David Talbot's New Book Brothers

[John Dolva]

David: "...Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers."

This, IMO, is critical, though not perhaps for reasons that are generally recognised.

Until 1970, the United States Post Office, the USPO, had a Post Master General who was a Cabinet Member. This was the established practice since the early days of the formation of the USPO. Also, it was a patronaged position. Under the PMG was the Postal Investigation service with agents dating back to the early 1800's.

This all changed in 1970, when Nixon reconstructed the USPO into the United States Postal Service. This was a partial privatisation of the service and the USPS PMG was no longer a Cabinet Member. Many USPO PI's retired and a new ones appointed.

John F. Kennedy appointed J. E. Day as his first PMG. Day held this position until mid 1963 when he resigned in somewhat of a cloud that was not referred to by either Kennedy or Day. However, in researching this, through a layer of smoke screens, including financial impropriety, it appears that the events that actually led to his resignation was because of him becoming involved in a Civil Rights issue regarding a black USPO employee. Kennedy disapproved. This occurred at the time of Kennedy's famous Civil Rights speech and the assassinaton of Medgar Evers and the issuance of a number of executive orders for research that would form the basis of Kennedy's Civil Rights Bills. IOW Day had proved himself to Kennedy to be the wrong person to be in a position to employ in what was/is? the largest employer in the USA.

Going back to Day's appointment by Kennedy in 1961...:

In 1975 it was revealed that Helms, Dulles and another, came personally to see Day within days of assuming office to inform him of a highly secret, important function he was expected to facilitate: the illegal mail opening program. Helms and Day differ as to the exact nature of the visit, but Day does not deny that he was briefed, though Helms contends his briefing was extensive.

IOW in mid 1963, we have two apparently closely allied persons, Day and Helms, with "Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers" and Day, now with reasons to resent Kennedy and his presidency in general.

Dallas in those days was definitely a closed city with the Citicens Council in firm control.

Harry D. Holmes, Dealey Plaza 11/22 witness, USPO PI, FBI informant DA-T7, confidant of Fritz of the DPD, possible (if Peters source is confirmed) Military Intelligence, and as PI with a straight line to Washington and his superiors there, ie by implicaton a hop, skip, and jump from the top echelon of the CIA. He could not in those days be expected to be pro black. I find that notion highly doubtful. Rather, his sympathies, particularly given his free reign within the Dallas Law enforcement Agencies (the first report of where the shots came from was the Terminal Annex. This was quashed within half an hour by a call to Harry, who checked and reported, no they did not.) That Harry could do this as a non DPD person tells a lot about his standing within a segregated city.

The inference then, is that Harry's sympathies lay with Day. Make of it what you will, but one can speculate within the realm of the possible that Harry was involved if Helms was involved.

http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/c...lreportIIIh.htm

FINAL REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES UNITED STATES SENATE

APRIL 23 (under authority of the order of April 14), 1976

DOMESTIC CIA AND FBI MAIL OPENING PROGRAMS

"On January 27, 1961, less than one week after Day assumed the position of Postmaster General, the Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence Staff wrote to Richard Helms to give him general background information for a proposed briefing of the Postmaster General and to advise him that:

"There is no record in any conversation with any official of the Post Office Department that we have admitted opening mail. All conversations have involved examination of exteriors. It seems to us quite apparent that they must feel sure that we are opening mail...."It is suggested that if the new Postmaster General asks if we open any mail, we confirm that some mail is opened. He should be informed, however, that no other person in the Post Office Department has been so informed. The reasons for this suggestion are (a) Despite all of our care in the selection and clearance of personnel for a knowledge of this project, at some point, someone is likely to blow it...The Postmaster General will have a better understanding of the importance of the project in the event we desire to expand it ...." 100

On February 15, 1961, Director Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and Cornelius Roosevelt, then Chief of TSD (Technical Services Division) , met with the new Postmaster General in his office. What transpired at that meeting is a subject of controversy. The only contemporaneous written record is a memorandum dated February 16, one day after the meeting, from Richard Helms back to the Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence Staff. Helms wrote:

