John Newman on Lisa Pease's challenges to his research

[David Andrews]

18 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

David,

This is just a guess on my part, but could "Bravo Club" be a reference to a B Company, or Company B?

Larry wrote, "And the Cubans he describes meeting Oswald were not linked to Alpha 66 but most recently to Army training, having just come out of it.”

This could be the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center (SWC), Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in particular, one of the 7th Special Forces Groups (SFG's)

Special Forces teams ([operational detachment alphas (SF ODAs).

 

I read about a very interesting case study called "Plan Lazlo" in Columbia in the early 1960;s. I'm just using this as an example. In summary, it said,

" BG (Brigadier General) Yarborough; LTC (Lieutenant Colonel) Little, the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center G-3; and COL Russell, the 7th Special Forces Group commander, went to Colombia in February 1962, to study the violence problem and evaluate the effectiveness of their counterinsurgency effort. Yarborough recommended that relationships between military and police be delineated, that military and intelligence services at all levels collaborate more, and that intelligence and counterintelligence programs be coordinated and standardized. These were deemed critical to a national counterinsurgency plan. The HUK counterinsurgency basic concept of operations (in the Philippines) was used by the team. To conduct antiviolence planning, identify requirements, and coordinate operations, Yarborough recommended that MTTs (mobile training teams) —psychological warfare, civic action, air support, and intelligence—and five Special Forces ODAs be sent to work with the Colombian military. The Special Warfare Center recommendations became part of Ambassador Freeman’s antiviolence plan and helped the Colombian generals preparing Plan Lazo.

https://www.soc.mil/ARSOF_History/articles/v2n4_plan_lazo_page_1.html

"Patsy" could be Marita Lorentz.

 

Steve Thomas

Steve, if you read the 'Verdestein' letter in full, you'll see that the designation 'Patsy' is applied to Oswald and Oswald situations uniformly, as a kind of substitution code (just as "Triple-man Zero' designates Nagell himself as triple agent, US-Soviet-US).  The capitalization and feminization of 'Patsy' seems a back-handed reference to Oswald's supposed bisexuality.  I'm foggy this morning, and perhaps need spelled out for me how Patsy could refer to Marita Lorenz.

The question is, where is Nagell getting this knowledge from, and whose purposes is he using it for from prison by October 8, 1967?  If you take a look at the timeline of revelations to law enforcement about David Ferrie (mentioned as 'Harry De Fairy" in the Nagell letter), and the 1967 press coverage of Garrison's investigation, the gay angle isn't made public on that year.  The upshot of Nagell's letter, in fact, seems to be painting Oswald as a wanna-be Commie who hoped to kill JFK and escape to Cuba.  This isn't the picture we see today, and it may not have been Nagell's actual knowledge of Oswald.  So why promote the patsy legend in 1967, and where did Nagell get his reading of Oswald and Ferrie from, since he's been shuttled between various incarcerations since 1963?  Why throw Alpha 66 out there as Oswald's handlers, as Larry admits Nagell is doing in the letter?

Edited January 5, 2020 by David Andrews

[Larry Hancock]

David, as for myself I'm fully committed to my new book coming out in a couple of months and to my final thesis on the conspiracy; delving back into Nagell beyond the analysis that I did in the work on by CD is just not in the cards.  Beyond that, my own take has come to be that Nagell provided very useful information on Oswald in Japan, as far as early visits to the Soviet Embassy there and his cooperation in certain activities (which would have been ONI driven); Nagell was only an observer.  Very possibly one of many watching what was going on with efforts to collect information from American GI's.  I've also come to believe that other than offering early information about Oswald being approached by unknown Cubans in New Orleans, with said Cubans manipulating him while he played along feeling he was a source on them, there is little to be gained about the actual attack in Dallas because he was off the grid at that point.  His revelations about Oswald could have been sensational in 1964, now they are simply corroborative.

On your questions, as to Alpha 66, anybody watching contemporary events or even reading magazines would have tossed up their name in regard to Cuba....and we have to be cautions because many individuals who had joined Alpha 66 were also DRE members or members of other groups at different points.  On Ferrie and hypnosis I'd have to dig back into the remarks and timing of that to even have an opinion. I certainly don't think Nagell actually went to Cuba and met either Raul or Fidel; at best he had been given a rather minimal assignment to monitor Oswald by Soviet agents in Mexico City, something which he only did marginally once he got back into the United States.  His travels and activities certainly don't reflect a total focus on Oswald in 1963.  And his remarks suggest that his Soviet contact and his CIA contact - who I feel was Henry Hecksher - both dropped off from him by summer.  Which makes since given Hecksher's new AMWORLD assignment (we do know he had been in MC when Nagell was though).   

