His name was Charles Briggs and he served as Executive Director of the Agency, which is the number three position in the agency’s hierarchy. His obituary in the Washington Post states:
A notable contribution was serving as liaison for the creation of the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, TX dedicated to the JFK Assassination.
The CIA’s intervention in the creation of popular culture is not unprecedented — witness its support for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop — but this episode of cultural production is especially intriguing.
Presumably, Briggs was acting in a public affairs capacity in assisting with the creation of the Museum, not in an operational role. The CIA is a foreign intelligence agency and its charter charter forbids operations on U.S. soil. But even if Briggs did act legally, his motivation still seems mysterious. If one man unaided shot President Kennedy for no discernible reason, why would the CIA care about a museum in Dallas?
I’m asking the Sixth Floor Museum for comment.
Source: CHARLES BRIGGS Obituary – Vienna, VA | The Washington Post (H/T Dan)
Hi Jeff,
After returning to this story following a mention on BlackOpRadio episode # 969B, I was wondering…did you get a response from the 6th Floor Museum following your post of November 6, 2015?
A Museum official acknowledged to me that it was true.
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Add this to these other events: 1) the CIA employ who broke into a safe containing JFK autopsy photos during the HSCA investigation, and 2) the whole George Joannides saga, and the CIA continues to not look good in the JFK assassination story.
Of course, we shouldn’t forget that the Warren Commission was really subject to CIA control, spearheaded by Allen Dulles, the CIA Director that JFK fired, along with CIA assets John J. McCloy and Gerald Ford.
Also important to keep in mind is the 1976 CIA document, 1035-960, that seems to coin the phrase “conspiracy theorist.” This document states, in pertinent part:
“Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization [i.e., CIA]. . . The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries. . . [The CIA should] employ propaganda assets to [negate] and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”
So it would be natural to expect that the Museum would not generally permit views of the JFK assassination and related subjects that were not consistent with the “official” ones promulgated by the US Government.
But today, one positive development is that the Sixth Floor Museum does appear to have a reading room with a broad variety of books on the JFK assassination from perspectives other than the Warren Commission. I went to this link and tested it by quickly running a search on the catalog on at least a dozen leading authors and researchers.
http://www.jfk.org/the-collections/reading-room/
I was pleased to find that all were represented, including, this website’s host, Jefferson Morley.
But getting the truth out is still a painfully slow and arduous process, as the mainstream media continues to follow CIA document 1035-960 — more than 52 years after the “Big Event” — with a consistency and rigidity that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.
Nothing at all mysterious about it. The CIA has been and is still doing whatever is necessary to cover up or confuse people about their murder of Kennedy. A trial jury found, as a matter of public record, that the CIA had murdered President Kennedy. This is thoroughly documented in Mark Lane’s “Plausible Denial,” 1991. This explains why the 6th-Floor “Museum” is so restricted as to access A person is not allowed to get close enough to look out the window from the shooter’s point-of-view. It’s just a tourist trap that costs money to see.
Eric, I agree. But would you speculate about who within the Sixth Floor Museum organization might have hired Briggs? If the CIA controlled the museum from the outset, the question is mute; but the public has long been assured that Dallas civic leaders have preserved and controlled the space. Is there a point where both interests converged, and if so, when and with whom?
Charles Briggs was a traitor to the truth and it is the failing of Americans to speak up about this that has allowed the truth about JFK’s assassination to be shrouded in the institutional secrecy that sadly continues.
Anyone who visits the 6th Floor Museum knows that its sole purpose is to portray Oswald as the lone assassin. If they were truly interested in the events of 11/22/63 they would show BOTH sides of the story and let the people judge. In 1988-1990 the museum was about 50/50 on conspiracy and then Gary Mack a.k.a. Larry Dunkel, was hired and he became a sell out for the $$$$$ in pushing Oswald alone assassin story. Every Major news media would ask him to put his spin on their story and he got paid even more. As someone who has just written a book showing Oswald’s innocence, the conspiracy side doesn’t pay well, backing up the lie of the US Govt. does.
This just verified many “rumours” I have heard the past 25 years about the Sixth Floor Museum. Thank you for posting this.
Nominees for “The Liaison Hall of Fame”:
No. 1: James Hardesty Critchfield … for his role as liaison between the CIA and the Gehlen Organization, and between the CIA, and the oil industry’s Near East CIA specialist.
