The Divine Skein at Dealey Plaza

[William Kelly]

This is the introduction to the unpublished manuscript I wrote with the grant from the Fund for Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project (circa 1994), with the addition of Gibson and El Nosair Sayyid, and a few other items. I will continue to expand on this theme, and would appreciate any critiques or feedback. - BK

THE DIVINE SKEIN AT DEALEY PLAZA

PSYOP OR PSYCHO - FREUD verses SUN TZU

By William Kelly

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a Watershed event in modern American history, the ramifications of which have yet to be fully realized. The details of the crime, the acoustics, ballistics, autopsy and medical evidence are covered elsewhere. This report and the ones that follow concern the covert intelligence operations that resulted in the murder of the president and the black propaganda operations that continue to this day, manipulating the news and judicial system to shield those responsible.

The time and the place – 12:30 p.m., Friday, November 22, 1963, Houston and Elm streets, Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, are notched in our national subconscious, and the picture of that square acre of time and place are etched in our collective memories.

If Dealey Plaza were pictured as a giant mosaic wall mural, broken into pieces like a puzzle, we would have a pretty good idea of what occurred there. Only a few pieces are still missing – the faces in the shadows, the names of the mangers pulling the strings of the puppets and pawns, details unnecessary to understand the nature of the plot.

Although there are many theories as to what happened in Dealey Plaza on that day, the events as they actually occurred only happened one way, and it is the responsibility of the independent researchers, journalists, professors and historians to determine that truth as close as possible.

Some people might consider the crime ancient history, even though it is such a current event that indictments can still be brought down for those responsible for crimes, if not homicide and conspiracy, then obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and perjury. Besides the issues concerning the accuracy of our historical perspective, truth and the pursuit of justice, it is important to know for oneself whether the death of the president was an unplanned, spontaneous act of a lone madman or a very well planned and executed coup d’etat.

John F. Kennedy was either killed by a deranged lone-nut, as the official Warren Commission concluded, or he was the victim of a covert action team of clandestine agents, as much of the evidence suggests. The truth is either one way or the other, but cannot be both.

If the assassination of JFK was the work of a lone-nut madman, the lessons to be learned from the tragedy are far less significant than if Kennedy was killed as part of a coup, as the ramifications stem into the realms of truth, justice, responsibility and national security.

Not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of analysis, a competent homicide investigation would proceed first by assuming that JFK was killed as an act of elimination. An understanding of current events and the details of the crime also suggest that what happened at Dealey Plaza was not only the product of a conspiracy, but by a much more clearly defined MO – Modus Operandi – that of a covert intelligence operation.

Although anyone with the training and knowledge can conduct such operations, the murder of the president, because of the extensive cover-up that occurred after the fact, must have had its origin in the very heart of the U.S. government. If it was an independent operation, a renegade group or the work of foreigners, those responsible would have been pursued to the ends of the earth. Instead, the evidence leads directly inside the government itself. Those responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza took over the government and controlled the investigation of the crime.

But because the modus-operandi MO – is that of a covert operation, by its very name and nature is meant to be hidden and concealed, so as to protect the real sponsors, in order to see it you must look at it through a special spectrum. This ‘crystal ball’ is similar to an onion, an analogy John Judge likes to use, as it has layers of deception that must be pealed off, revealing layers of truth, and can only be understood if you are educated in the history and trained in the crafts and techniques covert intelligence operations.

Allen Dulles' book The Craft of Intelligence was published in 1963, and was the book that he was promoting when he visited Dallas shortly before the assassination. In this book Dulles notes that the biographical method of study is a good way to learn and understand practically any subject. Pick a person and learn everything you can possibly know about them.

And he suggests that Sun Tsu’s book The Art of War was very special and worthy of attention.

As for biographies, Lee Harvey Oswald is one of the first characters you have to come to know in order to understand the assassination. The primary, but not first suspect, Oswald “is your man,” as LBJ told the Dallas authorities, and no conspiracy, so the official investigators pretty much handed the American public the head of Oswald on a platter.

While a typical homicide investigator on the street may not have the historical background or training in intelligence operations, and may not have the investigative resources federal governmental agencies have at their disposal, a common man’s instincts will tell you something and lead you to clues worth pursing. Every homicide investigator begins with a body, and a suspect who can usually be identified as one who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime. We have that with John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Their paths crossed at Dealey Plaza, an intersection out of the Twilight Zone, one that we keep going back to see if we went in the right direction when we left there.

Oswald had the means, the U.S. Marine Corps training, the experience and the tools - the ability to kill. He also had the opportunity since he worked in a building at the scene of the crime, which makes JFK one of the few assassination victims who, rather than being stalked by his assassin, is delivered to the window his killer.

The problem with Oswald is that he did not have a motive. He actually liked JFK. Not even the Warren Commission, even though they concluded Oswald was the assassin, could determine a motive for the murder.

But the more you learn about Oswald, rather than finding the psychotic, homicidal maniac, you realize he was merely a pawn in a much bigger game of power politics, a game that continues to this day.

Although Oswald may have been a loner, he was seldom alone and not deranged. He was definitely an operative agent, although exactly who he was an agent for has yet to be precisely determined, but can be.

At an early meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book and recommended the other Commissioners read it. Robert Donovan's book The Assassins purports to show how American assassins are all psychologically deranged loners, but commissioner John J. McCloy called Dulles on this notion, pointing out that Lincoln’s assassination was a conspiracy since co-conspirators were hung along with John Wilkes Booth.

But Dulles paraphrases Donovan, the author of the book, saying that Booth was such a dominating person in the plot that it almost wasn’t a conspiracy.

And Dulles wasn’t the first to suggest the accused assassin was crazy, as Donald Gibson points out in his book, Assassination Cover-up (Donald Gibson. P.99), which also gets into the Dulles-McCloy exchange over the Lincoln conspiracy, and is worth quoting. Gibson writes:

...As was noted earlier, James Reston had suggested, less than 24 hours after the assassination, that this act was committed by one person and that it reflected a “strain of madness” in the country. The New York Herald Tribute had editorialized on November 23 that the assassins in the United States are typically “crazed individuals” and are “real lunatics.” On November 25, the Wall Street Journal asserted that assassins are “idiots” and suffering with “hysteria.” Also, in Dallas, Mayor Earle Cabell was quoted in the November 23 Dallas Morning News describing the assassination as the work of a maniac, as an “irrational act” of a “deranged mind.” As documented earlier, this was not the view of the police officials or the district attorney.

(Allen) Dulles was the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had the experience in intelligence work and in international affairs. He was one of the most sophisticated men in the world. Later, we will discuss the relationship between Dulles and the other early sources of the lone-nut theory. This man probably was not just repeating what he had seen in the newspapers, unless what was appearing in the media immediately after the assassination and what he tried to impose on the Commission had a common source.

On December 5, (Earl) Warren briefly mentioned the mental illness issue. He then also brought this up and he began but did not get to finish a description of a book he had been reading which focused on “the psychiatric angle.”

On December 16, Dulles was far more aggressive in his promotion of this “angle.” Dulles was handing out copies of a book which analyzed seven previous attempts on the lives of U.S. Presidents. Dulles was giving this book to members of the Commission and to the Commission’s lawyers. As indicated by Dulles, the theme of the book was that such attempts were typically the acts of lone individuals, usually individuals with mental disorders. The book that Dulles was pushing was The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan. Although Dulles did not identify it, the Donovan book was published in the year mentioned by Dulles as the publication year and Donovan’s book contains a statement that is almost identical to something said by Dulles.

