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

February 11, 2020Angleton, Assassination, Best of, Experts3 comments

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

February 10, 2020Assassination, Best of, ExpertsNo comments

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.

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

February 9, 2020Assassination, Best of, ExpertsOne comment

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.”

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CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: ‘I’m not privy to who struck John’

February 8, 2020Angleton, Assassination, Best of, Experts5 comments

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

The killing of Lee Harvey Oswald is another key to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen’s JFK analysis. He argues that one of the conspirators had to have had access to the Mafia bosses who could induce Jack Ruby to eliminate the accused assassin as a witness.

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Jim Lehrer interviewed Oswald

January 23, 2020Assassination, News3 comments

“I went right to Oswald. ‘Did you kill the president?’”

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Lehrer on JFK: ‘there may have been a conspiracy’

January 23, 2020Assassination, News12 comments

Jim Lehrer

Jim Lehrer

Former PBS news anchor Jim Lehrer appeared on the Diane Rehm’s NPR radio program yesterday and talked about his suspicions of conspiracy in the assassination of President Kennedy.

His careful comments broke from the orthodoxies of American journalism.

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Science and the ‘single bullet theory’

January 16, 2020Assassination, Review3 comments
McClelland-on-JFK-head-wound

On the Kennedys And King blog, Millicent Cranor reviews a recent article on the ballistic evidence in JFK’s assassination, which appears in the December 2019 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology.

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New JFK documents show CIA had ‘very intensive’ interest in Oswald before JFK assassination: 

January 9, 2020Angleton, Assassination, Best of, Best of Web8 comments

I’m re-upping this post from two years ago, because the point needs emphasizing and praise is due.

The Canadian Broadcasting Company–more than any U.S. media organization–recognized the single most important finding to come out in the very incomplete JFK document release  in  2017-18.

The Fifth Estate show on CBC News understood a fact that leading  historians resist: Accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was not a “lone nut.” He was the target of CIA surveillance for four years before Kennedy was killed.

Documents released recently by the U.S. National Archives on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination suggest the CIA was watching Lee Harvey Oswald much more closely than previously thought before the fatal shot was fired in Dallas, an author tells The Fifth Estate.Former Washington Post reporter and author Jefferson Morley told The Fifth Estate the official story was that Oswald came out of nowhere and shot the president on Nov. 22, 1963.  “What the files show is that’s a cover story. It’s not true. High level CIA officials were paying attention to Oswald from 1959 to November 1963,” said Morley, author of several books on the assassination, the CIA and a JFK website.

The highest of those officials was counterintelligence chief James Angleton.

For the full story on the legendary Angleton, go here.

Source: New JFK documents suggest CIA had ‘very intensive’ interest in Oswald before assassination: Fifth Estate | CBC News 

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Perception management: public relations and the JFK story

December 31, 2019Assassination, Best ofNo comments

Mike Kilroy, communications executive in Los Angeles, has some interesting things to say about the JFK assassination story and the art of public relations. In a presentation to a group of young professionals in the communications industry, Kilroy dissected how the story that President Kennedy had been killed by a pro-Castro communist was disseminated on November 22, 1963. It’s a story of perception management.

You can read Kilroy’s presentation here.

New York Times publishes an erroneous letter about the JFK medical evidence by a libelous reporter

December 29, 2019Assassination6 comments

Grassy knoll aftermath
A cop runs toward the grassy knoll moments after President Kennedy was shot.

Last month the New York Times published a letter that seriously misstated the JFK medical evidence. Harris Meyer, senior report for Modern Healthcare, called out the Times with a call for a correction. Meyer’s letter contains important information that Dennis Breo, the author of the letter (and the newspaper of record) chose to omit, perhaps because the information calls into question Breo’s reporting on the subject.

Here’s Breo’s letter, “Mysteries, Solved and Unsolved,” in which he claims that he and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) had definitely resolved questions about JFK’s autopsy in 1992

Meyer responds:

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Another JFK motorcade reconstruction and the limits of forensic evidence

December 28, 2019Assassination, Video4 comments

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.

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Mapping JFK’s motorcade

December 23, 2019Assassination6 comments

Motorcade 63 is a nifty piece of JFK research from programmer Mark Tyler.

Tyler has reconstructed the passage of the President Kennedy’s motorcade through Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963 by combining photographic and eyewitness evidence. He explains his transparent methodology and his conclusions here.

In a note to researchers Tyler says this:

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Raven Rock and the presidential succession of 1963

December 17, 2019Assassination, Review2 comments

Dan Alcorn illuminates an underappreciated aspect of November 22, 1963. President Kennedy and his government had been preparing for a succession emergency for some time.

When President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, our nuclear weapons system would have needed urgently to know who was in command, and when word of the President’s death came, the system would immediately switch command to the Vice President, now the successor commander-in-chief. The swearing-in ceremony is a mere formality– power would have passed when word of the President’s death was first received. Standby authority for military officers to use nuclear weapons existed if the President or designated successor

Source: Raven Rock by author Garrett Graff Reviewed by Dan Alcorn, AARC Board member

I was a middle-aged JFK lone-nutter (briefly)

December 12, 2019Assassination, Experts2 comments

Honest recollections from Vince Palamara, the Secret Service researcher extraordinaire. He bought the official JFK story for a while. Nothing wrong with that.  Millions did. Then he took a closer look and changed his mind. I like his candor about how it happened. He writes:

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Talking About Angleton, Philby, Oswald, and Israel

December 9, 2019Angleton, Assassination, VideoNo comments

The other day I talked about my book THE GHOST with Keenan Duffey, host the Thrill Is Gone podcast, about espionage, real and fictional.

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