David Andrews

He didn't oppose the creation of Israel, he opposed undue Israeli influence on US politics and US govt. departmental operations and policies.

The David Martin book on Forrestal could have used a good editor, but contains some interesting digested information from other sources about how Forrestal (among many in Washington) was under threats and pressure from the Israelis, and was also disturbed by the influence of Communist sympathizers in the Truman admin who were holdouts from FDR's govt. Any influence of the former upon the latter? The version of the [Forrestal] diaries edited by FDR apologist and New York Herald Tribune journalist, the Yale graduate Walter Millis, was a severely edited version of the original. By the time Millis had done his chopping the diaries had been gone over by both the White House and the Pentagon and there can be little doubt that they took out the most damaging and revealing things about the administration, the most important of which […] would have been how their policies were consciously aiding the Communist cause. The original diaries would very likely have named names like Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie, people within the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who were doing the bidding of the Communists. Not only did Millis take a lot out, but he also put into the published version as much of his own analysis as that which came from Forrestal, often taking issue with Forrestal when he went against the approved “leftist line.” Put into perspective, it helps one see how JFK was labeled a comsymp by his own subordinates, who were still holding grudges from FDR's prosecution of WW II and the post-war peace Makes you think also about how Forrestal's son, Michael, chose to side with JFK's opponents in the Vietnam crisis. No 13th floor exit for this war baby. Others chose to tar Forrestal with anti-Semitism when they spotted a chance to distort his stand on the Palestine partition issue. Forrestal was not anti-Semitic; he had simply urged that Truman not play domestic politics with the Palestine question and had explained his position as follows: 'If we are to safeguard western civilization in this crisis, the British and American fleets must have free access to Near Eastern oil. That is a fact, however unpleasant it may be.... I am interested in justice in Palestine, but this interest must remain secondary to my primary interest, which is the protection of America and the West from the gravest threat we have ever faced [Soviet Russia]. No minority has the right to jeopardize this nation for its own selfish interest.' Forrestal gave everything he had to the war, and couldn't stand the realignment of influence during the peace. It's a wonder no one over at State went bat-sh*t crazy by 1948-1949.

Teddy Roosevelt would call them bad sports.

"An act of war does not mean a declaration of war" -- Somebody https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/08/suleimani-assassination-two-us-airbases-in-iraq-hit-by-missiles-in-retaliation

Trump's Madman theory. The Nixonian resemblance was on my mind, but as Nixon found out, the Madman strategy doesn't fly in a complex world with better communications than Machiavelli's. At least we don't have to put up with Roger Stone cheering him on: https://www.salon.com/2020/01/07/donald-trumps-new-fire-and-fury-more-madman-cosplay-with-no-exit-strategy/

Maybe we can send them Sean Connery to play Soleimani, and everything will be all better. Meanwhile, another scene we've seen before: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/07/qassem-suleimani-burial-iran-general-home-town

Elizabeth Warren today became the first to point out that Trump ordered the Suleiman strike in the middle of the impeachment hearings. Suleiman's daughter advised today that US military personnel today would soon be waiting for their children to die. Sleep tight. Meanwhile, taking his military cues from ISIS, Trump is threatening Iranian cultural sites: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/06/trump-threat-destruction-iran-heritage-war-crime

Did you read the article on Oswald and disciplinary methodology in the Warren Report. which Doug Caddy posted? The comic book influence, while not applied to Oswald, was part of the psychological "backgrounding:" of delinquency the shaped the legend of LHO in the WR.

Just to point out, if it's any help, that the "public" faces of the TSBD, south and east, have the same window arrangement, while the "industrial" faces, north and west, fronting the railroad yard and the loading area, have a different arrangement with fewer windows. I think the latter two sides are the same design, and the north side doesn't have a window opposite the south side "sniper window." I think the designer was trying to balance appearance with economy, and I'm not sure if structural elements are represented in the facades.

