Benjamin Cole

39 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Benjamin, did you watch any cable news over the past two weeks of the 2016 campaign?

No. 

On 4/7/2021 at 11:38 AM, Ron Bulman said:

Nixon was subservient to Dulles under Eisenhower just trying to get along.  He wondered if he was implicated himself in the BOP, in turn the JFKA, and more.  Just a thought, partial speculation.

Prescott Bush was Nixon's mentor.  Allen Dulles was Prescott Bush's lawyer.  And I'd guess an associate of his son.

Ron Bulman---

My guess is Nixon was Nixon, and had a high IQ himself. The guy wrote books after all, which are not bad reading.

Who was using who?  Nixon is a strange character, deeply conflicted. His unforgivable sin was his role in helping to murder 6 million SE Asians. 

I suspect Nixon, like so many others, was dubious about the accuracy of the WC's conclusions. He was pressuring the CIA to clean up the Watergate situation for him. 

Once in the Oval Office, Nixon seemed to answer to no one in particular. I am not sure Nixon believed in anything, or felt true alliance with anyone. 

On 4/7/2021 at 7:34 AM, Cliff Varnell said:

Benjamin, I like your work on Nixon v. Helms 1971, although I'd add that Nixon tried 3 times to get the files on the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the overthrow of Diem in So. Vietnam -- soon after he came into the White House in '69, Oct. '71 and May '72.  Helms stiffed him him each and everytime.

I think Nixon would have learned more about the Kennedy Assassination from the Diem files, but who knows?

I'm less enthusiastic about your take on Trump.

Benjamin Cole's text in italic, my response in bold.

Come October, President Joe Biden will make a decision on whether to release the remaining 15,834 still-repressed files that were supposed to have been released under the JFK Records Act of 1992.

The JFK Act required that all the JFK files be made public in their entirety within 25 years, which of course, was 2017.

But back in October 2017, President Donald Trump caved to the warnings of then-CIA director Mike Pompeo, FBI director Christopher Wray, and the National Security State, and left the remaining 15,834 files either redacted or totally under wraps.

However, the mercurial Trump then also ordered the withheld files to be reviewed again within four years, perhaps seeking leverage over his adversaries in the intelligence communities.

Fast forward to present, Trump has been booted from office and the betting is that Biden will also cave before the National Security State, despite the JFK assassination having happened 58 years ago.

Yeah, my money's on non-disclosure.  I'd also bet there's nothing in those files that would tell us anything about the murder of JFK.  The cover-up, yes, but nothing about the murder itself ever made paper.

History is full of confounding realities. For all of his weaknesses, Trump was probably the better hope for full disclosure of the JFK records than Biden.

For Trump was often, perhaps usually, at odds with the National Security State, variously called the “invisible government” or the “shadow government,” and, of late, “The Deep State.”

The Deep State installed Trump into the White House.  In late October '16 the FBI had hundreds of thousands of H. Clinton e-mails on the laptop of a sex pervert married to a top Clinton aide.  They knew these e-mails were duplicates of what they already had. 

They also had the Steele Dossier, as did the rest of the US intel community.

On Oct. 28 FBI head James Comey announced a re-opened investigation into Clinton's e-mails which set off a media firestorm that lasted until the election.  Cable news was Bash Hillary TV 24 hours a day for 11 straight days.  If the Deep State wanted to take down Trump why wasn't the Steele Dossier dropped?

In one of his seemingly ubiquitous running battles, Trump in 2019 detailed then-US Attorney General Robert Barr to investigate the nation’s investigative agencies, to ascertain whether elements of the Deep State illegally colluded to first try to prevent his ascendance to the White House, and then to undermine his presidency.

"Prevent his ascendance"?  They greased his ascendance!

"Undermine his presidency"?  RussiaGate was entirely driven by Trump himself.  The Mueller investigation came about because Trump fired James Comey.  Mueller treated Trump with great delicacy.  He didn't go after the kids, didn't go after the finances, allowed Trump's lawyers to give non-answers to written questions, allowed Bill Barr to publicly misrepresent the Mueller Report for 2 months before giving a low-energy testimony to Congress.

The Mueller Report was a limited modified hang-out that had no repercussions.  The surveillance of Carter Page went no where, ditto the Steele Dossier.  Neither were reported on cable news prior to the '16 election.  The Deep State installed Trump and then covered his ass after he screwed up.

At present, the criminal investigation into what is called “Russiagate” is led John Durham, now special counsel to the Justice Department and the former US Attorney for the District of Connecticut (2018–2021).

Durham, originally tasked by Barr in May 2019 to investigate whether the invisible government had it in for Trump, has left the US Attorney’s Office with the advent of the Biden Administration, but has stayed on and is leading the criminal Russiagate investigation, as special counsel.e.  There;'s nothing to it.

The Dunham Probe was a Trump PR move.  There's nothing to it.

https://lawandcrime.com/awkward/durham-investigation-insiders-say-no-evidence-to-support-obamagate-has-been-found-in-18-months/

Like so many modern-day Washington look-sees, the Durham inquiry promises to be interminable yet inconclusive and spun thereafter by party-based PR machines and media mouthpieces.

Even a synopsis of the National Security State vs. Trump could consume a book. The famed Mueller investigation ended in a muddle, followed by a December 2019 report by the Department of Justice Inspector General that concluded that the FBI copiously lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, aka the FISA court, to gain permission to spy the former Trump campaign staffer Carter Page during the 2016 election.

So what?  Nothing came of it.  Zero.

To critics, Trump’s directives to Barr and Durham were the actions of a paranoid, or rank political theater. That could be. To put it mildly, Trump was and is a man of manifest flaws.

But then, what other aspiring presidential candidate had contemporaneously written about him in the op-ed section of The New York Times, by a one-time director of the CIA: “Donald J. Trump is not only unqualified for the job, but he may well pose a threat to our national security.”[2]

That line was penned by Michel J. Morell, professional lifer in the CIA, a onetime deputy director, and occasional acting director until his retirement in late 2013. 

The Morell missive was run in The New York Times even before Trump became President.

You don't have to be a Deep Stater to notice that Donald Trump has the emotional make-up of a hyper-spoiled 8 year old.

 

Cliff--

I am not here to defend Trump, or Nixon. 

My point is, we have an intel community that does not answer to the elected President. 

It is not OK, just because Nixon and Trump were unpopular in certain circles, and perhaps even deserved their unpopularity. In the case of Nixon, a case can be made he was a war criminal---what he did to SE Asia is heart-breaking. And he knew it was a lost cause.  

I disagree with your take on the Deep State backing Trump. 

I think the US globalist community was aghast at Trump, for good and bad reasons. 

But hey---different opinions is what makes an intellectual stew. I welcome yours. 

5 hours ago, Denny Zartman said:

I can see that you put some thought and work into your article, Benjamin. You also have courage to share your theory of the case and subject it to scrutiny.

I personally find much of the logic flawed and/or not supported by the evidence at hand. Too much goes into unsupported assumptions, and many important witnesses and events seem to be ignored.

No serious researcher asserts this.

Because someone doesn’t believe the evidence shows Oswald to be in the sixth floor snipers nest doesn’t mean that they believe he was a totally innocent bystander with absolutely no involvement on any level. He had a role to play during the shooting, even if it wasn’t as the sixth floor shooter.

Loyalty has nothing to do with expendability. A general would not refuse to send a soldier into battle simply because the soldier has shown loyalty to the military, any more than a general would send only disloyal soldiers into battle.

That’s why it appears that Oswald was to be killed during his apprehension. According to the official story, one officer (Tippit) had already drawn a weapon on Oswald, and another one hit Oswald in the face during his arrest. How do we know the handgun Oswald allegedly had on him (that either misfired and left a dent on the shell, or had the hammer come down on an officer’s hand and didn’t hit the shell at all) wasn’t one used by the police attempting and failing to shoot Oswald during the theater scuffle? More on that later...

You might be aware of the story of Jerry Coley, employee of the Dallas Morning News newspaper, who took a photographer down to the plaza and photographed what they believed was a puddle of blood. The feds later came down to the newspaper offices, took the negatives, and told Coley and the others to keep quiet about it all. Intrepid reporter Hugh Aynesworth reported that the puddle was merely a puddle of red soda pop (complete with a nearby broken soda bottle, I believe.)

Now, if you believe Coley’s story, and that the feds would come down  and confiscate a picture and tell multiple newspapermen to keep quiet about a puddle of cherry soda, what do you think they would have done or said to anyone who claimed to have been standing next to Oswald at the time of the shooting?

Oswald had a job to do. What that was, we do not know for certain. Because he was not seen by a reported witness at the time of the shooting does not automatically mean he was in the sixth floor sniper’s nest. He was seen on the first floor at 12:25 and again on the second floor at 12:32, and he reportedly said during interrogations that he was on the lower floors at the time of the shooting.