"We gave him [Day] the background, development, and current status, withholding no relevant details...After we had made our presentation, the Postmaster General requested that we be joined by the Chief Postal Inspector, Mr. Henry Montague. This gentleman confirmed what we had had to say about the project and assured the Postmaster General that the matter had been handled securely, quietly, and that there had been no "reverberations." The meeting ended with the Postmaster General expressing the opinion that the project should be allowed to continue and that he did not want to be informed in any greater detail on its handling. He agreed that the fewer people who knew about it, the better." 101

While Helms cannot specifically recall now whether Day was informed of the fact of mail openings, he strongly suggests that Day must have been so informed. Helms recently testified as follows:

"As I say, "withholding no relevant details." I assume when I wrote that I meant what I wrote. . . . I cannot imagine what the point of holding it back from him would have been. We were going down to get his permission to continue the operation, and after all, it was his Post Office, if we had lied to him, and then he had discovered through his Chief Postal Inspector that something else was going on, that would not have been a very wise way to behave, it seems to me." 102

Day's version of these events differs from Helms.... According to his account of the meeting, he interrupted Mr. Dulles before being informed that the project involved the opening of mail....

... it cannot be definitely said that Day knew -- or did not know -- of the mail openings. All that is clear is that an Agency memorandum suggests that the CIA was prepared to inform the Postmaster General of this activity, that Helms at the time believed Day had been provided with enough of the "relevant details" to interpret his reaction as generally approving the continuance of the project; and that Day's general belief was that the Postmaster General had no control over and should defer to the Agency's covert operations, even those which might involve the United States mails...

After Day's (likely forced resignation) Kennedy appointed J. A. Gronouski:

John A. Gronouski. -- There is no claim by the CIA that Mr. Gronouski, who was Postmaster General from August 1963 until November 1965, was ever informed of the CIA's New York mail intercept project. According to one internal CIA document, consideration was given to the idea of informing him in 1965 at the time of the hearings of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Practice and Procedure. This subcommittee, chaired by Senator Edward V. Long of Missouri, was investigating the use of mail covers and various other techniques by federal agencies, and CIA officials were seriously concerned about "the dangers inherent in Long's subcommittee activities to the security of the Project's operations . . ." 106

The idea of informing Gronouski was quickly rejected, however, "in view of various statements by Gronouski before the Long subcommittee." 107

Since Gronouski had agreed with the Subcommittee that tighter administrative controls on mail covers were necessary and generally supported the principle of the sanctity of the mail, it is reasonable to infer that CIA officials assumed he would not be sympathetic to the technique of mail opening. Such an inference is supported by the next sentence in the memorandum which reflects this conversation: "[Thomas] Karamessines agreed with this thought and suggested that, in his opinion, the President (LBJ) would be more inclined to go along with the idea of the operation."

Finally, the likely hood that Oswald was known by the Agencies is highly likely. The person who could have been in on this info was removed in mid 1963, and replaced by a person the CIA did not trust.

Edited June 25, 2007 by John Dolva

[Dawn Meredith]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

I have been seeing this spin for awhile now. In many articles recenty and some not so recent books. (As far back as Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt in the 80's): putting the kill -Castro plots on Bobby. I won't even read Ultimate Sacrifice for this reason and this type of disinformation ruined Joan Mellen's book for me. It was always clear to me that when cover story one:- LN LHO- got discredited, the two fall- back positions would be The Mob did it, or Castro did it because the Kennedys were trying to kill Castro. CIA disinformation that Op Mockingbird will be happy to peddle.

Dawn

[Myra Bronstein]

...

I have been seeing this spin for awhile now. In many articles recenty and some not so recent books. (As far back as Henry Hurt's Reasonable Doubt in the 80's): putting the kill -Castro plots on Bobby. I won't even read Ultimate Sacrifice for this reason and this type of disinformation ruined Joan Mellen's book for me. It was always clear to me that when cover story one:- LN LHO- got discredited, the two fall- back positions would be The Mob did it, or Castro did it because the Kennedys were trying to kill Castro. CIA disinformation that Op Mockingbird will be happy to peddle.

