Treasure trove of JFK, LBJ documents declassified by CIA

[Octafish]

File: In this Oct. 29, 1962, file photo, President John F. Kennedy poses in the White House office with Gen. David Shoup, left, Marine Corps Commandant, and Adm. George Anderson, Chief of U.S. Naval Operations in Washington. The chiefs met with the president to review the situation in Cuba and operation of the U.S. naval blockade. As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba. That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday, Sept. 16, 2015. (AP Photo/William J. Smith, File) William J. Smith AP

Treasure trove of JFK, LBJ documents declassified by CIA

Historian calls it “an incomparable window into a how a president thinks”

No new clues for conspiracy theorists looking for signs of CIA plots

CIA brief after JFK’s death featured a poem the president liked

BY PAUL J. WEBER
The Associated Press/Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Sept. 16, 2015

As the U.S. and Russia reached the brink of nuclear war in 1962, President John F. Kennedy received top-secret intelligence from the CIA that a new warhead launcher was spotted in Cuba.

Amid those grave concerns, the memo ends on a different note. A U.S. agent in Moscow describes “packed houses and enthusiastic applause” during a run of Russian performances by the New York City Ballet.

That report, given to Kennedy a day before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis, is among roughly 19,000 pages of newly declassified CIA documents from the Cold War released Wednesday. Stamped “For the President’s Eyes Only” on some pages, the dossiers were delivered daily by the spy agency to the White House.

Known as the President’s Daily Brief — President Barack Obama is the first to swipe through his on a tablet — they are tightly guarded rundowns of CIA intelligence from around the globe. For the first time, some of the oldest briefs are being made public, starting with those written in the 1960s for presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots are likely to be disappointed. Many of the briefs remain partially redacted, and what isn’t won’t rewrite textbooks.

CONTINUED...

http://www.star-telegram.com/news/nation-world/article35487948.html

Nothing for "Conspiracy theorists mining for signs of nefarious CIA plots." Of course. Thanks, AP, for the take-away.

Real thanks to the Startlegram for printing this news.

Some of what got edited from the story:

Freeing the President’s Daily Brief

John Prados
National Security Archive

September 16, 2015–Today the big pooh-bahs of the security services–Fearful Leader Clapper, the Machiavellian Brennan, former SEAL chieftain Admiral McRaven, and a number of their predecessors, have gathered in Austin, Texas, at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Their purpose is to preside over an event at which the government agencies and the National Archives formally open for research the key intelligence reports for the ages. Today these are called the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs). Jack Kennedy knew them as the PICKL (predictably, “pickle”), or President’s Intelligence Checklist; Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff had even more awkward names like “Synopsis of Intelligence Items Reported to the President.” (They never could find an acronym for that one.)

If you’re familiar with the PDB at all it is probably due to the now-notorious issue of August 6, 2001, in which CIA analysts reported their sense that Al Qaeda terrorists were likely to employ large aircraft as weapons. The Bush White House, which paid no attention, moved heaven and earth to keep that PDB out of the hands of 9/11 investigators. Michael Morrell, Mr. Bush’s CIA briefer, went on to great things at the agency after his time with the PDB, so you can see it’s serious business.

SNIP...

“Sources and methods” are spookspeak for intelligence tradecraft or for specific agent identifications or information compartments (such as overhead imagery, communications intelligence, or the like). But the PDBs are information reports, not efforts to create new intel channels or technologies. Names of agents and whatnot can easily be removed from ancient documents or are, in a number of instances, already known from the CIA’s declassification of specific cases. (For example, Tenet asserted sources and methods protection for PICKLs of the Cuban Missile Crisis in spite of the fact the agency had already released portions of those very documents, plus the actual transcripts of interviews with its Soviet spy Oleg Penkovskiy, whose information lay at the heart of that reporting.) A number of PDBs, bearing on Vietnam, Chinese nuclear weapons, the Six-Day war in the Middle East, and other subjects had already been declassified, with the secrecy apparatus considering them as simple information reports. Currying favor with the press and enhancing his stature as maven of top-level information, Henry Kissinger permitted the PDB to be photographed, a picture published in Newsweek on November 22, 1971. There’s no way a true “sources and methods” issue would have been treated in such a cavalier fashion. But suddenly the sources and methods bugaboo descended to chill the entire declassification process.

In 2004 the National Security Archive joined scholar Larry Berman to challenge this idiocy. Berman had requested and had been denied release of a pair of innocuous PDBs. The Archive joined him in a lawsuit for release of the material as is provided under the Freedom of Information Act. Though we lost the suit for the two specific PDBs in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2007, the justices ruled that CIA could no longer claim a blanket exemption for the class of documents, and that PDBs from the Kennedy and Johnson eras had to be considered for release.