Well, you're right, and I'm glad to know it. The Los Angeles Times article ran over three days in June 1967. I had mistimed the appearance of the Playboy interview, and also of the NBC News special countering the Garrison case, which also discussed the homosexual angle. I have to say, it was precipitous of Garrison to give so much of his case against Shaw away in the press, possibly killing his case ahead of the courtroom, and introducing material that was used to smear Garrison as incompetent, when if kept secret it could only have come from infiltration of his office. Too many reactionary moves in an incendiary case. In my post, I did not mean to decide whether Clay Shaw was part of the assassination plotting, at least in regard to the actual Dallas action. I meant, rather, to call attention to the fact that Clay Shaw is not mentioned in the plot outlined in the Nagell 'Verdestein' letter, thinking this may have been a CIA-motivated omission that would help protect Shaw. Nagell was visited in jail by, among others, a Garrison investigator later declared by Garrison to be a CIA plant. So, several more reasons to not trust the 'Verdestein' letter. I suspect that Nagell fitted things about Devid Ferrie gleaned from the Garrison case uproar to things he already knew about Oswald and assassination plans existing before his arrest, knowledge that now seems limited, at least as represented in the letter. The strongest connections between Nagell and Oswald seem to be, as Larry Hancock suggests, the Hidell ID card copy and the statements Nagell made before the assassination.

His letters to Art Greenstein seem to be speculation that is based on what he probably read about Garrison's case in the newspapers while still incarcerated. Nagell's attitude toward Oswald and Ferrie in the 'Verdestein' letter, with its intimations of effeminacy and homosexuality, addresses issues that - as far as I can find - were not mentioned in any press account between Shaw's March 1, 1967 arrest and the October 8, 1967 date of the letter. These allegations would emerge in the Clay Shaw trial beginning February 6, 1969. In 1967 there would be every reason for reporters to conceal any advance knowledge, as reports of Shaw being homosexual might have prejudiced potential jurors for or against him. I would be interested to know if I am wrong, and if leaks (or Garrison boasts) did run in the press between Shaw's arrest and Nagell's letter, or if the homosexual angle did make the press at any time before the Shaw trial opened. There are a number of reasons to distrust or question Nagell's 'Verdestein' letter, including his presumption that Oswald was a shooter, and the letter's exclusion of Clay Shaw from the plotting. As I've said, I'm wondering if the homosexual angle, the Alpha 66 connection to Oswald that Nagell made, and other details were fed to Nagell by an intelligence agency for disinformation purposes. This is information that might have been obtained by informants or listening devices in Garrison's offices.

Delete, please.

Doug, thank you, but I doubt it's true. I'm more of a JFKA critic than a researcher, being tied up in my own projects. Like a broken clock, I'm right twice a day. I'll try to do that here.

Plus this old chestnut, from Mike Pence: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/01/pence-falsely-links-soleimani-9-11-attacks-justify-assassination.html

Nobody's mentioning that the Suleimani attack comes in the middle of the impeachment drama. Haven't we seen this wag-the-dog strategy before?

Features the classic mid-70s lyric reflecting the days of Watergate and the Church Committee: I know you're working for the CIA They wouldn't have you in the Maf-eye-yay !

This lady's videos get around a lot on the net:

Actually...a very interesting analysis of how the Warrren Report employs, and "validates," the tropes of 1950s juvenile delinquency studies. Probably the next best example is Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood, only a few years after the WR, and possibly informed by the WR. If Oswald had had a collection of violent comic books, the noose would have been cinched. One wonders how, or if, any of the case history and the family legend (absent father, orphanage abandonment, truancy, etc., producing a malcontent and misfit), might have been allowed in court as "backgound" against an Oswald who survived. Odds are, though, that his survival was never part of the plan. The essay is also a portrait of the FBI's non-evidentiary methodology. Well worth reading. Inspirational quote: ("The introduction of the 'biographical' is important to the history of penality," Foucault noted, "because it established the 'criminal' as existing before the crime and even outside of it."' ) While this new vision of causality took the individual as its object, then, it also dispersed the origins of criminal behavior across the social field; the individuation of a criminal act through life-history simultaneously represented a kind of death of the individual subject. "Behind the offender to whom the investigation of the facts may attribute responsibility for an offense," wrote Foucault, "stands the delinquent whose slow formation is shown in a biographical investigation .... [O]ne sees penal discourse and psychiatric discourse crossing each other's frontiers; and there, at their point of junction, is formed the 'dangerous' individual, which makes it possible to draw up a network of causality in terms of the entire biography and present a verdict of punishment- correction." In the Warren Report, Oswald is Foucault's ultimate "dangerous individual." He is the perfect poster boy for a disciplinary society: the youthful deviant who, diagnosed but untreated, went on to strike a lethal blow at the core of national security. This image of Oswald was all the more potent because the Commission's biographical truth was to be the final legal word on his life, undisturbed by the discourse of moral and legal blame that a criminal trial in Texas would have produced had Oswald lived.