It’s not possible for someone in five minutes to run up four or five flights of stars, run the diagonal length of the floor from the northwest corner to the southeast corner through a maze of boxes, fire on the president, and then, in the next TWO minutes, again run the entire diagonal length of the sixth floor from the southeast corner to the northwest corner through a maze of boxes, stash the rifle, run down four flights of stairs (while not being seen by witnesses reportedly descending the stairs at the same time) and not be out of breath or noticeably sweating.

It’s just not possible. It’s really not. No matter how fanciful one’s imagination gets, it’s not possible to do all that in seven minutes and not be noticeably winded or sweating.

In my opinion, your theory breaks down there.

There are still more unanswered questions that arise from assuming Oswald was shooting from the sixth floor. You refer to Oswald as being fairly well-read and at least moderately versed in the art of intelligence and spycraft, as well as involved to a fairly high level in this particular operation as the designated fake shooter in your theory. Then please tell me why someone like Joseph Milteer could predict that Kennedy would be shot from an office building with a high powered rifle, and that someone would be picked up afterward to throw off the investigation, but Oswald could not?

Either Milteer knew it, which adds to your number of people wittingly involved, or Milteer guessed it. Milteer knew or guessed a patsy would be picked up, something that the comparatively worldly and more involved operationally Oswald did not know or could not guess. That’s very hard to believe, especially if Oswald is using his own rifle and carrying ID on him that links him to it.

So where was Oswald? Could he have been doing something like waiting on a phone call? He wouldn’t have gotten that call if he did. Apparently the power to the building went out just before the assassination and was restored just afterwards, disabling the phones and the elevators. According to Vincent Palamara’s “Honest Answers”, the power switch to the building was on the first floor, near the segregated lunchroom that Oswald often used and near an office. Could Oswald have been the one instructed to turn the power off and on? It would have kept him out of the public eye. And if he wasn’t the one who turned the building power off and on, who did? If it was someone else, doesn’t that just add to the number of conspirators involved?

And let’s not forget that there are a number of serious researchers out there that do believe Oswald was photographed outside the TSBD at the time of the assassination, so your assertion that Oswald was “invisible” at the time of the shooting is debatable to say the least.

I just don’t follow this logic. Was the false flag intended to be blamed on multiple shooters? Then who was the intended patsy to be picked up and blamed for shooting from the knoll? Why would anyone want to divert attention from their false flag? Aren't flags intended to attract attention?

The story of Amos Euins is so amusing when you realize that there were two cars worth of press people crawling north on Houston street straight toward the south face of the TSBD. One press person even had the time to point out a shooter who, by some accounts, either slowly withdrew the rifle barrel after the shooting, or, in Euins’s account, actually leaned out the window to get “a look at his work” - yet somehow not one photographer managed to snap a photograph of a person that was leaning out the window so far a fifteen-year-old could see the top of his head. The southern face of the building was bathed in bright sunlight and there was the sound of firing weapons coming from it, and two cars of professional press people managed to talk about it but not one managed to take one picture.

So curious. So convenient.

If Oswald only fired once in your scenario, who put down the other two shells on the floor?

Again, this is a false dichotomy. The only two options are not "Oswald was firing in the sniper's nest" or "Oswald was a bystander completely uninvolved in any way." Most serious students of this case believe he was involved, just not necessarily the shooter.

What’s your source on this? My research indicates LBJ brought it up himself immediately after Kennedy’s death.

 

Restrained? According to the official story, one officer had already drawn his weapon at Oswald, and another hit him in the face during the arrest. I’m also not convinced that Oswald was the one who pulled a gun and either had a misfire or had the hammer stopped. Either the shell had a dent or it didn't.

What’s more probable, that the worldly ex-Marine who was eventually killed with a handgun thought he was going to shoot his way to freedom, or that the DPD unsuccessfully tried to silence him for possibly the second time that day?

Obviously they did in Ruby’s case. And it seems Oswald did too, at least to how I’m hearing your theory.

Again, I just don't follow the logic that makes you come to this "Oswald fired once" theory. What are you basing it on, and who put down the other two shells reportedly found on the floor in the sniper's nest?

How do you arrive at the conclusion that the cast was washed prior to testing? Your quote from Pat Speer seems to indicate that the cast was washed and taken home after testing rather than thrown away as was custom.

Are we really going to entertain every possibility, no matter how farfetched? As a wise man once said, “Theoretical physics can prove an elephant can hang from a cliff with his tail tied to a daisy. But use your eyes, your common sense.” If you had a piece of paper with a curve on it found at the scene, or a piece of Saran Wrap found in Oswald’s pocket, or a witness that saw him washing his face with a garden hose, then maybe you could start to make a case for something like this. Without any evidence, it’s just fanciful talk that, IMHO hurts your theory rather than helps it.

I’d be interested to see you cite a court case where nitrate evidence was thrown out because of swirling air. Lawyer Mark Lane said that the negative nitrate cheek test would have been court admissible evidence that Oswald did not fire a rifle that day. Until I hear a persuasive argument by another lawyer as to why it wouldn’t be considered legally admissible in a court of law, I’m going to have to go with Lane’s interpretation of the contemporary rules of evidence.

Denny Z-

Thanks for reading, and you certainly raise a lot of reasonable challenges. 

Here goes with my responses---keep in mind I consider a reasonable premise that pre-JFKA witting participants are few, very few.  

1. "No serious researcher says LOH had nothing to do with it." OK, then we agree.

In my essay, I leave open that LOH may have had another role. Some researchers do suggest "Oswald had nothing to do with it." Even Garrison once said so, but he might have been indulging in rhetorical flourish. 

2. Was Oswald expendable? I am going to ask an unfair question. Can you detail another peacetime CIA mission in which a loyal CIA officer or serious asset was turned into a patsy, and slated for death? (The question is "unfair" as there may have been such a mission, and it is secret).  But I know of no such mission. 

Sure, in wartime, under extreme duress, decisions have to be made. But the JFKA, false, fake or otherwise, was a volitional peacetime mission, with options. If the CIA wanted JFK dead, they had many options. JFK could be poisoned, or maybe just run out of office by exposing his love life, if that was their goal.  

3. If the DPD was part the JFKA, and wanted LOH dead, they had ample opportunity at the Texas Theater. Listen, in Los Angeles, if a suspect draws weapon on the LAPD, he will be dead. I stand by my assessment. By the account of multiple witnesses, LOH drew a weapon on the DPD and lived. I call that remarkable restraint. Whether LOH's gun misfired etc., who knows. 

4. LOH not sweating in the second-floor coke machine encounter. LOH was a former Marine and 24 years old. Perhaps not a fitness buff, but you are talking about a young guy walking briskly down the stairs. It was not a hot day. LOH had 75-90 seconds to get there. People have paced off the TSBD walk many times, and it is doable. LOH feigned nonchalance, and was quickly vouched for by Truly. Marion Baker did not examine LOH, but hustled quickly past. 

5. If you have a photo of LOH outside of the TSBD at the time of the shooting, bring it on. 

6. The shells in the sniper's nest. Yes, supposedly there were three. Some say the evidence was monkeyed with before the photographer got there.

Or, LOH fired once and headed for the exit, and Eladio Del Valle tossed a couple shells down, and then fired in earnest. 

7. I do not think it is farfetched that LOH may have washed his face, or sweated, on his way to the Texas Theater, or inside the Texas Theater. Or visited the bathroom at Beckley. Or stuck a small piece of cardboard as a shield on his face when firing.  Why is this farfetched? 

The ordinary nitrate tests are no longer admissible court evidence, and are not used anymore. In briedm they are unreliable. 

Pat Sheer says the cheek cast itself was washed before Guinn did his fancy neutron thing. I stand by my assessment the cheek cast is inconclusive at best. I would not hang a man, or exonerate him, on such evidence. 

8. I would like to know who turned off the power to the TSBD too. LOH? A prankster? Possibly. I am not sure how turning off the power aids in the JFKA, fake, false-flag, or not. With the lift out, the shooters are trying to escape by the stairs, and now pursuers have no choice but to go up the stairs. Seems like a bad move to me. 

9. Euins credibility. Yes, Euins credibility can be challenged. Maybe Euins was a kook. No one else saw a bald man shooting. No one has a photo of the gunman, despite plenty of press photographers. But my false-flag fake assassination scenario holds up under different details. I just offered a version, with Del Valle. Sheesh, maybe the real shooters were on the Dal-tex roof top, and LOH fired twice and missing, while the real shooters did their work with silencers. 

10. The grassy knoll shooter? I contend Eladio Del Valle brought along the grassy knoll shooter to aid in his, Del Valle's escape. The diversion worked to a large extent. A grassy knoll shooter was not in Phillips' false flag, fake assassination plan. It was piggybacked on. 

