Pierre Lafitte datebook, 1963

[Leslie Sharp]

@Jeremy Bojczuk

A cursory google translate:
Latin                      French

duum                    deux


Both Rene and Pierre spent a good deal of their adolescent years in  Europe. The datebook reflects a number of similar quirks. "merde merde,"  "vu je" "di coup de grace."

 

[Leslie Sharp]

3 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

CIA agents were reportedly not to keep datebooks per their confidentiality agreements from what I've read.  Former director Allen Dulles apparently did.  Per recent re confirmation on this site, his for 11 22-23-24 1963 said simply, Farm.  

Federal Bureau of Narcotics "Colonel" George Hunter White", a CIA contract agent apparently felt no such compunction as he kept several over several years.  Which are quite revealing.  With no apparent implication of intent of monetary gain. 

Though to my knowledge they have not been verified by "expert" analysts.  Jean Pierre Laffite reputedly kept one, abbreviated, coded, in 1963, likely it seems with others over the years, that his family did not wish to fully reveal, though it seems his wife did feel part of the one from 1963 should be revealed as a part of history.  Is that where this argument over authenticity and relevance is stuck at the moment?

It's my understanding that Lafitte was not an official "agent."  He was a 'special employee' off and on of several three letter agencies including CIA, FBN, INS and FBI.

Hank's intro lays out a little more specific detail about the Lafitte collection he had access to.

 

[Leslie Sharp]

On 8/2/2023 at 7:36 AM, Ed Berger said:

The George Hunter White papers archive is out at Stanford University in California. The archive inventory has a lot of entries for White's "daily appointment book", which might be it? 

EDIT: Box 5, folder 6 contains "George White affidavit re. Jean Pierre Lafitte". Could be a cool thing to get a copy of... 

Ed, you had a lengthy post a few days ago that I was in the middle of responding to but failed to send; we were discussing the JA Ranch, Whitneys and Vanderbilts, Crichton, Byrd, Amarillo ...

Do you know which thread?

[Ron Bulman]

2 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Ed, you had a lengthy post a few days ago that I was in the middle of responding to but failed to send; we were discussing the JA Ranch, Whitneys and Vanderbilts, Crichton, Byrd, Amarillo ...

Do you know which thread?

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Posted Monday at 12:19 AM

  On 7/30/2023 at 10:16 PM, Ed Berger said:

I've tracked the Vanderbilt angle because an heiress married Northern Ireland investor John Adair and together they established the JA Ranch with Charles Goodnight in the Palo Duro Canyon located in the Texas Panhandle.  Amarillo, as you know, was HQ for Crichton's Dorchester, with Byrd on the board... An heir to the JA married into the Symington family — Stuart Symington first Sec. Air Force and partner with Clark Clifford during the BCCI debacle.

Fascinating! Do you know to what degree the Adairs might have crossed paths with Crichton down in Amarillo? I'm thinking about Crichton's latter day Arabian Shield company, which if memory serves correctly was actually formed through Dorchester. One of the investors at one point into Arabian Shield was Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief who was in turn a major stockholder in BCCI.

Expand  

Not to digress from the datebook but this threw me for a loop.  Seeing Charles Goodnight in a post about the JFKA made me stop and think, huh?  I fully understand it in the context of the two above comments after reading them.  But first seeing Goodnight's name did stun me, which led to chuckles as I read on about the connections, as Ed said, fascinating. 

I have J Evetts Haley's book on Goodnight.  I've been to his replicated dug out in Palo Duro Canyon as well as his home, the historical center. 

Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site | THC.Texas.gov - Texas Historical Commission

Goodnight was my G-G-G Grandfathers close neighbor (two listings away) on the 1860 Palo Pinto County census.  That year he was one of 96 volunteer rangers, for which Goodnight was a scout, which participated in the capture of Cyntia Ann Parker.  The basis of John Wayne's The Searchers.

I just discovered personally this historical jewel myself a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of a Dublin, Tx library DVD.  From 107 years ago.  Film in it's infancy, for Dr. Joseph Mc Bride.

