Leslie Sharp

4 minutes ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

So, in other words, there's nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary about this photo. Moving on...

Are you joking?  There's nothing mysterious about the head of Mossad, dressed in western gear, photographed with Angleton in the early 1960s in a locale likely to be the Arizona border?

 

You are welcome to move right along, @Jonathan Cohen, while the adults pursue the investigation.

1 minute ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

Well, that make sense, Angleton was the commander of the Israeli Desk in CIA for thirty years.

I guess we can close down this thread.

Brilliant gumshoeing, Leslie, as per usual!   

I'm not convinced!  lololol.

I sent the link to our friend in Haifi who had already seen the photo and never once suggested it was Amit, and he served in intel for his required stint.

 

Amit's features are far more chiseled, his ears are pointy, and from photos I've seen he would have been much shorter than JJA.

Beating this horse to shoe leather, WHAT was he doing in the Southwest ... and "rent a costume" was not an option in the early '60s.

When those questions are answered, the thread will be QED. 

54 minutes ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

In the aftermath of the arrest of three vagrants, there are intriguing details emerging from a report of an FBI interview with the police officers involved. Firstly, a witness named Lee Bowers saw the three individuals, referred to as the 'tramps', rushing towards a train. Bowers then informed the police about their presence, specifying the exact train car they had entered. Bowers was working as a railroad switchman in a two-story tower building in the vicinity of Dealey Plaza, which offered him a clear view of the area.

Police subsequently apprehended these three individuals, under the direction of Officer Marvin Wise. Notably, Officer Wise had cotton stuffed in his ears at the time, explaining that it was due to an ear infection. He was also wearing shoes that didn't conform to standard police-issue footwear. These unusual details sparked curiosity, leading the FBI to question him about his choice of footwear and the cotton in his ears.

Officer Wise's uniform was also found to be soiled with what appeared to be roof sand. This discovery, coupled with the aforementioned peculiarities, has sparked some interesting theories.

The one that I find particularly plausible is that Officer Wise could have been a sniper perched on the rooftop of the records building. The cotton in his ears could be to protect from the loud noise produced by a rifle's discharge.

You can review the FBI interview note with Officer Wise here -> https://web.archive.org/web/20190909155847/http://jfkassassinationfiles.com/hsca_180-10112-10156

 

Thanks for this.  Wise was a legitimate officer, but your point is well taken.

 

The question posed here is whether certain support teams for the plot, independent of local law enforcement — identified by Lafitte as 'swamp groups' or 'kill squads' — were disguised in uniform and were those in uniform armed with rifles from the cache as identified in a document on another thread.

I didn't see to whom Wise reported but I may have missed it? Any ideas?

@Robert Montenegro Check Angleton and the Cowboy.  Israeli Ambassador says it's Amit.

2 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

Well, in a word, it is horrifying that Coup, and the significance of the Lafitte document are being ghosted.

On that note however, nothing would make me happier than to see that blasted datebook authenticated—for whatever it's intrinsic & intellectual value may represent... 

I predict if we publish a report by one of the best in the field of document examination, and his determination is that the datebook is authentic —authored by Lafitte and at least one other member of his family, within a twelve month (1963) timeframe (with allowance for aide memoir added in the months following the assassination) — the detractors of Albarelli will cry "SO! WHAT DID YOU HAVE TO PAY TO GET THAT POSITIVE ANALYSIS?"

Two qualified professional examiners called to testify in court cases with a lot on the line — mostly financial — have advised me that this is an uncertain "science" and to be prepared for challenge, regardless.

19 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

I have heard about this IG report from our own private conversations, but for the life of me, I have never seen it.

I think you'll have to contact Alan.

In any case, we have two, brand new documents, on e from 1962, and the other from 1975, cementing Barnes in that role. 

I'll check in with him.  

The significance is that Barnes as DOD chief has been in the public domain since AT LEAST November 2021 when Alan's essay was published in Coup, and NO ONE in the revered community has addressed it other than you. Kudos!!  

Why has Coup been ghosted by many who purport to be in genuine search of who killed JFK? Barnes has been on the radar of the majority of "the community" for fifty years at least.  We come along and publish that he was DOD chief, AND that he was liaising with project manager Lafitte and the strategist Skorzeny on behalf of CI Angleton ... but that falls on deaf ears for the past eighteen months!

I don't accept that lack of official "authentication" by a paid examiner is the reason. I'm convinced it's something else.

As Dick Russell notes in his limited analysis, only someone directly involved would have been privy to the level of detail revealed in Lafitte's datebook.  

Hank's revelations turned the investigation and the research community on its end.  In time, I have faith those with the integrity they've displayed over decades, will come 'round.

@Mike Chesser located this to indicate the Cowboy is Meir Amit as per Ambassador Dermer's FB post:. 

 

@Robert Montenegro @Paul Brancato you're probably familiar with the photo of the tramps from various angles. I grabbed this one because it captures the uniformed guys, full body, to ask if they fit your understanding of support teams a.k.a. "kill squads" or "swamp groups" as referenced in Lafitte's record of Otto's strategy for Lancelot Project?  There must be other photos that better exemplify candidates for those teams who might have been provided a huge cache of rifles when they arrived in Dallas?

https://m.facebook.com/groups/702791629733219/posts/4521681414510869/
 

59 minutes ago, Paul Cummings said:

Not disagreeing but would like to see in context were this was taken.

Didn't Meyer wear thick corrective lens set in thick black rims due to his injury? Also, the shape of the head  and the hairstyle bear no resemblance to Meyer - at least not to my naked eye.

22 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Paul, I know where you're going with this, and it's a logical hypothesis, but I hope we take this one bite at a time in a methodical fashion.  Let's identify whether cowboy in the photo is a border patrol officer working directly with Angleton; or possibly Lafitte in disguise; or merely a cowboy bystander?  Blowing too much air in the balloon risks it bursting if you get my drift.

@Paul Brancato @Robert Montenegro, you're probably familiar with the photo of the tramps from various angles. I grabbed this one because it captures the uniformed guys, full body, to ask if they fit your understanding of support teams,  "kill squads" or "swamp groups" as referenced in Lafitte's record of Otto's strategy for Lancelot Project?  There must be other photos that better exemplify candidates for those teams who might have been provided a huge cache of rifles when they arrived in Dallas?

https://m.facebook.com/groups/702791629733219/posts/4521681414510869/

(I'll move this content to the recently revived Tramps thread for future discussion. thanks.)

On 7/7/2023 at 8:27 PM, Robert Montenegro said:

 

The modern Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Operations (formerly, the Directorate of Plans), had it's beginnings in an organization called "Katō Kikan," whose headquarters was originally based at Naval Air Station Atsugi, which, by 1955, housed Marine Air Control Squadron 1, where Mr. Lee Oswald was attached to forward operations targeting Chinese airspace.

The following entry should be read with the most supreme sobriety, for it displays a glimpse of what is being hidden by modern US intelligence, concerning the history of covert operations, surveillance and "executive action," from an article called, "Democracy's Porous Borders: Espionage, Smuggling and the Making of Japan's Transwar Regime (Part I)" by Tessa Morris-Suzuki.

QUOTE—

"...The “almost generic” problem of inter-service rivalry in the world of secret operations was very familiar to CIA operatives in Japan, because the same problem also plagued US intelligence operations in Japan during the occupation era. The CIA had been created in July 1947, but during the first years of its existence, its influence in Japan was circumscribed by the presence of a number of other US intelligence agencies, with whom its relations were often frosty. In the early stages of the occupation of Japan, the most powerful intelligence organizations were the Allied Occupation Authority’s Civil Intelligence Section (CIS) and the US Army’s intelligence section, G2, with its various subordinate bodies.

G2 was headed by the irascible and vehemently anti-communist Major General Charles A. Willoughby (1892-1972). Willoughby, who was the son of a German father and American mother and whose birth name was Adolf Tscheppe-Weidenbach, had moved to America at the age of eighteen and become a naturalized US citizen. As Takemae Eiji notes, “fellow Occupationaires mocked the General’s stiff Prussian bearing, referring to him alternately as ‘Sir Charles’ and ‘Baron von Willoughby’… Regarded as a martinet by his subordinates – he took a perverse pride in the epithet ‘Little Hitler’, and even MacArthur dubbed him ‘my loveable fascist’ – the volatile Willoughby nonetheless enjoyed the Supreme Commander’s full confidence”. Willoughby responded to his critics in kind, reserving his fiercest invective for the liberal press, whose journalists he called “bastards” and “pen prostitutes”, and accused of furnishing “aid and comfort to the enemy”. Occupying a dual role as head of intelligence both for US army forces in Japan and for the US Far Eastern Command, Willoughby possessed intelligence and counter-intelligence powers that encompassed the entire East Asian region. Jack Canon’s Z Unit, created in 1947, was just one of a large number of organizations through which he exercised those powers.

But after the establishment of the CIA, and particularly after the outbreak of the Korean War, Willoughby found himself having to share his turf with a growing number of other US intelligence organizations, and both he and his superior General Douglas MacArthur deeply resented the intrusion. The CIA gained its first significant foothold in Japan in 1948 via the blandly named Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a special unit created to engage in psychological warfare operations, and the Agency’s influence grew rapidly after the Korean conflict erupted in June 1950. In 1949, the first head of the CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, expressed optimism that “we have finally reached a satisfactory agreement with Willoughby, and I hope that it will keep up”. But the hope was forlorn. Relations between Willoughby and the CIA remained tense for decades. Willoughby was irked by the power of the CIA, but at the same time longed to be a part of the action, and after his departure from Japan in 1951 continued to bombard CIA Director Allen Dulles with offers of help and suggestions on how the Agency could improve its cooperation with the military: suggestions to which Dulles replied in the tone of courteous forbearance that bureaucrats often reserve for those they deeply dislike. As Willoughby explained to Dulles in 1961, “it was quite clear to me, based on my efforts to fit CIA into the MacArthur command structure in Japan, that you will always be in collision, overt or covert, with the [Armed] Services”. Meanwhile, intelligence gathering was also being carried out by a range of other US groups including the US Far East Air Forces (FEAF) and by several separate signals intelligence and communications units.

Eventually, it was the CIA that gained the upper hand in the struggle for intelligence control. Immediately after MacArthur’s dismissal in April 1951, Willoughby too returned to the United States in a state of “nervous slump”, handing over to the CIA his files, many of his contacts in Japan, and his messages of concern about the need to continue protecting and nurturing the former senior Imperial Army officers whom he considered “essential for rearmament”.

