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Wednesday, 15 December 2021 04:18

Creating the Oswald Legend: Appendix

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Vasilios Vazakas provides a helpful appendix for his multi-part series on “Creating the Oswald Legend” identifying the actors and players on this grand chess board.


Appendix

The Grand Chess Board: actors and players


CIA Officers

Allen Dulles

Director of the CIA

Dulles was held responsible by JFK for the bungled Bay of Pigs invasion and was fired afterwards. Dulles never forgot or forgave JFK for the humiliation suffered. Kennedy decided to return West Irian to Indonesia from Dutch colonial rule. What Kennedy did not know, but Allen Dulles did, was that West Irian was a region extremely rich in minerals, even richer than Katanga. In the 1920s and 1930s, Allen Dulles was a lawyer at the giant corporate law firm Sullivan and Cromwell. He represented the Rockefellers there and he knew that Indonesia had huge mineral and oil potential. One of the oilfields in Sumatra exploited by Caltex was the size of similar oilfields in Saudi Arabia. In 1936, a joint Dutch and American expedition—including explorer/geologist Jean Jacques Dozy—was organized by Allen Dulles through Sullivan and Cromwell. That expedition discovered two enormous mineral deposits in West Irian. The American firms that financed the expedition were two divisions of Standard Oil. One of the two colossal deposits was called the Ertsberg and the other the Grasberg. Both were extravagantly rich in gold, silver, and copper. Just the gold content was much larger than the wealthiest gold mine in the world, then located in South Africa. Allen Dulles was close to the DeMohrenschildt family and transferred George DeMohrenschildt to West Irian to work on Standard Oil’s drilling, since the region had one of the largest oil deposits in Indonesia. Dulles lied to Kennedy on several occasions regarding the Sino-Soviet split. He told him it was not real, but a Cold war ploy to fool America. It was real and Dulles was using Indonesia as a wedge to further the split between China and the Soviet Union. From 1958, his first attempt to overthrow Sukarno, Dulles was planning on regime change. That would have allowed his clients to control the oil, gold, copper, and silver reserves of Indonesia rather than go to the citizenry of Indonesia, as Kennedy and Sukarno had planned. The policy of wedge against China and the Soviet Union would have been disrupted. Dulles had used religious organizations like the Unitarians to create humanitarian front organizations in order to conceal OSS and later CIA covert operations to destabilize Eastern Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia.

James Jesus Angleton

(Chief of CIA Counterintelligence)

Angleton’s obsession and mission was to catch a Soviet mole that allegedly had infiltrated the Agency. His secretive mole hunt unit, the Special Investigations Group (SIG), held a 201 file on Oswald prior to the assassination. John Newman thought that Oswald was an off-the-books agent for Angleton. In 1960, he used Oswald in a mole hunt to find out who had betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to its shoot down. Angleton did not find any mole, but he used the mole hunt as an alibi to cover his role in the U-2 incident, which resulted in the Paris Peace Summit cancellation. Similarly, he used the Oswald legend and an imposter to catch a mole had betrayed the CIA operations against Cuba in Mexico, even contacting the head of KGB assassinations before he himself tried to get to Cuba. Angleton had the excuse to manipulate information and to lower Oswald’s profile in a way that it would not raise suspicion until after November 22. Angleton, who John Neman believes was privy to the conspiracy to assassinate the President, had to design a fool-proof plot. The idea was to make it appear that the Cubans and Soviets manipulated Oswald in Mexico City in such a way to use him in the assassination of Kennedy. Angleton knew that the exposure of this plot would plant a WWIII virus in Oswald’s files that would halt any real investigation, in order to prevent a possible nuclear war. To achieve that, Oswald’s profile had to be lowered for the six weeks before the assassination. Angleton had to come up with a cover story, so no one would ever question his role in the plot. Again, Angleton would fail to catch a mole, but he had used the mole hunt to cover his true role that resulted in the murder of a U.S. President.

David Atlee Phillips

(CIA Covert Action/SAS Counterintelligence)

David Phillips was the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Actions in Mexico CIA station and also worked for the SAS/CI. He and James McCord first targeted the FPCC back in 1961. He dangled an American student, Court Wood, into the FPCC by pretending to be pro-Castro interesting in starting a new FPCC chapter, something that Oswald tried to emulate two years later both in New Orleans and Mexico. Prime suspect for handling Oswald and the Mexico City incident involving Oswald’s visits to the Cuban and Soviet Consulates. Lied far too many times about the events that took place to the HSCA investigators. On October 1, 1963, a diplomatic pouch was sent to CIA HQ addressed to a Michael Choaden. This was an alias for Phillips, that way he controlled all the materials in both Mexico and Washington. His assets like Alvarado tried to implicate Oswald in the assassination as a Cuban agent. In New Orleans he met with Banister, Ed Butler, and Sergio Arcacha Smith.

E. Howard Hunt

(Propaganda expert and an Officer of CIA’s Domestic Operations Division in 1962 under Tracey Barnes)

Bagley revealed to Malcolm Blunt that E. Howard Hunt was in the Soviet Division in 1962. There was no sign he ever worked in Soviet Russia Division. Blunt discovered that as part of a mole hunt, Bruce Solie of the Office of Security/Security Research Staff handed over Security and Personnel files to the FBI on various suspected moles. One of these was CIA staffer Peter Karlow. Those files contained information that Hunt was attending parties with the Karlows. Blunt is of the opinion that Hunt was spying on his own colleagues and that this would explain his sudden appearance in the Soviet Division. He also suspects that Hunt could only have been there under the instructions of Angleton, although Angleton always denied any relationship with Hunt. Later, Angleton revealed to author J. Trento that Hunt was in Dallas on the day of the assassination and that Hunt “had possibly been sent there by a high-level mole inside the CIA.” Trento believed that Angleton was trying to hide his own connections to Hunt and that it was him that had sent Hunt to Dallas. Hunt was the founder of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) that was so prominent in Oswald’s contacts in New Orleans. In 1968, Hunt employed Cubans from the Trafficante drug trafficking network to eliminate French smugglers and the old French Connection by redirecting the heroin trade from Marseille to Southeast Asia and Mexico to supply the US.

