FINALLY, PROOF: Charles Tracy Barnes was the CIA Chief of Domestic Operations Division, Support!

[Gerry Down]

3 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said:

@Gerry DownGerry, are you familiar with the name Richard Thomas Gibson? He was among the original cofounders of FPCC in New York; by 1962 he had moved operations to Tangier, Morocco for some reason.  Documents indicate the agency considered recruiting him.  See what you think. https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1797&sort=agency

I mention Gibson because Tangier was a hotbed of intrigue, and a focal point during Hank's investigation:  Frank Wisner Jr. had recently joined the foreign service and his first post was Tangier. The name Wisner appears in the Lafitte datebook, as does Barnes (staying with the assumption that "T" in the datebook is Tracey Barnes).

We have yet to conclude that Lafitte's Wisner was the infamous Wisner Sr. of the Mighty Wurlitzer . . . most likely it was he and not his son; however, the Tangier post leaves open the possibility the young Wisner was being used by the agency under cloak of the State Department in Tangier.

We also know that Thomas Eli Davis was arrested in Tangier in November, and that some six weeks earlier he met Oswald at the Hotel Luma in Mexico City. Richard Gibson claimed to have known of Oswald via FPCC.

Your question re. Barnes' official whereabouts throughout 1963 is important; Alan Kent concentrated on that very question and discovered that his file goes dark for three months. It is worthwhile to revisit the question now that more files have been release. 

I'm familiar with Gibson. The YouTube channel, NoTrueFlagsHere, did a few videos on him a while back. Oswald may have contacted him in, I think, August 1962.

[Robert Montenegro]

15 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

"close but no cigarette".

 

Still, the closest damned cigarette in sixty flippin' years...

...of course, it is not my goal to convince one person, once again, no offense...

 

7 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said:

It is worthwhile to revisit the question now that more files have been release. 

 

Thank you, Leslie, you took my next point out of my hands before I could type it. Tracy Barnes' files from about May 1961 onwards are a dark hole.

That is why this file, along with Robert D. Morrow's unsubstantiated claims, are basically all we have to go on.

I would stress again, being cornered by provocateurs is what got me kicked off of the forum two years ago, so I refuse to engage in this monkey shine any further.

Pat me on the head, give me a cookie, and let's boogie.   

[Gerry Down]

9 minutes ago, Leslie Sharp said:

@Gerry DownYour question re. Barnes' official whereabouts throughout 1963 is important; Alan Kent concentrated on that very question and discovered that his file goes dark for three months. It is worthwhile to revisit the question now that more files have been released. 

Interesting. Which 3 months in 1963 does his file go dark?

And where can Alan Kent's work on Tracey Barnes be viewed?

[Leslie Sharp]

16 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

I'm familiar with Gibson. The YouTube channel, NoTrueFlagsHere, did a few videos on him a while back. Oswald may have contacted him in, I think, August 1962.

Not sure.  You may be aware of the Moroccan living in Russia who said that he dated Marina before she met Oswald?

 

[Leslie Sharp]

16 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

Interesting. Which 3 months in 1963 does his file go dark?

And where can Alan Kent's work on Tracey Barnes be viewed?

Posted earlier today on this thread (see final paragraph for history of Kent's essay on Barnes):

Barnes remains the prime candidate for Lafitte's "T." Without doubt, your [Robert Ward Montenegro] research strengthens the argument.

Other candidates under consideration while Hank was alive included J. Walton Moore whose good friend Col. Lawrence Orlov appears in the Lafitte datebook.  Hank and I contemplated that Moore as COS Dallas was T, responsible for an operational structure not dissimilar to QJ/WIN or WI/Rogue organized for the one off Lancelot Project — the plan to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas where Moore was based and where Orlov engaged in the oil business. In short, there was more than one T functioning from early 1963 through November.

Another candidate was Birch Dilworth O'Neal, for reasons I won't elaborate on in this thread lest it detracts from Robert's brilliant research.

Lastly, Hank left me with notes to pursue clues to Ukraine connections to the Dallas hit, specifically Gen. Charles Willoughby's close ties to OUN leader Jarslov Stetzco. So we went in search, and have since pursued a number of avenues including one Steve Tanner who was among the first two hundred OSS recruits, and responsible for Eastern European ops to infiltrate Ukrainian solders into Soviet Russia.  Tanner is identified in Otto Skorzeny's private papers as revealed by Major Ralph Ganis in "The Skorzeny Papers," and according to Ralph, Steve and Otto formed a lifelong friendship. In a classic incident of "high strangeness and synchronicity" that followed Albarelli around, Tanner retired to a lake resort less than an hour's drive from Pierre Lafitte's last residence.

For these reasons, Hank decided that Alan Kent's thorough analysis and convincing argument: Tracy Barnes was a pivotal character in the plot and Lafitte identified him, for some unknown reason, simply as T, (likely because he had been knows as Trick among agent comrades for years) — would be presented in essay form as a stand-alone document in the appendix of Coup. He considered this investigation a "work in progress," and anticipated precisely what unfolds here and on other venues in pursuit of a common goal: to solve the cold case murder investigation of Jack Kennedy.  For now, Barnes as "T" makes the most sense 

[Leslie Sharp]

25 minutes ago, Gerry Down said:

Interesting. Which 3 months in 1963 does his file go dark?

And where can Alan Kent's work on Tracey Barnes be viewed?

Gerry, following is the preliminary draft of Alan Kent's essay titled, "T" In The Lafitte Datebook. The final edit is published in the appendix of Coup in Dallas:

 

THE FOLLOWING IS A VERSION OF THE T ESSAY ANIMATED BY YOUR COMMENTARY. SOME SUGGESTED CHANGES WERE MADE, SOME SUGGESTIONS WERE ARGUED AGAINST, AND A SMALL HANDFUL ARE LEFT TO YOUR SAGE DISCRETION! THE ENDNOTES ARE BROKEN DOWN INTO MORE DIGESTIBLE MORSELS, AS IS SOME OF THE TEXT MATERIAL. WE GO...FORWARD.

“T” IN THE LAFITTE DATEBOOK: FINAL THOUGHTS

 

 

 

Since it became obvious – very early on – that the character who Pierre Lafitte refers to as T in the notes he created in the course of acting as project manager for the assassination of President Kennedy was a crucial link in the plot, we have all (Hank Albarelli, Leslie Sharp, and myself) been attempting to use the evidence that Lafitte presented to us as a guidepost to identifying this person. I have explored multiple possibilities over the past several months. John Tilton was a starting point, but there was not nearly enough to suggest that he was involved in the plot. William Kent (Robert Trouchard) was a more interesting candidate; a long-time Agency operative who worked closely with David Phillips, running propaganda operations out of Miami’s JMWAVE CIA station and, as Chief of Covert Operations at WAVE during 1962 and a part of 1963, supervised George Joannides, who was involved in what looks to be the operational use of Lee Oswald in 1963. Kent made a remark to his family that closely resembled what T said to Lafitte about Oswald, and he may well have spent part of what is a mysterious transition time for him in New Orleans in 1963, although that interpretation must be inferential. As John Newman said about him in Dallas last year: “He was a bad man.” Still, he never rose to the level of power and respect in CIA that T seemed to have, and in the end, I could not tie him as closely as is necessary to the role. I will say this about him, echoing what Antonio Veciana famously told Gaeton Fonzi about David Attlee Phillips: “It’s not him. But he knows.” Kent is a future research project for anyone who is deeply interested in the covert shenanigans that enveloped the world that Oswald moved in.