What is happening at the LBJ Library today is a direct result of that court battle. Notice that the agency took its sweet time–8 years– to cough up any of this material. Without seeing the rest of the documents I nevertheless expect the collection will be laced with redacted passages, pages, and whole documents. The organizers of this event promise that PDBs will be posted on the CIA website, presumably today after the event. I have argued elsewhere that the agency’s declassification process has been corrupted. It functions to protect proper secrets only at the margin and is far more concerned with preventing embarrassment–a stance explicitly prohibited in the regulations supposed to govern secrecy and declassification. I’ll have more to report on the PDBs once I get the chance to see what the agency has done.

CONTINUED...

http://johnprados.com/2015/09/16/freeing-the-presidents-daily-brief/

President's Daily Brief docs and more from National Security Archive at GWU:

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB530-Presidents-Daily-Briefs-from-Kennedy-and-Johnson-Finally-Released/

[Frustratedlady]

1. It would be wonderful if some of these "documents" included names of those who would do harm.

I'm sure we won't live long enough to know what happened in Dallas, but surprises do pop up in the strangest places.

Let's hope.

[Octafish]

3. Jefferson Morley, former Washington Post writer, is on the case...

CIA bares the origins of its JFK coverup

Three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA told his successor Lyndon Johnson that the agency’s sources had just confirmed press reports that accused assassin Lee Oswald had visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City two months before.

Here’s what the President’s Intelligence Checklist reported on November 25, 1963.



Intentionally or not, the CIA was misleading the new president about what Agency personnel knew of the man accused of killing his predecessor.

The Nov. 25 briefing, released by the CIA with much fanfare on September 16, 2015, informed to the new president that CIA had only learned about Oswald’s contacts with the Cubans and Soviets after Kennedy’s death.

Contemporary news organizations, not well informed about the historical records of JFK’s assassination, found the briefing newsworthy The Washington Times proclaimed the CIA had “confirmed” Oswald’s links to the Soviets and Cubans within days of the assassination. Politico included the November 25 briefing among “13 newly released presidential briefs you’ll want to read.”

In fact, CIA records declassified in the 1990s show that a host of senior CIA operations officers had already learned-and conferred among themselves–aboutvOswald’s foreign contacts six weeks earlier, in early October 1963–when JFK was very much alive.

Here’s the proof: a four page CIA cable about Lee Oswald, dated October 10, 1963. This document was not declassified until 1998.

CONTINUED w/links to the documentation...

http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/in-newly-released-presidential-briefing-papers-cia-bares-the-origins-of-its-jfk-coverup/

I met Mr. Morley at the Duquesne conference in 2013. The guy is a top researcher and writer -- no nonsense, just reports the facts -- a real journalist. As long as he and more than a few others are working, we still have hope, Frustratedlady!

[Frustratedlady]

5. Thanks for the info. I've never felt secure with either agency, especially with JEH at that time.

After reading many writings over the years, I still came away with a sick feeling that there was a lot more to the story. I don't hold out much hope that anyone will put 2 and 6 together to come up with 10, but an Oops! moment is always possible.

[Octafish]

6. Is this a Democracy, when We the People are kept in the dark by those appointed to office?

One the 20th century's greatest mathematicians clearly saw and understood what happened in 1964.

16 Questions on the Assassination

By Bertrand Russell

EXCERPT...

2 and 3: Conduct and Official Secrecy

If the composition of the Commission was suspect, its conduct confirmed one’s worst fears. No counsel was permitted to act for Oswald, so that cross–examination was barred. Later, under pressure, the Commission appointed the President of the American Bar Association, Walter Craig, one of the supporters of the Goldwater movement in Arizona, to represent Oswald. To my knowledge, he did not attend hearings, but satisfied himself with representation by observers.

In the name of national security, the Commission’s hearings were held in secret, thereby continuing the policy which has marked the entire course of the case. This prompts my second question: If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security? Indeed, precisely the same question must be put here as was posed in France during the Dreyfus case: If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy?

4: The Crucial Question Was Not Asked

At the outset the Commission appointed six panels through which it would conduct its enquiry. They considered:

- What did Oswald do on November 22, 1963?
- What was Oswald’s background?
- What did Oswald do in the U.S. Marine Corps, and in the Soviet Union?
- How did Ruby kill Oswald?
- What is Ruby’s background?
- What efforts were taken to protect the President on November 22?

This raises my fourth question: Why did the Warren Commission not establish a panel to deal with the question of who killed President Kennedy?

