Matt Cloud's compilation of Harvey & Lee related coincidences and some theories explaining them

[Matt Cloud]

19 minutes ago, Matt Cloud said:

For accuracy and completeness, Paul Joliffe DID acknowledge the Bentley death on Dec. 3, 1963 but perhaps not its potential significance in light of what was said on the phone-call.   (Above, at his pt. 2.)

I should note, accounts indicate that Bentley already lived in Connecticut for the last five years or so of her life, which brings some ambiguity into the caller's statement that she "had to come here to make the call to the Tippits."  What does the "here" mean if she was already in CT, either because that's already where she lived in those years or because she was in CT to prepare for the surgery as Paul Jolliffe writes.

 

Does "here" mean she had to come to Westport specifically to make the call -- perhaps from a pay-phone -- because she assumed or knew that her phone at home in Middlefield was tapped?

 

"In the late 1950s, she largely faded into obscurity. Bentley returned to Connecticut, where she worked as a teacher, first in Hartford and then in Middletown, teaching English at the Long Lane School for Girls, a state correctional institution. She taught there for the final five years of her life, and lived in nearby Middlefield. Bentley died on Dec. 3, 1963, from abdominal cancer at Grace-New Haven Hospital."

https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/article/CT-Files-The-Red-Spy-Queen-17042588.php

 

I would also point out some comments by John Earl Haynes of the Library of Congress on research on Bentley being "dangerous." 

Haynes, too, sees the academic work on American Communism as heavily skewed to the left. Haynes has also made his career outside of mainstream academia, where he says you simply can't address the subject of Soviet espionage in a scholarly way. Over dinner, he elaborated the point. ''There's been a tendency to freeze consideration,'' he said. ''For example, let's take a look at Elizabeth Bentley.'' Bentley, a spy who turned herself in to the F.B.I. in 1945, was probably the government's most valuable defector from the American Communist Party.

''This was a major incident,'' Haynes continues. ''Do you know how many doctoral dissertations there are on Bentley? None. Because it's one of those, We shouldn't look at this -- this is dangerous. You're not going to be able to get a job if you write a dissertation about Elizabeth Bentley. If this was a field in which things were normal, there would be half a dozen Elizabeth Bentleys stretched over the last 20 or 30 years. But this is a field where young historians soon get the message: don't look at that area; it's dangerous.''

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/28/magazine/cold-war-without-end.html

 

Haynes I should point was at that time, and for years after, the "gatekeeper" you might say of the Moynihan papers at the LoC.  Until, that is, they were transferred to NARA relatively recently.  There they were under the protection of Mark A. Bradley.  His bio from NARA:

"Mr. Bradley also served as a CIA intelligence officer and as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's legislative assistant for foreign affairs and intelligence matters and as his last legislative director. He co-drafted the legislation that established the Public Interest Declassification Board." 

https://www.archives.gov/about/organization/senior-staff/director-isoo

 

Bradley and I were colleagues together on Moynihan's staff, from '99, when he came on board, until 2001.  He resigned from NARA more or less simultaneously with the "discovery" of classified docs at Biden Penn center.  

 

"Nov. 3, 2022--The director of the Information Security Oversight Office is planning to retire next summer, giving the head of the National Archives the chance to choose ISOO’s next leader amid a White House review of classification policies.

Mark Bradley, a former CIA officer who has served as director of ISOO since December 2016, plans to retire on June 1, 2023. He made the announcement Wednesday during a meeting of the National Industrial Security Program Policy Advisory Committee (NISPPAC)."

The ISOO director position is selected by the Archivist of the United States and approved by the president. President Joe Biden’s pick to be the next Archivist is facing headwinds to her confirmation in the Senate.

“Whether we’re going to have a continuation of this administration or another one, I want to give the powers that be ample time to pick another director of ISOO, because I think the position is too important to languish,” Bradley said at the NISPPAC meeting.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/open-datatransparency/2022/11/isoo-director-to-step-down-next-summer/

 

 

 

 

In addition, and in keeping with the algebraic symmetry of the Cold War, it appears that the classified docs that ended up at Trump's Mar-a-Lago passed through NARA, to Mark Bradley specifically, en route. Page 19:

 

https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/3.1.23_nara_briefing_transcript.pdf

 

Wednesday, March 1, 2023

U.S. House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

 

CHAIRMAN TURNER: So the problem is, is that from the point of understanding that documents were packed at the White House and went to you, and that documents were packed here and went to you, nobody has looked under the hood. And so that is what we are trying to figure out at this point, is: How does this work? How should it work? What do you need? And so let's start with you, Mark, with a question, because you have raised some questions just in your comments themselves. 

