Uncovering Popov's Mole

[David Cooper]

I had a class where the teacher asked us to write an essay arguing whether persuasion was more effective than coercion or vice versa. Once we finished and turned in our essays he assigned us to write an essay taking the opposite point of view. Today, knowing what I have learned in the half century since then, I would argue that blackmail is far more compelling than persuasion--see the cases of Angleton, Nixon, etc. Roy Cohn & J. Edgar Hoover certainly were practitioners as well. Cynthia Chung's recent book, "The Empire on which the Black Sun Never Set" has very good information about this, as well as Whitney Webb's recent books--as Anthony Thorne mentioned. I particularly found the first volume, "One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 1" to be a great source of background information--long before Jeffrey Epstein got into this game. Was JFK blackmailed into accepting LBJ as his running mate as some accounts have suggested? Did FDR blackmail Hoover into compliance with his policies?

FYI, in "The Secret War Against the Jews", Loftus and Aarons have a different take on the true story of Israel's attack on the USS Liberty, based on their high-level intelligence sources, that presents a far more plausible explanation for what happened than most of the other discussions of this topic. 

[Benjamin Cole]

Great review, but I take issue with this:

"On the flip side, he (LHO) was a high-school drop-out with the writing skills of a dim-witted 12 year old, horrid with a gun and not professionally stable." ---Bleau

---30---

Writing skills: LHO had spelling problems, and not even a high school education, let alone a college degree.  It has been a while since I read his memoirs-diary (he wrote as advised by Mohrenschildt), but aside from the spelling, they were not so bad. 

Remember, LHO appeared on a live radio program, in an adversarial situation, and acquitted himself. Not so easy to do---at age 23 (?).

LHO was not "horrid with gun"; he managed to pass his last shooting test with the Marines. In any hunting party, he would probably be mediocre. "Mediocre with a gun," might be about right.

"Not professionally stable": LHO was well-regarded by Wesley Buell Frazier, his immediate supervisor at TSBD.  LHO had a honorable discharge from the Marines, and had gotten through Marine boot camp at age 16 or 17.  He job-hopped a little upon return to US. He held down his job in Russia. 

LHO was a chess player, and read an interesting and hardly low-brow only assortment of books from the New Orleans Public Library. 

Titovets in Russia, and Mohrenschildt, both smart guys (regardless of their politics), regarded LHO as an interesting conversationalist. Really, LHO was a dullard? 

Also, the idea that the Russians had low regard for LHO: Possibly true, but then possibly LHO wanted out of Russia and was not keen on making favorable impressions, and he seemed to instinctually distrust authority. 

The Russians may not have found LHO useful---but why? As LHO's loyalties were not to Moscow? 

 

 

 

[Michael Kalin]

Splendid book -- John Newman shows how to go about reconstructing murky events from the dim past. Chapter 15, "Uncovering Popov's Mole in the CIA," subtitled "The Quest for Provenance, Authenticity, and Multiple Independent Attestation in the Case of Popov's Mole," should be mandatory reading for JFK assassination researchers before devising scenarios. There's a tendency to stumble over the issues of provenance & authenticity, and getting tripped up altogether by a dearth of attestation. A few are actively discussed in this forum at almost any time.

The review describes the story well. No quibbles save one.

On the surface, the thesis seems to rest on solid foundations. What makes this reviewer hesitant to fully endorse it, is that it needs to be peer-reviewed by other hard to come by free-speaking intelligence experts.

No "seems" about it. The thesis rests on solid foundations. As to peer-review, promises more than it delivers, too often a mechanism for enforcing a craven orthodoxy.

That the big shots in "intelligence" were mean bastards will probably surprise nobody, but the ease with which they were duped may startle others as much as it startled me. Talking specifically about Angleton, Hoover & Helms, who must have learned their craft by watching Saps At Sea.

[Paul Brancato]

5 minutes ago, Michael Kalin said:

Splendid book -- John Newman shows how to go about reconstructing murky events from the dim past. Chapter 15, "Uncovering Popov's Mole in the CIA," subtitled "The Quest for Provenance, Authenticity, and Multiple Independent Attestation in the Case of Popov's Mole," should be mandatory reading for JFK assassination researchers before devising scenarios. There's a tendency to stumble over the issues of provenance & authenticity, and getting tripped up altogether by a dearth of attestation. A few are actively discussed in this forum at almost any time.