CONTINUED...

http://22november1963.org.uk/bertrand-russell-16-questions-on-the-assassination

If the Government is so certain of its case, why has it conducted all its inquiries in the strictest secrecy? To which I'd add: And why, almost 52 years after the fact, are 1,100 known JFK assassination related records still kept secret by CIA? Who's really in charge in the USA?

[hifiguy]

14. According to James Douglass there were so many "Oswalds"

running around in the fall of 1963 that a scorecard was needed to keep track of which one was where doing what. What a perfect way to set up a patsy.

[Octafish]

22. THAT was the part of James Douglass' book I found so strange...

...I heard Douglass speak at Oakland Community College near Detroit in 2013. The guy was asked about that and he said he didn't believe it possible, at first. He interviewed the people he could, and sourced the testimony of others such as the police in front and behind, the Texas Theater. He found that, as a historian, he had to relate the multiple Oswald aspect because that is what the record shows.

Background for those interested.

[SidDithers]

18. ...

Sid

[Octafish]

19. Admiral George Burkley thought more than one shooter was involved.

Gee. For some reason, the Warren Commission failed to get the TESTIMONY of the one man who was JFK's doctor, was in the motorcade, treated him in the ER at Parkland Hospital, and was present at the autopsy later that night at the US Naval Hospital in Bethesda, evidently causing problems for Gen. Curtis LeMay.

Adm. Burkley got a lawyer to make sure he could get through to the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

AGENCY: HSCA
ORIGINATOR: HSCA
FROM: RICHARD SPRAGUE
TO: FILE
MEMORANDUM
March 18, 1977
TO : FILE
FROM : RICHARD A. SPRAGUE

William F. Illig, an attorney from Erie, Pa., contacted me in Philadelphia this
date, advising me that he represents Dr. George G. Burkley, Vice Admiral, U.S.
Navy retired, who had been the personal physician for presidents Kennedy and
Johnson.

Mr. Illig stated that he had a luncheon meeting with his client, Dr. Burkley,
this date to take up some tax matters. Dr. Burkley advised him that although he,
Burkley, had signed the death certificate of President Kennedy in Dallas, he had
never been interviewed and that he has information in the Kennedy
assassination indicating that others besides Oswald must have participated.

Illig advised me that his client is a very quiet, unassuming person, not wanting
any publicity whatsoever, but he, Illig, was calling me with his client's
consent and that his client would talk to me in Washington.

''Conspiracy Mongers.'' Nice smear.

[SidDithers]

23. ...

Sid

[Octafish]

25. Odd that you can find humor in the assassination of President Kennedy, siddithers of DU.

No one could pay me enough to write or refer to such nonsense.

For those interested in learning:

Mass Media ignoring 'RFK Believed in Conspiracy' shows corrupt nature of America's Press

[SidDithers]

26. I find humour in the obsessive nature of the JFK conspiracy theorists...

Sid

[Octafish]

28. ''Obssessive'' is a psychoanalytic term. Like ''Infatuated.''

They can be used to discredit people. Did you know CIA encourages its "assets in the media" to use it on critics of the Warren Commission?

b. To employ propaganda assets to and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose. The unclassified attachments to this guidance should provide useful background material for passing to assets. Our ploy should point out, as applicable, that the critics are (I) wedded to theories adopted before the evidence was in, (II) politically interested, (III) financially interested, (IV) hasty and inaccurate in their research, or (V) infatuated with their own theories. In the course of discussions of the whole phenomenon of criticism, a useful strategy may be to single out Epstein's theory for attack, using the attached Fletcher article and Spectator piece for background. (Although Mark Lane's book is much less convincing that Epstein's and comes off badly where confronted by knowledgeable critics, it is also much more difficult to answer as a whole, as one becomes lost in a morass of unrelated details.)

http://www.jfklancer.com/CIA.html

Do you know what a "Disnformationist" is, SidDithers of DU?

[SidDithers]

29. I think "obssessive" is completely appropriate, in this case...

Sid

[Octafish]

32. Here are two FBI documents naming George Bush in connection with JFK assassination...

First George Herbert Waker Bush...

Poppy Bush warned FBI -- AFTER -- JFK assassinated.

In the hour of the death of President John F. Kennedy, Texas oilman George Herbert Walker Bush named a suspect to the FBI in a "confidential" phone call. He then added he was heading for Dallas. Skeptics need not take my word for it, that's what Poppy told the FBI:



Here's a transcript of the text:

TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63

FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL

SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY

At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.

BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.

BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.

BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.

# # #

Gee. Why was Poppy Bush in Dallas when JFK was assassinated?

