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Posts posted by Steven Gaal
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D'oh.
--Tommy
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YES Mr. Graves is a loquacious debater. " two one three one Bond Lane, Hicksville, New York," (GRAVES)is not a real address. Gee ....golly at a loss for words .....AH !!
D'oh.
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JFK Assassination: First JFK Conspiracy Theory Was Paid For By The CIA
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CIA Miami Chief of Covert Operations George Joannides’ actions in 1963 provide strong evidence that certain Central Intelligence Agency personnel manipulated Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured above) for propaganda purposes both before and after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. Above: Oswald handing out leaflets for his "Fair Play For Cuba" committee in New Orleans in Aug. 1963. WikiCommons
Less than one day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, a Central Intelligence Agency-funded organization in Miami published a special edition of its monthly magazine in which it linked the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to Cuban President Fidel Castro.According to JFKFacts.org moderator Jefferson Morley, this was the first JFK assassination conspiracy theory to reach the public in print.
Moreover, the CIA propaganda effort remains exactly that -- a lie and an attempt to spread a conspiracy theory -- because there has never been a preponderance of evidence -- let alone incontrovertible evidence -- that Castro or Castro-backed groups organized or implemented a plot to murder the U.S. president.
The Nov. 23, 1963, special edition of the magazine, Trinchera (in English: Trenches), was published by members of the Cuban Student Directorate, a CIA-funded organization based in Miami.
Leaders of the Directorate, also known as the DRE, its Spanish acronym, received $51,000 per month in 1963 dollars ($389,000 per month in 2013 dollars), or roughly $4.8 million per year, from the CIA, according to an April 1963 memo found in the JFK Library in Boston.
Declassified CIA records prove that the publication was paid for by undercover CIA Officer George Joannides, who was chief of psychological operations in the CIA’s Miami station.
Ongoing Suit To Make Public JFK Assassination Files Held By CIA
Morley is the plaintiff in the ongoing Morley v. CIA suit, which seeks to make public Joannides’ classified files.
Morley believes Joannides’ files -- and at least some of the information in the more than 1,100 other related classified files from key CIA officers -- will provide more information regarding the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of President Kennedy. The CIA, which said the files are “not believed relevant” to the JFK assassination, has refused to make public the files, citing “national security.” However, the CIA's claim has never been independently verified.
In Morley’s suit, his attorney has responded to the CIA’s latest brief, on the issue of court fees. Having won on appeal twice, the plaintiff Morley argues that the standard practice of the U.S government paying court fees for a successful appeal should apply. The CIA counters that the litigation has not generated any significant new information, and therefore the government should not have to pay the court fees. The issue is now in the hands of U.S. Judge Richard Leon.
Other files related to the JFK assassination that the CIA refuses to make public include the files of CIA Officers David Atlee Phillips, Birch D. O’Neal, E. Howard Hunt, William King Harvey and Anne Goodpasture.
Regarding the Directorate (DRE), within the CIA, the south Florida Anti-Castro group was known by its code name AMSPELL. The group was “conceived, created and funded by the Agency in September 1960 and terminated in December 1966,” according to a CIA memo, dated April 1967.
CIA Miami Psychological Warfare Operations Chief Joannides handled contacts with the DRE, according to Joannides’ July 1963 job evaluation. With the CIA’s support, the DRE engaged in “intelligence collection, political action and propaganda.”
In its Nov. 23, 1963, special edition, the DRE's Trinchera focused on comments Oswald made during a debate on a New Orleans radio program with DRE Delegate Carlos Bringuier in August 1963. The DRE asserted that Oswald and Castro were “the presumed assassins.”
Also, earlier, in August 1963, Joannides’s AMSPELL had a series of encounters with a Castro supporter named Oswald in New Orleans. The Cuban students confronted and publicized Oswald’s one-man chapter of the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which generated newspaper, radio and TV coverage of Oswald’s obscure, tiny political action group.
Hence, two objective facts stemming from the above are:
1) Joannides was running “psychological warfare” operations aimed at discrediting Castro supporters in the United States in the summer of 1963.
2) Members of Joannides’ AMSPELL network played a leading role in publicizing Oswald’s pro-Castro views both before and after Kennedy was assassinated.
The question Morley v CIA seeks to answer is: are the two facts related?
The CIA could clarify the situation, but, as noted, the CIA won’t make public or release the aforementioned files on Joannides, nor will it make public the files of the other key CIA officers.
CIA: Pattern Of Obstruction Regarding Joannides, Et Al.
So what, one may ask, is the CIA hiding? What is in the Joannides’ file and the other CIA officers’ files that the Agency is so worried about?
It might be something as minor as an operation or project that was mismanaged or had failed despite a large amount of money, time, energy or resources allocated to it. No U.S. government department wants to be seen foundering or mismanaging public dollars -- particularly not in the current era of fiscal austerity.
That said, given the CIA’s history of failing to tell the truth and obfuscation, the Joannides’ files may indicate something more substantial, something that reflects adversely -- or worse -- on the Agency. That’s because the CIA’s latest refusal to make public the files represents the fourth time the Agency has opposed a public interest effort to obtain the full truth on the assassination of President Kennedy. Those incidences:
1) Warren Commission: delay and obstruct. In 1964, CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms, “the man who kept the secrets,” and Joannides’ boss, never told the Warren Commission that Kennedy’s alleged assassin had scuffled with the CIA-backed Cubans in New Orleans. Helms also never disclosed that Joannides -- and other CIA agents who were under his supervision and funding -- had helped communicate the story of Oswald’s pro-Castro activities. It wasn’t until 1998 -- when the CIA was forced to disclose Joannides’ support for Oswald’s antagonists among the anti-Castro students -- that the public learned of this psychological warfare operation. The Agency has resisted further disclosure about the nature, focus and objective of Joannides’ operations in 1963 ever since.
2) HSCA: lie, deflect, delay and obstruct. In 1978, Joannides served as CIA liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), which re-investigated the JFK assassination, but he did not disclose the obvious conflict of interest to the HSCA in regard to his role in the events of 1963.
HSCA Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey said that had he known who Joannides was at that time, Joannides would have not continued as CIA liaison, but would have become a witness who would have been interrogated under oath by the HSCA staff or by the committee. In addition, Joannides’ failure-to-disclose occurred despite the fact that Blakey and the CIA had a pre-investigation agreement between the HSCA and the CIA that CIA personnel who were operational in 1963 could not be involved in the committee’s investigation.
Many would consider the above deception by the CIA audacious, to put it diplomatically.
When Morley first informed Blakey about a decade ago about Joannides’ role in the very anti-Castro activities from 1963 that the HSCA was investigating, Blakey was flabbergasted:
“If I’d known his [Joannides’] role in 1963, I would have put Joannides under oath -- he would have been a witness, not a facilitator,” Blakey, now a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, told The New York Times. “How do we know what he didn’t give us?”
3) ARRB: lie again, delay and obstruct. After Oliver Stone’s seminal 1991 film “JFK” increased debate about who was behind Kennedy’s murder, the public pressured Congress to declassify more files related to the JFK assassination, and Congress created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) to oversee the release of more documents. However, incredibly, the CIA once again failed to tell the ARRB about Joannides’ 1963 work, and the board was blinded to a legitimate and germane investigation area.
U.S. Judge Jack Tunheim, ARRB chairman from 1994-1995, said that had the board known about Joannides’ activities in 1963, it would have been a no-brainer to investigate him:
“If we’d known of his role in Miami in 1963, we would have pressed for all his records,” Judge Tunheim said, the New York Times reported.
4) Obstruction No. 4: Morley v CIA
Fast-forward 18 years into the now postmodern era, and the CIA’s response to petitions for pubic disclosure in the Morley v CIA case looks a lot like its stance versus the Warren Commission, the HSCA and the ARRB: refuse to make public the documents, seek to delay, obfuscate the issues, and do not confirm or deny.
Moreover, the CIA’s stance versus Morley looks all the more problematic due to the fact that it has been 50 years since the assassination of President Kennedy. The Cold War is over: the United States won. There is no existential threat to the United States. Russia, the world's second strongest military power, while not a U.S. ally, is not an enemy, either, but a rival. Cuba’s centrally planned communist economic model has been discredited for decades, and it will likely become a market-oriented economy in the decade ahead. Cuba also poses no threat to the U.S. or its interests in the region -- i.e., don’t expect Cuba to invade Florida or export its centrally planned economic system to Brazil or Mexico any time soon. Even so, the CIA argues that making public the classified JFK assassination files would cause “extremely grave damage” to U.S. national security.
JFK Assassination Investigation Status
It must be underscored that, to date, there is no smoking gun or incontrovertible evidence of a plot or conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, but there is a pattern of suspicious activity, along with a series of anomalies and a commonality of interests among key parties, that compel additional research and the release of non-public documents.
Further, the CIA probably is not covering up some tectonic, systemic crisis-triggering secret about the assassination of President Kennedy, or even evidence of a colossal Agency operational failure that would prompt the American people to call for a dismantling of the national security state apparatus.
But you would not know it from the CIA’s stance toward the old, still-classified JFK assassination files.
See Also:
The Reissue of Oswald and the CIA^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^By John Newman
Reviewed by James DiEugenioOswald and the CIA is not an easy book to read. And I think this is one of the reasons that it was underappreciated when it was first published in 1995. One would expect this result in the mainstream press. But even the research community was not up to the task of understanding the true value of this important work when it was originally published.
Jerry Rose's The Fourth Decade discussed the book twice: once directly and once indirectly. That journal specifically reviewed the book in late 1995 (Vol. 3 No. 1). The reviewer was a man named Hugh Murray. His review was completely inadequate. He gave the book less than two pages of discussion. Murray never even addressed the volume's two crucial chapters on Mexico City, which are the key to the book. (This would be like criticizing the Warren Report and never addressing the single bullet theory.) In the summer of the following year (Vol. 3 No. 3), Peter Dale Scott did something that may have been even worse. He wrote a long article for Rose's publication entitled "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole". This piece seriously distorted and misinterpreted both the book itself and some of the important information Newman had unearthed. This sorry performance partly explains why the book's achievement was never really comprehended even within the critical community.
But to be honest, Newman made some mistakes that contributed to the book's disappointing reception. The author felt it was important to get the book out quickly. He thought he should do so while the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB)) was still operating in order to draw attention to its work. I thought this was an error at the time. I still do. For there were some documents, not fully processed at the time, which would have been useful to the endeavor. For instance, The House Select Committee's Mexico City Report, aka the Lopez Report, had not yet been fully declassified. And to his credit, Newman updated his work on Mexico City with a 1999 article for Probe (Vol. 6 No. 6 ). This is included in The Assassinations.
Secondly, because of this haste, the book is--to put it gently--not adroitly composed. Newman's previous book, JFK and Vietnam, also deals with a complex topic: President Kennedy's intent to withdraw from the Vietnam conflict. Yet that book is skillfully arranged and written. When I asked the author about the comparison between the two, he said, "But Jim, that book was ten years in the making." I should also add that he had an editor on the first book. Something he did not have, at least to my knowledge, on the second.
Third, Major John Newman was an intelligence analyst for twenty years. And he approached Oswald and the CIA in that vein. In other words, he played to his strengths. Therefore the book is a study of Oswald as he is viewed through the intelligence apparatus of the United States government. Or, as the author notes, it's about "Oswald the file". The author rarely tries to fill out the story or the personage. For instance, the alleged attempted suicide of Oswald in Russia is not mentioned here. Ruth Paine is mentioned once; Michael Paine not at all. Only a highly disciplined, almost obsessed mind, could hew to that line almost continuously. Or the mind of a former intelligence analyst. Consequently, because of its inherent longeurs, the book makes some demands on the reader. Which some, like Scott and Murray, were not up to.
IINow, with caveats out of the way, lets get to the rewards in this valuable, and undervalued, book. No person, or body, not even the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), has ever dug more deeply into what the American intelligence community knew about Oswald prior to the assassination. What Newman reveals here literally makes the Warren Commission look like a Model T Ford. All the denials issued to that body by the likes of John McCone and J. Edgar Hoover are exposed as subterfuges. Contrary to their canards, there was a lot of interest in Oswald from the time he defected to Russia until the assassination.
Newman first discovered this when he was hired by PBS to work on their ill-fated Frontline special about Oswald in 1993. And it was this discovery that inspired him to write the book. The CIA Director at the time of the debate in Congress over the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board had testified there were something like 39 documents at CIA about Oswald. Most of them were supposed to be clippings. Newman discovered there was many, many times that amount. Further, he discovered the Agency held multiple files on Oswald. And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there were some puzzling irregularities within the record. (When the author expressed his continuing bewilderment about this to the archivist, the archivist replied, "Haven't you ever heard of Murphy's Law?" To which Newman shot back, "Every time I turn around I'm walking into Mr. Murphy.")
Mr. Murphy makes his appearance right at the start. Once Oswald defected to Russia in 1959 the FBI opened up a file on him for security purposes. But at the CIA there is a curious, and suspicious, vacuum. Richard Snyder of the American Embassy in Moscow sent a cable to Washington about Oswald's defection. But the exact date the CIA got it cannot be confirmed (p. 24). Further, the person who received it cannot be determined either. Since Oswald was a former Marine, the Navy also sent a cable on November 4th. This cable included the information that Oswald had threatened to give up radar secrets to the Soviets. But again, no one knows exactly when this cable arrived at CIA. And almost as interesting, where it was placed upon its immediate arrival. (p. 25) This is quite odd because, as Newman points out (Chapter 3), Oswald's close association with the U-2 plane while at Atsugi, Japan should have placed alerts all over this cable. It did not. To show a comparison, the FBI recommended "a stop be placed against the fingerprints to prevent subject's entering the US under any name." (Ibid) So, on November 4, 1959, the FBI issued a FLASH warning on Oswald. This same Navy memo arrived at CIA and, after a Warren Report type "delayed reaction", eventually went to James Angleton's CI/SIG unit on December 6th. Angleton was chief of counter-intelligence. SIG was a kind of safeguard unit that protected the Agency from penetration agents. It was closely linked to the Office of Security in that regard. But as Newman queries: where was it for the previous 31 days? Newman notes that the Snyder cable and this Navy memo fell into a "black hole " somewhere. In fact, the very first file Newman could find on Oswald was not even at CI/SIG. It was at the Office of Security. This is all quite puzzling because, as the author notes, neither should have been the proper resting place for an initial file on Oswald. This black hole "kept the Oswald files away from the spot we would expect them to go-the Soviet Russia division." (p. 27)
Another thing the author finds puzzling about this early file is that he could find no trace of a security investigation about the danger of Oswald's defection. This is really odd because while talking to some of his friends the author found out that Oswald knew something that very few people did: the U-2 was also flying over China. If Snyder's original memo said that Oswald had threatened to give up secrets on radar operation to the Russians, and Oswald had been stationed at the U-2 base in Japan, there should have been a thorough security investigation as to what Oswald could have given the Russians. For the obvious reason that the program could be adjusted to avoid any counterattack based upon that relayed information. Newman could find no evidence of such an inquiry. (pgs 28,33-34) Further, the author found out that Oswald was actually part of a unit called Detachment C, which seemed to almost follow the U-2 around to crisis spots in the Far East, like Indonesia. (p. 42)
Needless to say, after Oswald defected, the second U-2 flight over Russia--with Gary Powers on board--was shot down. Powers felt that, "Oswald's work with the new MPS 16 height-finding radar looms large" in that event. (p. 43) The author segues here to this question: Whatever the CIA did or did not do in regard to this important question, it should have been a routine part of the Warren Commission inquiry. It was not. As the author notes, "When called to testify at the Warren Commission hearings, Oswald's marine colleagues were not questioned about the U-2." (p. 43) Oswald's commander in the Far East, John Donovan, was ready to discuss the issue in depth. The Commission was not. In fact, Donovan was briefed in advance not to fall off topic. (p. 45) When it was over, Donovan had to ask, "Don't you want to know anything about the U-2." He even asked a friend of his who had testified: "Did they ask you about the U-2?" And he said, "No, not a thing." (Ibid) Donovan revealed that the CIA did not question him about the U-2 until December of 1963. But this was probably a counter-intelligence strategy, to see whom he had talked to and what he had revealed. Why is that a distinct probability? Because right after Powers was shot down, the CIA closed its U-2 operations at Atsugi. Yet, Powers did not fly out of Atsugi. As Newman notes, the only link between Powers and Atsugi was Oswald. (p. 46)
Right after this U-2 episode, Newman notes another oddity. The CIA did not open a 201 file on Oswald for over a year after his defection, on 12/8/60. (p. 47) This gap seriously puzzled the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Investigator Dan Hardway called CI officer Ann Egerter about it. It was a short conversation. She didn't want to discuss it. (p. 48) The HSCA tried to neuter the issue by studying other defector cases. But as Newman notes: defection is legal but espionage, like giving up the secrets to the U-2, is not. (pgs 49-50) So the comparison was faulty. In fact, when Egerter finally opened Oswald's 201 file, the defection was noted, but his knowledge of the U-2 wasn't. This delay in opening the 201 file was so unusual that the HSCA asked former CIA Director Richard Helms about it. His reply was vintage Helms: "I am amazed. Are you sure there wasn't? ... .I can't explain that." (p. 51) When the HSCA asked where the documents were prior to the opening of the 201 file, the CIA replied they were never classified higher than confidential and therefore were no longer in existence. Newman notes that this is a lie. Many were classified as "Secret" and he found most of them, so they were not destroyed. Further, the ones that were classified as confidential are still around also. (p. 52)
And this is where one of the most fascinating discoveries in the book is revealed. Although no 201 file was opened on Oswald until December of 1960, he was put on the Watch List in November of 1959. This list was part of the CIA's illegal HT/LINGUAL mail intercept program-only about 300 people were on it. Recall, this is at a time when Oswald's file is in the so-called Black Hole. It was not possible to find a paper trail on him until the next month. How could he, at the same time, be so inconsequential as to have no file opened, yet so important as to be on the quite exclusive Watch List? This defies comprehension. In fact, Newman is forced to conclude, "The absence of a 201 file was a deliberate act, not an oversight." (p. 54) Clearly, someone at the CIA knew who Oswald was and thought it was important enough to intercept his mail. Long ago, when I asked Newman to explain this paradox in light of the fact that his first file would be opened at CI/SIG, he replied that one possibility was Oswald was being run as an off the books agent by Angleton. In light of the other factors mentioned in this section, i.e. concerning the U-2 secrets, the "black hole" delay, plus what we will discover later, I know of no better way to explain this dichotomy.