 

Finally, I decided that Bernardo de Torres was T, and laid out a case for that scenario. De Torres was a better candidate than the previously-examined CIA men. And I still think that a very good case can be made for him as a knowing participant in the plot that Lafitte was managing. From a combination of the testimony of Angelo Murgado, Gerry Hemming, Rolando Otero, de Torres’ close associate Juan Adames, and the timeline hit of PL’s “D/T” engaging with Oswald on the crucially important date of September 24, 1963, I think that de Torres’ role can be reliably inferred. Still, T to Lafitte was not only a figure who Pierre seemed to defer to and respect, but he was clearly a very large presence in Agency circles. T was trusted to relay instructions from James Angleton, and was involved in personal meetings of great importance in Madrid, New Orleans, and Dallas in October and November of ’63. That doesn’t sound like Bernardo; not really. Leslie posed the question: “Can you see de Torres sitting down with Ilse Skorzeny?!” No, I can’t. It doesn’t work. – (Added back in light of our last conversation that touched on the potential value of outlining “the process” for the reader. Your call!)

 

A few months ago, Dick Russell suggested the possibility that T was the elite CIA legend Tracy Barnes. Subsequently, I have made lists of the characteristics of T as he appears in the datebook, and have overlaid this information with various potential “Ts,” including Barnes. I have also utilized the valuable insights gleaned from extensive conversation among Albarelli, Sharp, and myself. What do we know – or can reasonably infer – about T as he moves through the pages of the datebook?

 

1.)    There are only two people that Lafitte repeatedly refers to by a single initial. One is T. The other is Otto Skorzeny. Clearly, Skorzeny was both a key player in this story, and a long-time, highly respected affiliate of Lafitte’s. It seems very likely that Twas a similarly renowned figure in the circles that Pierre had moved in.

2.)    As mentioned, T is acting as an intermediary between Angleton and Lafitte. He is also, at times, making decisions on various matters. “T says no,” and “T says yes” are examples of these directives. Apparently, T was highly trusted by the ultimate author(s) (Re: “authors” vs “deciders,” don’t think the difference is significant) of the project designed to eliminate JFK. Lafitte, who was a powerfully independent force, seems to take direction from T.

3.)    That T acts as a conduit of instructions from Angleton – and is mentioned in the December 5 entry with Angleton (“JA – close out Lancelot – T”) - indicates that this person is very close to Angleton; probably a long-time colleague of Angleton’s.

4.)    Assuming that T is a long-time colleague of Angleton’s, and a “presence” in intelligence circles, the fact that he is actively involved in this project is a likely indication that he regarded JFK as did numerous CIA hard-liners: as a betrayer at the Bay of Pigs, and as a national security threat for multiple reasons, which have been thoroughly covered in the historical literature of the period.

5.)    That T is available for multiple personal meetings during October and November of 1963 in Dallas and New Orleans is indicative of T having some sort of plausible official business to attend to in these cities. 

6.)    If T was a high-level performer in intelligence circles, his participation in a plot to kill Kennedy certainly indicates a “rogue” personality. Very likely, there would be other indications of him acting independently of formal chains of command. (Rogue from JJA? No, not necessary; the op itself is pretty “rogue!”)

7.)    T is engaging in a complex plot to assassinate a sitting president, and is trusted by those who conceived this plot to operate at a high degree of competence. This is probably not the first time that he has been involved in the directing of subordinates who are preparing for a political assassination.

 

To summarize the picture of T as he emerges in the pages of the datebook, he seems to be a highly regarded, probably high-ranking, long-standing colleague of Jim Angleton who (like JA, as depicted in several of Lafitte’s entries) is confident that he can move outside the formal structure of command to engage in a plot that he regards as necessary to remove a “national security” threat from power, who has experience with the strategy and tactics of organizing political assassinations at a high level in the past and, in 1963, was positioned such that he could engage with plotters in New Orleans and Dallas without drawing undue suspicion to himself. Of course, T would also be someone whose first or last name begins with the letter T. 

 

Without delving into the history of multiple speculative attempts to tie these characteristics to various people, I am going to focus on Tracy Barnes. Because a study of Barnes’ lengthy career at CIA provides hits on every one of the seven points listed above. I’m not going to attempt a biography of Barnes – something that should certainly be executed by an enterprising historian – but I will cite material that seems relevant to a judgement about Barnes as T. In the interest of clarity, I will approach Barnes from the standpoint of the portrait of T that emerges from the Lafitte datebook entries, in an attempt to arrive at a reasonable position on the identity of T. Or rather, I will attempt to reconstruct the path I traveled toward the conclusion that T was very likely Barnes. The data that I choose to feature will be very plainly cherry-picked. I have no doubt that Barnes was capable of great charm. By all accounts, he was a fine husband and family man. In his final post-CIA stint, he apparently did excellent work in race relations for Yale in a role as a kind of ambassador to inner-city New Haven. But in his work at CIA, he was as hard and ruthless as many of his less genteel comrades. No less an operator as Richard Helms considered him to be reckless and irresponsible. His wife Janet said of Barnes that during his time as Chief of Staff at two Agency postings in the 1950s, “Every morning, Tracy got up and went to war.” It is Barnes as risk-taking warrior that we are primarily interested in here.

 

BARNES

Was Barnes of the stature – within the intelligence community, and particularly within the realm of covert operations – that Pierre Lafitte would defer to him in a matter of such importance as the assassination of President Kennedy? I think so. A brief overview of Barnes’ career follows…Barnes was among a small handful of Agency operatives who virtually defined the nature of covert operations, and of Agency-related political violence. With an OSS background, and a well-deserved reputation for daring that was made during the Second World War, Barnes’ path into CIA was cleared by the man who would mentor him and who would act as his patron as long as he was in power within CIA – Allen Dulles. Dulles had been taken with Barnes immediately upon meeting with him in 1944. Dulles wrote his OSS superior David Bruce: “I have met Tracy Barnes here today and am anxious to get him to Switzerland as soon as possible…We can find useful work for him.” 

 

Barnes’ first major post-war positions overlapped for a time. During 1950-1952, he served as counsel to the Undersecretary of the Army, and held the position of Deputy Director of the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB came to be in April, 1951, as an Army project, designed to interface between the Department of State, the Defense Department, and the National Security Council, in order to formulate national policy on matters that were very broadly categorized as “psychological operations.” In 1953, it was placed under the control of the NSC, and specialized in creating psy-op plans for scenarios of battle against Communism but, as had the PSB, ranged widely in its interests. The Board’s name was changed to the “Operations Control Board,” and it lived until 1961, when incoming President Kennedy elected to axe it. "It functioned primarily as a small, but carefully selected, staff operation helping to formulate policy in specific areas of the utmost sensitivity," wrote Eric Chester. The PSB “grew to be a monster, out of control…” said Townsend Hoopes, then an aide to Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Russ Baker, in "Family of Secrets," wrote that the PSB "explored everything from the use of psychotropic drugs as truth serum to the possibility of engineering unwitting assassins..."