The review describes the story well. No quibbles save one.

On the surface, the thesis seems to rest on solid foundations. What makes this reviewer hesitant to fully endorse it, is that it needs to be peer-reviewed by other hard to come by free-speaking intelligence experts.

No "seems" about it. The thesis rests on solid foundations. As to peer-review, promises more than it delivers, too often a mechanism for enforcing a craven orthodoxy.

That the big shots in "intelligence" were mean bastards will probably surprise nobody, but the ease with which they were duped may startle others as much as it startled me. Talking specifically about Angleton, Hoover & Helms, who must have learned their craft by watching Saps At Sea.

A question for you - and bravo for reading the book closely. How sure are you that Angleton was duped? Is there another possible explanation?

[Michael Kalin]

37 minutes ago, Paul Brancato said:

How sure are you that Angleton was duped? Is there another possible explanation?

There's no room for doubt about either "Philby's close control over Angleton" [p.378] or Solie replacing Philby in the same influential role after the latter confessed & fled to the Soviet Union.

It is a fact that the legendary counterintelligence chief twice submitted to mentoring by men with whom he felt a need to share all of his most sensitive secrets. Instead of learning from his disastrous experience with Philby, Angleton simply waded into a second--even more submissive--relationship with Bruce Solie. When that experience, too, ended in disaster, Angleton's career ended in 1974, leaving him a broken man until his death in 1987. [ibid]

[Paul Brancato]

4 hours ago, Michael Kalin said:

There's no room for doubt about either "Philby's close control over Angleton" [p.378] or Solie replacing Philby in the same influential role after the latter confessed & fled to the Soviet Union.

It is a fact that the legendary counterintelligence chief twice submitted to mentoring by men with whom he felt a need to share all of his most sensitive secrets. Instead of learning from his disastrous experience with Philby, Angleton simply waded into a second--even more submissive--relationship with Bruce Solie. When that experience, too, ended in disaster, Angleton's career ended in 1974, leaving him a broken man until his death in 1987. [ibid]

Thanks for the quote. Maybe he was outsmarted. But isn’t it also possible he was the man behind the curtain? Definitely he played it like he was duped by Philby and spent the balance of his career trying to make up for that mistake, only in turn to again get played by Solie. I’m not convinced though, and the reason for that is it presumes a level of incompetence that Angleton otherwise did not demonstrate. Maybe the real idiots were the ones that didn’t fire him after the Philby defection, an inconceivable decision. McCone was in charge when Philby disappeared from Beirut in Jan 1963. He was new and perhaps not in the know. Id love to listen to his briefing when someone briefed him on Philby and Angleton. Meanwhile Angleton stays in place under LBJ and continues to work behind the scenes for Israel. I have to wonder whether Bagley felt the same as Newman does now. Does Newman give any indication what Bagley thought when Angleton survived such a horrendous scandal? 

[Michael Kalin]

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

Does Newman give any indication what Bagley thought when Angleton survived such a horrendous scandal?

Although Bagley figures heavily in UPM, I don't remember anything on point. Bagley authored several books. You may wish to look into them.

[Evan Marshall]

I bought the hardbound version but at 80 I need bigger print and the convivence of loading it on my laptop.

Edited June 22, 2023 by Evan Marshall

[Pete Mellor]

On 6/20/2023 at 8:30 PM, Paul Brancato said:

I’m not convinced though, and the reason for that is it presumes a level of incompetence that Angleton otherwise did not demonstrate.

Paul, I've had a similar impression of Angleton & have wondered if the popular image of 'the legendary CI chief' is really a true picture.

