Leslie Sharp

Roger, has Bart cleared up the discrepancy that on at least one occasion Hosty is filmed stating Oswald told him he was in the lunch room?

It's my understanding the material Robert accumulated during his own investigation into the assassination of his brother still exists. Have you heard that as well?

Thanks Pete.

Thank you for that trajectory. The popular meme is that "Hosty tore up his notes because he was ordered to." This sets the record straight, presumably. As a matter of interest distinct from PM, did Hosty keep notes from his visit at the Paine's house in early November? I'll search, but if you know off the top of your head . . .

Not to digress from the datebook but this threw me for a loop. Seeing Charles Goodnight in a post about the JFKA made me stop and think, huh? I fully understand it in the context of the two above comments after reading them. But first seeing Goodnight's name did stun me, which led to chuckles as I read on about the connections, as Ed said, fascinating. I have J Evetts Haley's book on Goodnight. I've been to his replicated dug out in Palo Duro Canyon as well as his home, the historical center. Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site | THC.Texas.gov - Texas Historical Commission Goodnight was my G-G-G Grandfathers close neighbor (two listings away) on the 1860 Palo Pinto County census. That year he was one of 96 volunteer rangers, for which Goodnight was a scout, which participated in the capture of Cyntia Ann Parker. The basis of John Wayne's The Searchers. I just discovered personally this historical jewel myself a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of a Dublin, Tx library DVD. From 107 years ago. Film in it's infancy, for Dr. Joseph Mc Bride. Old Texas (1916) (texasarchive.org) Quote Thanks, Ron!

Ed, you had a lengthy post a few days ago that I was in the middle of responding to but failed to send; we were discussing the JA Ranch, Whitneys and Vanderbilts, Crichton, Byrd, Amarillo ... Do you know which thread?

Mods, Hear! Hear! Perhaps mention of the continuity of the coup in Dallas and the through line to Trump contributed to the distraction; or, perhaps Mr. Cole is just hovering to make sure no one mentions that Trump failed to release the files when he had the obligation and the opportunity in 2017.

That means who did it and why. We are in full agreement.

Does Bart reproduce Hosty's note? When was Hosty's note written? When was it made public? I need to catch up here. I'm trying to recall: I think the debate was related to architectural terms. Have you posted the most current iteration of an image(s) of Prayer Man on EF recently? If so, can you point me to the thread? Ralph Cinque has posted photos on Facebook in the past few days.