In response to a comment from McCloy that there was a plot in the Lincoln assassination, Dulles noted that that was true “but one man was so dominant it almost wasn’t a plot.” In his book, Donovan, who was in 1963 the New York Herald Tribune’s Washington bureau chief, argued that in the U.S., assassinations were the work of individuals and he went on to say:

This was true even in the Lincoln assassination, in which, though other conspirators were involved, Booth was the moving spirit and dominated his accomplices to such an extent that the plot was the product of one man’s will.”

The implication of this is that if conspiracies have leaders, they aren’t conspiracies! Donovan’s analysis contained another ingredient that was important in Dulles’s proffered conclusions about the assassination, i.e., that the assassins were usually crazy. Donovan’s conclusion:

By and large the true story behind the assassination and attempted assassinations of American Presidents is that the assassins not only were lone operators, but were, most of them, men suffering from mental disease, who pulled the trigger in the grip of delusion...

When Donovan later wrote the introduction of the Popular Library Edition of The Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy, he applied his generalization to the Kennedy assassination:

“For the murder of President Kennedy was so horrifying, so senseless, so heart-rending that the act was difficult to comprehend in terms of the average person’s experience. To anyone who happened to know the history of assassinations of American Presidents, Lee Harvey Oswald conformed remarkably to the pattern of obscure misfits, loners, fanatics, cranks and mentally deranged and deluded men who committed these historic crimes. Indeed he even bore a vague physical resemblance to them.”

“To millions everywhere, however, the crime in Dallas was too momentous in all its implications to be accepted as the pitifully simple thing it was, the solitary act of a deranged and deteriorating wanderer, taking his revenge on the world by destroying one of its finest living figures. Surely, it seemed to many – especially to many abroad – there MUST be a further explanation, a more complex cause, a plot, a conspiracy.”

Donovan uses about eight different terms to suggest that Oswald was a lone nut. The official line that developed during the hours immediately following the assassination had not changed, it was restated with even greater emphasis by Donovan.

Donovan was not your everyday journalist. Although he never graduated from college, he was the Washington correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and later the LA Times, and had written the best seller “PT 109,” that was made into a movie. Donovan’s Assassins was published in 1955 (Harper, NY), and after Dulles’ genuflection, he also wrote the introduction to A Concise Compendium of the Warren Commission Report (Popular Library, NY, 1964), which continued promoting the lone-nut thesis.

The attempt to attribute psychological motives to the accused assassin continues, and many millions of words have been written on the subject, with Donovan’s original seven case studies being expanded to over eighty subjects included in the Secret Service Exceptional Case Study.

One of the problems with all of these official academic psychological studies of assassins is they accept the false premise that Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy, when in fact it can be reasonably demonstrated that he was what he claimed to be – a Patsy. So these authorative studies are of one animal - the Patsy, when they wrongfully assumed they were studying another animal - the Assassin. Whether assassin or fall-guy, Oswald was a covert intelligence operative, and in fact he sets the mold for what I call the Covert Operative Profile that can be used in the analysis of political assassins, just as the academic studies profile psychotics.

Rather than use Donovan’s The Assassins as a primer on political assassinations for the Warren Commissioners, Dulles should have handed out copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which he recommends highly in The Craft of Intelligence for anyone who wants to try to understand the arcaine world of clandestine espionage and covert intelligence operations.

Just as psychotic assassins are described by armchair psychoanalysis as paranoid skidso maniacs, covert operators can also be defined more precisely by the type of secret agents they are.

In his book The Craft of Intelligence Dulles elaborates on this theme when he writes, “In a chapter of the Art of War called the ‘Employment of Secret Agents,’ Sun Tzu gives the basics of espionage as it was practiced in 400 B.C. by the Chinese – much as it is practiced today. He says there are five kinds of agents: native, inside, double, expendable and living. ‘Native’ and ‘inside’ agents are similar to what we shall later call ‘agents in place.’ ‘Double,’ a term still used today, is an enemy agent who has been captured, turned around and sent back where he came from as an agent of his captors. ‘Expendable agents’ are a Chinese subtlety which we later touch upon in considering deception techniques. They are agents through whom false information is leaked to the enemy. Sun Tzu says they are expendable because the enemy will probably kill them when he finds out their information was faulty. ‘Living’ agents to Sun Tzu are later-day ‘penetration agents.’ They reach the enemy, get information and manage to get back alive.”

There are many different English translations of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but Dulles notes, “For my remarks on Sun Tzu I am indebted to the recent excellent translation of the Art of War with commentaries by General Sam Griffith (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963).”

Dulles continues: “To Sun Tzu belongs the credit not only for this remarkable analysis of the ways of espionage but also for the first written recommendations regarding an organized intelligence service. He points out that the master of intelligence will employ all five kinds of agents simultaneously; he calls this the ‘Divine Skein.’ The analogy is to a fish nest consisting of many strands all joined to a single cord. And this by no means exhausts Sun Tzu’s contribution. He comments on counter-intelligence, on psychological warfare, on deception, on security, on fabricators, in short, on the whole craft of intelligence. It is no wonder that Sun Tzu’s book is a favorite of Mao Tse-tung and is required reading for Chinese Communist tacticians. In their conduct of military campaigns and of intelligence collection, they clearly put into practice the teachings of Sun Tzu.”

“Espionage of the sort recommended by Sun Tzu,” writes Dulles, “which did not depend upon spirits or gods, was, of course, practiced in the West in ancient times also, but not with the same degree of sophistication as in the East; nor was there in the West the same sense of craft or code of rules so that one generation could build on the experiences of another.”

Today, the same crafts and techniques are used, just as they were used centuries ago by Sun Tzu. There have been advances however, not only in the crafts and techniques of espionage, but also in the technique of criminal profiling, a new tool in which criminal behavior is categorized in a similar way.

The category Oswald belongs to, since he should not be among the psychotics studied by the academics, is the Covert Operative Personality, which also includes other rogues of similar persuasion – Feliz Rodriguez, Frank Forini Sturgis, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Richard Case Nagel, Michael Townley, Frank Terpel, El Nosair Sayyid, Ali Mohammad, et. al.

The Oswald profile fits those who are military trained, usually USMC, and from a military family, fluent in a foreign language, can travel extensively, maintains safe house and dead drops, is familiar with codes, ciphers and covert communication techniques, works on an operational need-to-know basis and does not talk about any clandestine affairs.

Of course Allen Dulles recognized these traits in Oswald, the primary suspect, but instead of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as Dulles recommends in the very beginning of The Craft of Intelligence, he promotes Donovan’s psychotic assassins.

In The Craft of Intelligence (p. 4) Dulles wrote: “But in the craft of intelligence the East was ahead of the West in 400 B.C. Rejecting the oracles and the seers, who may well have played an important role in still earlier epochs of Chinese history, Sun Tzu takes a more practical view.”

“What is called ‘foreknowledge’ cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations,” he wrote. “It must be obtained from men who know the situation.”

In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu wrote about The Employment of Secret Agents. “Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy wherever they move, and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.”