Well, those are my responses. 

Thanks for reading. Obviously, there are a lot of opinions in this matter.  Perhaps we disagree, and that's okay. 

16 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Benjamin Cole--intriguing scenario. The piggybacking and small number of participants are appealing. Yet the devil is in the details, so some questions that come to mind. The fake-assassination attempt blamed on Castro makes a lot of sense in principle in keeping with known Cold War m.o. (Northwoods proposal, etc.), and also makes sense in how operatives could be part of it for patriotic reasons who would not knowingly be party to assassination of a president.

-- the objection, however, is "no one talked"--meaning here a witness of accepted credibility, or a document--of such a false-flag fake attempt. Would not someone close to the situation, among fellow agency employees or friends or family members, if not a participant personally, have learned what happened and talked? Yet no one of accepted credibility seems to have done so, nor does it seem any document of accepted credibility has turned up saying this. Is this a major objection or a minor objection? 

-- there is the difficulty, perhaps not insurmountable, but difficulty, of imagining the logistics of how an outsider, who does not belong in the TSBD, could both get to the 6th floor, and then exit, without being noticed by a single TSBD employee all of whom were questioned by the FBI concerning this very point, none of whom reported seeing anyone suspicious who did not belong in the building, anywhere near the 6th floor, that morning or at the time of the shooting. Thinking on this point has caused me to consider whether there was at least one more "inside man" in the TSBD apart from Oswald. Not necessarily as a shooter or himself seen in a 6th floor window, but as one who could assist in logistics, cover for Oswald, help smuggle in a firearm or a shooter or a person who was seen in the 6th floor window (if that is not to be explained solely by Oswald himself).

-- If as you assume Oswald was a CIA (or other agency) asset, do you have a conjecture on who Oswald reported to? Although there are other possible answers, one possibility might be someone inside the TSBD. 

-- But if there was more than Oswald, inside the TSBD, involved in a plot to fake an assassination attempt, this almost necessarily involves pre-planning to have Oswald obtain that job in the TSBD, rather than find employment somewhere else. (If Oswald was carrying out such a plot as the only one in his workplace, without a second man accomplice in the building, then all that would need to be assumed would be that Oswald arrange to find employment at any building on the likely parade route, not TSBD specifically.)

-- But if there was premeditated intent to place Oswald in the TSBD before he was there, how would that work exactly? It would again almost require supposition of a second "inside man" in the TSBD, one in control of hiring, on the TSBD end of it. The TSBD was owned by absentee owner Byrd said to be friends with LeMay (side question: is that friendship in fact verified?). But the on-site person of interest in this line of thinking might be Truly, who was not simply a hired manager but was on the board of directors. A lot of attention has been focused on Ruth Paine's phone call to Truly with some thinking that Ruth Paine must therefore have been knowing and witting of a plot, but that fails to explain how and why Linnie Mae Randle, that very Monday morning, would on her own initiative come over to where Ruth and Marina and other women were drinking coffee before Ruth called Truly, and Linnie Mae suggested that maybe Marina's husband could get a job where her brother Wesley had recently been hired, at the TSBD, following which Ruth made her phone call to Truly. If there was premeditation to have LHO employed in the TSBD, how is Linnie Mae's initiative to walk over and suggest just that, which both preceded and prompted Ruth's phone call, accounted for? If there was prior intent or premeditation at work in Lee ending up at TSBD, the logic would seem to lead more logically instead to what David Talbot asks in his book on Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard, whether the mechanism was to have the TSBD-employment idea suggested from Byrd/TSBD to Linnie Mae, prompting Linnie Mae to suggest that to Marina and Ruth. (Talbot considers Ruth not witting of anything other than what Ruth testified.) Furthermore, if Ruth had never made that phone call to Truly--if no more had happened following Linnie Mae's walking over and suggesting the TSBD employment idea to Ruth and Marina, than that either Marina or Ruth simply told Oswald of the TSBD job possibility and Oswald had followed through, Oswald would still have been hired by Truly anyway (no phone call from Ruth necessary at all)--according to Buell Wesley Frazier's book just out in which Frazier says Linnie Mae had told him, Wesley, of the situation with Lee's unemployment difficulty that same day, and Wesley says he himself the next day at work (Tue AM) asked his supervisor, Shelley, if Oswald could be hired at TSBD, and Shelley spoke to Truly and Shelley got back to Frazier later that day with a green light message from Truly to have Oswald come in for an interview. This is what Frazier says in his current book. So either Oswald's hiring at TSBD was the random accident usually assumed, or, if there was premeditation and intent concerning Oswald's placement there, the focus of interest would most logically be on Linnie Mae Randle, outside the TSBD, and inside the TSBD, Truly. (Then there is the freak accident that Linnie Mae Randle herself amazingly appears on a DPD document listing her as an employee of TSBD--although she did not commute physically to the building and there is no other sign she worked there--and that has another explanation as a mistake.) Do you have thoughts on this question Benjamin, of the mechanics of Lee's TSBD employment and whether that was preplanned or accidental at the time of Lee's hiring, in terms of how it works with your scenario?

-- final comment: I am not quite as certain as you that officials of a powerful spy agency of the US government would not knowingly burn an asset, considering him expendable in the service of greater Cold War interests, especially if his effective usefulness was over. Would that be considered any more morally objectionable in internal spook reasoning than generals sacrificing some foot soldier's life to win a battle in a war?      

Anyway thanks for your essay.

Greg D.--

1. No one talked about the false flag fake assassination attempt. Indeed! To do so would be to admit a CIA op backfired with horrid results. That makes Keystone Kops look smart. I think the number of people who knew about LOH as a false-flag shooter would have been Phillips, and one superior at CIA. Then the two guys Philips brought in to help LOH. If they were Del Valle and Hermininio, they were dead by 1967. Phillips sort of talked about it. 

2. A "stranger" getting into the TSBD. My understanding is some of the offices inside the TSBD were rented out to non-TSBD businesses. Then you have the usual ruses of looking like a delivery man, etc. Maybe the true assassins even got in the night before, simple lock-and-key job. 

3. I think at the time, LOH was reporting to Phillips. I doubt anyone inside TSBD knew anything. There is the curious fellow Shelley. 

4. Getting LOH the job inside the TSBD. That's a tough one. LOH seems to have several  jobs with "connected" companies, that is companies linked to the National Security state. Did Angleton turn some gears to get LOH inside the TBSD? I don't know. Perhaps it was happenstance. 

One could posit if LOH had not gotten a job at the TSBD, then he would have shot at JFK from the top of the Dal-Tex building. He was not supposed to hit anyway. The false-flag fake assassination attempt does not need the TSBD.  

5. Intentionally killing LOH, as part of a real JFKA planned by CIA high-ups. Well, maybe. I contend CIA higher-ups did have LOH executed, by their Mafia buddies. But more likely they wanted him to disappear, show up in Cuba, after a false flag attempt. 

I will tell you or anybody another strange part of the story: 

LOH's wallet was found at the scene of the Tippit murder. 

So, of the hundreds (maybe thousands) of street murders in the US in 1963, only in the Tippit case did the murderer helpfully leave behind his wallet at the scene of the crime. 

Or, it was planted after the fact.

The planting seems more likely. So who planted LOH's wallet at the Tippit shooting? That adds (likely) another participant in the JFKA. 

On 4/7/2021 at 1:38 PM, Richard Booth said:

I have to say here that your "piggyback" theory is incredibly compelling. I think it is a perfect analysis of how the plan was carried out by a small group at the very top, a plan that allowed them to both utilize the full force of the CIA without underlings knowing that their actions were in furtherance of a conspiracy to assassinate the president. 

I differ from your conclusions in that I believe the "piggybackers" -- those who knew the JFK hit was the ultimate goal -- were more than just 3-4 people. I suspect it was probably closer to 6-8 people and that the poison-pills injected into the plot (such as the WW3 virus) guaranteed that everyone at the agency would participate in a cover-up in order to protect themselves, protect their loyal officers, protect the country, protect the agency.

Catch-22: Containing Discovery of the Piggyback

The "poison pills" woven into the plot essentially guaranteed that anyone at CIA who was able to figure out that their various operations were hijacked or piggybacked upon would be forced to cover-up that fact to protect their own job, to protect their officers and assets, to protect the country, and to protect the CIA.

Inevitably, some in CIA would have figured out what happened. It was inevitable. However, many of these people were probably loyal intelligence professionals who loved their jobs, believed in the CIA, and supported their subordinates. They dare not share their concerns or speak up for it they did, they not only would likely have had little hard evidence to prove their suspicion, but they would commit career suicide if they spoke up, they would endanger the very agency they believed in and loved, and they would have destroyed what they believed was a necessary institution.