William K. Harvey

(CIA Chief of Foreign Intelligence Division D)

Head of the CIA’s executive action ZR/RIFLE assassination program. On his notes wrote that “Corsicans recommended Sicilians lead to Mafia.”

He also had security clearance for “Project Rock” a codename for the U-2 plane. According to a CIA document, they re-evaluated Harvey’s file in respect for approval to get security clearance to “Project Rock.” Mark Wyatt, Harvey’s Deputy in Rome, revealed that Harvey was in Dallas in November 1963. According to Wyatt, he had bumped into Harvey on a plane to Dallas sometime before the assassination. When he asked Harvey what was doing in Dallas, he replied vaguely, “I am here to see what’s happening. To be fair to Harvey, he was not in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Wyatt said that they were both attending a Gladio meeting in Sardinia, Italy, when they heard about the assassination. Later that afternoon, Wyatt found Harvey collapsed in his bed after drinking martinis. Malcolm Blunt revealed that in August 1963, Harvey wanted to meet with Clare Boothe Luce, some months prior to the assassination.

Tennet H. Bagley

(CIA Chief of Soviet Russia/Counter Intelligence)

Told researcher Malcolm Blunt that Oswald was a witting false defector. Bagley had nothing to say about Kostikov’s role as KGB assassination officer. Yet on November 23, 1963, submitted a memo describing Kostikov as “an identified KGB officer…in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th department responsible of assassinations.” It is worth mentioning that Bagley was transferred in 1963 from the Bern station in Switzerland to Langley and promoted as Chief of SR/CI, just in time for the suppression of Kostikov’s KGB role.

William Larson

(CIA Chief of the Information Management Staff)

Revealed to HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf that the Office of Security did not open 201 files and that a 201 file should be opened whenever a subject accumulates at least five documents. Oswald’s file had 12 items and yet a 201 file was not open. Larson also revealed that the Office of Security worked closely with Angleton’s Counter Intelligence staff.

Richard M. Bissel

(CIA Deputy Director of Plans)

Involved in the development of U-2 & A-12 spy planes, CORONA satellites, CIA Liaison with Air Force and Defence industry. Brought Helliwell back from the Far East to organize a similar network of drug trafficking and bank laundering to finance the war against Castro. One of the architects of the Bay of Pigs invasion

Robert Gambino

(CIA Office of Security Chief)

Revealed to HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf that the CIA Mail Logistics responsible for incoming documents bypassed the General Filing System and sent all the Oswald information to the CIA Office of Security instead of the Soviet Russia division

Raymond Rocca

(Angleton’s Deputy in CIA Counter Intelligence)

Cabled Luis Echeverria on November 23rd concerning the relationship between Oswald and Sylvia Duran who took over the Mexico investigation from the FBI and the WC, before Helms had assigned Angleton his liaison duties with the Commission. the day after the assassination, a CIA agent escorted Elena Garro de Paz to the Vermont Hotel. In other words, within 24 hours, Angleton and Rocca are controlling Duran, a prime witness to Oswald not being in Mexico City, and Elena Garro, a witness who would eventually say that Oswald was having an affair with Duran.

Ann Egerter

(Counter Intelligence/Special Investigations Group Officer)

Worked under Birch O’Neil and his Deputy Scotty Miller. She opened a 201 file on Oswald in 1960 after a State Department request about US defectors to the USSR. She wrote Oswald’s middle name Henry, not Harvey, and the slot that is labeled Source Document is filled in with the acronym CI/SIG, which is not a document. Finally, in the notes below Dottie Lynch is still waiting for the file. She works in the SR division where the file should have been placed originally.

Edward G. Lansdale

(Air Force Major General and CIA affiliated, member of the American Security Council)

Malcolm Blunt believes that although Lansdale was a military man, he was working mainly for the CIA.  Blunt mentioned that Lansdale resigned or retired temporarily from the army in October 1963. A short time later he returned to the army and he was promoted. The man who was pushing for his promotion was none other than Allen Dulles himself. Not only that but Lansdale headed the first mission in Saigon in 1954 and this mission was a CIA creation. John Newman found out that after his retirement, Lansdale visited his friend Sam Williams in Denton, Texas, which was near Dallas around the time of the assassination. He was Nelson Rockefeller’s clandestine associate in Southeast Asian propaganda activities. Lansdale was an adviser to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund/Special Studies Project and was appointed head of new counterinsurgency office at the Pentagon after the Bay of Pigs. William K. Harvey disliked Lansdale, thought of him as a security risk and could not work with him. If any of the two was part of the assassination planning certainly did not involve the other.

Paul Helliwell

Helliwell was a member of the OSS and later of the CIA in the Far East; he was one of the most prominent members of the China Lobby. He was the originator of the CIA’s off-the-books accounting system and nicknamed Mister Black Bag. His mission was to assist Chang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma to invade China. This army managed and controlled the opium traffic in the region. Helliwell created two front companies to help KMT to carry out its war and the drug trade. One was Sea Supply in Bangkok and the other was CAT Inc., later Air America in Taiwan. Helliwell had organized a drug trafficking network supported by banks to launder CIA’s drug profits in the Far East. Helliwell’s main objective was to cement the CIA’s relationship with organized crime. Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante were both planning to invest in the Far East by bringing heroin back to the States. Helliwell established banks in Florida and became the owner of the Bank of Perrine in Key West, “a two-time laundromat for the Lansky mob and the CIA”, and its sister Bank of Cutler Ridge. Lansky would deposit money into the Bank of Perrine, reaching the US from the Bank of World Commerce in the Bahamas. Lansky also used the small Miami National Bank, where Helliwell was a legal counsel, to launder money from abroad and from his Las Vegas casinos. Peter Scott claimed that Helliwell worked with E. Howard Hunt, Mitch WerBell and Lucien Conein on developing relationships with drug dealing Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and became CIA paymaster for JM/WAVE to finance Chief of Station Ted Shackley’s operations against Cuba.