Dawn

Well I suffered through Ultimate Sacrifice and applaud you on your wisdom in opting not to Dawn.

I consider it a "mob dunnit" book in lockstep with official HSCA cover-up #2.

To add insult to injury it's several hundred pages too long and agonizingly redundant.

Why is it that disinfo books tend to be overlong?

...

I suppose they're hoping to occupy us with these red herrings for as long as possible, possibly with a little gratuitous torture thrown in for spite.

[Sid Walker]

I agree that the Left's history on the Kennedy case is pretty abysmal. Ray Marcus noted this a long time ago, after he tried to engage the interest of such left-wing icons -- back in the '60s -- as Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Cockburn is a disaster of muddled thinking on this. And of course the Nation has been a repository for some of the most wrong-headed journalism on the subject for years.

I ascribe this to the Left's insistence that JFK was a Cold War hawk (a strange misperception they share with the Right, who yearn to embrace Kennedy as one of their own). If Kennedy was a hawk, these leftists reason, how could he have been the victim of a right-wing plot? I suspect it also has something to do with the limitations of Marxist theory -- which doesn't allow for complex analyses of the "ruling class" and how violent splits can occur within it.

Considering this, I guess I should not have been surprised that the most snide and dismissive review of my book so far appeared in the liberal Boston Globe and was penned by an editor of the American Prospect, the lefty political journal. He sang Bugliosi's praises, while brushing my book off as the gossipy rantings of a lunatic.

Of course, there have been some notable exceptions in the Left's coverage of Dallas -- Ramparts magazine in the 60s (as well as the more obscure but important Minority of One journal) and hey, Salon today (I take the blame for that). But by and large it has not been a pretty picture.

David,

Not sure if you are still visiting this thread... but just in case, I'd like to comment rather late on this earlier post of yours.

When I read accounts of the contacts between JFK conspiracy researchers and Chomsky over several decades - in articles and letters by Vincent Salandria, Michael Morrissey and others - I found it quite impossible to ascribe Chomsky's behaviour to an ideological blind spot.

Chomsky has played a calculated game of evasion and distortion over the assassination of JFK since at least the 1960s.

I.F. Stone did the same thing, way in 1964. He took umbrage over Bertrand Russell's suggestion that the Warren Commission was seriously flawed. Wholly out of character, the same Stone whose trademark quotation was "governments lie", announced without equivocation that Russell's critique was a disgraceful slur on good men.

This kind of behaviour triggers the alarm on my crap detector.

How about yours?

[Tim Gratz]

Dawn wrote:

"I won't even read Ultimate Sacrifice for this reason and this type of disinformation ruined Joan Mellen's book for me. "

There are definite risks involved in reading a book with which you disagree. You might even change your pre-conceived opinions!

Dawn also wrote:

"CIA disinformation that Op Mockingbird will be happy to peddle."

Well, there is no question that Lamar Waldron is a card-carrying member of Operation Mockingbird. (I've seen his card!)

Why, why--any author who disagrees that the Garrison gospel that the CIA did it must be a Mockingbird member! But wait--I thought Walter Sheridan was reporting to RFK, not to Richard Helms! Oh, I am so confused!

Edited July 6, 2007 by Tim Gratz

[William Kelly]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

[Harry J.Dean]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

[John Geraghty]

I agree that the Left's history on the Kennedy case is pretty abysmal. Ray Marcus noted this a long time ago, after he tried to engage the interest of such left-wing icons -- back in the '60s -- as Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Cockburn is a disaster of muddled thinking on this. And of course the Nation has been a repository for some of the most wrong-headed journalism on the subject for years.

I ascribe this to the Left's insistence that JFK was a Cold War hawk (a strange misperception they share with the Right, who yearn to embrace Kennedy as one of their own). If Kennedy was a hawk, these leftists reason, how could he have been the victim of a right-wing plot? I suspect it also has something to do with the limitations of Marxist theory -- which doesn't allow for complex analyses of the "ruling class" and how violent splits can occur within it.

Considering this, I guess I should not have been surprised that the most snide and dismissive review of my book so far appeared in the liberal Boston Globe and was penned by an editor of the American Prospect, the lefty political journal. He sang Bugliosi's praises, while brushing my book off as the gossipy rantings of a lunatic.