In short, speaking up would have in their view endangered the national security of the country. They would be in a Catch-22: "I know what happened here ... but if I talk about it, it could destroy the CIA and that in turn would gravely damage our national security and do more harm to this country than the KGB or Soviets could ever hope to achieve on their own." The would be stuck. No choice but to keep their mouth shut.  

Win Scott

I believe that Winston Scott is one of the people who did figure out that his station, his assets, and his personnel were used by the piggybackers. He figured it out. Probably rather quickly. It seems the most Scott did (as far as we know) about this was keep some evidence of this in his safe: holding onto recordings of the Oswald impersonator on the phone in Mexico and holding on to photos of Oswald (or an Oswald impersonator) in his safe. He probably kept these things for himself, a memento, a reminder, maybe ... more likely as "insurance" for himself.

Richard Helms said in the PBS Frontline documentary (about Scott having photos and audio of Oswald) "that's fine for Win Scott to say, but he doesn't have any evidence so what he is talking about?". 

What PBS Frontline left out is that Jim Angleton hopped on a plane--in such haste he forgot to even bring his passport--to Mexico where he confiscated the evidence from Scott's safe before Scott could even be buried. When you watch that PBS Frontline documentary, pause it when Richard Helms said "that's fine for when Scott to say ... but what is he talking about?" and then pick-up and read Jim DiEugenio's Destiny Betrayed chapter 16 "Mexico City and Langley." Then pick up John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee and read the chapter "1963, Mexico City- Pandora's Box" (page 614-706) -- regardless of what you may think about Armstrong's central thesis, his chapter on Mexico City serves as the best scholarship on what happened in Mexico City and is without equal in research in this case. It's that important.

The Piggybackers: Compartmentalization is the key

I believe that Angleton and Dulles were at the top of the plot. The WWIII virus and various other "poison pill" components of the plot were Angleton's handiwork. The key really is compartmentalization, where various people involved in things like setting up Oswald don't know they're participating in an assassination plot. All they know is they're handling a sensitive clandestine project. Maybe they think they're working on a Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation, maybe some think it's one of the Castro assassination plots, and more than likely many of the assets and agents utilized had no idea of the bigger picture, they only have very specific direct orders to do (A) (B) and (C) and they don't question why, they just do what they are asked without any need to know why.

Your analysis is astute, it's a very good analysis of the mechanics of how a compartmentalized operation can be carried out without key people in the operation knowing the bigger picture. I do disagree with some of the things you have suggested, however. Here are some of my thoughts on that:

Joannides

You mention a few times Joannides as a possible figure at the top who was part of the piggybacking -- I disagree there and think that Joannides was most probably/most likely participating in what he thought was a Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation where DRE, Ed Butler and INCA and all these assets were part of an operation designed to discredit the FPCC by linking it directly to Russia and Cuba, to try to show the organization was a front for the KGB and DGI. James McCord, however, I suspect may have been one of the people in the FPCC discrediting operation who might have also been aware of how the operation would be piggybacked. 

Once 11/22/63 happened, those DRE boys wasted no time taking advantage of the situation by sending their PR packet on Oswald to newspapers and radio stations to link the assassination to Castro. I view this as DRE being opportunists. They saw an opportunity to spin the assassination in a way that furthered their own goals in a way that aligned with their genuine beliefs. For example, I can see a situation whereby Bringuier or some of his DRE friends really did believe that Oswald was a Castro agent meanwhile Joannides knew better, knew that Oswald's "connections" to Castro were merely part of a legend being put together as part of the FPCC discrediting operation.  

David Phillips

I think he was aware of the piggybacking/assassination plot, and that he is central to the Mexico City stuff.

The things that happened in Mexico City look less like an operation targeting the FPCC than they do an operation designed to make Oswald look like a DGI/KGB assassin frantically seeking an escape route to Cuba for his upcoming starring role in "the big event." What happened in Mexico City makes little sense in terms of a FPCC discrediting operation ... though perhaps it was framed as one by Phillips to his subordinates and co-workers. 

The whole Kostikov and "Department 13" stuff, and the "Oswald trying to get to Cuba" stuff--all this makes sense only in terms of painting Oswald as a DGI/KGB assassination and sabotage agent who was quite clearly trying to seek some kind of escape route to Cuba.   

The Piggyback Players

I have my own suspicions who the 6-8 people aware of the JFK hit were, the "piggybackers" who designed and carried out the plan that Angleton put together. The compartmentalization allowed the piggybackers to have the entire agency at their disposal, every resource and department they needed. All it takes is one key figure in each necessary department. By having these 6-8 people within all these CIA departments not only do they have the full power of the CIA at their disposal to carry out the plan but they also guarantee that everyone in these departments is forced into the cover-up after the fact to protect their own jobs, their own departments, and personnel who contributed to operations that were "piggybacked."

For example, it can be shown that the piggybackers probably had people carrying out actions for them within: the Directorate of Operations, the Domestic Operations Division, the Domestic Contacts Division, Counter-Intelligence, the Office of Security, the Western Hemisphere Division, The Soviet Russia division, the Miami station, and the Mexico City station, just to name a few. 

In doing it this way, it also ensured that virtually every department in the CIA would be required to participate in the cover-up for all the reasons stated previously.

Here are my nominees for the Piggyback Players -- those who knew the JFK was the target and who exploited other "legitimate" operations to that end:

• Allen Dulles -- no longer DCI but still having meetings with key piggybackers who were still at CIA
• James Angleton -- I believe he was the leading figure who put the entire plan together 
• David Phillips -- key to Mexico City and in hijacking Joannides' FPCC operation from New Orleans by telling subordinates in Mexico City that what they were doing there was just an extension of the FPCC operation
• William K. Harvey -- I haven't figured out his role but suspect it relates to sourcing shooters 
• Howard Hunt -- a piggybacker embedded in multiple areas at CIA. He was chief of covert operations in Tracy Barnes' Domestic Operations Division, he was "on-loan" to Mexico City Station when the Oswald stuff went down, and he was also embedded into the Soviet Russia division by Angleton. (see Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 5 by Vasilios Vazakas) I believe Hunt was a central person for the piggybackers and served several different roles. He was no "bench warmer" like he claimed in his limited hang-out deathbed confession which curiously omits James Angleton, while absurdly accusing Cord Meyer and LBJ.
• Sergio Arcacha-Smith 
• Eladio Del Valle 
• Herminio Diaz Garcia

Much of this is speculation, but when you have all of the information surrounding these people and their actions, the puzzle pieces begin to fall together.

A plot like this can be carried out with even a dozen people being aware that JFK was the target, basically because the "poison pill" (or "virus" as Newman called it) was embedded into the plot in several different forms which essentially guaranteed that everyone would be forced to participate in the cover-up in order to ensure that the entire CIA wasn't destroyed. Anyone and everyone at CIA who might have figured out what happened was left in a compromising position by having their own officers and departments unknowingly--in many cases--carry out central parts of the plot.

The Most Secret CIA "Family Jewel"

When Angleton's replacement, George Kalaris came on board, he commissioned former CIA officer Cleveland Cram to come out of retirement to do a study of Angleton's reign from 1954 to 1974 to "find out what in hell happened. What were these guys doing."

Cram took the assignment and was given access to all CIA documents on covert operations. The study, entitled History of the Counterintelligence Staff 1954-1974, took six years to complete and was finished in 1981. Cram produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages.

Cram's approximately four-thousand-page study has never been declassified.

It remains locked in the CIA's vaults.

I often wonder if Cram put together what happened on 11/22/63, figuring out James Angleton's most egregious, sinister, and successful operation and that this study will never be declassified, so we'll never know. 

However, as Grover Proctor said, I think that the case has been figured out. It has been solved: "Who says that it hasn't come out already?" The marketplace of ideas has been flooded with an enormous number of opposing and contradictory "solutions," some by well-meaning and hard-working researchers, and some which are obvious and blatant attempts at disinformation. Who is to say that, somewhere in that morass of opinion and deception, the real answer hasn't already been revealed?"

I believe that it has been figured out, and this post by Benjamin Cole fits squarely within that description.

IMHO of course.

 

Richard Booth:

Well, our viewpoints have a lot in common, and a few variances, but that's OK. I almost like your viewpoint better. 

That is amazing stuff about the Cram History. 

Call me naive, I find it hard to swallow that many people, in official positions, in fact planned the assassination of a sitting US President.  

Maybe I am like Robert Blakey and just can't believe people could be so foul. Blakely wised up part-way, and maybe I will too some day. 

I am prepared to believe complicity was rife after the JFKA, and that someone fairly high in the CIA or intel operated with the Mob to get LOH shot. 

But thanks for reading, and I look forward to more discussions about this, the best detective story ever written. 

3 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

 

The five guys who organized the JFKA (so I speculate):

Averell Harriman

George H.W. Bush

Carl Jenkins

Henry Hecksher

Charles Siragusa (perhaps unwitting)

The names of the shooters, spotters, communication specialists, observers, misdirection artists -- lost to history.