 

Baker does not source this sentence, but a recently-published study of PSB/CIA interaction during this period of time finds evidence that PSB liaised with the Agency in matters related to the 1950s CIA "mind control" projects Artichoke, Bluebird, and MKULTRA. The author of the study notes that available documentary evidence on these relations is scanty. John Prados, who researched PSB through the resources at the Truman Library, explained the paucity of evidence: "In December 1988, after the author wrote about the PSB in a systematic way for the first time, the CIA sent a plane with a team of armed guards to Kansas City. The team went to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Mo., seized the PSB records, and returned them to Washington...The CIA held onto the records for months, extracted several hundred documents from the set, and only then returned them to the Truman Library. It cannot have been the quality of the PSB's planning for psychological warfare that accounted for this degree of concern at Langley." 

As is the case with subsequent career adventures, Barnes' work with this strange organization is less than clear. For the record, it will be noted that Barnes’ stint with the PSB, which apparently interacted with CIA mind control experiments, corresponds with the time period that Pierre Lafitte was engaged with George Hunter White in the process of setting up scenarios in Greenwich Village in which unsuspecting victims were given frequently massive does of LSD and related hallucinogenic drugs, activity that was being sponsored by CIA under the aegis of “Project Artichoke,” and that Federal Bureau of Narcotics operative White and FBN “special employee” Lafitte had been vetted for this project by head of CIA Counterintelligence James J. Angleton.

 

Barnes formally entered the CIA in 1952, riding Dulles’ recommendation to the Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner. Not that Wisner would have needed much prompting. Barnes had worked with Wisner during the 1930s at the Wall Street law firm Carter, Ledyard, and Milburn, following his legal training at Harvard Law School. When, in 1952, then-Deputy Director of CIA Dulles and Wisner placed him at the head of the newly-created “PP” staff (Psychological and Paramilitary warfare), Barnes was being fast-tracked toward the top of the intelligence community. The formal title of the position he achieved in October of '52 was: "Assistant Director of CIA for OPC," a heady accomplishment that bespoke deep connections with powerful men, people who would promote and protect Barnes as long as they enjoyed positions of power. When a member of Barnes’ PP staff, E. Howard Hunt, once requested advice from Barnes on the most efficient way to “dispose” of a suspected European double agent, Barnes sent him to PP staffer Boris Pash, who was supposed to be in charge of arranging such matters. Hunt later claimed that Pash showed little interest in his request. Evan Thomas wrote: “If Pash showed restraint, it was self-imposed. Barnes, his colleagues said, was willing to try just about anything.” Let’s keep that judgement in mind as we head toward Guatemala.

 

The effort by the Eisenhower administration to destabilize and topple the government of Guatemalan leader Jacob Arbenz was the venture in which numerous CIA personnel gained the future trust of D.C. politicos. It was the time of Tracy Barnes’ life. Barnes was placed in a formal position of command of PBSUCCESS by then CIA Director Allen Dulles. By this time, Barnes was a grade GS-18 employee, and he reported only to Dulles' Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner during the 1953-54 Guatemalan operation. The story of PBSUCCESS has been told often. Suffice to say that it was the operation that earned the CIA the gratitude and trust of Eisenhower, and had the toxic effect of convincing Dulles and his most trusted men that they could accomplish just about anything. Two aspects of PBSUCCESS that have to do with the development of Barnes are of interest here. In the process of creating the team that would manage to combine psychological, intelligence, and military tactics in the course of persuading Arbenz to flee his country, Barnes brought together an all-star bunch of past and future Agency talent. David Phillips, E. Howard Hunt, Rip Robertson, David Morales, Col. Al Haney, and Henry Hecksher all utilized their formidable skills for Barnes. Several of these characters would later be of interest to researchers of the assassination of JFK. It should also be noted that the CIA Chief of Staff in Guatemala during this time was Birch O'Neal, a former FBI man. O'Neal would later be selected by James Angleton to head Angleton's darkest hole in CIA counterintelligence, CI/SIG, the "special investigative group" which would - belatedly - open a CIA 201 file on Lee Oswald a year after he had defected to the Soviet Union. If Oswald was being handled as a "vest pocket" operation by Angleton, as many of the deepest researchers into the JFK murder now believe, O'Neal would very likely have been the only Agency officer who Angleton would have shared details of that project with. No question that Barnes would have closely liaised with O'Neal during the Guatemalan operation.

 

And, regarding assassination, plans for the disposal of Guatemalan assets of Arbenz, as well – potentially – of Arbenz himself were on the table during the life of PBSUCCESS. In 1953, a CIA officer proposed the assassination of Arbenz in a manner that would suggest the culpability of Guatemalan Communists who had turned on Arbenz. Numerous plans to hit various members of the Guatemalan government floated in and around the anti-Arbenz effort. The beneficiary of the U.S. coup against Arbenz, Castillo Armas, had at his disposal special “K” groups, whose purpose was to kill leading political and military leaders within the Arbenz government. In the end, Arbenz was tricked into defeat, and – as far as is known – these plans were not put into action. But Barnes was deeply involved with them. In response to a request from Al Haney, CIA HQ sent a five page roster of 58 Guatemalans who were marked for assassination, including "high government and organizational leaders" suspected of Communist leanings. This targeted killing was approved by Frank Wisner, and by Barnes. The mindset that Barnes brought to the Guatemalan operation – and a telling indication of his core views – was his response to the concerns expressed by a young David Attlee Phillips, who Barnes recruited to run a “black” propaganda radio station. Purportedly, Phillips expressed some doubt about participating in the overthrow of a democratically elected government. The answer that he quotes Barnes as giving him (in his autobiographical “The Night Watch”) showed that Dulles’ and Wisner’s choice to head what they regarded as a vital Cold War mission had no doubts: “It’s not a question of Arbenz. Nor of Guatemala. We have solid intelligence that the Soviets intended to throw substantial support to Arbenz…Guatemala is bordered by Honduras, British Honduras, Salvador, and Mexico. It’s unacceptable to have a Commie running Guatemala.”

 

After Arbenz was defeated, in an operation that involved “Frank Bender,” among others, Barnes and a handful of his top men were congratulated personally by President Eisenhower, and Barnes was rewarded with two stellar CIA Chief of Staff posts, in Frankfurt, Germany, and in London. In Germany, Barnes attempted to nurture and encourage a group of European emigres who had volunteered to serve as a secret CIA paramilitary force. This was part of a mostly-discarded vision of “rolling back” Communism; a plan that Dulles and Wisner at CIA and numerous hard-core Air Force and Navy men had played with for years. Jim Critchfield, a CIA officer who had served as a liaison to the Gehlen organization, told Thomas that, in the late 1950s, “he [Barnes] still believed in rollback. There was no gap between Tracy and Wiz. Tracy tried to keep the émigré force alive while he was in Germany.”  He returned to the United States in 1960 to take the number two position (Assistant Director of Plans) under the DD/P, Richard Bissell, in the Cuban project designed to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Bissell left a great deal of the Cuba Project operational tasks to Barnes, including the myriad assassination plots that were developed during this time period. Barnes was hip-deep in the theory and practice of political assassinations during the early 1960s. David Wise, in “The American Police State…” describes Barnes’ approval of a plan to eliminate an Iraqi colonel, a suspected Communist sympathizer, with a poisoned handkerchief. In 1961, a senior CIA official approved the delivery of three carbine guns to Dominican Republic dissidents who were interested in eliminating Trujillo. Subsequently, one of the guns was found in the possession of one of Trujillo’s reported assassins. In an interview given for a 1999 oral history-based study of CIA operatives, Richard Bissell stated that Barnes had authorized the transfer of the carbines, claiming that “…almost certainly, the State Department would have been consulted.” No evidence exists that anyone above or parallel to CIA’s DD/P was notified of this contribution to the murder of Trujillo, an assassination which Col. William C. Bishop claimed – in a very detailed account – to have participated in. Deputy Chief of the CIA History Staff Michael Warner delineated an important aspect of Barnes’ role at the time in his valuable study “The CIA’s Internal Probe of the Bay of Pigs Affair”: “Although he [Barnes] rarely imposed operational direction himself, he often reviewed and approved decisions in Bissell’s name.” In other words, Barnes was willing and able to step outside formal chains of command to set in motion plans that he believed were necessary – even, as in the Trujillo matter, when they involved the operational details of a political assassination.