To the Victors, the Spies: Intelligence and the Transwar Regime

The making of Japan’s transwar regime began even before the formal surrender was signed. On 19 to 20 August 1945, a sixteen-person Japanese delegation traveled to Manila to negotiate with Douglas MacArthur, Charles Willoughby and others about the transfer of power to the incoming occupation forces. The delegation was led by the Imperial Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff, Kawabe Torashirō (1890-1960). Meanwhile, the Imperial Army’s chief of intelligence, Arisue Seizō (1895-1992), who on 8 August had been the first senior military official sent to Hiroshima to inspect the effects of the atomic bombing, was given the task of preparing the reception for MacArthur and his staff when they arrived at Atsugi Airbase.

Despite Arisue’s first-hand experiences in Hiroshima, his attitude to the victors, like Kawabe’s, was so welcoming that both men quickly won the trust of the US command. Charles Willoughby, an outspoken admirer of Benito Mussolini, may also have been attracted to Arisue by the fact that the former intelligence chief had once served as Japanese Military Attache in Rome, where he had developed a similar enthusiasm for Italian Fascism and reportedly attempted to develop a joint Japanese-Italian strategy towards the Muslim world. Rather than being investigated for war crimes, therefore, Arisue was “interrogated, then called in for consultation very early in the occupation”, and “a working relationship apparently developed”.

Arisue was soon installed by Willoughby in a section of G2’s headquarters in the NYK Building in central Tokyo, where his ostensible task was to collect and analyze archives and write monographs about Japan’s wartime activities. One advantage of this appointment was the opportunities it provided, not only to unearth and preserve the archive of Japan’s military actions in Asia, but also to make parts of it disappear from the record (so continuing a process which had begun with the destruction of many documents during the last days of the war). A US official note from May 1946 advises that some Japanese War Ministry documents “of a special nature” are absent from the catalogue of files that had been drawn up, “having been left in the charge of Arisue.”

Arisue’s new position of trust with the American forces enabled him to provide financial support to Kawabe Torashirō, who also soon became a key informant to the occupation forces; and Arisue then proceeded to recruit a number of other leading former military figures, including Hattori Takushirō, who had held key positions in the Imperial army general staff, and later Tsuji Masanobu, a wartime colonel and military strategist who was regarded as one of the architects of the invasion of Malaya and Singapore, and had gone into hiding during the early occupation era after being listed as a Class A war criminal. As Willoughby later wrote, these people had been “the brains” of the former Imperial Japanese general staff: “monographs were just a cover, to keep them from starving”. Equally importantly, the research activities of Arisue, Kawabe, Hattori, Tsuji and others enabled them to become crucial conduits of information for the US occupiers – a role to which they took with enthusiasm. They rapidly reestablished their authority over now unemployed former military subordinates, creating a web of private intelligence organizations which provided information to the Americans in return for a variety of monetary and other rewards. This web, as we shall see, extended across borders into many parts of the former Japanese empire.

Kawabe Torashirō had no previous intelligence background, but, the CIA observed, “as the last active representative of the Japanese General Staff free to act on behalf of the Army, he has the authority to order cooperation from such Japanese as he might choose, and he has apparently chosen well”. By 1948, Kawabe’s private intelligence gathering organization was working in close cooperation with those of Arisue and others, in a powerful combination sometimes known as the KATO Organization (Katō Kikan), after the initials of its four core ex-military leaders: Kawabe, Arisue, and former senior military officers Tanaka Ryūkichi and Ōikawa Genshichi. The Katō Kikan cooperated and competed with a host of similar though less powerful secret or semi-secret organizations, many of them created by former military officers. The process by which these groups were formed and re-formed is outlined by the 1951 CIA report on the Japanese intelligence services: “An ‘expert’, contacted by an American agency, would form a group out of personnel known to him who happened to be available and willing. Often such groups would include non-professionals. Associations in the underground became fluid as they received the backing of first one prominent political and military figure and then another”. At least for part of the occupation period, organizations like Kawabe’s were largely (and covertly) funded by US authorities..."

—END QUOTE

As you can see, the precursor to the CIA's assassination capabilities were set up under a United Army Counterintelligence operative named COL. Joseph Young "Cactus Jack" Canon, whose "Z-Unit" hunter-killer assassination team was absorbed by the Office of Policy Coordination, later the Directorate of Plans.

A photograph of COL. Canon from 1946.

COL. Canon's "Z-Unit" was supported by an autonomous intelligence organization called, "Katō Kikan," whose commander was a savagely cruel Imperial Japanese war criminal by the name of Lt. Gen. Seizō Arisue.

A photograph of Lt. Gen. Seizō Arisue from 1944.

Both the Katō Kikan and Z-Unit would later be completely absorbed by a joint CIA-Japanese intelligence organization called, "Naikaku Chōsa-Shitsu," or in English, "Cabinet Research Office."

The liaison to the CIA until 1955 within the innocuously titled "Cabinet Research Office" was Lt. Gen. Seizō Arisue—that is until he was replaced by the new CIA Chief of Covert Action in Tokyo, Japan, Everette Howard Hunt Jr., who took over CIA assassination operations in Japan under the cryptonym BGSAMURAI.

Perhaps the above information is why the Japanese CIA files surrounding President Kennedy's murder are so sensitive?

Unravel the Japanese covert action thread, and the whole show is blown.

Great dive into this history, Robert. 
 
For the purpose of distilling down its relevance to the specifics of Lancelot Project - the successful plot to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas  — and relying on Lafitte's 1963 datebook for guardrails lest we slip down fox holes, Hank Albarelli uncovered that Lafitte was acting as liaison / project manager on behalf of strategist N-zai Otto Skorzeny and CI James Angleton's crew including Wm King Harvey and Tracey Barnes  — the following from  Albarelli's final investigation: Coup in Dallas, pub. November 19, 2021, fleshes out the details.

(note: General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur's favorite little fascist, appears in a total of 11 entries in Lafitte's 1963 record.)

The following excerpts from Coup underscore the professional history — some of which is highlighted in Monté's historical review — shared by Willoughby and General Edwin Walker and those who pulled off the assassination of Kennedy in Dallas outside any structure other than that necessary for the success of the specific plot, relying solely on the common bonds of blind-loyalty, coordinated skills and trust, and above all, ideology.

Excerpts:
Between October 1st, when Lafitte says that he sent a cable to Madrid that all was ok, and to tell Tom D. (Davis), he then notes, O. says come to Madrid.  Eight days later, in the most incriminating statement written by Lafitte to date reveals a recap of Otto’s strategy, worth repeating once again now that we have Otto’s role as tactician in context:  

OSARN_OSARN_OSARN_

OSARN-get Willoughby-Litt- 

plus Souetre, others (Hungarians)

Lancelot proj - kill squads Dallas,

New York, Tampa-(Labadie) -T says 

called Oswald to purpose [sic]- weapons- 

Walker. Davis in N.O. with 

swamp groups Florida (Decker, 

Bender, Vickers, K of M)---

 

To underscore the ideology driving Otto Skorzeny's choice for involvement in the plot to kill Kennedy, one that unites all those named on October 9 including Lafitte, the history of the Secret Organization of National Revolutionary Action (OSARN) as presented in Chapter 1 warrants repeating as well: 

OSARN was closely aligned with Benito Mussolini and Hitler. OSARN’s purpose was stated: “We want to build a new Europe in cooperation with national socialist German and all other European nations freed from liberal capitalism, Judaism, Bolshevism and French Masons . . . to regenerate France and the French race . . . to ensure that Jews who stay in France are subject to harsh laws, preventing them from infesting our race. . . . OSARN was also closely associated with Reinhardt Heydrich, head of the dreaded National Socialist Gestapo.” 

By 5th of November, within a day or two of Tom and Carolyn Davis’s arrival in Madrid, Otto had told Pierre that Lancelot is a “go,” adding reference to a “phone booth.”  This is particularly telling if the Davis couple had just delivered detailed schematics of Dealey Plaza and the kill zone.  By November 15th, Otto seems to have reconsidered the tech building - phone booth/bridge, telling Lafitte to “turn them.”  That is the last mention of Otto or Ilse Skorzeny until the 28th, when Pierre makes a note to “call Madrid.” The 1st of December, he is sending cables to New York and Madrid.

 

Askins?

—Lafitte datebook, September 12, 1963

 

Askins - Willoughby OK

—Lafitte datebook, October 2, 1963

 

Canon-- S + V?

—Lafitte datebook, September 14 1963

 

Willoughby team – Canon (Z org) D.

—Lafitte datebook, November 21, 1963

 

 

“Cactus Jack” Canon

 The November 21 entry in the 1963 records of Pierre Lafitte constitutes an “endgame” in his running chronicle of plans to assassinate the president. These authors are convinced that Z Org is the unit long controlled by Col. Joseph (Jack) Young Canon. 

            Described as a taciturn, gun-loving Texan, Canon served under Gen. Charles Willoughby during the US Army occupation of Japan, running a Gestapo-like institution called the “Z Unit.” Canon and his subordinates engaged in some of the same kinds of torturous practices that would later be seen during the United States’ occupation of Iraq. He and Willoughby were busily fighting the Cold War in Southeast Asia at an early stage, and doing so with very little supervision because their commanding officer, General Douglas MacArthur was also slavishly devoted to the anti-communist cause. Although Unit Z was formally dissolved in 1952, with Canon moving on to assignments in the Middle East, including Cairo, “many of its operations continued thereafter, and Canon continued to visit Japan at least until the mid-1950s,” writes historian Teresa Morris-Suzuki. . . . 
 

Col. Charles “Boots” Askins, Jr.

Boots Askins was a storied gunman in Texas since the early 1930s, and had moved within far-right circles all his life. Author Jeffrey Caufield, in his study of the assassination of JFK, features a letter from Joseph Milteer (himself a racist and far right associate of Willoughby and Walker) to Charles Askins pertaining to a forthcoming meeting of one of the myriad clandestine organizations that the radical right was running during the ’60s, indicating very “hush-hush” stuff. 

            Born in October 1907, the son of a prominent hunter and writer, Askins Jr. followed in his father’s footprints and, according to legend, "left some marks deeper than his dad."  Prior to enlisting in the US Army, Askins had served in the US Forest Service and Border Patrol in the American Southwest.  

            During WWII, he served as a battlefield recovery officer, making landings in North Africa, Italy, and D-day. Following the war, he was posted in Spain as an attaché to the American embassy, assisting Franco’s administration in rebuilding the arms and ammunition factories after the war. This is but one clue that Askins was well known to General Willoughby and through that connection, he knew fellow Texan “Cactus Jack” Canon. In his role at the embassy in Madrid, Askins undoubtedly encountered Johannes Bernhardt of SOFINDUS, Otto Skorzeny, and Victor Oswald, all of whom need no further introduction to our reader. As attaché, Askins would also have been familiar with US Embassy officials including CIA agent Al Ulmer, and fellow attaché Jere Wittington, Otto and Ilse’s close friend and minder. 