The five guys who organized the LHOA (sis)

Harriman

Bush

David Phillips

Edward Lansdale

Jack Ruby

The names of potential back-up patsies are found in the roster of usual suspects, most especially Allen Dulles.

Obviously, I cannot refute your scenario.

I have only offered what I think is a credible scenario. 

I still tend to lean to "fewer is better" in terms of pre-event JFKA believability. 

After the event, complicity was a patriotic (and ruling class) duty. 

4 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Benjamin Cole--intriguing scenario. The piggybacking and small number of participants are appealing. Yet the devil is in the details, so some questions that come to mind. The fake-assassination attempt blamed on Castro makes a lot of sense in principle in keeping with known Cold War m.o. (Northwoods proposal, etc.), and also makes sense in how operatives could be part of it for patriotic reasons who would not knowingly be party to assassination of a president.

-- the objection, however, is "no one talked"--meaning here a witness of accepted credibility, or a document--of such a false-flag fake attempt. Would not someone close to the situation, among fellow agency employees or friends or family members, if not a participant personally, have learned what happened and talked? Yet no one of accepted credibility seems to have done so, nor does it seem any document of accepted credibility has turned up saying this. Is this a major objection or a minor objection? 

-- there is the difficulty, perhaps not insurmountable, but difficulty, of imagining the logistics of how an outsider, who does not belong in the TSBD, could both get to the 6th floor, and then exit, without being noticed by a single TSBD employee all of whom were questioned by the FBI concerning this very point, none of whom reported seeing anyone suspicious who did not belong in the building, anywhere near the 6th floor, that morning or at the time of the shooting. Thinking on this point has caused me to consider whether there was at least one more "inside man" in the TSBD apart from Oswald. Not necessarily as a shooter or himself seen in a 6th floor window, but as one who could assist in logistics, cover for Oswald, help smuggle in a firearm or a shooter or a person who was seen in the 6th floor window (if that is not to be explained solely by Oswald himself).

-- If as you assume Oswald was a CIA (or other agency) asset, do you have a conjecture on who Oswald reported to? Although there are other possible answers, one possibility might be someone inside the TSBD. 

-- But if there was more than Oswald, inside the TSBD, involved in a plot to fake an assassination attempt, this almost necessarily involves pre-planning to have Oswald obtain that job in the TSBD, rather than find employment somewhere else. (If Oswald was carrying out such a plot as the only one in his workplace, without a second man accomplice in the building, then all that would need to be assumed would be that Oswald arrange to find employment at any building on the likely parade route, not TSBD specifically.)

-- But if there was premeditated intent to place Oswald in the TSBD before he was there, how would that work exactly? It would again almost require supposition of a second "inside man" in the TSBD, one in control of hiring, on the TSBD end of it. The TSBD was owned by absentee owner Byrd said to be friends with LeMay (side question: is that friendship in fact verified?). But the on-site person of interest in this line of thinking might be Truly, who was not simply a hired manager but was on the board of directors. A lot of attention has been focused on Ruth Paine's phone call to Truly with some thinking that Ruth Paine must therefore have been knowing and witting of a plot, but that fails to explain how and why Linnie Mae Randle, that very Monday morning, would on her own initiative come over to where Ruth and Marina and other women were drinking coffee before Ruth called Truly, and Linnie Mae suggested that maybe Marina's husband could get a job where her brother Wesley had recently been hired, at the TSBD, following which Ruth made her phone call to Truly. If there was premeditation to have LHO employed in the TSBD, how is Linnie Mae's initiative to walk over and suggest just that, which both preceded and prompted Ruth's phone call, accounted for? If there was prior intent or premeditation at work in Lee ending up at TSBD, the logic would seem to lead more logically instead to what David Talbot asks in his book on Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard, whether the mechanism was to have the TSBD-employment idea suggested from Byrd/TSBD to Linnie Mae, prompting Linnie Mae to suggest that to Marina and Ruth. (Talbot considers Ruth not witting of anything other than what Ruth testified.) Furthermore, if Ruth had never made that phone call to Truly--if no more had happened following Linnie Mae's walking over and suggesting the TSBD employment idea to Ruth and Marina, than that either Marina or Ruth simply told Oswald of the TSBD job possibility and Oswald had followed through, Oswald would still have been hired by Truly anyway (no phone call from Ruth necessary at all)--according to Buell Wesley Frazier's book just out in which Frazier says Linnie Mae had told him, Wesley, of the situation with Lee's unemployment difficulty that same day, and Wesley says he himself the next day at work (Tue AM) asked his supervisor, Shelley, if Oswald could be hired at TSBD, and Shelley spoke to Truly and Shelley got back to Frazier later that day with a green light message from Truly to have Oswald come in for an interview. This is what Frazier says in his current book. So either Oswald's hiring at TSBD was the random accident usually assumed, or, if there was premeditation and intent concerning Oswald's placement there, the focus of interest would most logically be on Linnie Mae Randle, outside the TSBD, and inside the TSBD, Truly. (Then there is the freak accident that Linnie Mae Randle herself amazingly appears on a DPD document listing her as an employee of TSBD--although she did not commute physically to the building and there is no other sign she worked there--and that has another explanation as a mistake.) Do you have thoughts on this question Benjamin, of the mechanics of Lee's TSBD employment and whether that was preplanned or accidental at the time of Lee's hiring, in terms of how it works with your scenario?

-- final comment: I am not quite as certain as you that officials of a powerful spy agency of the US government would not knowingly burn an asset, considering him expendable in the service of greater Cold War interests, especially if his effective usefulness was over. Would that be considered any more morally objectionable in internal spook reasoning than generals sacrificing some foot soldier's life to win a battle in a war?      

Anyway thanks for your essay.

Greg D-

Thanks for reading, and asking such trenchant questions. 

I will have to re-read your thoughtful reply a few times, and then gin up a response. 

Sadly, I have a day job even at my age, so wait for the week-end. 

16 hours ago, Richard Booth said:

Good point John. I agree with you.

I think it was a complex affair planned at very high levels with Jim Angleton and Allan Dulles at the top. 

The only way this works is if you get people in key departments participating in the plot without them knowing they are participating in JFK's assassination. By making sure that you have people in every key department contributing you guarantee they will all cover it up after the fact.

The fact that this was planned for Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Maryland shows it was definitely bigger than a few Cuban exiles hijacking something.

I agree with Ben's analysis of how a plot was hijacked, but propose the inverse of what he said: that very high level people created and sold something other than an assassination plot and they pulled a bait and switch. 

I have to concede, if there really were CIA-assisted or planned bona-fide assassination plots in Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington D.C. and Maryland, then there had be be a squad somewhere inside military intel or the CIA working details out. 

That is, more witting participants than I think is likely. 

But some of these other plots look a little thin, and there is such a thing as a lone-nut gunman. See the Reagan shooting. Some lady-nut pointed a gun at President Ford.  

The Chicago plots remain tantalizing, but appear also to involve Cubans. 

10 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

So basically your plot absolves CIA central command, though you say it’s at least possible that Angleton and Dulles might be in on it. And you still base Phillips’ involvement to Veciana’s stories? I was on that page for a long time, but no longer believe it. Well, who knows? 
I think like Cliff that the killers, the actual shooters and those for whom they worked, had an agenda different than Cuba - Vietnam. Castro lived out his days in relative peace, unlike millions of SE Asians. This is why I think it unlikely that the shooters were Cuban. Going down the trail of the Cuban exiles is surely suggestive, and they certainly had a grudge. But they never got what they wanted. Also down that hole are CIA/Mafia connections. The shenanigans at the autopsy, the murder of Oswald, all done by forces not engaged in with the original false flag operation or the piggybacked one, for expediency, rallying around the flag and the new Prez, or their own self interests. In a nutshell, changing Cuba policy was the target of both plots. It does seem logical, and I would bet it’s a majority opinion that Cuban exiles were at the heart of it. 
My opinion differs, and that all it is - an opinion - from yours because I think the piggybackers set up the false flag operation before they hijacked it, providing cover for themselves. I think the CIA/Military nexus is at the heart, and that Lansdale is a more suspicious character than Phillips. I incline towards outsourced assassins that did not include Oswald and were not shooting from the TSBD, either Corsican or from that drug running clique, shooters for hire. What I really disagree with is the notion that some Cuban exiles took advantage on their own and turned a faked attempt into a real assassination. 
 

Paul B-

Of course, your scenario is entirely possible as well. 

Not to challenge you, but to foment conversation, could you describe your scenario in terms of number of witting participants? 

And what was LOH's level of involvement in your scenario? 

Did CIA brass deliberately make LOH a patsy, despite him being a loyal, or at least serviceable assets for years? 

How and when did LOH determine he was a patsy? 