Anne Goodpasture

Anne Goodpasture was a CIA officer from Staff D posted to the Mexico CIA station. She tried to disguise her role in retrieving photos each day. But Lopez and Hardway found out the man she named in this function only did the legwork for Goodpasture. They finally discovered that Goodpasture was responsible for photographic and electronic surveillance. The translating team said that they did not review all photographs from the Soviet Embassy, only what Goodpasture would allow them to see, and all such photographs were under her control. They also revealed that, although Goodpasture was an assistant to station chief Win Scott, she was a closer assistant to David Phillips. She provided the photographs of the mystery man in Mexico. When Goodpasture was questioned about it, she replied that it was the only photograph of a non-Latin person taken on October 1, 1963. But Lopez and Hardway discovered that the photo was taken on October 2, 1963. Dan Hardway described her as ‘’a lying, conniving bitch. And if there was any justice in this world, she would be in jail.’’

David Sanchez Morales

Morales was also known as ‘’El Indio’’ was the chief of operations at the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami, operations involving training paramilitary teams to infiltrate and invade Cuba. His haunting words to his friend ‘’we took care of that S.O.B.’’ have convinced may researchers that Morales was involved in the assassination. Bill Simpich believes that had used his Cuban intelligence forces, called AMOTs, to impersonate Oswald and Duran. It is unlikely that Morales would have been able to manipulate the Oswald files and foresee all the subsequent events that led to the assassination. . It is more likely that Morales would have also taken orders from Angleton and not the other way around.

Dorothe Matlack

Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence (ACSI)

The CIA and Army Intelligence worked together to form the Caribbean Action Center (CAC) for collecting intelligence from Cuban refugees. One of the major participants in this group was Dorothe Matlack, Assistant Chief of Staff of Intelligence (ACSI) for Army Intelligence and Liaison to the CIA. Matlack had joined the Interagency Defector Committee (IDC) in 1953. This involved State, DIA, Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, and CIA. She also cooperated with Tony Czajkowski of the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division and CIA Defector Coordinator George Aurell and worked with the CIA in analyzing reports made by notorious defectors such as Anatoly Golitsyn. On May 7, 1963, Matlack and Czajkowski met with George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne.

CIA Operations (may include Cuban Exiles and the Mafia)

CIA DOD and Air Proprietaries

The DOD would recruit anti-Castro Cuban exiles with the purpose of breaking into foreign embassies and United Nations missions that were suspected of being friendly and sympathetic to Castro’s regime. Another important aspect of the DOD was his affiliation with the CIA proprietary organizations. The most infamous and most important CIA proprietary company was the Pacific Corporation Holdings, located in Washington D.C., that was incorporated in Dover, Delaware, a State with a friendly tax law that allowed companies formed in Delaware but not operating there to not pay state corporate tax.

Pacific Corporation was the parent company of the CIA air proprietaries, Civil Air Transport Co., Ltd., CAT Inc., later renamed Air America Inc.; Air Asia Co., Ltd.; the Pacific Engineering Company; and the Thai Pacific Services Co., Ltd. Air America took over all the operations in South East Asia, while Air Asia operated from Taiwan.

Another air proprietary linked to Pacific Corporation was Southern Air Transport (SAT), incorporated in Miami and operated in both the Far East and Latin America. Most importantly, the air proprietaries like CAT/Air America not only provided their services to facilitate the opium trade in the Golden Triangle, which included Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand, but also were involved in the replacement of elected governments in Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Air America did not only operate for the CIA, but they were doing contract work for large oil companies in the Southeast Asia

Trafficante, Lansky, Anti-Castro Cubans and drug trafficking

Santo Trafficante’s main areas of influence were Florida and the Caribbean, operating casinos in Cuba. After 1959, large numbers of anti-Castro Cubans moved to Florida and Trafficante used them to take control over Florida’s bolita lottery, a Cuban numbers game. This worked as a cover, since these Cubans became Trafficante’s new group of heroin couriers and distributors, who were unknown to American law enforcement agencies. They used drug smuggling to finance their operations—trafficking cocaine from Latin America and later heroin from Marseille. Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s protégé and head of the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC) in Miami, was involved in drug trafficking to finance his war. The DOD under Barnes and Hunt would protect the Cuban drug network and Angleton was aware of it. Another CRC member of New Orleans, Sergio Arcacha Smith, who was associated with Hunt, Phillips, and Banister, was involved in contraband operations from Florida to Texas, specializing in drugs, guns, and prostitution.

In 1968, Trafficante visited Hong Kong and Southeast Asia to examine the possibilities of importing heroin from those regions to the US via Mexico and Latin America

DOD & Angleton’s CI operations

Orchestrated the Mexico charade and a mole hunt when Oswald defected in the USSR.

Angleton’s Counter Intelligence was obliged to ask the FBI to assist tracking Soviet illegals, moles, and spies entering the US. But with the creation of the new division, he could conduct his operations with the DOD without having to inform Hoover about it. Malcom Blunt believes that “DOD would have been ripe for exploitation purposes. And of keen interest to Angleton for positive counterintelligence usage. DOD was somewhere other agency elements could drop personnel into and thus be a vehicle for disguised operations: such as Howard Hunt’s PCS/DOD in 1962 when he turned up in the Soviet Russia Division.