Sun Tzu: “Now there are five sorts of secret agents to be employed. These are native, inside, double, expendable and living. A native agent is one of the nationality of the enemy. An inside agent is one who lives and works in the enemy camp. A double agent is an enemy agent who works for both sides. An expendable agent is one that can be cut loose after achieving his goal. A living agent is one that can get into the enemy camp and return with information. When these five types of agents are all working simultaneously and none knows their method of operation, they are called ‘The Divine Skein,’ and are the treasure of the sovereign.”

Although satellite and communication intelligence have become more significant in today’s world of espionage, the nature of the clandestine network in action – the “Divine Skein” is still the most reliable means of learning the intentions of other people and governments and acting covertly against them.

In this regard, little has changed since the days of Sun Tzu. The same type of agents are classified and utilized today, as they were in the ancient Chinese dynasties as well as on November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza. Now their means and method is known as “covert intelligence operations,” and are “compartmentalized” on a “need to know” basis, so each member of the network team only knows his job and role, and may not even know who he is actually working for.

The gunmen who killed JFK were well trained and competent professional marksmen and killers, operating on a need-to-know basis as part of a covert intelligence operation. The shooters were the easy part, mere technicians. It is the covert operational managers at the top of the clandestine pyramid who are actually responsible for the crime, and the subject of this pursuit.

The accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was an agent trained in what Dulles called “the crafts of intelligence,” but he wasn’t a very good marksman, and undependable for that part of the operation. Rather than the assassin, as the evidence suggests, Oswald was what he claimed to be, an archetypical patsy, the fall guy set up and framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Oswald was, at various times in his short, 22 year old career, an inside agent, a living agent, possibly a double agent, and in the end, an expendable one.

It is not the pawns in the Great Game we are after, but rather, the Knights, Bishops and Rooks, the middle managers and who they work for - the intelligence officers who pull the chains of the puppets and pawns like Oswald, and Rodriguez, Sturgis and Townley.

Sun Tzu calls the men at the top “wise generals” and the “sovereign,” and the operations of the network “The Devine Skein,” giving it a sort of deity or godlike association, since only the patriarch at the top knows all that is going on during the game. To the little man on the street it appears to be divine intervention, or the work of God, when actually it is mere man-made magic.

Professor Paul Linebarger, who wrote the textbook on Psychological Warfare, trained three generations of American spies in the techniques of psychological clandestine operations – the “black arts,” including E. Howard Hunt, Ed Lansdale and David Atlee Phillips. Besides his own textbook on Propaganda, Linebarger had his students read “The American Confidence Man” by David W. Maurer.

A professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Maurer’s book started out as a study of the slang used by swindlers and crooks in the big time confidence games prevalent in the first half of the last century. Using a unique social science technique – Maurer introduced himself to the crooks, told them what he was doing and after obtaining their confidence, learned their lingo as well as how they pulled off such complicated operations as “The Big Store,” which was used as the basis of the popular movie, “The Sting.”

– Setting up a Big Store in a city where there are lots of transients – Marks, the store operators pay off the Dicks with the understanding only transients will be marked by Ropers for a Sting and no locals will be taken advantage of. The Roper meets a Mark casually, or what appears to be coincidental circumstances, though he’s actually been selected out of a crowd because of his profile – class, money, out of his home element, etc. and is brought to the Big Store where the Roper passes the Mark off to the Inside Man, who sets up the Sting. The Wire is the operation used in the movie “The Sting,” though there were other similar, totally theatrical productions like The Ring and The Stock, which also end with the money being given to the thieves without the Mark even knowing he was robbed.

“The big time confidence games are in reality, only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast – Except the Mark, knows his part perfectly.” - David Maurer, The American Confidence Man [Pocket Books, N.Y. 1949].

In the Big Store that is Dealey Plaza, JFK was the Mark, John Connally roped him and Lyndon Johnson played the Inside Man and greased the official Dicks. And it was the American people who were swindled of their democracy, without even knowing how they did it. Well now we know how they did it and can illustrate it quite clearly for anyone who wants to know.

As with The Sting, the behind the scene network of operators that makes up the Devine Skein is compromised of many different types of people, from street-wise con artists to suave, Ivy League corporate executives and bankers in business suits.

Now ordinary people can look into the glass onion and see The Big Picture, like a moving picture that leaves Dealey Plaza into the cool, dark tunnel and then emerges into the light of day on the trail of the assassins, the picture moves wherever the evidence leads, to places on the board and individuals who are players in the Great Game, whether they want to be or not.

The names of the real assassins of President Kennedy may never become as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald, but I am convinced that we will come to know them, even if they are now dead. We look into the Glass Onion, enter the ‘wilderness of mirrors,” not to name the guilty, but for the adventure of answering the questions, figuring out the riddles, to learn the how and the why, and to view today’s circumstances with the proper perspective.

If Oswald was just crazy, nothing else would make sense, but when you look at the Devine Skein through the Glass Onion of covert operations, it all makes sense, and you learn to understand what happened at Dealey Plaza.

As William Manchester wrote, “…If you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of the scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”

But the evidence is there, if you know what to look for and where to look for it. People ask all the time, “Who killed JFK?” Well, anyone can know the answer, but you just can’t say a name, you have to take the inquisitive journey and learn for yourself, not just who killed JFK, but how and why they did it.

While we don’t have all the pieces to the big picture and mural puzzle, especially the one with the “smoking gun,” and there probably are no still secret document that gives the names to the men who pulled the triggers, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence fits in very nicely with the covert history of current events.

The psychological makeup of that “wretched waif Oswald” is of little consequence, and all the academic studies of the Patsy are wrong because they are based on the false premise that he was the assassin.

On the other hand, an understanding of the Cold War history and the rules of the Devine Skein puts things in a proper perspective and balances out the scales of history, if not justice. The tools of the social scientist are limited. We can read and interview, and in the end we must judge for ourselves what is real and what is not. A homicide detective once told me that even if you know who murdered someone, you still need to develop the evidence to convict them in a court of law. But the counter-intelligence investigator, the journalist and historian do not have to meet those same standards to know the truth.

Most of the American people have always known, in fact most assumed or have come to believe there was a conspiracy at Dealey Plaza. Even if they couldn’t see through the Glass Onion clearly, they knew in their hearts that something was wrong, not only with the official version of events, but with our constitutional democracy.

It has only been since Watergate in 1972 that the general public became familiar with the covert operational terms such as “black bag operation” and “executive action.”

Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria calls it the “Transparent Conspiracy,” where it is prearranged for anyone who takes up the trail of the assassins to be led into a labyrinth of never ending false trails, dead ends and Machiavellian intrigues. “The material we already have demonstrates conclusively that only the only candidate behind the assassination is the American government,” says Salandria, “so to go into a microanalysis only gets oneself into a hopeless maze, and we fail to address the real issues. You can try to develop a model of explanation of what was going on, what happened and why, but to rehash this is useless.”

With an understanding of the crafts and history of covert intelligence operations, as well as the application of standard homicide investigative techniques, the network responsible for the assassination can be identified, and the Divine Skein provides a model of the labyrinth. The Divine Skein is a map of the maze from those who have been there to those who are just taking up the trail and want to take it even further. To understand the truth of what happened at Dealey Plaza you can’t get caught up in all of the ballistics, trajectories, acoustics, autopsies and caskets. Forget the “single-bullet-theory,” suspend judgment on any theories you may have developed. Take up the trail cold and follow it wherever it leads.