 Old Texas (1916) (texasarchive.org)

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[Leslie Sharp]

2 hours ago, Ron Bulman said:

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• Members
• •  7.9k
• Location:75 Mi. S/W of Fort Worth
• Interests:Football, searching for Truth in JFKA & RFKA, grandkids.

 

Posted Monday at 12:19 AM

  On 7/30/2023 at 10:16 PM, Ed Berger said:

I've tracked the Vanderbilt angle because an heiress married Northern Ireland investor John Adair and together they established the JA Ranch with Charles Goodnight in the Palo Duro Canyon located in the Texas Panhandle.  Amarillo, as you know, was HQ for Crichton's Dorchester, with Byrd on the board... An heir to the JA married into the Symington family — Stuart Symington first Sec. Air Force and partner with Clark Clifford during the BCCI debacle.

Fascinating! Do you know to what degree the Adairs might have crossed paths with Crichton down in Amarillo? I'm thinking about Crichton's latter day Arabian Shield company, which if memory serves correctly was actually formed through Dorchester. One of the investors at one point into Arabian Shield was Kamal Adham, the Saudi intelligence chief who was in turn a major stockholder in BCCI.

Expand  

Not to digress from the datebook but this threw me for a loop.  Seeing Charles Goodnight in a post about the JFKA made me stop and think, huh?  I fully understand it in the context of the two above comments after reading them.  But first seeing Goodnight's name did stun me, which led to chuckles as I read on about the connections, as Ed said, fascinating. 

I have J Evetts Haley's book on Goodnight.  I've been to his replicated dug out in Palo Duro Canyon as well as his home, the historical center. 

Charles and Mary Ann Goodnight Ranch State Historic Site | THC.Texas.gov - Texas Historical Commission

Goodnight was my G-G-G Grandfathers close neighbor (two listings away) on the 1860 Palo Pinto County census.  That year he was one of 96 volunteer rangers, for which Goodnight was a scout, which participated in the capture of Cyntia Ann Parker.  The basis of John Wayne's The Searchers.

I just discovered personally this historical jewel myself a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of a Dublin, Tx library DVD.  From 107 years ago.  Film in it's infancy, for Dr. Joseph Mc Bride.

 Old Texas (1916) (texasarchive.org)

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• Quote

Thanks, Ron!

[Jeremy Bojczuk]

Leslie Sharp writes:

Quote

The datebook reflects a number of similar quirks. "merde merde,"  "vu je" "di coup de grace."

I'm not sure how similar those three quirks are to DUUM, what with duum being Latin and the others French, with a bit of Italian in the last one. Are there any examples of the author or authors inserting archaic Latin words into the datebook, using capital letters? Incidentally, the first of the three quirks may turn out to be an apt description of the datebook.

Quote

A cursory google translate

If that's how Google translated it, Google got it wrong. The French for duum is not deux but des deux, which means 'of the two': des is a contraction of de ('of') and les (the plural form of 'the').

Admittedly, my French isn't vastly better than my rather rusty Latin, and it's conceivable that there's an idiomatic usage I'm not aware of, in which deux is used instead of des deux. But until someone demonstrates the existence of such a usage, we have to conclude that DUUM does not mean what Leslie claims it means.

We're still facing the problem that 'of the two' doesn't make sense in the context of 'rifle into building'. Either the indistinct handwriting does not spell out D-U-U-M, or, if it does, D-U-U-M is an unexplained acronym.

[Leslie Sharp]

INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER H. P. ALBARELLI JR. 