CIA Counter Intelligence & Police Training

The CIA’s Counter Intelligence Staff was responsible for the Police Group (CI/PG). This CI/PG would be in constant liaison with the OPS of USAID and its training facility, the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington. The CI/PG would exchange daily information with USAID on training programs with IPA and tours for foreign police/security representatives sponsored by the CIA’s Area Divisions. James Angleton wrote a memo explaining how USAID cooperated with CIA in law enforcement training and operations. CIA’s 1947 chapter forbade any “Police or Subpoena power” and only the FBI had the right to legitimately train the domestic Police forces. Phillip Melanson acquired documents showing that the CIA provided training to Metropolitan Police. This ranged from seminars, briefings, workshops in bugging, clandestine action, disguise techniques, lock picking, equipment loaning, and explosives detection.  One of the documents revealed that CIA agents posed as cops and had received police badges and ID cards as early as 1960 to pursue “foreign intelligence targets”, as the CIA claimed. The CIA would also contact “friendly” police departments to ask for discreet handling of CIA personnel when in trouble and also to check on CIA employees and other people. Some of the police departments having received training and equipment were New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Miami, San Diego, and Minnesota. Dallas was not in those documents, but the name of some police departments was blanked out and Melanson believed that one of them was Dallas. He reasoned that Dallas would have not refused the CIA’s generous offer of training., especially when Mayor Earle Cabell was a CIA asset and his brother was a CIA Deputy Director and the force was full of right wingers and anti-Communists, who were always eager to unmask subversives and spies.

New Orleans

Guy Bannister

Banister’s office was located in the Balter building in New Orleans. In the same building were located the offices of a Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), and Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative. When Banister moved to 544 Camp Street, Arcacha Smith rented an office for CRC in the same building. It was CIA officer E. Howard Hunt who had helped create this organization. Gordon Novel has said that he met Arcacha Smith in 1961 at Banister’s office upon Ed Butler’s recommendation and, at that meeting, was a person who fit the description of David Phillips. When Oswald moved to New Orleans, it is possible that his job there was related to industrial security in search for subversives. He was employed by the Reily Coffee Company, but he also worked covertly for Guy Banister. William Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, was the company’s Vice President and specialized in industrial security. Alfred Claude, the man who hired Oswald, left Reily and went to work in Chrysler’s aerospace division, which was based in NASA’s New Orleans facilities. Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s supervisor, and two other Reily employees, Dante Marachini and John Branyon, went on also to work for NASA, more likely in the industrial security division. Oswald was frequenting a New Orleans’s garage and had revealed to its owner, Adrian Alba, that he was going to work for NASA. Bill Nitschke, a Banister associate, confessed that Banister had given an offer to NASA to get a contract for industrial security in NASA’s New Orleans facilities.

That Banister’s investigating agency was doing industrial security work can be indicated by the testimony of former Banister associate, Joseph Oster. He told L.J. Delsa, an HSCA investigator, that Banister was using two sources to seek out subversives and Communists, FIDELAFAX and the American Security Council.

David Ferrie

When Oswald was in New Orleans, he was in contact with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw.  When Oswald was fifteen, he met David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Ferrie was a Captain. In 1961, Ferrie and an exiled Cuban, Sergio Arcacha Smith, were part of the CIA’s training and preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Jim Garrison was the first official to present witnesses that had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the areas of Clinton and Jackson, ninety miles north of New Orleans, Oswald and his two companions went to the neighboring village of Clinton to register. It happened to be the day when a drive to register black voters—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—was on. When the Cadillac appeared, most voters thought it might be the FBI, so they noticed the car and its occupants. Several witnesses, from simple voters, to the Registrar, and the local Sheriff, testified that they identified the three people as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. The Sheriff even approached the car and asked the tall grey haired driver for his license. It turned out to be Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart of New Orleans. Why did Shaw and Ferrie take Oswald to Jackson to seek a job at the hospital and register as a voter?

Clay Shaw

Garrison was contacted by a witness who revealed to him that a Mr. "White" of Freeport Sulphur company had contacted him to discuss a possible Castro assassination plan. The same witness had heard Clay Shaw or David Ferrie talking about some nickel mines in Cuba. Another witness, Jules Ricco Kimble, told Garrison’s office that a Mr. “White” along with Shaw and David Ferrie had flown in a plane to Cuba to make a deal regarding some nickel mines. It could be a coincidence, but Johnny Roselli testified that he “represented himself to the Cuban contacts as an agent of some business interests of Wall Street that had nickel interests and properties around in Cuba and I was getting financial assistance from them.” This, of course, was when Roselli was associated with the CIA and trying to arrange the murder of Fidel Castro. It would have been interesting if Roselli had named those nickel interests in Cuba, but it may be more than an assumption that he was talking about the same nickel mines involving Freeport Sulphur. regarding Clay Shaw’s contacts with the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). One of these documents stated Clay Shaw had been granted covert security approval for project QK/ENCHANT. Newly discovered documents revealed that the CIA was examining the prospect of using Banister’s agency as a cover company for project QK/ENCHANT. Based on ARRB investigation, QK/ENCHANT was a cryptonym for “permission to approach” and utilization for cleared contact purposes. These probably indicated the use of individuals and companies as contact cover for CIA proprietary organizations. Author Bill Davy showed the above document to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and, after examining it, he said to Davy, “That’s interesting…he was doing something there.” He added that Shaw would not need a covert security clearance for DCS.

