Jon G. Tidd Posted February 1, 2015 Author Share Posted February 1, 2015 Thomas Graves, You write: Is it reasonable to assume that the U.S. had "false defector" programs into the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War? If so, is it possible that at least one of those false defectors might not have known the real reason he was sent and / or was sent precisely because he appeared to be an "Odd Duck" who just might know some military secrets? What do we know about the "missions" that any of the U.S. false defectors were on (if there were any U.S. false defectors)? Separate Question: Would you agree with former Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee that "Oswald had the fingerprints of Intelligence all over him"? I can imagine a false defector program easily enough, but then I have difficulty imagining the benefits such a program would provide to the organization controlling it. I can't, for example, imagine Oswald's mission if I assume he was a false defector. As to Schweiker's fingerprints comment I think it's a distraction. If Schweiker had information about Oswald he should have laid it out publicly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 Jon - do you know anyone personally who has interacted and intersected with intelligence agents from various branches for several years with barely a month or even week going by without some footprint or other? Is it usually so confusing to look at the military records of an individual? Should we expect to find so many confusing and conflicting bits of info normally in someones service record? I find the 'footprints of intelligence' descriptor very useful to describe Oswald's confusing and obfuscated record. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad Milch Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 (edited) One of the basic questions I would ask is: Did a 6th floor TSBD 'sniper's nest' shooter (Lee Oswald or anyone else) have an unobstructed line of sight to JFK the entire length of the ambush (shot #1 thru shot #3)? As we know, the Secret Service, FBI & WC avoided addressing this question & providing the public with visual evidence to answer it by omitting representations of the SS 'follow-up' car & the human passengers it contained that tailgated the JFK parade car when it came under gunfire on Elm Street. To this day, one has no historically accurate Government investigation & report visual reenactments to determine if a clear line of sight existed for each of the alleged TSBD shots 51 years ago, the most critical being the shot that struck JFK in the head & killed him. As I commented several times on this forum, a visit to Dealey Plaza & standing, squatting or sitting on the Z-313 'street X' with one or more friends standing 10 or so feet back representing the SS car, it's windshield, humped hood, fat fenders & two agents standing roughly 7 feet above street level on running boards while one on the street X (the Z-313 spot) looks back at the TSBD should bring results that indicate such a shot from the 'sniper's nest would not be possible because the shooter's line of sight was obstructed. I believe had Lee Oswald had lived to stand trial his attorneys would have conducted their own 'historically accurate' shooting re-enactments & demonstrated to the jury that what was published in the WC was a distorted con job on the public. This same con job has continued throughout the years in TV documentaries & special reports. One needs to actually visit the site & determine for themselves that the 'kill shot' did not originate from the TSBD 'sniper's nest' because a shooter there did not have an unobstructed line of sight to JFK to shoot & kill him. BM Edited February 1, 2015 by Brad Milch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Knight Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 Had Lee Oswald lived to stand trial, there would be no Warren Commission, or a report by them. But I understand a great deal of what you're saying. The question, then, boils down to whether the elevation of the street behind the SS-100 presidential limo, vs. the elevation of the 6th floor window, would be sufficient to provide an unobstructed target for a shooter in that window. I suppose if one knows how to create 3D animations, we could answer that question to the best of our ability, using the extant photographic evidence to determine the position of the "Queen Mary" in relation to the presidential limo. But I don't have those skills. My problem with existing 3D models is that they generally ignore the SS follow-up car, and are made with a bias towards "proving" the SBT. I'd like to see an unbiased 3D animation, and then decide for myself whether the shots could have occurred as described in various accounts...to see which account(s) best approximate what we see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brad Milch Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 (edited) Just substitute Henry Wade for the WC report, Mark (lol). You are correct! I can't encourage enough people to actually visit the site & try their own z-313 re-enactment. In my case, me & my two friends tried all sorts of variations in body positions & moved several feet before & past the Z-313 street X. In none of them could the person at the z-313 street X see the lower portion of the sniper's nest window (if any of the window could be seen at all). The slope of the street & a tailgater is what makes the difference here. In the vicinity of the Z-313 street X, a 'tailgater' simply blocks a 'sniper's nest' view of a human target. Closer to the TSBD this situation changes & a line of sight is possible for other than the z-313 headshot. I suspect had Oswald lived, his attorneys would have argued that he did not murder JFK because he could not see him at the Z-313 shot because of his guards on the right side of the Queen Mary or the car's hood & windshield blocked an unobstructed shot if a shooter did see JFK as a target. This doesn't eliminate him possibly being a participant in the non-lethal shots, providing the weapon for another shooter to use or whatever. One can get a view of Z-313's street X from the 6th Floor Museum's online webcam and can see what cars tailgating a smaller car in front of them at the Z-313 street X looks like. They won't have the luxury of having replicas of the JFK Lincoln of the 1956 Queen Mary with actor stand-ins for the guards & human targets. It's better than nothing