I have not read a detailed appraisal of his WWII CI work in Italy as chief of XI.  However, a number of Angleton's post war intelligence assets were exposed as frauds by John Whitten.  At CIA his world was largely a closed shop.  CI & CI/SIG were compartmentalised entities that seemed to operate without any external audit or control.  Angleton's operations were financed with totally unaudited funds.  He ran complete control of his own internal filing vaults and safes.  He held the same tight personal control of the Israeli desk.  His tenure ran through half a dozen agency Directors without any real interference or scrutiny.  Legend is defined as a story handed down, the truth of which has never been ascertained.  Could that be applied to J.A.?   Ann Goodpasture who worked closely with Angleton described him as weird.  I can well imagine his paranoia upon learning of a high echelon mole in Langley!  It must have driven him nuts for years.  Add the Philby defection in '63, along with KGB infiltration of British, French, W. German & NATO  agencies, his world was coming apart at the seams.  He then suspects many leading politicians around the globe of being Soviet agents.  Britain's Harold Wilson, Whitlam in Australia, Palme in Sweden, Trudeau in Canada and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.   He even suspected Averill Harriman & Henry Kissinger to be Soviet spies.  With the calamitous damage to SR division caused by SIG as a result of the internal mole hunt, it really wasn't until '74/75 with Petty's CIA report on the CI and its chief that any probative assessment of the situation in Angleton's domain had ever been produced, that no doubt caused William Colby to bring the curtain down, or perhaps up, on Angleton's career, that was in reality littered with failures and treasons.     

[Paul Brancato]

13 hours ago, Pete Mellor said:

Paul, I've had a similar impression of Angleton & have wondered if the popular image of 'the legendary CI chief' is really a true picture.

I have not read a detailed appraisal of his WWII CI work in Italy as chief of XI.  However, a number of Angleton's post war intelligence assets were exposed as frauds by John Whitten.  At CIA his world was largely a closed shop.  CI & CI/SIG were compartmentalised entities that seemed to operate without any external audit or control.  Angleton's operations were financed with totally unaudited funds.  He ran complete control of his own internal filing vaults and safes.  He held the same tight personal control of the Israeli desk.  His tenure ran through half a dozen agency Directors without any real interference or scrutiny.  Legend is defined as a story handed down, the truth of which has never been ascertained.  Could that be applied to J.A.?   Ann Goodpasture who worked closely with Angleton described him as weird.  I can well imagine his paranoia upon learning of a high echelon mole in Langley!  It must have driven him nuts for years.  Add the Philby defection in '63, along with KGB infiltration of British, French, W. German & NATO  agencies, his world was coming apart at the seams.  He then suspects many leading politicians around the globe of being Soviet agents.  Britain's Harold Wilson, Whitlam in Australia, Palme in Sweden, Trudeau in Canada and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt.   He even suspected Averill Harriman & Henry Kissinger to be Soviet spies.  With the calamitous damage to SR division caused by SIG as a result of the internal mole hunt, it really wasn't until '74/75 with Petty's CIA report on the CI and its chief that any probative assessment of the situation in Angleton's domain had ever been produced, that no doubt caused William Colby to bring the curtain down, or perhaps up, on Angleton's career, that was in reality littered with failures and treasons.     

Failures and treasons - good way to describe it. I’m inclined towards treasons.

[Evan Marshall]

After being involved in critical war industry in WW2, my Pop took a job in High Energy Physics search at Stanford University in Ca. He told me he never once forgot that he was 13th child of a Coal Mine veterinarian in Castle Gate, Utah. However, a number of his co-workers were so fixated on their own egos they were almost useless to deal with. His boss was the first of his family not to go into the mines of Russia while my Pop was the first of the Marshall family not to go into the mines of Utah.

Angleton was dazzled by his own " brillance" and probably got outsmarted many more times than we have record of.

[David Josephs]

I know this will be met with the usual vitriol - my armor is reinforced - really depends on which Oswald we speak...

the big, dumb Lee Harvey or the smaller, slighter intellectual Harvey Lee

The man Ruby killed was not a "dimwitted 12-year old"

Harvey on the left, August 1953.. turns 14 in Oct.  / On the right is 20 months earlier as a 6th grader at 5'4 115 lbs.

Boys don't hit puberty and get smaller and less muscular.

Further examples of the duality of Oswald below.  Yes, they are supposed to all be the same man

Namaste... DJ

.