Stephen Barrett Tanner died peacefully on June 20, 2016, in St. Johnsbury. He was born on November 4, 1922, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents William Maddox Tanner and Daisy Barrett Tanner, both from Texas. While he was a student at Yale University, majoring in German literature, he was drafted into the U.S. Army in March of 1943. He served in the Army Signal Intelligence Corps and participated in the Italian campaign of World War II. His fluency in both German and Italian were instrumental in decoding and translating radio transmissions intercepted by his unit from German forces. At the end of the war he hunted for, arrested, and interrogated German officers and Nazi collaborators. He then returned to Yale to complete his degree and, while there, he taught two courses in Italian. Upon graduation, he was recruited by, and joined, the CIA. He was an able and successful Cold War warrior, focusing his many talents on gaining intelligence about the Soviet Union. When living overseas his cover was the U.S. Department of State, which meant that he had to do two jobs at the same time, the regular work of a Foreign Service employee plus his job for the CIA. After retiring from the government, he worked as a consultant for various American and European companies doing business abroad. He also briefly became a professional tennis teacher and wrote and published several books of humor. The time he spent as a high school student at the Putney School in Putney was a very important, formative time of his life. His love for the school and devotion to fund-raising never wavered throughout his adult life. He also attended the Middlebury College Summer Language School, where he met a student whose family owned a summer place on the shores of Willoughby Lake in Westmore — it was love at first sight! On June 7, 1947, he and Anne Wallis Swift were married in Princeton, New Jersey. In later life his favorite sport was tennis, but as a young man it was figure skating. He was a member of both the Cambridge and Boston skating clubs, and in 1940 he won the U.S. Junior Pairs Championship with skating partner Dorothy Glazier. His favorite hobby was opera, particularly Italian opera, and he took singing lessons whenever he could. In his retirement years he became an avid impresario and was always organizing concerts, soirees, and other entertainments. He frequently used those events to raise money for various local causes — to help buy the North Beach of Willoughby Lake for the town of Westmore; to refurbish the kitchen of the Westmore Community Church Friendship Hall after it was damaged by fire; to establish the Neighbor Helping Neighbor Fund; to provide scholarships for local children, and more. He felt that raising money to help others was his most important activity in his later years. He is survived by his wife, Anne (Nancy) Tanner; his son Bruce Tanner; his daughter Kersten Tanner; his grandson William Tanner; and his granddaughter Kelly Tanner. A memorial service, followed by interment of his ashes in the Lake View Cemetery in Westmore will begin at 2 p.m on Wednesday, July 27, at the Westmore Community Church, Westmore. Instead of flowers, a donation may be made in his memory to the Westmore Community Church, or the Putney School, in Putney. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/167601469/stephen-barrett-tanner The administrator of worldhistory.biz no longer accepts registration so I'm unclear who authored this work but much of the information comports with other sources. https://www.worldhistory.biz/sundries/35355-a-rich-blind-man.html A Rich Blind Man . . . . . . But in July 1949, under relentless pressure from the army, the CIA took over the Gehlen group. Housed in a former Nazi headquarters outside Munich, Gehlen welcomed dozens of prominent war criminals into his circle. As Helms and Sichel feared, the East German and Soviet intelligence services penetrated the Gehlen group at the highest levels. The worst of the moles surfaced long after the Gehlen group had transformed itself into the national intelligence service of West Germany. Gehlen's longtime chief of counterintelligence had been working for Moscow all along. Steve Tanner, a young CIA officer based in Munich, said Gehlen had convinced American intelligence officers that he could run missions aimed at the heart of Soviet power. "And, given how hard it was for us," Tanner reflected, "it seemed idiotic not to try it." "WE WEREN'T GOING TO SIT STILL" Tanner was an army intelligence veteran fresh out of Yale, hired by Richard Helms in 1947, one of the first two hundred CIA officers sworn into service. In Munich, his assignment was to recruit agents to gather intelligence for the United States from behind the iron curtain. Almost every major nationality from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had at least one self-important emigre group seeking help from the CIA in Munich and Frankfurt. Some of the men Tanner vetted as potential spies were Eastern Europeans who had sided with Germany against Russia. They included "people with fascist backgrounds trying to save their careers by becoming useful to the Americans," Tanner said, and he was wary of them. The non-Russians "hated the Russians violently," Tanner said, "and they were automatically on our side." Others who had fled the outlying republics of the Soviet Union exaggerated their power and influence. "These emigre groups, their main goal was to convince the U. S. government of their importance, and their ability to help the U. S. government, so that they would get support in one form or another," he said. Lacking guidelines from Washington, Tanner wrote his own: to receive the CIA's support, the emigre groups had to be founded on native soil, not in a Munich coffeehouse. They had to have contact with antiSoviet groups in their home country. They should not be compromised by close collaboration with the Nazis. In December 1948, after a long and careful assessment. Tanner believed he had found a band of Ukrainians who deserved the CIA's backing. The group called itself the Supreme Council for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Its members in Munich served as political representatives of the fighters back home. The Supreme Council, Tanner reported to headquarters, was morally and politically sound. Tanner spent the spring and summer of 1949 preparing to infiltrate his Ukrainians behind the iron curtain. The men had come out of the Carpathian Mountains as couriers months before, carrying messages from the Ukrainian underground written on thin sheets of paper folded into wads and sewn together. These scraps were seen as signs of a stalwart resistance movement that could provide intelligence on events in Ukraine and warning of a Soviet attack on Western Europe. Hopes were even higher at headquarters. The CIA believed that "the existence of this movement could have bearing on the course of an open conflict between the United States and the USSR." Tanner hired a daredevil Hungarian air crew who had hijacked a Hungarian commercial airliner and flown it to Munich a few months earlier. General Wyman, the CIA's special-operations chief, formally approved the mission on July 26. Tanner supervised their training in Morse code and weaponry, planning to drop two of them back into their homeland so that the CIA could communicate with the partisans. But the CIA had no one in Munich with experience in parachuting agents behind enemy lines. Tanner finally found someone. "A Serbo-American colleague who had parachuted into Yugoslavia in World War Two taught my guys how to jump and land. And it was crazy! How can you do a backward somersault on impact with a carbine strapped to your side?" But that was the kind of operation that had made the OSS famous. Tanner cautioned against great expectations. "We realized that in the woods of western Ukraine, they weren't liable to know what was on Stalin's mind, the big political issues," he said. "At least they could get documents, they could get pocket litter, clothing, shoes." To create a real network of spies inside the Soviet Union, the CIA would have to provide them with elements of disguise—the daily detritus of Soviet life. Even if the missions never produced much important intelligence. Tanner said, they would have strong symbolic value: "They showed Stalin that we weren't going to sit still. And that was important, because up 'til then we had done zilch as far as operations into his country." On September 5, 1949, Tanner's men took off in a C-47 flown by the Hungarians who had hijacked their way into Munich. Singing a martial strain, they jumped into the darkness of the Carpathian night, landing near the city of Lvov. American intelligence had penetrated the Soviet Union. The CIA history declassified in 2005 offers a terse summary of what happened next: "The Soviets quickly eliminated the agents." "WHAT HAD WE DONE WRONG?" The operation nevertheless set off a huge wave of enthusiasm at CIA headquarters. Wisner began drawing up plans to send more men to recruit networks of dissidents, create American-backed resistance forces, and send the White House early warning of a Soviet military attack. The CIA dispatched dozens of Ukrainian agents by air and by land. Almost every one was captured. Soviet intelligence officers used the prisoners to feed back disinformation—all's well, send more guns, more money, more men. Then they killed them. After five years of "abortive missions," the agency's history states, "CIA discontinued this approach." "In the long run," it concludes, "the Agency's effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain using Ukrainian agents was ill-fated and tragic." Wisner was undaunted. He started new paramilitary adventures all over Europe.