Ed Butler

Ed Butler, the founder of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. Oswald’s appearance on Bill Stuckey’s New Orleans radio show “Carte Blanche”. There, he talked about his political views and debated with Ed Butler and Carlos Bringuier. The result of this interview was a record production by Dr. Alton Ochsner’s INCA, an album with the title, “Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red.” On the front cover was a drawing of Oswald’s face and on the back of the album was the headline “I am a Marxist” with the date of August 21, 1963, at the bottom were photographs of Congressman Hale Boggs, psy war specialist and Ochsner employee Ed Butler, and Dr. Alton Ochsner himself. Ed Butler did not only have connections to the previously discussed American Security Council, but he was also in contact with General Edward Lansdale and CIA Deputy Director Charles Cabell. After Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison learned about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his contacts with Butler and INCA. Butler got so scared that he packed all the INCA files and parts of Banister’s files and moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment with Patrick J. Frawley, a prominent member of the American Security Council

Alton Ochsner

(Esteemed Surgeon Doctor in New Orleans)

Malcolm Blunt revealed that Ochsner was a cleared CIA source since May of 1955 and the CIA had sources inside Ochsner’s large New Orleans clinic. He had the reputation of an extreme right-winger: anti-welfare, anti-Medicare, and racist. He was the President of the International House (IH) and he was also a member of the International Trade Mart (ITM), where he worked with Clay Shaw, who was once a Managing Director of the International House. He was a member of the exclusive New Orleans Boston Club and he had been invited to the secretive west coast Bohemian Club. During his time at Tulane University, he managed to attract financial support from the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. Ochsner’s INCA organization was getting financial support from Standard Oil, the Reily Foundation, Mississippi Shipping Company, the Hibernia bank, and ITM.

Various Persons of Interest

Priscilla Johnson

She interviewed Oswald in his hotel in Moscow while he was waiting to be relocated. Next day she had a dinner with McVickar. He wrote a memo where he stated that Priscilla had told him that Oswald would be trained in electronics but Priscilla later denied that she did. When Josef Stalin died, his daughter Svetlana defected to the States and stayed with Priscilla’s father, Stewart Johnson. Priscilla helped Svetlana write her memoirs. Following JFK’s assassination, Priscilla was privileged enough to spend time with Marina Oswald in the summer and fall of 1964. As an important witness to testify for the Warren Commission, Marina was not allowed to come in contact with anyone, living under Secret Service protection. How Priscilla managed to stay with her when nobody else could approach her is a question that has not been answered. Priscilla had one more privilege: to write Marina’s biography. Senator Richard Russell, a member of the Warren Commission, was not convinced that Oswald was guilty or that he had travelled to Mexico, but an unexpected incident helped change his mind. Marina testified that she found a ticket to Mexico inside a magazine while writing her biography with Priscilla. In other words, after numerous searches, the FBI and the Dallas Police could not find it, but Priscilla and Marina did. In 1977 Priscilla published her book titled Marina and Lee. Marina revealed that she did not contribute much to the book; it was Priscilla who had to discover most of the facts and put them in order. Priscilla never stopped trying to convince the public that Oswald was guilty. She appeared before the HSCA, along with her attorney and a written affidavit. The Committee found this odd, since she was not being accused of anything so the affidavit and the lawyer were not necessary.

Yekaterina Furtseva

Yekaterina Furtseva was an interesting character that some believe was the most powerful woman in the Soviet Union and Khrushchev’s lover. She even had authority over KGB’s head, Vladimir Y. Semichastny, threatening to replace him with his deputy whenever he displeased her. She loved everything American and she was primarily concerned about her family’s well being. In 1993, it was revealed that Oswald had a champion in the Politburo, and it was none other than Furtseva. In The Man who Knew too Much Russell reported that “Furtseva urged that the young ex-Marine be allowed to stay on … and sought to keep KGB chief Semichastny from recruiting Oswald.” Later Semichastny concluded that Furtseva was running her own shop.

Johnny Roselli

John Martino’s claimed that the “Anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together.” Larry Hancock in his recent e-book “Tipping Point” presents a case where CIA Cuban exile teams in JM/WAVE were trained to kill Castro, but later shifted their focus to Kennedy after they learned that JFK was secretly negotiating to restore relations with Castro. To them, this constituted the ultimate betrayal. It is likely that such information would have been passed down from William Harvey to Johnny Roselli. Therefore, in this scenario, those most likely involved in the conspiracy to kill Kennedy were Roselli, Harvey, David Morales, Rip Robertson, Felipe Vidal Santiago, Roy Hargraves, John Martino, CIA paramilitary officer Carl Jenkins, and Cubans like Chi Chi Quintero, Felix Rodriquez, Carlos Hernandez, Nestor Izquierdo, and Segundo Borgas.

Pawley-Bayo mission (CIA crypt Operation TILT). This was a sea voyage into Cuba. It was allegedly designed to exfiltrate Soviet scientists who wanted to defect and testify before Senator James Eastland’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. That testimony was to state that the Russians still had missiles present in Cuba.

Apart from millionaire William Pawley and Cuban exile Eddie Bayo, others that took part in the operation were John Martino, Eugenio Martinez, and CIA agent Rip Robertson. Pawley had asked CIA Deputy Director Pat Carter and Ted Shackley of JM/WAVE to help him with the mission. Pawley would have used his private yacht, while David Morales supervised the mission. Operation TILT failed, since the exile Cubans disappeared on their way to Cuba and were never heard from again.

Peter Dale Scott has written that the real purpose of the mission was to assassinate Castro. Jack Anderson reported the Johnny Roselli story that the assassination team was captured in Cuba and Castro “turned them” and sent them to Dallas to assassinate Kennedy instead. At one point, Bayo had asked for help from a wealthy Kennedy supporter, Theodore Racoosin, who later reported that someone from within the White House—possibly Robert Kennedy—had authorized him to organize meetings with Cuban exiles and learn details of CIA Cuban operations. Scott believes that this operation was used to blackmail the Attorney General, so he would not investigate his brother’s assassination.

