Anthony Thorne
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I'll have more to say on this topic within the next week or two.
Vince was right about a number of things from this period.
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I found it interesting to read William Davey’s article on Walter Sheridan, NBC, and the Garrison case. That article at Kennedys and King is here:
https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/shoot-him-down-nbc-the-cia-and-jim-garrison
Davey concludes his article by noting that NBC was, by all accounts, working with the CIA from 1967 onwards to discredit Garrison’s case.
In the four months prior to the Garrison trial, another person was stationed at NBC. Edward Jay Epstein. As part of his doctoral dissertation for Harvard, Epstein did a tour of the major networks, some of whom were more receptive than others. From September to December 1968, Reuven Frank, the President of the NBC news division, pretty much allowed Epstein to live there full time.
From page XV of the preface to Epstein’s News from Nowhere: Television and the News:
QuoteMy field study began at NBC in September 1968. Reuven Frank, the president of the news division, allowed me more or less free reign of the news organization : I was able to attend, on a regular basis, the news manager meetings in the morning, which he chaired; observe the proceedings in the newsroom throughout the day; interview personnel; travel with camera crews; and examine memoranda and budget statements pertinent to the news operation. Robert J. Northshield, the executive producer of the NBC Evening News, further permitted me to observe closely the decision making involved in that program on a daily basis for a four-month period, including staff meetings, critiques, film-editing sessions, writing conferences, and the continuous discussions that went on between producers, news editors and correspondents.
I have no idea what coverage NBC did or didn’t give the Garrison case during this period (I’m assuming if they did any, it wasn’t great), but Epstein was in discussions with NBC producers about Garrison during his time there.
From page 71 of Epstein’s book:
Quote“…after NBC did a scorching expose of the unorthodox investigation of the Kennedy assassination by Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, Garrison immediately appealed to the the FCC for equal time, and NBC found it necessary to turn over a half-hour of prime time to him, in which he presented his own theories as established facts. “To say this didn’t please the powers that be at NBC is to put it mildly,” the producer commented. (A CBS documentary unit that reached similar conclusions about Garrison was more restrained in what they presented on the air, according to the producer, because of the intervention of CBS attorneys.)
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This article popped up while I was looking at other stuff. It's an unsigned story from the Los Angeles Times, published on October 18th, 1963. Allen Dulles is bothered about Soviet spy exchanges and has decided that week to share his misgivings with the author.
The story covers six short paragraphs, yet Dulles is quoted directly in just one sentence, noting that "..innocent American travelers" might be accused of spying by the Russians. The story goes on to note how Americans in the Soviet Union who have never been involved in espionage might be arrested, and Dulles is bothered by this. Dulles isn't sure what to do about the matter, but presumably just wanted the Los Angeles Times to know about it. The story makes note of the Gary Powers spy exchange, but that took place 18 months earlier, so it must be just one of those things that Dulles thought of the topic when he did.
Since Dulles isn't sure one way or another what can be done about the matter, I'm guessing in practical terms the story just serves one purpose - it pops the phrases AMERICAN TRAVELLER and SOVIET SPYING and INNOCENT into the reader's brain, and hopefully reminds the reader that if they hear of some traveller being accused of being a spy in the Soviet Union, the guy probably really wasn't a spy at all.
Side note - young LA Times publisher Otis Chandler, son of Norman, was at the time of this memo two years away from joining the advisory board of the American Press Institute. In June 1975, Brent Scowcroft recommended Otis Chandler to Henry Kissinger as a possible nominee for the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, alongside other candidates such as Clare Booth Luce and Paul Nitze. So someone up high was presumably happy with Chandler's work.
https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP70-00058R000200070064-2.pdf
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Epstein's professor for some years at Harvard in the late 60's and very early 70's - when Epstein was writing the Ph.D that was eventually published as News from Nowhere: Television and the News - was Edward C. Banfield. Banfield, a friend of Leo Strauss when they were both at the University of Chicago, can glibly be described as the racist academic who was later celebrated by the American Enterprise Institute. Banfield later served as an advisor to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan. Two of Banfield's other students, Christopher DeMuth and Bruce Kovner, later served at leading figures (president and chairman) at the AEI for decades. A 2007 Slate article talks about how much a central role Muth and his AEI members played in designing and selling the Iraq war.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2007/10/chris-demuth-hack-extraordinaire.html
And a similar article from the period discusses Kovner, with similar insights into his role with AEI.
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/12353/
When the Iraq war started up in 2003, the original Team B group from the late 70's fell back into the news, along with discussion of their prior faulty intelligence assessments. The membership of Team B featured Strauss students, Harvard academics and AEI folk, and it was at this point in 2003 that Edward Jay Epstein posted a blog on his website defending Team B's work.
http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/2003question/teamb.htm
I take it that Epstein's association with ardent anti-communists and militarist folk rubbed off just a little, as a spooky fear of the Soviets is a recurring theme of his recent books on Kindle, including Epstein's 2014 publication James Jesus Angleton - Was He Right?