 

It is widely accepted today that CIA’s planning for the Bay of Pigs landing was premised on two eventualities that did not occur: 1.) That Castro and several of his key men would be assassinated prior to or during the invasion, and 2.) That if – or, more accurately, when - the invasion began to fail, President Kennedy would fully commit forces for an invasion of Cuba. CIA assassination planning against Castro at the time was being vetted from the offices of the DDP, allowing “deniability” to CIA head Dulles. Larry Hancock writes: “Although Bissell denied any knowledge of Castro assassination projects to the CIA’s own Inspector General, confirmation of his role is now available from numerous sources…This suggests that Bissell, and very likely Barnes, were at the center of virtually every CIA assassination project of the early 1960s, perhaps explaining Barnes’ bland reassurances to Howard Hunt that everything was under control ( a response given when Hunt kept proposing that Castro should be assassinated). It may also explain why Barnes was very much aware of special circumstances that would have found the Brigade arriving in a leaderless and chaotic Cuba. That would help make a great deal more sense out of the planned invasion…” The Bay of Pigs attack on Castro's Cuba was to have been a replica of the success had in Guatemala, and most of the Agency officers who had served under Barnes during that operation were re-assembled for the Cuban venture. 

 

Reportedly, the dramatic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion had such an effect on Barnes that he became physically ill for several months. His wife Janet would say that Tracy was “sick at heart.” “The phone rang, day and night, the families of the people killed. Tracy’s only way to deal with it was to keep working. He was very bitter about how it happened – about the Kennedys.” When CIA IG Lyman Kirkpatrick wrote up a scathing internal examination of CIA Bay of Pigs planning, directly pointing at the "delusions" of Barnes and Bissell, Barnes was tasked by Bissell to offer up a response. He drafted the DD/P rebuttal to Kirkpatrick, completing it in January, 1962. Barnes argued that the invasion had not been given a real chance to succeed and that Kirkpatrick had nit-picked alleged CIA mistakes, when the real fault lay in the failure by the Kennedy administration to remove Cuban T-33 jets with a devastating “D-Day” airstrike. “It is impossible to say how grave was [CIA’s] error of appraisal, since the plan that was appraised was modified by the elimination of the D-Day airstrike. Had the Cuban Air Force been eliminated, all these estimates might have been accurate instead of underestimated…” wrote Barnes. The fast-and-loose game Barnes played with air strikes that had never been promised by Kennedy would buttress the prevailing view of CIA hard-liners that “one more airstrike would have saved the Brigade” as Michael Warner wrote.

 

 

Kennedy's disinclination to move toward an overt war-footing as the Cuban exile invaders were being slaughtered at Playa Giron would blacken his name for all time among those Cuban and American participants in the failed invasion. As far down the road as 1998, Grayston Lynch, one of the two CIA paramilitary officers who were directing the army faction that went to war in the Bay of Pigs invasion, would write a book titled: "Decision For Disaster," in which he railed at Kennedy administration cowardice, using the same arguments that Barnes had laid out in his response to the IG Report. The other CIA trainer who watched his men perish while waiting for JFK to act was Barnes' Guatemalan paramilitary expert, Rip Robertson. 

 

In 2001, British author Matthew Smith introduced an important story to American readers. Smith was told this story by a man who he and many others regarded as a very reliable source. In November, 1963, Wayne January was a partner in an aviation company based at Dallas' Redbird Airfield. The company January represented owned a small fleet of DC-3 planes, which they were attempting to sell off. The final plane was sold by phone in mid-November to an entity called the Houston Air Center. The buyer sent a man who January described as an Air Force colonel to sign for the plane on November 18. The military man brought with him a Cuban pilot who would check the plane over prior to the completion of the deal. Over the next few days, the pilot and January got to know one another and established a certain trust. On November 21, as final work on the plane was about done, the pilot told January that "They are going to kill your President." January - shocked - asked a simple question: "Why? Why would anyone want to do that?" The pilot told January that he had been a mercenary, hired by CIA for participation in the Bay of Pigs invasion. He described the horror of the final day of the invasion; the brutal "mopping up" that Castro's forces inflicted on the men who were sent on an impossible mission by the Agency. He emphasized that the people above him, the people that he believed to be involved in a plan to kill JFK, were animated by the "betrayal" of the President.

 

January had kept the tail number of the Douglas DC-3 that was sold to the Houston Air Center, and subsequent research validated the history of the plane as January had remembered it. The point of this story is not necessarily that the Air Force colonel, or the Houston Air Center, or the Cuban pilot, were involved in the assassination. But the pilot knew something. And he knew that hatred of Kennedy due to what many perceived as being criminal negligence at the time of the Bay of Pigs operation was one of the motives of those who were involved in the assassination. There were other motives that moved those who became enmeshed in the plot that Pierre Lafitte inadvertently chronicled for future generations. Some were no doubt "economic," in a selfish sense. "Coup in Dallas..." presents evidence that JFK's sexual dalliances with women who could have been seen as being Soviet agents played a part in the run-up to the assassination. But the full-on hatred of Kennedy by right-wing "national security" zealots began in early 1961. As Don DeLillo wrote in Libra, "...after the Bay of Pigs, nothing was the same." And it wasn't. Not for Kennedy. Not for the men at the helm of CIA who Kennedy sent packing: Dulles, Cabell, and Bissell. And, soon after their departure, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George H. Decker. And not for the one high-level Bay of Pigs planner who walked between the raindrops without being drenched in the aftermath of the disaster: Tracy Barnes

 

I will return to a survey of Barnes’ post-Bay of Pigs career in a moment, focusing on the time period that is most relevant to our inquiry. But we should probably ask – and answer – a key question that was implicitly raised in my earlier portrait of T. Was Barnes close to the man who was one of the key planners of the assassination of President Kennedy, CIA Head of Counterintelligence James Angleton? T certainly was. And, so too was Tracy Barnes. Barnes and Angleton were both Yale men, and both had attended Harvard Law School, although Angleton did not graduate. Barnes, a few years older than Angleton, did not attend these institutions at the same time as did Angleton, but both men were members of Yale’s secret society “Scroll and Key,” the major rival of the more famous “Skull and Bones” for the souls of young Yale men. Purportedly, Scroll and Key possesses the silverware of Adolf Hitler in its archives. Be that as it may, membership in a blueblood society such as Scroll and Key is a life-long bonding experience. Angleton and Barnes – and their wives – also met with some regularity at the Washington D.C. society gatherings that became known as the “Georgetown Set” during the 1950s. These meetings began in the late 1940s, organized by Frank Wisner, and featured the reminisces of former OSS men, such as Angleton and Barnes. Barnes’ secretary when he was Assistant DD/P, Alice McIlvaine, told long-time CIA operative George Holmes that “everyone in the clandestine service” at that time, regularly attended meetings at the DD/P’s office – except Angleton, who was notorious for going his own way. In contrast, McIlvaine said, “When Angleton called, Tracy ran to his office.”