The quagmire is that you can also draw a through line from America First Committee of the 1930s, through Dallas and those assassinations you so appropriately include, to Trump's attempted coup in 2020. We're not confronted with a choice between the two; we're confronted with finding a Third Way.

Did you come across an Oswald L. Johnson of Atlas Corp?

Amazing find, Ed. So Clint et al were flying under the flag of WCC! Remember he was involved in a hotel development concern in the Bahamas with Leo Corrigan, Ruby's landlord; and Corrigan's son in law, international department at Mercantile Bank, worked alongside one of the Villere brothers from New Orleans who handled PR for Shaw's International Trade Mart; he was photographed with Neil Mallon of Dresser Industries not long after the assassination. The Villeres appear in the Skorzeny Papers. I'm sure you know that D.H. Byrd was on the Delhi-Taylor board. Among the tenants of 3707 Rawlins in spring of 1963, along with international real estate concern Previews Inc. that provided Ilse Skorzeny not just a cover but a lucrative gig, was a company named "Delhi." I traced it to East Texas which is Murchison country but couldn't identify business documents to confirm; the Rawlins address led to a Alexandria VA concern. I wonder if it might have led eventually to IMC. (I'm thinking about nickel here.)

I remember debating the interpretation of the notes as an exercise mostly to emphasize that Australians didn't "speak Dallas." I wonder if Bart has read Coup?

Thanks, Pete, Both Scott Foresman & S.W. Publishing Co. are of keen interest. Byrd received close scrutiny and rightfully so, while O.V. Campbell and his partner (whose name escapes me! lolol) slipped through the cracks. I think I mentioned that I tracked the board of directors of each tenant. Warren Caster was SW Publishing; as you know, he was in Denton.

It's my understanding that Lafitte was not an official "agent." He was a 'special employee' off and on of several three letter agencies including CIA, FBN, INS and FBI. Hank's intro lays out a little more specific detail about the Lafitte collection he had access to.

@Jeremy Bojczuk A cursory google translate: Latin French duum deux Both Rene and Pierre spent a good deal of their adolescent years in Europe. The datebook reflects a number of similar quirks. "merde merde," "vu je" "di coup de grace."

Pete, can you say whether Bart Kamp delves into the tenants of the depository building?

Nicolae Malaxa. You know his ties to Nixon? I wasn't sure if the Western Tubes were the same either. If so, it's quite significant. I wasn't aware of the link to Skorzeny at the time.

That's a start. Seems to me that playing to MAGA is only going to further enrage Kennedy Democrats during the primary so he's actually cancelling out any serious chance of taking the nomination. He'll drain Biden of much needed energy and resources to defeat Trump. So, what's up?

I think Financial Times permits a couple of free reads. https://www.ft.com/content/bafd0e2b-901a-4c47-b721-5c563532028a

Where is Robert Kennedy's outrage?

And Timothy Mellon, reportedly $5 million.

' . . . Other top Kennedy supporters [in addition to Timothy Mellon, son of OSS Paul Mellon] include Patrick Byrne, the former chief executive of Overstock.com, and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, as well as a large contribution from a group funded by Silicon Valley investor David Sacks. https://www.ft.com/content/bafd0e2b-901a-4c47-b721-5c563532028a The Oval Office meeting took place Dec. 18, about six weeks after the 2020 presidential election lost by former President Trump; outside advisers including former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne gathered for a discussion with White House attorneys. They discussed a plan to have the military seize voting machines in the key states that Trump lost, appoint Powell as a special counsel to investigate purported voter fraud and have Trump declare martial law as part of the effort to overturn the election results. https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4085087-special-counsel-digging-into-oval-office-meeting-in-final-days-of-trump-presidency-report/

Stephenson, Donovan, Dulles formed World Commerce Corporation. Skorzeny's first gig was contract work with Frank Ryan, Madrid, WCC. David Ogilvie composed the mission statement of WCC; his brother-in-law Rosser Reeves (who coined "I Like Ike") appears in Pierre Lafitte's financial ledger.