[Matt Cloud]

Hey whaddya know?  Geo -- The views and experience of Whiz Kid Harold Brown of RAND -- the Secretary of the Air Force, for whom J.D. Tippit of Connecticut worked -- align with Paul Kecskemeti's.  Probably nothing ...

 

Summer Studies, Centers, and a Governmentwide ...

 

Oxford University Press

https://princeton.universitypressscholarship.com › view

 

 

 

Sep 19, 2019 — ... Harold Brown. He stayed on to serve as special assistant for ... On the debate about RAND analyst Paul Kecskemeti's book Strategic Surrender, see.

 

 

P. 3:

In October 1950, Paul Kecskemeti at RAND produced another comprehensive report on space that Walter A. McDougall believes should “be considered the birth certificate of American space policy.”~ This report highlighted the psychological impact the first satellite would likely have on the public and raised the issue of how the Soviet Union might respond to overflight of their territory and space-based reconnaissance. It even suggested that one way to test the issue of freedom of space would be first to launch an experimental U.S. satellite in an equatorial orbit that would not cross Soviet territory before attempting any satellite reconnaissance overhead the Soviet Union.

 

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=3e9dd0ad61c39eab74e6f312bc0aba66bb82162c

Edited February 29 by Matt Cloud

[Matt Cloud]

Coincidence time!

 

As I’ve been relegated over to my own dedicated thread and having received warning for “being rude to an Admin,” a claim which could be disputed, I thought I’d drop a few items to help move things along.

 

Here goes:

 

1. Elizabeth Bentley testified in 1948 that during the FDR administration, the Soviets learned the U.S. had broken, or were about to break, the VENONA cables.  “That the White House informant, who remained unidentified, gave the word that the Americans ‘were about to break – or translate the Russian code.’  When excited Russians asked ‘which code’ she was at loss for explanation ‘and so was this contact man she said.’”

 

See “Woman Links Spies to U.S. War Offices and White House; Elizabeth T. Bentley Accuses Commerce Official as Source of Data Sent to Russia; Wallace Leader Named; Senate Inquiry Witness Says Informer in President’s Home Warned of Broken Code,” C.P. Trussell, New York Times, July 31, 1948, p. 1.

 

Most histories of VENONA attribute the Soviets learning of VENONA having been cracked to Kim Philby or William Weisband, with usual estimations of the break as occurring in 1948.  That Bentley said it had occurred during the Roosevelt years is significant, and potentially alters all understandings of VENONA material and “when we knew they knew we knew.”  That question, when the U.S. knew that the Soviets knew the U.S. had broken the cables’ code, was – coincidentally of course – a question repeatedly asked by Senator Moynihan of his staff to research in the late 1990s, as the state of knowledge in those years was exploding and very much in flux.  The key point for now is that Soviets knew the cable was cracked and continued using it.

 

 

2. Beginning in 1945, Bentley’s FBI handler was William King Harvey, then of the F.B.I., along with Robert Lamphere and Wililiam J. Cotter.  

 

“Harvey was … among a trio of FBI agents who made up the first U.S. counterespionage team aimed at the Soviets. He was in the thick of a case that became one of the biggest spy stories of the time when it was made public several years later. In the fall of 1945, a woman named Elizabeth Bentley approached the FBI to confess that she had worked for years as a courier for a Soviet spy ring, exposing a shocking penetration of the U.S. government by Soviet intelligence. Eventually, she gave the names of more than a hundred people in the United States and Canada who were working for the Soviets, including twenty-seven people in government agencies, among them Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official.”

 

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-hick-from-indiana-who-nailed-master-spy-kim-philby

 

 

As discussed here previously, Cotter was married to Virginia Alicia McMahon of Norwalk, CT, who worked as a cryptanalyst on VENONA at Arlington Hall during and after the war.  She deceased at age 42 in 1962.