Of course, there have been some notable exceptions in the Left's coverage of Dallas -- Ramparts magazine in the 60s (as well as the more obscure but important Minority of One journal) and hey, Salon today (I take the blame for that). But by and large it has not been a pretty picture.

David,

Not sure if you are still visiting this thread... but just in case, I'd like to comment rather late on this earlier post of yours.

When I read accounts of the contacts between JFK conspiracy researchers and Chomsky over several decades - in articles and letters by Vincent Salandria, Michael Morrissey and others - I found it quite impossible to ascribe Chomsky's behaviour to an ideological blind spot.

Chomsky has played a calculated game of evasion and distortion over the assassination of JFK since at least the 1960s.

I.F. Stone did the same thing, way in 1964. He took umbrage over Bertrand Russell's suggestion that the Warren Commission was seriously flawed. Wholly out of character, the same Stone whose trademark quotation was "governments lie", announced without equivocation that Russell's critique was a disgraceful slur on good men.

This kind of behaviour triggers the alarm on my crap detector.

How about yours?

And the strange thing is that Chomsky signed onto an advert placed in the New York Times in the 60's by Mark Lane saying that the Kennedy assassination had not been properly investigated. So it seems that Chomsky had early inclinations towards our way of thinking, but then backed off.

Take from that what you will.

John

[Myra Bronstein]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

Can you recommend some specific sources on a Mormon/gov't alliance Harry?

Other than google that is.

[William Kelly]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.........

.....Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

CHARLES FORD. OKAY, LETS CHECK OUT WHAT CIA FILES HAVE ON CHUCK FORD.

FIRST A RECORD FROM 1945 OF OSS AGENTS GOING TO CHINA, INCLUDING FORD AND DEMOHRENSCHILDT'S FRIEND AND CIA DOMESTIC CONTACTS DIVISION DEBRIEFER J. WALTON MOORE! THERE ARE TWO CHARLES FORDS HOWEVER, CHARLES E. AND CHARLES D. BUT I THINK WE HAVE THE RIGHT GUY.

http://www.nara.gov/cgi-bin/starfinder/29254/jfksnew.txt

AGENCY INFORMATION

AGENCY : CIA

RECORD NUMBER : 104-10124-10342

RECORDS SERIES : JFK

AGENCY FILE NUMBER : 80T01357A

DOCUMENT INFORMATION

ORIGINATOR : CIA

FROM : FORD, CHARLES E., OSS

TO : SECURITY OFFICE, OSS

TITLE : OVERSEAS SECURITY APPROVAL [listING OF MEN LEAVING FOR

KUNMING, CHINA, INCLUDING J. WALTON MOORE].

DATE : 04/18/1945

PAGES : 1

DOCUMENT TYPE : PAPER - TEXTUAL DOCUMENT

SUBJECTS : CIA FILES; KUNMING, CHINA; MOORE, J. WALTO; TRAVEL

ORDERS

CLASSIFICATION :

RESTRICTIONS : 1A

DATE OF LAST REVIEW : 04/22/1994

COMMENTS : JFK44 : F20 : 1994.04.22.09:35:01:500007 :\

http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/findi.../cia-files.html

Then in Box 3: after F1 - Ted Shackley, F2 William M., F3 James Angleon, F4 Win Scott, F5- Special Activties TSD John Patrice Lumumba, there's JFK-M-03 (F6) Charles Ford/RFK/Mafia.

Two other NARA JFK record RIFFS link Charles Ford to Rocky Siscalino and a guy named Fiscalini (NFN).

I'm sure Mad Max and Black Slyde Hersh have already been through these boxes and records, but there might be something there they didn't like.

If that's a Oswald/DeMorn/Moore/Ford/RFK connection, it's less than six degrees of separation.

BK

Edited July 8, 2007 by William Kelly

[William Kelly]

Since my previous post didn't register, I'm going to bump it by noting that David Talbot, in focusing on RFK, does a fine service in pointing new research in the right direction.

Unfortunately, conspiracy debunkers and RFK baiters and haters have already rooted thorugh the debris.