At the last meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles tried to have all of the testimony, reports and exhibits classified, but was over ruled by the other commissioners. “Go ahead and publish the stuff,” Dulles said, “people won’t read it anyway.”

John Judge said, “What they are telling us is that ‘We killed the son-of-a-bitch, and you can’t do anything about it’.”

Well, Dulles was wrong, and many thousands of people have read it, and I believe we can do something about it.

My personal approach is to adapt the style David Maurer developed when he researched and wrote about the “Big Con,” and get to know the lingo and the lexicon of the clandestine warriors, learn their history, get to know their biographies, and where they live, and then slip up next to them and ask them why they did it.

LINKS:

Craft of Intelligence

http://books.google.com/books?id=mH3qdHK6_...lt&resnum=2 - v=onepage&q=&f=false

The Art of War By Sun Tzu – Translated by Samuel B. Griffith

http://books.google.com/books?id=5QKhUYU-r...lt&resnum=5 - v=onepage&q=&f=false

Samuel Griffith Society Annual Conference – Adelaide

http://www.samuelgriffith.org.au/pages/Con...eneralinfo.html

http://www.tecom.usmc.mil/HD/Whos_Who/Griffith_SB.htm

Retired Brigadier General Samuel B. Griffith II, a noted author, lecturer, and Sinologue, died unexpectedly 27 March 1983 in Newport, Rhode Island.

General Griffith was born 31 May 1906, in Lewiston, Pennsylvania. Upon graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1929, he accepted a commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps. Prior to World War II, he took part in the Second Nicaraguan Campaign, and served in China, Cuba, and England.

During his first tour of duty in China, he was a language officer at the American Embassy in Peiping. During World War II, following a period observing British commando training in England and Scotland, he returned to the 1st Marine Division and served as executive officer and later commander of the 1st Raider Battalion on Guadalcanal, and executive officer of the 1st Raider Regiment in operations on New Georgia. He earned the Navy Cross on Guadalcanal in September 1942 for “extreme heroism and courageous devotion to duty” during the fighting near the Matanikau River. During this action, General Griffith suffered wounds for which he was awarded the Purple Heart. For his exploits in July in New Georgia, he was awarded the Army Distinguished Service Cross.

After participating in the post-World War II occupation of North China, where he commanded the 3d Marines and later the U.S. Marine Forces in Tsingtao, he was a student and then a faculty member at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport from 1947 to 1950. From 1951 to 1952, he was Chief of Staff, Fleet Marine Force, Atlantic, and from 1953 to 1956, General Griffith was on the staff of the U.S. Commander in Chief, Europe. He retired from the Marine Corps in 1956, after completing more than 25 years of active service.

Following his retirement, General Griffith entered Oxford University (New College) and was awarded his D.Phil. in Chinese Military History in 1961. With an interest in China and the Chinese language dating back to pre-World War II days, he translated Sun Tzu’s The Art of War in 1963 and Mao Tse-tung’s On Guerrilla War in 1978. He also wrote the definitive The Battle for Guadalcanal, The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and his last major work was In Defense of the Public Liberty, a book concerned with the Revolutionary War. He was a Research Fellow, China Study, at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Institute for Defense Studies in London. General Griffith published widely in such journals as New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Town and Country, Marine Corps Gazette, and Foreign Affairs. He has also lectured widely at such establishments as the Armed Forces Staff College, United States Military Academy, Foreign Policy Association, Marine Corps Schools, among other places. General Griffith was a life member of the 1st Marine Raider Association and the 1st Marine Division Association.

Henry Berry's Semper Fi,

Sam Griffith training with British Commandos at time of Pearl Harbor

http://books.google.com/books?id=3KW35jiuI...t&resnum=2#

xxxx

Robert J. Donovan

Robert J. Donovan (August 21, 1912-August 8, 2003) was a Washington correspondent, author and presidential historian.[1] His titles include The Assassins (1955), Eisenhower: The Inside Story (1956), PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II (1961), The Future of the Republican Party (1964), Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-48 (1977), Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949-53 (1982), Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia (1984), The Second Victory: The Marshall Plan and the Postwar Revival of Europe (1987), Confidential Secretary: Ann Whitman's Twenty Years with Eisenhower and Rockefeller (1988), Unsilent Revolution: Television News and American Public Life, 1948-1991 (199

Robert J. Donovan - NY Times Obit

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/10/us/rober...-of-pt-109.html

By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Published: Sunday, August 10, 2003

Robert J. Donovan, a ''shoe leather'' newspaper reporter without a college education who became a Washington correspondent, best-selling author and presidential historian, died on Friday at Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, Fla. A longtime resident of Washington, he moved to Florida in 2001. He was 90.

Best known for ''PT-109'' (McGraw-Hill, 1961), his stirring account of John F. Kennedy's war experiences, Mr. Donovan traveled 30,000 miles while doing research for the book and brought back a piece of coral from the South Pacific, which Kennedy kept on his desk after he became president. Mr. Donovan interviewed all 10 natives of the Solomon Islands involved in rescuing Kennedy and his crew after a Japanese destroyer sank their patrol torpedo boat in 1943. A 1963 movie based on the book starred Cliff Robertson as Kennedy.

Mr. Donovan wrote 14 books, many about Washington politics, and was instrumental in the revival of Harry S. Truman's flagging reputation with a two-volume biography, ''Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-48'' (Norton, 1977) and ''Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949-53'' (Norton, 1982).

Born in Buffalo in 1912, Mr. Donovan began his career in journalism at The Courier-Express there, earning $6 a week as a copy boy. He could not afford college in the Depression years, a career-killing drawback, it would seem, for the big-time newspaper Mr. Donovan had his heart set on, The New York Herald Tribune. But Mr. Donovan got to know an editor who was tired of hiring Yale University graduates. ''When I told him I hadn't been to college, a light came into his eyes,'' Mr. Donovan once told an interviewer.

A 26-year career with The Herald Tribune followed. He became its Washington bureau chief in 1957. The consummate insider, he could nonetheless needle Washington officials.

His journalism career was interrupted by World War II, when against the strenuous advice of a colleague at The Courier-Express, Mr. Donovan submitted to being drafted by the Army, though he had a young wife, Martha Fisher, and a small daughter, Patricia. Mr. Donovan survived the Battle of the Bulge, he noted in a laconic retelling, but the colleague did not survive the war. He died in 1945 when a B-25 bomber hit the Empire State Building.

The Chandler family, intent on strengthening the journalism reputation of The Los Angeles Times, which it controlled, wooed Mr. Donovan from The Herald Tribune and made him the newspaper's Washington bureau chief in 1963. He narrowly missed becoming the top editor of the paper in 1970. According to ''The Life and Times of Los Angeles,'' (Atheneum, 1984) by Marshall Berges, Mr. Donovan was puzzled by the newspaper's culture, where editorial meetings were conducted in ''elliptical code.'' Otis Chandler, the publisher, got wind of Mr. Donovan's candid self-assessment to colleagues: ''I shouldn't be editor of this paper; I don't know what they're talking about.''