As I've exceeded my EF allotment to attach links from private images, the images of Askins and Canon post-military service can be found here:
https://www.americanrifleman.org/content/askins-on-the-1911/
https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/inside-story-of-us-black-ops-in-post-war-japan/

 

9 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/178-10002-10364.pdf

 

The document in the above link are hand-written notes concerning E. Howard Hunt's superiors between 1962 & 1963, taken during an interview with Mr. Hunt, for the Rockefeller Commission.

 

The above link states the following information, which was given by E. Howard Hunt:

QUOTE—

"...Hunt—1962 + 1963

Jan 1962 assd to Domestic Oper. Div. of DDP. handling proprietaries based in U.S. (impact of which is abroad.) Immed. superior was Stanley Gaines was either Chief of Oper or Exec Off of DOD + Tracy Barnes was Div Chief DOD. (Barnes is cousin by marriage to VP Rockef.)..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, now we have a brand new, follow-up document, indicating that Charles Tracy Barnes was the Chief of the Domestic Operations Division, Support.

 

Interestingly enough, this debriefing states that E. Howard Hunt had at least one other superior officer in DODS—Stanley Gaines, who Hunt claims was in-charge of companies in the continental United States that were supporting Directorate of Plans operations abroad.

   

Thanks Mr. Down, for provoking me to search harder and find a supporting document.

 

Robert, Do we have the IG report that defines Barnes as DOD chief as referenced in Alan Kent's essay published in Coup back in 2021?

I can ask Alan for a link to the document, or you may already have it?

 

28 minutes ago, Karl Kinaski said:

@Leslie Sharpsaid, quote:

Help me find Biden's and I will change sides. 

Touché!

2 hours ago, Karl Kinaski said:

@Leslie Sharp said;

Don't forget the lizard boy, quote from:

 

And who are the guys who should censor world leaders ... the real world leaders? Who are they? Some Schwabs and Gates' and Zucks? Who are they to tell me what I should think and what not. The danger is not exemptions. On the contrary: The danger comes from governments playing god by deplatforming you and punishing you for thoughtcrimes. I do not need a 1984. IMO there are two possibilities for the US in 2024: RFK jr is your next president and the JFKA riddle will be solved and there will be an end of US warmongering all over the world or something will happening to RFK jr and then the US country will go to hell. It will not go to hell with RFK jr as your next president and it will not go to hell with Trump as your next president. It will go to hell with every other candidate as far as I can see. Trump and RFK jr are very different characters but they have more in common as one can imagine. Both men have the capability to turn the US and it's so called deep state upside down and put an end to the cancer of secrecy surrounding world events like the JFKA (Which IMO was a US -Sowjet joint venture and related to the Khrushchev disempowerment in Oct 1964)  and the Covid-outbreak.  (Which was obviously a US-China joint venture in one way or another.) 

Trump and RFK jr are brave men risking their lives, like JFK and RFK were risking their lives. Deep state is in a crisis. He is fighting for his life. He is about to put Trump in jail and trying to character-assassinate RFK jr in a range never seen before ... let's assume Mr Deep State will not succeed and Trump will be republican nominee for president and RFK jr democratic nominee for president and let's think the unthinkable, a Trump-Kennedy ticket with Trump managing foreign policy and Kennedy managing domestic policy  ... science fiction? Who knows. Not me. 😉

 

 

 

in a range never seen before

That pretty much sums it up. You're fully integrated into the Trump Brain.

7 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/104-10119-10100.pdf

 

For well over thirty years now, researchers have been diligently trying to verify bonafides, in regards to claims made in Robert D. Morrow's controversial book, "First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy."

 

One of the most controversial, was the claim that Charles Tracy Barnes, formerly Deputy Director of the Psychological Strategy Board during the Korean War and CIA Special Assistant for Paramilitary & Psychological Operations during the Guatemalan coup d'état (cryptonym PBSUCCESS) was, by 1962, commander of a highly illegal branch of CIA called Domestic Operations Division, which was tasked with supporting the Directorate of Plans in covert operations that were active within the continental United States (sometimes under the designation OOA or "...Other Operational Activities..." in support of DDP).

 

Well, now we have the documented proof:

 

 

The above document states the following:

 

QUOTE—

"...REF: Memo 11/15/62 from D/Sec to C/DODS in Subj file On above date Joseph Murphy, Security Officer, DODS, advised that subject is considering filing an appeal from the security disapproval date of 11/15/62 for his wife to accept employment with (Spanish Embassy) Mr. Murphy requested advice as to procedure in filing an appeal. I suggested the, if subject had any justification not previously submitted to Security, a second request would be considered by this Branch, but that, if subject was filing an appeal with no additional justification, the appeal should be submitted thru Chief, DODS, and should reflect the views of Tracy Barnes. Subject has discussed his request with Mr. Barnes and may want to contact someone in Security above the Branch..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, when Chief, Reports & Publications, Domestic Operations Division, Support, Directorate of Plans, (C/R&P/DODS/DD/P), Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was whining and moaning to CIA Office of Security about his wife not being able to get a job with CIA in the Madrid, Spain US Embassy, this hand-written memo was generated, giving us the first documented evidence anywhere, that Charles Tracy Barnes' official job title in 1962 was, "...Chief, Domestic Operations Division, Support..."

 

And if CIA officialdom was behind the murder of President Kennedy, now we have a prime candidate for project manager, so to speak...

 

...perhaps Tracy Barnes really is Milice française, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale terrorist Jean-Pierre Lafitte's "...well connected T..."

 

 

From Alan Kent's essay titled, "T" in the Lafitte Datebook as published in Hank Albarelli's final investigation, Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK.

. . . Evan Thomas writes: “For a long time, he [Barnes] wanted to get the CIA involved in spying in the United States, just as MI-6 ran a London field station.” Of course, CIA was specifically barred from such activity. Nonetheless, Barnes got his wish. CIA’s Domestic Operations Division is shrouded in a great deal of mystery to this day. One will find start dates for the organization that range from 1962-1964 in published material. A part of this confusion probably lies in the fact that some of what DOD was involved in was ongoing informally before it had a proper home. However, according to a CIA IG report, DOD was officially inaugurated on February 2, 1963. Thomas quotes Howard Hunt, who was brought into DOD by Barnes as his Covert Operations chief, to the effect that DOD under Barnes was less than what Tracy had desired, that it was a “trash heap for ops that no one else wanted.” The specific actions that DOD was supposed to have been created for involved the conducting of clandestine operations within the U.S. against “foreign targets,” entities or individuals who were alleged to be operating in the U.S. under the control of foreign powers; practically speaking, under Communist control. The word “foreign” provided a fig leaf of legitimacy for this division, but the designation of its responsibilities in the once-classified document that formalized DOD stated that the scope of its activities was to “exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activity within the United States.”  Far from being the “trash heap” Hunt described, the creation of this division of CIA provided carte blanche for activities that were supposed to be beyond the pale for the Agency. DOD would later play a part in the massive rights violations that were part and parcel of CIA’s “Operation Chaos.” Barnes continued to deal extensively with CIA proprietary companies during his stint as head of DOD, offering up opportunities for the clandestine moving of funds for “off the books” projects. Victor Marchetti spoke haltingly of DOD to researcher Bill Davy, after offering up the opinion that Clay Shaw’s extant Agency documentary record suggested that Shaw was working for Barnes’ mysterious unit: “It was one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services. This was Tracy Barnes’ old outfit. They were getting into things…uh…exactly what, I don’t know. But they were getting into some pretty risky areas. And this is what E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time…” Malcolm Blunt, the premier source on the clandestine history of CIA as revealed in both documentary evidence and oral history, recently responded to my question about the activities of Barnes’ DOD simply by shaking his head. 

25 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

Interesting. Which 3 months in 1963 does his file go dark?

And where can Alan Kent's work on Tracey Barnes be viewed?

Gerry, following is the preliminary draft of Alan Kent's essay titled, "T" In The Lafitte Datebook. The final edit is published in the appendix of Coup in Dallas:

 

 

 

 

Since it became obvious – very early on – that the character who Pierre Lafitte refers to as T in the notes he created in the course of acting as project manager for the assassination of President Kennedy was a crucial link in the plot, we have all (Hank Albarelli, Leslie Sharp, and myself) been attempting to use the evidence that Lafitte presented to us as a guidepost to identifying this person. I have explored multiple possibilities over the past several months. John Tilton was a starting point, but there was not nearly enough to suggest that he was involved in the plot. William Kent (Robert Trouchard) was a more interesting candidate; a long-time Agency operative who worked closely with David Phillips, running propaganda operations out of Miami’s JMWAVE CIA station and, as Chief of Covert Operations at WAVE during 1962 and a part of 1963, supervised George Joannides, who was involved in what looks to be the operational use of Lee Oswald in 1963. Kent made a remark to his family that closely resembled what T said to Lafitte about Oswald, and he may well have spent part of what is a mysterious transition time for him in New Orleans in 1963, although that interpretation must be inferential. As John Newman said about him in Dallas last year: “He was a bad man.” Still, he never rose to the level of power and respect in CIA that T seemed to have, and in the end, I could not tie him as closely as is necessary to the role. I will say this about him, echoing what Antonio Veciana famously told Gaeton Fonzi about David Attlee Phillips: “It’s not him. But he knows.” Kent is a future research project for anyone who is deeply interested in the covert shenanigans that enveloped the world that Oswald moved in.

 

Finally, I decided that Bernardo de Torres was T, and laid out a case for that scenario. De Torres was a better candidate than the previously-examined CIA men. And I still think that a very good case can be made for him as a knowing participant in the plot that Lafitte was managing. From a combination of the testimony of Angelo Murgado, Gerry Hemming, Rolando Otero, de Torres’ close associate Juan Adames, and the timeline hit of PL’s “D/T” engaging with Oswald on the crucially important date of September 24, 1963, I think that de Torres’ role can be reliably inferred. Still, T to Lafitte was not only a figure who Pierre seemed to defer to and respect, but he was clearly a very large presence in Agency circles. T was trusted to relay instructions from James Angleton, and was involved in personal meetings of great importance in Madrid, New Orleans, and Dallas in October and November of ’63. That doesn’t sound like Bernardo; not really. Leslie posed the question: “Can you see de Torres sitting down with Ilse Skorzeny?!” No, I can’t. It doesn’t work. – (Added back in light of our last conversation that touched on the potential value of outlining “the process” for the reader. Your call!)