 

After the post-Bay of Pigs purge of the top echelon of CIA by President Kennedy, Barnes was still employed, but there is a great deal of murkiness about his work-related activities from late 1961 through the early part of 1963. There is reason to believe that Barnes was involved in the use of CIA proprietary companies as cover instruments, which foreshadowed his 1963 role as head of CIA’s Domestic Operations Division. Joe Trento, in “The Secret History of the CIA,” relates the story of an August 1961 briefing that Barnes gave to top CIA officials regarding covert projects. Barnes touted the purchase of a cigarette factory in Africa as cover for Agency operations. Justin O’Donnell, Bill Harvey’s deputy at Division D – a man who had refused to be directly involved in CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba, and who was becoming increasingly wary of covert action, blew up at Barnes and exclaimed: “A cigarette factory in the middle of Africa? For Christ’s sake! What in God’s name are we going to do with it?” As Larry Hancock writes, he probably was “giving Barnes grief, since he knew that it was a cover for an assassination project.” O’Donnell had been a top-notch Agency employee for years, but after he questioned Barnes dramatically, he was on the street within three weeks, attesting to Barnes’ continued power and to his unwillingness to brook dissent. One of Barnes’ 1961-’62 duties was coordinating payments to the families of National Guard volunteers killed during the Bay of Pigs invasion. In Victor Marchetti’s “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” the former executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms revealed that these payments were being handled under Agency cover through Double-Chek Corporation. Barnes’ involvement with CIA proprietaries was a signature feature of his career. As a summation of Barnes’ tendencies by a knowledgeable source who dealt with him frequently during the early 60’s, Jake Esterline, Task Force Chief for the Bay of Pigs operation, told CIA historian Jack Pfeiffer that Gerry Droller (“Frank Bender”) had been brought into the operation, along with E. Howard Hunt, to handle the “political aspects” related to the plan, and that he (Esterline) “sort of” ran Bender, but that he “never knew what Tracy was going to do next, when I turned my back…” 

 

Thomas writes: “For a long time, he [Barnes] wanted to get the CIA involved in spying in the United States, just as MI-6 ran a London field station.” Of course, CIA was specifically barred from such activity. Nonetheless, Barnes got his wish. CIA’s Domestic Operations Division is shrouded in a great deal of mystery to this day. One will find start dates for the organization that range from 1962-1964 in published material. A part of this confusion probably lies in the fact that some of what DOD was involved in was ongoing informally before it had a proper home. However, according to a CIA IG report, DOD was officially inaugurated on February 2, 1963. Thomas quotes Howard Hunt, who was brought into DOD by Barnes as his Covert Operations chief, to the effect that DOD under Barnes was less than what Tracy had desired, that it was a “trash heap for ops that no one else wanted.” The specific actions that DOD was supposed to have been created for involved the conducting of clandestine operations within the U.S. against “foreign targets,” entities or individuals who were alleged to be operating in the U.S. under the control of foreign powers; practically speaking, under Communist control. The word “foreign” provided a fig leaf of legitimacy for this division, but the designation of its responsibilities in the once-classified document that formalized DOD stated that the scope of its activities was to “exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activity within the United States.”  Far from being the “trash heap” Hunt described, the creation of this division of CIA provided carte blanche for activities that were supposed to be beyond the pale for the Agency. DOD would later play a part in the massive rights violations that were part and parcel of CIA’s “Operation Chaos.” Barnes continued to deal extensively with CIA proprietary companies during his stint as head of DOD, offering up opportunities for the clandestine moving of funds for “off the books” projects. Victor Marchetti spoke haltingly of DOD to researcher Bill Davy, after offering up the opinion that Clay Shaw’s extant Agency documentary record suggested that Shaw was working for Barnes’ mysterious unit: “It was one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services. This was Tracy Barnes’ old outfit. They were getting into things…uh…exactly what, I don’t know. But they were getting into some pretty risky areas. And this is what E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time…” Malcolm Blunt, the premier source on the clandestine history of CIA as revealed in both documentary evidence and oral history, recently responded to my question about the activities of Barnes’ DOD simply by shaking his head. 

 

While the precise nature of what Barnes was doing as head of DOD in 1963 cannot be laid out with precision, Hancock offers a very plausible guess: “The full nature of Barnes’ new Domestic Operations Division is undocumented; it seems likely that it included the responsibility for intelligence collection through the previously existing CIA Domestic Contact Service…” DCS, a long-standing CIA presence by 1963, was tasked with the exploitation of “foreign intelligence information” from sources within the United States who were suspected of having developed such information while visiting foreign countries of interest. Certainly, that would have included a defector to a “denied” Communist country such as Lee Oswald. DCS operated field offices within the U.S. “for purposes of intelligence collection, operational support, and other assigned missions.” As in the internal description of the purposes of DOD, there is a great deal of slipperiness in this mission statement.

 

A BRIEF STOP: J. WALTON MOORE AND ASSOCIATES

A few days before his death, George de Mohrenschildt told author Edward Epstein that he had been contacted by the head of DCS in Dallas, J. Walton Moore, in 1961, several months prior to Lee Oswald’s return from the Soviet Union, and briefed about Oswald. De Mohrenschildt was a frequently-used source of Moore’s, dating back into the late 1950s. Moore would later dissemble when testifying about his contacts with de Mohrenschildt, stating that he had seen George infrequently in the 1960s, but de Mohrenschildt’s wife Jeanne called Moore up on this, claiming that she and George quite frequently dined with Moore and his wife. While it is often stated in the literature that Barnes was “Moore’s boss” from his perch as head of DOD, this assertion cannot be proven. Still, the overlap between DOD and the DCS seems strong enough to suggest that as a likelihood. Moore occupies a unique and very interesting position in the story of the Kennedy assassination. De Mohrenschildt told Epstein that he “would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” When de Mohrenschildt first made contact with Oswald, he arrived in the company of a CIA informant, Col. Laurence Orlov. Orlov, a long-time oilman and acquaintance of de Mohrenshildt’s, was also an informant for Moore at DCS in Dallas, as well as being a social companion of Moore’s. Joan Mellen writes: “It seems apparent that J. Walton Moore…had set up the meeting between de Mohrenschildt and Oswald.” And, it could well be added, if what de Mohrenschildt told Epstein about a 1961 contact from Moore regarding Oswald is accurate, Moore would seem to be on a short list of people who were involved very early on in maneuvering Lee Oswald.