Mr. Donovan is survived by his second wife, Gerry Van Der Heuvel, whom he married in 1978, and his stepchildren, Claudia, of Amherst, Mass., and Heidi, of Ottawa, Kan. His first wife, Martha Fisher, died in 1974. Their children, who also survive, are Patricia, Amy, and Peter Donovan, all of Washington.

Edited August 17, 2009 by William Kelly

[Jack White]

Bill...this is magnificent. It ought to be published. It is the best thing you have written.

I especially liked your analogy to THE STING.

Thanks.

Jack

[William Kelly]

Bill...this is magnificent. It ought to be published. It is the best thing you have written.

I especially liked your analogy to THE STING.

Thanks.

Jack

Hey Jack,

Thanks for reading it. I'm glad somebody is following this stuff.

I only made a few original copies and recently found one. I was a little shy

about posting it on line, and I'm glad your interested and maybe will dig up some more.

Here's a link to where I elaborate on the Big Con at Dealey Plaza.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2008/01...aley-plaza.html

And I think there's a thread on the forum on that topic.

BK

[Gene Kelly]

Bill:

I second jack's comments. interesting and well written. This addresses the 'process' and strategy... as opposed to facts, how many shooters, who did it, and speculation of motive. It resonates with the work Tom Scully has done on the magicians, and gets to the heart of the intelligence operatives pulling the strings in Dealey Plaza. I've always thought that it's the pattern of facts (i.e. rabbit trails, disinformation, false flags, deception) that points to the culprits. Your work is thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Gene

[Dixie Dea]

Good work Bill. Thanks for posting it. It gives me even more to think about!

Dixie

[David Andrews]

Bill's work ought to be applied to study not only of the Mexico City "Oswald(s)," but to the activities of Richard Case Nagell (under Desmond Fitzgerald, others) and to Nagell's relations with, and perceptions of, the "Oswald" that he knew and supposedly refused to kill.

Would Dick Russell have anything to add along these lines?

[Greg Parker]

This is the introduction to the unpublished manuscript I wrote with the grant from the Fund for Constitutional Government Investigative Journalism Project (circa 1994), with the addition of Gibson and El Nosair Sayyid, and a few other items. I will continue to expand on this theme, and would appreciate any critiques or feedback. - BK

THE DEVINE SKEIN AT DEALEY PLAZA

PSYOP OR PSYCHO - FREUD verses SUN TZU

By William Kelly

The assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a Watershed event in modern American history, the ramifications of which have yet to be fully realized. The details of the crime, the acoustics, ballistics, autopsy and medical evidence are covered elsewhere. This report and the ones that follow concern the covert intelligence operations that resulted in the murder of the president and the black propaganda operations that continue to this day, manipulating the news and judicial system to shield those responsible.

The time and the place – 12:30 p.m., Friday, November 22, 1963, Houston and Elm streets, Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas, are notched in our national subconscious, and the picture of that square acre of time and place are etched in our collective memories.

If Dealey Plaza were pictured as a giant mosaic wall mural, broken into pieces like a puzzle, we would have a pretty good idea of what occurred there. Only a few pieces are still missing – the faces in the shadows, the names of the mangers pulling the strings of the puppets and pawns, details unnecessary to understand the nature of the plot.

Although there are many theories as to what happened in Dealey Plaza on that day, the events as they actually occurred only happened one way, and it is the responsibility of the independent researchers, journalists, professors and historians to determine that truth as close as possible.

Some people might consider the crime ancient history, even though it is such a current event that indictments can still be brought down for those responsible for crimes, if not homicide and conspiracy, then obstruction of justice, destruction of evidence and perjury. Besides the issues concerning the accuracy of our historical perspective, truth and the pursuit of justice, it is important to know for oneself whether the death of the president was an unplanned, spontaneous act of a lone madman or a very well planned and executed coup d’etat.

John F. Kennedy was either killed by a deranged lone-nut, as the official Warren Commission concluded, or he was the victim of a covert action team of clandestine agents, as much of the evidence suggests. The truth is either one way or the other, but cannot be both.

If the assassination of JFK was the work of a lone-nut madman, the lessons to be learned from the tragedy are far less significant than if Kennedy was killed as part of a coup, as the ramifications stem into the realms of truth, justice, responsibility and national security.

Not for the sake of argument, but for the sake of analysis, a competent homicide investigation would proceed first by assuming that JFK was killed as an act of elimination. An understanding of current events

Right on, Bill.

Those events are identified by many as:

Vietnam

Civil Rights

Détente with the Soviet Union

The “Cuban situation”

What few have done is apply the same technique to understand Oswald’s life. What, for example, was happening on political and societal levels both overtly and covertly at the time of Oswald’s “defection”? Which of those actions/policies/events if any, do Oswald’s actions fit in with?

and the details of the crime also suggest that what happened at Dealey Plaza was not only the product of a conspiracy, but by a much more clearly defined MO – Modus Operandi – that of a covert intelligence operation.

Although anyone with the training and knowledge can conduct such operations, the murder of the president, because of the extensive cover-up that occurred after the fact, must have had its origin in the very heart of the U.S. government. If it was an independent operation, a renegade group or the work of foreigners, those responsible would have been pursued to the ends of the earth. Instead, the evidence leads directly inside the government itself. Those responsible for what happened at Dealey Plaza took over the government and controlled the investigation of the crime.

Took over “lock, stock and barrel” – the predictive words used during the Oxnard phone call. Foreknowledge. And not through the black magic she was quite obviously employing. As suggested by Sun Tzu, she knew the right people. That should not surprise. Sections of the right wing and various alpha agencies had more than a passing interest in the occult and New Age/self help industries. Then there was someone like Jack Parsons who founded Aerojet and the Jet Propulsion Lab who set up an OTO lodge in California on behalf of Aliester Crowley.

But who took over? LBJ? Not really. The first batch of Neocons who infested his White House. The Neocons were quite happy to allow Civil Rights legislation. It was good for business. It was foreign policy they were into. Aggressive, nationalistic, pre-emptive.

If you look closely, you can see them paving the way… grooming and recasting various groups in their own image. Liberal on social issues (when it is “good for business” – as shown by the Dallas Citizens Council and its smooth transition from segregation) – conservative fiscally and in foreign policy.

Look at the comments made during at the meeting of the ACLU… “The John Birch Society should not be seen as anti-Semite”. Recasting the public image. Preparing to take over “lock, stock & barrel”.

Look at the words of Bernard Weissman:

“…as far as our domestic policy goes, I am a pretty liberal guy…”

Representative BOGGS. Or any of your associates. I asked you if in your study of events in Germany, having been stationed there, that you didn't soon associate, or that you didn't see some association in your mind of the alleged so-called extreme right with naziism.

Mr. WEISSMAN. No. In fact, I never thought--I thought of the extremists as superpatriots. I had never really defined the term fascist or Nazi in my own mind----

Representative BOGGS. Of course, you realize that members of your religion in Germany were described as traitors, treasonable, and Communists. And I presume that on the other side of the coin those making the accusation classified themselves as superpatriots.

Mr. WEISSMAN. This is quite true. But you are getting into a field right now that at the time----

Mr. WEISSMAN. I didn't refer to it directly. In other words, in the letter I received from Larrie, he said--he mentioned that the NIC, the leadership, Frank McGee, was anti-Jewish, and it might be best if I changed my name in order to bring myself down to where I can associate with these people

Note: McGhee was also an organiser for the JBS.