 

A few months ago, Dick Russell suggested the possibility that T was the elite CIA legend Tracy Barnes. Subsequently, I have made lists of the characteristics of T as he appears in the datebook, and have overlaid this information with various potential “Ts,” including Barnes. I have also utilized the valuable insights gleaned from extensive conversation among Albarelli, Sharp, and myself. What do we know – or can reasonably infer – about T as he moves through the pages of the datebook?

 

1.)    There are only two people that Lafitte repeatedly refers to by a single initial. One is T. The other is Otto Skorzeny. Clearly, Skorzeny was both a key player in this story, and a long-time, highly respected affiliate of Lafitte’s. It seems very likely that Twas a similarly renowned figure in the circles that Pierre had moved in.

2.)    As mentioned, T is acting as an intermediary between Angleton and Lafitte. He is also, at times, making decisions on various matters. “T says no,” and “T says yes” are examples of these directives. Apparently, T was highly trusted by the ultimate author(s) (Re: “authors” vs “deciders,” don’t think the difference is significant) of the project designed to eliminate JFK. Lafitte, who was a powerfully independent force, seems to take direction from T.

3.)    That T acts as a conduit of instructions from Angleton – and is mentioned in the December 5 entry with Angleton (“JA – close out Lancelot – T”) - indicates that this person is very close to Angleton; probably a long-time colleague of Angleton’s.

4.)    Assuming that T is a long-time colleague of Angleton’s, and a “presence” in intelligence circles, the fact that he is actively involved in this project is a likely indication that he regarded JFK as did numerous CIA hard-liners: as a betrayer at the Bay of Pigs, and as a national security threat for multiple reasons, which have been thoroughly covered in the historical literature of the period.

5.)    That T is available for multiple personal meetings during October and November of 1963 in Dallas and New Orleans is indicative of T having some sort of plausible official business to attend to in these cities. 

6.)    If T was a high-level performer in intelligence circles, his participation in a plot to kill Kennedy certainly indicates a “rogue” personality. Very likely, there would be other indications of him acting independently of formal chains of command. (Rogue from JJA? No, not necessary; the op itself is pretty “rogue!”)

7.)    T is engaging in a complex plot to assassinate a sitting president, and is trusted by those who conceived this plot to operate at a high degree of competence. This is probably not the first time that he has been involved in the directing of subordinates who are preparing for a political assassination.

 

To summarize the picture of T as he emerges in the pages of the datebook, he seems to be a highly regarded, probably high-ranking, long-standing colleague of Jim Angleton who (like JA, as depicted in several of Lafitte’s entries) is confident that he can move outside the formal structure of command to engage in a plot that he regards as necessary to remove a “national security” threat from power, who has experience with the strategy and tactics of organizing political assassinations at a high level in the past and, in 1963, was positioned such that he could engage with plotters in New Orleans and Dallas without drawing undue suspicion to himself. Of course, T would also be someone whose first or last name begins with the letter T. 

 

Without delving into the history of multiple speculative attempts to tie these characteristics to various people, I am going to focus on Tracy Barnes. Because a study of Barnes’ lengthy career at CIA provides hits on every one of the seven points listed above. I’m not going to attempt a biography of Barnes – something that should certainly be executed by an enterprising historian – but I will cite material that seems relevant to a judgement about Barnes as T. In the interest of clarity, I will approach Barnes from the standpoint of the portrait of T that emerges from the Lafitte datebook entries, in an attempt to arrive at a reasonable position on the identity of T. Or rather, I will attempt to reconstruct the path I traveled toward the conclusion that T was very likely Barnes. The data that I choose to feature will be very plainly cherry-picked. I have no doubt that Barnes was capable of great charm. By all accounts, he was a fine husband and family man. In his final post-CIA stint, he apparently did excellent work in race relations for Yale in a role as a kind of ambassador to inner-city New Haven. But in his work at CIA, he was as hard and ruthless as many of his less genteel comrades. No less an operator as Richard Helms considered him to be reckless and irresponsible. His wife Janet said of Barnes that during his time as Chief of Staff at two Agency postings in the 1950s, “Every morning, Tracy got up and went to war.” It is Barnes as risk-taking warrior that we are primarily interested in here.

 

BARNES

Was Barnes of the stature – within the intelligence community, and particularly within the realm of covert operations – that Pierre Lafitte would defer to him in a matter of such importance as the assassination of President Kennedy? I think so. A brief overview of Barnes’ career follows…Barnes was among a small handful of Agency operatives who virtually defined the nature of covert operations, and of Agency-related political violence. With an OSS background, and a well-deserved reputation for daring that was made during the Second World War, Barnes’ path into CIA was cleared by the man who would mentor him and who would act as his patron as long as he was in power within CIA – Allen Dulles. Dulles had been taken with Barnes immediately upon meeting with him in 1944. Dulles wrote his OSS superior David Bruce: “I have met Tracy Barnes here today and am anxious to get him to Switzerland as soon as possible…We can find useful work for him.” 

 

Barnes’ first major post-war positions overlapped for a time. During 1950-1952, he served as counsel to the Undersecretary of the Army, and held the position of Deputy Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB came to be in April, 1951, as an Army project, designed to interface between the Department of State, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council, in order to formulate national policy on matters that were very broadly categorized as “psychological operations.” In 1953, it was placed under the control of the NSC, and specialized in creating psy-op plans for scenarios of battle against Communism but, as had the PSB, ranged widely in its interests. The Board’s name was changed to the “Operations Control Board,” and it lived until 1961, when incoming President Kennedy elected to axe it. "It functioned primarily as a small, but carefully selected, staff operation helping to formulate policy in specific areas of the utmost sensitivity," wrote Eric Chester. The PSB “grew to be a monster, out of control…” said Townsend Hoopes, then an aide to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Russ Baker, in "Family of Secrets," wrote that the PSB "explored everything from the use of psychotropic drugs as truth serum to the possibility of engineering unwitting assassins..."

 

Baker does not source this sentence, but a recently-published study of PSB/CIA interaction during this period of time finds evidence that PSB liaised with the Agency in matters related to the 1950s CIA "mind control" projects Artichoke, Bluebird, and MKULTRA. The author of the study notes that available documentary evidence on these relations is scanty. John Prados, who researched PSB through the resources at the Truman Library, explained the paucity of evidence: "In December 1988, after the author wrote about the PSB in a systematic way for the first time, the CIA sent a plane with a team of armed guards to Kansas City. The team went to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., seized the PSB records, and returned them to Washington...The CIA held onto the records for months, extracted several hundred documents from the set, and only then returned them to the Truman Library. It cannot have been the quality of the PSB's planning for psychological warfare that accounted for this degree of concern at Langley." 

As is the case with subsequent career adventures, Barnes' work with this strange organization is less than clear. For the record, it will be noted that Barnes’ stint with the PSB, which apparently interacted with CIA mind control experiments, corresponds with the time period that Pierre Lafitte was engaged with George Hunter White in the process of setting up scenarios in Greenwich Village in which unsuspecting victims were given frequently massive does of LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, activity that was being sponsored by CIA under the aegis of “Project Artichoke,” and that Federal Bureau of Narcotics operative White and FBN “special employee” Lafitte had been vetted for this project by head of CIA Counterintelligence James J. Angleton.

 

Barnes formally entered the CIA in 1952, riding Dulles’ recommendation to the Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner. Not that Wisner would have needed much prompting. Barnes had worked with Wisner during the 1930s at the Wall Street law firm Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn, following his legal training at Harvard Law School. When, in 1952, then-Deputy Director of CIA Dulles and Wisner placed him at the head of the newly-created “PP” staff (Psychological and Paramilitary warfare), Barnes was being fast-tracked toward the top of the intelligence community. The formal title of the position he achieved in October of '52 was: "Assistant Director of CIA for OPC," a heady accomplishment that bespoke deep connections with powerful men, people who would promote and protect Barnes as long as they enjoyed positions of power. When a member of Barnes’ PP staff, E. Howard Hunt, once requested advice from Barnes on the most efficient way to “dispose” of a suspected European double agent, Barnes sent him to PP staffer Boris Pash, who was supposed to be in charge of arranging such matters. Hunt later claimed that Pash showed little interest in his request. Evan Thomas wrote: “If Pash showed restraint, it was self-imposed. Barnes, his colleagues said, was willing to try just about anything.” Let’s keep that judgement in mind as we head toward Guatemala.

 

The effort by the Eisenhower administration to destabilize and topple the government of Guatemalan leader Jacob Arbenz was the venture in which numerous CIA personnel gained the future trust of D.C. politicos. It was the time of Tracy Barnes’ life. Barnes was placed in a formal position of command of PBSUCCESS by then CIA Director Allen Dulles. By this time, Barnes was a grade GS-18 employee, and he reported only to Dulles' Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner during the 1953-54 Guatemalan operation. The story of PBSUCCESS has been told often. Suffice to say that it was the operation that earned the CIA the gratitude and trust of Eisenhower, and had the toxic effect of convincing Dulles and his most trusted men that they could accomplish just about anything. Two aspects of PBSUCCESS that have to do with the development of Barnes are of interest here. In the process of creating the team that would manage to combine psychological, intelligence, and military tactics in the course of persuading Arbenz to flee his country, Barnes brought together an all-star bunch of past and future Agency talent. David Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson, David Morales, Col. Al Haney, and Henry Hecksher all utilized their formidable skills for Barnes. Several of these characters would later be of interest to researchers of the assassination of JFK. It should also be noted that the CIA Chief of Staff in Guatemala during this time was Birch O'Neal, a former FBI man. O'Neal would later be selected by James Angleton to head Angleton's darkest hole in CIA counterintelligence, CI/SIG, the "special investigative group" which would - belatedly - open a CIA 201 file on Lee Oswald a year after he had defected to the Soviet Union. If Oswald was being handled as a "vest pocket" operation by Angleton, as many of the deepest researchers into the JFK murder now believe, O'Neal would very likely have been the only Agency officer who Angleton would have shared details of that project with. No question that Barnes would have closely liaised with O'Neal during the Guatemalan operation.