 

 

3. Elizabeth Bentley would begin teaching in Louisiana in 1955, at a Catholic School, around same time Lee Harvey Oswald also was in school in Louisiana.

 

4. Louis Weinstock, head of the Painters’ Union, would go on trial in the early to mid-‘50s for subversive activities (the Smith Act) and perjury, inter alia, in NY, before Judge Irving R. Kaufman of Rosenberg trial fame and in DC, before E. Barrett Prettyman, later famous for the Castro-Donovan-Alfred Boerum (a McMahon brother-in-law) negotiations to secure the Bay of Pigs prisoners in 1962.  Weinstock served about two-years’ time, and some of the issues over which he was originally charged were dismissed or reversed over the ensuing years – the disposition of the cases is worth noting.

 

See “Weinstock Admits Treachery of CP in Fight on Smith Act,” The Militant, Jan. 31, 1949 (highlighting divisions between Stalinists and Trotskyites) (“Weinstock used to be secretary-treasurer of Painters District Council No. 9, and it was in that capacity in 1944 that he played his part in the scabby Stalinist campaign to prevent the mobilization of the labor movement against the Smith Act when 18 Socialist Worker Party and C.I.O. members were railroaded to prison under its provisions in the Minneapolis trial. The members of the union have since then kicked Weinstock out of that post, and the forum he used in discussing The Militant’s expose was a meeting … held at Yorkville Temple on Jan. 17.  He could not deny that he and his fellow Stalinists had prevented the District Council from extending aid to the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which was helping the 18 Trotskyites.”).

 

From FBI report on Claudia Jones, part 10 of 10, p. 71:

 

“On January 10, 1955, United States District Court Irving R. Kaufman ordered revocation of bail and ordered warrants issued for all defendants except Louis Weinstock, who was then on trial in a separate perjury proceeding in [D.C.].”

 

See also Louis Weinstock v. United States, 231 F.2d 699 (D.C. Cir. 1956); Louis Weinstock, Petitioner, v. Subversive Activities Control Board, Respondent, 331 F.2d 75 (D.C. Cir. 1963) (Submitted October 3, 1962, Decided December 17, 1963)

 

In Harvey and Lee (2003), p. 67, John Armstrong notes the leniency of the treatment toward Weinstock “suggests that he may have been working for the U.S. Government.”  (That seems to have go unnoticed here.)

 

5. On December 8, 1959, an FBI Operation Solo report to Director Hoover from SAC Chicago states that in the investigation pertaining to Louis and Rose Weinstock, an informant stated “Weinstock also stated that while in Hungary, he had seen Emil and Grace Blair Gardos.  They have a son who is attending a university in Hungary.  He is studying to be a physicist and has almost completed his education.  Emil Gardos was scheduled to leave Hungary for Moscow on or about November 1, 1959.  He is scheduled to be a Commercial Attaché in Moscow.”

 

November 1, 1959 is – coincidentally – virtually the precise date that Lee Harvey Oswald is attempting to gain entry via defection into the Soviet Union.

 

6.  On October 25, 1960, a U.S. Department of Justice FBI background memorandum states that Louis Weinstock, along with Communist Party attorney Mary Metlay Kaufman, planned on traveling from NY to DC the next day via train to meet with Soviet Embassy officials.

 

Kaufman had been the invited guest of Moscow to the Francis Gary Powers U-2 trial there a few weeks before. A November 2, 1960 FBI memo to Director J. Edgar Hoover from SAC NY states that an informant “advised that on August 26, 1960,” Kaufman “stated that while in Moscow, she had learned from Powers’ defense counsel Grinev (ph) that ‘Security Police Officials already were in town when Powers was brought in by the local people [after being shot-down].’ [IN OTHER WORDS – THEY WERE WAITING FOR HIM.]  Grinev (ph) also informed Kaufman that Powers is a highly intelligent person.  He told the Moscow officials everything and was most cooperative.  He spared no details, and volunteered information regarding matters he was not questioned about.”