John Martino

John Martino was an exiled Cuban who worked in a Havana Casino owned by Santo Trafficante Jr. back in 1956. He was imprisoned in Cuba between 1959 and 1962. When he returned to the States, he became involved in the anti-Castro cause. He took part in the notorious Operation Tilt, he had both Mob and CIA connections. Later in life, he admitted to his business partner Fred Claasen that the anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together and tried to frame him as a Castro assassin in a plot to murder President Kennedy. Those Cubans posed as Castro agents and it is more likely that Oswald played along to reveal their agenda as part of his mission to smoke out subversives and pro-Cubans. The plan was to fly him out of the country and kill him en route, possibly on his way to Cuba, in such a way that would prove Castro and Cuba were pulling Oswald’s strings. John Martino’s claimed that the “Anti-Castro Cubans put Oswald together.” On November 26, the CIA and Mafia-affiliated Frank Sturgis said to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper that Oswald had connections to the Cuban Government and that he had made a call to the Cuban Intelligence. The same day John Martino, another CIA and Santo Trafficante Jr. ally, stated in an interview that he had contacted Cuban G-2 in Mexico City and had distributed FPCC leaflets in Miami. Martino also revealed that Castro killed Kennedy to retaliate for a plot devised by Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to replace Castro with Huber Matos, who was in a Cuban jail.

Dallas

Max Clark

Max Clark was a retired Air Force Colonel and he used to work at General Dynamics as industrial security officer. Clark had also received covert security clearance from the CIA for “Project Rock” while working for General Dynamics. A CIA document had linked “Project Rock” to Project Oarfish, a code for the manufacturing of the U-2 airplane. Max Clark was working closely with I.B. Hale, a former FBI agent and later head of General Dynamics industrial security. It was Virginia, wife of I.B. Hale, that had helped Oswald to get a job at Leslie Whiting on July 1962. George DeMohrenschildt was encouraged by Max Clark and J. Walton Moore of the CIA to befriend Oswald and become his mentor. It was George DeMohrenschildt who helped Oswald get a new job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) after he quit his job at Leslie Welding. JCS was doing contract work for the U.S. Army Map Service and that work was related to U-2 flights over Cuba. Oswald got the job four days before President Kennedy was shown pictures of missiles in Cuban taken by the U-2.

Dallas Police officers

Reserve officer Kenneth Croy was near Main Street and asked a policeman outside the Courthouse if he was needed assistance with the investigation of the President’s murder. Croy claimed that the policeman replied that he was not needed; so he decided to go home. He heard on the radio that an unidentified officer was shot at 10th and Patton. He went there and  ”discovered” a wallet allegedly given to him by a civilian. Strangely enough, he never filed a report and never asked the name of the witness he talked to or the name of the person that gave him the wallet.

Captain Westbrook, the Chief of the Police Personnel Department, was at the TSBD when he heard on the radio that a police officer had been shot in the Oak Cliff area. He decided to go there to investigate a murder; which was odd since he was a personnel officer and not a homicide detective. FBI agent Hosty said that his colleague, FBI Agent Bob Barrett, who was present at Tippit’s murder scene, told him that Captain Westbrook asked him: “Have you ever heard of a guy named Lee Harvey Oswald?” Barrett said no. Westbrook then asked him, “How about Alek Hidell?” Then Barrett said that he saw Westbrook holding and searching a wallet, which was supposed to be Oswald’s wallet. This wallet would link Oswald to Hidell and to the weapons that killed both Tippit and Kennedy. However, the Warren Commission gave a different version concerning the wallet: that it was found on Oswald after he was arrested at the Texas Theater. Westbrook’s “personnel” work was not over, since he heard on the radio that a suspect was seen entering the Texas Theater looking suspicious, without paying a ticket. So the personnel officer went there and witnessed the arrest of Oswald. He then gave the order to drive the suspect to the police station. So, the Chief of Personnel had managed to be present at the three major crime scenes: Dealey Plaza, 10th and Patton, and the Texas Theater. It was a remarkable work of sleuthing for a Personnel Officer.

Sergeant Gerald Hill was the man who first reported on a radio call at 13:40 that the shells found at the Tippit crime scene were fired from a 38 automatic, not a 38 special. Later when testifying for the Warren Commission, he denied under oath that he made such a call; but twenty years later he admitted to Dale Myers that he made the call after all. When Hill returned from the Texas Theater, he sat down to write a report regarding Oswald’s arrest. Captain Westbrook informed him that Oswald was not just the suspect in Tippit’s murder, but also for President Kennedy’s assassination.

Senator Thomas Dodd

Senator Thomas Dodd was one of the major forces who opposed Kennedy’s Congo policy. He initiated hearings in the senate on the “loss” of Congo to Communism. Senator Thomas Dodd, another member of the powerful American Security Council. Dodd was the Chairman of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee trying to legislate the use of interstate mail orders for weapons. Dodd’s subcommittee started its hearings two days after Hidell ordered the Smith & Wesson gun and the Manlicher–Carcano was also one of the weapons investigated. Senator Dodd was also member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—headed by the racist, right-wing Senator James Eastland of Mississippi—which was investigating the FPCC. Dodd called the FPCC “the chief public relations instrument of the Castro network in the United States” and believed that both the Socialist party and the Communist Party had infiltrated the committee. It might have been possible that Oswald, as a member of a private investigating firm, was contacted by Dodd’s committee to infiltrate these three organizations. The son of one of Senator Dodd’s friends, who had been hired as an investigator to do work for the subcommittee, was involved in a strange incident in Mexico, causing a disturbance in a strip club. He was arrested by Mexican police for having a gun and posing as a police officer. The same man was arrested for carrying three weapons and ammunition in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on a weekend that President Kennedy was there. After the assassination Dodd promoted the false information that Oswald had been trained at a KGB assassination school in Minsk.

