Tag: Oswald

Angleton: The role of a ‘master bureaucratic operator’ in the JFK story

I think this might be the most cogent radio interview I did about THE GHOST.

(Just because I was on Lew Rockwell’s show doesn’t mean I agree with this politics.)

Order the paperback edition of THE GHOST now

From the new paperback edition of THE GHOST:

“Historians and journalists usually describe COINTELPRO as an FBI program, which is not quite the case. It was created by Hoover but functioned as a joint FBI-CIA venture, with a bureaucratic division of labor. Hoover took the lead in targeting dissident Americans inside the United States; Angleton took the lead outside the United States. In the case of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and its most famous member Lee Harvey Oswald, the FBI and the CIA would work together.
Angleton used the HUNTER program to feed the COINTELPRO beast.”

What a senior KGB officer said about Lee Harvey Oswald

Nikolai Leonov
Insider: Fidel Castro, Nikolai Leonov, and Nikita Khrushchev

Nikolai S. Leonov has an interesting perspective on the story of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Leonov joined the KGB in 1958 and retired in 1991 with the rank of Lieutenant General. In the spring of 1963, his fluency in Spanish gained him the job as the Russian interpreter for Cuba president Fidel Castro during his first visit to the USSR in the spring of 1963, In the photo above he is the man standing between and behind Castro and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. …

Sept. 27, 1963: Oswald arrives in Mexico City

On this day 55 years ago, a strange American visitor appeared at the Soviet and Cuban consulates in Mexico City. His name would soon be world famous: Lee Harvey Oswald. Within 24 hours, a joint US-Mexico intelligence gathering operation received wiretap reports on his unusual actions.

The story of what happened next is told in Bill Simpich’s groundbreaking new book, “State Secret: Wiretapping in Mexico City, Double Agents, and the Framing of Lee Oswald,” which is being serialized by MaryFerrell.org.

In a season of JFK sotries distinguished by ill-informed experts, bogus revelations, and a Fox News fibber, Simpich’s book qualifies as the most important piece of JFK scholarship to be published this year.

Did Castro figure out the JFK case in just five days?

Under the suggestive title “Castro Figured Out The JFK Case in Five Days”, an English version of his speech at the University of Havana on November 27, 1963, is available from CTKA.

In due course, the Warren Commission was provided with a slightly different version, but its members feared and rejected Castro’s line of argument depicting JFK’s assassination as part of a broader “plan against peace, against Cuba, against the Soviet Union, against humanity, against progressive and even liberal sectors of the United States.”

General Fabian Escalante: U.S. government withholds JFK records that undoubtedly prove a plot

Now available on You Tube retired Major General Fabian Escalante, former head and current historian of Cuba’s State Security Department,i gives a sneak preview of his upcoming book Beyond Any Reasonable Doubt. The Assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Aggression Against Cuba.

What the curious case of Richard Gibson tells us about Lee Harvey Oswald

I was on BBC 3 Radio yesterday talking about the curious case of Richard Gibson, co-founder of the leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee and, it turns out, a longtime CIA spy.

The larger context of Gibson’s story, which I broke in Newsweek, tells us a lot about the CIA’s surveillance of Lee Oswald in 1963.  …

Who was running CIA covert operations in Mexico City in 1963?

MEXI operations
Sensitive source: A newly-released JFK file still conceals a key name.

Fifty five years later, this remains a highly sensitive question.

Take a look at page 9 of this lightly-redacted 1977 CIA memo, released last month by the National Archives. The name of a CIA officer who was running covert operations along with David Phillips in 1963, has been postponed for release until 2021.

CIA man David Phillips as you’ve never seen him

David Phillips
David A. Phillips

While many JFK files remain secret, some of the new JFK files, released this week, do contain material that has never been seen before. For example, the administrative file of David Phillips. Phillips, a top CIA officer in 1963, later dissembled under oath about what he knew of Lee Harvey Oswald. A trusted CIA agent says he saw Phillips with Lee Harvey Oswald two months before JFK was killed.

Many pages about Phillips’s career that were once secret are now open.

‘Reasonable doubt’: Kennedy assassin ‘acquitted’ in mock Weymouth High trial 

There are some gems in the new JFK files, which I will report shortly. But first a tip of the hat to the social studies students at Weymouth High School (Mass.) who recreated an event that never happened: the criminal trial of Lee Oswald, JFK’s accused killer who protested his innocence. …

JFK documents illuminate the death of a diplomat who asked too many questions about Oswald

James Angleton
James Angleton oversaw the surveillance of Oswald

Phil Shenon has a long piece in The Guardian excavating the sad story of Charles Thomas, a U.S. diplomat who investigated Lee Harvey Oswald’s actions in Mexico in the 1960s.  Thomas was rebuffed by top CIA officials, including counterintelligence chief James Angleton. Thomas was denied an expected promotion and later committed suicide.

The story illuminates a central mystery of the JFK assassination story but not quite in the way than Shenon proposes.

Rigged triangulation: Oswald, Kostikov, and AMLASH

A specter is haunting the JFK research: the specter of Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov (1933-2002). It has recently slipped through Jefferson Morley’s remarkable study on the secret life of CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton (The Ghost, St. Martin’s Press, 2017): “Kostikov had been visited by a Cuban government official named Rolando Cubela” (page 150).

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