 

 

On 6/16/2023 at 10:38 AM, Benjamin Cole said:

Great review, but I take issue with this:

"On the flip side, he (LHO) was a high-school drop-out with the writing skills of a dim-witted 12 year old, horrid with a gun and not professionally stable." ---Bleau

---30---

Writing skills: LHO had spelling problems, and not even a high school education, let alone a college degree.  It has been a while since I read his memoirs-diary (he wrote as advised by Mohrenschildt), but aside from the spelling, they were not so bad. 

Remember, LHO appeared on a live radio program, in an adversarial situation, and acquitted himself. Not so easy to do---at age 23 (?).

LHO was not "horrid with gun"; he managed to pass his last shooting test with the Marines. In any hunting party, he would probably be mediocre. "Mediocre with a gun," might be about right.

"Not professionally stable": LHO was well-regarded by Wesley Buell Frazier, his immediate supervisor at TSBD.  LHO had a honorable discharge from the Marines, and had gotten through Marine boot camp at age 16 or 17.  He job-hopped a little upon return to US. He held down his job in Russia. 

LHO was a chess player, and read an interesting and hardly low-brow only assortment of books from the New Orleans Public Library. 

Titovets in Russia, and Mohrenschildt, both smart guys (regardless of their politics), regarded LHO as an interesting conversationalist. Really, LHO was a dullard? 

Also, the idea that the Russians had low regard for LHO: Possibly true, but then possibly LHO wanted out of Russia and was not keen on making favorable impressions, and he seemed to instinctually distrust authority. 

The Russians may not have found LHO useful---but why? As LHO's loyalties were not to Moscow? 

 

 

 

 

[Paul Brancato]

Or met with silence. I’ll bite, but not with vitriol. Could you summarize how this theory elucidates the assassination itself? Was one of the Oswalds a shooter, or a patsy? If either, what was the other one up to? 

[Benjamin Cole]

4 hours ago, David Josephs said:

I know this will be met with the usual vitriol - my armor is reinforced - really depends on which Oswald we speak...

the big, dumb Lee Harvey or the smaller, slighter intellectual Harvey Lee

The man Ruby killed was not a "dimwitted 12-year old"

Harvey on the left, August 1953.. turns 14 in Oct.  / On the right is 20 months earlier as a 6th grader at 5'4 115 lbs.

Boys don't hit puberty and get smaller and less muscular.

Further examples of the duality of Oswald below.  Yes, they are supposed to all be the same man

Namaste... DJ

.

 

 

 

No vitriol. 

I find this expression useful, when it applies, inside the EF-JFKA for all discussions:

"We are just on different pages on this one." 

That expression does not signify one party is smarter, more ideologically pure, more knowledgeable, etc. than the other party.

I wish all participants adopted this tone, when there are different points of view.

Attacking another participant for their views on the EF-JFKA, or their political views, is offensive. 

LHO's writings (if they are his) from inside the radio plant in Minsk are fairly sophisticated. And they look like a first draft, at that. With editing and a second draft, I doubt many 22-year-olds could match. And LHO never got through high school.

The LHO that authored the Minsk paper was no dummy. 

 

 

Edited July 14, 2023 by Benjamin Cole

[David Josephs]

37 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

LHO's (HARVEY's) writings (if they are his) from inside the radio plant in Minsk are fairly sophisticated. And they look like a first draft, at that. With editing and a second draft, I doubt many 22-year-olds could match. And LHO (LEE) never got through high school.

Thanks Ben, well said.

I don't think we'll ever know the extent of Harvey's education, but as you said... and adding his talks on radio and at lectures - which on its face it difficult on it's own - he was extremely well versed...  rehearsed his own words or words provided is the question.  

John Edward (who married the daughter of Hungary Communist immigrants) knew it was not his brother ... 
Robert deserves much more scrutiny than he's been given.  his testimony timeline does not jive with the facts. (See bottom images)

1 hour ago, Paul Brancato said:

Or met with silence. I’ll bite, but not with vitriol. Could you summarize how this theory elucidates the assassination itself? Was one of the Oswalds a shooter, or a patsy? If either, what was the other one up to? 