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I haven't listed to it, but if you scroll down the link, Ed Haslam recently did a podcast with Kris Millegan on the book. It's episode six.
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This is the most diverting line to me so far.
"discussing US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's approval of a plan concerning US presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering US elections as a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server."
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Really good article. And RAND came up a lot in some of the stuff I've looked at over the last year or two with the guys from CSIS, neocons, and all those disparate groups. Insofar in that, whenever I'd do a Google search to find out who was who at some conference somewhere, when people were typically gathering to discuss how the Cold War needed to keep going and can we get some more weapons contacts for Lockheed etc - frequently some obscure guy would turn out to have spent time at RAND before he moved elsewhere, or he'd moved from some think tank or science board direct into working with RAND. And all these guys cross over, shake hands, vouch for each other at Senate hearings when senators outside the loop wonder why some guy is being nominated into a position in the Reagan or Bush Sr administrations, join 'independent' groups where they produce a paper explaining why the world needs further weapons contracts again, and so on.
Sometime over the next few weeks I'll go back over some of the stuff I've written down and dig up some RAND stuff, as it is fascinating. Often RAND just served as an excuse to provide an official looking paper or report that folks outside RAND could wave at congress and say, you see, we do need more military spending. And then you'd find the folks that wrote the RAND paper would leave, join up with the folks from congress, and start up some security company or weapons advisory group together. Fred Kaplan wrote a great book on RAND in the late 80's called THE WIZARDS OF ARMAGEDDON. Three months ago, he published an interesting new book on a similar subject - THE BOMB: PRESIDENTS, GENERALS, AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF NUCLEAR WAR. I'm keen to read it. This link has more about it.
https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2020-06/features/bomb-presidents-generals-secret-history-nuclear-war
During the early 70's former RAND analyst and executive Fred Ikle became the boss of many future neocons when he became director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency - Wolfowitz worked under him, for example. And the title of the agency was a funny one, because most of the guys in charge weren't keen on any disarmament at all.
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I think Trump’s knowledge of deep secrets regarding the event is zero, and the whole subject came to his attention the fortnight of the original scheduled releases. He agreed to everything being released as it seemed like a popular response, then on the day, when greeted with various ‘We can’t release these, Mr President!’ messages and excuses and explanations, he responded with annoyance and a shrug, and agreed to the new plans simply as that was what so many advisors were urging.
If the endless date-extensions and excuses for not releasing things became a big public issue, he might have stronger conversations and make more demands about it, but at this point I doubt he’s thought about the subject for a very long while.
And if Harris and Biden win the election, you won’t be seeing many, if any new JFK releases for some time. Not to mention all the other subjects they’ll happily cover up.
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That’s a helpful list, with quite a few titles I’m keen to read. Thank you.
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Larry - I just ordered NEXUS for my Kindle, as a prelude to reading your new work next month. Looking forward to digging in to both. I did read an edition of SWHT some years back - if you think there's any other pieces of yours I should make an effort to look at before reading your imminent monograph I'm happy to have a look. Thank you.
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Hey, I never called Bob a kook, I just said I hoped he wears his jester outfit again because it was funny the last time he did it.
Bob has been helpful on this board with PDF scans. And the incongruous news stories that pop up with distraught quotes from county personnel as Bob wins another vote somewhere and pops up for work wearing the full jester get up are good value if you’re into sending screenshots of these stories to friends for laughs, which I am.
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Hopefully Bob will wear his jester outfit when he put together his campaign ad.
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No problem Ron.
CSIS is discussed in this thread. You also posted in it, but it was some months back.
Ichord does pop up in Watergate literature (Googling 'Richard Ichord Watergate' brings up a number of links). His obituary gives more details about him. He was a fervent anticommunist.
I might start a new thread at some point making some of the connections more explicit. It's a can of worms though and some of these things only become clearer in longer posts rather than shorter ones.
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I don't disagree with any of that. But this is probably the result of me not making things explicit. I'm just observing how the networks that carried out the JFK hit continued, and strengthened, and deepened their activities for decades afterwards, through Vietnam, Iran Contra and other events where the CIA played a role or had an interest. And at a certain point, when the wind started blowing in a certain direction, their history of networking and plotting and looking towards the future paid dividends, and not just financial ones.
FWIW, later HUAC chair Richard Ichord wrote the introduction for Stefan Possony's prophetic late 70's book on international terrorism, and then chaired an important panel and report at the end of 1980 - 'The Ailing Defense Industrial Base: Unready for Crisis' - that was the progenitor of threads that led to the PNAC Rebuilding America's Defences document. And Krulak (Charles) fronted anthrax preparations for the some of the same people. But this is probably outside the scope of this thread.
CSIS, the think tank mentioned in another thread by me which was begun with the assistance of Arleigh Burke - at loggerheads with JFK through the period Charles cited - is never far from the scene through all the stuff I've just alluded to.