“The CIA’s James Critchfield, who worked with Gehlen on a daily basis for nearly eight years, recalled ….. “
https://books.google.com/books?id=DRDeAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=james+critchfield+gehlen+dulles&source=bl&ots=LjfJGsjCKO&sig=okzXO-ZG86YghD0kYI9s2JclxQs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDYQ6AEwBGoVChMIkdPYz4j9yAIVBM9jCh0LWgKP#v=onepage&q=james%20critchfield%20gehlen%20dulles&f=false
Q. How did you become involved in the Middle East?
{Critchfield} A few days before Christmas, in 1959, Allen Dulles invited me to his office. . . . Q. And were you also surprised, as time went on in the 1960s, by the increased violence of the Ba’ath Party? …. {Critchfield} Quite clearly after Saddam Hussein took power, America slowly developed, not a hostility, but enormous reservations about the ability of the Ba’ath to constructively bring Iraq along. But during those years, the oil companies continued to deal with Iraq, and there were a lot of American business interests.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/saddam/interviews/critchfield.html
No. 2: Adolf Augustus Berle …. for his role as liaison between the Department of State and the Federal Bureau of Investigation:
‘Before creating new intelligence agencies or overhauling old ones, contemporary intelligence reformers should consider the deeply personal dynamics that made the Berle-Hoover connection so formidable. Effective liaisons like theirs serve as compelling reminders that intelligence cooperation is, at its most basic level, a matter of individual, and not institutional, interaction.’
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no3/html_files/FBI_State_3.htm
If I remember correctly at one point in the 70’s or 80’s while I worked there the “Power Elite” of Dallas wanted to demolish the building. It has obviously since become the Oswald did it from here Museum, an ode to the Warren Omission if you will. While you will find a small “Conspiracy” exhibit about Cubans and Communists you wont find any reference to the Grassy Knoll or the possibility of a second shooter. The fist time I went I thought this would be a tough shot between the elevation and the tree limbs. I say this from the perspective of a deer hunter in my younger years, shooting from a high angle increases the difficulty for someone of my or Oswald’s (couldn’t hit maggie’s drawers)level of expertise, (E.G. shooting downward from a Colorado mountain to a creek below). Then I went behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll and looked at the X’s on the street (removed for the 50th), fish in a barrel, a squirrel or rabbit with a 22.
In a way this “revelation” does not surprise me. It’ confirms my personal my personal belief’s of a conspiracy.
Much like the City of Dallas ticketed only, pre-approved access only (providing personal information for) to Dealy Plaza for the 50th.
Is this what one would call: “Leaving the fingerprints of Intelligence, everywhere?”
So, the implication is that the CIA helped perpetuate the “Lone Nut” theory by lending its vast invisible hand to creating/sustaining the famous 6th Floor Museum at the old Texas Book Depository?
Sounds a bit far-fetched, no?
20 years ago — I would have dismissed this out of hand, and probably tagged Jeff Morely as a “Conspiracy Theorist”
But not anymore.
A concerted push was made by many powerful American institutions to create and stamp the “Lone Nut” narrative into the American psyche. It solved many problems at many levels. It solved the Dallas Police Department’s lax security that allowed Ruby to silence Oswald. It solved the FBI’s problem, of why it didn’t pay more attention to Oswald in Dallas/New Orleans before the murder. It solved LBJ’s twofold political problem: (1) having to explain why the real killers were running around the country scot free and (2), worse, blaming USSR or Castro for the JFK murder, and pushing us to a military confrontation with the Communists, for killing our President. It even solved RFK’s problem of why he was running Operation Mongoose to have the CIA/Mob try to assassinate Castro.
As for the CIA: it certainly solved at least 3 big problems: (1) if the CIA had been running Oswald as an agent provocateur to infiltrate and disrupt the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a Castro-funded front organization, (2) if the CIA in Mexico City in 9/63 had Oswald in its sights at the Soviet and Cuban Embassies, but negligently let him slip away, and (3) if the CIA had sent or prompted Oswald to defect to the USSR as a mischief maker in the first instance, for potential use to be determined later on an “as-needed” basis.
Killing Oswald, and then blaming him solely for the JFK murder, solved many, many, many high level problems. The question is whether such blame is valid.
Briggs was a communist.
Strange that the Sixth Floor Museum needed a CIA liaison
“If one man unaided shot President Kennedy for no discernible reason, why would CIA care about a museum in Dallas?”….
Just mind boggling. Absolutely weird.