As Thomas Powers, in his book Intelligence Wars and New York Review of Books, calls attention to the dynamic duo of Max Holland and Slyde Hersh, and their quest to discover the role of one Charles Ford.

Ford, a CIA officer and Langly office mate of JM/WAVE veteran Sam Halpern, was also reportedly working on special projects for RFK.

A quick NANA Riff search produced a half-dozen docs from the JFK ASS Records Collection pertaining to Ford, one an 1945 OSS doc that indicates Ford traveled to China with J. Walton Moore, George DeMorn's Dallas CIA contact.

While we already know that some anti-Castro Cubans reported on LHO's New Orleans activities directly to RFK, if this link proves true - then it is another possible link between RFK being briefed of LHO's activities before the assassination.

Ford apparently used the alias of - Rocky Siscalini/ Fiscalini, and appears in a CIA Task Force doc that references Mike Madigan/Richard Helms/Ford/RFK.

BK

Edited July 8, 2007 by William Kelly

[Harry J.Dean]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

Can you recommend some specific sources on a Mormon/gov't alliance Harry?

Other than google that is.

Myra

Just now briefly checked google re; the subject, and can only point out my personal

experience as outlined in the 1990 manuscript/book, YROJ Connection to the

JFK Assassination, and on the Forum Index under my name.

My aim is to direct researchers toward the ongoing, and present powerful

undercurrent of this succesful subversion.

One may well begin with Sen. Orrin Hatch,and/or Gen.Brent Scowcroft etc & etc.

Harry

[Harry J.Dean]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

Can you recommend some specific sources on a Mormon/gov't alliance Harry?

Other than google that is.

Myra

Just now briefly checked google re; the subject, and can only point out my personal

experience and associations as outlined in the 1990 manuscript/book, YROJ Connection

to the JFK Assassination, and on the Forum Index under my name.

My aim is to direct researchers toward the ongoing, and present powerful

undercurrent of this successful subversion.

One may well begin with Sen. Orrin Hatch,and/or Gen.Brent Scowcroft etc & etc.

Harry

[Terry Mauro]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

*********************************************************************

"Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!"

How are you, Harry? And, so right you are!

Is it safe to lump the John Birchers' in with them, or am I just whistling down a well?

Plus, isn't obvious how the theory of "Separation of Church and State" never seemed to pertain to these privileged

classes, who in reality never amounted to anything more than a bunch of holy-rollers? Talk about Islamic fundamentalists,

these Christian guys are just as deadly.

[Myra Bronstein]

The "new" CIA is reviving one of its oldest dirty tricks with this Bobby Kennedy smear. And yes, consider the sources-- Kissinger and Helms. I explain the genesis of this attack on RFK in my book. I just blogged about it in Salon. Here's part of what I wrote:

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

Spreading poisonous disinformation about the Kennedys has long been one of the CIA's oldest family jewels. Helms' loyal aide Sam Halpern was a master at disseminating these lies to the press for years. But don't expect the agency to come clean about this any time soon.

PS The fact that media is once again falling for this old lie -- including NPR's Daniel Schorr, the blithering idiot Chris Matthews, CNN etc -- once again shows how deeply misinformed the press is about this hugely important chapter in our history. I can't tell you how fed up I am with my profession.

http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/about/blog.html

The whole Kissinger/Helms story that RFK was behind plots to kill Castro was new to me when it recently made news, but then I just read the same story (Intelligence Wars, NYRB, 2004) in a Thomas Powers New York Review of Books from February 4, 1999.

Thomas Powers, who of Oswald, in the chapter called The Mind of the Assassin, after reviewing most of his intelligence related activities, writes, "Oswald's Tale brings us right up to the pinch-lipped misery and sour odor of the man. He borught pain to many and happiness to none. Anger is what this makes me feel. It was an insect that brought Kennedy down. Would to God he had popped first beneath somebody's foot."

Powers then joins forces with Mad Max Holland and Dark Slyd Hersh, not in a search for the truth, but to step on Bobby the Bug, whose been dead eight years when, as Powers says, these words were "written down in the heat of a government crisis, the words of a man [Henry Kiss] in a position to know [bK: and known to lie], recorded on the day, perhaps even within the hour, they were uttered."