I don't think Nagell could have known exactly what Oswald's role in Dallas was; he would have been guessing after the fact.  He did however know that as of New Orleans he was being played as a patsy so I would guess he would have figured the same for Dallas?

Beyond that, as with most sources and especially with Nagell who was highly situational; I would generally trust what he was writing or even telling his attorney or the court immediately after his arrest.  After you get past 1964/65 I tend to take it all with a couple of pinches of salt.  Dick may feel very differently.  My attitude is based on the total volume of his correspondence.

Edited January 4, 2020 by Larry Hancock

[Steve Thomas]

28 minutes ago, David Andrews said:

Steve, if you read the 'Verdestein' letter in full, you'll see that the designation 'Patsy' is applied to Oswald and Oswald situations uniformly, as a kind of substitution code...

David,

Yes, my reading of the "Patsy" part was specious? spurious? superficial?.

all that stuff.

 

Steve Thomas

[David Andrews]

4 hours ago, Steve Thomas said:

David,

Yes, my reading of the "Patsy" part was specious? spurious? superficial?.

all that stuff.

 

Steve Thomas

I didn't say any of that.  I liked the Plan Lazo stuff you found at the Army Historian site, I was just confused where Lorenz came in.  Maybe I wasn't reading it right - that's not historically unknown around here.

People should look at the Plan Lazo material in relation to JFK's Alliance of Progress in South America, since everything the man did in terms of Cold War strategy made him enemies, in this case probably the Rockefellers, since WW II the feudal overlords of the continent:

https://www.soc.mil/ARSOF_History/articles/v2n4_plan_lazo_page_1.html

Edited January 4, 2020 by David Andrews

[Steve Thomas]

1 hour ago, David Andrews said:

I didn't say any of that.  I liked the Plan Lazo stuff you found at the Army Historian site, I was just confused where Lorenz came in.  Maybe I wasn't reading it right

David,

No. I said that. You were right. I just threw that in at the last minute. I shouldn't have. I didn't read Nagell's correspondence all the way through.

Steve Thomas

 

 

[Gene Kelly]

Mike

That's is an excellent presentation.  As a communications expert, you recognize and provide insights about the public opinion manipulation that went on after the assassination.  Its as interesting (if not more so) than the mechanics of the plot itself such as shooters, players, sponsors etc. Plus, it helps point towards who those true culprits were ("clean beacons to the killers" as Vincent Salandria would say).  I'm curious as to who the CIA DRE case officer was before Joannides, who was suspicious of the official story.  Fascinating that the NOLA leaflet legend was not distributed to the media from WDSU TV in New Orleans (plausible and more innocent) but rather personally delivered by an anti-communist propagandist aligned with CIA (do you know who that was?).  Notable that the Warren Report was dubbed too 'complex' for the public to understand, and the obvious campaign to discredit Stone's movie.  I'm unfamiliar with the 2005 open letter to CIA from Bugliosi, Mailer and Posner in the NY Times Book Review ... any added information you have about that would be appreciated.  I am familiar with an open letter to NYT dated June 17, 2007 signed by Jefferson Morley, Norman Mailer, Anthony Summers and David Talbot - which mentions an earlier March 15th  letter penned by those same authors, plus Robert Blakey, Gerald Posner and other writers - criticizing Times writer Bryan Burrough (who had praised Vincent Bugliosi's book) as "superficial and gratuitously insulting": 

And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information 

Also, there's some interesting dots to connect here: 

• Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) secretly funded by CIA for propaganda purposes in Latin America, started by David Phillips in Cuba then later reformed in the US
• FBI and CIA campaign to discredit FPCC (part of COINTELPRO) and the staged Oswald machinations in New Orleans ... anti-FPCC campaign led by CIA’s David Phillips
• Helms appoints new DRE case officer Joannides, who reports directly to him In ‘63, and later becomes chief of Psychological Warfare at JM/WAVE station in Miami 

