Experts

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

January 24, 2020Angleton, Assassination, Best of, ExpertsNo 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 year 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.

But Mowatt-Larssen was not just any tourist.

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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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RIP: Dr. Robert McClelland, the most important JFK witness

September 25, 2019Assassination, Best of, Experts, They Talked36 comments

Dr. Robert McClelland saw JFK’s wounds up close on November 22, 1963.

Dr. Robert McClelland, the surgeon who oversaw the effort to save President Kennedy’s life in 1963, died earlier this month at age 89.  In his interviews, you sense a man of considerable dignity, humility, and integrity. It comes as no surprise that he self-published an anthology of writings on surgery to which thousands of doctors subscribed. He was both a teacher and doctor, an instructor and  a healer. And it is those qualities that make McClelland one of the most important witnesses to JFK’s assassination.

In 1963, McClelland was 34 years old. He had just become the chief of surgery at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital. When the mortally wounded JFK was brought to Trauma Room One, McClelland stood over the dying president and participated in the efforts to save him. He observed the president’s fatal head wound for about 10 minutes from a distance of less than two feet.

“My God,” he recalled saying to his colleagues. “Have you seen the back of his head. There’s a wound in the back of his head that’s about five inches in diameter.”

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20) ‘I was naive:’ Q&A with Howard Willens, Warren Commission defender

August 6, 2019Assassination, Best of, Experts81 comments
Howard Willens

Howard Willens, former staff attorney on the Warren Commission, remains one of its most vigorous public defenders 50-plus years later.

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14) Newly discovered Air Force One tape captures a top general’s response to JFK’s murder

July 31, 2019Assassination, Best of, Experts, News58 comments

JFK and Curtis LeMay

The most complete version of the Air Force One radio transmissions made on the day President John F. Kennedy was killed 50 years ago were aired publicly for the first time today [at a JFK assassination conference at Duquesne University.

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10) If there was a JFK conspiracy, wouldn’t somebody have talked?

July 27, 2019Assassination, Experts, Question91 comments

Actually, somebody did talk.

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9) November 11, 1963: right-wing racist talked about how JFK would be shot

July 26, 2019Assassination, Experts, In 196312 comments

There were warnings in the fall of 1963 that President Kennedy’s life was in danger. JFK was hated by the political right for his increasingly forthright defense of peace and civil rights.

An undercover policer officer in Florida was canvassing his sources when he heard talk of a plot. And the details were specific.

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3) What was Operation Northwoods? Was it connected to JFK’s assassination?

July 20, 2019Assassination, Experts, From the Files, Presidency, Question33 comments
Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was a Pentagon plan to provoke a U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1963 through the use of deception operations.

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

August 26, 2018Assassination, Experts15 comments

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. Read more

Doug Horne responds to Jeremy Gunn’s 50th anniversary speech 

July 27, 2018Assassination, Experts3 comments

Doug Horne, former analyst for the Assassination Records Review Board  has posted a thoughtful response to his former boss Jeremy Gunn’s speech about the state of the JFK case.

For the most part, his speech was a cautionary tale about not jumping to conclusions without first considering ALL of the evidence about any facet of the assassination, pro or con. Jeremy is saying here that one must approach all evidence (film evidence such as the Z film or many of the autopsy photos; eyewitness testimony; and so-called forensics evidence) with extreme caution, and take nothing for granted about its accuracy or provenance. Yet—and I find this unfortunate—Jeremy continues to use all of the uncertainties about the evidence as a “mask” to hide behind in a sense, which allows him to continue to say that he personally has no idea who killed President Kennedy, in an attempt to avoid controversy.

Source: Here is My Response to Jeremy Gunn’s 50th Anniversary Speech About the JFK Evidence – insidethearrb

David Kaiser on ‘the new global aristocracy’

June 15, 2018Assassination, Experts3 comments

We interrupt our regularly scheduled JFK programming for this special message. David Kaiser, a prolific and subtle diplomatic historian, has a piece on his blog,History Unfolding, that is well worth reading. Kaiser’s long historical perspective frames our political realities without pity.

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The trouble with Nicholas Nalli’s paper on “Gunshot-wound dynamics model’ for JFK assassination

June 14, 2018Assassination, Best of, Experts6 comments

ZAPRUDER

This paper, published in the scientific journal Heliyon, represents an attempt to salvage Professor Luis Alvarez’s model of the gunshot that killed President Kennedy. Alvarez tried to explain the rearward recoil motion of Kennedy’s head, seen in Abraham Zapruder’s film, by what he called a “jetting effect.” Read more

What can Microsoft teach us about the JFK story?

June 9, 2018Assassination, Experts, Video3 comments

“Cognitive search” is Microsoft’s concept and tool; use computing power to capture analyze massive amounts of data found in the latest JFK files.

But the example these engineers give is not exactly inspiring.

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Will Trump release all of the JFK files tomorrow?

April 25, 2018Assassination, Experts, News4 comments

Jesse Walker, author of United States of Paranoia, hedges his bets:

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What will Trump do about the JFK files this week?

April 24, 2018Assassination, Experts, NewsOne comment

Gerald Posner, author of Case Closed, is optimistic.  Read more

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