I didn't say any of that. I liked the Plan Lazo stuff you found at the Army Historian site, I was just confused where Lorenz came in. Maybe I wasn't reading it right - that's not historically unknown around here. People should look at the Plan Lazo material in relation to JFK's Alliance of Progress in South America, since everything the man did in terms of Cold War strategy made him enemies, in this case probably the Rockefellers, since WW II the feudal overlords of the continent: https://www.soc.mil/ARSOF_History/articles/v2n4_plan_lazo_page_1.html

Steve, if you read the 'Verdestein' letter in full, you'll see that the designation 'Patsy' is applied to Oswald and Oswald situations uniformly, as a kind of substitution code (just as "Triple-man Zero' designates Nagell himself as triple agent, US-Soviet-US). The capitalization and feminization of 'Patsy' seems a back-handed reference to Oswald's supposed bisexuality. I'm foggy this morning, and perhaps need spelled out for me how Patsy could refer to Marita Lorenz. The question is, where is Nagell getting this knowledge from, and whose purposes is he using it for from prison by October 8, 1967? If you take a look at the timeline of revelations to law enforcement about David Ferrie (mentioned as 'Harry De Fairy" in the Nagell letter), and the 1967 press coverage of Garrison's investigation, the gay angle isn't made public on that year. The upshot of Nagell's letter, in fact, seems to be painting Oswald as a wanna-be Commie who hoped to kill JFK and escape to Cuba. This isn't the picture we see today, and it may not have been Nagell's actual knowledge of Oswald. So why promote the patsy legend in 1967, and where did Nagell get his reading of Oswald and Ferrie from, since he's been shuttled between various incarcerations since 1963? Why throw Alpha 66 out there as Oswald's handlers, as Larry admits Nagell is doing in the letter?

Larry, it would be so good to have a work on Nagell that could dialogue with the Dick Russell book and also with the collected Nagell materials, including those provided by Malcolm Blunt and Bart Kamp as a .pdf collections last year. If these latter overlap with documents you have collected on your site, forgive me - I'm simultaneously enmeshed in my own 9/11 project and some personal issues, and I don't have time to review RCN at length. I would love to immerse myself in the Nagell enigmas and produce an accurate reading, but in the absence I have to stick to my main project. These are questions I have about the Nagell legend and the Russell book: Between September 1963 and the 1967 date of the 'Verdestein' letter, Nagell was shuttled among jaols, prisons and mental hospitals. How, in that 1967 letter, does he know about Alpha 66 and the David Ferrie interest in hypnosis? Were visitors from intelligence agencies feeding him the above factoids, in order to produce the kind of legend detailed in the letter, and presumably elsewhere, verbally, for a time? Did Nagell, in cooperation with the South Korean HID intel agency, run Oswald during his Atsugi days in operations against a Soviet officer and a Japanese communist? This is given lengthy treatment in the Russell book. Russell reports that after Nagell boasted that he had invented the Hidell alias, Nagell was shocked into silence when Russel suggested it was a combo of HID and the last letters of Nagell. Nagell's past experience with Oswald would have been a perfect gambit to approach Oswald if the Soviets indeed turned Nagell and sent him to monitor Oswald, and later assassinate him. Did the Soviets put Nagell on a boat traveling across the Gulf of Mexico to Cuba to meet Raul Castro, and possibly Fidel, as a prelude to his assassinating Oswald and leaving the US for an exile in Cuba? I realize that Nagell's assertion can now never be proven, but a dialogue between Russell and an established researcher such as yourself might produce some useful revelations. Because of my own interest in Nagell as a documentary film or feature film subject, I have more than once floated in EF posts my hope to talk to Russell, but these were either unnoticed or unacknowledged. Paul Brancato asked whether Nagell perceived Oswald as a shooter, a patsy, or an informant. This knowledge of how Nagell understood Oswald, and whether this understanding approached the actuality of Oswald, is a sizable lacuna in the Russell book: in an important sense, we can't know Nagell without knowing Oswald. Russell knew Nagell and researched his statements, hints, teases and jokes -- discussing these with Russell would be as significant to this case as being able to interview Gaeton Fonzi today about Veciana. Neither would give one a complete key to the JFKA, but they would give important background and settle many questions. If I had time, or if somebody would convince me that making the time would be of use, I could go through the Russell book and the documents you've collected and provide more dialogue points on those materials. I would do that to contribute to a work-in-progress that would see print someday. However, I hope that my points are part of the dialogue you hoped for. If more comes to me, I'll share it here. I am sure I am not the only one on EF with questions, and those members should raise them.