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Chuck, thanks, I just found it interesting that after what you described, Krulak worked further with the CIA, and his son was involved in shadowy crisis and anti terrorism planning. The COG and anthrax prevention folk all made big bucks for themselves and various weapons corporations when the events they planned for became reality.
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Not sure if this has been discussed here on this board. General Victor Krulak, noted above, is an interesting guy with an odd history. Victor Krulak later was involved in running a news service and newspapers (with a Latin American wing) for the CIA. Joseph Trento uncovered the story in the 70’s. The organisation was called Copley Press. There are a series of articles on the CIA Crest site about this. This PDF, linked from another site, is just one of them. Trento’s articles on the topic were controversial at the time.
https://tupiwire.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/copley-press-and-the-cia-article.pdf
General Krulak’s son, Charles Krulak, became a well known Marine Corp Officer. In the 80’s (again according to a document at CIA Crest) he shared discussions and meetings on Continuity of Government preparations with Richard Clarke. In 1996, Charles Krulak joined forces with Dick Cheney’s business partner Joshua Lederberg to convince the Joint Chiefs to invest in biowarfare vaccine preparations, in case future terrorists decided to hit the US with doses of anthrax.
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Stone did an interview in the late 70’s or early 80’s about SEIZURE, and recounted a funny story - which I’m paraphrasing from memory - about Villechaize. The actor was outdoors in the countryside leaving the film’s set one evening with the other actors, and stumbled into a newly dug hole. This wasn’t witnessed by anyone else, Villechaize was too short to climb out, the shape of the hole prevented him from shouting, and Villechaize was worried that he might freeze to death if he was left there overnight. Everyone else left, and Villechaize was all alone in the darkness. Villechaize cheered himself up while it got colder as he could see a light on a stand had been left on, visible through the trees, and someone would surely be back soon to turn it off and pack up the equipment. Villechaize looked at the light for a few hours as it got colder and colder. Miraculously, a crew member did come back for another reason, spotted Villechaize, and pulled him out. At this point, Villechaize, grateful for the rescue, looked at the light, and realised that for the previous few hours he’d been staring at the full moon through the trees.
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I’m guessing that John Oliver also has a production team or producers of his show that lean a certain way, and Oliver is just going with what he’s been told. Because it doesn’t look he’s done any research into the topic at all.
The Joe Rogan char with Oliver Stone that I just posted will probably get a couple of million views or more over the coming days, so hopefully stuff like this will help counter the rubbish John Oliver has just spread - our Oliver is better than their Oliver.
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Don’t forget to click on the highlighted text within the interview to see more snide footnotes from the interviewer repeating the official story. But regardless, that was a good discussion from Oliver.
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The author of that piece wrote another article about 'books about JFK' in 2017, and enthused about Robert Dallek. But I don't feel the need to investigate his writing much further.
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Great article by Rob and I appreciate the effort Rob made to illuminate Stanley Marks' life and work. All I could really do when reading Stanley's observations was to nod affirmatively and think, jeez, this guy feels (or obviously felt) about things the same way that we do. But Stanley was quicker to catch on to things than pretty much every other writer.
It would have been a pleasure to chat to Stanley if he was around, but I took some solace from the photo of him with his wife Ethel. He had a great wife and a loving family and he lived into his 80's. That's pretty good.
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Jim - reading through your article, half your points in it seem to come from Warren Commission witnesses saying, yeah, he did speak Russian, and he spoke it really well. Were any of them coached? Were any Warren Commission witnesses ever coached? Were those ones coached? Beats me. But does that question ever occur when judging Warren Commission testimony that supports the official story?
I’ll have to go through Walt Brown’s chronology again - a mammoth task - as one of Brown’s regular points throughout the work is that, despite commentary suggesting otherwise, Oswald couldn’t speak Russian. And he digs up a bunch of instances where LHO could have, or should have, or was asked to, but didn’t.
And could assets or dupes who weren’t agents occasionally do the same sort of thing that an agent might do, thereby sometimes muddying the water as to who was an agent, and who was an asset doing much the same thing? I’d argue the answer lies somewhere between ‘sometimes’ and ‘not often’, but doesn’t make it all the way over to ‘never’.
Enjoying this discussion regardless.
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The text below was posted by Peter Dale Scott on Facebook today. I know Bill Kelly has written about this topic before.
“From the petition:
"AARC seeks documents related to a briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on September 25, 1963 by CIA Cuban operations head Desmond Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald informed the Joint Chiefs that CIA was studying in detail a parallel in history to develop an approach to dealing with Fidel Castro- the July 20, 1944 plot by German military officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler. "
In other words, on 9/25/63, Desmond Fitzgerald, a long-time suspect in the case who at the time was withholding important relevant information from the Kennedys, discussed with the Joint Chiefs a plan, parallel to Valkyrie, for assassinating a Chief of State from inside his own administration.
This is worth watching.“
John Newman's posting on Facebook today
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
Newman noted in a discussion under his Facebook posts that a legal battle for additional documents, presumably through FOIA, is underway right now.