ON THE SUBJECT OF 

PIERRE LAFITTE

       

. . . Former Army Colonel Albert R. Haney, who was a close and valuable source for this author’s investigation into Dr. Frank Olson’s murder, and was also quite close to CIA director Allen Dulles, after he valiantly assisted in bringing Dulles’s wounded son, Sonny, home from Korea, said [to Albarelli in Florida]: “I never met Lafitte, or whatever his name was, but I’d heard so much about him that I felt like I knew him. I’ll tell you this right up front: there were very few people like him, very few… I was told a story once, about an amazing incident where Angleton had somehow challenged Lafitte to try and fool him somehow. Anyway, a while later Angleton went to lunch one day and a very gracious maître d’ greeted him and took him to his table, where a most attentive waiter took his order and brought him his drinks. Angleton was there for about an hour or so and never once had any clue that the maître d’ and waiter were Pierre Lafitte, who greeted him on the sidewalk smiling broadly and still dressed as the waiter.” 

***

            Former FBN agent and high-ranking US Treasury Department official Malachi L. Harney made some studied observations of Lafitte in his little-known book devoted to the subject of classic informers and law enforcement officials. Harney introduced Lafitte as a “most interesting character” and the “type of person sometimes of invaluable assistance to the law enforcement officer, who is an outsider, but must be in a compartment of his own. This is a sort of ‘private eye’ individual but a very special variety of that genus.” Claimed Harney, conforming to the cover story put out by the FBN about Lafitte’s beginnings with the Bureau, and embellishing some on his own with the infamous Joseph Orsini drug-case story:

As an indication of his versatility, this man, who never had any previous contact with the narcotic traffic [sic], was able, when released from [Ellis Island] under security bond, to make a case resulting in the disclosure of a ring importing seventeen kilograms of heroin monthly through the Port of New York, through connivance of crewmen of the French Lines, who were members of a Corsican smuggling mob. Cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics with the French police brought about the seizure of a large clandestine heroin conversion plant in the outskirts of Paris. In addition to its magnitude, this case was highly important for its timing and for its revelation as to the source of a flood of heroin into New York. Lafitte, with Narcotic’s Bureau District Supervisor George H. White, went on from there to develop a case against a leading narcotics distributor in New England—a Mafia character who, as a sideline, had connections which enabled him to filch a steady supply of revolvers from a factory before the registry numbers of the weapons were recorded. 

Harney then speculated: “Lafitte would have been a great detective in any organization, combining a tremendously keen mind with a histrionic ability which made him an undercover operator par excellence. Some of his motivation to assist the law is quite simple. He had been able to make a good living at it, when one considers the rewards for recovering property and similar emoluments. He had a special reason for coming to us, in that he was anxious to enlist some official sympathy on trying to clarify an obscure, nationality status.” 

            Harney does not explain this status, nor does he tell us how Lafitte’s immigration status was ultimately resolved [the CIA resolved it, under pressure from Lafitte], but we do know that in 1957 Bernard Fensterwald, a former State Department employee and highly regarded attorney, who had just been hired by US Senator Thomas C. Hennings, Jr. contacted the FBI at the direction of Hennings to inquire about the Bureau’s reaction to a request to Hennings to sponsor legislation to block the deportation of Lafitte. FBI official Louis B. Nichols responded: “I told Fensterwald that this, of course, was a matter for the Immigration Service and, on a purely personal and confidential basis, the Senator should be exceedingly cautious before he got out on a limb; that if he inquired into Lafitte’s background he would find an extensive record; and that under no circumstances would the Bureau support Lafitte. I told him officially, of course, we could not take a position but that, personally, we would hate to see some friend embarrassed and that he should be very cautious. Fensterwald stated that was enough for him.”

            All of this, of course, significantly adds to the overall mystery that still, to this day, surrounds the man known as Pierre Lafitte, but here it is important to note that Bernard Fensterwald later, during the mid-1970s, launched a thorough investigation of his own into the assassination of President Kennedy that in part focused strongly on French soldier and OAS coordinator Jean Rene Souetre (and the then unidentified CIA operative OJ/WIN), as well as several other foreign assassins, who had been expertly trained in Spain by Otto Skorzeny. It seems highly likely that Fensterwald’s initial exposure to Pierre Lafitte may have led him to these strong JFK assassination leads. It also seems highly probable that at the same time Fensterwald was aware that Lafitte had been tasked with undercover work in France attempting to unearth Soviet moles burrowed into the French government. 

