Category: Experts

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: the making of a patsy

Rolf-Mowatt-Larssen
Former CIA station chief Rolf Mowatt-Larssen addresses a conference of JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)

[ICYMI Part I : A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president / Part II: ‘The very top people.’ / ]

CIA veteran Rolf Mowatt-Larseen proposed a “thought experiment” to the November 2019 JFK conference in Dallas. He reverse-engineered the lone gunman scenario, posing a question both novel and incisive.

 “How can you get away with a really elaborate but very simple plan of deception, to end up in a place where the president is dead and it is blamed on someone else, other than the people who perpetrated it?” he asked. “Not easy.”

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘The very top people’

Former CIA station chief Rolf Mowatt-Larssen addresses a conference of JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)

[ICYMI: Part I: A veteran CIA officer analyzes the death of a president.]

“Why am I doing this?” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen asked the audience at the Coalition Against Political Assassinations’ conference in Dallas. “As a CIA officer it’s a little controversial. What is my goal? My goal is to have an answer [about who killed JFK] for myself and my children.” That may sound overly ingenuous to some, but most people in the room, myself included, had the same agenda.

Mowatt-Larssen was nine years old when he heard the news from Dallas.

CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: A veteran officer analyzes the death of a president

Rolf-Mowatt-Larssen
Former CIA station chief Rolf-Mowatt-Larssen addressed a conference of JFK researchers in Dallas in November 2019. (Credit: Jefferson Morley)

(This article, titled “Under CIA Eyes,” first appeared in Counterpunch, Vol. 25 published in January 2020.).

“I was struck by the intimacy and the smallness of the whole surroundings,” said retired CIA officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen after his first visit to Dealey Plaza in November 2019.

Dealey Plaza, a grassy Art Deco entry point to downtown Dallas, is where President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on November 22, 1963. Hundreds of thousands of people still come from around the world to see the spot where the popular liberal president was ambushed. Many of them have the same reaction to the crime scene: the intimacy, the smallness.

Mowatt-Larssen was not just any tourist.

Talking JFK in the desert

Valerie Plame
L to R: Mary Beth Long, Valerie Plame, Jonna Mendez, Lucy Kirk (Jeff Stein photo)

This was an educational experience for me. I thought I was going into the proverbial lions’ den. I was wrong. The secret intelligence professionals in the room were quite open to the way Mowatt-Larssen and I described and explained the events of November 1963.

Russia, Russia, Russia was on our minds, of course, but the talks also included a fascinating discussion on the activities of “rogue” CIA agents surrounding the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, presented jointly by investigative journalist Jefferson Morley and former senior CIA officer Rolf Mowatt- Larssen. The audience at the Hacienda del Sol, a hillside luxury resort that once hosted John Wayne, Spencer Tracy. Katharine Hepburn and other Hollywood stars filming Westerns nearby, was also treated to presentations by former female CIA operatives Mary Beth Long, Plame, Jonna Mendez and Lucy Kirk (left to right, above).

Source: A Gathering of Spies in the Desert – by Jeff Stein

JFK Expert: Lone Gunman Theory Is Still BS

Wecht’s latest book, “The JFK Assassination Dissected” (Exposit Books), summarizes his six decades of research into the subject, and pokes holes in the conclusion made by the seven-man Warren Commission that Oswald, without any help, shot and killed Kennedy when his motorcade drove past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.“Young people are still being taught that the 35th president was murdered by a lone gunman, and that is simply bulls–t,” Wecht boomed during an interview at his modest office in downtown Pittsburgh last month.

Source: JFK assassination expert: Lone gunman theory is still ‘bulls–t’

JFK Redacted: CIA Counterintelligence and the Failure of Dallas

The CIA now has until December 15, 2021 to produce the last of its JFK assassination files. As I told the Washington Post, I suspect this second delay in the legally-mandated release of the files is a “ruse.” I hope the CIA proves me wrong. In any case, we will learn more about the Agency’s intentions in six weeks.

Meanwhile, although BIden’s JFK records embargo is an important development, what we have learned in recent years is just as important as what we might learn. Case in point: this new video from Vince Palamara, the JFK research community’s leading expert on the Secret Service. The video illuminates one aspect of the JFK story that the CIA is still hiding 58 years after the fact.

The JFK Cover-Up Strikes Again 

James K. Galbraith, is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

I am not accusing Biden, or the agencies whose advice he accepted on these matters, of breaking the law. On the contrary, I take them at their word: that in their view, a full disclosure of all documents would compromise military, intelligence, and foreign relations.

Source: The JFK Cover-Up Strikes Again by James K. Galbraith – Project Syndicate

‘Last Second in Dallas’: Debate and Agreement

The publication of Tink Thompson’s “Last Second in Dallas,” and a favorable review from San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, has triggered a debate about the forensic evidence in the case.

Dr. Randy Robertson has published a critique of Thompson’s work on the Kennedys and Kings web site. On the the Assassination Archives and Research Center, Drs. Gary Aguilar, Dr. Doug DeSalles, and attorney Bill Simpich say Robertson’s critique is based on five factual mistakes.

RIP Vincent Salandria, Leading Warren Commission Critic

From the Truth and Reconciliation Committee

The writings of Vincent J Salandria on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are historic, foundational, and essential to any serious scholar interested in understanding the real dynamics of the Kennedy murder and its place as a terrible and pivotal moment of the American Century. In his 1967 book Six Seconds in Dallas, Josiah Thompson notes that what he terms the “second generation” of assassination researchers—including Mark Lane, Edward J. Epstein, Harold Weisberg, Raymond Marcus, Léo Sauvage, Richard Popkin—owe “a deep debt to Salandria’s pioneering and largely unsung research.” Thompson is accurate, since Salandria is in the front rank of Warren Commission critics, and the prescience of his analysis is an instruction to all interested people.

Source: FAREWELL TO THE “FIRST RESEARCHER” 

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