soviet Union on mutual outer space activities. The previously classified documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act to teacher William Lester as part of research for a new book about JFK. He said that JFK’s interest in UFOs could have been fuelled by concerns about relations with the former Soviet Union. Unclassified: A second memo written by JFK on November 12 1963, 10 days before his assassination, which has been released by the CIA ‘One of his concerns was that a lot of these UFOs were being seen over the Soviet Union and he was very concerned that the Soviets might misinterpret these UFOs as U.S. aggression, believing that it was some of our technology,’ Mr Lester told AOL News. ‘I think this is one of the reasons why he wanted to get his hands on this information and get it away from the jurisdiction of NASA so he could say to the Soviets, “Look, that's not us, we're not doing it, we're not being provocative. “.’ But conspiracy theorists said the documents add interest to a disputed file, nicknamed the ‘burned memo’, which a UFO investigator claims he received in the 1990s. The document, which has scorch marks, is claimed to have been posted to UFO hunter Timothy Cooper in 1999 by an unknown CIA leak, but has never been verified. Disputed: In the 'burned memo' the CIA director allegedly wrote: 'Lancer [JFK] has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow' In a note sent with the document, the apparent leaker said he worked for CIA between 1960 and 1974 and pulled the memo from a fire when the agency was burning some of its most sensitive files. The undated memo contains a reference to ‘Lancer’, which was JFK's Secret Service code name. On the first page, the director of Central Intelligence wrote: ‘As you must know, Lancer has made some inquiries regarding our activities, which we cannot allow. ‘Please submit your views no later than October. Your action to this matter is critical to the continuance of the group.’ The current owner of the ‘burned memo’, who bought it from Timothy Cooper in 2001 told AOL News that it shows that when JFK asked questions about UFOs that the CIA ‘bumped him off’. UFO investigator Robert Wood said he has tested the paper it was printed on, the ink age, watermarks, font types and other markings. He said: ‘I hired a forensics company to check the age of the ink and check several other things that you can date, using the same techniques you’d use in a court of law.’ Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1378284/Secret-memo-shows-JFK-demanded-UFO-files-10-days-assassination.html#ixzz1kxhRuG6j

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118046609 Scheduled for 9 PM Eastern Time on Monday, January 30, 2012.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/was-nixon-gay-no-but-that-doesnt-stop-the-rumor-mill/2012/01/09/gIQA4jkWVQ_story.html?hpid=z2

Sun journalists and police officer arrested in corruption investigation Met police search News International's headquarters in Wapping as four current and former Sun employees are arrested By Lisa O'Carroll and Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Saturday 28 January 2012 07.49 Four current and former senior Sun journalists and one serving police officer have been arrested as part of Scotland Yard's investigation into police corruption. The Metropolitan police have also launched a search at News International's headquarters in Wapping, east London, in an attempt to secure any potential evidence relating to alleged payments to police by journalists. Officers were accompanied by lawyers who arrived at the Sun's offices between 6am and 8am on Saturday morning. They are there to ensure that "journalist privilege" in relation to sources is not compromised. It is the first time since the phone-hacking scandal erupted that the Sun has been targeted in such a major way, but sources stressed the dawn raid had nothing to do with voicemail interception and was solely related to paying police for stories. The four Sun employees arrested are understood to be Mike Sullivan, the Sun's crime editor, the former managing editor Graham Dudman, the executive editor, Fergus Shanahan, and Chris Pharo, a newsdesk executive. The arrests came after information was passed to the police by News Corporation's internal investigations unit, the Management and Standards Committee. It was set up by Rupert Murdoch in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, which erupted last July, and operates independently of News International. It is understood that staff and management at the Sun had no warning of the police plans to make arrests or conduct a search of the paper's newsroom. A statement from News Corp in New York said: "Metropolitan police service (MPS) officers from Operation Elveden today arrested four current and former employees from the Sun newspaper. Searches have also taken place at the homes and offices of those arrested. "News Corporation made a commitment last summer that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past would not be repeated. "It commissioned the Management and Standards Committee to undertake a review of all News International titles, regardless of cost, and to proactively co-operate with law enforcement and other authorities if potentially relevant information arose at those titles. "As a result of that review, which is ongoing, the MSC provided information to the Elveden investigation which led to today's arrests. "No comment can be made on the nature of that information to avoid prejudicing the investigation and the rights of individuals." The Management and Standards Committee has been charged with ridding the company of old practices and illegal activities such as phone hacking which led to the abrupt closure of the News of the World in July after 168 years. One source said. "They are there to drain the swamp." In his witness statement to the Leveson inquiry earlier this month, the Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, said: "To the best of my knowledge, the Sun has never knowingly paid or made payments in kind to police … for information." Scotland Yard confirmed in a statement that the investigation "relates to suspected payments to police officers and is not about seeking journalists to reveal confidential sources in relation to information that has been obtained legitimately." It is understood that three of the four journalists were arrested before 8am on Saturday while the fourth was arrested in mid-morning. "Home addresses of those arrested are currently being searched and officers are also carrying out a number of searches at the offices of News International in Wapping. These searches are expected to conclude this afternoon," the Met said in an earlier statement. A source said police were interested in everything from "notepads, emails, Post-it notes". All four men were being questioned at police stations in Essex and London, police said. Fourteen people have so far been arrested under Operation Elveden – 13 by the Metropolitan police and one by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. The operation is being run in conjunction with Operation Weeting, the Met inquiry into the phone hacking of voicemail boxes. It was launched after officers were handed documents suggesting that News International journalists made illegal payments to police officers. Others questioned as part of the inquiry include the former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks, the ex-Downing Street communications chief Andy Coulson, the former News of the World managing editor Stuart Kuttner, the paper's former royal editor Clive Goodman, the former News of the World crime editor Lucy Panton and the Sun district editor, Jamie Pyatt. Brooks and Coulson are both former editors of the News of the World, which was closed in July at the height of the hacking scandal following revelations that the murdered teenager Milly Dowler's phone had been hacked. Deborah Glass, the deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, said: "It will be clear from today's events that this investigation is following the evidence. "I am satisfied with the strenuous efforts being made by this investigation to identify police officers who may have taken corrupt payments, and I believe the results will speak for themselves

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/26/nypd-cia-officer-pulled_n_1234115.html

Did the CIA have a role in having NYPD show this film to its officers? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/26/nypd-commissioner-kelly-anti-muslim-film

And yet another new book: http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Order-Investigating-Synchronicity-Assassination/dp/1936296551/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327634107&sr=1-1

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=18699