Joseph Backes

I'm sorry but I'm too skeptical. We are dealing with documents that are severely degraded, extremely poor and often illegible photocopies, information made on every imaginable government form. In addition to handwritten documents, antiquated computer formats; audio in many formats; film, video and photography in many formats and that's just the stuff in English. Asking a new computer system to search through all that as though it's all already in a legible standardized format is very hard to believe. Joe

Unless it tells you where it got its info from it's useless. It has to specify here, here, and here. And then you need to go there, there and there to verify that the info was real. People think it's a magic button that will do the reading and thinking for you. That AI will solve the case. Nope. It's the next big stupid Ponzi scam. Technology years ahead of the law, again. Before it is regulated or banned billions will be made and lost.

Folks, Unless info posted here has a verifiable source that you can check, a book, a magazine, a document, preferably with a RIF number, don't trust it. I asked a question and Bob Ness ( if that is his real name, if that is a real person ) posted something he got from ChatGPT, an AI thing. We have enough fiction to deal with. Joe

AI? You used AI? Artificial intelligence? Ugh.

Bob, Okay, great, now where did you get that from? Joe

Looking for info on a CIA guy. Last name could be Rednar or Fednar, or Pednar. This is around April 1962. Joseph B Pednar? Room 2-F-16, ext 7322. Thanks Joe

In this article Morley writes about the assassination of CIA station chief in Athens, Greece Richard Welch in 1975. In the article Morley refers to a small magazine called "CounterSpy." This was described as the quarterly journal of the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate. Has anyone ever heard of them or this journal before? I'd like to get the complete run. The internet archive has some of the issues of CounterSpy. There are 133 pages here. Actually, this comes from the CIA Crest site. 1.) Sprin, '76 Vol 3. Issue 1 starts on p. 1 2.) Winter, '76 Vol. 2. Issue 4 starts on p. 68 Joe

Do not conflate these two separate investigations. The CIA's own internal investigation originally headed by John Whitten is not the same thing as the Warren Commission investigation. Angleton eventually wrestled control of the CIA's internal investigation away from Whiten. The CIA as we're learning had and is still hiding a lot about MC.

Yes, it was 1.) 1993 2.) Aug 25, 1998 3.) Nov 9, 2017 4.) April 26, 2018 5.) Dec 15, 2022

Good for Malcolm for not answering that insulting question. Please Mr. Blunt, go broke and insane studying the JFK assassination for me and then tell me who did it and why, oh, and hurry up about it 'cause I got dinner in the microwave and the game's about to start.

For those who want to follow along. 1.) RIF # 104-10105-10168. Kent in New Orleans with a cover, the Christian Fellowship Fund. 2.) IF # 178-10002-10091. Deposition of William C Sturbitts The trouble is a lot of material is not online at MFF. ( Not that that's MFF's fault. The entire JFK Records Collection is MASSIVE.) And of the stuff that is online you often have to actually read each document, page by page. The RIFs are good, but a vital bit of info could be in a doc and you'd never know if you're going only by the RIF. 3.) 104-10291-10022 - Kent's CIA Personnel File. 291 pages

Peter, Try reading some of John Newman's work. Forums like this and people not doing the work make leaps and assumptions. They think there is a straight line between Angleton and LHO, or Solie and LHO, or Popov and LHO because they don't know any other names. Most people commenting couldn't name 10 CIA people working in the Directorate of Plans at that time to save their lives. To everybody in the CIA Oswald "the mere radar operator," is perfectly expendable if he surfaces a mole. That's the reason for his "defection," but there's no reason to believe LHO is 100% knowledgeable about it, or that he would be told everything. He went wittingly, probably thinking he's saving the U-2 program, or he's going to outsmart the KGB or something stupid like that. There's no reason to believe LHO ever even heard of Angleton or Solie.

Only MIcheal Griffith could read that Lew Rockwell article and think it supports the WC, lone gunman story.

No. Oswald was not Solie's man, nor, Angleton's. I don't think Oswald had any idea who is sending him or why. He just thinks he's going to be a big hero, which is one reason why he was called "a useful idiot." Oswald is being used as a dangle to find a mole. The idea was that if the KGB bites what Oswald is offering about his knowledge of the U-2 then Angleton et. al. can discover where there is a security leak, and where the mole is. Meanwhile, the mole is who Angleton is reporting to back home in the U.S., inside CIA, inside the OS, Mr. Bruce Solie.

Who the F is John Leo Keenan? Regardless, folks, don't waste your time with this. There's too much work to do. Read the documents.