As Powers puts it (p.372-373), "...The secrets a the heart of secrets are rarely confided to official paper or the appropriate files. The deepest secrets of all have nothing to do with the burn time of ballistic missiles, the configuration of fissionable material in nuclear weapons, or other technical matters, but rather with what presidents want. Those are what ancient Chinese writer about war and statecraft Sun-tzu called 'mouth-to-mouth" matters."

"One such surfaced recently when the Assassinations Records Review Board released a two-page 'Memorandum of Conversation' from Gerald Ford Presidential Library recording some comments of Henry Kissinger on January 4, 1975, during a discussion of news stories by Seymour Hersh claiming extensive wrongdoing by the CIA."

"According to Max Holland, who is writing a book about the Warren Commission, Kissinger, then serving as both Ford's secretary of state and his national security advisor, had sought a blanket denial from the agency but had been infromed by William Colby that some major secrets remain hidden. A former director, Richard Helms, was summoned back to Washington from his post as Amabassador to Iran to fill in the details for Kissinger at a breakfast meeting shrotly before Kissinger met in the White House with President Ford and Brent Scowcroft, who was taking notes."

"'Helms said all these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,' Kissinger said, as recorded by Scowcroft during the meeting with Ford. 'If they come out, blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro.'"

"The friends and defenders of the Kennedy brothers say it isn't so; but there it is on paper, written down in the heat of government crisis, the words of a man in a position to know, recorded on the day, perhaps even within the very hour, they were uttered."

"Holland and Hersh, still on the case, also learned recently the name of the CIA intelligence officer named to serve as liaison with the attorney general during the year in which he continually pressed the CIA for results in getting rid of Castro - a career intelligence officer, now dead, named Charles Ford."

"According to Ford's office-mate Sam Halpern, a CIA officfer also assigned to Task Force W in the agency's effort to get rid of Castro, Ford traveled hither and yon about the country on Robert Kennedy's business, but there public knowlege comes to an end. Hersh's book The Dark Side of Camelot, published in 1998, includes some addiional ancillary detail. Whether still-classified CIA files can fill out the story of Ford's work for Bobby remains unknown but it's likely, just as it is likely no one will be given free range of the files until many, many additional years have passed, if then."

"Think of the CIA's files as the nation's unconscious. There you may find the evidence, like the gouges on rock where a glacer has passed, of what American leaders really thought, really wanted, and really did - important clues to who we are as a people. Does this eternal battle over access to the files make sense when few still care what happened at the Bay of Pigs? Does it matter whether we are permitted to haul up the last piece of paper to the light of day before letting it rest? There is no right anwer, just personal preferences: some would rather know, and some would rather not."

"[Mad Max] Holland and [Dark Slyd] Hersh, still on the case....." are undobutedly sill chasing down Charles Ford and what he was doing for "Bobby" traveling "hither and yon," the office-mate to Sam Halpern, the sill-alive CIA officer also assigned to Task Force W., who also hates Kennedy.

Now that Bugliosi is fizzling out, I'm sure we will soon receive a barage of broadsides from the likes of Powers, Holland and Hersh.

BK

The note writing, record keeping General Brent Scowcroft served directly under

presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush Sr. and now with Bush Jr.

Scowcroft is only one of several thousands of Mormons imbeded within influencial

positions of U.S. Government Administrations.

It is urgent, that JFK Researchers expose such powerful socio/religious/politico

combinations!

Harry

Can you recommend some specific sources on a Mormon/gov't alliance Harry?

Other than google that is.

Myra

Just now briefly checked google re; the subject, and can only point out my personal

experience and associations as outlined in the 1990 manuscript/book, YROJ Connection

to the JFK Assassination, and on the Forum Index under my name.

My aim is to direct researchers toward the ongoing, and present powerful

undercurrent of this successful subversion.

One may well begin with Sen. Orrin Hatch,and/or Gen.Brent Scowcroft etc & etc.

Harry

Thank you Harry.