Rachel Maddow, JFK and Easy Money

[Joe Bauer]

Sandy, the further testimony by Helms in response to Belin's Oswald/CIA questions on the pages following the one you cited from the Mary Ferrell site is what is truly worthy of serious scrutiny, suspicion and concern.

Just one example:

In response to Belin's questions regarding Oswald and any contact with the CIA he may have had Helms actually says:

"Whether any CIA officer ever talked to him (Oswald ) any place I do not know."

We all know what that statement honestly admits.

 

 

 

[James DiEugenio]

The real story behind this is that when Helms was brought back to testify for the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee, he was rehearsed extensively by the CIA.

They prepared two large briefing books for him one of about 200 pages and one of about 130 pages.

The materials in those books are mostly summary in nature, with not very many verbatim docs.

The summaries are, in many places, either wrong or false.  Especially on this issue of any contacts with Oswald.   As John Newman showed, it was not just the CIA which was unreliable on this, the HSCA in their report was also wrong about these CIA documents in the Oswald file.   

But most importantly, the Helms preparation was clear spun in order to make Oswald out to be an agent of Castro and they used certain secret informants they had in their employ to do so. These guys were later exposed by people like Arnaldo Fernandez as being complete charlatans.

What this proves is that from almost the beginning with David Phillips's pre planned Castro did it stories, to the 1974-75 inquiries, to today with people like Shenon, this Castro did it story has been the CIA's created fallback, and its simply recycled in different formats with different emphasis.  And somehow, it goes by unnoticed by the MSM.

[Larry Hancock]

Well said Jim....is there anything that would tie down where within the Agency, what directorate or what level of staff the fall back was conceived?  Was it iterative, a follow on to Phillips and MC and the DRE...or did somebody call a meeting and make a project out of it (as with the effort to protect the WCR)?   Your comment raised the question - if Helms was prepped and given a briefing book, who is it that prepares material for someone at his level, who approved it ...Helms himself or someone else. Who is it that gives the call for Helms to go to Congress and spin a fall back story, and who prepares him to do that?

[Paul Brancato]

My take is that Helms was in on it. He was Harvey's superior. The extensive briefing books prepared for Helms might be evidence of that. So my answer to your question Larry would be that they were prepared with the approval of Helms. As Jim says, and I certainly agree, the Castro theory was the fallback because the trail was laid in the first place to make Castro guilty. It became the fallback when Oswald was deemed a lone nut soon after the assassination. That doesn't mean that the anti-Castro CIA/mafia/Cuban exile crowd was necessarily the nexus that ran the ground crew.. it is clear they ran Oswald, set him up as the assassin -  Oswald the rabbit, whose life was the rabbit hole. 

 

Edited October 30, 2017 by Paul Brancato

[Ron Ecker]

On 10/28/2017 at 9:05 PM, James DiEugenio said:

another prime example of just how uninformed, ignorant, and simply obtuse the online media is on this case.

A good example of such ignorance on the TV news networks is Turker Carlson the other night, oohing and ahhing with some guest over a newly released document (the same one released in 1976?) about the anonymous Cambridge, England phone call made minutes before the assassination. We've only known about that phone call for 41 years.

 

[James DiEugenio]

Ron:

 

But did we know that Osborne was at Grisbee when the call was made?  Apparently he was.

[Ron Bulman]

Gentlemen, you are getting deep.  Thank you.  Helms,  only Director of Central Intelligence convicted of lying to Congress, which he proudly proclaimed as a "Badge of Honor, like a banner".

His files could be interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Helms

I forget, who replaced him?  Bush or was their one in between?

 

Edited October 31, 2017 by Ron Bulman

[Ron Ecker]

1 hour ago, James DiEugenio said:

But did we know that Osborne was at Grisbee when the call was made?  Apparently he was.

He visited his hometown of Grimsby that November, but we don't know where he was on the 22nd. (Grimsby is not near Cambridge.)