IIIIn his analysis of the Russian scene with Oswald on the ground, Newman made clear two important points. First, whereas most of the attention prior to this book was on embassy official Richard Snyder's interaction with Oswald, Newman revealed a man behind the scenes, peering through the curtains: John McVickar. It was this other embassy official who asked Priscilla Johnson to interview Oswald without Snyder's OK. (p. 72) What makes this interesting is the timing. Oswald had actually refused an interview with American reporter Bob Korengold. He had not been very forthcoming with Aline Mosby, the first journalist to talk to him. Then two things happened. First, the Russians communicated to Oswald that he would be allowed to stay in Russia (p. 73). Second, after McVickar gave Johnson the tip about Oswald, the defector agreed to meet her at her room. He arrived at nine at night. He stayed until well past midnight. (p. 72) What makes this interesting is that Newman reveals that Oswald's room at the Metropole Hotel was equipped with an infra-red camera for the observation of its occupants-and the CIA knew this. (p. 9) Second, Oswald found out he would be allowed to stay through a Russian official who actually visited his room.
After the long interview with Priscilla Johnson, McVickar had dinner with the reporter. Johnson, of course, worked for the conservative, and intelligence affiliated, North American News Alliance. At this dinner, somehow, some way, McVickar revealed that Oswald was going to be trained in electronics. (p. 84) Which he was.
Besides the discoveries about McVickar, Newman actually found documents that revealed that Johnson had applied to work for the CIA as early as 1952. She then worked with Cord Meyer, who helped fund the Congress for Cultural Freedom, exposed later as a CIA conduit. At the time Newman wrote the book, it was not yet revealed that the CIA did not hire her because they later deduced she could be used to do what they wanted anyway and they classified her as a "witting collaborator." (The Assassinations p. 435) The story based on this interview received little play in the media at the time, although it did announce that Oswald was a defector. But after the assassination, Johnson revised this original story-to Oswald's disadvantage-- and it received circulation through the wire services, including the front page of the Dallas Morning News. Thanks to Newman we now know that McVickar was ultimately responsible for it.
Another hidden action that was first revealed in this book was that in 1961, the CIA launched a counterintelligence program against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which had been formed the year before. According to the author, that effort was launched by the CIA's Office of Security, under the orders of James McCord. (p. 95) Further, this operation was done within the United States, which made it illegal for the Agency, and without the permission of the FBI. Making it even more interesting is that, as Newman first revealed, David Phillips was also part of this program. (p. 241) This program used neighbors hired as spies, and double agents posing as sympathizers, both reporting back to the CIA. (p. 241)
When Oswald decided he wanted to return from Russia, Newman notes another appearance by Mr. Murphy. Actually two. No "lookout" card was inserted on Oswald by the State Department. Although it appears that one was prepared, it was never active. (p. 138) This would have alerted State and other agencies that a security risk had applied to reenter the country. Second, many FBI files that contained the security risk information on Oswald from 1959 are now missing. (p. 153) Finally, the FBI very selectively issued documents from these files to the Warren Commission. The HSCA got more of the picture. But in 1994, when the author went looking for the information hinted at to the HSCA, he couldn't find them. (p. 154)
When Oswald tries to return, he negotiates to have potential legal proceedings against him dropped. (p. 218) Interestingly, he was taken off the Watch List in 1960, then placed back on it in August of 1961. (But yet, his mail was opened even when he was off the list! p. 284) And at this time, there is the first documentary evidence that the CIA had an operational interest in Oswald. At the end of a memo about Oswald's probable return, the chief of the Soviet Russia division wrote, "It was partly out of curiosity to learn if Oswald's wife would actually accompany him to our country, partly out of interest in Oswald's own experiences in the USSR, that we showed operational intelligence interest in the Harvey [Oswald ] story." (p. 227)
Marina got her exit visa surprisingly fast. Oswald explained his behavior there as, "It was necessary to make this propaganda because at the time he had wanted to live in Russia." (p. 235) Oswald thought his passport would be confiscated when he returned. But, surprisingly-or not-Oswald was actually able to sign papers for a government loan at the American Embassy. A man named Spas Raikin of the Travelers Aid Society was contacted by the State Department to meet Oswald and his new wife in New York in June of 1962. The Oswalds made it through customs and immigration without incident. And without any evidence of an attempt at a debriefing.
When Oswald arrived back in Texas, FBI agent John Fain did do an interview with him. Oswald then got a job at Leslie Welding, and started to subscribe to communist newspapers. At this point, Mr. Murphy pops up again. Even though the FBI had informants in many post offices looking out for just this sort of thing-a former defector subscribing to communist periodicals- and Oswald has signed a post office form instructing the post office to deliver him foreign propaganda, the Bureau did an inexplicable thing. In October, they closed their Oswald file. (p. 271)
What makes the timing of this fascinating are two events. First, the CIA campaign against the FPCC begins to heat up, and the FBI opens up a similar front against the FPCC led by Cartha De Loach. (p. 243) Second, George DeMohrenschildt, the Baron, enters Oswald's life. In his interview with the Warren Commission, the Baron tried to conceal his knowledge of who J. Walton Moore was. Moore was the head of the CIA office in Dallas who, it was later revealed, approached the Baron about going out to meet the returned defector. But DeMohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that Moore was "some sort of an FBI man in Dallas. Many people consider him the head of the FBI in Dallas." (p. 277)
Newman closes this section of the book with a beautiful Mr. Murphy episode. He notes that FBI agent James Hosty was now, rather belatedly, looking for Oswald and his wife. This was in March of 1963. Hosty also recommended that Oswald's case be reopened. The grounds for this reopening? Oswald had a newly opened subscription to the Communist newspaper, The Worker. (p. 273) But, as the author notes, when the Dallas FBI office had previously learned of an earlier such subscription-to the exact same publication-it had closed his file! This recommendation had a caveat. Hosty left a note in Oswald's file "to come back in forty-five to sixty days." (Ibid) But by then, of course, Oswald would be in New Orleans. Newman poses the question: Was the reason Oswald's case was closed for these six months because DeMohrenschildt was now making his approach to Oswald? (p. 277) Was another reason because Oswald was now about to enter the fray, along with the CIA and FBI, against the FPCC in New Orleans? (p. 289)
IVThe two finest parts of this distinguished work are the sections on New Orleans and, especially, Mexico City. Newman notes that the official story is that the FBI lost track of Oswald while he was organizing his FPCC group in New Orleans under the name of Hidell. This is when many credible witnesses place him in league with Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith at 544 Camp Street. But even though FBI agents Regis Kennedy and Warren DeBrueys were specialists on the anti-Castro beat in New Orleans, the FBI holds that Hosty did not know that Oswald moved to New Orleans until June 26th. In this book, the author demonstrates with a chart why this is so hard to believe. On page 300 he lists seven different events between May 14th and June 5th that should have caused the Bureau to realize that Oswald had moved. If you believe the Bureau, it wasn't enough.
The author suspects this methodical obtuseness was due to the fact that Oswald was in, what Newman calls, his "undercover" phase in New Orleans. That is, he has visited Jones Printing to order flyers with two different stamps applied, neither of them in his name. The first is under the name Hidell, and the second is addressed 544 Camp St. Newman believes that Banister was using Oswald to smoke out leftwing students and liberal professors at Tulane, like Prof. Leonard Reissman. Newman also brings out the fact that in a memo to the Bureau from New Orleans, the information that several FPCC pamphlets contained the 544 Camp St. address was scratched out. (p. 310)
The next discovery made by the author is also arresting. The FBI says they discovered Oswald was in New Orleans at the end of June. (p. 317) Yet they did not verify where he lived until August 5th. As Newman notes, the latter is the same day that Oswald broke out of his undercover mode and contacted some Cuban exiles, using his real name. Or as the author puts it: " ... the FBI's alleged blind period covers-to the day-the precise period of Oswald's undercover activity in New Orleans." (Ibid)
On August 5th, Oswald begins to play an overt role as an agent provocateur with Carlos Bringuier of the anti-Castro exile group, the DRE. The Warren Commission never knew that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMSPELL. When Oswald is arrested on Canal Street after his famous altercation with Bringuier, he actually had the Corliss Lamont booklet, "The Crime Against Cuba" with him. This had the "FPCC 544 Camp Street" stamp on it. (As I showed in my first book, this particular pamphlet was very likely provided to Banister through the CIA itself. See Destiny Betrayed, p. 219) Newman then details Oswald's arrest, his court date, his activities in front of the International Trade Mart-with flyers in his own name with his own address, and how Oswald now goes to the papers to get ads published for his cause. Oswald was attracting so much attention that J. Edgar Hoover requested a memorandum on him in late August with a detailed summary of his activities. This went to the CIA. When Oswald debated Bringuier on a radio program, the moderator Bill Stuckey offered the tape to the FBI. And the DRE reported the incident to the CIA. As Newman builds to his climax, all of this is important in light of what will happen next.
After creating a lot of bad publicity for the FPCC in New Orleans, Oswald now lowers his profile again. At the Mexican consulate in New Orleans, he and CIA operative Bill Gaudet get visas to go to Mexico on September 17th .Why is the date important? Because on the day before, the 16th, the CIA told the FBI they were considering countering FPCC activities in foreign countries. A week later, Oswald leaves New Orleans on a bus to Mexico.
What Newman does with the legendary Oswald trip to Mexico is, in some respects, revolutionary. Greatly helped by the release of the finally declassified Lopez Report, he actually goes beyond that magnificent document. According to the Warren Commission, Oswald was in Mexico City from Friday September 27th to Wednesday October 3rd. The ostensible reason was to acquire an in-transit visa from the Cuban consulate so he could travel from Cuba back to the Soviet Union. But as Newman notes, this story makes little sense and is likely a ruse. (p. 615) Oswald already had a passport to Russia, but the stamp warned that a person traveling to Cuba would be liable for prosecution. If he really wanted to go to Russia, Oswald could have gone the same roundabout route he had in 1959. The route he was choosing this time actually made it much harder, if not impossible, to get to Russia in any kind of current time frame.
When Oswald first shows up at the Cuban consulate it allegedly is at 11:00 AM on Friday. (p. 356) Yet as the author notes on his chronological chart, he is supposed to have already called the Soviet Consulate twice that morning. (Ibid) The problem with those two calls is that they were both in Spanish which, as the Lopez Report notes, the weight of the evidence says Oswald did not speak. He tells receptionist Silvia Duran he wants an in-transit visa for travel via Cuba to Russia. But he has no passport photos. He leaves to get the pictures taken. When he returned with the photos, Duran told him that he now had to get his Soviet visa before she could issue his Cuban visa. (p. 357)
Oswald now went to the Soviet Consulate. But here we find another problem with what is supposed to be his third call there. The time frames for the call and the visit overlap. He cannot be outside calling inside when he is already inside. (Ibid) Further, this call is also in Spanish, which creates a double problem with the call. Once inside, Oswald learns he cannot get a visa to give to Duran unless he requested it from Washington first. And the process would take weeks. Oswald now makes a scene and is escorted out. He goes back to the Cuban consulate. Oswald tells Duran there was no problem with the Soviet visa. She does not buy his story and calls the Soviet consulate. They tell her they will call her back. Embassy official and KGB secret agent Valery Kostikov calls back. Oswald's attempt falls apart since Oswald knows no one in Cuba and the routing to the Russian Embassy in Washington will take too long. (p. 359) This call seems genuine. But as the author notes, and as we shall see, there was one problem with it: neither Duran nor Kostikov mentioned Oswald by name.
Oswald creates another scene and quarrels with Cuban counsel Eusebio Azcue. Now, and this is important, Duran insists that this is the last time she saw or spoke to Oswald. This created a serious problem because the Warren Commission reported that she did talk to him again.(p, 408) The apparent source for this is an FBI memo of Dec. 3, 1963. The HSCA realized this was a problem. So they grilled Duran on this point. They tried three different ways to get her to admit she could be wrong. She stuck by her story. (pgs 409-410)
Why is this so problematic? Because on the next day, Saturday September 28th, the Lopez Report says there was a call from a man and a woman to the Soviet Consulate. Further, in his interviews, Newman discovered that the Russians maintain that the switchboard was closed on Saturday. (p. 368) From this and other evidence, Newman concludes that the man in this call is not Oswald. Duran says the woman is not her. Further evidence of this impersonation is that Oswald had visited the Russian Consulate earlier that day. And this phone conversation has little, if any, connection to what he discussed there. From information in the Lopez Report, from CIA Station Chief's Winston Scott's manuscript, and interviews with the transcribers, there was also a call made on Monday, the 30th, from Oswald to the Soviet Consulate. This call is apparently lost today.
Finally, on Tuesday, October 1st, there are two calls from Oswald to the Soviet Consulate. Right off the bat, these are suspicious because they are in poor Russian. Yet Oswald was supposed to have spoken fluent Russian. So again, these two calls appear to have been made by an imposter.
But why? In the new Epilogue written for this edition, Newman writes it is because when Duran originally called the Soviet Consulate, Oswald's name was not specifically mentioned. When Oswald then went to the Soviets on Saturday, and created another scene, this was the last of the actual encounters. The specific problem was this: There was no direct record made between Oswald and Kostikov. As we shall see, this could not be allowed. So the two calls on Tuesday had to be made. And the necessity was such that the risk was run of exposing the charade by not having Oswald's voice on the tapes. Why was this so important?
VPrior to Oswald's Mexican odyssey, the FBI reports on his FPCC forays in New Orleans went into a new operational file at CIA, which did not merge with his 201 file. (p. 393) According to the author, this file eventually contained almost a thousand documents. Newman dates the bifurcation from September 23rd: shortly after Oswald goes to the Mexican consulate, and right about when he leaves New Orleans. The FBI report goes to Oswald's CI/SIG soft file and his Office of Security file. (p. 394) But after the assassination, all the FBI reports suddenly revert back to Oswald's 201 file. Only two compartments in the Agency had all of Oswald's file-CI/SIG and Office of Security. As we shall see, there is a method to all this meandering.
At CIA HQ, after the information about Oswald in Mexico City arrives, a first cable is sent on October 10. This cable is meant for the FBI, State Department and the Navy. This cable describes a man who does not resemble Oswald. He is 35 years old, has an athletic build, and stands six feet tall. (p. 398)
At almost the same time this cable was sent, a second cable from CIA HQ goes to Mexico City. This one has the right description of Oswald. So therefore, in a normal situation, the officers in Mexico City could match the description to their surveillance take. But it was missing something crucial. It said that the latest information that CIA had on Oswald was a State Department Memorandum dated from May of 1962. This was not true. For just one example, the Agency had more than one FBI report about Oswald's FPCC activities in New Orleans. Yet, for some reason, the file used to draft this cable was missing the FBI New Orleans reports. What makes these two varyingly false cables even more interesting is that Angleton's trusted assistant Ann Egerter signed off on both of them for accuracy. (p. 401) Apparently, she didn't know what she was signing, or if they contradicted each other. Further, Egerter sent Oswald's 201 file, which was restricted, to the HQ Mexico City desk until November 22nd. (Ibid)
For the first cable, Jane Roman was the releasing officer. She also participated in the drafting of the second cable. What makes her participation in all this so interesting is that she had read the latest information about Oswald in New Orleans on October 4th, less than a week before she signed off on the first cable. When Newman confronted her with these contradictory documents, she said: "I'm signing off on something that I know isn't true." (p. 405) She went on and tried to explain it with this: "I wasn't in on any particular goings-on or hanky-panky as far as the Cuban situation ... to me it's indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis." (p. 405) Note her reference to the "Cuban situation". For it was Oswald's activities with the Cubans in New Orleans that was left out of the second cable to Mexico City. Therefore Mexico City chief Win Scott could not coordinate Oswald's New Orleans activities with what Oswald had done on his home turf.
For the second cable, the releasing officer was Tom Karemessines who was deputy to Richard Helms. It has never been explained why this cable had to go so high up into officialdom for permission to release it.
There is one last piece to this mosaic that is necessary for its deadly denouement to be fully comprehended. Ann Egerter testified that their counter-intelligence group knew Kostikov was a KGB agent. But the story is that they did not know he was part of Department 13, which participated in assassinations, until after Kennedy's assassination. (p. 419)
All of this is absolutely central to the events that occur on November 22, 1963. Consider: Here you have a defector who was in the Soviet Union for almost three years. He returns and then gets involved confronting anti-Castro Cubans in New Orleans. He then goes to Mexico City, and visits both the Cuban and Soviet embassies trying to get to Russia from Cuba. He creates dramatic scenes at both places, and here is the capper: He talks to the KGB's officer in charge of assassinations in the Western Hemisphere. By the time Oswald returned to Dallas, the alarm bell should have been sounding on him throughout the intelligence community. Especially in view of Kennedy's announced visit to Texas. He should never have been allowed to be on the motorcade route. The Secret Service should have had the necessary information about him and he should have been on their Security Index.
This did not happen. In fact, at the time his profile should have been rising, these false cables within the CIA and to the FBI, State, and Navy were actually lowering it. The final masterstroke, which made sure the information would be concealed until November 22nd, was not discovered until after the book's initial publication. As stated above, the FBI had issued a FLASH warning on Oswald back in 1959. After four years, this was removed on October 9, 1963! This was just hours before the first CIA cable mentioned above was sent. (The Assassinations p. 222)
As Newman notes, "the CIA was spawning a web of deception". (p. 430) When JFK is killed, and Hoover tells President Johnson about Oswald's trip to Mexico City and his visits to both the Cuban and Russian embassies, the threat of nuclear war quickly enters the conversation. But when the FBI discovers that the voice on the tapes are not really Oswald's it does two things: 1.) It points to something even more sinister, therefore throwing the intelligence community into a CYA mode, and 2.) It forces the Agency to hatch a cover story: the tapes were routinely destroyed days after they were made. The result of all this was an investigation that was never allowed to investigate. A presidential commission whose leader was told beforehand that millions of lives were at risk because the Cubans and Russians might be involved. And it exposed an intelligence community that was asleep at the switch, therefore allowing the alleged assassin to be moved into place by the KGB. The result was therefore preordained: a whitewash would follow. And Newman presents written evidence from both J. Edgar Hoover and Nicolas Katzenbach demonstrating that the subsequent inquiry was curtailed at its inception. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach wrote that speculation about Oswald had to be "cut off" and the idea that the assassination was a communist conspiracy had to be rebutted. (p. 632) Newman later discovered that Hoover realized he had been duped by the CIA about Oswald in Mexico City. (The Assassinations, p. 224)
In his new Epilogue for this 2008 edition, Newman explains why only someone who a.) Understood the inner workings of the national security state, and b.) Understood and controlled Oswald's files, could have masterminded something as superhumanly complex as this scheme. One in which the conspiracy itself actually contained the seeds that would sprout the cover-up.