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yet another un-asked for, lengthy post from Leslie Sharp that has absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. Will it ever stop?

[Leslie Sharp]

9 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Yet another un-asked for, lengthy post from Leslie Sharp that has absolutely nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination. Will it ever stop?

Vince Salandria was rarely mistaken, but when he said, they'll wear you down,  he hadn't met Albarelli or those of us who recognized his revelations would shift the cold case murder investigation 180 degrees.

[Guest Doug Campbell]

The co-author said:

"...his revelations would shift the cold case murder investigation 180 degrees."

Did not, has not, will not.

Conspiracy Buff-Fluff.  Ineffable twaddlespeak.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

8 hours ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Vince Salandria was rarely mistaken, but when he said, they'll wear you down,  he hadn't met Albarelli or those of us who recognized his revelations would shift the cold case murder investigation 180 degrees.

Uh-huh. That must be why hardly any serious student of the Kennedy assassination believes your conclusions.

[Leslie Sharp]

5 hours ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

Uh-huh. That must be why hardly any serious student of the Kennedy assassination believes your conclusions.

Why don't you visit the reviews and the cover blurbs; get back to me when you have.

 

[Jonathan Cohen]

36 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said:

Why don't you visit the reviews and the cover blurbs; get back to me when you have.

 

I have. And the majority of reviews from actual students of the case find the book to not be credible.

[David Josephs]

9 hours ago, Doug Campbell said:

The co-author said:

"...his revelations would shift the cold case murder investigation 180 degrees."

Did not, has not, will not.

Conspiracy Buff-Fluff.  Ineffable twaddlespeak.

 

Doug... say it isn't so my man.

I understand those who have a limited grasp of the information available being overly skeptical... but you know better than that Doug.  You of all people know how difficult bringing forward evidence of this nature is - and I wonder for what possible gain, and to whom?

I keep a healthy amount of skepticism, yet am finding the timing of the notes and the timing of events that seemed unrelated before when seen from a different POV, make a different kind of sense.If it is i

And what is the conclusion of the "forgery" ?  Angleton, Barnes, W. Harvey (and many others directly related to ZR/RIFLE) - who we have suspected all along as being part of the Facilitators - are being shown in that very light.  

And you can't buy that?  Men connected via the trials of war and espionage who now sit atop one of the most powerful and clandestine apparatuses the world has known... and a young playboy president betraying their country to the Russians so that we and the communists can continue to "breathe the same air".

Is it truly that hard to accept that the Mil Ind Complex has its protectorate? That issues on the global stage are much more complicated than "getting out of Vietnam"? and the deepest and longest embracing of hatred after religion is ideology based - how to control the hearts and minds of the masses for "our" own ends.

We KNOW Oswald didn't do it
We KNOW the military enabled the post assassination cover-up with the SS, FBI, CIA & INS
We KNOW the CIA, Cubans, Mafia, Chi-comms, etc are cover narratives after the "Oswald did it" narrative is stripped away 
We KNOW there are powerful forces in this world which were even more empowered during the early 60's

I remain at a loss for why intelligent people cannot embrace what may be a roadmap to the very people we've suspected - with names of those never before considered - and the connections leading to a resolution.

When do we stop spending time showing Oswald didn't do it and start spending time looking into the evidence that may lead us to who did?

[Leslie Sharp]

1 hour ago, Jonathan Cohen said:

I have. And the majority of reviews from actual students of the case find the book to not be credible.

Do you mean Doudna and Litwin? Or perhaps Koch?  None of whom to my knowledge read Coup prior to issuing a public review.

Or do you mean Quinlan, Shaw, Storper, Montenegro, et al? Or Dick Russell's Foreword and limited analysis of the datebook?

How long have you been a "student" of the assassination, @Jonathan Cohen? I've yet to read a comment of yours that offers up original research or insight into events in Dallas.

Edited August 11, 2023 by Leslie Sharp