Somebody wanted Castro out of Cuba, and somebody wanted to foment a war.  It would appear that there were a number of parallel interests competing for those objectives ... the rabbit holes that you caution to avoid.  On the communications aspect, I'd also recommend taking a look at a recent Ohio University doctoral dissertation  “Lost in the Master’s Mansion: How the Mainstream Media Have Marginalized Alternative Theories of the JFK Assassination" by Jim DeBrosse published in August 2014.  Its an interesting read. The following is from the abstract: 

This dissertation examines the patchwork of misleading, suspect and narrowly selected evidence that supports the Warren Report’s theory and then documents via content and textual analyses and in-depth telephone interviews how the mainstream media have marginalized and at times ridiculed critics of the lone gunman theory in book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, TV news broadcasts, and the selection of books for publication. 

Gene

[Gene Kelly]

And what I forgot to add is, with all due respect to John Newman's work about the Army, Veciana and Alpha 66 ... I'm not ready to give Phillips and CIA a "bye" on culpability just yet 

[Paul Brancato]

2 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

And what I forgot to add is, with all due respect to John Newman's work about the Army, Veciana and Alpha 66 ... I'm not ready to give Phillips and CIA a "bye" on culpability just yet 

Gene - what do you think of the notion, which I’ve presented a few times here, that an assassination ATTEMPT was hijacked by a full on assassination? This accommodates the Phillips/CIA plot and adds to it a military coup. Leaving aside Veciana, Phillips was certainly implicated in the MC machinations pre and post assassination. My point in all this is that I don’t see why a failed attempt whose trail led to Castro wouldn’t have sufficed if the aim had been to turn JFK’s Cuban policy. If JFK had survived that day, and if he had subsequently been convinced that Castro had tried to kill him, what actions would he have taken? I think the answer is obvious. On the other hand, JFK in the Oval Office for a second term would have put the kabosh on escalation in Vietnam. For that war to proceed he needed to be removed. And in reality Castro’s Cuba survived, and the Pentagon turned its sights on SE Asia. 

[Matt Allison]

4 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

Gene - what do you think of the notion, which I’ve presented a few times here, that an assassination ATTEMPT was hijacked by a full on assassination? 

This would be a good way to draw people into a plot if they were not comfortable with the idea of actually killing JFK. Then once the assassination actually occurred,  everyone is scrambling to CYA. 

On RCN, I defer to Larry, but IIRC, Nagell said he thought the reason he wasn't called to testify in NO was because it was his belief that "Oswald was in it up to his eyeballs", and Garrison wanted to posit that Oswald was 100% innocent of everything.

His letters to Art Greenstein seem to be speculation that is based on what he probably read about Garrison's case in the newspapers while still incarcerated.

[David Andrews]

His letters to Art Greenstein seem to be speculation that is based on what he probably read about Garrison's case in the newspapers while still incarcerated.

Nagell's attitude toward Oswald and Ferrie in the 'Verdestein' letter, with its intimations of effeminacy and homosexuality, addresses issues that - as far as I can find - were not mentioned in any press account between Shaw's March 1, 1967 arrest and the October 8, 1967 date of the letter.  These allegations would emerge in the Clay Shaw trial beginning February 6, 1969.  In 1967 there would be every reason for reporters to conceal any advance knowledge, as reports of Shaw being homosexual might have prejudiced potential jurors for or against him. 

I would be interested to know if I am wrong, and if leaks (or Garrison boasts) did run in the press between Shaw's arrest and Nagell's letter, or if the homosexual angle did make the press at any time before the Shaw trial opened.

There are a number of reasons to distrust or question Nagell's 'Verdestein' letter, including his presumption that Oswald was a shooter, and the letter's exclusion of Clay Shaw from the plotting.  As I've said, I'm wondering if the homosexual angle, the Alpha 66 connection to Oswald that Nagell made, and other details were fed to Nagell by an intelligence agency for disinformation purposes.  This is information that might have been obtained by informants or listening devices in Garrison's offices.

Edited January 5, 2020 by David Andrews

[Matt Allison]

1 hour ago, David Andrews said:

I would be interested to know if I am wrong, and if leaks (or Garrison boasts) did run in the press between Shaw's arrest and Nagell's letter, or if the homosexual angle did make the press at any time before the Shaw trial opened.