In this new chapter, Newman names James Angleton as the designer of the plot. (p. 637) He also names Anne Goodpasture, David Phillips' assistant in Mexico City, as the person who hatched the internal CIA cover up by saying the ersatz tapes had been destroyed in October. This is evidenced in a cable she sent on 11/23 (pgs 633-634). Yet she probably knew this was false. Because she later testified to the ARRB that a voice dub of a tape had been carried to the Texas border on 11/22/63, the night before she sent the cable (p. 654). Further, Win Scott had made his own voice comparison after the assassination. He could not have if the tapes had been destroyed. (p. 635) Angleton made sure Scott's voice comparison never became public by swooping into Mexico City and confronting, nearly threatening, Win Scott's widow after he died. Once he was inside the house, he removed four suitcases of materials from Scott's office. This included the contents of his safe where the Mexico City/Oswald materials had been stored. (p. 637)
This remarkable book could never have been composed or even contemplated without the existence of the Assassination Records Review Board. No book takes us more into Oswald's workings with the intelligence community than this one. And his section on Mexico City is clearly one of the 5 or 6 greatest discoveries made in the wake of the ARRB. The incredible thing about the case he makes for conspiracy and cover up is this: The overwhelming majority of his evidence is made up of the government's own records. Its not anecdotal, its not second hand. In other words, its not from the likes of Frank Ragano, Billy Sol Estes, or Ed Partin. It is material that could be used in a court of law. And it would be very hard to explain away to a jury. Imagine the kind of witness Jane Roman would make.
Which is why it all had to be concealed for over thirty years. So much for there being nothing new or important in those newly declassified files. Angleton knew differently. Just ask Win Scott's widow. Or read this book.
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The Central Banker/U.S. Government Recovery Illusion Is Now Falling Apart=-=-=-=-=-=July 12th, 2014---------------------------------
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- Hair-Raising Technique Detects Drugs, Explosives On Human Body
sciencehabit writes Scientists have found a way to combine Van de Graaff generators with a common laboratory instrument to detect drugs, explosives, and other illicit materials on the human body. In the laboratory, scientists had a volunteer touch a Van de Graaff generator for 2 seconds to charge his body to 400,000 volts. This ionized compounds on the surface of his body. The person then pointed their charged finger toward the inlet of a mass spectrometer, and ions from their body entered the machine. In various tests, the machine correctly identified explosives, flammable solvents, cocaine, and acetaminophen on the skin.
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www.latimes.com/.../la-me-ln-ex-tsa-screener-threats-lax-20140519-story.htmlMay 20, 2014 ... A former TSA screener arrested on six federal charges after allegedly making a
series of 9/11-related threats against LAX is not mentally ...
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Jan 31, 2012 ... Possibly the Most Incompetent TSA Story Yet. The storyline: TSA screener finds
two pipes in passenger's bags. Screener determines that ...
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rt.com/usa/160292-tsa-agent-trial-incompetent/Former 'Satan-obsessed' TSA agent who made LAX threats ruled incompetent for
trial. Published time: May 20, 2014 22:10. Get short URL. Reuters / Kevork ...
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- Hair-Raising Technique Detects Drugs, Explosives On Human Body
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And by the way, how do you know that it was a "national security issue, Gaal?"
--Tommy
Edited by Thomas Graves, Today, 10:13 PM.
**************************************************************
"Vallee drove a 1962 Ford Falcon with the New York licence plate 31-10RF. After JFK's assassination, NBC news learned of Vallee's arrest on Nov 2nd in Chicago. Luke Christopher Hester, an NBC Chicago employee, asked his father in law, Hugh Larkin, a retired New York City police officer, to check on Vallee's licence plate. Larkin asked
his old friends in the New York PD to do a check on the plate. They came back to Larkin saying the licence plate was "frozen" and "only the FBI could obtain the information."===========
Does seem some info Car in Vallee's name
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=62272&relPageId=50
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?docId=62272&relPageId=51
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Oh My God!
The FBI threatened to sodomize the people looking into the issue of Vallee's license plates???
That's horrible!
LOL // THOMAS GRAVES
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When a car registration is a national security issue ,I think the people of the USA are getting the treatment that the FBI threatened. NO LOLPLEASE IF YOU CAN POST WERE THE HSCA FOUND THAT THERE WAS NO LHO CAR REGISTRATION. (ISNT THAT YOUR CONTENTION ?? ) -
Jack S. Martin and Thomas Beckham were CERTAINLY involved in the JFK murder. I only disagree with her as regards their CIA status -- I say they were below the level of ROGUES. // Paul Trejo
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Low level assets can be run by high level CIA officers. RE: HUNT and the burglar assistants Watergate.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
- I agree with Jim DeEugenio assessment
- ROGUES have TSD help ?? Got to be kidding.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
NEXUS by Larry Hancock Reviewed by Jim DeEugenioThen came the icing on the cake: the back channel. This refers to Kennedy’s negotiations with Castro through reporter Lisa Howard, diplomat William Attwood, and French journalist Jean Daniel. The goal was to normalize relations with Cuba. This began in January 1963 and continued all the way up to Kennedy’s death. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Helms were opposed to it. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara looked at it as a way of weaning Castro from the Soviets. In fact, McNamara said the end result could be an ending of the American trade embargo in return for Castro removing all Soviet personnel from the island. (Hancock, pgs. 99-100) Averill Harriman from the State Department was also for it. But he said, “Unfortunately, the CIA is still in charge of Cuba.” (ibid, p. 102) Hancock interestingly notes that Bundy was part of the movement to block any continuance of the back channel when LBJ became president.
Since Helms knew about the back channel, and since the NSA likely was picking up some of Howard’s phone calls, Hancock here makes an interesting assumption. Since Angleton and Helms were good friends, and since Angleton’s domain was counter-intelligence, Angleton very likely knew about the back channel. Through both Helms and the NSA. Since he and Harvey were close in 1963, Angleton had to have told him.
Hancock then advances some interesting evidence that at least three of the Cuban exiles knew about the back channel. They were Rolando Otero, Felipe Vidal Santiago, and Bernardo DeTorres. (Ibid, pgs. 114-15, 122)
Hancock then begins to lay out the plotting around Oswald in the summer of 1963. He clearly implies that this was done to kill off the back channel, which it did. As the time comes to move the plot to Mexico City and Dallas, the occurrences of Oswald “doubles” begin to manifest itself. The author notes the famous Sylvia Odio incident and states that the Odio family was associated with Ray’s group called JURE. And, in fact, Sylvia had just visited with Ray and his assistant that summer. So this may have been an attempt to associate Oswald with the CIA’s least favorite exile group.From here on in, which is about the last thirty pages or so of the book, I thought Hancock lost sight of his goal. He now begins to lose the macro view of the assassination, that is, from the top down; and he begins a micro view. That is how the ground level worked in Dallas with Ruby as a featured player. Not to say that this information is not interesting. Much of it is. I was especially taken by the work of Anna Marie Kuhn Walko on Roy Hargraves. The substance of this is that Hargraves had Secret Service credentials and was in Dallas in November of 1963. Hancock does not really recover the macro focus until the very end where he mentions that Harvey’s files were gone through after his death. (Hancock, p. 186) And he finalizes the work with a nice closing quote from Phillips saying that JFK was likely killed in a conspiracy, likely utilizing American intelligence officers. (ibid)
I have some other disagreements. Hancock apparently buys the part of the CIA Inspector General report saying that Roselli met with Jim Garrison in Las Vegas in 1967. In a private letter I saw, Garrison says it never happened. And he would not know Roselli if he saw him.
I disagree with part of Hancock’s analysis on Mexico City. He seems to think Oswald was actually there and did most all the things attributed to him. My view is that Oswald may have been in Mexico City, but the weight of the evidence says he did not do most of the things attributed to him. I also thought the author did not make enough of what was going on with Oswald in New Orleans. After all, the CIA program to counter the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was being run by Phillips. And that is what it appears Oswald was up to in New Orleans. At one point in the narrative Hancock says there is no evidence that Ruby knew JFK was going to be killed in the motorcade route. Well then, what about Julia Ann Mercer? And I would be remiss if I did not say that the book is studded with numerous typos and pagination errors. Apparently, there was a rush to get the volume out for the 48th anniversary.
But overall, I think this is an interesting and worthwhile work. As I said, it has a unique approach to it, and Hancock’s analysis of the crime has sophistication, intelligence and nuance to it. Which, in these days of Lamar Waldron, Tom Hartmann and Mark North, is not all that common.########################^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^########################One of the more interesting facts that Lane relies upon was first revealed by Jim Douglass in his excellent book JFK and the Unspeakable. It is widely accepted that moments after a bullet tore through President Kennedy's head, Dallas policeman Joe Marshall Smith confronted a fake Secret Service agent behind the picket fence atop the grassy knoll. As Smith stated in his Warren Commission testimony, after he heard the shots, “...this woman came up to me and she was just in hysterics. She told me, 'They are shooting the President from the bushes.' So I immediately proceeded up there...I looked in all the cars and checked around the bushes.Of course, I wasn't alone. There was some deputy sheriff with me, and I believe one Secret Service man when I got there. I got to make this statement, too. I felt awfully silly, but after the shot and this woman, I pulled my pistol from my holster, and I thought, this is silly, I don't know who I am looking for, and I put it back. Just as I did, he showed me that he was a Secret Service agent...he saw me coming with my pistol and right away he showed me who he was.” (7H535) Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler, who took Smith's deposition, did not ask for a description of the man with the Secret Service credentials because, as Liebeler well knew, there were no genuine Secret Service personnel on foot in Dealey Plaza. Although Commission apologists like Vincent Bugliosi have attempted to blunt Smith's testimony by asserting that he “doesn't say how the person showed him who he was” and therefore he could have been mistaken because he probably just saw a badge and “assumed it was a Secret Service badge” (Bugliosi, p. 865), this ignores what Smith told author Anthony Summers: “The man, this character, produces credentials from his hip pocket which showed him to be Secret Service. I have seen those credentials before, and they satisfied me and the deputy sheriff.” (Summers, italics added, Conspiracy, p. 37)
There is no doubt that the man on the grassy knoll seconds after the shooting was brandishing fake Secret Service credentials. The question is, who in 1963 had the know-how to create them? The answer, as Douglass reveals, is the CIA. Douglass quotes from a document written by Stanley Gottlieb, chief of the CIA's Technical Services Division, that was finally declassified in 2007 in response to a 15-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit: “...over the years” the TSD “furnished this [secret] Service” with “gate passes, security passes, passes for presidential campaign, emblems for presidential vehicles; a secure ID photo system.” (JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 266) This is a remarkable revelation, and could be said to show that the CIA and its Cuban exile guerrillas not only had the motive, but had the means to pull off the assassination in broad daylight, and then to escape unhindered. But for me, the Mexico City legend aside, this as good as Lane gets when it comes to filling in the details and connecting the CIA to the assassination.
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The HSCA investigated that charge in detail and recovered the records from New York, it proved to be a totally unsubstantiated rumor. You should be able to find
the HSCA reports on line.
LARRY HANCOCK
+++++++++++++Havent found it yet.
http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/part-1d.html
Seems more rumor then fact.
I went with Skolnick.
Skolnick also says that Vallee's
car, bearing New York license
plate 311 ORF, was "linked or
registered to Lee Harvey Op
wald."
Attempts by a Chicago TV station
to trace the plates turned
up an FBI "freeze, on this vital
information. Others who have
tried to learn about these license
plates have had sodden threatening
visits from the FBI, accord-
Eng to Skolnick.
======
Skolnick isnt the best source at times.
+++++++++From JFK and the Unspeakable, by James W DouglassThomas Arthur Vallee was arrested on suspicion of planning the
assassination of President Kennedy on the day Kennedy was due to
participate in a motorcade through Chicago. Briefly, Vallee shared the
following similarities with Oswald: he was an ex-Marine with an
unstable history and he had been assigned to a U-2 base in Japan, Camp
Otsu.Page 205: "In August 1963, as Oswald was preparing to move from New
Orleans back to Dallas, Vallee moved from New York back to Chicago.
Just as Oswald got a job in a warehouse right over Kennedy's future
motorcade route in Dallas, so, too, did Vallee get a job in a
warehouse right over Kennedy's future motorcade route in Chicago. Like
Oswald in Dallas (before his summer in New Orleans), Vallee found
employment as a printer. He was hired by IPP Litho-Plate, located at
625 West Jackson Boulevard in Chicago. "Douglass goes on to say, after personally visiting the site, Vallee's
location at IPP Litho-Plate gave him a "nearer, clearer" view of the
November 2 Chicago Motorcade, as it was on the third floor.Lieutenant Moyland, a member of the Chicago PD, was responsible for
Vallee being put under Secret Service surveillance, and therefore his
arrest. Moyland ate in a cafeteria on Wilson Avenue, Chicago,
regularly. The manager informed him one day in late October, 1963 that
a regular customer had been making threatening remarks against Kennedy
for some time. Moyland waited for the customer at the appropriate time
and went over to his table to engage him in conversation. "He told the
man firmly that nothing good could come from the remarks he was making
about President Kennedy. His behaviour could in fact lead to serious
consequences." Lieutenant Moyland then left the cafetaria and phoned
the Secret Service.Berkely Moyland was then phone back by an official in the Treasury
Dept (with jurisdiction over the Secret Service) who committed him to
absolute silence on the matter. He was given stringent orders not to
write anything about it, talk with anyone about it, and just to forget
all about it. Netherless in his final years Moyland shared the story
with his son, who shared it with Douglass in an interview.Thomas Arthur Vallee was arrested on a pretext 2 and a half hours
before Kennedy was due to touch down in Dallas.Evidence of an intelligence connection with Vallee? from page 203 -
"Vallee drove a 1962 Ford Falcon with the New York licence plate
31-10RF. After JFK's assassination, NBC news learned of Vallee's
arrest on Nov 2nd in Chicago. Luke Christopher Hester, an NBC Chicago
employee, asked his father in law, Hugh Larkin, a retired New York
City police officer, to check on Vallee's licence plate. Larkin asked
his old friends in the New York PD to do a check on the plate. They
came back to Larkin saying the licence plate was "frozen" and "only
the FBI could obtain the information." The registration for the
licence plate on the car Thomas Arthur Vallee was driving at the time
of his arrest was classified - restricted to US intelligence
agencies."So we have another "Lone Nut" with a Marine background, who had been
stationed at a U-2 airbase in Japan (the U-2 was commandered by the
CIA), links to the intelligence services and who just happened to find
a job in a warehouse conveniently overlooking the proposed motorcade
route of Kennedy through downtown Chicago.Just another coincidence I suppose, in a long, long line of
'coincidences" regarding this case.PS Regarding the curious four-man sniper team in Chicago, of which two
were arrested, Douglass has this to say - "However, it was not Moyland
but an FBI informant named "Lee" whose alert disrupted the more
critical four-man rifle team that represented the real threat to
Kennedy, and thus to potential patsy Vallee as well."++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TIPSTER LEE ??????
=
Jim DiEugenio
====
The man who was supposed to be accused of the crime was Thomas Vallee. Like Oswald, Valle was a former Marine who was stationed at a U-2 base in Japan. Vallee supposedly was resentful toward Kennedy because of the Bay of Pigs disaster. Curiously, the codename of the FBI informant who tipped off the Secret Service was “Lee.” The existence of a prior assassination plot with parallels to Kennedy’s killing in Dallas would seem to be relevant if one were exploring a wider conspiracy, but there was not one word about this episode in the Warren Report
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
===
On November 2, 1963, Kennedy was set to appear at the Army/Air Force football game in Chicago at 11:40 a.m. At the Chicago Secret Service Bureau, Special Agent in Charge Maurice Martineau informed agents about reports of assassins on October 30. Martineau was repeating a tip from the FBI, in which an informant identifying as "Lee" talked about a four-man sniper team of "rightwing para-military fanatics" with high-powered rifles, who would shoot at Kennedy as his motorcade was driving from O'Hare down the Northwest Expressway, around a slow loop off the highway exit of what is now ironically known as the JFK Expressway.
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Gilberto Policarpo Lopez was also a very LOW-LEVEL intelligence asset. Yet even though his career parallels Oswald's in so many ways, it is rushing to judgment to presume that he was being groomed to be a patsy of the JFK murder.
PAUL TREJO#############################################
LOW LEVEL CIA PEOPLE AWARE OF LOPEZ OPERATION BELOW ??
LOW LEVEL PEOPLE GET SUCH SIMILAR PEOPLE (SIMILAR HISTORIES) IN SAME LINE OF ACTIVITY BELOW ??
http://jfkcountercou...retrospect.html
****************
“In both the Tampa and Dallas attempts, officials sought a young man in his early twenties, white with slender build, who had been in recent contact with a small pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In Dallas that was Lee Harvey Oswald, but the Tampa person of interest was Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, who – like Oswald- was a former defector. 44 We later document eighteen parallels between Dallas suspect Lee Harvey Oswald and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, but here are a few: Like Oswald, Lopez was also of interest to Navy Intelligence. Also similar to Oswald, Gilberto Lopez made a mysterious trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, attempting to get to Cuba. Lopez even used the same border crossing as Oswald, and government reports say both went one way by car, though neither man owned a car. Like Oswald, Lopez had recently separated from his wife and had gotten into a fistfight in the summer of 1963 over supposedly pro-Castro sympathies. 45 Declassified Warren Commission and CIA documents confirm that Lopez, whose movements parallel Oswald in so many ways in 1963, was on a secret ‘mission’ for the US involving Cuba, an ‘operation’ so secret that the CIA felt that protecting it was considered more important than thoroughly investigating the JFK assassination.” 46
################################################################- Per Bolden the Secret Service coverup was orchestrated by the Secret Service HDQ in Washington DC.
- There were the Tampa and Chicago plots (which I have already mentioned in this THREAD) indicating a larger organizational operation.
- Lopez fits a pattern. Thomas Vallee in Chicago drove 1962 Ford Falcon that registered in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. THUS THERE IS NO RUSH TO JUDGEMENT. I dont know why you dont see the higher level CIA operation. Its possible that your conservative ideology precludes you from criticism of police/military (CIA) organizations.
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May 14th, 2008An Odyssey for Truth and JusticeEd McCarthy of the White House News Photographer Association/H.V. Press, Former SS Agent Abraham Bolden, and Adult Education Director of Newburgh Enlarged School District Gary Van Voorhis during Bolden’s recent visit to the area as part of his book tour for “The Echo from Dealy Plaza.”
By Ed McCarthy
An odyssey that began 5 decades ago by Abraham Bolden continues to this day. Bolden was the first African-American to serve The White House Presidential Protection detail. He was hand-picked personally by President John F. Kennedy to serve on the detail. President Kennedy affectionately referred to Bolden as "The Jackie Robinson of The Secret Service". Bolden had been a Pinkerton National Detective and an Illinois State Police Investigator prior to joining the U.S. Secret Service in October 1960.In the course of his duties, he found laxity in the security for the president and also some agents deep concerns as to President Kennedy’s safety. He also told of the severe racism that he encountered from some of the agents. (In current history there is a class action lawsuit by Black agents of the Secret Service alleging basically the same conditions exist. The case even refers to Bolden’s plight).