But when it came to the Black Border ad, they got Weissman to put his name on it to show that Jews could be “Superpatriots” just like them. The Reich Wing – Just a big all-embracing melting pot of love really.

But this “embrace” of Jewry really starts smack bang in the middle of planning for the Dallas presidential trip.

But because the modus-operandi MO – is that of a covert operation, by its very name and nature is meant to be hidden and concealed, so as to protect the real sponsors, in order to see it you must look at it through a special spectrum. This ‘crystal ball’ is similar to an onion, an analogy John Judge likes to use, as it has layers of deception that must be pealed off, revealing layers of truth, and can only be understood if you are educated in the history and trained in the crafts and techniques covert intelligence operations.

Allen Dulles' book The Craft of Intelligence was published in 1963, and was the book that he was promoting when he visited Dallas shortly before the assassination. In this book Dulles notes that the biographical method of study is a good way to learn and understand practically any subject. Pick a person and learn everything you can possibly know about them.

And he suggests that Sun Tsu’s book The Art of War was very special and worthy of attention.

As for biographies, Lee Harvey Oswald is one of the first characters you have to come to know in order to understand the assassination. The primary, but not first suspect, Oswald “is your man,” as LBJ told the Dallas authorities, and no conspiracy, so the official investigators pretty much handed the American public the head of Oswald on a platter.

While a typical homicide investigator on the street may not have the historical background or training in intelligence operations, and may not have the investigative resources federal governmental agencies have at their disposal, a common man’s instincts will tell you something and lead you to clues worth pursing. Every homicide investigator begins with a body, and a suspect who can usually be identified as one who had the means, motive and opportunity to commit the crime. We have that with John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald.

Their paths crossed at Dealey Plaza, an intersection out of the Twilight Zone, one that we keep going back to see if we went in the right direction when we left there.

Oswald had the means, the U.S. Marine Corps training, the experience and the tools - the ability to kill.

Not to be too picky – because I agree whole-heartedly that this is an outstanding work – but you later say he “wasn’t a very good marksman, and undependable for that part of the operation.”

He also had the opportunity since he worked in a building at the scene of the crime, which makes JFK one of the few assassination victims who, rather than being stalked by his assassin, is delivered to the window his killer.

Your analogy is that Dealley Plaza is the “Big Store”. I’d take a slightly different view. It was just the address of the Big Store. The Big Store was really the TSBD – and it had only been relocated to that address a few months prior. William Weston’s work on this is essential reading.

The problem with Oswald is that he did not have a motive. He actually liked JFK. Not even the Warren Commission, even though they concluded Oswald was the assassin, could determine a motive for the murder.

But even that works in their favor. A motiveless crime, or a crime where the motive is so psychologically warped and deep-rooted, it is impossible to identify. You can’t get more lone-nuttish than that.

But the more you learn about Oswald, rather than finding the psychotic, homicidal maniac, you realize he was merely a pawn in a much bigger game of power politics, a game that continues to this day.

Although Oswald may have been a loner, he was seldom alone and not deranged. He was definitely an operative agent, although exactly who he was an agent for has yet to be precisely determined, but can be.

At an early meeting of the Warren Commission Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book and recommended the other Commissioners read it. Robert Donovan's book The Assassins purports to show how American assassins are all psychologically deranged loners, but commissioner John J. McCloy called Dulles on this notion, pointing out that Lincoln’s assassination was a conspiracy since co-conspirators were hung along with John Wilkes Booth.

But Dulles paraphrases Donovan, the author of the book, saying that Booth was such a dominating person in the plot that it almost wasn’t a conspiracy.

And Dulles wasn’t the first to suggest the accused assassin was crazy, as Donald Gibson points out in his book, Assassination Cover-up (Donald Gibson. P.99), which also gets into the Dulles-McCloy exchange over the Lincoln conspiracy, and is worth quoting. Gibson writes:

...As was noted earlier, James Reston had suggested, less than 24 hours after the assassination, that this act was committed by one person and that it reflected a “strain of madness” in the country. The New York Herald Tribute had editorialized on November 23 that the assassins in the United States are typically “crazed individuals” and are “real lunatics.” On November 25, the Wall Street Journal asserted that assassins are “idiots” and suffering with “hysteria.” Also, in Dallas, Mayor Earle Cabell was quoted in the November 23 Dallas Morning News describing the assassination as the work of a maniac, as an “irrational act” of a “deranged mind.” As documented earlier, this was not the view of the police officials or the district attorney.

(Allen) Dulles was the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. He had the experience in intelligence work and in international affairs. He was one of the most sophisticated men in the world. Later, we will discuss the relationship between Dulles and the other early sources of the lone-nut theory. This man probably was not just repeating what he had seen in the newspapers, unless what was appearing in the media immediately after the assassination and what he tried to impose on the Commission had a common source.

On December 5, (Earl) Warren briefly mentioned the mental illness issue. He then also brought this up and he began but did not get to finish a description of a book he had been reading which focused on “the psychiatric angle.”

On December 16, Dulles was far more aggressive in his promotion of this “angle.” Dulles was handing out copies of a book which analyzed seven previous attempts on the lives of U.S. Presidents. Dulles was giving this book to members of the Commission and to the Commission’s lawyers. As indicated by Dulles, the theme of the book was that such attempts were typically the acts of lone individuals, usually individuals with mental disorders. The book that Dulles was pushing was The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan. Although Dulles did not identify it, the Donovan book was published in the year mentioned by Dulles as the publication year and Donovan’s book contains a statement that is almost identical to something said by Dulles.

In response to a comment from McCloy that there was a plot in the Lincoln assassination, Dulles noted that that was true “but one man was so dominant it almost wasn’t a plot.” In his book, Donovan, who was in 1963 the New York Herald Tribune’s Washington bureau chief, argued that in the U.S., assassinations were the work of individuals and he went on to say:

This was true even in the Lincoln assassination, in which, though other conspirators were involved, Booth was the moving spirit and dominated his accomplices to such an extent that the plot was the product of one man’s will.”

The implication of this is that if conspiracies have leaders, they aren’t conspiracies! Donovan’s analysis contained another ingredient that was important in Dulles’s proffered conclusions about the assassination, i.e., that the assassins were usually crazy. Donovan’s conclusion:

By and large the true story behind the assassination and attempted assassinations of American Presidents is that the assassins not only were lone operators, but were, most of them, men suffering from mental disease, who pulled the trigger in the grip of delusion...

When Donovan later wrote the introduction of the Popular Library Edition of The Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President Kennedy, he applied his generalization to the Kennedy assassination:

“For the murder of President Kennedy was so horrifying, so senseless, so heart-rending that the act was difficult to comprehend in terms of the average person’s experience. To anyone who happened to know the history of assassinations of American Presidents, Lee Harvey Oswald conformed remarkably to the pattern of obscure misfits, loners, fanatics, cranks and mentally deranged and deluded men who committed these historic crimes. Indeed he even bore a vague physical resemblance to them.”

“To millions everywhere, however, the crime in Dallas was too momentous in all its implications to be accepted as the pitifully simple thing it was, the solitary act of a deranged and deteriorating wanderer, taking his revenge on the world by destroying one of its finest living figures. Surely, it seemed to many – especially to many abroad – there MUST be a further explanation, a more complex cause, a plot, a conspiracy.”