at all. Your 3D presentation description (if historically accurate in regards to the cars & human passengers) would really answer a lot of questions & shouldn't be that hard for today's computer visual effects gurus to create & publicize IMHO. BM Edited February 1, 2015 by Brad Milch Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon G. Tidd Posted February 1, 2015 Author Share Posted February 1, 2015 (edited) Paul Brancato, Here was my experience in Viet Nam: I was assigned to 525th Military Intelligence Group within a few days of arriving in country. The 525th HQ was in Saigon. It had component or unit headquarters in each of the four Military Regions of Viet Nam. One was in Da Nang (I Corps), another in Nha Trang (II Corps), another in Bien Hoa (III Corps), and the fourth in Can Tho (IV Corps). Each unit HQ was equivalent to a battalion HQ and was commanded by a lieutenant colonel. The lieutenant colonel belonged to the army's Military Intelligence (MI) branch. Each of the four unit HQs had a number of teams, usually two-man teams, spread throughout the Military Region where it was located. The teams collected information from agents and fed the information back up the chain of command, where the information was fed to analysts. All the unit HQs and their teams operated under cover. The unit HQ and the team to which I was assigned initially operated mainly under military cover. I was 1LT Tidd (my true name and rank) but wore the brass of an armor branch officer. My true brass was that of an MI officer. My cover story for a certain period was that I was expert in compound security. I lived on a U.S. military compound, crafted out of an old French villa, in a city near the Cambodian border. No one on the compound, including its commanding officer, knew of my true role, which was to meet a certain individual periodically and debrief him. I functioned as the compound security officer. A friend of mine from the intelligence school lived in a regular house two blocks away and, under civilian cover, did the same sort of work as I. His cover was that he was studying the local economy. If you had visited the city where I was stationed and encountered my friend or I you would have gleaned nothing of our actual roles and would have come away with an unremarkable acceptance of our cover stories. Another friend of mine, from language school, worked directly out of 525 MI Group HQs in Saigon. He was under deep cover. His whole fabricated identity as special operator was a cover story that allowed him access to individuals who had the potential to provide extraordinarily valuable information. Unlike I, who lived on the periphery of danger and only occasionally entered a real danger zone, this friend lived in a danger zone 24/7 and experienced a good share of combat. My friends and I knew what the other was up to but none of the details. That's characteristic of the compartmentalization in an intelligence organization. While my friends and I carried out our jobs in Viet Nam, no one except just a few in our unit, had even the slightest clue what we were doing. Did we do anything that would identify us as MI Branch officers? Absolutely not. I was an armor officer. The place of business for which I had been trained was an M60 main battle tank. My friend under deep cover -- he was a Special Forces officer who helped train foreign nationals. So yes, if you had investigated my friend or me you would have been misled and possibly utterly wrong about us because of our cover stories. Did my friend or I bear "the fingerprints of intelligence"? No. I came across CIA officers in Viet Nam. They operated under cover but the cover was pretty shallow. What they did, however, was well concealed. As to these officers, yes they bore "the fingerprints of intelligence" for anyone who knew they worked for the CIA, and lots of people did. But so what? It just didn't matter. Unlike some military intelligence officers, whose cover story obscured who they were and what they did, CIA officers were sometimes pretty easy to spot if you had a trained eye. Different missions, different kettles of fish. Edited February 1, 2015 by Jon G. Tidd Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Graves Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 (edited) Thomas Graves, You write: Is it reasonable to assume that the U.S. had "false defector" programs into the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War? If so, is it possible that at least one of those false defectors might not have known the real reason he was sent and / or was sent precisely because he appeared to be an "Odd Duck" who just might know some military secrets? What do we know about the "missions" that any of the U.S. false defectors were on (if there were any U.S. false defectors)? Separate Question: Would you agree with former Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee that "Oswald had the fingerprints of Intelligence all over him"? I can imagine a false defector program easily enough, but then I have difficulty imagining the benefits such a program would provide to the organization controlling it. I can't, for example, imagine Oswald's mission if I assume he was a false defector. As to Schweiker's fingerprints comment I think it's a distraction. If Schweiker had information about Oswald he should have laid it out publicly. Jon Tidd, One of the many possible missions for a false defector to Russia (who by definition either had a means of getting sensitive information to the U.S., or who planned to re-defect to the U.S. some day) might have been to gather "soviet realities" intelligence as mundane as where post offices were located, what time they turned the street lights on, and what the passenger train schedules were. The CIA had a special section for collecting this kind of intelligence in Russia: SR/6. In his "Historic Diary," Oswald wrote extensively about the radio factory he worked in. I believe I've read that this information ended up in a special file at CIA. Knowing that Oswald had been trained in certain aspects of electronics by the Marine Corps, the CIA could have reasonably expected that the Russians would put him to work in an electronics-oriented factory. Oswald himself said he hoped the Russians would let him go to school. If the Russians had sent him to an electronics school, he might have "picked up" a lot of information on Russian electronic devices, the locations of different electronics factories, and the status of different electronics projects. --Tommy Edited February 1, 2015 by Thomas Graves Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon G. Tidd Posted February 1, 2015 Author Share Posted February 1, 2015 Thomas Graves, You're right about "Soviet realities" in Minsk. The CIA might have wanted that information. And might have wanted information about the radio factory where Oswald worked. It just seems to me the CIA guy in the American embassy in Moscow could have gotten all such information, through local agents, for a few rubles. There just was no need for the CIA to recruit and train and transport Oswald to the USSR to get such information. This is low-level, publicly available in at least some instances, information. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paul Brancato Posted February 1, 2015 Share Posted February 1, 2015 Thanks for that Jon. You say you ran into many CIA officers in Vietnam and that they were relatively easy for you to spot. Did your knowledge of these individuals extend to actually seeing ID's? If not, do you think that any or all of them carried ID's identifying themselves as CIA employees? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon G. Tidd Posted February 2, 2015 Author Share Posted February 2, 2015 (edited) Paul Brancato, The only ID I saw in Viet Nam was my own, a plain vanilla military ID with no indication of branch. It allowed me access to the Saigon PX and commissary, where I could buy cigarettes and booze, which I never did. Footnote: I only used my ID once in Saigon, to gain entrance to the USO club, run from what I could see by middle-aged white American women. I went to the second floor of the club and played on a piano the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which I'd taught myself to play in college. Edited February 2, 2015 by Jon G. Tidd Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Graves Posted February 2, 2015 Share Posted February 2, 2015 (edited) Thomas Graves, You're right about "Soviet realities" in Minsk. The CIA might have wanted that information. And might have wanted information about the radio factory where Oswald worked. It just seems to me the CIA guy in the American embassy in Moscow could have gotten all such information, through local agents, for a few rubles. There just was no need for the CIA to recruit and train and transport Oswald to the USSR to get such information. This is low-level, publicly available in at least some instances, information. OK, Jon. You're right. Oswald wasn't an intelligence operative. He was just a nineteen-year-old "Odd Duck" marine smart enough to have acquired a radar and U-2 background who knew how to get into Russia quickly and who, after attempting to renounce his citizenship and threatening inside the U.S embassy in Moscow to commit espionage against the U.S. (but never charged), was not given a "dishonorable" discharge by the Marine Corps but a less serious "undesirable" one, and later given his passport back and allowed to return to the U.S. with a Russian wife whose uncle was an officer in the MKVD, and who, despite his above-mentioned background and the fact that he was starting a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans, was not only given a new U.S. passport, but was given it quickly. It's no wonder that he, at some point, came to the attention of the assassination plotters. LOL --Tommy Edited February 3, 2015 by Thomas Graves Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon G. Tidd Posted February 3, 2015 Author Share Posted February 3, 2015 Thomas Graves, It's easy for me to believe some U.S. agency greased the skids for his entry into the USSR. You or I would have in 1959. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark Knight Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 Before Mr. Trejo took over the Edwin Walker thread, there was a compelling argument made that it might have been Walker himself who gave Ozzie Rabbit the lowdown on how to get an instant visa to the USSR. Both were traveling in Europe at the same time, and Ozzie's itinerary gets suddenly untraceable about the time their paths might have crossed. Even though Ozzie was a Marine, Army Intel sure seemed to have a fat folder on him by 1963...or access to someone else's fat folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Graves Posted February 4, 2015 Share Posted February 4, 2015 (edited) Thomas Graves, It's easy for me to believe some U.S. agency greased the skids for his entry into the USSR. You or I would have in 1959. Jon Tidd, It only took Oswald two days to get his Russian tourist visa from the Russian Consulate in Helsinki. Before he arrived in Helsinki, the average waiting time to get a Russian tourist visa there was one to two weeks. Yes, I know that the Russian consul there had recently shown a profound weakness for CIA-provided Finnish girls, booze, and Leonard Bernstein concerts. Why would the Ruskies have given a tourist visa as quickly as two days to you or I in 1959? Because they would have appreciated us for the wonderful people we secretly are and would have wanted us to get into Russia as soon as possible to spread some good cheer and enlightenment around? Or would they have been more interested in big bucks you (definitely not I) might be planning to spend in Russia? More to my original point, everything I've read indicates that Oswald chose to apply for a Russian tourist visa in the city it which it was the easiest to get it quickly -- Helsinki -- and that although diplomats knew that Helsinki was the easiest place to get it quickly, it was not common knowledge among the general tourist population. --Tommy Edited February 4, 2015 by Thomas Graves Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jon G. Tidd Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 Another question: Is there anything that would not have happened, most likely, during JFK's presidency had he not been assassinated? I'm not suggesting we debate Viet Nam or civil rights. Those were on the table in 1963, and it's speculative what JFK would have done with respect to Viet Nam (I think he would have sent help to the South) or as regards civil rights (I think he would have gone forward). I'm asking those here to say what likely would not have happened on the world stage if JFK had not been assassinated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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