Is there an audiobook of ‘Scorpions’ Dance?’
Yes there is. If you like listening to your spy stories, you can pre-order it here.
Yes there is. If you like listening to your spy stories, you can pre-order it here.
[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: ‘The very top people’Read More »
Next month, the Spy Museum in Washington DC will host conversation about Scorpions Dance. I’ll be talking with with James Rosen, author of Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.
An excerpt from my book:
“As told by the Washington Post, and the movie All the President’s Men, Watergate is the tale of a lawless and paranoid president brought to justice by an independent press. The reports of the Senate Watergate Committee and House Judiciary Committee wove narratives of impeachable offenses committed by a president who had abused his powers, both at home …
…You’re invited to the Spy Museum’s event on the CIA and WatergateRead More »
Sponsored by Shane O’Sullivan (Kingston School of Art) and Dr Melissa Graves (The Citadel), the conference features a remarkable array of guests: Register here : The Watergate Break-in: 50 Years Later.
…..the dual lives and “clandestine collaborative relationship” between CIA director Richard Helms and PresidentRichard Nixon ….
(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.
…CIA tradecraft & JFK’s assassination: A veteran officer analyzes the death of a presidentRead More »
If you live in the Washington area and want to get out for an entertaining evening, come see me talk about Scorpion’s Dance at Politics and Prose Bookstore on Connecticut Ave on June 13.
…Key details of the CIA’s relationship with three of the Watergate burglars are still shrouded in official secrecy, even on the 50th anniversary of the break-in that lead to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
-Source: The [Redacted] Truth About the CIA’s [Redacted] Role in Watergate
The [Redacted] Truth About the CIA’s [Redacted] Role in WatergateRead More »
Listen here: The president pledged to protect “the Dirty Tricks Department.” An audio excerpt from Scorpions’ Dance by Jefferson Morley.
…President Nixon pressed CIA director on “the Who shot John? angle”Read More »
This is an edited version of Howard Hunt’s much-touted “deathbed confession” about the assassination of JFK.
Hunt insinuates, without supporting evidence, that certain CIA officers and Lyndon Johnson were involved in the killing of President Kennedy.
…On the ‘deathbed confession’ of Watergate burglar, Howard HuntRead More »
Question from a reader:
“.. Or at least knew of the plot involving Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis, and Cubans associated with the Bay of Pigs project?”
…
Was Richard Nixon was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy?Read More »
Excerpted from Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin’s Press, 2022
“Richard Helms disliked the term spymaster, but no other word captures his extraordinary—and invisible—position in the wake of Kennedy’s assassination. The deputy director had one hand-picked case officer in Miami, George Joannides, running the AMSPELL network, which was generating headlines across the country and around the world that Kennedy had been killed by a communist
…Excerpted from Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin’s Press, 2022
“I waited fifty minutes,” Lanuza recalled. “Then I started to call my list.” Decades later he could still rattle off the reporters’ names and publications from memory. “I called Hal Hendrix. He was the most important person in Miami News.” Hendrix, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the missile crisis, would later a corporate executive and CIA asset in Chile. Lanuza called Mary Louise Wilkinson, a sympathetic reporter at the Miami News. He called John Dille, a writer at Life Magazine who had written a laudatory cover story on the DRE.
…[Excerpted from Scorpions’ Dance: The President, the Spymaster and Watergate (St Martin’s Press, 2022)]
“At ten past six that evening, Miami station chief Ted Shackley sent a cable to Des Fitzgerald with a copy going to Helms’ office. The station had heard from Luis Fernandez Rocha, the secretary general of the Cuban Student Directorate, whom Helms had grilled in his office almost exactly one year before. The DRE boys said they knew all about the suspected assassin.
…The CIA’s favorite Cubans linked Oswald to CastroRead More »
Book List on Scorpion’s Dance:
…“As the Senate Intelligence Committee prodded the CIA over all sorts of issues, including the JFK assassination and attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, Helms became increasingly defensive of his agency’s conduct over the years. The centrality of Nixon and Helms to so many pivotal moments in history makes Morley’s revelations about their sparring even more intriguing.”
‘The centrality of Nixon and Helms to so many pivotal moments in history.’Read More »