It is - There's some business where Olson empties his wallet in a trashcan, then we see a flashback where somebody tells him to do it. I think it's Lashbrook since that's who's mainly babysitting him in NYC. Rememebr, though, that this is in the -drama portion of the docudrama. The main show is in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh and Eric Olson reveal that the alleged straight dope is that Frank Olson was assassinated, and everything we've seen in the previous episodes was window dressing. That would be a great documentary title: The Alleged Straight Dope.

Larry, who is Nagell referring to as 'Bravo' in the substitution-coded Verdestein/Greenstein letter, if not Alpha? Did he infiltrate any exile camps, pretending to be an arms runner? Would really like to know, and also hear your take on any other coded references in the letter. "Patsy is needed! She is pro-Castor Oiler well-known to Bravo Club. Two Bravo members speak to Patsy, convince her they are boyfriends, buy her Cuber Liber Cocktail (minus rum), get her drunk on glory, tell her they are special emissaries to Yanquis Land personally by Young Regent of Isle of Cuber to give Xmas present to Young Regent of Yanquis Land . . . have "chosen" Patsy to help deliver Xmas present. Will be furnished Safe Conduct Pass to Isle of Cuber by Embassy in Mexico City. Will be given proper treatment on arrival. Oh, joy! Will live happily ever after. Can Patsy join Xmas Present Committee now?" https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-private-correspondence-of-richard-case-nagell Also, Nagell had no contact with any conspiracy or Oswald after New Orleans. -- Was this also Dick Russell's finding? How late in 1963 (prior to his September arrest) was Nagell still bound to kill Oswald or be exposed by the Soviets? Larry, don't retire yet. We need a monograph reading on Nagell, apart from the Russell book.

Nobody can really say, being that Dick Russell is somewhat inconclusive on the matter of how Nagell perceived Oswald. We also don't know, verbatim, what Nagell said after his arrest. We have the 1967 'Arturo Verdestein' letter, which Nagell wrote from prison to his friend Arthur Greenstein. That's always worth a new look. In it, Nagell paints Oswald as patsy-shooter-hypnosis victim (see link). Nagell may not have known Oswald's motives, involvements and affiliations fully. From reading Dick Russell, my sense is that Nagell knew Oswald had been an intelligence operative in Japan and probably knew, obliquely, that Oswald still was one in the US. Nagell may also have been telling tall tales in the 'Verdestein' letter. But, how would he have known about David Ferrie and hypnosis while imprisoned during 1967? Did CIA visitors feed that to him? And who was Arthur Greenstein really, anyway? How would he have understood Nagell's obscure references if he was really only a young US tourist that Nagell had met in Mexico? (Including the obscure outlining of a silver-backed currency.) The letter: https://kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/the-private-correspondence-of-richard-case-nagell

Nagell claimed that the Soviets sent him, as a double-agent, to spy on Alpha 66. Maybe the Soviets felt that killing Oswald after Nagell reported him as a designated patsy would deter a plot that they felt was low-level and instigated by Alpha. Keeping out of notoriety the defector they had once taken in and stopping an invasion of Cuba and its global consequences would also be a motive. Remember that JFK himself had had RFK tell Dobrynin that he feared a military coup and nuclear war under continued stress between the powers.