John Simkin breaks down the mysteries of a key JFK story: Yuri Nosenko and the Warren Report.
“I want to consider the way senior figures in the CIA and FBI, such as Richard Helms, James Jesus Angleton and J. Edgar Hoover, dealt with this evidence. In doing so, I will show that their own interpretations were overwhelmingly influenced by their own ideological views and more importantly, their own political needs, at the time. In discussing this issue I will also show that this case shows that we have very little chance of discovering who planned and carried out the assassination of President Kennedy.”
John Simkin did a masterful job of reporting and analysis in this essay with this caveat: a whole book cound be written on the Nosenko case. There was a movie made abourt the case which starred Tommie Lee Jones who, of course, played Clay Shaw in Stone’s “JFK” film.
John wrote:
CIA agent, Miles Copeland, was aware of these regular meetings. He later commented: “What Philby provided was feedback about the CIA’s reactions. They (the KGB) could accurately determine whether or not reports fed to the CIA were believed or not… what it comes to, is that when you look at the whole period from 1944 to 1951, the entire Western intelligence effort, which was pretty big, was what you might call minus advantage. We’d have been better off doing nothing.” (18)
—————————————————————–
Interesting “aside” re Copeland. He was a long time CIA officer whose first post was Damascus, Syria in 1947. He was involved in the March 1949 coup d’eta in Syria. He worked with Archibald Roosevelt (son of Teddy) and Kermit Roosevelt in the CIA supported coup in Iraq in 1954. He was involved in a CIA plot to assassinate Egyptian premier Gambel Abdul Masser. Few people have heard of him but many people my age know of his son Stewart who was the drummer for the 1970s band “The Police”.