Bolden then was assigned to the Chicago SS office where he worked counterfeit cases. On November 1, 1963, the Chicago SS office had received a teletype warning of a "Cuban" hit team in Chicago to Assassinate the President on his trip to Chicago, on November 2nd, to see the Army-Navy football game. Other agents, as well as Bolden, were made aware of the situation. A tip was received from a rooming house landlady who said her tenant, Thomas Arthur Vallee, was threatening the president and arranged to have off from work the next day. Chicago police and the Secret Service stopped a car driven by former U.S. Marine Vallee for a headlight that was out. The ticket is still sealed as classified at the national archives. Vallee’s car was found to contain explosives an M-1 Rifle and 3000 round of ammunition. Vallee was briefly detained and released. Simultaneously the SS agents had surveillance on two of the alleged Cuban Hitmen who managed to slip away. The President’s trip was cancelled.
The license plate and registration on the 1962 Ford Falcon that Vallee was driving on November 1st in Chicago was New York Registration License plate # 311-ORF and was registered in the name of Lee Harvey Oswald. This is 21 days prior to President Kennedy’s assassination and the world knowing the name Oswald.
Bolden shortly thereafter was back in Washington on assignment and spoke to Secret Service Director James J. Rowley and as he had with U.B. Baughman the previous director had told him of his observations and knowledge of the Chicago incidents. Bolden tried to contact Warren Commission Counsel J. Lee Rankin. The very next day Bolden was arrested and falsely accused of soliciting a bribe from counterfeiter. This put Bolden through two trials and wound up in prison for more than 3 years before the witnesses broke down under oath in Federal Court and told that they were forced by the Government to lie against Bolden. The Prosecutor in the case was called before the judge and took the 5th amendment when asked if the frame up were true. The ordeal of Bolden is well documented in his new book "The Echo from Dealey Plaza".
In research at The National Archives in Washington of The Assassination files of 25 Million documents it turned up that in fact NY plate 311-ORF at the Vallee Traffic stop was registered in the Name of Lee Harvey Oswald. Documents declassified also state that same car in Dallas Texas at the time of the assassination. The detailed information with the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles is still withheld by order of The US Secret Service and The FBI. In the 1960’s license plate in the Hudson Valley were coded OR for Orange County, UL which meant Ulster County, SU was Sullivan County and DU was Dutchess County. Of the 25 Million documents in The JFK Assassination archives, there is a 6 page Secret Service report about a trip of President Kennedy to Stewart Air Force Base, (Newburgh, NY) and of him being shadowed by two member of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party.
Bolden has never received an apology for what he was put through. This man is truly an American Hero. In this writer’s opinion, he should be given an apology publicly and Awarded either "The Presidential Medal of Freedom" or "The Congressional Gold Medal" which is awarded for "An especially meritorious Contribution to the security or National Security." Abraham Bolden today is as patriotic as they come and deeply believes in the American way. He is a true patriot and for him the dream’s not over. Let’s not disappoint him. This is a chance for America to make it right.
Information for this article was from released documents from the National Archives.
posted in fair use from The Hudson Valley Press.
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https://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/The_CIA_and_the_JFK_Assassination
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Propaganda officer David Phillips told HSCA investigators many contradictory stories; investigator Dan Hardway told author Gaeton Fonzi that "I'm firmly convinced now that he [Phillips] ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie that I could trace back to him. That's what got him so upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel." Other agency employees dispute the official story in various ways. Explaining why CIA Headquarters sent out two cables on the Oswald with false information, prior to the assassination, officer Jane Roman said, "To me its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need to know basis."
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CIA Headquarters
Oswald with false information
prior
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I dont know why you dont see the higher level CIA operation. Its possible that your conservative ideology precludes you from criticism of police/military (CIA) organizations. (Gaal)
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NEW disability payments system responsible for deaths in Britain
#######################################Dennis Moore
A new disability benefit, Personal Independence Payments (PIP), brought in by the UK government to replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA), has resulted in the deaths of thousands of people. In addition, many seriously ill people have been left without a payment months after applying.
Some of those who have applied for PIP are diagnosed with serious degenerative illnesses that are life-threatening and seriously debilitating.
PIP was introduced in June 2013 as part of the government’s overall welfare cuts. The benefit is paid to claimants between the ages of 16 and 64 with a long-term health condition. The benefit is split into two parts including daily living and mobility activities. The claimant completes a form, and then most applicants have to attend a face-to-face assessment to determine eligibility. These assessments have been carried out via the private contractors Atos Healthcare and Capita Business Services.
PIP was rolled out nationally after only a short trial period two months earlier in the north of England. In February 2014, a highly critical report was published by the National Audit Office (NAO). It raised concerns over the rush to implement PIP, stating it “did not allow enough time to test whether the assessment process could handle large numbers of claims. As a result of this poor early operational performance, claimants face long and uncertain delays.”
The report found that the administration costs of PIP will be up to three-and-a-half times as much as the previous benefit (DLA) it was meant to replace and will take double the amount of time to administer. Each new PIP claim is worth between £21 and £134 a week to disabled claimants and costs an average £182 to administer, compared to £49 under the old scheme (DLA).
The NAO showed that in some areas of the north of England in the first six months of the introduction of PIPs, there was a backlog of 92,000 cases—three times the number expected—with the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) only making decisions in 16 percent of cases.
Sharon Brennan, a freelance writer and journalist, explained the case of Malcolm Graham, a 56-year-old from Essex who was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in September 2013. He had previously been employed for 40 years. He applied for PIP on advice from Macmillan Cancer support and his local Citizens Advice office. After applying for PIP, he rang the DWP almost daily for eight months to try to find out the status of his claim and if a decision had been made, but to no avail.
In that time, Graham was forced to endure a 10-hour operation in which large parts of his stomach and oesophagus were removed and undergo 10 sessions of chemotherapy.
Brennan said that as of June 23, when her article was published, Graham was still awaiting a decision on his claim and was dependent on his family for the extra financial support that he has incurred, due to not being able to get about because his mobility has been affected. The article said he was in debt with his electricity payments and has had a debt-recovery firm calling at his home.
The cases of those terminally ill who are expected to have less than six months to live is a disgrace. These PIP applicants should only have waited a short time to get an award due to the severity of their condition. However, claimants have regularly been awaiting decisions up to a month. Under the old rules governing DLA, the time limit was seven days in which a decision had to be made.
The government has attempted to defend these decisions by claiming that the rules are different for PIP. This is untrue, as the principles for offering help to the terminally ill are supposedly the same under PIP as they were under DLA.
The impact of this debacle is that many seriously ill people are left in financial plight, having to turn increasingly to family members for help and forced to resort to food banks, loans and charitable donations for assistance.
In October 2013, PIP was due to be rolled out across the UK but there were concerns that Atos was not capable of reducing backlogs or managing higher volumes of cases. Contractually, assessment providers were supposed to have carried out 97 percent of assessments for PIP within 30 days. The report disclosed that Atos and the other contractor Capita had completed only 55 and 67 percent, respectively—clearly a substantial shortfall.
Atos had stated in its tender document that it had “contractual agreements” in place with a national network of 56 NHS hospitals, 25 private hospitals and more than 650 physiotherapy practices to provide assessments. Leaked government documents showed this not to be true. It was suggested that Atos’s PIP assessment backlog would not be cleared until March of next year.
As a result of Atos declaring many people to be “fit for work” who clearly weren’t, its £500 million contract has come under increasing scrutiny. An estimated 42 percent of appeals against the DWP were upheld, with the government admitting as many as 158,300 of those assessed were wrongly deemed fit for work.
Thousands of people have died as a result. According to information provided by Labour MP Michael Meacher, 1,300 people had died after being placed in the “work-related activity group” and another 2,200 died before the assessment process was completed. An additional 7,100 died after being placed in the group for those entitled to unconditional support, as they are too ill or disabled to work.
Earlier this year, Atos decided to end the contract early. A new provider is to be appointed early next year.
The government’s response to the PIP crisis has been to dismiss it, claiming that the figures used were out of date. Minister for Disabled People Mike Penning claimed the new PIP system ensured “support goes to those who need it most”.
There have been a number of private companies who have come under scrutiny following exposures of irregularities and failings with public contracts. Earlier this year, there were serious concerns raised about the government’s much-heralded scheme for unemployed people, Universal Jobmatch. This scheme was established supposedly to assist job seekers in finding work by matching workers with employers looking to fill job vacancies via the use of digital job searches.
The contract was won at the time of its inception by Monster Incorporated, one of the world’s largest Internet recruitment companies. This cost £17 million to set up with running costs of £6 million a year.
The Guardian estimated that a third of a million jobs—50 percent of all the jobs advertised on the site—were considered bogus, being falsely and illicitly promoted. An investigation by Channel 4 News found that thousands of the job postings on the site were fake and were set up to entice job seekers to spend money unnecessarily on fake criminal record checks, or were using individuals’ personal data for the purposes of identity fraud.
The carve-up of the welfare state and the ransacking of public services have led to a scramble for profits at any cost, whilst at the same time wreaking havoc against millions of the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license.
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The Trade Mart incident was made up of CIA/FBI people. Walker/Birchers could not put that together. Shelly is there also ,this is a vast and deep organization, which I will post about below.
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Steven, I will admit that that story about Bill Shelley being at the NOLA Trade Mart and also at the Dallas TSBD building is important news.
I don't think that it shoots my theory about Walker out of the water, though.
Bill Shelley is also important because he actually testified before the Warren Commission on 14 May 1964, in Dallas, questioned by Attorney Joseph Ball. Here's a snippet of that testimony:
==================== Shelley testimony snippet BEGIN =============
Mr. BALL. ...Do you recall seeing a couple of guns in the Texas School Book Depository Building on the 20th of November 1963?
Mr. SHELLEY. Yes, sir.
Mr. BALL. Where?
Mr. SHELLEY. Just outside Mr. Truly's office on the will-call counter.
Mr. BALL. And how did they get there?
Mr. SHELLEY. Mr. Warren Caster had just purchased them and brought them in and stopped by to see us.
Mr. BALL. Did you handle the guns?
Mr. SHELLEY. I held the .22.
Mr. BALL. And was there another make of gun too---there was, wasn't there?
Mr. SHELLEY. Yes; I believe there was a .30-06 Mauser that had been converted. It was a foreign make converted to a .30-06.
Mr. BALL. Did you handle that?
Mr. SHELLEY. No...
==================== Shelley testimony snippet END =============
This is additional confirmation of the claims of DPD sheriff Roger Craig, who present when the DPD found the "murder rifle" on the 6th floor of the TSBD depository -- and standing only inches from it, saw clearly the words stamped right on the barrel: "30-06 MAUSER".
Shelley confirms -- under oath -- that he saw a Mauser at the TSBD depository on that day, too -- only it belonged to Mr. Caster, and it was shown in a harmless circumstance.
All this contradictory testimony is very suspicious to me. The fact that Shelley was also one of those arrested on 11/22/1963 is also suspicious. The fact that Shelley was also seen at the NOLA Trade Mart close to Lee Harvey Oswald, is also very suspicious.
Yet how in the world does that shoot down my theory about Ex-General Walker and the John Birch Society?
I've already shown the close connections between Walker and Guy Banister. They are connected precisely through the John Birch Society, as well as through the related paramilitary group, the Minutemen. Other fellow travelers on the right-wing in Dallas (along with General Walker) would be DPD officers Roscoe White and J.D. Tippit.
One final point -- Joan Mellen and Larry Hancock's recent works largely predominate the current reading of JFK researchers, and yet I think that their suspicions of the CIA are based too loosely on extremely low-level assets of the CIA, for example, in Joan Mellen's case, Fred Crisman and Jack S. Martin. (In Larry Hancock's case, we find a plethora of Cuban Exiles.)
Other CIA-connected assets include self-confessed plotters Frank Sturgis and Gerry Patrick Hemming -- but again they were very low level, and probably always hungry for the next cash 'contract' as mercenaries typically would be.
Lee Harvey Oswald falls into the same category -- he would probably have done anything to get hired full-time into the CIA (or even the FBI). He was a wannabe. That best explains why he cooperated so fully with his framers.
My point is that one mainly finds in the JFK plot these low-level assets among the CIA -- and they are so low-level that one is justified in doubting official CIA involvement.
(True, there are three bona-fide CIA Agents who were self-confessedly involved, namely: Richard Case Nagell, David Morales and E. Howard Hunt. Yet the first two were mainly "field" agents, and Hunt was nearing the end of his career, and admitted to being "a bench warmer" in the plot.)
Anyway -- even if Shelley turns out to be one of these low-level "assets" of the CIA, this cannot be used to prove that the CIA was officially involved. What the evidence strongly implies is that a bunch of these low-level CIA "assets" got together and made something work on their own.
Best regards,
--Paul Trejo
LOW LEVEL CIA PEOPLE AWARE OF LOPEZ OPERATION BELOW ??
LOW LEVEL PEOPLE GET SUCH SIMILAR PEOPLE (SIMILAR HISTORIES) IN SAME LINE OF ACTIVITY BELOW ??
http://jfkcountercou...retrospect.html
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“In both the Tampa and Dallas attempts, officials sought a young man in his early twenties, white with slender build, who had been in recent contact with a small pro-Castro group called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In Dallas that was Lee Harvey Oswald, but the Tampa person of interest was Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, who – like Oswald- was a former defector. 44 We later document eighteen parallels between Dallas suspect Lee Harvey Oswald and Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, but here are a few: Like Oswald, Lopez was also of interest to Navy Intelligence. Also similar to Oswald, Gilberto Lopez made a mysterious trip to Mexico City in the fall of 1963, attempting to get to Cuba. Lopez even used the same border crossing as Oswald, and government reports say both went one way by car, though neither man owned a car. Like Oswald, Lopez had recently separated from his wife and had gotten into a fistfight in the summer of 1963 over supposedly pro-Castro sympathies. 45 Declassified Warren Commission and CIA documents confirm that Lopez, whose movements parallel Oswald in so many ways in 1963, was on a secret ‘mission’ for the US involving Cuba, an ‘operation’ so secret that the CIA felt that protecting it was considered more important than thoroughly investigating the JFK assassination.” 46
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COLLINS RADIO CONNECTION TO LOW LEVEL PEOPLE ??
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Bannister really not low level his partner part of De Gaulle's assassination attempt. THIS NOT LOW LEVEL.
see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=21269
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SMOKING MEMO IS PART OF ASSASSINATION AND CAME FROM James Jesus Angleton office. HE IS HIGH LEVEL.
NOT LOW LEVEL.
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PAUL PUT ON THINKING CAP == IF ASKED TO TAKE PART IN POTUS ASSASSINATION by low level CIA operatives, Ruby would double check with his non low level ultra-deep CIA contacts.....THE IMPLICATION OF this post
see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=21269
IS THAT THE OVERT KILLING OF LHO BY RUBY WAS THE FIRST BIG ACTION BY HIGHER CIA PEOPLE TO COVERUP THE LOWER LEVEL PEOPLE FOULING UP THE PLOT IN MAKING LHO LIVE TOO LONG.
Yes ,BANNISTER & GPH knew all the right wing kooks (all of them) ,but they were to find patsies/useful idiots to become possible Elm St fall guys. LOOKING AT THE NARA DOCS we see GPH in the END 62 and 63 MEETING WITH A NUMBER OF FAR RIGHT ELEMENTS (PATSY SEARCH). IF as HE ,GPH STATES, HE IS woring for James Jesus Angleton,then the conjecture of low-level CIA POTUS killing seems false.
THANKS SG
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Virtual Economy’s Phantom Job Gains Are Based on Statistical Fraud. And More Fraud Is in the Works
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts 7/8/14+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Washington can’t stop lying. Don’t be convinced by last Thursday’s job report that it is your fault if you don’t have a job. Those 288,000 jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate are more fiction than reality.
In his analysis of the June Labor Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, John Williams (www.ShadowStats.com) wrote that the 288,000 June jobs and 6.1% unemployment rate are “far removed from common experience and underlying reality.” Payrolls were overstated by “massive, hidden shifts in seasonal adjustments,” and the Birth-Death model added the usual phantom jobs.
Williams reports that “the seasonal factors are changed each and every month as part of the concurrent seasonal-adjustment process, which is tantamount to a fraud,” as the changes in the seasonal factors can inflate the jobs number. While the headline numbers always are on a new basis, the prior reporting is not revised so as to be consistent.
The monthly unemployment rates are not comparable, so one doesn’t know whether the official U.3 rate (the headline rate that the financial press reports) went up or down. Moreover, the rate does not count discouraged workers who, unable to find a job, cease looking. To be counted among the U.3 unemployed, the person must have actively looked for work during the four weeks prior to the survey. The U.3 rate automatically declines as people who have been unable to find jobs cease trying to find one and thereby cease to be counted as unemployed.
There is a second official measure of unemployment that includes people who have been discouraged for less than one year. That rate, known as U.6, is seldom reported and is double the 6.1% rate.
Since 1994 there has been no official measure than includes discouraged people who have not looked for a job for more than a year. Including all discouraged workers produces an unemployment rate that currently stands at 23.1%, almost four times the rate that the financial press reports.
What you can take away from this is the opposite of what the presstitute media would have you believe. The measured rate of unemployment can decline simply because large numbers of the unemployed become discouraged workers, cease looking for work, and cease to be counted in the U.3 and U.6 measures of the unemployment rate.
The decline in the employment-population ratio from 63% prior to the 2008 downturn to 59% today reflects the growth in discouraged workers. Indeed, the ratio has not recovered its previous level during the alleged recovery, an indication that the recovery is an illusion created by the understated measure of inflation that is used to deflate nominal GDP growth.
Another indication that there has been no recovery is that Sentier Research’s index of real median household income continued to decline for two years after the alleged recovery began in June 2009. There has been a slight upturn in real median household income since June 2011, but income remains far below the pre-recession level.
The Birth-Death model adds an average of 62,000 jobs to the reported payroll jobs numbers each month. This arbitrary boost to the payroll jobs numbers is in addition to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ underlying assumption that unreported jobs lost to business failures are matched by unreported new jobs from new business startups, an assumption that does not well fit an economy that fell into recession and is unable to recover.
John Williams concludes that in current BLS reporting, “the aggregate average overstatement of employment change easily exceeds 200,000 jobs per month.”
In other words, the economy did not gain 288,000 new jobs last month. But let’s assume the economy did gain 288,000 jobs and exam where the claimed jobs are reported to be.
Of the alleged 288,000 new jobs, 16,000, or 5.5 percent are in manufacturing, which is not very promising for engineers and blue collar workers. Growth in goods producing jobs has almost disappeared from the US economy. As explained below, to alter this problem the government is going to change definitions in order to artificially inflate manufacturing jobs.
In June private services account for 82 percent of the supposed new jobs. The jobs are found mainly in non-tradable domestic services that pay little and cannot be exported to help to close the large US trade deficit.
Wholesale and retail trade account for 55,300 jobs. Do you believe sales are this strong when retailers are closing stores and when shopping malls are closing?
Insurance (most likely the paperwork of Obamacare) contributed 8,500 jobs.