An issue Malcolm briefly touches upon is the question of did the ARRB interview Tennent "Pete" Bagley? Currently it doesn't appear that they formally, properly did. I love Malcolm but I could kill him, he was a very, very disorganized researcher. He copied what was interesting to him when he found it and wanted to copy something. He did not copy entire documents. He did not copy the RIF page and then the whole document. He would often fly right past the RIF page, find something interesting, like page 18 of a 52 page document. He'd copy that. And them move onto another document, finding page 22 of a 78 page document interesting and copy that. Then he'd copy a finding aid without copying the whole intact thing, just parts of it, and it might be a finding aid to something not in NARA at all but at a completely different place, like a presidential library, or a special collection at a college or university. And then he'd go back to NARA and cherry pic this page and that page. Then that weeks worth of copying went into a bag for poor old Bart Kamp to try to make sense of years, if not decades later. Bart would take pics of docs stripped of their RIF sheet and context and email them to me, sometimes 10 a day. And it would take hours trying to make sense of each document as I tried to put some text, proper nouns, names into an advanced search on MFF in an attempt to learn, aha, this is page X from RIF # yadda-yadda. I had to organize what Bart sent me by what day, what email address he used, what title he gave to the file, even when Malcolm did copy the RIF page Bart wouldn't use it to name what he's sending to me. I created a whole index, it was like translating the language of what Malcolm and Bart used and then translating it into the language of RIFS. It took forever! It was infuriating because it was and still is properly organized at NARA. It was organized to begin with. It's like the Tasmanian Devil became a researcher. HIs memories and stories would be so much more powerful if every time, boom, there's the doc, there's the RIF#, there, you can read it yourself and see he's telling you the truth, there, this document is really important. See? If we could match his memory with a RIF# we'd be so much better off, we'd be so much further along in the research. So, we get these interviews of Malcolm, and he remembers this and that, but it's nearly impossible to reverse engineer what he did and when. It's very difficult to match up his memory with the specific document he's talking about because he didn't copy the RIF page, and keep his stuff properly organized. You can do it some of the time but not all the time. So, we don't have a date for when Bagley came over. We don't have any documentation, not even a fax or email between Bagley and the ARRB. We don't have a government voucher for his hotel, plane trip, nothing, if he did come over. If those records exist they are in the ARRB's internal files. And making things worse is the ARRB's internal records do not have RIFs ( they oddly seem to be exempt from the whole RIF system ) and they are not 100% open and declassified for us to search through. None of it is online. You have to be in Archives II to access them. So, I'm not 100% convinced they did talk with Bagley with a formal interview that would have been recorded on audiotape, and that every trace of it disappeared. Malcolm was going through stuff as it came into NARA while NARA was processing it. So, sometimes that's great as Malcolm might get something free and clear, open in full before the spook boys and girls try and redact it and put a withdrawal form in the folder / box. Sometimes Malcolm would be there too early or too late to get anything. Sometimes if Malcolm was there a few days earlier, or a few later, it would be there no problem. There was no way to tell and schedule when best to be there. It was a bit chaotic in the 1990's, especially when the "interfiling" was goin on. Oh, and in 1993 the CIA docs had their own funky number, what I call the 1993 numbers. For example, a document titled "REQUEST FOR INFORMATION ON SOVIET PERSONALITIES" had the CIA's own internal number - 1993.05.17.13:51:03:000088. Many CIA docs didn't have a RIF number until years later. So, it needs some proper research by someone being physically present in Archives II by someone properly anal enough to take meticulous notes as to what he's going through and when, what box #, what folder #, which ARRB staff person's files, to see if there is a record, any record or a tape of an ARRB interview with Bagley. Maybe there's some indication they talked. Who knows? Joe

No, no, no, no, no. The term "mole" is not something used for one man and only once, never to be used again. There have been several moles in different agencies over time. Learn to use Google, please. Robert Hanssen was caught. Laughably, Google refers to Hanssen as a "public servant," when the more accurate description is traitor. Hanssen worked for the FBI. He turned traitor in '79. He stopped in 1981, and then started again in 1985 and stopped in 1991. He was arrested in 1992. Aldrich Ames was another mole. He worked for the CIA. He was arrested in 1994. Bruce Solie was never caught, never suspected until the research of John Newman. Solie worked for the CIA. Solie worked in the CIA's Office of Security. Solie was Angleton's boss. Solie died December 25, 1992. I believe John Newman is correct. Bruce Solie was a lot like the character of "security" in the movie Stalag 17. He attained the position of top mole hunter while being the mole himself. I also recommend watching the Martin Scorsese film, "The Departed." A gangster in the Boston mob played by Jack Nicholson recruited a young Irish mob kid to go into the Massachusetts state police academy and become a mole. He's played by Matt Damon. He'd be a real cop but secretly working for Nicholson's character, who is based on real life mobster Whitey Bulger. The cops think there's a mole. They recruit an undercover cop who infiltrates the Irish mob. He's played by Leonardo DiCaprio. So, the two moles are in a race to uncover each other. The problem is the mob boss has more than one mole in the police dept. Joe

No, I don't know but it might be in a book on the CIA. David Murphy was at one point. Jack Maury was another. I read somewhere today the importance of Greece to the CIA. They had a secure line to send message from HQ to Greece and then from Greece to other places. George Joannides came from Greece. Jack Maury was CIA chief of station in Athens. In 1967 the CIA installed Georgios Papadopoulos as head of state in a military coup. Philip Talbot, the U.S. ambassador disapproved of the coup which ushered in the regime of the colonels ( 1967 - 1974 ) calling it a rape of democracy. Jack Maury replied "How do you rape a whore?" Maury must have been really popular in Greece after that. It was another George Papadopoulos who got the whole Trump - Russia thing going. I wonder if there is a relation?