Michael and Ruth Paine

Michael Paine was related to the Forbes and Cabot families. Michael’s mother, Ruth Forbes, was a very good friend of Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles former lover Michael’s stepfather was Arthur Young, a famous inventor and one of the creators of Bell Helicopter. That connection helped his step-son Michael Paine get a high tech/high security clearance to work at Bell Helicopter in Fort Worth. Ruth Paine’s father, William Avery Hyde, and his wife Carol were prominent members of the Ohio Unitarians. An employee of theTexas Employment Commission wanted to inform Oswald that they had found him a job at Trans Texas Airport. Ruth Paine answered that he was not home and so they called back the next day to hear that Oswald had taken a job elsewhere. Ruth never informed Oswald about this job, even though it paid about $100 more per month than the TSBD one. The backyard photographs of Oswald posing with a rifle were found by the police at the Paines’ home. But a week later, another piece of evidence turned up out of the blue— on November 30. It was a note found inside a book incriminating Oswald in the attempted murder of General Walker, which is bizarre since Oswald, for seven months, had never been considered a suspect in that case. Ruth Paine also provided other evidence: a betting guide and a English-Spanish dictionary that allegedly proved that Oswald had visited Mexico. Ruth was also responsible for discovering the well-known “Kostin letter“ allegedly written by Oswald saying that he met Comrade Kostin (meaning Kostikov) in Mexico City. some of these items were discovered after the Dallas Police searched the Paine home and garage—twice! A good example would be the Imperial Reflex camera which was allegedly used to take the backyard photographs. That camera was not on the original Dallas Police inventory list. It was found by Ruth two weeks after the assassination. 

Criminal Intelligence Section (CIS)

This unit was also involved in Presidential protection by helping to identify and neutralize potential dangerous local threats. The CIS had compiled a list of twelve TSBD employees who were unaccounted for but the CIS list had put on top the name of Harvey Lee Oswald. Melanson believed that a common CIA practice was to keep two files on certain individuals, an overt file and a covert file that usually had the first two names transposed. It was L. D. Stringfellow, a CIS officer who provided the 112th MIG the incriminating information that Oswald had defected to Cuba in 1959 and was a card-carrying member of Communist Party. CIS was not only aware of Jack Ruby’s gun running activities, but withheld this information. They also investigated Ruby’s shooting of Oswald and found nothing sinister. In 1963, it was one of the three sections of Police’s Special Services Bureau, along with Vice and narcotics, and their offices were not located at the City Hall, but at the Dallas Fair Grounds, where Jack Crichton’s underground Emergency Command and Communications bunker was located. In the force were officers George Lumpkin, Jack Revill, Stringfellow, and W. P. Gunnaway. Colonel Jack Crichton, was the head of the 488th Army Reserve Intelligence unit in Dallas. According to Russ Baker, Crichton revealed “in a little-noticed oral history in 2001, there were about hundred men in that unit and about forty or fifty of them were from the Dallas Police Department.”  Crichton was the man who, through Lumpkin, arranged for his friend Ilya Mamantov to translate Marina’s testimony and, as we have shown earlier, to falsely connect Oswald to a dark and scopeless rifle. Researcher Bill Kelly believes that Crichton’s 488th Army Reserve Intelligence unit was connected to ACSI-Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, U.S. Army Reserves and that Captain Lumpkin and Army Reserve Colonel Whitmeyer were ACSI officers.

Eastern Establishment

Percival Brundage

Brundage was a major Unitarian Church officer from 1942-1954 when the Unitarian Church was cooperating with, first, the OSS, and later the CIA. He was also president of the International Association for Religious Freedom (IARF) from 1952-1955 and president of the American Friends of Albert Schweitzer College from 1953-1958, the College in Switzerland were Oswald was supposed to visit and study. Most importantly, Brundage became the most prominent member of the Bureau of Budget (BOB) during the Eisenhower presidency. Brundage was responsible as the head of BOB for drafting the congressional legislation for the creation of NASA. Through his BOB activities he was involved with the U-2, the satellite programs, the Pentagon and the CIA. Brundage and one of his associates, E. Perkins McGuire, were asked to hold the majority of a new airline stock “in name only.” They both agreed to act on behalf of the CIA. The airline was none other than Southern Air Transport, which was used in paramilitary missions in the Congo, the Caribbean and Indochina.

Frederick Osborn Jr.

Frederick Henry Osborn Sr. was a trustee of Princeton University and a member of the Rockefeller Institute and the Carnegie Corporation. Osborn was a Director of the Population Association of America, the American Eugenics Society, and of the Association for Research in Human Heredity. He was also an associate of Dean Acheson. John D. Rockefeller III appointed Osborn the Population Council’s first Director Osborn, along with Wickliffe Preston Draper, founded the Pioneer Fund; the purpose was to advance pro-eugenic research and propaganda. In 1937, Osborn stated that the Nazi’s racial sterilization program was “the most important social program which has ever been tried.” His son Frederick Osborn Jr. and his wife Nancy who provided character references for Ruth and Michael Paine, when the FBI was investigating them for their close relationship to Marina and Lee Oswald.

Henry Luce

Owner of the Time, Life, Fortune empire. Henry Luce was the man who invented the term “American Century,” which involved global American dominance projected by American businesses leading a worldwide economy. Anti-Communist and member of the American Security Council.

C. D. Jackson

He was an expert in wartime propaganda, public relations, advertising, publishing, psychological warfare, black ops, and he was an opinion maker. During the Eisenhower Presidency, he was the Special Assistant to the President for International Affairs and he had been an editor-in-Chief of Henry Luce’s TimeLife, and Fortune magazines. He bought the Zapruder film for Time Inc. When Jackson viewed the film he withhold it from public viewing. On 29 November 1963, Life published a special issue on the assassination that included only thirty-one selected frames, which did not allow the readers to understand the sequence and direction of the shots, especially the fatal head shot. Marina Oswald was isolated at the Inn of the Six Flags by the Secret Service. James Herbert Martin was the manager and later became Marina’s agent, also arranged for Marina to pen a book. That was arranged from C. D. Jackson and Life’s Edward K. Thompson, through their Dallas representative Isaac Don Levine. It was Allen Dulles who had urged C. D. Jackson to have Marina’s story written by Levine, but that book never materialized. C. D. Jackson was indirectly connected to the Pawley-Bayo mission (CIA crypt Operation TILT).