 

And, regarding assassination, plans for the disposal of Guatemalan assets of Arbenz, as well – potentially – of Arbenz himself were on the table during the life of PBSUCCESS. In 1953, a CIA officer proposed the assassination of Arbenz in a manner that would suggest the culpability of Guatemalan Communists who had turned on Arbenz. Numerous plans to hit various members of the Guatemalan government floated in and around the anti-Arbenz effort. The beneficiary of the U.S. coup against Arbenz, Castillo Armas, had at his disposal special “K” groups, whose purpose was to kill leading political and military leaders within the Arbenz government. In the end, Arbenz was tricked into defeat, and – as far as is known – these plans were not put into action. But Barnes was deeply involved with them. In response to a request from Al Haney, CIA HQ sent a five page roster of 58 Guatemalans who were marked for assassination, including "high government and organizational leaders" suspected of Communist leanings. This targeted killing was approved by Frank Wisner, and by Barnes. The mindset that Barnes brought to the Guatemalan operation – and a telling indication of his core views – was his response to the concerns expressed by a young David Attlee Phillips, who Barnes recruited to run a “black” propaganda radio station. Purportedly, Phillips expressed some doubt about participating in the overthrow of a democratically elected government. The answer that he quotes Barnes as giving him (in his autobiographical “The Night Watch”) showed that Dulles’ and Wisner’s choice to head what they regarded as a vital Cold War mission had no doubts: “It’s not a question of Arbenz. Nor of Guatemala. We have solid intelligence that the Soviets intended to throw substantial support to Arbenz…Guatemala is bordered by Honduras, British Honduras, Salvador, and Mexico. It’s unacceptable to have a Commie running Guatemala.”

 

After Arbenz was defeated, in an operation that involved “Frank Bender,” among others, Barnes and a handful of his top men were congratulated personally by President Eisenhower, and Barnes was rewarded with two stellar CIA Chief of Staff posts, in Frankfurt, Germany, and in London. In Germany, Barnes attempted to nurture and encourage a group of European emigres who had volunteered to serve as a secret CIA paramilitary force. This was part of a mostly-discarded vision of “rolling back” Communism; a plan that Dulles and Wisner at CIA and numerous hard-core Air Force and Navy men had played with for years. Jim Critchfield, a CIA officer who had served as a liaison to the Gehlen organization, told Thomas that, in the late 1950s, “he [Barnes] still believed in rollback. There was no gap between Tracy and Wiz. Tracy tried to keep the émigré force alive while he was in Germany.”  He returned to the United States in 1960 to take the number two position (Assistant Director of Plans) under the DD/P, Richard Bissell, in the Cuban project designed to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Bissell left a great deal of the Cuba Project operational tasks to Barnes, including the myriad assassination plots that were developed during this time period. Barnes was hip-deep in the theory and practice of political assassinations during the early 1960s. David Wise, in “The American Police State…” describes Barnes’ approval of a plan to eliminate an Iraqi colonel, a suspected Communist sympathizer, with a poisoned handkerchief. In 1961, a senior CIA official approved the delivery of three carbine guns to Dominican Republic dissidents who were interested in eliminating Trujillo. Subsequently, one of the guns was found in the possession of one of Trujillo’s reported assassins. In an interview given for a 1999 oral history-based study of CIA operatives, Richard Bissell stated that Barnes had authorized the transfer of the carbines, claiming that “…almost certainly, the State Department would have been consulted.” No evidence exists that anyone above or parallel to CIA’s DD/P was notified of this contribution to the murder of Trujillo, an assassination which Col. William C. Bishop claimed – in a very detailed account – to have participated in. Deputy Chief of the CIA History Staff Michael Warner delineated an important aspect of Barnes’ role at the time in his valuable study “The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair”: “Although he [Barnes] rarely imposed operational direction himself, he often reviewed and approved decisions in Bissell’s name.” In other words, Barnes was willing and able to step outside formal chains of command to set in motion plans that he believed were necessary – even, as in the Trujillo matter, when they involved the operational details of a political assassination.

 

It is widely accepted today that CIA’s planning for the Bay of Pigs landing was premised on two eventualities that did not occur: 1.) That Castro and several of his key men would be assassinated prior to or during the invasion, and 2.) That if – or, more accurately, when - the invasion began to fail, President Kennedy would fully commit forces for an invasion of Cuba. CIA assassination planning against Castro at the time was being vetted from the offices of the DDP, allowing “deniability” to CIA head Dulles. Larry Hancock writes: “Although Bissell denied any knowledge of Castro assassination projects to the CIA’s own Inspector General, confirmation of his role is now available from numerous sources…This suggests that Bissell, and very likely Barnes, were at the center of virtually every CIA assassination project of the early 1960s, perhaps explaining Barnes’ bland reassurances to Howard Hunt that everything was under control ( a response given when Hunt kept proposing that Castro should be assassinated). It may also explain why Barnes was very much aware of special circumstances that would have found the Brigade arriving in a leaderless and chaotic Cuba. That would help make a great deal more sense out of the planned invasion…” The Bay of Pigs attack on Castro's Cuba was to have been a replica of the success had in Guatemala, and most of the Agency officers who had served under Barnes during that operation were re-assembled for the Cuban venture. 

 

Reportedly, the dramatic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion had such an effect on Barnes that he became physically ill for several months. His wife Janet would say that Tracy was “sick at heart.” “The phone rang, day and night, the families of the people killed. Tracy’s only way to deal with it was to keep working. He was very bitter about how it happened – about the Kennedys.” When CIA IG Lyman Kirkpatrick wrote up a scathing internal examination of CIA Bay of Pigs planning, directly pointing at the "delusions" of Barnes and Bissell, Barnes was tasked by Bissell to offer up a response. He drafted the DD/P rebuttal to Kirkpatrick, completing it in January, 1962. Barnes argued that the invasion had not been given a real chance to succeed and that Kirkpatrick had nit-picked alleged CIA mistakes, when the real fault lay in the failure by the Kennedy administration to remove Cuban T-33 jets with a devastating “D-Day” airstrike. “It is impossible to say how grave was [CIA’s] error of appraisal, since the plan that was appraised was modified by the elimination of the D-Day airstrike. Had the Cuban Air Force been eliminated, all these estimates might have been accurate instead of underestimated…” wrote Barnes. The fast-and-loose game Barnes played with air strikes that had never been promised by Kennedy would buttress the prevailing view of CIA hard-liners that “one more airstrike would have saved the Brigade” as Michael Warner wrote.

 

 

Kennedy's disinclination to move toward an overt war-footing as the Cuban exile invaders were being slaughtered at Playa Giron would blacken his name for all time among those Cuban and American participants in the failed invasion. As far down the road as 1998, Grayston Lynch, one of the two CIA paramilitary officers who were directing the army faction that went to war in the Bay of Pigs invasion, would write a book titled: "Decision For Disaster," in which he railed at Kennedy administration cowardice, using the same arguments that Barnes had laid out in his response to the IG Report. The other CIA trainer who watched his men perish while waiting for JFK to act was Barnes' Guatemalan paramilitary expert, Rip Robertson. 

 

In 2001, British author Matthew Smith introduced an important story to American readers. Smith was told this story by a man who he and many others regarded as a very reliable source. In November, 1963, Wayne January was a partner in an aviation company based at Dallas' Redbird Airfield. The company January represented owned a small fleet of DC-3 planes, which they were attempting to sell off. The final plane was sold by phone in mid-November to an entity called the Houston Air Center. The buyer sent a man who January described as an Air Force colonel to sign for the plane on November 18. The military man brought with him a Cuban pilot who would check the plane over prior to the completion of the deal. Over the next few days, the pilot and January got to know one another and established a certain trust. On November 21, as final work on the plane was about done, the pilot told January that "They are going to kill your President." January - shocked - asked a simple question: "Why? Why would anyone want to do that?" The pilot told January that he had been a mercenary, hired by CIA for participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He described the horror of the final day of the invasion; the brutal "mopping up" that Castro's forces inflicted on the men who were sent on an impossible mission by the Agency. He emphasized that the people above him, the people that he believed to be involved in a plan to kill JFK, were animated by the "betrayal" of the President.

 

January had kept the tail number of the Douglas DC-3 that was sold to the Houston Air Center, and subsequent research validated the history of the plane as January had remembered it. The point of this story is not necessarily that the Air Force colonel, or the Houston Air Center, or the Cuban pilot, were involved in the assassination. But the pilot knew something. And he knew that hatred of Kennedy due to what many perceived as being criminal negligence at the time of the Bay of Pigs operation was one of the motives of those who were involved in the assassination. There were other motives that moved those who became enmeshed in the plot that Pierre Lafitte inadvertently chronicled for future generations. Some were no doubt "economic," in a selfish sense. "Coup in Dallas..." presents evidence that JFK's sexual dalliances with women who could have been seen as being Soviet agents played a part in the run-up to the assassination. But the full-on hatred of Kennedy by right-wing "national security" zealots began in early 1961. As Don DeLillo wrote in Libra, "...after the Bay of Pigs, nothing was the same." And it wasn't. Not for Kennedy. Not for the men at the helm of CIA who Kennedy sent packing: Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell. And, soon after their departure, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George H. Decker. And not for the one high-level Bay of Pigs planner who walked between the raindrops without being drenched in the aftermath of the disaster: Tracy Barnes

 

I will return to a survey of Barnes’ post-Bay of Pigs career in a moment, focusing on the time period that is most relevant to our inquiry. But we should probably ask – and answer – a key question that was implicitly raised in my earlier portrait of T. Was Barnes close to the man who was one of the key planners of the assassination of President Kennedy, CIA Head of Counterintelligence James Angleton? T certainly was. And, so too was Tracy Barnes. Barnes and Angleton were both Yale men, and both had attended Harvard Law School, although Angleton did not graduate. Barnes, a few years older than Angleton, did not attend these institutions at the same time as did Angleton, but both men were members of Yale’s secret society “Scroll and Key,” the major rival of the more famous “Skull and Bones” for the souls of young Yale men. Purportedly, Scroll and Key possesses the silverware of Adolf Hitler in its archives. Be that as it may, membership in a blueblood society such as Scroll and Key is a life-long bonding experience. Angleton and Barnes – and their wives – also met with some regularity at the Washington D.C. society gatherings that became known as the “Georgetown Set” during the 1950s. These meetings began in the late 1940s, organized by Frank Wisner, and featured the reminisces of former OSS men, such as Angleton and Barnes. Barnes’ secretary when he was Assistant DD/P, Alice McIlvaine, told long-time CIA operative George Holmes that “everyone in the clandestine service” at that time, regularly attended meetings at the DD/P’s office – except Angleton, who was notorious for going his own way. In contrast, McIlvaine said, “When Angleton called, Tracy ran to his office.”