 

Moore, an ex-FBI man, as well as an OSS agent during his service in the Second World War, had joined CIA in 1948, being assigned to Domestic Contacts at that time. By the 1960s, Moore was exceptionally well-known and respected within CIA. A friendly and personal letter from then Deputy Director of CIA Gen. Charles Cabell is in the record. Cabell, addressing Moore as “Walt,” thanked him for his hospitality during a recent (1960) Cabell visit to Dallas. Late in Moore’s career, a note in his personnel file shows that the Houston-based DCS office was upgraded in status, the New Orleans DCS office was placed under the Houston office in Agency command structure, and both offices were subordinate to the Dallas office, still headed by Moore. After the assassination of Kennedy, Moore would pop up periodically during times of intense interest in the assassination. In 1976, with the HSCA investigation into Kennedy’s death about to begin, Moore – still in the position in Dallas with DCS that he had occupied since 1948 – wrote to the head of that division, asking for help in handling “the exposure of [Clay] Shaw’s connections with CIA.” When de Mohrenschildt died from gunshot wounding in 1977, Moore clipped the news stories reporting the death and sent them to the chief of CIA’s Domestic Contact Division.

 

On a cover sheet over a Dallas Times-Herald article which stated that the HSCA had uncovered “new, unproven evidence on Oswald’s ties with CIA, FBI,” Moore wrote “Nothing new, is there?” Moore’s Agency files also feature a detailed account of the story of Gilberto Policarpo Lopez (December, 1963), a young man whose late 1963 travels parallel those of Lee Oswald. Lopez moved suspiciously before and after the assassination of President Kennedy – attempting to get a visa to Cuba in Mexico City in the fall of 1963, and boarding a plane from Texas headed for Mexico City in the immediate aftermath of the assassination. A note from CIA DD/P Richard Helms to Win Scott at the Mexico City CIA station is also in Moore’s files. The note is suggestive of Lopez being involved in a highly compartmentalized intelligence operation. Beyond the particulars of the Lopez story, the significance for our interest is that Moore is being entrusted with highly sensitive information pertaining to an investigation of the murder of President Kennedy, information which was not widely shared within CIA. J. Walton Moore was not “regular folks” in CIA by the 1960s; he was something out of the ordinary - particularly for an employee whose record reflects no obvious advancement for nearly 30 years. 

 

As George deMohrenschildt prepared to venture into Haiti in the spring of 1963, he and his Haitian business partner Clemard Charles were being closely monitored for possible use by both CIA and military intelligence. Dorothe Matlack, Army Intelligence’s chief liaison with CIA was on top of this effort, and she leaned heavily on the “smooth operator,” Sam Kail. CIA’s Domestic Operation Division, headed by Tracy Barnes, was also involved in the deMohrenschildt-Charles matter. On April 26, 1963, Gale Allen, a case officer from DOD, requested an “expedite check” on deMohrenschildt from CIA’s Office of Security. That request was not revealed in any of CIA’s released records on deMohrenschildt, but was referred to in a December, 1974 memorandum written by Jerry Brown of Office of Security Analysis. In a 2004 interview with historian David Kaiser, Allen claimed to have no recollection of deMohrenschildt, but suggested that he was probably acting on behalf of someone else who “had plans for deMohrenschildt.” Bill Simpich writes: “The man with the plans was apparently C. Frank Stone, also of DOD, who asked [CIA records-keeper] Anna Panor to request more information on deMohrenschildt. Stone’s name can take us down the path of a still-mysterious CIA operation known as WUBRINY. “WUBRINY” was apparently Thomas J. Devine, a long-time CIA staff employee who was well acquainted with George H. W. Bush. 

 

If Tracy Barnes was T, I think that we can see – from a distance – the outlines of a nexus of men who Barnes – as head of DOD – would have had “legitimate” operational interest in meeting in Dallas and New Orleans in 1963. People who centered around the Domestic Contact Service, including assets of J. Walton Moore, who seems to have been on the ground floor of CIA’s active outreach to Lee Oswald in 1961, 1962, and 1963. While these people – deMohrenschildt (who Lafitte makes a note to “call” as late as November 20, 1963), and Col. Orlov, as well as Dallas resident and high-level intelligence agent Sam Kail, were no doubt involved in numerous schemes that Barnes could have had interest in, we know from the evidence of the Lafitte datebook that these people also had roles to play in the forthcoming murder of JFK, as the planning for that event rolled on through 1963. It is possible that Moore himself is being referred to in a key entry. On September 16, 1963, Lafitte wrote: “T says Oswald is idiot, but will be used regardless.” Above that is a note to “see J. in Dallas.” 

  

BACK TO TRACY…

 Another “suggestion,” about Barnes and DOD activity in 1963, presented as if it were known with some certainty, can be found in Donald Freed’s “Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier,” published in 1980. Freed, relying on the research of a formidable collection of investigative reporters and researchers, notes that Barnes – unlike his Agency superior, DD/P Richard Bissell, and his long-time patron Allen Dulles, came up standing after the Bay of Pigs fallout. Freed writes: “Barnes was put in charge of the new, most secret, and unconstitutional Domestic Operations Division, and Howard Hunt became his operations officer, running totally illegal domestic fronts, including one in New Orleans disguised as the Fair Play For Cuba Committee.” The specific source of this assertion is not given in the book, so – much like some other claims about the DOD, it cannot be substantiated. But Freed had great sources…We will leave that claim here, in the interest of a full perspective.

 

We do not know what Barnes was doing in October and November of 1963, the period of time in which Lafitte’s T arrives in New Orleans and Dallas (and Madrid) for multiple meetings that were concerned with the final planning for the assassination of JFK. The Thomas book has nothing on Barnes’ activities during this time period. The Assassination Records Review Board, very interested in any internal Agency documents that would pin Barnes down at critical times, requested “chronological files” on Barnes from 1959-1964. Of the handful of top-level CIA operatives whose personnel files were of particular interest to ARRB,  Barnes was the only figure whose files the Records Board referred to in that manner.  After a fair amount of uninformative communication with Agency contacts on the matter, CIA gave the ARRB a few scattered documents that pertained to Barnes. ARRB was not going to get information of this caliber. During the Watergate scandal, a reporter filed a FOIA request for the records of Barnes’ assistant Howard Hunt, focusing on Hunt’s travel during the time he was employed at DOD. “No travel records were found” was the official response. Agency Services Staff head Charles Briggs, the Agency respondent to FOIA requests at the time, allowed that Hunt’s travel records could be had within the Office of Finance, but denied further exploration on the basis that Hunt’s personal privacy would be infringed, and on the more interesting grounds that, when all information relating to operational data was removed from Hunt’s files at the time, the resulting documents would be “useless to the requestor.”