Joe Alsop

Joseph Alsop of the New York Herald Tribune called LBJ and suggested to him the need for a presidential commission, but the President argued that it would ruin the Texas and FBI investigations. Alsop tried to convince Johnson otherwise and offered the information that Dean Acheson, the former Secretary of State, was also in favor. Alsop was indirectly admitting that he was acting in collusion with Acheson. Alsop inflated a minor incident in Laos involving north Vietnamese invaders. Alsop arrived in Laos in time to report about a “massive new attack in Laos” by “at least three and perhaps five new battalions of enemy troops from North Vietnam.” Later he wrote of “aggression, as naked, as flagrant as a Soviet-East German attack on West Germany.”

Dean Acheson

He was an American Statesman and lawyer. On December 4, 1963, Dean Acheson praised LBJ for appointing the Warren Commission and LBJ replied that “we did the best we could and I think we’ve got Hoover pretty well in line.” It was McCloy, Lovett, and Acheson that later advised LBJ on Vietnam and recommended escalation of the war.

Eugene Rostow

Dean of the Yale Law School, called Bill Moyers at the White House on November 24, 1963, to suggest the possibility of a Presidential Commission which would include distinguished citizens. It should be noted that Rostow told Moyers there was someone else in the room when he called, but he did not say who it was. Rostow told Moyers that he had already spoken to Katzenbach about three times, but he was speaking directly to Moyers because Katzenbach “sounded too groggy so I thought I’d pass this thought along to you.” Katzenbach wrote his memo as a result of his conversations with Rostow.

Rockefeller Business Interests World Wide

The Rockefeller brothers made huge profits from the Vietnam war since they had ownership and shares in big defense contractors like Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, Boeing, and General Motors. That last company gained more than $1.3 billion in military contracts in 1968. But these were short-term profits for the Rockefellers. The real deal was in reconstructing the infrastructure after the war had ended and financing would be needed to achieve that. Under this mistaken assumption, in 1965, Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank opened a branch in Saigon—a huge fortress with no windows but thick glass blocks and stone walls that could withstand mortar attacks. A major force behind the Vietnam War was the Rockefeller’s Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG). That membership included Rockefeller Brothers Inc., Chase Manhattan Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Standard Oil of Indiana. SEADAG’s Samuel P. Huntington believed that cheap labor created by forced relocation would help Saigon win the conflict. Anthropologist Jules Henry explained that the war would create cheap labor that would be able to compete with the lower productive costs of Chinese and Japanese industry and that “the destruction of the Vietnamese countryside is the first, and necessary, step to the industrialization of Vietnam and nationalization of its agriculture. US corporations had a big stake in Belgium’s monopoly of copper and uranium in Katanga province of Kongo through Tanganyika Concessions Limited: a company in which the Rockefellers were shareholders. The Rockefellers and the Guggenheims held stocks in the Belgian diamond mining operation in Kasai province, Northwest of Katanga. Their investment was $20 million, while their Belgians partners had invested only $2 millions. Kennedy’s Treasury Secretary Douglas C. Dillon also had a stake in Congo. He was an investor in Laurence Rockefeller’s textile mill and also in Laurence’s automobile import company in Congo. Two Rockefeller companies were also doing oil business in Indonesia: Stanvac (jointly held by Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Mobil, Socony being Standard Oil of New York); and Caltex, (jointly held by Standard Oil of California and Texaco.) Freeport Sulphur, a Rockefeller controlled company, would be hugely rewarded by the West Irian mineral mines. Freeport Sulphur subcontracted Bechtel to handle the engineering aspects of the mining. Freeport was later renamed Freeport McMoran. It became one of the two largest mining corporations in the world. The eventual wealth mined from the two deposits topped 100 billion dollars. David Rockefeller opposed JFK’s economic and Foreign policies.

LBJ and friends

LBJ reversed JFK’s foreign policy in Vietnam/Southeast Asia and around the Globe. LBJ’s friends from Texas were to be hugely compensated from the war that the new president was promoting. The Texas located company manufacturing Bell helicopters—where Michael Paine worked—would profit immensely from their use in Vietnam. General Dynamics plane production—located in Fort Worth—would gain huge contracts during that war. Another of LBJ’s friends who profited from the Vietnam War was David Harold Byrd, owner of the Texas School Book Depository. In early November, 1963, Byrd and his investment partner James Ling bought $2 million worth of stock in Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), a defense company they owned. It may have been a coincidence, but the fact is that the navy awarded LTV the first major contract in February 1964 to construct the A7 Corsair fighter plane for operations in Vietnam. Peter Dale Scott calculated that this sum of money was worth $26 Million by 1967. LBJ was a close friend to the Brown Brothers, who owned a construction company named Brown and Root. In 1962, a consortium of private American construction corporations made up of Raymond International and Morrison-Knudsen (RMK) were building Vietnam’s infrastructure. But the construction was limited. The original contract was for $15 million. But in the beginning of 1965, the sum had reached $150 million. RMK could not keep up with the demands of construction. They added to their team two large American companies, Brown and Root and J.A. Jones, to form the largest ever consortium, RMK-BRJ. This consortium took the largest share of all Vietnam construction work, around 90 percent of the total. The US Navy granted RMK-BRJ a cost-plus-fixed-fee to quickly prepare Vietnam for a major U.S. military presence.

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Last modified on Tuesday, 04 January 2022 05:05
Vasilios Vazakas

Vasilios Vazakas was born in Athens, Greece, and studied in Edinburgh, Scotland; he holds a BEng in energy engineering and an MSc in building services engineering. He has had a long-running interest in the JFK assassination, its relation to US foreign policy, and its relevance today.  Vasilios has contributed a number of book reviews to this site.

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