Did CIA brass intend for LOH to be dead in the immediate aftermath of the JFKA? Otherwise, there would be a lot of risk LOH would begin to talk about what he knew. 

Surely, John Newman has taken a whack at Veciana. But I find Newman curiously peevish in some of his commentary about Veciana, and also demanding of excruciatingly strict timelines from a man in his winter, decades from events.

Paper records can be lost, stolen or faked.  Could Newman be led up the wrong tree by some planted documents? 

Many people consider Phillips' claim he did not even know who was Veciana to be a stretch. 

Well, let us see Newman comes up with. He is being rather coy. 

10 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

A long overdue exercise, Benjamin, great thread.

I like to approach the fact of conspiracy with a similar "constraint."

Thanks, Cliff. 

I cannot prove anything. My gut tells me the plot to kill JFK had to be small, very small in terms of knowing participants. 

That said, I do not regard my scenario as the be-all, end-all. It is a description of how a plot could be very small, and dovetails with certain undisputed facts about the case. 

10 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Benjamin - It’s hard for me to square the Oswald Legend, which I think most would agree was orchestrated by his handlers, with his possible  involvement as a shooter. After all, the footprints of Intelligence surrounding Oswald throughout his life up to New Orleans and beyond would have remained unnoticed were it not for the assassination. They are easily explained as parts of other Intelligence operations. The Legend made him a good patsy, but I cannot imagine him accepting the patsy role wittingly. I agree with the logic that he would have been watching the motorcade, not shooting at it.  Investigators have been plagued with rabbit holes over the 58+ years, and personally I think the biggest of these is Ozzie himself. Can we analyze his movements before and after, and avoid the elements that were part of his Legend, such as firearm ownership, proCastro sympathies, Walker shooting, multiple wallets, trips to the Mexico Embassies etc? Your analysis presumes his guilt in some manner, and you try to fit everything into that envelope. Mine presumes his innocence and does likewise. Meanwhile, the murderers remain unknown, unacknowledged, and unpunished. That’s a Rabbit Hole. There are other ways of seeing his movements, and removing the bits that seem planted is useful in my opinion. 

I do think the idea of a piggyback operation is very logical, and it has been posited by others. Your theory needs the guilty being named, or guessed at anyway, and I’m talking about the Cabal that hijacked the false flag operation. If Oswald, involved or not, drinking a coke or not, expecting help disappearing afterwards or not, having and using a handgun or not, going to MC or not, shooting a police officer or not, etc etc, didn’t kill JFK, who did? 

Paul B.--

"Your theory needs the guilty being named, or guessed at anyway, and I’m talking about the Cabal that hijacked the false flag operation."--PB

That's the point of my article!

The "guilty" are some relatively low-level exiles who piggybacked on Phillips' PR stunt.  Eladio Del Valle for example, but maybe some other bald guy, or maybe even a guy wearing a fake bald-looking beanie cap as a disguise.   

One could posit "the guilty" are those who intentionally leaked the false-flag plan to the exiles (and that could go up to Dulles or Angleton), or were sloppy and the false-flag assassination plot leaked.  

Or maybe Phillips showed extraordinarily bad judgement, and hired Cuban exiles to do the false-flag job in combo with LOH, and the exiles did it their way, for real. 

As I said, where the CIA higher-ups probably became involved was in the cover-up and murder of LOH. Somebody had to promise something to Marcello (or perhaps a guy named Civello) to get Ruby to do the deed. Marcello was going to extract assurances from the highest levels. 

And Blakely said the LBJ Administration backed off of mob-hunting. 

Anyways, that my guess. 

5 hours ago, Richard Booth said:

I have to say here that your "piggyback" theory is incredibly compelling. I think it is a perfect analysis of how the plan was carried out by a small group at the very top, a plan that allowed them to both utilize the full force of the CIA without underlings knowing that their actions were in furtherance of a conspiracy to assassinate the president. 

I differ from your conclusions in that I believe the "piggybackers" -- those who knew the JFK hit was the ultimate goal -- were more than just 3-4 people. I suspect it was probably closer to 6-8 people and that the poison-pills injected into the plot (such as the WW3 virus) guaranteed that everyone at the agency would participate in a cover-up in order to protect themselves, protect their loyal officers, protect the country, protect the agency.

Catch-22: Containing Discovery of the Piggyback

The "poison pills" woven into the plot essentially guaranteed that anyone at CIA who was able to figure out that their various operations were hijacked or piggybacked upon would be forced to cover-up that fact to protect their own job, to protect their officers and assets, to protect the country, and to protect the CIA.

Inevitably, some in CIA would have figured out what happened. It was inevitable. However, many of these people were probably loyal intelligence professionals who loved their jobs, believed in the CIA, and supported their subordinates. They dare not share their concerns or speak up for it they did, they not only would likely have had little hard evidence to prove their suspicion, but they would commit career suicide if they spoke up, they would endanger the very agency they believed in and loved, and they would have destroyed what they believed was a necessary institution.

In short, speaking up would have in their view endangered the national security of the country. They would be in a Catch-22: "I know what happened here ... but if I talk about it, it could destroy the CIA and that in turn would gravely damage our national security and do more harm to this country than the KGB or Soviets could ever hope to achieve on their own." The would be stuck. No choice but to keep their mouth shut.  

Win Scott

I believe that Winston Scott is one of the people who did figure out that his station, his assets, and his personnel were used by the piggybackers. He figured it out. Probably rather quickly. It seems the most Scott did (as far as we know) about this was keep some evidence of this in his safe: holding onto recordings of the Oswald impersonator on the phone in Mexico and holding on to photos of Oswald (or an Oswald impersonator) in his safe. He probably kept these things for himself, a memento, a reminder, maybe ... more likely as "insurance" for himself.

Richard Helms said in the PBS Frontline documentary (about Scott having photos and audio of Oswald) "that's fine for Win Scott to say, but he doesn't have any evidence so what he is talking about?". 

What PBS Frontline left out is that Jim Angleton hopped on a plane--in such haste he forgot to even bring his passport--to Mexico where he confiscated the evidence from Scott's safe before Scott could even be buried. When you watch that PBS Frontline documentary, pause it when Richard Helms said "that's fine for when Scott to say ... but what is he talking about?" and then pick-up and read Jim DiEugenio's Destiny Betrayed chapter 16 "Mexico City and Langley." Then pick up John Armstrong's Harvey and Lee and read the chapter "1963, Mexico City- Pandora's Box" (page 614-706) -- regardless of what you may think about Armstrong's central thesis, his chapter on Mexico City serves as the best scholarship on what happened in Mexico City and is without equal in research in this case. It's that important.

The Piggybackers: Compartmentalization is the key

I believe that Angleton and Dulles were at the top of the plot. The WWIII virus and various other "poison pill" components of the plot were Angleton's handiwork. The key really is compartmentalization, where various people involved in things like setting up Oswald don't know they're participating in an assassination plot. All they know is they're handling a sensitive clandestine project. Maybe they think they're working on a Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation, maybe some think it's one of the Castro assassination plots, and more than likely many of the assets and agents utilized had no idea of the bigger picture, they only have very specific direct orders to do (A) (B) and (C) and they don't question why, they just do what they are asked without any need to know why.

Your analysis is astute, it's a very good analysis of the mechanics of how a compartmentalized operation can be carried out without key people in the operation knowing the bigger picture. I do disagree with some of the things you have suggested, however. Here are some of my thoughts on that:

Joannides

You mention a few times Joannides as a possible figure at the top who was part of the piggybacking -- I disagree there and think that Joannides was most probably/most likely participating in what he thought was a Fair Play for Cuba Committee operation where DRE, Ed Butler and INCA and all these assets were part of an operation designed to discredit the FPCC by linking it directly to Russia and Cuba, to try to show the organization was a front for the KGB and DGI. James McCord, however, I suspect may have been one of the people in the FPCC discrediting operation who might have also been aware of how the operation would be piggybacked. 

Once 11/22/63 happened, those DRE boys wasted no time taking advantage of the situation by sending their PR packet on Oswald to newspapers and radio stations to link the assassination to Castro. I view this as DRE being opportunists. They saw an opportunity to spin the assassination in a way that furthered their own goals in a way that aligned with their genuine beliefs. For example, I can see a situation whereby Bringuier or some of his DRE friends really did believe that Oswald was a Castro agent meanwhile Joannides knew better, knew that Oswald's "connections" to Castro were merely part of a legend being put together as part of the FPCC discrediting operation.  

David Phillips

I think he was aware of the piggybacking/assassination plot, and that he is central to the Mexico City stuff.

The things that happened in Mexico City look less like an operation targeting the FPCC than they do an operation designed to make Oswald look like a DGI/KGB assassin frantically seeking an escape route to Cuba for his upcoming starring role in "the big event." What happened in Mexico City makes little sense in terms of a FPCC discrediting operation ... though perhaps it was framed as one by Phillips to his subordinates and co-workers. 