 

After the post-Bay of Pigs purge of the top echelon of CIA by President Kennedy, Barnes was still employed, but there is a great deal of murkiness about his work-related activities from late 1961 through the early part of 1963. There is reason to believe that Barnes was involved in the use of CIA proprietary companies as cover instruments, which foreshadowed his 1963 role as head of CIA’s Domestic Operations Division. Joe Trento, in “The Secret History of the CIA,” relates the story of an August 1961 briefing that Barnes gave to top CIA officials regarding covert projects. Barnes touted the purchase of a cigarette factory in Africa as cover for Agency operations. Justin O’Donnell, Bill Harvey’s deputy at Division D – a man who had refused to be directly involved in CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba, and who was becoming increasingly wary of covert action, blew up at Barnes and exclaimed: “A cigarette factory in the middle of Africa? For Christ’s sake! What in God’s name are we going to do with it?” As Larry Hancock writes, he probably was “giving Barnes grief, since he knew that it was a cover for an assassination project.” O’Donnell had been a top-notch Agency employee for years, but after he questioned Barnes dramatically, he was on the street within three weeks, attesting to Barnes’ continued power and to his unwillingness to brook dissent. One of Barnes’ 1961-’62 duties was coordinating payments to the families of National Guard volunteers killed during the Bay of Pigs invasion. In Victor Marchetti’s “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” the former executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms revealed that these payments were being handled under Agency cover through Double-Chek Corporation. Barnes’ involvement with CIA proprietaries was a signature feature of his career. As a summation of Barnes’ tendencies by a knowledgeable source who dealt with him frequently during the early 60’s, Jake Esterline, Task Force Chief for the Bay of Pigs operation, told CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer that Gerry Droller (“Frank Bender”) had been brought into the operation, along with E. Howard Hunt, to handle the “political aspects” related to the plan, and that he (Esterline) “sort of” ran Bender, but that he “never knew what Tracy was going to do next, when I turned my back…” 

 

Thomas writes: “For a long time, he [Barnes] wanted to get the CIA involved in spying in the United States, just as MI-6 ran a London field station.” Of course, CIA was specifically barred from such activity. Nonetheless, Barnes got his wish. CIA’s Domestic Operations Division is shrouded in a great deal of mystery to this day. One will find start dates for the organization that range from 1962-1964 in published material. A part of this confusion probably lies in the fact that some of what DOD was involved in was ongoing informally before it had a proper home. However, according to a CIA IG report, DOD was officially inaugurated on February 2, 1963. Thomas quotes Howard Hunt, who was brought into DOD by Barnes as his Covert Operations chief, to the effect that DOD under Barnes was less than what Tracy had desired, that it was a “trash heap for ops that no one else wanted.” The specific actions that DOD was supposed to have been created for involved the conducting of clandestine operations within the U.S. against “foreign targets,” entities or individuals who were alleged to be operating in the U.S. under the control of foreign powers; practically speaking, under Communist control. The word “foreign” provided a fig leaf of legitimacy for this division, but the designation of its responsibilities in the once-classified document that formalized DOD stated that the scope of its activities was to “exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activity within the United States.”  Far from being the “trash heap” Hunt described, the creation of this division of CIA provided carte blanche for activities that were supposed to be beyond the pale for the Agency. DOD would later play a part in the massive rights violations that were part and parcel of CIA’s “Operation Chaos.” Barnes continued to deal extensively with CIA proprietary companies during his stint as head of DOD, offering up opportunities for the clandestine moving of funds for “off the books” projects. Victor Marchetti spoke haltingly of DOD to researcher Bill Davy, after offering up the opinion that Clay Shaw’s extant Agency documentary record suggested that Shaw was working for Barnes’ mysterious unit: “It was one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services. This was Tracy Barnes’ old outfit. They were getting into things…uh…exactly what, I don’t know. But they were getting into some pretty risky areas. And this is what E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time…” Malcolm Blunt, the premier source on the clandestine history of CIA as revealed in both documentary evidence and oral history, recently responded to my question about the activities of Barnes’ DOD simply by shaking his head. 

 

While the precise nature of what Barnes was doing as head of DOD in 1963 cannot be laid out with precision, Hancock offers a very plausible guess: “The full nature of Barnes’ new Domestic Operations Division is undocumented; it seems likely that it included the responsibility for intelligence collection through the previously existing CIA Domestic Contact Service…” DCS, a long-standing CIA presence by 1963, was tasked with the exploitation of “foreign intelligence information” from sources within the United States who were suspected of having developed such information while visiting foreign countries of interest. Certainly, that would have included a defector to a “denied” Communist country such as Lee Oswald. DCS operated field offices within the U.S. “for purposes of intelligence collection, operational support, and other assigned missions.” As in the internal description of the purposes of DOD, there is a great deal of slipperiness in this mission statement.

 

A BRIEF STOP: J. WALTON MOORE AND ASSOCIATES

A few days before his death, George de Mohrenschildt told author Edward Epstein that he had been contacted by the head of DCS in Dallas, J. Walton Moore, in 1961, several months prior to Lee Oswald’s return from the Soviet Union, and briefed about Oswald. De Mohrenschildt was a frequently-used source of Moore’s, dating back into the late 1950s. Moore would later dissemble when testifying about his contacts with de Mohrenschildt, stating that he had seen George infrequently in the 1960s, but de Mohrenschildt’s wife Jeanne called Moore up on this, claiming that she and George quite frequently dined with Moore and his wife. While it is often stated in the literature that Barnes was “Moore’s boss” from his perch as head of DOD, this assertion cannot be proven. Still, the overlap between DOD and the DCS seems strong enough to suggest that as a likelihood. Moore occupies a unique and very interesting position in the story of the Kennedy assassination. De Mohrenschildt told Epstein that he “would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” When de Mohrenschildt first made contact with Oswald, he arrived in the company of a CIA informant, Col. Laurence Orlov. Orlov, a long-time oilman and acquaintance of de Mohrenshildt’s, was also an informant for Moore at DCS in Dallas, as well as being a social companion of Moore’s. Joan Mellen writes: “It seems apparent that J. Walton Moore…had set up the meeting between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald.” And, it could well be added, if what de Mohrenschildt told Epstein about a 1961 contact from Moore regarding Oswald is accurate, Moore would seem to be on a short list of people who were involved very early on in maneuvering Lee Oswald.

 

Moore, an ex-FBI man, as well as an OSS agent during his service in the Second World War, had joined CIA in 1948, being assigned to Domestic Contacts at that time. By the 1960s, Moore was exceptionally well-known and respected within CIA. A friendly and personal letter from then Deputy Director of CIA Gen. Charles Cabell is in the record. Cabell, addressing Moore as “Walt,” thanked him for his hospitality during a recent (1960) Cabell visit to Dallas. Late in Moore’s career, a note in his personnel file shows that the Houston-based DCS office was upgraded in status, the New Orleans DCS office was placed under the Houston office in Agency command structure, and both offices were subordinate to the Dallas office, still headed by Moore. After the assassination of Kennedy, Moore would pop up periodically during times of intense interest in the assassination. In 1976, with the HSCA investigation into Kennedy’s death about to begin, Moore – still in the position in Dallas with DCS that he had occupied since 1948 – wrote to the head of that division, asking for help in handling “the exposure of [Clay] Shaw’s connections with CIA.” When de Mohrenschildt died from gunshot wounding in 1977, Moore clipped the news stories reporting the death and sent them to the chief of CIA’s Domestic Contact Division.

 

On a cover sheet over a Dallas Times-Herald article which stated that the HSCA had uncovered “new, unproven evidence on Oswald’s ties with CIA, FBI,” Moore wrote “Nothing new, is there?” Moore’s Agency files also feature a detailed account of the story of Gilberto Policarpo Lopez (December, 1963), a young man whose late 1963 travels parallel those of Lee Oswald. Lopez moved suspiciously before and after the assassination of President Kennedy – attempting to get a visa to Cuba in Mexico City in the fall of 1963, and boarding a plane from Texas headed for Mexico City in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. A note from CIA DD/P Richard Helms to Win Scott at the Mexico City CIA station is also in Moore’s files. The note is suggestive of Lopez being involved in a highly compartmentalized intelligence operation. Beyond the particulars of the Lopez story, the significance for our interest is that Moore is being entrusted with highly sensitive information pertaining to an investigation of the murder of President Kennedy, information which was not widely shared within CIA. J. Walton Moore was not “regular folks” in CIA by the 1960s; he was something out of the ordinary - particularly for an employee whose record reflects no obvious advancement for nearly 30 years. 

 

As George deMohrenschildt prepared to venture into Haiti in the spring of 1963, he and his Haitian business partner Clemard Charles were being closely monitored for possible use by both CIA and military intelligence. Dorothe Matlack, Army Intelligence’s chief liaison with CIA was on top of this effort, and she leaned heavily on the “smooth operator,” Sam Kail. CIA’s Domestic Operation Division, headed by Tracy Barnes, was also involved in the deMohrenschildt-Charles matter. On April 26, 1963, Gale Allen, a case officer from DOD, requested an “expedite check” on deMohrenschildt from CIA’s Office of Security. That request was not revealed in any of CIA’s released records on deMohrenschildt, but was referred to in a December, 1974 memorandum written by Jerry Brown of Office of Security Analysis. In a 2004 interview with historian David Kaiser, Allen claimed to have no recollection of deMohrenschildt, but suggested that he was probably acting on behalf of someone else who “had plans for deMohrenschildt.” Bill Simpich writes: “The man with the plans was apparently C. Frank Stone, also of DOD, who asked [CIA records-keeper] Anna Panor to request more information on deMohrenschildt. Stone’s name can take us down the path of a still-mysterious CIA operation known as WUBRINY. “WUBRINY” was apparently Thomas J. Devine, a long-time CIA staff employee who was well acquainted with George H. W. Bush. 

 

If Tracy Barnes was T, I think that we can see – from a distance – the outlines of a nexus of men who Barnes – as head of DOD – would have had “legitimate” operational interest in meeting in Dallas and New Orleans in 1963. People who centered around the Domestic Contact Service, including assets of J. Walton Moore, who seems to have been on the ground floor of CIA’s active outreach to Lee Oswald in 1961, 1962, and 1963. While these people – deMohrenschildt (who Lafitte makes a note to “call” as late as November 20, 1963), and Col. Orlov, as well as Dallas resident and high-level intelligence agent Sam Kail, were no doubt involved in numerous schemes that Barnes could have had interest in, we know from the evidence of the Lafitte datebook that these people also had roles to play in the forthcoming murder of JFK, as the planning for that event rolled on through 1963. It is possible that Moore himself is being referred to in a key entry. On September 16, 1963, Lafitte wrote: “T says Oswald is idiot, but will be used regardless.” Above that is a note to “see J. in Dallas.” 