As so few can purchase homes, “real estate rental and leasing” contributed 8,500 jobs.
Professional and business services contributed 67,000 jobs, but 57% of these jobs were in employment services, temporary help services, and services to buildings and dwellings.
That old standby, education and health services, accounted for 33,700 jobs consisting mainly of ambulatory health care services jobs and social assistance jobs of which three-quarters are in child day care services.
The other old standby, waitresses and bartenders, gave us 32,800 jobs, and amusements, gambling, and recreation gave us 3,500 jobs.
Local government, principally education, gave us 22,000 jobs.
So, where are the jobs for university graduates? They are practically non-existent. Think of all the MBAs, but June had only 2,300 jobs for management of companies and enterprises.
Think of the struggle to get into law and medical schools. There’s no job payoff. June had jobs for 1,200 in legal services, which includes receptionists and para-legals. Where are all the law school graduates finding jobs?
Offices of physicians (mainly people who fill out the mandated paperwork and comply with all the regulations, which have multiplied under ObamaCare) hired 4,000 people. Outpatient care centers hired 700 people. Nursing care facilities hired 2,400 people. So where are the jobs for the medical school graduates?
Aside from all the exaggerations in the jobs numbers of which ShadowStats.com has informed us, just taking the jobs as reported, what kind of economy do these jobs indicate: a superpower whose pretensions are to exercise hegemony over the world or an economy in which opportunities are disappearing and incomes are falling?
Do you think that this jobs picture would be the same if the government in Washington cared about you instead of the mega-rich?
Some interesting numbers can be calculated from table A.9 in the BLS press release. John Williams advises that the BLS is inconsistent in the methods it uses to tabulate the data in table A.9 and that the data is also afflicted by seasonal adjustment problems. However, as the unemployment rate and payroll jobs are reported regardless of their problems, we can also report the BLS finding that in June 523,000 full-time jobs disappeared and 800,000 part time jobs appeared.
Here, perhaps, we have yet another downside of the misnamed Obama “Affordable Care Act.” Employers are terminating full-time employment and replacing the jobs with part-time employment in order to come in under the 50-person full time employment that makes employers responsible for fringe benefits such as health care.
Americans are already experiencing difficulties making ends meet, despite the alleged “recovery.” If yet another half million Americans have been forced onto part-time pay with consequent loss of health care and other benefits, consumer demand is further compressed, with the consequence, unless hidden by statistical trickery, of a 2nd quarter negative GDP and thus officially the reappearance of recession.
What will the government do if a recession cannot be hidden? If years of unprecedented money printing and Keynesian fiscal deficits have not brought recovery, what will bring recovery? How far down will US living standards fall for the 99% in order that the 1% can become ever more mega-rich while Washington wastes our diminishing substance exercising hegemony over the world?
Just as Washington lied to you about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,
Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Waco, and any number of false flag or nonexistent attacks such as Tonkin Gulf, Washington lies to you about jobs and economic recovery. Don’t believe the spin that you are unemployed because you are shiftless and prefer government handouts to work. The government does not want you to know that you are unemployed because the corporations offshored American jobs to foreigners and because economic policy only serves the oversized banks and the one percent.
Just as the jobs and inflation numbers are rigged and the financial markets are rigged, the corrupt Obama regime is now planning to rig US manufacturing and trade statistics in order to bury all evidence of offshoring’s adverse impact on our economy.
The federal governments Economic Classification Policy Committee has come up with a proposal to redefine fact as fantasy in order to hide offshoring’s contribution to the US trade deficit, artificially inflate the number of US manufacturing jobs, and redefine foreign-made manufactured products as US manufactured products. For example, Apple iPhones made in China and sold in Europe would be reported as a US export of manufactured goods. Read Ben Beachy’s important report on this blatant statistical fraud in CounterPunch’s July 4th weekend edition: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/07/04/we-didnt-offshore-manufacturing/
China will not agree that the Apple brand name means that the phones are not Chinese production. If the Obama regime succeeds with this fraud, the iPhones would be counted twice, once by China and once by the US, and the double-counting would exaggerate world GDP.
For years I have exposed the absurd claim that offshoring is merely the operation of free trade, and I have exposed the incompetent studies by such as Michael Porter at Harvard and Matthew Slaughter at Dartmouth that claimed to prove that the US was benefitting from offshoring its manufacturing. My book published in 2012 in Germany and in 2013 in the US, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, proves that offshoring has dismantled the ladders of upward mobility that made the US an opportunity society and is responsible for the decline in US economic growth. The lost jobs and decline in the middle class has contributed to the rise in income inequality, the destruction of tax base for cities and states, and loss of population in America’s once great manufacturing centers.
For the most part economists have turned a blind eye. Economists serve the globalists. It pays them well.
The corruption in present-day America is total. Psychologists and anthropologists serve war and torture. Economists serve globalism and US financial hegemony. Physicists and chemists serve the war industries. Physicists and computer geeks serve NSA.
The media serves the government and the corporations. The political parties serve the six powerful private interest groups that rule the country.
No one serves truth and liberty.
I predict that within ten years truth and liberty will be forbidden words uttered only by “domestic extremists” who are a threat that must be exterminated without due process of law.
America has left us. We now have the tyranny of the Orwellian state that rules, not by the ballot box and Constitution, but by force and propaganda.
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Dulles loyalist James Jesus Angleton seems to be connected to creating (if needed) a Communist Agent Dallas patsy inside of French Intelligence (Jean Souetre-Michael Mertz) . This is foreknowledge. SEEWe all know about the CIA ducument saying that Jean Souetre was in Fort Worth on the morning of Nov.22 1963 and in Dallas the afternoon of the same day.Was Dinkin a "code breaker" or a "crypto operator"? Isn't a crypto operator someone who just looks after the computers and changes the codes on a regular basis? I've read in several places that Dinkin was a "crypto operator"... Just curious.
There is a dispute a to wether the man in question was Jean Souetre or Michel Victor Mertz.
1. Jean Souetre
Member of the French OAS, assassination attempts against DeGaulle. The OAS hated JFK for supporting the Algeria independence.
Souetre was in conduct with Banister and E.H.Hunt, perhaps for operations against Fidel Castro, not necessarily to murder JFK, but it could be possible tha he was.
Eugene Dinkin a US army code breaker (the man who knew too much) discovered a messsage that JFK was to be assassinated in November.
Dinkin was staged in Metz France and one of his duties was to decipher cable trafficking originating with the OAS.
Souetre gave an interview later and claimed that he was in Spain and not in Dallas and that he could prove it.
He said that a man named Michel Victor Mertz, a narcotics smuggler and SDECE agent was impersonating him in order
to leave a trail that could lead not back to Mertz but to his enemy Souetre. Of course it could have been the other way round and it was Souetre
who was impersonating Mertz.
2. Michel Victor Mertz was an agent of SDECE. James Jesus Angleton was in contact with SDECE and especially a man
named Phillipe de Vosjoli that many believe that he was spying against his country for Angeton. Now most of us accept that Angleton
was one of the main facilitators of the plot specially in framing Oswald. If he was also the facilitator that organized the shooters he
might have asked Vosjoli's help to recruit shooters from the French underworld connected to either the OAS or the SDECE.
3. A third alternative is that neither Mertz or Souetre were involved in the assassination and this dual confussion of two men using its other's
name was deliberately designed to confuse researchers and again create a cognitive dissonance were everything is possible but nothing is certain.
Similar to two Z films, two autopsies two everything.
It is more likely that the shooters came from the ranks of CIA special ops soldiers staged in Laos or Vietnam with no loose ends and connections that can be
traced back to their origins, like French terrorists, heroin smugglers or French agents could be traced.
--Tommy
===================see deep background
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Thus, as I say -- I can explain the entire NOLA Trade Mart operation with Edwin Walker and the John Birch Society at the very center of that cyclone.
Best regards,
--Paul Trejo
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The Trade Mart incident was made up of CIA/FBI people. Walker/Birchers could not put that together. Shelly is there also ,this is a vast and deep organization, which I will post about below.
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As for the Allen Dulles connection with British interests, they clearly existed insofar as the USA and England were Allies during WW2, but to suggest that they had global consequences after the clear defeat of England and the clear assumption of US Imperial power after WW2 is not only unproven, it is unnecessary.
--Paul Trejo
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It is an Anglo/American relationship that is striving for domination.
This book might be of help to you. http://www.carrollquigley.net/pdf/The_Anglo-American_Establishment.pdf
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Ruby was part of a transnationally protected narcotics network connected to the School Book depository for many years before the assassination and its Elm St home.
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PD SCOTT
I should add that the Orwellian behavior of the U.S. governing has included not only suppression of the truth, but the propagation of lies. In the 1950s, when CIA operations in Southeast Asia were partly financed by proceeds from the KMT-controlled drug traffic, the U.S. routinely parroted the false claims of Harry Anslinger, chief of the federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), that KMT drugs reaching America via Bangkok and Hong Kong were coming instead from Communist China.106 (Anslinger “had established a working relationship with the CIA by the early 1950s.”)107In a major FBN bust in 1959, for example,The arrests were delayed until after the ringleader, Chung Wing Fong, a former Hip Sing president and official of the San Francisco Anti-Communist League (a KMT front) had been ordered by the US consulate in Hong Kong to travel to Taiwan. In this way Fong became no more than an unindicted conspirator, and the KMT disappeared from view; [George] White then told the US press that the heroin had come from Communist China (“most of it from a vast poppy field near Chungking”).108(FBN official George White was simultaneously a CIA operative.)The FBN propaganda line on Asian opium, which effectively protected the pro-KMT societies distributing it in America, went essentially unchallenged in the US press until the 1970s, when Nixon began revising U.S. policy towards China.######################
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books.google.com/books?isbn=1569768137Tom Clavin - 2010 - 224 pages... Virginia Hill—one often children from a backwoods Alabama family, she had ...
but the killers were known to be connected to Jack Ruby, the mobster who ...
see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=16754
===============
Book Documents The Mafia's Mexican Connection
Before the Mexican drug cartels, it was the Italian Mafia who supplied Americans with party favors.
In La Cosa Nostra en Mexico author Juan Alberto Cedillo states that during the 1940s Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Charlie "Lucky" Luciano and Meyer Lansky smuggled narcotics fom the land of the shaking earth, and the wise guys even sent Virginia Hill south of the border to charm the pants off dirty officials as reported by Fox News Latino.
======In 1923, he was a little-known
Assistant U.S. Attorney in the state of New York, who became
friends with super-rich Albert Lasker, one of the heads of the
General American Tank Car Company, which had the first patent
for a welded petroleum railway tank car (without rivets) and
dominated the shipment of Rockefeller petroleum on Harriman
railways. This, plus Lasker’s tight family connections with
Germany, and his financial cronyism with most of the Robber
Barons, allowed him to introduce Donovan to all the right people.
With Lasker’s encouragement, Donovan became a celebrity when
he and Federal Bureau of Narcotics agent Ken Oyler cracked an
major drug ring in Buffalo, and made a huge drug seizure in
Canada, making America look virtuous just before the 1924
Geneva Opium Conference. These drugs were traced to the
Golden Triangle, where the borders of Burma, China, Laos and
Thailand meet. Lasker introduced Donovan to the Rockefellers and
Harrimans. Oyler introduced Donovan to FBN chief Harry
Anslinger, who got his job as drug czar because he married the
niece of Coolidge Administration Treasury Secretary Andrew
Mellon. Mellon was one of the Robber Barons who had set up the
Federal Reserve system. Mellon’s son-in-law, diplomat David K.
Bruce, later helped Allen Dulles, Anslinger and Donovan organize
the OSS.7 It was practically a Mellon family enterprise.
Once OSS was set up, Donovan became heavily involved in
opium and heroin, mingling narcotics with espionage during the
war.8 He learned a lot from the Brits. In China, he worked with
SOE’s William and John Keswick of Jardine-Matheson, Britain’s
biggest opium cartel in Asia, with a controlling interest in
Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, and ties to the
Openheimer family through the giant mining firm Rio Tinto Zinc.
(HSBC was one of the main repositories of Santy’s gold, and has
blocked all efforts by his heirs to access it.) Together, Donovan
and the Keswicks arranged deals with KMT spy-boss General Tai
Li and his underworld business partner, druglord Du Yueh-sheng.
So did Commander “Mary” Miles of SACO, the Sino American
Cooperative Organization set up by Donovan’s old friend Navy
Secretary Frank Knox, as cover in China for the Office of Naval
Intelligence (ONI). Their currency in covert operations was drugs,
gold, and diamonds.
Donovan also set up a special office in OSS called X-2
which spied on foreign insurance companies – many of the biggest
being in Nazi Germany. His partner in running X-2 was Cornelius
Starr, who started out selling insurance in Shanghai in 1919 and
6 New Epilogue ~ GOLD WARRIORS by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
went on to build American International Group (AIG), into one of
the largest insurance companies on earth today.9 Early in the
war, Donovan sent James Jesus Angleton to Rome as chief of X-2
and other OSS black operations there. Angleton paid Sicilian and
Calabrian Mafiosi to smuggle OSS agents into Sicily and across to
the toe of Italy.10 In appreciation, Angleton and Donovan put
Sicilian gangsters in positions of political leverage in Palermo and
Rome, and kept them supplied with gold and guns. In America,
the Mafia helped government agents keep an eye out for Nazi
spies along the Atlantic and Gulf waterfronts, on the understanding
that when the war ended, Mafia dons currently serving time in
federal penitentiaries would be freed and “deported” back to Sicily.
In effect, Donovan and his circle of intimates wove a web
linking the underworld in Asia, Europe, and America, to U.S. banks
and the U.S. Government. This would pay off richly during the
Cold War.
In 1946, when the OSS was shut down by Truman, to be
succeeded by the CIA, Donovan pretended to resume private
practice as a Wall Street attorney, but in reality spent most of his
time helping Paul Helliwell set up black banks to make use of the
Black Eagle Trust. To disguise these postwar operations,
Donovan founded World Commerce Corporation (WCC) with
financial backing from the Rockefellers, particularly Nelson
Rockefeller. One of WCC’s main objectives was to buy and sell
surplus U.S. weapons and munitions to foreign underworld groups,
like the Chinese and Italian mafias, in return for their cooperation
against communist and socialist political parties, or labor unions.
Author Douglas Valentine called it a sort of private Marshall Plan, a
cross between “an import-export combine and a commercially
oriented espionage network”.1112
To maintain secrecy, WCC was registered in Panama. Many
of its operations involved the Nationalist Chinese in Asia, and the
Sicilian and Calabrian Mafia in Europe. The Nationalist Chinese
provided the hard drugs, and the Sicilians moved them into the US
through Meyer Lansky in Havana and Santo Traficante in Tampa,
or through Mexico to Bugsy Siegel in California.
Mixing drugs and espionage in Italy, Donovan and Angleton
forged a three-way alliance with the Mafia, the postwar Christian
Democratic Party, and the Vatican. New York narcotics boss Frank
Coppola was recruited to be Donovan’s liaison with Sicilian
godfather Salvatore Giuliano. In May 1947, paid by Donovan and
provided with guns by Coppola, Giuliano’s men murdered eight
people and wounded 33 in a Sicilian village that had made the
mistake of voting for Communist Party candidates. Coppola’s main
mission was to get Mafiosi into the Christian Democratic party, and
the party’s deputies into government, while eliminating rival
Communist candidates, killing them if necessary. Their reign of
terror was so successful that by 1948, Italian Communist Party
boss Palmiro Togliatti accused the US of subverting Italy’s
elections, not the first or last time that was voiced.
The point here is that it was not strictly a CIA operation, it
was a Donovan operation supported by the CIA, and Donovan’s
WCC had been set up with Rockefeller money. Where do you
draw the line?
In Asia, Donovan was a registered agent of the Thai
government, creating an alliance between the disgraced
Nationalist regime on Taiwan and crooked Thai generals.
Together, they moved opium and heroin out of the Golden
Triangle, bypassing old French channels of the Union Corse,
which had gone through Laos and Vietnam. To dominate the Asian
drug trade, remnant Nationalist Chinese armies stranded in
southwest China crossed the border into Burma where they seized
control of the Golden Triangle. They were lavishly supported by
Washington on the pretext that they were carrying out guerrilla
operations against the Chinese Communists. These KMT forces
became the main movers of drugs into the international market,
aided by the CIA airline Air America, and the CIA shipping line Sea
Supply, set up by Helliwell and Donovan.
Air America was dreamed up by Donovan and Old China
Hands William Pawley, Whiting Willauer, and General Claire
Chennault. In the 1930s, Pawley had set up the Central Aircraft
Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) for Madame Chiang Kai-shek,
to assemble planes for what later were called the Flying Tigers.
Pawley was paid lavishly by the Chiang regime, the Soong family,
and druglord Du Yueh-sheng. In 1950, Donovan and Pawley
bought out Chennault and took over his beat-up airline. They
persuaded the China Lobby to pay Chennault $5-million for his
airline, which was re-named Air America. Pawley then “retired” to
Havana where he went into business with Meyer Lansky. Pawley
spent lavishly, buying sugar plantations, an airline, and a bus
company. When Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba from the
Batista regime, Pawley escaped to Miami where he continued his
alliance with Lansky, using a Miami bus company as his front.13
Meanwhile, Pawley helped Donovan persuade Texas right-wing oil
man H.L. Hunt to support the KMT regime with millions of dollars
for covert operations. Valentine points out that Pawley and
8 New Epilogue ~ GOLD WARRIORS by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
Donovan were aided in all this by CIA’s Allen Dulles, Admiral
Charles Cooke, ambassador William Bullitt, Brooklyn publisher M.
Preston Goodfellow, former SOE agent William Keswick, and
Satiris Fassoulis, vice president of Commerce International China,
a subsidiary of Donovan’s WCC.
Donovan kept up his close ties to General Chennault and
former Flying Tigers’ physician Dr. Margaret Chung, said to be a
key link between the KMT drug generals and Bugsy Siegel. While
the China Lobby insisted that all narcotics came from Communist
China, the KMT’s General Tuan and General Li assured us over
dinner in Chiangmai that they were the ones moving the drugs.14
We observed their opium-laden mule trains, trucks, and planes,
and airdrops over the Gulf of Thailand to waiting Taiwanese cargo
and fishing vessels.