 

QUERY: Is this part of the set-up for having Oswald take blame for Popov’s mole’s claim that a Soviet mole in the U.S. had given technical plans for the U-2 to the Soviets?

 

 

7.  On December 15, 1960, The Joint Study Group on Foreign Intelligence Activities of the United States Government is submitted to Allen Dulles Director of CIA from Lyman B. Kirkpatrick, CIA inspector General and Robert M. Macy, Chief of the International Division, Bureau of the Budget, et al. Recall, above, it was with Bob Macy that Moynihan went around on 11/22/63 saying “We must get hold of Oswald.”

 

 

8.  Spring 1962, Lee Harvey Oswald writes the International Rescue Committee for aid in returning to the U.S.  The IRC had been run by Leo Cherne in the 1950s, and specialized in Hungarian relief aid.  Recall, above, Cherne, along with Clare Booth Luce, who later informed CIA Director Colby of a counterintelligence op run against Oswald after he had infiltrated her anti-Castro Cubans after Bay of Pigs, and Adolf Berle, who had given the cold-shoulder to Bentley’s compatriot Whittaker Chambers’ claims of Soviet espionage in 1939, were authors of various “Situation in Hungary” reports in the 1950s.  Moynihan worked for Cherne at the IRC circa ’53-55.

 

9. June 1, 1962. Ft. Worth Star Telegram, p. 11: “U.S. Moves to Order Registration of Reds.”  “Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy formally requested a government agency Thursday to label 10 persons [including Louis Weinstock] as Communists and order them to register under the 1950 internal security act.”

 

10. December 19, 1962.  Louis Weinstock, now of the Worker, writes to thank him for his offer of photo enlargement services for advertisement purposes for The Worker.  His affidavit on the matter is even included in the Warren Commission. (That important detail, among others, seems to have been overlooked on this forum, btw.)  This photographic work by Oswald would possibly be an offshoot of practices learned while in the employ of Jaggers-Chiles Stovall, and would necessary implicate photo reconnaissance work, which rely on similar enlargement procedures. 

 

See Weinstock’s affidavit to the Warren Commission.  (Among other facts, that seems to have gone unnoticed around here.)

 

Interesting that Bentley, just days after the assassination, somehow was able to link up Oswald and Weinstock – before it had become publicly known that the two had written each other.  Amazing.

 

11. It should be noted further that matters involving the U-2, photo reconnaissance and imagery and balance of power strategic thinking in this area are all matters clearly within the purview of persons such as Whiz Kid Harold brown, formerly of RAND -- along with Paul Kecskemeti – and for who Air Force Col. J.D. Tippit of Connecticut, the person to whom Bentley placed the infamous call at issue just after the assassination, worked for, as Air Force Secretary, at least -- we know -- in 1965.

[Steve Thomas]

On 2/28/2024 at 8:36 AM, Geo Kozma said:

i am going to edit myself to make myself mor easy to understand.

Geo,

Do not ever apologize because you can't speak perfect English.

I applaud your bravery in attempting to speak with other people in a language that is not your native language.

I wish I had your courage.

Steve Thomas

 

[Paul Cummings]

1 hour ago, Steve Thomas said:

Geo,

Do not ever apologize because you can't speak perfect English.

I applaud your bravery in attempting to speak with other people in a language that is not your native language.

I wish I had your courage.

Steve Thomas

 

Second.

[Matt Cloud]

A little background on the goings-on at Tregaron, 3100 Macomb Street NW, Washington, DC, home today of The Washington International School Red Devils, home in the early 1960s, possibly beginning in 1958, of the U-2 / CORONA / COMSAT / COMOR / NRO programs, or at least a substantial portion of such, as well as home to a young Labor Department employee, Daniel P. Moynihan.

 

What? You don't have Cape Canaveral North being run out of your house?  

 

https://t.co/smdq8R8Tic

 

https://www.comsat-history.com/COMSATOralHistory/ComsatHistory-Matthew_Gordon.pdf

 

https://cinephiliabeyond.org/arthur-c-clarkes-2001-a-space-odyssey-diary/

 

https://www.nro.gov/portals/65/documents/foia/declass/Sunshine2019/SC-2018-00036_C05112526.pdf

 

 

 

 

[Matt Cloud]