Tag: Dealey Plaza

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.

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.

A question about the grassy knoll

MIke writes:

People keep putting stock into people who said the shot came from the knoll. Yeah I know those days were chaotic they might’ve thought it came from the mall but I look at it in the context of 911. There were there were reports that there was a sniper at the Lincoln Memorial, bomb exploded outside the state department all witness accounts turned out to be totally ridiculous. I think the silence is probably shot came from behind. What’s your response?

Another JFK motorcade reconstruction and the limits of forensic evidence

While reviewing Mark Tyler’s Motorcade 63, I thought of Dale Myers’ 3D animation reconstruction of President Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963. Myer’s work is the most sophisticated effort to update the official story of the Warren Commission that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed the president for no reason.

Now is a good time to lay to rest the JFK conspiracy theories about George Bush

George H. W. Bush, CIA director
George H. W. Bush, CIA director and future president

(This post was first published on the JFK Facts blog, in different form under a different headline, in March 2013)

The theory that the late President Bush was somehow complicit in JFK’s death has often been heard in the comments section of this site. Exactly how he was involved is rarely explained.

Four claims are adduced to support this theory:

 

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