One of Donovan’s top financial allies was Helliwell’s front
man General Erle Cocke, whose family had been in banking for
generations. After WW2, Cocke served in the World Bank and
IMF, and as head of the American Legion, but also on the board of
CIA banks such as Nugan Hand. In April 2000, just two weeks
before he died of pancreatic cancer, General Cocke agreed to give
a legal deposition to the attorney of six plaintiffs who said they had
been swindled by former intelligence agents of the South African
Apartheid regime. The scam was typical of many rackets run
under a part of the Black Eagle Trust called Project Hammer, in
which unsuspecting investors were encouraged to put up money
for projects in the Third World, which then collapsed, swallowing
their money.15
In his deposition, reproduced on our CDs, General Cocke
said he knew a lot about the Black Eagle Trust’s Project Hammer
because he had been a part of the Donovan spider web for
decades. He testified that by the 1990s, he knew personally that
Project Hammer had assets exceeding $1-trillion. Cocke testified
that no Project Hammer transaction could take place without the
personal approval of Citibank CEO John Reed. General Cocke
explained that Reed was “the cheese” (the Big Cheese, boss, or
overseer) of Project Hammer. “I had no problem seeing the
president of the United States, but I could never get in to see John
Reed.” Reed was third in a string of Citibank CEOs groomed by
Donovan, each the mentor of the next, starting with George Moore
who was an OSS agent during the war. Rising quickly to head
Citibank after the war, he trained Walter Wriston as his
replacement, who in turn trained John Reed.16
Ties between Citibank and the CIA were always close, and a
number of top spooks joined the bank when they left the Agency,
such as former DCI John Deutsch, who left Langley under a cloud
to immediately become a member of Citibank’s board. John Reed,
who denies knowing anything about Project Hammer, has since
left Citibank under a cloud, and is now head of the U.S. Stock
Exchange.
It is curious that in the 1990s – while Reed and Citibank were
being sued for moving $50-billion in Santa Romana’s gold from
New York to the Bahamas, and General Cocke testified that Reed
was overseeing Project Hammer with assets of over $1-trillion –
that Citibank claimed to be going bankrupt. It was not the only
player in the game of musical chairs by major banks, as various
Rockefeller Holdings absorbed each other and their offshore
holdings companies like hungry amoebas.
By this time, Spain’s Santiago Vila Marques, also was
serving as the attorney for Alberto Cacpal’s huge gold deposits,
many of them at Citibank. Before John Reed retired, Vila Marques
cabled him asking for a meeting to “clarify” Cacpal’s assets in
Citibank, which totalled hundreds of millions of dollars. Reed never
replied.17 In effect, Reed was succeeded at Citibank by President
Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the new chairman of
Citigroup, who has been equally opaque and evasive.
As documented in earlier chapters, Santy’s Bengal Trading
stashed most of his gold at UBS in Zurich, in the name of Pedro
Palafox Laurel. These bonds, which UBS first acknowledged were
redeemable in 2003, then reversed itself by claiming then were
now considered false. This is odd because when Santy’s daughter
Diana Luatic visited UBS as an adult, the official in charge of the
gold repository said in front of witnesses that he remembered first
meeting her as an adolescent when he had taken her prints as part
of security measures for her gold accounts. Vila Marques, as
attorney for Loretta Laurel, is preparing to launch a legal battle with
UBS, as soon as he has washed his hands of the US Fed.18
Seen as a giant spider web, the involvement of a great many
organizations and individuals becomes apparent.
Of one thing we can be sure: Since the Federal Reserve
system was established in 1913, privatising the money supply and
making gold vanish, it has served “The Illuminati” and their
servants in “The Octopus” far better than it has served the great
majority of American citizens. Interlocking directorships and
personal networks reveal an astonishing variety of racketeering
between the moneymen, the spooks, the druglords, and the
10 New Epilogue ~ GOLD WARRIORS by Sterling & Peggy Seagrave
underworld. National Security hides little from America’s enemies.
But it hides a great deal from U.S. citizens.
The fact that the US Government has been able to pull in all
this gold, both Japanese and Nazi war loot and gold from a large
number of endangered banks and desperate individuals, and then
renege on redeeming their holdings, has enabled the US to
acquire companies and properties throughout the world that
represent an American financial global empire by massive fraud.
One is tempted to speculate that these manuevers were part of
what put the Clinton Administration in the black. US imperial policy
pretends to occupy a theological and morale highground compared
to Old Europe and Old Asia, but it is a farce.
It was all summed up brilliantly by Henry Ford: “It is well
enough that the people of the nation do not understand our
banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would
be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”19
====
++++++++++
see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=9010&page=2
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The Mobsters of Wall Street. JPMorgan Chase, “Too Big to Jail”
Assume that you ran a business that was found guilty of bribery, forgery, perjury, defrauding homeowners, fleecing investors, swindling consumers, cheating credit card holders, violating U.S. trade laws and bilking American soldiers. Can you even imagine the kind of punishment you’d get?
How about zero? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. No jail time. Not even a fine. Plus, you still get to stay on as boss, you get to keep all the loot you gained from the crime spree, and you even get an $8.5 million pay raise!
Of course, you and I would never get such outrageous, absurd, kid-glove pampering by legal authorities. But, then, we’re not the capo of JPMorgan Chase, America’s biggest bank and a crime syndicate that apparently is too big to jail.
Jamie Dimon is the slick, vainglorious, silver-haired boss of the JPMorgan house of banksters. This CEO has fostered a culture of thievery during his years as a top executive at JPMorgan, leading to a shameful litany of crime. Yet, federal prosecutors have bowed to the politically connected Wall Streeter, refusing to ruffle his feathers with even a single criminal charge.
Meanwhile, one of the scams that Dimon directly supervised produced a $6 billion loss for shareholders in 2012. And his reign of mismanagement and illegalities cost the bank’s shareholders another $20 billion in federal fines last year, resulting in a 16 percent drop in profits. You might think the bank’s board of directors would at least slap Jamie’s wrist for the loss of those billions of dollars, but no — in January, they rewarded him, raising his pay by some 70 percent to a sweet $20 million!
The New York Times noted that, “To ordinary Americans,” such a reward for poor performance “may seem curious.” Curious? Uh-uh.
Try incomprehensible, insane and immoral. Wall Street’s haughty elites continue to demonstrate that they’re common mobsters — only not so ethical.
That’s the funny thing about Wall Street mobsters (or as I like to call them: Banksters) is that they make a killing by defrauding millions of homeowners, customers, investors and taxpayers — then, when caught, they wonder why we don’t love them.
That’s “funny” as in “bizarre,” not as in “ha-ha.”
You would think that after racking up a record level of regulatory fines for the recidivist criminal operation overseen by the boss, a little self-reproachment might have done Dimon some good. But he chose a funny way (again meaning bizarre) to express remorse: He’s been running a feel-sorry-for-me campaign, claiming that he’s the victim of this sordid story!
Never mind his long rap sheet of malfeasance and incompetence, which cost so many so much, Jamie wails that everything from Wall Street’s bailout to the pay of top bank executives have made people envious of bankers’ success. Thus, he moans, an anti-Wall Street sentiment has spread through the public, prompting politicians and regulators to pander to this populist anger by persecuting enterprising bankers like him. He called the whole thing “unfair.”
Good grief. This guy builds bank profits through rip-offs, piles billions of dollars in fines on the backs of shareholders, pockets $20 million in personal pay for one year’s work — and he wants us to weep for him? Being a Wall Street boss, you see, means never having to say you’re sorry, for it’s always someone else’s fault.
Only 25 years ago, more than a thousand bankers were prosecuted for this sort of malfeasance during the savings & loan scandal. Let’s return to the ethical accountability of those days. Or maybe We the People should send our own message to today’s banksters by rolling a guillotine down the center of Wall Street.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
(MOBSTERS CAN KILL,GAAL)
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Langley..yes GOOGLE reads you 5 X 5..what ?? Simkim ...oh yeah , we can take care of him ....
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Google Has Received 250,000 Article Removal Requests as Internet Censorship Takes Off in Europe While the internet is an amazing tool for communication and free speech, we must also be aware of how it can be abused.by Michael Krieger | Liberty Blitzkrieg | July 4, 2014
In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston’s arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
- From George Orwell’s 1984The reason Big Brother and his band of technocrat authoritarians spend so much time and effort erasing history in the classic novel 1984, is because they are a bunch of total criminals and they know it. Their grip on power is made so much easier if the proles are kept ignorant, confused and in the dark. This strategy is not just fiction, it is the philosophy of tyrants and authoritarians throughout history.
While the internet is an amazing tool for communication and free speech, we must also be aware of how it can be abused by those in power who wish to whitewash history. For more on this epic struggle, read the post, Networks vs. Hierarchies: Which Will Win? Niall Furguson Weighs In. In it, Mr. Furguson explains that the biggest threat to networks overcoming hierarchies is if government technocrats are able to gain a hold of the technological tools we now use to communicate with each other. He fears this is already happening with the NSA’s PRISM program and the complicity of all the major tech companies in the agency’s unconstitutional spying.
So it appears Orwell’s feared “memory hole” has begun to emerge in Europe. This shouldn’t be seen as a surprise considering the region’s devastating youth unemployment rate and angst throughout society. The way censorship is gaining a foothold in the region is through something known as a “right to be forgotten” ruling issued by the European Court of Justice. This ruling states that Google must essentially delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.
Of course this is incredibly vague, and who is to decide what it “no longer relevant” anyway? Seems quite subjective. This is clearly an attempt to take a tool designed to decentralize information flow (the internet) and centralize and censor it. As such, it must be resisted at all costs.
So far, we know of two major media organizations that have been informed of deleted or censored articles, the BBC and the Guardian. The BBC story is the one that has received the most attention because the content related to former ex-Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal, who received a $161.5 million golden parachute compensation package after running the Wall Street firm into the ground and playing a key role in destroying the U.S. economy. The BBC reports that:
A blog I wrote in 2007 will no longer be findable when searching on Google in Europe.
Which means that to all intents and purposes the article has been removed from the public record, given that Google is the route to information and stories for most people.
So why has Google killed this example of my journalism?
Well it has responded to someone exercising his or her new “right to be forgotten”, following a ruling in May by the European Court of Justice that Google must delete “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” data from its results when a member of the public requests it.
Now in my blog, only one individual is named. He is Stan O’Neal, the former boss of the investment bank Merrill Lynch.
My column describes how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.
Is the data in it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant”?
Hmmm.
Most people would argue that it is highly relevant for the track record, good or bad, of a business leader to remain on the public record – especially someone widely seen as having played an important role in the worst financial crisis in living memory (Merrill went to the brink of collapse the following year, and was rescued by Bank of America).
To be fair to Google, it opposed the European court ruling.
Maybe I am a victim of teething problems. It is only a few days since the ruling has been implemented – and Google tells me that since then it has received a staggering 50,000 requests for articles to be removed from European searches.
I asked Google if I can appeal against the casting of my article into the oblivion of unsearchable internet data.
Google is getting back to me.
Since the original post, the author has provided an update:
So there have been some interesting developments in my encounter with the EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” rules.
It is now almost certain that the request for oblivion has come from someone who left a comment about the story.
So only Google searches including his or her name are now impossible.
Which means you can still find the article if you put in the name of Merrill’s ousted boss, “Stan O’Neal”.
In other words, what Google has done is not quite the assault on public-interest journalism that it might have seemed.
I disagree with his conclusion, and here is why. As is noted on this Yahoo post:
We don’t know whether it was O’Neal who asked that the link be removed. In fact, O’Neal’s name may be being dragged through the mud unnecessarily here. Peston believes it may be someone mentioned by readers in the comments section under his story about the ruling.
He suggests that as a “Peter Dragomer” search triggers the same disclosure that a result may have been censored, that perhaps it was not O’Neal who requested the deletion. In an amazing coincidence, the person posting as “Peter Dragomer” claims to be an ex-Merrill employee.
Of course, it’s not an amazing coincidence. In fact, going forward someone else can just post a comment below an article on a high profile person to get the article removed so that the person in the article can pretend it wasn’t his doing. In any event, someone who voluntarily leaves a comment should have zero say under this law. They went ahead and made the comment in the first place. Now you want an article article removed because of a comment you made? Beyond absurd.
Now here’s the Guardian’s take:
When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide.
Stark evidence of this fact, the result of a European court ruling that individuals had the right to remove material about themselves from search engine results, arrived in the Guardian’s inbox this morning, in the form of an automated notification that six Guardian articles have been scrubbed from search results.
The first six articles down the memory hole – there will likely be many more as the rich and powerful look to scrub up their online images, doubtless with the help of a new wave of “reputation management” firms – are a strange bunch.
The Guardian has no form of appeal against parts of its journalism being made all but impossible for most of Europe’s 368 million to find. The strange aspect of the ruling is all the content is still there: if you click the links in this article, you can read all the “disappeared” stories on this site. No one has suggested the stories weren’t true, fair or accurate. But still they are made hard for anyone to find.
As for Google itself, it’s clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship. Whether for commercial or free speech reasons (or both), it’s informing sites when their content is blocked – perhaps in the hope that they will write about it. It’s taking requests literally: only the exact pages requested for removal vanish and only when you search for them by the specified name.
But this isn’t enough. The Guardian, like the rest of the media, regularly writes about things people have done which might not be illegal but raise serious political, moral or ethical questions – tax avoidance, for example. These should not be allowed to disappear: to do so is a huge, if indirect, challenge to press freedom. The ruling has created a stopwatch on free expression – our journalism can be found only until someone asks for it to be hidden.
Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal action. Others may be looking for search tools and engines outside the EU. Quicker than that is a direct innovation: how about any time a news outlet gets a notification, it tweets a link to the article that’s just been disappeared. Would you follow @GdnVanished?
This last idea is actually a great one. Every time an article gets censored it should be highlighted. If we could get one Twitter account to aggregate all the deleted stories (or perhaps just the high profile ones) it could make the whole censorship campaign backfire as the stories would get even more press than they would have through regular searches. Ah…the possibilities.
Interestingly, due to all the controversy, a European Commission spokesman has come forth to criticize Google for removing the BBC article. You can’t make this stuff up. From the BBC:
Google’s decision to remove a BBC article from some of its search results was “not a good judgement”, a European Commission spokesman has said.
A link to an article by Robert Peston was taken down under the European court’s “right to be forgotten” ruling.
But Ryan Heath, spokesman for the European Commission’s vice-president, said he could not see a “reasonable public interest” for the action.
He said the ruling should not allow people to “Photoshop their lives”.
The BBC understands that Google is sifting through more than 250,000 web links people wanted removed.
Perhaps it wasn’t in “good judgment ” to issue this idiotic ruling in the first place. Just another government xxxx-show. As usual.
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Secret studies proving Monsanto sells poison
by Jon Rappoport
July 3, 2014
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Claire Robinson has written a stunning article exposing hidden proof Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide is poison:
“The glyphosate toxicity studies you’re not allowed to see,” gmwatch.org, July 2, 2014.
Glyphosate is the main ingredient in Roundup, Monsanto’s product, which is used in hurricane-like proportions on GMO crops.
Robinson doesn’t baldly assert these secret studies prove the poisonous nature of Roundup, but her piece certainly leads to that conclusion.
Here are the facts:
In China, this year, the Ministry of Agriculture admitted that legalizing the import of Roundup was based on a single toxicology test done in St. Louis.
Monsanto then stated, as Robinson reports, “that the study constituted its own commercial secret, adding that the company had never disclosed the study anywhere in the world and did not agree to disclose it now.”
Why not? Because the study proved Roundup was safe? Are you kidding?
In Europe, two studies on Roundup toxicity are also hidden in the closet.
The European Food Safety Authority and German regulators, Robinson states, “have refused… requests to release the studies, on the grounds that they are commercially confidential information.”
In other words, the studies are owned by a corporation(s).
No problem. Nothing is riding on the results of those studies except the health of the population of Europe.
In 2011, a group called Earth Open Source issued a report: “Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?”
Robinson writes: “The report found that industry’s own studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s showed that glyphosate causes birth defects in experimental animals. While the industry studies themselves are held by the German government and remain secret, the Earth Open Source authors examined Germany’s summary report on the studies, which is in the public domain. This report was submitted to the EU Commission and led to glyphosate’s European approval in 2002.”
What?!
Germany’s summary report invented various “redefinitions” of birth defects that downplayed their significance, and Roundup was approved for sale.
And again, the actual studies are being held secret.
Let’s see. Studies on the toxicity of Roundup are hidden by Monsanto and government regulators. The studies are called “corporate property.” That’s the justification.
“We own this science and we’re not releasing it. But don’t worry, it’s not important, you’re safe, Roundup is safe, it’s all good.”
Here’s the bottom line. If corporate science is used to justify the safety of corporate products, then that science must be made public in every detail, so it can be examined by people who don’t owe their souls to the corporations.
Anyone who stands in the way of this happening is a rank criminal.
But in this respect, we live in a lawless society. Government protects the corporations and itself.
The US Justice Department wouldn’t arrest and prosecute Monsanto executives who hide toxicity data in a million years.
But poisoning Americans? No problem.
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(CORPORATIONS CAN KILL FOR PROFIT,GAAL)
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So, for comparison's sake, how many.....rail workers have died in the last 6 months?
How about.....doctors?
How many....homeless men?
Again: other than rampant speculation and fantasy, WHAT are the facts? A half-dozen or so people working in a particularly disliked-at-the-moment profession have died in the last 6 months? Pardon my Vietnamese, but So Pho King Wat?
Homeless men,rail workers and Doctors are not part of multi-Billion dollar transactions that can be derailed by whistleblowers .....Corporations are kingdoms and sometimes the KING KILLS.....
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++Leaked documents on Royal Dutch Shell are not particularly complimentary; it seems to be in control of the state–>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afL0N191IFI; http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/dec/08/wikileaks-cables-shell-nigeria-spying==================== -
U ! U! USA !!!! (Gaal)
Foreigners to command Security Bureau of Ukraine
27.06.2014 | Source: Pravda.RuHackers from Anonymous managed to intercept correspondence of the Security Bureau of Ukraine. It was revealed that SBU was hiring foreign specialists.
The hackers gained access to the correspondence between SBU Headquarters and the head of the department in the Sumy region, Mr. Ivanchuk. It was said in the intercepted messages that the Security Bureau of Ukraine was supposed to accept "English-speaking specialists" and provide all sorts of assistance for them.
The message from June 7, 2014 contains a list of employees recommended for transfer to another area or dismissal, in connection with the "complicated political situation," Segodnya.Ua reports.
In addition, all employees of the SBU in the Sumy region were instructed to collected documents, translated into English. It was also recommended to strengthen the work of the department to teach basic European languages to employees.
The press service of the SBU in the Sumy declined to comment the news, citing the lack of evidence. At the same time, during another telephone conversation, it was acknowledged that some employees were indeed transferred to other regions, although it was a scheduled procedure.
According to Anonymous, gaining access to correspondence was made possible thanks to the low computer literacy of Sumy IT-specialists, who forwarded emails from a secure SBU mail account to free mail server online.ua. Experts on cyber security studied the intercepted correspondence and confirmed its authenticity.
Foreign, particularly English-speaking military instructors are quite common for the Ukrainian army. It is known, for example, that the storm of the city of Mariupol was supervised by English-speaking commanders.