David-  Garrison's Playboy interview came out in the October 1967 issue, meaning Nagell could have had access to it; also, in Patricia Lambert's book there is mention of Garrison's homosexual theory of the assassination being made in an LA Times article in March of 1967. When extensive S&M materials were found by Garrison's staff upon searching Clay Shaw's home after his arrest, Garrison told the New Orleans press all about it. 

My sense then is that Ferrie and Shaw's sexuality was publicly known when Nagell wrote the letter.

I don't think Clay Shaw plotted the assassination and I don't think Nagell thought he did either.

Edited January 5, 2020 by Matt Allison

[Michaleen Kilroy]

10 hours ago, Gene Kelly said:

Mike

That's is an excellent presentation.  As a communications expert, you recognize and provide insights about the public opinion manipulation that went on after the assassination.  Its as interesting (if not more so) than the mechanics of the plot itself such as shooters, players, sponsors etc. Plus, it helps point towards who those true culprits were ("clean beacons to the killers" as Vincent Salandria would say).  I'm curious as to who the CIA DRE case officer was before Joannides, who was suspicious of the official story.  Fascinating that the NOLA leaflet legend was not distributed to the media from WDSU TV in New Orleans (plausible and more innocent) but rather personally delivered by an anti-communist propagandist aligned with CIA (do you know who that was?).  Notable that the Warren Report was dubbed too 'complex' for the public to understand, and the obvious campaign to discredit Stone's movie.  I'm unfamiliar with the 2005 open letter to CIA from Bugliosi, Mailer and Posner in the NY Times Book Review ... any added information you have about that would be appreciated.  I am familiar with an open letter to NYT dated June 17, 2007 signed by Jefferson Morley, Norman Mailer, Anthony Summers and David Talbot - which mentions an earlier March 15th  letter penned by those same authors, plus Robert Blakey, Gerald Posner and other writers - criticizing Times writer Bryan Burrough (who had praised Vincent Bugliosi's book) as "superficial and gratuitously insulting": 

And now your reviewer, Burrough, seems to lump together all those who question the official story as marginal fools. Burrough’s close-minded stance should be unacceptable to every historian and journalist worthy of the name — especially at a time when a federal agency is striving vigorously to suppress very relevant information 

Also, there's some interesting dots to connect here: 

• Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil (DRE) secretly funded by CIA for propaganda purposes in Latin America, started by David Phillips in Cuba then later reformed in the US
• FBI and CIA campaign to discredit FPCC (part of COINTELPRO) and the staged Oswald machinations in New Orleans ... anti-FPCC campaign led by CIA’s David Phillips
• Helms appoints new DRE case officer Joannides, who reports directly to him In ‘63, and later becomes chief of Psychological Warfare at JM/WAVE station in Miami 

Somebody wanted Castro out of Cuba, and somebody wanted to foment a war.  It would appear that there were a number of parallel interests competing for those objectives ... the rabbit holes that you caution to avoid.  On the communications aspect, I'd also recommend taking a look at a recent Ohio University doctoral dissertation  “Lost in the Master’s Mansion: How the Mainstream Media Have Marginalized Alternative Theories of the JFK Assassination" by Jim DeBrosse published in August 2014.  Its an interesting read. The following is from the abstract: 

This dissertation examines the patchwork of misleading, suspect and narrowly selected evidence that supports the Warren Report’s theory and then documents via content and textual analyses and in-depth telephone interviews how the mainstream media have marginalized and at times ridiculed critics of the lone gunman theory in book reviews, newspaper columns, magazine articles, TV news broadcasts, and the selection of books for publication. 

Gene

Thanks, Gene.  To answer your questions:

Quote

I'm curious as to who the CIA DRE case officer was before Joannides, who was suspicious of the official story. 

He's the subject of the recent USA Today story in the second to final slide:  Ross Lester Crozier

Quote

Fascinating that the NOLA leaflet legend was not distributed to the media from WDSU TV in New Orleans (plausible and more innocent) but rather personally delivered by an anti-communist propagandist aligned with CIA (do you know who that was?). 

It was Ed Butler of INCA who facilitated the radio 'debate' (ambush?) between LHO and Carlos Bringuier.

Quote

Notable that the Warren Report was dubbed too 'complex' for the public to understand, and the obvious campaign to discredit Stone's movie. 

