Secrets and Lies

[Gary Buell]

I am currently reading Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & Germ Warfare by Gordon Thomas. One of his main sources was William Buckley of the CIA (not the National Review editor) who eventually was tortured to death by Islamic extremists. Fascinating material on MKULTRA and some of the people involved. On the assassination:

p.265 "During his stay in Mexico, Buckley met with the CIA's station chief in the city. The man told him that the only excitment in his work had been the discovery that a former radar operator in the U.S. Marine Corps, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, had shown up in the city in the company of a KGB officer. They had made several trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies as well as mixing with various groups of Cuban exiles in the city. The station chief said he had filed a report on the matter but there had been no follow-up from Langley. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald."

p. 267 "When Buckley returned to Langley, he found the Agency gripped in a collective paranoia. The belief in an elaborate plot to murder the President had taken root early on when an Associated Press wire message annunced that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman had been shot and killed in the vicinity of the assassination. The message had been quickly corrected. But it took many hours before the CIA was ready to let go of the idea that the Russians had struck. The belief was reinforced when Buckley mentioned what the station chief in Mexico had told him about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had been seized for carrying out the killing. "In moments," he was to remember, "the whole of the Operations area was in uproar. Men were sent to Mexico, to Florida, to infiltrate the Cuban community. To anywhere that Oswald had been, may have been, could have been--and sometimes where he manifestly had not been."

Edited December 15, 2007 by Gary Buell

[William Kelly]

I am currently reading Secrets & Lies: A History of CIA Mind Control & Germ Warfare by Gordon Thomas. One of his main sources was William Buckley of the CIA (not the National Review editor) who eventually was tortured to death by Islamic extremists. Fascinating material on MKULTRA and some of the people involved. On the assassination:

p.265 "During his stay in Mexico, Buckley met with the CIA's station chief in the city. The man told him that the only excitment in his work had been the discovery that a former radar operator in the U.S. Marine Corps, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, had shown up in the city in the company of a KGB officer. They had made several trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies as well as mixing with various groups of Cuban exiles in the city. The station chief said he had filed a report on the matter but there had been no follow-up from Langley. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald."

p. 267 "When Buckley returned to Langley, he found the Agency gripped in a collective paranoia. The belief in an elaborate plot to murder the President had taken root early on when an Associated Press wire message annunced that a Secret Service agent and a Dallas policeman had been shot and killed in the vicinity of the assassination. The message had been quickly corrected. But it took many hours before the CIA was ready to let go of the idea that the Russians had struck. The belief was reinforced when Buckley mentioned what the station chief in Mexico had told him about Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who had been seized for carrying out the killing. "In moments," he was to remember, "the whole of the Operations area was in uproar. Men were sent to Mexico, to Florida, to infiltrate the Cuban community. To anywhere that Oswald had been, may have been, could have been--and sometimes where he manifestly had not been."

Thanks for that Gary,

Of course the MC Station Chief is Win Scott, and we most certainly look forward to Jeff Morley's forthcoming bio of WS next spring.

In the meantime, I had been reading the Tarassov interviews from the HSCA days, which I have found fascinating (Thanks Rex).

You can be sure they did check out the Sov Rus Cuba Connections and in following them, were led to the actual pepatrators, and in discovering the domestic plot, threw the lone-nut switch.

As the translators and transcriptionists for the CIA phone tap at the Soviet embassy in MC, the Tarassovs were never questioned by any investigators until HSCA, which tells me that they already knew the answers.

BK

BK

[John Simkin]

p.265 "During his stay in Mexico, Buckley met with the CIA's station chief in the city. The man told him that the only excitment in his work had been the discovery that a former radar operator in the U.S. Marine Corps, having defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, had shown up in the city in the company of a KGB officer. They had made several trips to the Soviet and Cuban embassies as well as mixing with various groups of Cuban exiles in the city. The station chief said he had filed a report on the matter but there had been no follow-up from Langley. The man was Lee Harvey Oswald."

Thank you for that. Buckley is an extremely interesting character. Buckley joined the CIA in 1955. Officially he left two years later and after graduating from Boston University he was employed as a librarian in Lexington.

In 1960 Buckley joined the 320th Special Forces Detachment. Promoted to the rank of colonel he served in Vietnam as a Senior Advisor to the ARVN. Buckley rejoined the CIA and served with Win Scott in Mexico in 1963. According to one source, Buckley was recruited by Ted Shackley and joined his Secret Team that had been involved with Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, Carl E. Jenkins, Raphael Quintero, Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada, in the CIA “assassination” program. Leslie Cockburn pointed out in her book, Out of Control (1987), that Buckley had had to approve CIA assassinations undertaken by the Shackley organizations. In his book, Prelude to Terror (2005) Joseph Trento claims that Buckley was "one of Shackley's oldest and dearest friends."

In 1983 Buckley became CIA station chief in Beirut. On 16th March, 1984, Buckley was kidnapped by the Hezbollah, a fundamentalist Shiite group with strong links to the Khomeini regime. Buckley was tortured and it was soon discovered that he was a senior CIA officer. Buckley eventually signed a 400 page statement detailing his activities in the CIA. He was also videotaped making this confession. William Casey asked Ted Shackley for help in obtaining Buckley’s freedom.

Three weeks after Buckley’s disappearance, President Reagan signed the National Security Decision Directive 138. This directive was drafted by Oliver North and outlined plans on how to get the American hostages released from Iran and to “neutralize” terrorist threats from countries such as Nicaragua. This new secret counterterrorist task force was to be headed by Shackley’s old friend, General Richard Secord. This was the beginning of the Iran-Contra deal.

Talks had already started about exchanging American hostages for arms. On 30th August, 1985, Israel shipped 100 TOW missiles to Iran. On 14th September they received another 408 missiles from Israel. The Israelis made a profit of $3 million on the deal.

In October, 1985, Congress agreed to vote 27 million dollars in non-lethal aid for the Contras in Nicaragua. However, members of the Reagan administration decided to use this money to provide weapons to the Contras and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

The following month, Ted Shackley traveled to Hamburg where he met General Manucher Hashemi, the former head of SAVAK’s counterintelligence division at the Atlantic Hotel. Also at the meeting on 22nd November was Manucher Ghorbanifar. According to the report of this meeting that Shackley sent to the CIA, Ghorbanifar had “fantastic” contacts with Iran.

At the meeting Shackley told Hashemi and Ghorbanifar that the United States was willing to discuss arms shipments in exchange for the four Americans kidnapped in Lebanon. The problem with the proposed deal was that Buckley was already dead (he had died of a heart-attack while being tortured).

Is it possible that Hezbollah now have information about the CIA role in the assassination of JFK?

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKbuckleyWF.htm