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REALIST NEWS – ANOTHER JP MORGAN BANKER DEADJuly 1st, 2014
http://investmentwatchblog.com/realist-news-another-jp-morgan-banker-dead/
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__Almost admit to having Castro survive= see GREEN BELOW._
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Alan Dulles back the Cuban Exiles to murder JFK, but then support the Lone Nut theory that Oswald acted alone" ///// TREJO =
Dulles dosent care who he motivates to kill JFK. If you read the material I presented you understand that DULLES family represented ,at times, British interests who wanted the survival of a Communist Cuba. The existence of Cuba is like the sand and the oyster, it's a creative irritant,creating a militant interventionist globalist USA. If at one time Dulles wanted Cuba gone he changed his mind as his Anglo betters directed. (see above thread post - # 49 - John Dulles creates CFR). As to anti-Castro rhetoric post assassination by Dulles ,thats all in the play/manipulation of elites to the masses.In the same fashion JFK did the same thing (though for better, IMHO, reasons). JFK researchers have shown JFK pro-Vietnam War rhetoric was designuous and that he was planing a withdrawal. see http://www.history-m...vietnam1963.htm and http://www.thenation...not-speculation (GAAL)
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"For more than a century, ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."Page 405 of Rockefeller's autobiography, "Memoirs", October 15, 2002 ISBN-13: 978-0812969733. -
SEEN MUCH ON ABOVE POST #10 ?? supressed .......
New Chemical Process Could Make Ammonia a Practical Car Fuel
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++overThruster (58843) writes A phys.org article says UK researchers have made a breakthrough that could make ammonia a practical source of hydrogen for fueling cars. From the article: "Many catalysts can effectively crack ammonia to release the hydrogen, but the best ones are very expensive precious metals. This new method is different and involves two simultaneous chemical processes rather than using a catalyst, and can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost. ... Professor Bill David, who led the STFC research team at the ISIS Neutron Source, said 'Our approach is as effective as the best current catalysts but the active material, sodium amide, costs pennies to produce. We can produce hydrogen from ammonia "on demand" effectively and affordably.'" The full paper. The researchers claim that a two-liter reaction chamber could produce enough hydrogen to power a typical sedan.
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Fine, Steven.
Wonderful.
But where's the Miami connection? //THOMAS GRAVES
+++++++++++
Number of Zukas' live in Miami++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
EDIT THIS WAS POSTED BEFORE (# 2) see http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=7793
++++++++++++++++++++++
Harper's
January 1982, pages 29-39.The Informant
Meet the biggest dealer in Miami's biggest industry
By John Rothchild
Miami residents don't wear many clothes, but they have more to hide, per capita, then inhabitants of any other city in the nation. They plot secret military missions in Cuba and carry out secret commercial missions in Colombia. At dockside bars, exiles from corrupt regimes and other political intriguers mingle with smugglers and other conventional criminals. In New York or Washington, one asks, "What does he do?" In Miami, one asks, "What does he really do?"
To describe crime as Miami's problem would be like describing oil as Houston's problem. The Quechua Indians of Peru, who have no word for "problem" in their language, give us a noble example of resignation that might be applied to this rogue city. The police and the courts, however, cannot respond as Quechuas, and they depend on informants to guide them through the murk. A city as full of criminal conspiracies as Miami is an informant's mecca. That is why there are days when the criminal justice system (as it is optimistically called) sometimes seems to be run by Ricardo "the Monkey" Morales.
For fourteen years, this stocky and intimidating Cuban exile has whispered into ears at the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, the IRS, the Miami and County police, and the state and federal prosecutor's offices. He has informed about terrorism, then about drugs, and now, in his most inspired effort to date, about terrorism with drugs. But Morales is not just an observer. In Morale's latest judicial happening, Tick-Talks (so named because it involved a bugged wall clock), Ricardo "the Monkey" Morales has made most of the major decisions for both the defendants and the prosecutors. His role in this legal proceeding is like that of a patient who directs his own gallbladder operation.
The Cubans began to flood Miami after Castro's overthrow of Batista in 1959. They were looking over their shoulders, hoping to return and recapture their homeland, but that hasn't happened. Many of their American hosts expected that the Cuban culture would have been diluted in the melting pot by now, but that hasn't happened either. Miami was once a Southern town, but the city has grown to resemble Santiago or Guayaquil much more than it resembles Birmingham or Mobile. Latin American inhabitants have been partially assimilated, of course, but they have affected Miami much more than Miami tem. There are now nearly 200,000 Cubans in the city alone (out of a total population of 350,000), and 600,000 in Dade county as a whole (out of 1.6 million). These figures don't include 125,000 who arrived as recently as the 1980 Mariel boatlift. They have been joined by 16,000 Nicaraguans and a growing number of Salvadorans. In Miami, Spanish is a more useful language than English at gas stations, in sidewalk encounters, and even in stores like the Woolworth's in Miami Beach. Many of the exiles float in with only the clothes on their backs, while rich Venezuelans and Colombians fly in above them to buy condominiums and fancy dresses. The economy is thriving.
A Cuban journalist friend of mine says, "Cubans no longer expect to retake their country. Now they want Dade County." Already Miami has a Latin mayor, and for the first time its city council is controlled by Cubans. Now Latinization is moving outward to smaller, contiguous cities such as Miami Beach, and toward the Dade County line. The triumph of the Cubans has created a secondary immigration, that of the Gringos who are leaving this area and heading for Ft. Lauderdale in Broward County, where one can still order a McDonald's hamburger in English.
Most Cuban immigrants have been remarkably industrious and law-abiding. The speed at which they worked up from nothing to control this city and its businesses would have been the envy of the Italians and Irish who came to New York in the last century. Yet an active minority of Cubans has created unique legal problems for Miami-unique not only in quantity but also in quality. The CIA is partly responsible fur the peculiarities, because in the 1960s the agency used this city as a base for its war against Castro. Hundreds of young Cubans were trained in this war, nut only to use machine guns and plastic explosive but also to outsmart the American institutions that were not apprised of the battle plans. When the CIA pulled out, these Cubans didn't just throw away their detonators and go home, which partially explains why Miami Herald reporter Helga Silva has a fourteen-page list of unsolved political murders, and why endless grand juries leave been called on to ponder terrorist affairs.
When Florida became the national center for the importing of cocaine and marijuana during the 1970s, Miami was asked to fight another unwinnable war, this time against itself. Law-enforcement agencies now struggle against the city's biggest business. Drug cases account for more than 50 percent of the criminal proceedings in town; U.S. attorney Atlee Wampler has estimated that if his office closed its doors to new cases, it would take all his full-time prosecutors more than nine years just to handle the backlog. A significant part of Miami's population winks at drug smuggling the way terrorism was winked at a decade ago.
Like many of his fellow Cubans, Ricardo Morales supported Castro at first. He was trained as a Castro secret-police agent, and his last job in Cuba was handling security investigations at Havana airport. He was in his early twenties when he defected in 1960. When he got to Miami, he was recruited by the CIA, which taught him about bombs and about the recoilless rifle, and he took part in various secret missions following the failure of the Bay of Pigs. When the CIA refused to sponsor future raids, Morales left the agency in disgust. That was in 1963. But he returned to take a special assignment in the Congo during 1964-65, partly out of respect for a couple of colorful CIA operatives and partly because he needed the action. When Morales left the Congo, he had acquired a reputation for intensity that exceeds the normal civilized limits. He had the courage to go to the edge of Africa to support his friends, and he had the ballistics training to dispatch them if they became his enemies. Morales had been impressing Miami with high-voltage performances ever since.
A man I know once made a surprise visit to Morales's apartment. He told Morales' girlfriend, who answered the door, that he wanted to have a friendly chat with Ricardo. He was invited to sit in the living room while Morales finished taking a shower. When Morales entered the room, he marched directly to the visitor's briefcase and opened it without asking permission. The visitor was too startled to object. Morales dredged up the tape recorder, which was already running. He removed the tape cassette and put it in his shirt pocket; he shook out the batteries and placed them at opposite ends of the mantelpiece, like trophies. Then he returned the neutralized recorder to the briefcase. So far, Morales had not said a word. Then Morales pulled out his revolver and laid it on the coffee table. He had disarmed his visitor, and now he was offering up his own concealed weapon for the visitor's inspection. My friend lacked the wit to empty the gun and place the bullets on the mantel piece, next to the batteries. Morales got out a couple of glasses from a cabinet and poured some Chivas Regal. His mood had shifted from menacing to jovial. "Now," he said, "we can talk." That's the Morales style.
Bombs and babies
One does not grow up hoping to be an informant. Morales got his first opportunity after his arrest in 1968. His fingerprints' matched those found on the remains of a bomb that had detonated in the office of a firm that sold medical supplies back to Cuba. The newspaper clipping shows a handsome young man with a crew cut, looking more like Ricky Ricardo of "I Love Lucy" than a veteran of the Cuban revolution and the Congo wars. The CIA might have lost interest in blowing up Castro, but its Cuban ex-operatives were still practicing on small stores, police stations, and travel agencies in Miami. Ad hoc military brigades formed, broke up, and reformed, often claiming to be following orders from the Invisible Government.
Morales was an important early arrest in the FBI's pursuit of the elusive groupings. But his fingerprints were barely dry before the charges were dropped and Morales was on the temporary FBI payroll. In the lingo, Morales was "flipped." The FBI wanted to use him to get somebody else. The salvation of informants in Miami is that there is usually somebody else to get.
In this case, the somebody else was Orlando Bosch, the terrorist pediatrician. Yes, an exploding baby doctor. Morales got himself a job making bombs for Bosch. He made phony bombs while reporting details of Bosch's upcoming missions back to the FBI. Bosch couldn't understand why his bombs didn't go off, but he kept trying. He and some associates were arrested in the act of shelling a Cuba-bound Polish freighter in the Miami harbor. Morales's testimony at the trial helped convict Bosch and send him to prison in late 1968.
By 1972 the terrorist pediatrician was walking the streets again, and the scowl on his cadaverous face would not make an infant coo. The local prediction was that Morales would replace ships headed for Cuba as Bosch's favorite target. A bomb did explode under Morales's car in 1971, driving shrapnel an inch into the asphalt of West Flagler Street. "I'm not saying it was Dr. Bosch," Morales said as he surveyed the damage. The Monkey reacted with nonchalance, as if his car had suffered a flat tire.
It was a period of narrow escapes for the Monkey. Only a few months before the bombing incident, Elidio Ruiz had been found dead at Morales's front door. Morales had recently informed on this Ruiz character to Sgt. Raul Diaz over at the county police department. Ruiz and Diaz. I know these names begin to sound alike, but reputations depend on our keeping them clear in our minds. Diaz, now a lieutenant, has been one of Morales's favorite informees. Morales informed Diaz that Ruiz had murdered another man who had informed on Ruiz. Exonerated on a technicality, Ruiz went to visit Morales and fell dead. Morales was then arrested for murder himself. But he was exonerated when a witness couldn't identify him in the courtroom.
So by 1971, Morales had survived a bombing and an attempted murder, had helped send the bomber to jail, had outlived the man who'd tried to kill him, and had deflected bombing and murder charges against himself. These are impressive results. But it was still early in Morales's career. Morales observers were not yet ready to speculate that he might have bombed his own, car to cover up a secret alliance with pediatrician Bosch. The Rolando Otero case was the one flat really made the Monkey's reputation in Miami.
Otero was another anti-Castro zealot. In 1975, he and Morales were such good friends that Morales had his own key to Otero's apartment. Meanwhile, more bombs were exploding around the city, including one in the men's room at the state attorney's office, one at the FBI building, and one at Miami police headquarters. Sgt. Raul Diaz and FBI agent Joe Ball, who had approved the original Morales flip in 1968, had several meetings with Morales. Once again, the Monkey came to the aid of law enforcement and declared that Otero was their bomber. This was in December 1975.
Having informed on his friend, Morales went back to Otero with some useful advice: leave the country. Otero took it. Then Morales told the understandably upset police that the leak to Otero had come from FBI agent Ball. Then Morales disappeared. In fact, Ball had to execute an affidavit denying that he helped Otero flee. It was impossible to tell who had done what, and whose side Morales was on. Morales at this time was commuting between Miami and Venezuela, where he was developing some new interests.
Otero went to Venezuela looking for work. He had a friend there who was head of airport security for the secret-police agency, DISIP. The friend's name was Ricardo "the Monkey" Morales. Don't ask me how he got that position. But Otero still trusted him enough to show up in his office, looking for a job. By February 1976, two months after informing on him, Morales had hired him in Venezuela and sent him to Chile on some DISIP mission. In Chile, Otero was arrested and extradited back to America to stand trial on the charges Morales had fingered him for. Twice Morales promised American authorities that he would return to Miami to testify against Otero, and twice he didn't show. After an acquittal on federal charges, Otero was convicted of one of the bombings in Florida state court, without Morales's help.
During this Venezuelan period, Morales exhibited some gray hairs and had raccoon rings under his eyes. The rumor was that he was under great strain trying to keep his personal affairs in some kind of balance. There was his delicate relationship with Otero, and also his relationship with our old pediatrician friend, Bosch. Bosch was now suspected of blowing up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight, killing all seventy-three people aboard. He also found his way to Venezuela, prompting speculation that he and the Monkey had made up, or perhaps had been collaborating all along. Then Bosch was jailed in Venezuela on a warrant signed by Morales, prompting further speculation that Morales had fooled him again, the way that Lucy fools Charlie Brown every October with the football. Or perhaps the warrant was only a ruse. Who knows?
I first met Morales during his sojourn in Caracas. In late 1976, two other journalists and I found ourselves on the same plane to Venezuela as Sgt. Raul Diaz, whom you already know, and Florida state attorneys George Yoss and Hank Adorno. We journalists were going to interview Bosch in his Venezuelan prison; the officials were going to talk to Bosch, and also to Morales, in their second futile effort to get his cooperation against Otero. They were hardly off the plane before they were offering Morales an ingratiating tidbit of information. They told him that some officious journalists had come to Caracas and were poking into international terrorism.
On of the other journalists, my friend Taylor Branch, had declared at the start of the trip: "If we have problems in Venezuela, I know a Cuban named Morales who runs security at the airport. He will help us out." We did have problems. A car followed our taxi to the hotel, and from the window of our room there we could see armed men hiding in the bushes outside. Branch and the third journalist, Hilda Inclan, tried several times to call their old friend Morales and ask for his help.
At 5 a.m., a burly little man broke into our hotel room, grabbed our passports off the bureau, and began to holler like a boot-camp sergeant. Branch whined in plaintive disbelief, "Ricardo, is that you?" Branch had told me the stories of Morales turning on Bosch and Otero, but even this wary reported had never imagined that the monkey might do it to him. Yet it was obvious that the goons in the bushes belonged to Morales. Morale pushed us out of the hotel room, refusing to acknowledge Branch's overtures of recognition.
We were driven to the airport by armed chauffeurs and held in a private office from sunup until about 8 a.m., when Morales returned to invite us to breakfast. Terrifying at 5, he was all charm at 8. We strolled casually down the crowded airport corridors to the dining room, but when Morales sensed that one of us might bolt for a nearby telephone, he stiffened and scowled, and this was enough to hold us back. At the breakfast table, he relaxed and told jokes and carried on a witty monologue about world affairs. Every time Branch marshaled the courage to ask Morales about our mistreatment, he would wither pretend Branch was no longer sitting at the table, or else he would say: "I don't know anything about this Bosch you came to see. Is that his name? Maybe I have read it in the papers." Our involuntary departure from Caracas had a typical Morales result. We felt betrayed, yet we did not completely dislike the abuser. Perhaps he had protected us from darker forces. Like Otero and Bosch and half the Miami legal establishment, we had no idea whose side he was really on.
Narcs and finks
After 1976, the anti-Castro business went into recession. Our hero returned from Venezuela to Miami, but instead of renewing his old connections, he was frequently seen at the Mutiny Bar with a new friend, Carlos Quesada. The Mutiny is to the apres-deal what Sardi's is the apres-theater, and Quesada was a familiar patron with a big bankroll and lizard-sized shoes. The tables are surrounded by wide-leaved plants and venal waitresses in leotards. There are phone jacks at the tables so people can do business in these jungle-like surroundings.
Quesada was an apolitical Cuban with an apolitical arrest record: 1969, violation of narcotics laws, three years probation; 1971, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, no action by state attorney; 1972, breaking and entering, disposition unknown; 1972, assault with intent to commit murder, victim didn't prosecute; 1974, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, case dismissed; 1977, breaking and entering, three years probation. The association between Quesada and Morales was considered a step up for Quesada, but a step down for Morales. The gossip around town was that the savvy Cuban who once traded secrets with Israeli and European spies was reduced to gossiping with silk-shirted drug punks. But genius can work with any raw material, and Morales found plenty of raw material at Quesada's $100,000 stucco house at 1724 SW 16th Street. It is the standard one-story Miami residence, surrounded by a wall and decorated with security improvements. When Morales first entered the house in November 1977, police were already hiding outside and taking pictures.
Lt. Raul Diaz calls the visitors to the house on 16th Street "a convention of informants." Diaz should know. Fausto Villar, a familiar presence at Quesada's table, was talking privately to Lieutenant Diaz. Quesada himself was known to drop a hint or two to the police, and so was Francisco Tamayo. Franklin Sosa had cooperated with the DEA. Jose "Pepe 70" Gonzales was blabbing to another department. Rudy Rodriguez was talking to several departments, according to Lieutenant Diaz.
You might suppose, if you don't live in Miami, that drug smugglers operate in secrecy, and that police agencies operate in ignorance until they learn of the smugglers' activities and arrest them.
Actually, the system of the relations between government and industry in America's drug capital is more complex than that. Each of several local, state, and federal police agencies has its own informants, who inform on other informants, who undoubtedly are informing on them. The informants are also the smugglers. In return for their information, they are sometimes allows to continue in business. So if you get enough informants in your network, like the diverse collection at Quesada's table, you are protected not by secrecy by selective prosecution. One can imagine that Ricardo Morales felt right at home in this new environment.
It's hard to fathom how the police decide when to take action and when to just listen. In this case, police say they were getting reports from two informants at Quesada's table - Fausto Villar and Pepe 70 Gonzales. Morales himself had introduced Villar to Sergeant Diaz some years earlier, and Diaz had introduced him to other officers. Now Villar wanted to tell on Quesada, possibly because he resented the feeling that Morales had usurped his position in the drug hierarchy. Pepe 70 was about to be sent to jail for selling a silencer to an undercover police officer. He was willing to tell on Quesada to secure a shorter sentence.
Pepe 70 was something of a sentencing expert. He got ten years for narcotics in Kansas in 1970, and - moving with remarkable speed - another ten years in California in 1971. Nevertheless, he was on the streets of Miami in 1977.
Leaks form Villar and Pepe 70 were the reported basis for a wiretap on Quesada's phone. Quesada changed the number four times between the summer of 1977 and the winter of 1978, which shows that smugglers are not completely indifferent to detection, even though a new number does not stop a wiretap. Quesada also made a half-hearted attempt to disguise his business through conceit, just in case somebody was listening. The most popular conceit was a fishing trip.