Donovan uses about eight different terms to suggest that Oswald was a lone nut. The official line that developed during the hours immediately following the assassination had not changed, it was restated with even greater emphasis by Donovan.

I thought I had a copy of newspaper of the day quoting Ike as pushing the Oswald as lone psycho line, but cant locate it, and now I'm doubting my memory of it. Can anyone help here? What was Ike's reaction to the assassination? Pushing the lone nut line so quickly seems odd (if he did) in light of his warnings about the MIC...

Donovan was not your everyday journalist. Although he never graduated from college, he was the Washington correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and later the LA Times, and had written the best seller “PT 109,” that was made into a movie. Donovan’s Assassins was published in 1955 (Harper, NY), and after Dulles’ genuflection, he also wrote the introduction to A Concise Compendium of the Warren Commission Report (Popular Library, NY, 1964), which continued promoting the lone-nut thesis.

The attempt to attribute psychological motives to the accused assassin continues, and many millions of words have been written on the subject, with Donovan’s original seven case studies being expanded to over eighty subjects included in the Secret Service Exceptional Case Study.

One of the problems with all of these official academic psychological studies of assassins is they accept the false premise that Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy, when in fact it can be reasonably demonstrated that he was what he claimed to be – a Patsy. So these authorative studies are of one animal - the Patsy, when they wrongfully assumed they were studying another animal - the Assassin. Whether assassin or fall-guy, Oswald was a covert intelligence operative, and in fact he sets the mold for what I call the Covert Operative Profile that can be used in the analysis of political assassins, just as the academic studies profile psychotics.

Rather than use Donovan’s The Assassins as a primer on political assassinations for the Warren Commissioners, Dulles should have handed out copies of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which he recommends highly in The Craft of Intelligence for anyone who wants to try to understand the arcaine world of clandestine espionage and covert intelligence operations.

Just as psychotic assassins are described by armchair psychoanalysis as paranoid skidso maniacs, covert operators can also be defined more precisely by the type of secret agents they are.

In his book The Craft of Intelligence Dulles elaborates on this theme when he writes, “In a chapter of the Art of War called the ‘Employment of Secret Agents,’ Sun Tzu gives the basics of espionage as it was practiced in 400 B.C. by the Chinese – much as it is practiced today. He says there are five kinds of agents: native, inside, double, expendable and living. ‘Native’ and ‘inside’ agents are similar to what we shall later call ‘agents in place.’ ‘Double,’ a term still used today, is an enemy agent who has been captured, turned around and sent back where he came from as an agent of his captors. ‘Expendable agents’ are a Chinese subtlety which we later touch upon in considering deception techniques. They are agents through whom false information is leaked to the enemy. Sun Tzu says they are expendable because the enemy will probably kill them when he finds out their information was faulty. ‘Living’ agents to Sun Tzu are later-day ‘penetration agents.’ They reach the enemy, get information and manage to get back alive.”

There are many different English translations of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but Dulles notes, “For my remarks on Sun Tzu I am indebted to the recent excellent translation of the Art of War with commentaries by General Sam Griffith (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963).”

Dulles continues: “To Sun Tzu belongs the credit not only for this remarkable analysis of the ways of espionage but also for the first written recommendations regarding an organized intelligence service. He points out that the master of intelligence will employ all five kinds of agents simultaneously; he calls this the ‘Devine Skein.’ The analogy is to a fish nest consisting of many strands all joined to a single cord. And this by no means exhausts Sun Tzu’s contribution. He comments on counter-intelligence, on psychological warfare, on deception, on security, on fabricators, in short, on the whole craft of intelligence. It is no wonder that Sun Tzu’s book is a favorite of Mao Tse-tung and is required reading for Chinese Communist tacticians. In their conduct of military campaigns and of intelligence collection, they clearly put into practice the teachings of Sun Tzu.”

“Espionage of the sort recommended by Sun Tzu,” writes Dulles, “which did not depend upon spirits or gods, was, of course, practiced in the West in ancient times also, but not with the same degree of sophistication as in the East; nor was there in the West the same sense of craft or code of rules so that one generation could build on the experiences of another.”

Today, the same crafts and techniques are used, just as they were used centuries ago by Sun Tzu. There have been advances however, not only in the crafts and techniques of espionage, but also in the technique of criminal profiling, a new tool in which criminal behavior is categorized in a similar way.

The category Oswald belongs to, since he should not be among the psychotics studied by the academics, is the Covert Operative Personality, which also includes other rogues of similar persuasion – Feliz Rodriguez, Frank Forini Sturgis, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Michael Townley, Frank Terpel, El Nosair Sayyid, Ali Mohammad, et. al.

The Oswald profile fits those who are military trained, usually USMC, and from a military family, fluent in a foreign language, can travel extensively, maintains safe house and dead drops, is familiar with codes, ciphers and covert communication techniques, works on an operational need-to-know basis and does not talk about any clandestine affairs.

Is this Covert Operative profile one you have developed?

Of course Allen Dulles recognized these traits in Oswald, the primary suspect, but instead of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, as Dulles recommends in the very beginning of The Craft of Intelligence, he promotes Donovan’s psychotic assassins.

In The Craft of Intelligence (p. 4) Dulles wrote: “But in the craft of intelligence the East was ahead of the West in 400 B.C. Rejecting the oracles and the seers, who may well have played an important role in still earlier epochs of Chinese history, Sun Tzu takes a more practical view.”

“What is called ‘foreknowledge’ cannot be elicited from spirits, nor from gods, nor by analogy with past events, nor from calculations,” he wrote. “It must be obtained from men who know the situation.”

In “The Art of War,” Sun Tzu wrote about The Employment of Secret Agents. “Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy wherever they move, and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.”

Sun Tzu: “Now there are five sorts of secret agents to be employed. These are native, inside, double, expendable and living. A native agent is one of the nationality of the enemy. An inside agent is one who lives and works in the enemy camp. A double agent is an enemy agent who works for both sides. An expendable agent is one that can be cut loose after achieving his goal. A living agent is one that can get into the enemy camp and return with information. When these five types of agents are all working simultaneously and none knows their method of operation, they are called ‘The Divine Skein,’ and are the treasure of the sovereign.”

Although satellite and communication intelligence have become more significant in today’s world of espionage, the nature of the clandestine network in action – the “Divine Skein” is still the most reliable means of learning the intentions of other people and governments and acting covertly against them.

In this regard, little has changed since the days of Sun Tzu. The same type of agents are classified and utilized today, as they were in the ancient Chinese dynasties as well as on November 22, 1963 at Dealey Plaza. Now their means and method is known as “covert intelligence operations,” and are “compartmentalized” on a “need to know” basis, so each member of the network team only knows his job and role, and may not even know who he is actually working for.

The gunmen who killed JFK were well trained and competent professional marksmen and killers, operating on a need-to-know basis as part of a covert intelligence operation. The shooters were the easy part, mere technicians. It is the covert operational managers at the top of the clandestine pyramid who are actually responsible for the crime, and the subject of this pursuit.

The accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was an agent trained in what Dulles called “the crafts of intelligence,” but he wasn’t a very good marksman, and undependable for that part of the operation. Rather than the assassin, as the evidence suggests, Oswald was what he claimed to be, an archetypical patsy, the fall guy set up and framed for a crime he didn’t commit. Oswald was, at various times in his short, 22 year old career, an inside agent, a living agent, possibly a double agent, and in the end, an expendable one.

It is not the pawns in the Great Game we are after, but rather, the Knights, Bishops and Rooks, the middle managers and who they work for - the intelligence officers who pull the chains of the puppets and pawns like Oswald, and Rodriguez, Sturgis and Townley.

Sun Tzu calls the men at the top “wise generals” and the “sovereign,” and the operations of the network “The Devine Skein,” giving it a sort of deity or godlike association, since only the patriarch at the top knows all that is going on during the game. To the little man on the street it appears to be divine intervention, or the work of God, when actually it is mere man-made magic.

Professor Paul Linebarger, who wrote the textbook on Psychological Warfare, trained three generations of American spies in the techniques of psychological clandestine operations – the “black arts,” including E. Howard Hunt, Ed Lansdale and David Atlee Phillips. Besides his own textbook on Propaganda, Linebarger had his students read “The American Confidence Man” by David W. Maurer.

A professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Maurer’s book started out as a study of the slang used by swindlers and crooks in the big time confidence games prevalent in the first half of the last century. Using a unique social science technique – Maurer introduced himself to the crooks, told them what he was doing and after obtaining their confidence, learned their lingo as well as how they pulled off such complicated operations as “The Big Store,” which was used as the basis of the popular movie, “The Sting.”

– Setting up a Big Store in a city where there are lots of transients – Marks, the store operators pay off the Dicks with the understanding only transients will be marked by Ropers for a Sting and no locals will be taken advantage of. The Roper meets a Mark casually, or what appears to be coincidental circumstances, though he’s actually been selected out of a crowd because of his profile – class, money, out of his home element, etc. and is brought to the Big Store where the Roper passes the Mark off to the Inside Man, who sets up the Sting. The Wire is the operation used in the movie “The Sting,” though there were other similar, totally theatrical productions like The Ring and The Stock, which also end with the money being given to the thieves without the Mark even knowing he was robbed.

“The big time confidence games are in reality, only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast – Except the Mark, knows his part perfectly.” - David Maurer, The American Confidence Man [Pocket Books, N.Y. 1949].

In the Big Store that is Dealey Plaza, JFK was the Mark, John Connally roped him and Lyndon Johnson played the Inside Man and greased the official Dicks. And it was the American people who were swindled of their democracy, without even knowing how they did it. Well now we know how they did it and can illustrate it quite clearly for anyone who wants to know.

As with The Sting, the behind the scene network of operators that makes up the Devine Skein is compromised of many different types of people, from street-wise con artists to suave, Ivy League corporate executives and bankers in business suits.

Now ordinary people can look into the glass onion and see The Big Picture, like a moving picture that leaves Dealey Plaza into the cool, dark tunnel and then emerges into the light of day on the trail of the assassins, the picture moves wherever the evidence leads, to places on the board and individuals who are players in the Great Game, whether they want to be or not.

The names of the real assassins of President Kennedy may never become as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald, but I am convinced that we will come to know them, even if they are now dead. We look into the Glass Onion, enter the ‘wilderness of mirrors,” not to name the guilty, but for the adventure of answering the questions, figuring out the riddles, to learn the how and the why, and to view today’s circumstances with the proper perspective.

If Oswald was just crazy, nothing else would make sense, but when you look at the Devine Skein through the Glass Onion of covert operations, it all makes sense, and you learn to understand what happened at Dealey Plaza.

As William Manchester wrote, “…If you put the murdered President of the United States on one side of the scale and that wretched waif Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the President’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”

But the evidence is there, if you know what to look for and where to look for it. People ask all the time, “Who killed JFK?” Well, anyone can know the answer, but you just can’t say a name, you have to take the inquisitive journey and learn for yourself, not just who killed JFK, but how and why they did it.

While we don’t have all the pieces to the big picture and mural puzzle, especially the one with the “smoking gun,” and there probably are no still secret document that gives the names to the men who pulled the triggers, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence fits in very nicely with the covert history of current events.

The psychological makeup of that “wretched waif Oswald” is of little consequence, and all the academic studies of the Patsy are wrong because they are based on the false premise that he was the assassin.

On the other hand, an understanding of the Cold War history and the rules of the Devine Skein puts things in a proper perspective and balances out the scales of history, if not justice. The tools of the social scientist are limited. We can read and interview, and in the end we must judge for ourselves what is real and what is not. A homicide detective once told me that even if you know who murdered someone, you still need to develop the evidence to convict them in a court of law. But the counter-intelligence investigator, the journalist and historian do not have to meet those same standards to know the truth.

Most of the American people have always known, in fact most assumed or have come to believe there was a conspiracy at Dealey Plaza. Even if they couldn’t see through the Glass Onion clearly, they knew in their hearts that something was wrong, not only with the official version of events, but with our constitutional democracy.

It has only been since Watergate in 1972 that the general public became familiar with the covert operational terms such as “black bag operation” and “executive action.”

Philadelphia attorney Vincent Salandria calls it the “Transparent Conspiracy,” where it is prearranged for anyone who takes up the trail of the assassins to be led into a labyrinth of never ending false trails, dead ends and Machiavellian intrigues. “The material we already have demonstrates conclusively that only the only candidate behind the assassination is the American government,” says Salandria, “so to go into a microanalysis only gets oneself into a hopeless maze, and we fail to address the real issues. You can try to develop a model of explanation of what was going on, what happened and why, but to rehash this is useless.”

With an understanding of the crafts and history of covert intelligence operations, as well as the application of standard homicide investigative techniques, the network responsible for the assassination can be identified, and the Divine Skein provides a model of the labyrinth. The Devine Skein is a map of the maze from those who have been there to those who are just taking up the trail and want to take it even further. To understand the truth of what happened at Dealey Plaza

you can’t get caught up in all of the ballistics, trajectories, acoustics, autopsies and caskets. Forget the “single-bullet-theory,” suspend judgment on any theories you may have developed. Take up the trail cold and follow it wherever it leads.

Good. It needed to be said!

Greg, Great comments on a great piece by Bill......I am always amazed how many light-years in advance 'we' are then the LNs...who are back on 11/23/63 stuck in time like insects in amber....Oswald did it...case closed.....think no more...the Empire is fine and the Emperor in fine clothing [despite looking naked!].

Edited August 16, 2009 by Peter Lemkin

[Ron Ecker]

Bill,

Well done, but "Devine" should be changed to "Divine" in the title and the several places it occurs in the body of the work. (I don't usually point out typos or misspellings, as seeming rather petty, but in the title of a work, it sort of sticks out. I was waiting to read something about someone named Devine.)

Ron

[William Kelly]

Bill,

Well done, but "Devine" should be changed to "Divine" in the title and the several places it occurs in the body of the work. (I don't usually point out typos or misspellings, as seeming rather petty, but in the title of a work, it sort of sticks out. I was waiting to read something about someone named Devine.)

Ron

Hi Ron,

Wasn't Devine a stripper at the Carousel Club?

I think I got them all, and will re-run spell check before I post it on my blog.

BK

Edited August 17, 2009 by William Kelly