Category: Assassination

Spies fall out: a Watergate story

Howard Hunt
Howard Hunt, burglar

The buddy-buddy friendship of CIA director Richard Helms and Watergate burglar Howard Hunt did not end well.

My story in Graydon Carter’s AirMailNews

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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.

You’re invited to the Spy Museum’s event on the CIA and Watergate

Next month, the Spy Museum in Washington DC will host conversation about Scorpions Dance. I’ll be talking with with James Rosen, author of Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

An excerpt from my book:

“As told by the Washington Post, and the movie All the President’s Men, Watergate is the tale of a lawless and paranoid president brought to justice by an independent press. The reports of the Senate Watergate Committee and House Judiciary Committee wove narratives of impeachable offenses committed by a president who had abused his powers, both at home …

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.

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