Police were not fooled by the following typical conversation between "C" (Quesada) and "W" (an associate):
C: How are you doing, inspector?
W: I went fishing.
C: Yeah?
W: Yeah, and I arrived last night.
C: Ah, it doesn't matter. I went by there but I didn't see you.
W: We had an accident yesterday and we had to come back.
C: Ave Maria.
W: With Julito.
C: Yeah?
W: Yeah. Perforated his hand with a kingfish hook.
C: Who?
W: Julito.
C: There, at the kingfish store?
W: No, there fishing. Out there for kingfish.
C: Aha.
W: [garbled]
C: Aha.
W: He perforated his hand with a big kingfish hook.
C. Ave Maria.In the spring of 1977, the police spent hundreds of hours recording and deciphering these Ave Marias and references to kingfish hooks. Morales tells us now that he completed a marijuana transaction out of the Quesada house in November 1977, and then didn't return to the house until late March 1978. The timing is very fortunate, because by March the police had already stacked up the tapes and gone out to arrest Quesada and Rudy Rodriguez and seven other people, seizing $913,000 and fifty-six pounds of cocaine in the process. Assistant police chief Philip Doherty said it was "like winning the Super Bowl." But Morales wasn't even on the field. He and his friend Franklin Sosa both stayed away during the critical phase of evidence collection and were not implicated. How did Morales know when to stay away? Good question.
And why did Morales go back to Quesada's tainted house after the bust? That one's easy to answer. This is the drug business. The best time to deal, in fact, is after the organization has been busted. The post-bust deal has a great chance of succeeding, because police have already completed their investigation. Besides that, money is needed to pay the lawyers, and perhaps to bail out some partners. As Morales later recollected to the police, he, Sosa, and Quesada (out on bail) were at Quesada's house, "and out of the blue sky, Franklin Sosa got up some sort of a connection with this guy Roberto who claimed he was going to give us 20,000 pounds." The Quesada group had momentarily tired of cocaine, since they had just lost fifty-six pounds of it to police, so this 20,000 pounds refers to marijuana. Sosa used the Quesada phone, which he knew had been recently tapped, to make his arrangements.
But police had not yet turned off the tape recorders, and they picked up the Sosa conversation as an epilogue to their surveillance. Officers were sent to the place where the bales of marijuana were to be loaded, and who did they find in the procession's lead car but Ricardo Morales. Sgt. Raul Diaz was dispatched to the scene and began intense discussions with the veteran informer. Meanwhile the Monkey's car and person were searched. This turned up an illegally concealed weapon - as common as Kleenex in many Miami glove compartments. More interesting was a membership card from DISIP, the Venezuelan Secret Police. Most interesting of all was a list of confidential radio frequencies from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Coast Guard, the FBI, and Secret Service, the Florida Highway Patrol, and the Miami and Miami Shores police departments. Was Morales allied with all of them? How did he get the list? "It baffles me," a DEA spokesman told the Miami Herald.
There was a difference of opinion among the various state and U.S. attorneys s to the Monkey's reliability. Sam Smargon, the prosecutor assigned to this case, argued that this ethereal defendant might vanish if allowed out of jail. "I wanted a high bond on this man because of his international contacts, Smargon says. At least one of Smargon's superiors, however, was called by the Defense to vouch for the Monkey, even though Morales had not shown up at the Otero trial despite two promises to do so. There were still prosecutors willing to trust Morales. Smargon didn't and neither did the judge, who set bond at $350,000. Later, Smargon also contracted Morales fever.
Word got out that Morales, froth his jail cell, had figured out that Pepe 70 and Fausto Villar were the informants responsible for the Quesada wiretap. It may have been spontaneous deduction on his part, but he certainly had enough possible sources. In any event, Morales's perception was disturbing to both Villar and Pepe 70. In the words of Sergeant Diaz, they were "scared xxxxless." Villar was loose in Miami and Pepe 70 was stuck in an Indiana prison for the silencer. Both suddenly forgot that they had ever talked to police about Quesada, Quesada's house, illegal drugs, or Ricardo Morales. Actually, Villar did remember that Morales was a "valiant man," and said so to the Miami Herald.
The fee for defending a major drug case can be substantial. In Miami (as elsewhere), the prosecutor's office tends to be underpaid basic training for the other side. Morales was represented by Pollack, Spain & O'Donnell, a firm with some canny ex-prosecutors who had left the world of seeking convictions for the more lucrative one of seeking acquittals. (Even the defense world is not all sunshine. Pollack sits all day in crepuscular darkness with a shotgun propped behind his desk.) Morales's lawyers argued that if the informants had never discussed Quesada with police - as they now claimed - then police had no business using them in as the basis for the wiretaps, and the wiretaps should be thrown out of court.
There were two police agencies involved in the Quesada bust, and they squabbled over some of the procedure, and the state attorney's office did riot necessarily make the best moves, and the result was that the judge ruled for Morales: the wiretaps were stricken. The new stories told by the frightened Villar and Pepe 70 were given more judicial credence than their old ones, which were supported by tape recordings, sworn affidavits, and the word of at least five police officers.
The principal defendant was acquitted without ever taking the stand. Morales had spent a hundred days or so in jail awaiting the trial, but now (July l978) he was free, and the two informants had been mortally terrified, and the police were humiliated, and the vanquished prosecutor, Sam Smargon, had suffered a coronary. Smargon says the heart attack was incidental to his judicial defeat, put he does remember that he felt great pressure. Perhaps he could have charged Morales with the concealed gun, in order to win at least something. By the end of the trial, it was too late for that, and besides, Smargon was getting Morales fever. "My request for the man had increased tenfold," Smargon recalls. "He could have taken the stand and said any number of things, but he didn't. The man doesn't lie."
Morales went back to Quesada's house to develop more drug deals. "I was broke, you know," he confided in a later affidavit. "We stared dealing right away." Rehabilitation is the judicial ideal, but the only apparent effect of Morales's encounter with the courts was to remind him of the advantages of cocaine. "Never in my life am I going to touch grass again," Morales declared. "It was getting on my nerves to see a house loaded with bales."
Things were looking up at the Quesada residence. Morales's legal moves had a devastating side effect on the prosecutions of Quesada, Rodriguez, and the other defendants. Their cases were transferred from state court to a federal court. Prosecutors hoped that a fresh judge might accept the wiretap evidence. But a federal magistrate also rejected the wiretaps, and the prosecutors had no phone conversations to connect Quesada and friends to those fifty-six pounds of cocaine. U.S. attorney Jerry Sanford appealed the magistrate's ruling in a final and desperate effort to rescue the prosecution.
Jerry Sanford has entered this saga before. He was the prosecutor who lost the first Otero case after Morales failed to appear, and now he stood to lose the Quesada case because of Morales's machinations, and yet his friendship with Morales had strengthened. Sanford was a frequent visitor during Morales's time in jail, and his goal was to make Ricardo's stay more pleasant. "I would say, 'Ricardo, do you need anything?' or, 'Ricardo, do you want anything?' and he would always answer no," Sanford told me. After Morales was released, "We would bullxxxx about the KGB and the CIA; about who did this and who did that." Sanford insists, "I believe Ricardo Morales is one of the few people who never tried to use me."
One of Morales's abiding talents is to arrange things so that nobody ever feels completely defeated on his account. Perhaps he worried that prosecutors would blame him for the rejection of the wiretaps.'' Now he would give the prosecution a way out. "I remember we were walking clown the hall," Sanford says. "It was just before a hearing on the wiretap appeal. Ricardo came up to me and said, 'What would you do if Quesada flipped?' I couldn't believe it." Morales was offering a spectacular cooperator, the second most important defendant in the case, behind Rudy Rodriguez.
Quesada was understandably eager to accept government immunity for all his crimes. He would have to testify against the other defendants, but he and Rodriguez had preen feuding anyway, and his Datsun 280 Z had been strafed with machine-gun bullets. Many believed that this attack came from Quesada's co-defendant, though others speculated that the machine-gun tattoo, which Quesada had escaped from intact, may even have been arranged by Morales to give the flip some dramatic impetus. The government was eager to accept Quesada's cooperation, so the deal was approved in less than twenty-four hours. "Like a bolt out of the blue," said Judge Sidney Aronovitz.
The wiretaps were finally admitted as evidence, with Quesada to verify their authenticity, and all the other defendants were convicted. Rodriguez got fifteen years. He and the other convicts weren't happy, but everybody else seemed delighted with Morales's choreography. The prosecutors had won a major case. They talked as if Rodriguez was the hardened criminal they wanted to put away, while Quesada was just fluff that could blow back onto the streets for all they cared. The police were vindicated. The defense attorneys got a fat fee. Rudy Rodriguez got back $450,000, half the money seized in the case. The IRS got the other half. Morales agreed to help the U.S. Attorney's office by appearing in front of a couple of grand juries pondering other unsolved crimes.
Quesada was free but had a tax problem, having testified under immunity that he had made $3 million in the drug business. Morales recommended a good lawyer to him. Guess who? Why, Jerry Sanford, who had gone into private practice following the Quesada conviction. Quesada also had a security problem, with Rodriguez threatening revenge, but the police department assigned him a bodyguard. Morales must have been gratified, with the agency that arrested Quesada now protecting him, and his former prosecutor now defending him, and nobody asking why a lesser defendant hadn't been flipped instead of Quesada, and the troublesome Rodriguez legally detained so that Morales and Quesada could get back to business. It was the fall of 1978.
Operation Tick-Talks
In December 1980, an important law-enforcement conference was held in a police car in the parking lot of Monty Trainer's dockside bar, and then moved to the parking lot at Zayre's, and formally reconvened at a room in the Holiday Inn on LeJeune Road. Crime watcher Ricardo Morales was telling two policemen, D.C. Diaz and Raul Martinez (neither to be confused with Raul Diaz), and later the assistant state attorney, Rina Cohan, that drugs were bought and sold out of Carlos Quesada's house at 1724 S.W. 16th Street. Can you imagine? Police should do something about Quesada, Morales said. He and his partners were flirting with heroin, which tested Morales's moral patience. "Heroin … goes against, you know, my own belief and religion, and, you know, I … flatly refuse to go along in this new kind of business."
Morales was ready to give a fifty-page deposition. But first he reminded prosecutor Cohan that "I was found not guilty by the jury, which you should be aware of," for earlier suspicious acts. All Morales wanted now was immunity for subsequent suspicious acts. In return, he would incriminate Quesada and many others. The same kind of immunity that Quesada got for incriminating Rudy Rodriguez back in 1979. Sgt. Raul Martinez helped Morales in his negotiations:
Sgt. Martinez: He will not be prosecuted for anything he did with … any of his co-conspirators?
Ms. Cohan: Correct. Includes Quesada…
Morales: Includes the whole organization. The whole family?
Ms. Cohan: That's correct.
Morales: I won't be prosecuted?
Ms. Cohan: No.
Sgt. Martinez: If all of a sudden you say in 1980 you murdered Juan Pepe …
Ms. Cohan: That's another story entirely.
Sgt. Martinez: That's what she is saying.
Morales: I didn't.
Sgt. Martinez: So you have to restrict yourself to the conspiracy.
Morales: To my activities, right? To my activities in the drug business, you know, for the past three years, right?Morales's revelations were not shocking. D.C. Diaz was the man assigned to be Quesada's bodyguard after Morales arranged Quesada's flip. To stay close enough to Quesada to shield him, you had to drink with him, and D.C. Diaz had done that, both at Quesada's house and at the Mutiny Bar. In fact, on different nights during the summer of 1980, you could have found either D.C. Diaz or Raul Diaz or ex-prosecutor Jerry Sanford or a customs agent named Czukas sitting at the same table with Carlos Quesada and his new associates.
Chief among these associates was Rafael Villaverde, ex-CIA, a Bay of Pigs alumnus who was ransomed by President Kennedy for medicine and truck parts, a man who moved up from picking tomatoes to operating a $2 million antipoverty agency for the Latin elderly. Villaverde, weighing more than 200 pounds, knows the mayor, knows the police, knows everybody he ought to know in Miami. Villaverde's welfare agency has been called a front for terrorists, but Villaverde once said that if bombers and assassins did congregate among his elderly, it was only to apply for benefits in anticipation of their retirement.
Other frequenters of Quesada's table at the Mutiny were Villaverde's brother, Raul, and the two Condom brothers, who share an unfortunate name, a conviction for cocaine smuggling, and membership in the paramilitary 2506 brigade, a venerable anti-Castro group. Morales was often at the Mutiny, too. He had introduced Quesada to Sanford, and Quesada in turn introduced D.C. Diaz to the Condom brothers, who were brought into the group by the Villaverdes, who were themselves introduced to Quesada by Morales. For the Monkey, the Mutiny gatherings in that summer of 1980 were "This is your life."
Everybody knew what everybody else was up to. Policeman D.C. Diaz told me, "Quesada knew where we were coming from. And he would give us information about drugs, usually things we already knew; or else he would tell stories on his competition. We would visit his house, and if there was something going on that he didn't want us to see, he would come outside and talk. He even tried to bribe us with Rolex watches." For more than a year, police had viewed Quesada and partners with suspicion and at close range, and yet nothing had broken. Perhaps they were waiting for Morales to make a move.
But tensions surfaced occasionally. Jerry Sanford recalls one night at the Mutiny when "Morales kept saying that so-and-so killed the Chilean ambassador in Washington, and Villaverde kept saying he knew it was somebody else, and Morales stared throwing pats of butter at Villaverde. Every time he made a point, he hurled a pat. Villaverde tried to ignore this, and so did Quesada. They just sat there and pretended it wasn't happening."
By later October, relations had broken down - not between the suspects and the police, but among the suspects. The Godfather was on television again ("when The Godfather comes on … the drug people, they get steamed up somehow, and some people may have gotten killed because of that," Morales opines), and Morales didn't get an invitation to customs agent Czukas's birthday party, which upset him. In fact, Morales recalls, it was a lousy month. He claims to have spent several hours one evening fending off various hit men. He says he escaped by brandishing a dummy hand grenade. "I pulled the handle and said 'trick or treat' … so that was my Halloween."
So by the first week in December, Morales was sitting in the parking lot with the police, restructuring his alliances once again. One theory is that he had been kicked out of the Quesada organization and was retaliating. Jerry Sanford's theory is that the Condom brothers had proposed a legitimate stock deal to Quesada and that Morales mistakenly assumed that "stocks" meant heroin, since none of his friends read the Wall Street Journal. The Villaverde brothers, now indicted, said Morales first introduced them to Quesada and then created this drug investigation, in retaliation for something the Villaverdes did back in 1976. They thought they had a contract with the CIA to assassinate a European terrorist named Carlos the Jackal. When they discovered (such is life in the underworld) that the target was a Libyan dissident and the client was Colonel Qaddhafi, they patriotically backed out. Morales was also somehow involved, Villaverde has contended.
Once again, the law enforcement people went along with Morales. "We don't have the money to buy information, and so we have to work on favors," says Lt. Raul Diaz. "There are certain things you can do for some people and then they owe you a favor. That is the system. Sometimes, it breeds what looks like corruption." The state gave Morales his immunity and then used his testimony for wiretap applications, first on a suspected lesser distributor named Roberto Ortega and then on Quesada's phone and behind the wall clock in Quesada's living room. This was Operation Tick-Talks. Police listened to hundreds of hours of conversation through the spring of 1981, but then the clock fell off the wall and the bug was discovered, so they had to move in to arrest an assortment of schoolteachers, airline pilots, and accountants, plus the Villaverde brothers and the Condoms and Quesada, making forty-eight people in all. They have been charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, although no drugs were seized.
Much ingenuity went into the Tick-Talks surveillance. Police detained the caretaker of the Quesada house on a minor traffic charge so that they could make a copy of the house key in his pocket, which gave them entry so they could install the wall bug. The way they came back to change the setting for daylight savings time was very clever. But letting Ricardo Morales chart the course of a criminal prosecution is bound to create a few problems.
For example, Sam Smargon, the state attorney who tried to keep Morales from getting bail when he way caught with the marijuana, and then lost the marijuana case, has moved over to the U.S. attorney's office, which Jerry Sanford vacated to go into private practice. Just before the recent flip, Morales requested that Smargon put him in the federal witness protection program. This program is for people who are helping the Feds, and Tick-Talks is a state matter. Morales had agreed to testify in a federal tax case against a reputed drug smuggler. But that case came arid went without Morales testifying. It seems more likely that Morales entered the federal witness protection program because he wanted to, for reasons having nothing to do with the tax case. Morales has been out of the federal program since July, but is continuing a witness protection program of his own by remaining out of sight of the U.S. marshals. Nobody will tell me where he is to this day.
Jerry Sanford, who was stood up by Morales in the Otero case and then flipped Quesada and later became Quesada's attorney, both on Morales's suggestion, signed on to defend Quesada against charges originated by Morales in Operation Tick-Talks. Sanford also sent Morales's request for federal protection to his friend Sam Smargon. Recently, Sanford simplified his life by stepping aside as Quesada's attorney. Tire last time I saw Sanford, he looked both relieved and tired.
The government couldn't get Morales to cooperate in the Otero case, and then lost the marijuana case against him because the wiretaps were thrown out and the informants were unreliable, and now it is going to try forty-eight new defendants in the belief that Morales will cooperate and the wiretaps will hold up. It has remarkable faith, and no physical evidence. Drugs were not confiscated in Tick-Talks, and the recorded dialogues between the suspected conspirators are much more befuddling than the old fish-hook exchanges on the previous go-round. The literal translation make it sound like the Villaverdes and Quesada were either milking cows, planting rose bushes, or collecting bazookas. Could they possibly not have known that they were being tapped, given all the lively barter of information in this town and the fact that Morales himself had disappeared?
It is now fall in Miami, and the heat had left the pavement. The only major character in any of the Morales episodes currently in prison is Orlando Bosch. He is still being held in Venezuela, even though he was acquitted there. Venezuela has a different system of justice. Rolando Otero is out on bond, and so is Carlos Quesada, and so are the Villaverdes. Rudy Rodriguez, the man they wanted to convict so badly that they flipped Morales and Quesada, spend about a year in jail awaiting the appeal because he couldn't make the bond of $1 million. Recently, however, the government changed its mind and agreed to let him use some property he owned as collateral on his bond, so Rodriguez is free again. Naturally, there is a rumor going around Miami about why the government let him out: Rodriguez has been flipped, and now he's an informant, too. The rumor doesn't say who is left to inform on.
The Ultimate USAEC secrets per the JFK hit.
in JFK Assassination Debate
Posted
edited and bumped so Gaal can't ignore it (GRAVES)
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The thrust of the debate on this thread has become whether or not High or Low level CIA people are part of the JFK assassination.
POST #84 above has answers to said debate. Thomas Vallee's car registration is a inconsequential sidebar that has become a stumbling block for Mr. Graves.![:blink:](//content.invisioncic.com/r16296/emoticons/default_blink.png)