 

As his old Agency nemesis, Richard Helms, moved toward the top of CIA, Barnes’ power and influence waned. Barnes and Bissell had kept Helms at arm’s length from decision-making positions during the 1950s and early 1960s. Even though Helms had occupied a position parallel to that of Barnes in the early 1960s (both men were assistants to the DD/P Bissell), Barnes was not only senior to Helms but, more importantly, enjoyed the protection of his patron, Allen Dulles, and subsequently the favor of John McCone, who Dulles was in close communication with throughout McCone’s reign. Barnes reportedly had gone straight to Dulles at one point in time in an effort to force Helms out of CIA. Helms, who would testify to his distaste for the “cowboy” operations of Barnes and Bissell, was promoted to DCI by Lyndon Johnson in 1966, and Barnes was gone from the Agency within weeks. Helms rubbed in his new power by forcing Barnes’ old friend Des Fitzgerald, then DD/P, to fire Tracy. Following the 1969 death of Allen Dulles, Barnes engaged in melancholy reminiscences with a very few close friends. When he was employed in his last worldly gig, at Yale, Barnes became close to Peter Almond, a graduate student who ran the Yale community relations program. “In long, if somewhat guarded conversations with Almond, he ‘talked of having grown weary with the direction of the Agency. By the time he got to Yale, I think he was fed up with the CIA, in a profound way,’ Almond would relate. ‘He was sick about it. He did not speak directly, he was elliptical, but clearly he was talking about assassinations…’” His former colleague – and fellow Yale classmate – Richard Bissell, would write about Barnes in his memoirs. Bissell, continually tied up in technical details, often ceded operational decisions to Barnes during his time as DD/P. He gently questioned Barnes’ judgement, and implied that Tracy had “led him astray,” as Thomas puts it. Barnes suffered a series of small strokes in 1969, and a major stroke in 1970. In 1972, following severe chest pains, he succumbed to a massive stroke.

 

CONCLUSION

 

Tracy Barnes moved beneath the radar through the most dramatic covert events that CIA was involved in between 1953 and 1963. Rather than being the “corporate liberal” that parts of Evan Thomas’ study make him out to be, Barnes was a daring, frequently “over-the-top,” hard-core cold warrior. Barnes was arguably more directly involved with operations that included political assassination than was any other high-ranking CIA officer of his era. By comparison, the man who many of us have been most interested in over years of studying the assassination, William K. Harvey, is not even close. (“Harvey mentioned as often as T…” I don’t think that changes the force of the “comparison” point being made.) Barnes went off on his own, to places in which he moved outside of a formal chain of command, more than once. He was bitter about the Kennedys following the Bay of Pigs, and remained so for the rest of his life. Personalizing the tragedy of the “brilliant disaster,” Barnes is quoted by Thomas as telling a friend late in his life that “Kennedy let me down.” ( “…was he so hubristic…?” Very likely! Intelligence operatives who moved without much “adult supervision” during the height of the Cold War frequently were.) (“Do we have Barnes tied to Otto, CW, and the European contingent? No, but he was tied to the “U.S. contingent” featuring JJA, and presumably motivated by multiple factors regarding JFK, as were all of them.) During the most critical time period in the narrative we are examining, he was head of a division of CIA that was the bureaucratic equivalent of a black hole; an area of CIA that we know far too little about, offering up opportunities for meetings of the kind that Lafitte records T engaging in.

 

Writing history is hard and precarious work, even when the source material being used is readily accessible and reasonably clear, much less when dealing with a record that has been truncated and veiled, as is the case with the topic of this book. Renowned scholars, dealing with archival material, regularly engage in deeply and passionately-argued disputes about the meaning and importance of various strands of evidence. Historians climb out on limbs that they believe to be sturdy enough to bear the burden of the weight being placed on them. Sometimes, the limbs break. One of the premier historical scholars of the past century, Charles Austin Beard, once remarked to a distinguished colleague of his: “What the hell do the historians think they are doing when they are selecting ten facts out of millions and gluing them together with adverbs?” Still, Beard and many other historians who have enhanced our knowledge of “the way the world works” over the years were able to isolate the most important parts of the narrative they worked with and make reasoned judgements about the validity of myriad sources. That difficult task has been accomplished by the author of this book, Hank Albarelli and, in a much more modest vein, I hope to have added fruitfully to an important part of the larger story that Hank tells.

 

There is no “smoking gun” that proves Tracy Barnes to be the integrally important T in the plan that we can now begin to assemble from the writings of Pierre Lafitte and corroboratory research into the key people who Lafitte named. Smoking guns are almost the historical equivalent of urban myths. They are rarely seen, at least in the way that the term is generally used. Strongly-patterned evidence that points to reasonable conclusions is what can be reasonably expected from a successful historical inquiry. There is a powerfully coherent mass of evidence pointing in the direction of Tracy Barnes as the “T” in Lafitte’s notes. If Barnes was not “T,” then someone who was uncannily like Barnes was.

  

SOURCE NOTES

 

Biographical information on Tracy Barnes is both voluminous, and…woefully inadequate. As a legendary figure in intelligence circles who was involved at a very high level in well-known CIA escapades, Barnes’ name is very familiar. But there has been no biographical treatment of him of the kind that his peers Dulles, Angleton, or Helms have had. The closest thing to a biography of Barnes is Evan Thomas’ justly respected study “The Very Best Men: Four Who Dared: The Early Years of the CIA,” in which Thomas profiled Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Desmond Fitzgerald, and Barnes. Thomas was granted access to CIA sources that, in some cases, are still not available to researchers. The book is a fine, well-written resource, but it should be noted that historian John Newman nails Thomas for his reliance on two major sources – Jake Esterline and former CIA DD/P Richard Bissell – in regard to one particular story involving a 1960 assassination plot against Raul Castro. Thomas’ reliance on these men – rather than on Church Committee testimony – “obscures the CIA’s responsibility for approving a plot that they had conceived.” (Newman, “Countdown to Darkness,” pp. 182-183)

 

This story involves an authorization by Barnes, once again acting for DDP Bissell. One would be curious to know how many more such exculpatory errors pertaining to Barnes and others might have crept into the book…There is also the previously mentioned chronological g

[Robert Montenegro]

Mr. Hancock and Mr. Simpich, come out, come out, wherever you are, and weigh in on this document.

Pretty please!

Edited July 9, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Leslie Sharp]

7 hours ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/104-10119-10100.pdf

 

For well over thirty years now, researchers have been diligently trying to verify bonafides, in regards to claims made in Robert D. Morrow's controversial book, "First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy."

 

One of the most controversial, was the claim that Charles Tracy Barnes, formerly Deputy Director of the Psychological Strategy Board during the Korean War and CIA Special Assistant for Paramilitary & Psychological Operations during the Guatemalan coup d'état (cryptonym PBSUCCESS) was, by 1962, commander of a highly illegal branch of CIA called Domestic Operations Division, which was tasked with supporting the Directorate of Plans in covert operations that were active within the continental United States (sometimes under the designation OOA or "...Other Operational Activities..." in support of DDP).

 

Well, now we have the documented proof:

 

 

The above document states the following:

 

QUOTE—

"...REF: Memo 11/15/62 from D/Sec to C/DODS in Subj file On above date Joseph Murphy, Security Officer, DODS, advised that subject is considering filing an appeal from the security disapproval date of 11/15/62 for his wife to accept employment with (Spanish Embassy) Mr. Murphy requested advice as to procedure in filing an appeal. I suggested the, if subject had any justification not previously submitted to Security, a second request would be considered by this Branch, but that, if subject was filing an appeal with no additional justification, the appeal should be submitted thru Chief, DODS, and should reflect the views of Tracy Barnes. Subject has discussed his request with Mr. Barnes and may want to contact someone in Security above the Branch..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, when Chief, Reports & Publications, Domestic Operations Division, Support, Directorate of Plans, (C/R&P/DODS/DD/P), Everette Howard Hunt Jr. was whining and moaning to CIA Office of Security about his wife not being able to get a job with CIA in the Madrid, Spain US Embassy, this hand-written memo was generated, giving us the first documented evidence anywhere, that Charles Tracy Barnes' official job title in 1962 was, "...Chief, Domestic Operations Division, Support..."