Well, to get back to Malcolm's talk, he mentions several CIA people I think it fair to say most people are not familiar with that I'd like to give you all some information about. 1.) Donald Deneselya, allegedly saw the CIA debrief on LHO when LHO returned from Russia.. The CIA deny any debrief occurred. 2.) Brian J Kelley, was with Counterintelligence in the CIA. At one time suspected of being a KGB mole in the 1990's. The real mole was Robert Hansen. 3.) Howard J Osborn, a CIA security officer. In 1963 he was the head of the Soviet Russia division. Later forced to resign for withholding documents from the FBI & Watergate congressional committee. One of those documents was about a visit by Lee R Pennington, Jr. to the home of James J McCord shortly after the break-in. Pennington witnessed McCord's wife burning documents which may have detailed info on McCord's links to the CIA. 4.) Col. Lawrence Kermit "Red" White, CIA executive director. 5.) Paul Leo Dillon, a CIA case officer. He handled GRU General Dmitri Polyakov in India. He may have been murdered, died of a lung problem in Oct 1980. Dillon had his cover blown by Phil Agee's book, "Inside the Company." Polyakov was given the codename TOPHAT. Dillon was the CIA case officer for Polyakov. The GRU gave Dillon the code name Plaid. His daughter, Eva Dillon, wrote a book, "Spies in the Family." Dillion later went to Mexico City. Bagley commented to Malcolm that Paul Dillon was not with him long that he "was in the basement," a term meaning unacknowledged deep cover. Bagley knew not to ask. 6.) Lee H Wigren, a research supervisor in SR/CI. Tennent Bailey was his supervisor. 7.) William J Hood, Western Hemisphere, Chief of Operations. Bagley was astonished when Malcolm gave him a list of everyone who ever worked in Bagley's unit. 8.) John Sherwood. His alias was John Breitheim. His pseudonym was Sidney P. Di Ubaldo. He later moved to Boulder, Co and apparently stalked a woman leading to a restraining order and an arrest. He committed suicide July 16, 2001. In an interview with someone John Sherwood told the interviewer that Cal Hicks, who was an interested part with Vecianna "was in the basement with Alpha-66." Malcolm was surprised to see the term "in the basement," in reference to Cal Hicks. The CIA likes to claim they had nothing to do with Alpha-66 and could not control them. 9.) Cal Hicks. Cal Hicks is Calvin W Hicks. See RIF#104-10193-10077 for CIA Op file on him. A member of WH/4/PM. 10.) Bill Bright, SR/CI/4. William C Bright. See Chapter 2 of Bill Simpich's State Secret for info on Bill Bright.

I stumbled across this today. I don't know if it's been posted here before or not. It's released by the CIA so yes, it still has some redactions. Still a good read. See - https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/DOC_0001262720.pdf Also - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0001262720 - A link to the CIA Crest website version. Part 1 of 2 And - https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0001262737 - A link to the CIA Crest website version. Part 2 of 2. Joe

Hopefully, I corrected the link.

Oh, and David Murphy was a CIA agent who interviewed Nosenko. Maybe that's why his name rang a bell. USA Today story

I think I have, and probably many others. Well, I found ( RIF #104-10425-10008 ) and I'm just stunned. Look at para 2. "Mr. David Murphy, an Agency official under [ redacted ] and he requested that his true affiliation not be revealed at this time. He is still under cover and uncoordinated revelation of his true status could become an embarrassment to the [redacted]" WOW! I hope this isn't old news. I just discovered this today. Joe

This one's interesting. It's how the CIA wants to use DAP, as a commercial business man who own a printing and publishing business in Santiago, Chile. DAP is cleared for use in the Fulminator project. He is to print OPC propaganda material, and "himself for cut-out and other agent functions in connection with specific OPC projects. It is planned to make him contract agent" This doc is date 17 Dec 1951 Sounds very similar to what LHO was doing in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. 104-10178-10028.

Another one 104-10128-10380 DAP lost an envelope given to him with his name on it and the instruction "hand carry." It was a CIA job application for Norman Satterwaite. So, while signing in at a guard's desk he left that behind. He went back 15 minutes later but the guard turned it in to OS. Apparently, this was his first security violation. This was Aug 22, 1955 104-10128-10381 - They cancel DAP covert security clearance. Now this is not as bad as you might think. He was issued one 30July 1954. But, now he is a staff officer. So, it seems he got a promotion and is in the club.