Tag: J. Edgar Hoover

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.”

Trumped: the mandate, the media, and the new clues in the JFK document (un)-Dump

Dick Russell sums up the political realities shaping the limited release of JFK records last week and what will happen next.

Clearly, elements of the CIA and FBI had done some last-minute arm-twisting. As night fell, Trump penned a memo saying: “I have no choice — today — but to accept [their] redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.”

Source: Trumped: The Mandate, the Media, and New Clues Amid the JFK Document (Un)-Dump – WhoWhatWhy

RIP: Bill Turner, FBI man who investigated the JFK story

Turner joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1951. He worked for the FBI for ten years but grew increasingly concerned with the way J. Edgar Hoover ran the organization. Turner became convinced that Hoover was placing too much emphasis on the dangers of the American Communist Party. Instead, he felt he should be using more resources to tackle organized crime. In 1961 Turner was dismissed from the FBI. He hired Edward Bennett Williamsand sued the FBI but lost. However he did manage to get anti-Hoover testimony by other agents into the record.

Source: JFKcountercoup on William Weyland Turner (1927-2015)

Why Marina Oswald could sue the FBI for illegal surveillance

Marina and Lee Oswald
Marina and Lee Oswald in 1962, with infant daughter June

Question: Why isn’t the FBI spying on Marina Oswald better known?

Answer:  Because much governmental effort has gone into making sure that it is not better known.

Why? Maybe because Marina Oswald and her children–alive and living in Texas–have solid grounds for a lawsuit.

Before my research, I knew vaguely about a 1975 New York Times report on how the FBI admitted tapping and bugging Marina’s conversations.  “Electronic surveillance,” the Times reported, was “based upon written approval of the Attorney General of the United States. The Government contended then that in national security cases, court approval was not required“. …

Politico’s report on Oswald’s alleged JFK threat overlooked one thing

David Slawson
David Slawson

A faithful reader calls attention to this passage in Phil Shenon’s POLITICO Magazine article on the former Warren Commission staff David Slawson and his change of heart about the Commission’s conclusions:

“He [Slawson] was outraged, in particular, when I showed him an eye-popping June 1964 letter from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to the commission that described how Oswald, in an outburst at a Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City during his trip there, had reportedly been overheard threatening, ‘I’m going to kill Kennedy.’

Don Adams RIP: an FBI agent who didn’t buy the official theory

Don Adams, FBI agent

Don Adams, whose career as an FBI agent spanned 22 years, never really bought the official line of his own employer: that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Adams, who died on June 14 at age 83 in Akron, Ohio, eventually wrote From an Office Building with a High-Powered Rifle (Trine Day, 2012), in which he argued that “the FBI’s investigation was compromised from the top down, beginning with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.”

What defenders of LBJ gloss over

Lyndon Johnson was a great American for working with Martin Luther King to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964-65, as depicted in the movie Selma. So say historian David Kaiser and former Cabinet official Joseph Califano. Yet It is no contradiction to note that Johnson could also be a crude and mean SOB, as Philip Nelson reminds us.

Johnson and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Nelson writes in OpEdNews:

How Henry Wade, DA of Dallas, ran afoul of the FBI and CIA

Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade on Oswald as an FBI informant.

As part of the paper’s 50th anniversary JFK coverage, Scott K. Parks of the Dallas News recounts a story that roiled the national press in early 1964: the rumor that accused assassin Lee Oswald was a paid FBI informant. Using declassified FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Parks sheds new light on how an independent Texas law man shook up official Washington.

In Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade believed the story that Oswald was an FBI informant and he persisted in talking about it, which worried U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, chairman of the commission investigating the assassination. It also worried the commission’s general counsel J. Lee Rankin.

“They did not want to be seen as conducting an investigation of Hoover’s FBI,” the story notes.

Nov 23 1963: The aftermath and a curious phone call

LBJ on the phoneIn the wee hours the day following JFK’s assassination, the confusion-clouded military autopsy of the slain president was concluded and the body delivered to the White House. In Dallas Lee Harvey Oswald remained in policy custody, undergoing interrogations of which no recordings were made. President Johnson began his first day as the new President.

In his first phone call with famed and feared FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Johnson received some surprising news. As “curious history” noted on another post this morning, “Hoover clearly states that the man in Mexico didn’t look like Oswald nor did the voice match. He states that it is a “different man”.

“Curious history” asks: “What do you make of that? The transcript is part of the LBJ library and seems as a credible source.”

Indeed, it is a credible source. The transcript of the call contains the following exchange: …

Scroll to Top