  

BACK TO TRACY…

 Another “suggestion,” about Barnes and DOD activity in 1963, presented as if it were known with some certainty, can be found in Donald Freed’s “Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier,” published in 1980. Freed, relying on the research of a formidable collection of investigative reporters and researchers, notes that Barnes – unlike his Agency superior, DD/P Richard Bissell, and his long-time patron Allen Dulles, came up standing after the Bay of Pigs fallout. Freed writes: “Barnes was put in charge of the new, most secret, and unconstitutional Domestic Operations Division, and Howard Hunt became his operations officer, running totally illegal domestic fronts, including one in New Orleans disguised as the Fair Play For Cuba Committee.” The specific source of this assertion is not given in the book, so – much like some other claims about the DOD, it cannot be substantiated. But Freed had great sources…We will leave that claim here, in the interest of a full perspective.

 

We do not know what Barnes was doing in October and November of 1963, the period of time in which Lafitte’s T arrives in New Orleans and Dallas (and Madrid) for multiple meetings that were concerned with the final planning for the assassination of JFK. The Thomas book has nothing on Barnes’ activities during this time period. The Assassination Records Review Board, very interested in any internal Agency documents that would pin Barnes down at critical times, requested “chronological files” on Barnes from 1959-1964. Of the handful of top-level CIA operatives whose personnel files were of particular interest to ARRB,  Barnes was the only figure whose files the Records Board referred to in that manner.  After a fair amount of uninformative communication with Agency contacts on the matter, CIA gave the ARRB a few scattered documents that pertained to Barnes. ARRB was not going to get information of this caliber. During the Watergate scandal, a reporter filed a FOIA request for the records of Barnes’ assistant Howard Hunt, focusing on Hunt’s travel during the time he was employed at DOD. “No travel records were found” was the official response. Agency Services Staff head Charles Briggs, the Agency respondent to FOIA requests at the time, allowed that Hunt’s travel records could be had within the Office of Finance, but denied further exploration on the basis that Hunt’s personal privacy would be infringed, and on the more interesting grounds that, when all information relating to operational data was removed from Hunt’s files at the time, the resulting documents would be “useless to the requestor.”

 

As his old Agency nemesis, Richard Helms, moved toward the top of CIA, Barnes’ power and influence waned. Barnes and Bissell had kept Helms at arm’s length from decision-making positions during the 1950s and early 1960s. Even though Helms had occupied a position parallel to that of Barnes in the early 1960s (both men were assistants to the DD/P Bissell), Barnes was not only senior to Helms but, more importantly, enjoyed the protection of his patron, Allen Dulles, and subsequently the favor of John McCone, who Dulles was in close communication with throughout McCone’s reign. Barnes reportedly had gone straight to Dulles at one point in time in an effort to force Helms out of CIA. Helms, who would testify to his distaste for the “cowboy” operations of Barnes and Bissell, was promoted to DCI by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, and Barnes was gone from the Agency within weeks. Helms rubbed in his new power by forcing Barnes’ old friend Des Fitzgerald, then DD/P, to fire Tracy. Following the 1969 death of Allen Dulles, Barnes engaged in melancholy reminiscences with a very few close friends. When he was employed in his last worldly gig, at Yale, Barnes became close to Peter Almond, a graduate student who ran the Yale community relations program. “In long, if somewhat guarded conversations with Almond, he ‘talked of having grown weary with the direction of the Agency. By the time he got to Yale, I think he was fed up with the CIA, in a profound way,’ Almond would relate. ‘He was sick about it. He did not speak directly, he was elliptical, but clearly he was talking about assassinations…’” His former colleague – and fellow Yale classmate – Richard Bissell, would write about Barnes in his memoirs. Bissell, continually tied up in technical details, often ceded operational decisions to Barnes during his time as DD/P. He gently questioned Barnes’ judgement, and implied that Tracy had “led him astray,” as Thomas puts it. Barnes suffered a series of small strokes in 1969, and a major stroke in 1970. In 1972, following severe chest pains, he succumbed to a massive stroke.

 

CONCLUSION

 

Tracy Barnes moved beneath the radar through the most dramatic covert events that CIA was involved in between 1953 and 1963. Rather than being the “corporate liberal” that parts of Evan Thomas’ study make him out to be, Barnes was a daring, frequently “over-the-top,” hard-core cold warrior. Barnes was arguably more directly involved with operations that included political assassination than was any other high-ranking CIA officer of his era. By comparison, the man who many of us have been most interested in over years of studying the assassination, William K. Harvey, is not even close. (“Harvey mentioned as often as T…” I don’t think that changes the force of the “comparison” point being made.) Barnes went off on his own, to places in which he moved outside of a formal chain of command, more than once. He was bitter about the Kennedys following the Bay of Pigs, and remained so for the rest of his life. Personalizing the tragedy of the “brilliant disaster,” Barnes is quoted by Thomas as telling a friend late in his life that “Kennedy let me down.” ( “…was he so hubristic…?” Very likely! Intelligence operatives who moved without much “adult supervision” during the height of the Cold War frequently were.) (“Do we have Barnes tied to Otto, CW, and the European contingent? No, but he was tied to the “U.S. contingent” featuring JJA, and presumably motivated by multiple factors regarding JFK, as were all of them.) During the most critical time period in the narrative we are examining, he was head of a division of CIA that was the bureaucratic equivalent of a black hole; an area of CIA that we know far too little about, offering up opportunities for meetings of the kind that Lafitte records T engaging in.

 

Writing history is hard and precarious work, even when the source material being used is readily accessible and reasonably clear, much less when dealing with a record that has been truncated and veiled, as is the case with the topic of this book. Renowned scholars, dealing with archival material, regularly engage in deeply and passionately-argued disputes about the meaning and importance of various strands of evidence. Historians climb out on limbs that they believe to be sturdy enough to bear the burden of the weight being placed on them. Sometimes, the limbs break. One of the premier historical scholars of the past century, Charles Austin Beard, once remarked to a distinguished colleague of his: “What the hell do the historians think they are doing when they are selecting ten facts out of millions and gluing them together with adverbs?” Still, Beard and many other historians who have enhanced our knowledge of “the way the world works” over the years were able to isolate the most important parts of the narrative they worked with and make reasoned judgements about the validity of myriad sources. That difficult task has been accomplished by the author of this book, Hank Albarelli and, in a much more modest vein, I hope to have added fruitfully to an important part of the larger story that Hank tells.

 

There is no “smoking gun” that proves Tracy Barnes to be the integrally important T in the plan that we can now begin to assemble from the writings of Pierre Lafitte and corroboratory research into the key people who Lafitte named. Smoking guns are almost the historical equivalent of urban myths. They are rarely seen, at least in the way that the term is generally used. Strongly-patterned evidence that points to reasonable conclusions is what can be reasonably expected from a successful historical inquiry. There is a powerfully coherent mass of evidence pointing in the direction of Tracy Barnes as the “T” in Lafitte’s notes. If Barnes was not “T,” then someone who was uncannily like Barnes was.

  

SOURCE NOTES

 

Biographical information on Tracy Barnes is both voluminous, and…woefully inadequate. As a legendary figure in intelligence circles who was involved at a very high level in well-known CIA escapades, Barnes’ name is very familiar. But there has been no biographical treatment of him of the kind that his peers Dulles, Angleton, or Helms have had. The closest thing to a biography of Barnes is Evan Thomas’ justly respected study “The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA,” in which Thomas profiled Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Barnes. Thomas was granted access to CIA sources that, in some cases, are still not available to researchers. The book is a fine, well-written resource, but it should be noted that historian John Newman nails Thomas for his reliance on two major sources – Jake Esterline and former CIA DD/P Richard Bissell – in regard to one particular story involving a 1960 assassination plot against Raul Castro. Thomas’ reliance on these men – rather than on Church Committee testimony – “obscures the CIA’s responsibility for approving a plot that they had conceived.” (Newman, “Countdown to Darkness,” pp. 182-183)

 

This story involves an authorization by Barnes, once again acting for DDP Bissell. One would be curious to know how many more such exculpatory errors pertaining to Barnes and others might have crept into the book…There is also the previously mentioned chronological g

16 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

Interesting. Which 3 months in 1963 does his file go dark?

And where can Alan Kent's work on Tracey Barnes be viewed?

Posted earlier today on this thread (see final paragraph for history of Kent's essay on Barnes):

Barnes remains the prime candidate for Lafitte's "T." Without doubt, your [Robert Ward Montenegro] research strengthens the argument.

Other candidates under consideration while Hank was alive included J. Walton Moore whose good friend Col. Lawrence Orlov appears in the Lafitte datebook.  Hank and I contemplated that Moore as COS Dallas was T, responsible for an operational structure not dissimilar to QJ/WIN or WI/Rogue organized for the one off Lancelot Project — the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas where Moore was based and where Orlov engaged in the oil business. In short, there was more than one T functioning from early 1963 through November.

Another candidate was Birch Dilworth O'Neal, for reasons I won't elaborate on in this thread lest it detracts from Robert's brilliant research.

Lastly, Hank left me with notes to pursue clues to Ukraine connections to the Dallas hit, specifically Gen. Charles Willoughby's close ties to OUN leader Jarslov Stetzco. So we went in search, and have since pursued a number of avenues including one Steve Tanner who was among the first two hundred OSS recruits, and responsible for Eastern European ops to infiltrate Ukrainian solders into Soviet Russia.  Tanner is identified in Otto Skorzeny's private papers as revealed by Major Ralph Ganis in "The Skorzeny Papers," and according to Ralph, Steve and Otto formed a lifelong friendship. In a classic incident of "high strangeness and synchronicity" that followed Albarelli around, Tanner retired to a lake resort less than an hour's drive from Pierre Lafitte's last residence.

For these reasons, Hank decided that Alan Kent's thorough analysis and convincing argument: Tracy Barnes was a pivotal character in the plot and Lafitte identified him, for some unknown reason, simply as T, (likely because he had been knows as Trick among agent comrades for years) — would be presented in essay form as a stand-alone document in the appendix of Coup. He considered this investigation a "work in progress," and anticipated precisely what unfolds here and on other venues in pursuit of a common goal: to solve the cold case murder investigation of Jack Kennedy.  For now, Barnes as "T" makes the most sense 

16 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

I'm familiar with Gibson. The YouTube channel, NoTrueFlagsHere, did a few videos on him a while back. Oswald may have contacted him in, I think, August 1962.

Not sure.  You may be aware of the Moroccan living in Russia who said that he dated Marina before she met Oswald?

