John Newman on Samuel Halpern

[Douglas Caddy]

John Newman posted this on Facebook yesterday;

For those going to Dallas Lancer (16-17 November) and San Francisco (16 December); I took care of Nosenko and Veciana last year; get ready for Samuel Halpern this year--one of the biggest frauds in the Kennedy case. The attached document is a lie. In February 1961, Bissell was behind it, trying to prevent the failure at the Bay of Pigs AND to hold on to his promotion to succeed Dulles (JFK had promised it). Later, Halpern used this lie to buttress his defamation of RFK. Nosenko, Veciana, and now Halpern--and Volume III is finally finished.

[Anthony Thorne]

The thoughtful follow up comments are worth a read.

JOAN MELLEN - 

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Strange as it may seem, "Sammy" was one of the good guys, Ted. I never met him, but people I know did. He was subject to abuse by James Angleton as a Jew who did not buy into Angleton's support of Israel. I have a new book called "Blood In The Water: How the United States and Israel collaborated to ambush the USS Liberty." It will be out first week in December.

 

WILLIAM KELLY - 

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Halpern was with DesFiz eating lunch in Georgetown when news of the assassination arrived and Halpern quotes Des as wondering if his Cubans were involved. Then Halpern fell lock step in line promoting the false Castro cover story. Strange as it may seem.

 

LEE SHEPHERD -

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Sam Halpern was also openly contemptuous of the Kennedy’s. “You’re dealing with two guys in the White House who made a botch of things at the Bay of Pigs and haven’t a clue what it means to run clandestine operations or covert operations or whatever you want to call them.” Halpern considered Kennedy’s unwillingness to actually “pay any price, bear any burden” a treachery that “virtually justified extraconstitutional correction.”

 

JOHN NEWMAN -

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 I have spent an entire year researching Mr. Halpern and his twisted tale of an RFK secret plot to use the Mafia to assassinate Castro. Little did Halpern know in 1962 that his own boss, William Harvey, was in charge of the secret CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro. Halpern only found out what Harvey and Roselli had been up to until he read the Church Committee reports that were published at the end of 1975 and into 1976! It was the biggest shock of Halpern's life and took him almost two decades to figure out how ignore and/or spin details to preserve his RFK Mafia marquee. In Volume III--Into the Storm--I have four chapters devoted to all of the details about Halpern's nearly four decades of activities on these matters. Amazingly, all of the SSCIA and CIA files on this unbelievable story have been laying in the open since 1early 976. The ONLY mention about these documents in ANY books on the case that I have seen so far was a brief one in David Talbot's "Brothers." I have yet to publicly release all of this new research. That will happen for the first time on the evening of 16 November--just 13 days from now--at the Lancer conference in Dallas. By the way, Halpern wasn't anywhere close to being the DDO! That was Bissell, and then Helms when he took over in early 1962. Halpern was the lowly executive officer to Harvey--who didn't bother to tell Sam that he was running the CIA-Mafia operation against Castro. Halpern didn't know about the crypt "ZRRIFLE" until he saw the papers about it for the first time in 1976. However, he was involved--one of the four people who were--in the operation that took place in November 1963, i.e. Fitzgerald giving the poison pen to Cubela and lying by saying RFK had authorized it. So, Sam didn't know the crypt until 1975; and that's when he saw the document I posted at the start of this thread saying that JFK started ZRRIFLE in February 1961. Of course, that was WAYOUT false, but Halpern loved it and used it to buttress his false RFK-Mafia myth.

 

TED RUBINSTEIN -

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Was Halpern involved in trying to link RFK to a Castro hit plot involving Charlie Ford/Fiscalini?

 

JOHN NEWMAN -

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Yes--Bingo on that. And Ford's sworn statement to the Church Committee blows that out of the water!! See RIF 104-10310-10119. This is another crucial document that anyone wishing to comment publicly about Halpern should read BEFORE commenting.

 

RIF 104-10310-10119 is titled MEMORANDUM: INTERVIEW BY SENATE COMMITTEE INVESTIGATORS and contains Ford's comments at length. It's here.

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=12643

[Larry Hancock]

Glad to see John doing this, personally I've become more and more skeptical of Halpern as a source the more I've waded into the documented details of the matters on which he often commented. 

[Ron Bulman]

RFK Jr. talks about Halpern in his book from this year, American Values. "Helms deputy, Sam Halpern … devoted enormous professional energies to besmirching the Kennedy family.  For more than thirty years Halpern continued to spread slanderous stories, painting JFK and RFK as the masterminds of the CIA's intrigues. this despite the fact Halpern told the CIA inspector general the opposite...  He later acknowledged that he would have considered murdering my father had he confirmed the CIA suspicion  that operation Mongoose was just "busy work"."  Page 131.

Halpern was one of journalist Seymour Hersh's key sources...for... The Dark Side of Camelot.  Historian David Talbot...Interviewed Halpern before his death in 2007 "Halpern made a career of contaminating the Kennedy name.  He was doing it even after he retired from the CIA".  Talbot told me.  "He rolled out all this nonsense that was demonstrably untrue.  He clearly had an agenda.".  Page 132.

He keeps going.  "Hersh bases his thesis on Halpern's claim that my father deployed the late Charles Ford as his liaison with assassins... Talbot dug up Ford's memo to the Church Committee.  Ford specifically rebuts Halpern... meeting with my father... (was to)...  Foment an anti-Castro uprising, not on Mafia assassination plots."