 

And if CIA officialdom was behind the murder of President Kennedy, now we have a prime candidate for project manager, so to speak...

 

...perhaps Tracy Barnes really is Milice française, Organisation secrète d'action révolutionnaire nationale terrorist Jean-Pierre Lafitte's "...well connected T..."

 

 

From Alan Kent's essay titled, "T" in the Lafitte Datebook as published in Hank Albarelli's final investigation, Coup in Dallas: The Decisive Investigation into Who Killed JFK.

. . . Evan Thomas writes: “For a long time, he [Barnes] wanted to get the CIA involved in spying in the United States, just as MI-6 ran a London field station.” Of course, CIA was specifically barred from such activity. Nonetheless, Barnes got his wish. CIA’s Domestic Operations Division is shrouded in a great deal of mystery to this day. One will find start dates for the organization that range from 1962-1964 in published material. A part of this confusion probably lies in the fact that some of what DOD was involved in was ongoing informally before it had a proper home. However, according to a CIA IG report, DOD was officially inaugurated on February 2, 1963. Thomas quotes Howard Hunt, who was brought into DOD by Barnes as his Covert Operations chief, to the effect that DOD under Barnes was less than what Tracy had desired, that it was a “trash heap for ops that no one else wanted.” The specific actions that DOD was supposed to have been created for involved the conducting of clandestine operations within the U.S. against “foreign targets,” entities or individuals who were alleged to be operating in the U.S. under the control of foreign powers; practically speaking, under Communist control. The word “foreign” provided a fig leaf of legitimacy for this division, but the designation of its responsibilities in the once-classified document that formalized DOD stated that the scope of its activities was to “exercise centralized responsibility for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational activity within the United States.”  Far from being the “trash heap” Hunt described, the creation of this division of CIA provided carte blanche for activities that were supposed to be beyond the pale for the Agency. DOD would later play a part in the massive rights violations that were part and parcel of CIA’s “Operation Chaos.” Barnes continued to deal extensively with CIA proprietary companies during his stint as head of DOD, offering up opportunities for the clandestine moving of funds for “off the books” projects. Victor Marchetti spoke haltingly of DOD to researcher Bill Davy, after offering up the opinion that Clay Shaw’s extant Agency documentary record suggested that Shaw was working for Barnes’ mysterious unit: “It was one of the most secret divisions within the Clandestine Services. This was Tracy Barnes’ old outfit. They were getting into things…uh…exactly what, I don’t know. But they were getting into some pretty risky areas. And this is what E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time…” Malcolm Blunt, the premier source on the clandestine history of CIA as revealed in both documentary evidence and oral history, recently responded to my question about the activities of Barnes’ DOD simply by shaking his head. 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Gerry Down]

Thanks Leslie.

[Robert Montenegro]

3 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

you would have to get other memos by the same author and demonstrate that they interchange a person's official title and their personal name within the one memo, ideally in the one sentence.

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/178-10002-10364.pdf

 

The document in the above link are hand-written notes concerning E. Howard Hunt's superiors between 1962 & 1963, taken during an interview with Mr. Hunt, for the Rockefeller Commission.

 

The above link states the following information, which was given by E. Howard Hunt:

QUOTE—

"...Hunt—1962 + 1963

Jan 1962 assd to Domestic Oper. Div. of DDP. handling proprietaries based in U.S. (impact of which is abroad.) Immed. superior was Stanley Gaines was either Chief of Oper or Exec Off of DOD + Tracy Barnes was Div Chief DOD. (Barnes is cousin by marriage to VP Rockef.)..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, now we have a brand new, follow-up document, indicating that Charles Tracy Barnes was the Chief of the Domestic Operations Division, Support.

 

Interestingly enough, this debriefing states that E. Howard Hunt had at least one other superior officer in DODS—Stanley Gaines, who Hunt claims was in-charge of companies in the continental United States that were supporting Directorate of Plans operations abroad.

   

Thanks Mr. Down, for provoking me to search harder and find a supporting document.

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Benjamin Cole]

1 minute ago, Robert Montenegro said:

 

• https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/2023/178-10002-10364.pdf

 

The document in the above link are hand-written notes concerning E. Howard Hunt's superiors between 1962 & 1963, taken during an interview with Mr. Hunt, for the Rockefeller Commission.

 

The above link states the following information, which was given by E. Howard Hunt:

QUOTE—

"...Hunt—1962 + 1963

Jan 1962 assd to Domestic Oper. Div. of DDP. handling proprietaries based in U.S. (impact of which is abroad.) Immed. superior was Stanley Gaines was either Chief of Oper or Exec Off of DOD + Tracy Barnes was Div Chief DOD. (Barnes is cousin by marriage to VP Rockef.)..."

—END QUOTE

 

So, now we have a brand new, follow-up document, indicating that Charles Tracy Barnes was the Chief of the Domestic Operations Division, Support.

 

Interestingly enough, this debriefing states that E. Howard Hunt had at least one other superior officer in DODS—Stanley Gaines, who Hunt claims was in-charge of companies in the continental United States that were supporting Directorate of Plans operations abroad.

   

Thanks Mr. Down, for provoking me to search harder and find a supporting document.

RM--

You appear to be a very solid researcher, and I am impressed. 

Side question: Recently, I tried to compile a list of all CIA-linked people in Dallas, Nov, 1963.

No need to research this---you seem busy enough---but off the top of your head, how many can you name?

People like Ruby, who ran guns, can be on there. Cabell, Moore, LHO, Mohrenschildt, people in the White Russian community...

The Cuban safehouse? I am missing some names....

Let me know. 

[Robert Montenegro]

17 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

RM--

You appear to be a very solid researcher, and I am impressed. 

Side question: Recently, I tried to compile a list of all CIA-linked people in Dallas, Nov, 1963.

No need to research this---you seem busy enough---but off the top of your head, how many can you name?

People like Ruby, who ran guns, can be on there. Cabell, Moore, LHO, Mohrenschildt, people in the White Russian community...

The Cuban safehouse? I am missing some names....

Let me know. 

 

Thank you for your kind complements.

Uh, that request is a helluva tall order.

I am not saying I couldn't come up with something, however it will take some time.

Message me what you have in the private DM, and I will get back to you.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Allen Lowe]

I am somewhat bewildered, but then I am not as active as many of you here - this, to me, is old news. Barnes' position as head of domestic contacts has been established for some time. It is doubly interesting because, as assistant to Kingman Brewster when he was head of Yale, Barnes was the favored contact for the Black Panthers as things roiled up in New Haven with the Ackley murder and the trial of Bobby Seal.  As a friend of mine, a journalist in that city, has said, the Left loved Barnes and he was in frequent contact.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Allen Lowe

[Robert Montenegro]

8 minutes ago, Allen Lowe said:

this, to me, is old news. Barnes' position as head of domestic contacts has been established for some time.

 

Only in hearsay had that information been "established" about Tracy Barnes.

Now we have it documented.

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by Robert Montenegro

[Allen Lowe]

Just now, Robert Montenegro said:

 

Only in hearsay had that information been "established" about Tracy Barnes.

 

Now we have it documented.

got it. And I think his actions in New Haven were something of a continuation of that role.

Edited July 9, 2023 by Allen Lowe