The whole Kostikov and "Department 13" stuff, and the "Oswald trying to get to Cuba" stuff--all this makes sense only in terms of painting Oswald as a DGI/KGB assassination and sabotage agent who was quite clearly trying to seek some kind of escape route to Cuba.   

The Piggyback Players

I have my own suspicions who the 6-8 people aware of the JFK hit were, the "piggybackers" who designed and carried out the plan that Angleton put together. The compartmentalization allowed the piggybackers to have the entire agency at their disposal, every resource and department they needed. All it takes is one key figure in each necessary department. By having these 6-8 people within all these CIA departments not only do they have the full power of the CIA at their disposal to carry out the plan but they also guarantee that everyone in these departments is forced into the cover-up after the fact to protect their own jobs, their own departments, and personnel who contributed to operations that were "piggybacked."

For example, it can be shown that the piggybackers probably had people carrying out actions for them within: the Directorate of Operations, the Domestic Operations Division, the Domestic Contacts Division, Counter-Intelligence, the Office of Security, the Western Hemisphere Division, The Soviet Russia division, the Miami station, and the Mexico City station, just to name a few. 

In doing it this way, it also ensured that virtually every department in the CIA would be required to participate in the cover-up for all the reasons stated previously.

Here are my nominees for the Piggyback Players -- those who knew the JFK was the target and who exploited other "legitimate" operations to that end:

• Allen Dulles -- no longer DCI but still having meetings with key piggybackers who were still at CIA
• James Angleton -- I believe he was the leading figure who put the entire plan together 
• David Phillips -- key to Mexico City and in hijacking Joannides' FPCC operation from New Orleans by telling subordinates in Mexico City that what they were doing there was just an extension of the FPCC operation
• William K. Harvey -- I haven't figured out his role but suspect it relates to sourcing shooters 
• Howard Hunt -- a piggybacker embedded in multiple areas at CIA. He was chief of covert operations in Tracy Barnes' Domestic Operations Division, he was "on-loan" to Mexico City Station when the Oswald stuff went down, and he was also embedded into the Soviet Russia division by Angleton. (see Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 5 by Vasilios Vazakas) I believe Hunt was a central person for the piggybackers and served several different roles. He was no "bench warmer" like he claimed in his limited hang-out deathbed confession which curiously omits James Angleton, while absurdly accusing Cord Meyer and LBJ.
• Sergio Arcacha-Smith 
• Eladio Del Valle 
• Herminio Diaz Garcia

Much of this is speculation, but when you have all of the information surrounding these people and their actions, the puzzle pieces begin to fall together.

A plot like this can be carried out with even a dozen people being aware that JFK was the target, basically because the "poison pill" (or "virus" as Newman called it) was embedded into the plot in several different forms which essentially guaranteed that everyone would be forced to participate in the cover-up in order to ensure that the entire CIA wasn't destroyed. Anyone and everyone at CIA who might have figured out what happened was left in a compromising position by having their own officers and departments unknowingly--in many cases--carry out central parts of the plot.

The Most Secret CIA "Family Jewel"

When Angleton's replacement, George Kalaris came on board, he commissioned former CIA officer Cleveland Cram to come out of retirement to do a study of Angleton's reign from 1954 to 1974 to "find out what in hell happened. What were these guys doing."

Cram took the assignment and was given access to all CIA documents on covert operations. The study, entitled History of the Counterintelligence Staff 1954-1974, took six years to complete and was finished in 1981. Cram produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages.

Cram's approximately four-thousand-page study has never been declassified.

It remains locked in the CIA's vaults.

I often wonder if Cram put together what happened on 11/22/63, figuring out James Angleton's most egregious, sinister, and successful operation and that this study will never be declassified, so we'll never know. 

However, as Grover Proctor said, I think that the case has been figured out. It has been solved: "Who says that it hasn't come out already?" The marketplace of ideas has been flooded with an enormous number of opposing and contradictory "solutions," some by well-meaning and hard-working researchers, and some which are obvious and blatant attempts at disinformation. Who is to say that, somewhere in that morass of opinion and deception, the real answer hasn't already been revealed?"

I believe that it has been figured out, and this post by Benjamin Cole fits squarely within that description.

IMHO of course.

 

Richard Booth: Many thanks for reading my piece, amd such a thoughtful and on-target response. I will have to read your reply a few more times, before I respond. 

As I said, I was trying to put together a JFKA with the minimum number of participants, so loose lips would not sink ships, before or after. Consider it thought-inducing design constraint. 

Thanks again for reading I will get back to you. 

4 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Separate but not unplanned.  I'm convinced the plan was to whack Oswald about 45 minutes after JFK.

That would have been the only way to pin the deed on Castro.

Robert Blakely also thought LOH was supposed to be hit, ASAP post JFKA, but something went awry. So you have good company, and evidently "hitting the hitter" is a known tactic in Mobland.

I think differently. 

In my scenario, LOH was supposed to escape, then perhaps show up in Cuba, or just change ID's and live life as a blond on a 100-acre ranch in Panama, or what have you. 

The fact that LOH was in police custody and alive forced the CIA to pull out all the stops to alter the situation, and ultimately rely on Jack Ruby. 

It sure seems likely that LOH concluded rather quickly after the JFKA that he was in danger. 

19 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Can we de-couple the Kennedy Assassination from the Oswald Assassination?

I don't think the guys who planned and executed the nuts and bolts of the JFKA knew anything about the LHOA. 

What did Ozzie's handlers need to know about the JFKA other than time and place?  The Kill JFK Team didn't need to know who'd take the fall.  If Oswald got into a car accident on the way to work 11/22 Kennedy was still going to get whacked.

I don't think there was anyone outside of W. Averell Harriman and George H. W. Bush who knew everything about both plots.

Larry posits a plot that came together 90 days out.  On August 24, W. Averell Harriman bum rushed the dispatch of Cable 243, green-lighting a coup against Diem.  Was Harriman, an oligarch with deep ties to global banking and Western intelligence, the top operator in a supra-institutional cabal dedicated to re-ordering the world's narcotics market in 1963?

I posit such.  The Skull & Bones boys and their Sicilian-American mafia allies wanted to take global heroin production away from the Corsican Mafia.

After all, it was Harriman who bucked the entire US foreign policy/military establishment in '62 by selling JFK on a partition of Laos, giving the CIA unfettered access to the Golden Triangle opium market and allowing the North Vietnamese nearly-unfettered access to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  To maintain access to the opium fields a militarized So. Vietnam was an absolute must. 

Nationalist Diem wanted to kick the Americans out, so he had to go.

When Kennedy made noises about pulling out of So Vietnam his fate was sealed.  

In the 50's Havana was the global hub of narcotics trafficking, so Castro had to go in the grand plan, but no dice.  I think Castro cut a deal with the Skull & Bones boys after the JFKA.  The heroin the Red Chinese supplied him as aid thereafter moved thru Bush's Zapata Off-Shore.  Or so I speculate...

90 days out Harriman tells Bush to contact Carl Jenkins and David Atlee Phillips.  In the 50's Jenkins taught the Thai Border Police how to interdict opium convoys and taught the Kuomintang how to keep their opium caravans from interdiction.  The best guy to plan an ambush of a slow moving motorcade.  Phillips was tasked with arranging a variety of potential patsies given any number of contingencies. Highly compartmentalized.

A lot of the Cubans we hear about may have been back-up patsies.

 

 

I think you are correct that the LOH slaying was a unplanned and separate operation from the JFKA. To me, the LOH slaying was more likely to involve the complicity of CIA higher-ups. 

I especially enjoyed the line, from somewhere, that "Marcello was traipsing around the swamps of Guatemala in his alligator shoes. "

3 hours ago, Tony Krome said:

A trained Marine loads a crappy revolver with odd rounds.

Oswald leaves the TSBD thinking he might be framed for shooting someone, so he shoots a cop and attempts shoot another.

Oswald leaves the TSBD thinking he might be framed for shooting someone, so he catches a bus thats on the way back to the scene of the crime.

The whole bus, cab, Beckley, gun scenario is truly laughable. It really is time to move on.

Tony Krome:

I do not blame anyone for skepticism in this case.

But remember, the bus-taxi-Beckley scenario unfolded not to LOH's plan. In fact, he had no plan, post the real JFKA. 

I surmise LOH planned on a provided ride from the TSBD after a failed false-flag attempt on JFK.  

After the JFKA, LOH suspected he had been set up. Yet he didn't have so much as a bicycle at his disposal. 

If LOH's thinking in the immediate aftermath of the JFKA is strained...well, who would not be stressed?

In fact, despite a complete lack of resources, LOH managed to escape the scene of the crime and arm himself.  