I meant that any anomalies citizen researchers found were not pursued by media because of the complexity of the case but more importantly journos were afraid of losing their jobs if they even tried to tackle it, I believe.  Sylvan Fox, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the for NY World-Telegram wrote the book in 1964 called 'The Unanswered Questions of the Kennedy Assassination" because he couldn't get his paper to publish his analysis and critique of the WC.  He's the only mainstream media person I found who questioned the story in the early days.  I believe LIFE and a couple of other outlets were publicly skeptical a couple of years later.

Quote

I'm unfamiliar with the 2005 open letter to CIA from Bugliosi, Mailer and Posner in the NY Times Book Review ... any added information you have about that would be appreciated.

Here ya go:  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2003/12/18/jfks-assassination/

Looks like it was 2003 not 2005.  My bad.

I agree with you - the assassination always looked to me like someone wanted a war.

I'll take a look at DeBrosse's paper.  Thanks for the tip.

 

[David Andrews]

2 hours ago, Matt Allison said:

David-  Garrison's Playboy interview came out in the October 1967 issue, meaning Nagell could have had access to it; also, in Patricia Lambert's book there is mention of Garrison's homosexual theory of the assassination being made in an LA Times article in March of 1967. When extensive S&M materials were found by Garrison's staff upon searching Clay Shaw's home after his arrest, Garrison told the New Orleans press all about it. 

My sense then is that Ferrie and Shaw's sexuality was publicly known when Nagell wrote the letter.

I don't think Clay Shaw plotted the assassination and I don't think Nagell thought he did either.

Well, you're right, and I'm glad to know it.  The Los Angeles Times article ran over three days in June 1967.  I had mistimed the appearance of the Playboy interview, and also of the NBC News special countering the Garrison case, which also discussed the homosexual angle.  I have to say, it was precipitous of Garrison to give so much of his case against Shaw away in the press, possibly killing his case ahead of the courtroom, and introducing material that was used to smear Garrison as incompetent, when if kept secret it could only have come from infiltration of his office.  Too many reactionary moves in an incendiary case.

In my post, I did not mean to decide whether Clay Shaw was part of the assassination plotting, at least in regard to the actual Dallas action.  I meant, rather, to call attention to the fact that Clay Shaw is not mentioned in the plot outlined in the Nagell 'Verdestein' letter, thinking this may have been a CIA-motivated omission that would help protect Shaw.  Nagell was visited in jail by, among others, a Garrison investigator later declared by Garrison to be a CIA plant.

So, several more reasons to not trust the 'Verdestein' letter.  I suspect that Nagell fitted things about Devid Ferrie gleaned from the Garrison case uproar to things he already knew about Oswald and assassination plans existing before his arrest, knowledge that now seems limited, at least as represented in the letter.  The strongest connections between Nagell and Oswald seem to be, as Larry Hancock suggests, the Hidell ID card copy and the statements Nagell made before the assassination.

Edited January 6, 2020 by David Andrews

[Matt Allison]

Yes, I would agree. Larry would know better than I, but I suspect the actual amount of time Nagell spent in New Orleans in the summer of 1963 might have only constituted a few weeks. He took himself out of the picture just before what he thought would be an assassination attempt in Washington DC. But Oswald, instead of traveling to DC as he had written he would, instead tried to get to Cuba by going to Mexico City. At least that's how the official narrative has it...

Edited January 6, 2020 by Matt Allison

[Larry Hancock]

My sense is that Nagell was indeed not in New Orleans more than a couple of weeks, likely just enough to locate Oswald and monitor him. That raises questions about the purported table and photos of Oswald's meeting with other parties.  Photos are easy to understand but how did the tape get made?   Did Nagell have the right equipment for a concealed recorder?  Or did he somehow bug the meeting place?  He does say he warned Oswald the people he was meeting with were not who Oswald thought they were....so how did Nagell know that, had he seen them in Florida, or did he observe them in New Orleans and know they were associated with anti-Castro Cubans and were not Castro agents (that seems most likely ). 

I'm not trying to minimize his story, its just that aside from knowing Oswald it seems a real challenge for Nagell to have picked up much detailed information in New Orleans given his short time there.  And given that he himself said he was forced to flee, its seems the bad guys were monitoring him as well, knew he had contacted Oswald and suspected he had warned him.

All of which suggests that Negell was inserting himself rather openly in both Miami and New Orleans without having the time to blend in.....suggesting he might have gotten a broad picture of how things were going - basically that Oswald was being set up for something, but probably not much detail beyond that.