As I see it,

• Harvey Oswald was made the patsy for the Tippit and JFK murders with evidence specifically created to do so.  He was building his bona fides to better infiltrate and report on the "Cuban" situations which turned out to also implicate him in the murders
• Lee Oswald is a mystery from 1959 until the summer of 1963* - his involvement in the assassination and/or setting up Harvey is a matter of interpretation and analysis of the individual events.  In their Hubris, the two Oswalds could have simply been a CIA experiment to see if they could do what the Russians and Germans and English had already perfected in their spy-craft - doppelgängers with sophisticated backstops   

Harvey being fingered for the JFK patsy makes the most sense when we see him somehow being steered to the TSBD job above all others.   Yet even this occurs weeks before Tampa and Chicago... If Vallee becomes the killed patsy... what becomes of Oswald and all that incriminating evidence... only FOUND after 12:30 on 11/22?  My take?  It never gets found as most of it never existed prior to 11/22.

Clear as mud? 

FWIW: The lies of Bill Randle to the FBI after telling the Secret Service something completely different is yet another aspect receiving little attention... see below

 

*August 1963
Dorothy Marcum was dating Jack Ruby in the summer of 1963 and her aunt worked for Ruby.109 Dorothy told the FBI she knew for a fact that Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby knew each other, because Oswald worked for Ruby in June and July (1963). In the summer of 1963 Jack Ruby was interviewing Francis Irene Hise for a job as a waitress when a young man came into the Carousel Club.  Ruby acknowledged the man by saying "Hi, Ozzie" and later joined him in the back room after finishing the interview with Francis. After Ruby hired Miss Hise the same young man came into the bar and asked if he could buy her a drink. After the assassination Miss Hise recognized "Ozzie" as "Lee Harvey Oswald."110

Other Ruby employees who claim to have seen Oswald at Ruby's Carousel Club include William Crowe, Wally Weston, Dixie Lynn, and Kathy Kay. In all, there were dozens of people who saw Lee Oswald and Ruby together in the summer of 1963-precisely when Harvey Oswald was working at Reily Coffee and residinf with his wife and child on Magazine Street.
During the last week of July (1963) Western Union employee Marshall Hicks delivered several telegrams to "Lee Harvey Oswald" at the Rotary Apartments,  1501- 1503 W. 7th Street in Dallas.113 The FBI made no attempt to locate copies of these telegrams.

Sept 1963
Dallas Police Detective H.M. Hart, of the Criminal Intelligence Division, received information from a Dallas Police confidential informant who knew Ruby. The
informant said that in September, 1963 Ruby rented an apartment at 223 South Ewing, for Lee Oswald (next door to Ruby's apartment building). The informant said the manager of the apartment asked Oswald to move because the manager did not like Oswald.114 The significance of these Ruby /Oswald sightings is that they occurred in the spring and summer of 1963, while Harvey and Marina were in New Orleans. It was Lee Oswald who knew and associated with Jack Ruby in the summer of 1963 and was familiar with CIA operatives, anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, Robert McKeown, and Cuban exiles from the Lake Pontchartrain camps. These sightings help to establish the time frame during which plans were formulated to use Lee Oswald to set up Harvey Oswald as a "patsy " in the assassination of President Kennedy.

 

The last image we know of LEE Oswald is from the image on his 1959 passport.  (The comparison is based on making the ears match as closely as possible)

All we know of Oswald, related to the assassination, is Harvey. 

On August 9 (Friday afternoon in New Orleans) Harvey Lee Oswald began handing out Fair Play for Cuba Committee leaflets in the 700 block of Canal Street, unaware that he was in the process of being set up as a ''patsy."   CIA Agent William Gaudet watched Oswald as he passed out the FPCC leaflets from his office in the International Trade Mart, while FBI informant Orville Aucoin took films of Oswald (later shown on national television). FBI photographers filmed the event with a 35 mm camera from across the street, while FBI informant Orest Pena watched.19   After talking with Oswald and the Cubans the arresting officer thought the leafleting incident was a staged event, designed to draw attention. The officer was correct but was unaware that two of the Cubans, Carlos Bringuier and Miguel  Cruz, were FBI informants and the third, Celso Hernandez, was a CIA contact.

 

The rest of the FBI report acknowledges Bill's awareness of Oswald working with Wesley and living a few doors down.