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

How do we know Oswald went home and got a gun?  Proof of delivery from Seaport Traders was never established.  See David Joseph's work on the forum here and at K & K.  One story has him saying he bought it in Fort Worth.  The different types of bullets supposedly fired from it into Tippit.  A modified version of the most popular gun used by police in the USA.  Some have even posited it was planted. 

Ron B.--

Certainly your skepticism is warranted. 

I am open as to whether LOH, or someone else, put Tippit down.

However, there seems little controversy that LOH's landlady-housekeeper, Earlene Roberts, witnessed him coming home and leaving suddenly. 

When LOH was arrested at the Texas Theater, by multiple accounts, he drew a handgun on arresting officers. A remarkably restrained DPD arrested him alive.

There was no tape recordings made of DPD interviews of LOH. However, transcripts indicate he admitted to getting a handgun. 

My take is that LOH did leave the TSBD after the JFKA, and did in fact retrieve a handgun from his room in a rooming house, and then somehow made it to the Texas Theater. 

I posit that part of what made LOH such a good patsy is that he was part of a plot that day---but a intentionally unsuccessful false flag assassination attempt on JFK. 

Fit like a glove. 

12 hours ago, Joe Bauer said:

Even if Oswald was on the bottom floor of the TXSBD when JFK was shot, his own interrogation admitted actions during and right after ( seconds ) just add to suspicious nature thoughts and questions.

Most everyone in the employee group there were showing great personal shock, sadness and distress. Billy Lovelady ( and Shelley?) take off running to look for possible shooters. Others are shocked and frozen with disbelief. They are anxiously talking with one another. Press and police are running frantically to and fro.

Yet,  Oswald decides that right there in the unprecendented frantic energy, highest shock and distressed scene ( The President has just been shot mere feet from him!) that now would be a good time to saunter up to the second floor lunch room to get a soda pop and stand there by himself sipping it as if this was just another typical work day?

Apparently, whatever Oswald had for lunch earlier, if anything, he missed having something to drink with it and all this excitement worked up a desperate thirst? 

And you'd also have thought that politically and "Fair Play For Cuba" obsessed Oswald would have been even more shocked and interested in such an event happening just feet from him contemplating what a JFK shooting incident would have meant to America's and JFK's Cuban foreign policy stances. A instant massive change for sure. 

Heck, you would also think maybe Oswald might have thought about making a quick phone booth call to his wife and Ruth Paine reassuring them about his personal safety being so close to the killing scene ( right in front of his building ) and knowing they would certainly soon be seeing this shocking news on TV or hear about it on the radio?

He had enough change in his pocket to do so considering his soda machine and bus ticket purchases.

Since Oswald's immediate supervisor or Truly himself never told any employees they could leave their jobs after the shooting, it seemed illogically selfish and irresponsible for Oswald to walk off his job like that.

Self-centered Oswald just being Oswald?

Perhaps, but like everything else with Lee Harvey Oswald...half the time his actions seem way too illogical relative to average folk. An enigma so pronounced, it begs suspicion of motivation beyond just his basic extremely closed, uncommunicative and secretive personality.  

Thanks for reading, and you are right, Oswald is an enigma...unless viewed through the lens that he is a CIA asset, and played some role, maybe even a patsy role, in the JFKA. 

In the wake of a shocking event, it is difficult to read a person's actions. 

For me, the fact that LOH went home and got a gun is indicative. Not of guilt necessarily, but that he knew he was a patsy. 

2 hours ago, Tony Krome said:

Mr. BALL. The first time he came to see you? 
Mrs. JOHNSON. Yes; that's something about 3 weeks before he came back. 
Mr. BALL. This was 1026 North Beckley? 
Mrs. JOHNSON. Yes. 
Mr. BALL. He talked to you? 
Mrs. JOHNSON. Yes; the first time and the last time; the first time, he told me he wanted a room and I told him I was very sorry, I just rented the last room and he said he was very sorry, he wanted to get near his work

So the person that Mrs. Johnson talked to in late September had a job.

Well...said he had a job. When I was in a stage of my life that I was renting rooms, I knew to represent myself as employed....

20 hours ago, Joe Bauer said:

Just read your entire conspiracy theory summary BC.

Whew!  

I never sleep and reading your JFK speculation/explanation post beat two hours of idle thought insominia tossing and turning.

So much to comment on. Agree with many of your plausible explanations.

Will chime in later with shared takes and thoughts.

 

 

Thanks for reading! 

Try to get some sleep. Try exercise and then a glass of port wine at night. Or not. 

35 minutes ago, Tony Krome said:

 

Beckley resident Hugh Slough described "Oswald": "I'd call him a fidgety-type person, very nervous and very high-strung."

If Oswald was a CIA asset / FBI informer, I doubt he was the guy Hugh described living at Beckley

Did the Johnsons or Earlene Roberts ever pick Oswald out in a line-up? Did any of the Beckley residents? Were the bus drivers who picked him up every morning, and dropped him home every afternoon ever questioned? Did any of the regular passengers at Oswald's bus stops ever come forward? Where's the Beckley resident ledger? Mrs Johnson said that "Oswald" enquired in person weeks prior to moving into Beckley, at a time when he was supposed to be in Mexico.

You mentioned that Oswald was invisible. Well, if he lived at Beckley, he was invisible on the TSBD/Beckley public transport route for 6 weeks.

Tony Krome:

Thanks for reading. 

Yes, descriptions of Oswald's personal behavior and character traits run the gamut. 

And yes, the investigation into the JFKA was essentially curtailed with 24 hours. 

Was there an Oswald imposter? I tend to lean against it, except on certain limited occasions. 

But, hey, anything is possible.

1 hour ago, Ron Bulman said:

Regarding no more than a handful of conspirators.  I agree, I.E. that information was on a need to know basis.  But less than a handful is four fingers.  I guess it's in how you define a conspirator.  Personally I believe Allen Dulles conspired with James Angleton, with the approval of David Rockefeller, a minimum of three at/near the top.  They needed at least one or two operations specialists with knowledge of the objective to facilitate it at both a organizational and operational level.  Bill Harvey and David Morales come to mind.

That's five and your hand is full.  But they still need shooter(s) and I think a spotter/rear guard/cover person for each.  At least one from the front and back adds two or four more.  A distraction shooter on the 6th floor?  Someone shot from there.  Small caliber throat shot from the front.  Head shot from the front (back! and to the left!).  Back shot at the Third Thoracic Vertebrate.  All of these knew what was going down.  Connally not hit by any of these.  Tague.

I think Johnson was briefed in advance to smooth his transition, does that make complicit in the conspiring?

A dozen, likely more involved with knowledge of what was happening as it did.  Several more aware that something was coming down.  John Martino, Joseph Milteer, more.       

Ron Bulman:

Thanks for reading. 

Certainly, elements of the international business class and the global security state had it in for JFK. No tears were shed. 

My explanation, of a small number of relatively low-level Cuban exiles, erstwhile CIA operatives, pulling off an unauthorized murder of JFK, lacks drama in some regards.

I still lean to towards "the fewer, the merrier" when it comes to a believable JFKA scenario. 

I have not led a criminal lifestyle. At times, when in a Walter Mittyish-way I ponder a criminal act, I plan to do it alone. I would not want even a single co-conspirator. 

13 hours ago, Robert Burrows said:

Somewhere in the video record of Oswald's interactions with the press during his three days of captivity he says something that I've always construed as a limited admission of involvement: "I have committed no acts of violence."

Thanks for reading. Interesting interpretation. 

1 hour ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Benjamin, the quest for simplicity is always to be applauded.  I'm soooo glad you brought this subject up.

My thang is having the simplest, strongest case for conspiracy as the subtext of my study.  The bullet holes in JFK's clothes are too low to associate with the throat wound.  This establishes the following root facts: JFK had a shallow wound in his back, no exit, no round found during the autopsy; the wound in his throat had no exit and no round found.

The night of the autopsy the doctors speculated JFK was hit with high tech weaponry, like the blood soluble darts developed for the CIA program MKNAOMI.

As a student in the Vincent Salandria School of Research into the Obvious --I can make a case for CIA conspiracy in under a hundred words.

 

The wounds, as reported, to JFK are baffling, as are many other aspects of the case. Like you, I assume more than the Mannlicher-Carcano was involved. 

Certainly, it is possible that CIA higher-ups organized the JFKA, and made their own asset, LOH, a completely unwitting patsy. 

But why would LOH go home and get his gun? This suggests he had some sort of participant role in the JFKA, even if unwitting of the final result. 

In the immediate wake of the shooting, why did not the totally uninvolved and unwitting LOH assume that nut cases took a pot shot at the President, or mobsters, or right-wingers, or Cuban exiles to whom he was not connected?  

Almost immediately, LOH deduced he was the likely patsy. 

Interesting case.