 

59 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

The memo does not seem so clear to me. Tracy Barnes could just be a personal assistant or advisor to the chief of DOD and the memo simply reflects the advice that to get the appeal past the chief of DOD he should make sure it passes the scrutiny of Tracy Barnes first.

Whoever the chief of DOD is they certainly would be an interesting individual. If LHO was CIA, his FPCC chapter would surely be considered a "domestic operation", which would be illegal being a CIA operation on US soil. Looks like Tracey Barnes could be involved at some angle if he was involved in the DOD. 

What was Tracey Barnes official job and location in 1963?

@Gerry DownGerry, are you familiar with the name Richard Thomas Gibson? He was among the original cofounders of FPCC in New York; by 1962 he had moved operations to Tangier, Morocco for some reason.  Documents indicate the agency considered recruiting him.  See what you think. https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1797&sort=agency

I mention Gibson because Tangier was a hotbed of intrigue, and a focal point during Hank's investigation:  Frank Wisner Jr. had recently joined the foreign service and his first post was Tangier. The name Wisner appears in the Lafitte datebook, as does Barnes (staying with the assumption that "T" in the datebook is Tracey Barnes).

We have yet to conclude that Lafitte's Wisner was the infamous Wisner Sr. of the Mighty Wurlitzer . . . most likely it was he and not his son; however, the Tangier post leaves open the possibility the young Wisner was being used by the agency under cloak of the State Department in Tangier.

We also know that Thomas Eli Davis was arrested in Tangier in November, and that some six weeks earlier he met Oswald at the Hotel Luma in Mexico City. Richard Gibson claimed to have known of Oswald via FPCC.

Your question re. Barnes' official whereabouts throughout 1963 is important; Alan Kent concentrated on that very question and discovered that his file goes dark for three months. It is worthwhile to revisit the question now that more files have been released. 

1 hour ago, Ron Bulman said:

This picture still bugs me.  Angleton hands on hips.  Both with a smirk on their faces.  The cowboy looks like a rancher.  To me more say Arizona than Texas, the string/bolo tie.  Leslie, you mentioned an Arizona license plate in a later post, but I don't see it.  Looked through a magnifying glass.  It's still blurred but I don't see Grand Canyon State or Arizona at the top.

I had a wild thought.  Barry Goldwater?  Nope.

Paul Brancato posted the picture was available in a search for Meir Amit, I didn't find it.  Which means nothing!

It's perplexing.  The article is from the Jewish News Syndicate.  The "Photo is BY the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center."

I guess one of us should contact them, however forthcoming they might be.

Ron, glad it's bugging you as well.

I sent it to a friend outside Haifi who knew Hank well. I'm confident if cowboy was Amit, or someone known to him within Mossad, he would have advised me.  I'll ask if he'll contact the center.  

Interesting that the photo is available online with a James Angleton search; however those versions don't include the license plate.  It's easy to wonder if someone deliberately resized the photo to exclude it.  

Yes, Grand Canyon State is obvious once you search for standard AZ plates during the 1960s. The fact the plate on the Starliner isn't government issue suggests cowboy might be a friend of or relative of JJA and or his wife, or maybe working undercove. I still lean toward border patrol or law enforcement, not agency specific.

A gun guy pointed out that he doesn't work with his hands. He could own a ranch but not work it.   

1 minute ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

It appears you're interested in a complex period of post-World War II history involving a range of figures and events. Ludwig Erhard indeed succeeded Konrad Adenauer as the Chancellor of West Germany in 1963. Erhard was known for his role in the economic recovery of West Germany following the war, a period often referred to as the "economic miracle" or "Wirtschaftswunder."

As for Werner von Braun, he was a German and later American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in National Socialist Germany and later in the United States. He, along with several other German scientists, were brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip, a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency largely carried out by the Special Agents of Army CIC.

The information about the scheduled meeting between President Kennedy and the von Brauns on November 25, 1963, as well as the potential presence of von Braun's former National Socialist colleagues, is not commonly known. It would be interesting to verify this from reliable sources. Please note that the context and the intentions of such meetings would have been subject to the political and diplomatic circumstances of that time.

Aside from your suggestion I'm unaware of these basics, William Manchester reported the Gold Room meeting.

The invitation for the cocktail party, November 25, was reported in several news articles.

It is reasonable to deduce that given the elaborate arrangements necessary for the Pentagon meeting, and for the cocktail party, and for Erhard's trip to Johnsons' ranch, said arrangements were discussed during Kennedy's trip to Berlin in June was it?



 

On 7/4/2023 at 9:46 PM, Paul Brancato said:

Obviously, yes, for Pete sake, you would not use shotguns in an ambush—a redundant and diversionary observation on your part, Mr. Crane.

However, security teams for the snipers, operating under deception that they are police officers arresting suspects, would need close-quarter combat arms.

Kinda like the two policemen carrying shotguns with the infamous "three tramps", who can be seen at the following link:

 

https://library.uta.edu/digitalgallery/img/10005175

 

 

The dilemma? Who was in charge? Who orchestrated the dance to ensure they didn't shoot one another by mistake?

Did Souetre's operation Petit Clamart have similar, potentially disastrous complications because he involved too many in the actual execution of the strategy?  Would Skorzeny turn things loose to Crichton on the ground, or Lansdale, or Morales?  The argument that security teams were essential - and that Lafitte is referencing them in his October 9 entry — is persuasive but it was and remains our contention that Lancelot Project was far less elaborate. Let's see how this unfolds. I remain open.

8 minutes ago, Keyvan Shahrdar said:

Konrad Adenauer was the first Chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. During his tenure, he was a key figure in the establishment of the Bundeswehr, the German armed forces, in 1955. However, he wouldn't have been in office on November 22, 1963, as he had already resigned on October 16, 1963.  Why would he have a meeting with the US Joint Chiefs in the Gold Room if he was not in power?

Please read carefully: Chancellor Adenauer's Bundeswehr generals. . .

Yes, Adenauer who handpicked the original cast of generals, had been replaced by Ludwig Erhard who, by the way, was the first foreign leader to visit the new president at his Hill Country ranch in December 1963.  

Another poignant anecdote seldom noticed: M/M Werner von Braun (beneficiaries of Operation Paperclip) were scheduled to attend a cocktail party with President Kennedy and Jackie on Monday, November 25.  It's possible the brilliant scientist's "former" N-azi parteigenosse were scheduled to attend as well.

45 minutes ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/104-10119-10100.pdf

 

For well over thirty years now, researchers have been diligently trying to verify bonafides, in regards to claims made in Robert D. Morrow's controversial book, "First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the Cia-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy."

 

One of the most controversial, was the claim that Charles Tracy Barnes, formerly Deputy Director of the Psychological Strategy Board during the Korean War and CIA Special Assistant for Paramilitary & Psychological Operations during the Guatemalan coup d'état (cryptonym PBSUCCESS) was, by 1962, commander of a highly illegal branch of CIA called Domestic Operations Division, that was tasked with supporting the Directorate of Plans in covert operations that were taking place within the continental United States.

 

Well, now we have the documented proof:

 

 

The above document states the following:

 

QUOTE—

"...REF: Memo 11/15/62 from D/Sec to C/DODS in Subj file On above date Joseph Murphy, Security Officer, DODS, advised that subject is considering filing an appeal from the security disapproval date of 11/15/62 for his wife to accept employment with (Spanish Embassy) Mr. Murphy requested advice as to procedure in filing an appeal. I suggested the, if subject had any justification not previously submitted to Security, a second request would be considered by this Branch, but that, if subject was filing an appeal with no additional justification, the appeal should be submitted thru Chief, DODS, and should reflect the views of Tracy Barnes. Subject has discussed his request with Mr. Barnes and may want to contact someone in Security above the Branch..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, when Chief, Reports & Publications, Domestic Operations Division, Support, Directorate of Plans, (C/R&P/DODS/DD/P), Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was whining and moaning to CIA Office of Security about his wife not being able to get a job with CIA in the Madrid, Spain US Embassy, this hand-written memo was generated, giving us the first documented evidence anywhere, that Charles Tracy Barnes' official job title in 1962 was, "...Chief, Domestic Operations Division, Support..."

 

And if CIA officialdom was behind the murder of President Kennedy, now we have a prime candidate for project manager, so to speak...

 

...perhaps Tracy Barnes really is Milice française, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale terrorist Jean-Pierre Lafitte's "...well connected T..."

 

 

@Robert Montenegro Barnes remains the prime candidate for Lafitte's "T." Without doubt, your research strengthens the argument.

Other candidates under consideration while Hank was alive included J. Walton Moore whose good friend Col. Lawrence Orlov appears in the Lafitte datebook.  Hank and I contemplated that Moore as COS Dallas was T, responsible for an operational structure not dissimilar to QJ/WIN or WI/Rogue organized for the one off Lancelot Project — the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas where Moore was based and where Orlov engaged in the oil business. In short, there was more than one T functioning from early 1963 through November.

Another candidate was Birch Dilworth O'Neal, for reasons I won't elaborate on in this thread lest it detracts from Robert's brilliant research.

Lastly, Hank left me with notes to pursue clues to Ukraine connections to the Dallas hit, specifically Gen. Charles Willoughby's close ties to OUN leader Jarslov Stetzco. So we went in search, and have since pursued a number of avenues including one Steve Tanner who was among the first two hundred OSS recruits, and responsible for Eastern European ops to infiltrate Ukrainian solders into Soviet Russia.  Tanner is identified in Otto Skorzeny's private papers as revealed by Major Ralph Ganis in "The Skorzeny Papers," and according to Ralph, Steve and Otto formed a lifelong friendship. In a classic incident of "high strangeness and synchronicity" that followed Albarelli around, Tanner retired to a lake resort less than an hour's drive from Pierre Lafitte's last residence.

For these reasons, Hank decided that Alan Kent's thorough analysis and convincing argument: Tracy Barnes was a pivotal character in the plot and Lafitte identified him, for some unknown reason, simply as T, (likely because he had been knows as Trick among agent comrades for years) — would be presented in essay form as a stand-alone document in the appendix of Coup. He considered this investigation a "work in progress," and anticipated precisely what unfolds here and on other venues in pursuit of a common goal: to solve the cold case murder investigation of Jack Kennedy.  For now, Barnes as "T" makes the most sense 

 

29 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

I wonder if someone in the MAGA-verse has already written a song extolling Ashli Babbitt.

She laid down her life to destroy American democracy for Il Douche and his MAGA Storm Troopers.

min. 1:25
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-2970059/Video-Jan-6-participant-Taylor-Taranto-seen-vigil-Ashli-Babbitt.html

 

@Robert Montenegro
Yup, the Mannerbund.