Could it be, he was on official business? I suspect he was on Secret Government business. After all, his eldest son bragged during his Texas Air National Guard and Harvard grad school days that his daddy was CIA.

Here's an FBI document from the same week of the assassination in which FBI Director J Edgar Hoover briefed one "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." Some strange coincidence there, wot?



Here's a transcript of the above:

Date: November 29, 1963

To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State

From: John Edgar Hoover, Director

Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963

Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.

The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.

# # #

I do remember that GHWB was head of the CIA when the Church Committee was looking into the CIA assassination programs. He made things all friendly-like and turned what had been a serious hunt for truth under previous DCI Colby into another dog-and-pony show that was big on show and light on facts.

Regarding Dallas: Now I don't know if Poppy was a trigger man, was only there to watch what happened or what just happened to be there. I do know Poppy Bush has never explained these memos. He's never even admitted where he was the day JFK was killed.

Seeing how he would go on to become President, as would his dim son, I believe it's vitally important that we learn the Truth.

Why? The United States and the world haven't been the same since November 22, 1963. And not a single major player in the nation's mass media have stepped up and demanded a real investigation. So, it's up to us, We the People.

What's more, Poppy Bush sheltered mass-murdering jet-bombing terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles.

Thanks for reminding me, siddithers of DU.

[SidDithers]

35. Yes, yes, we've all seen those the previous dozens of times you've posted them...

See how appropriate the word is?



Sid

[Octafish]

36. Why do you act like JFK assassination is a joke, SidDithers of DU?

Odd.

[SidDithers]

37. See post #26...

Sid

[Octafish]

38. George HW Bush in Dallas day JFK was killed and you joke?

That is odd.

[SidDithers]

40. See post #26...

Sid

[Octafish]

42. Allen Dulles hid CIA-Mafia assassination plots from Warren Commission and America

To the Republican Dulles and his "boss," Vice President Richard Nixon, the Bay of Pigs Thing was supposed to have ushered in a new era of moneymaking for their "Friends" like Meyer Lansky.

AUG 1960: Richard Bissell meets with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA's Office of Security, and discusses with him ways to eliminate or assassinate Fidel Castro. Edwards proposes that the job be done by assassins hand-picked by the American underworld, specifically syndicate interests who have been driven out of their Havana gambling casinos by the Castro regime. Bissell gives Edwards the go-ahead to proceed. Between August 1960, and April 1961, the CIA with the help of the Mafia pursues a series of plots to poison or shot Castro. The CIA’s own internal report on these efforts states that these plots "were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs." (CIA, Inspector General's Report on Efforts to Assassinate Fidel Castro, p. 3, 14)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/bayofpigs/chron.html

Details on the actual sit-down:

Ever wonder about the sanity of America's leaders? Take a close look at perhaps the most bizarre plot in U.S. intelligence history

By Bryan Smith
Chicago Magazine
November 2007
(page 4 of 6)

EXCERPT...

By September 1960, the project was proceeding apace. Roselli would report directly to Maheu. The first step was a meeting in New York. There, at the Plaza Hotel, Maheu introduced Roselli to O'Connell. The agent wanted to cover up the participation of the CIA, so he pretended to be a man named Jim Olds who represented a group of wealthy industrialists eager to get rid of Castro so they could get back in business.

"We may know some people," Roselli said. Several weeks later, they all met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. For years, the luxurious facility had served as the unofficial headquarters for Mafioso leaders seeking a base close to their gambling interests in Cuba. Now, it would be the staging area for the assassination plots.

At a meeting in one of the suites, Roselli introduced Maheu to two men: Sam Gold and a man Roselli referred to as Joe, who could serve as a courier to Cuba. By this time, Roselli was on to O'Connell. "I'm not kidding," Roselli told the agent one day. "I know who you work for. But I'm not going to ask you to confirm it."

Roselli may have figured out that he was dealing with the CIA, but neither Maheu nor O'Connell realized the rank of mobsters with whom they were dealing. That changed when Maheu picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, which carried an article laying out the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. Leading the list was Sam Giancana, a.k.a. "Mooney," a.k.a. "Momo," a.k.a. "Sam the Cigar," a Chicago godfather who was one of the most feared dons in the country—and the man who called himself Sam Gold. "Joe" was also on the list. His real name, however, was Santos Trafficante—the outfit's Florida and Cuba chieftain.

Maheu alerted O'Connell. "My God, look what we're involved with," Maheu said. O'Connell told his superiors. Questioned later before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (later nicknamed the Church Committee after its chairman, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho), O'Connell was asked whether there had ever been any discussion about asking two men on the FBI's most wanted list to carry out a hit on a foreign leader.

"Not with me there wasn't," O'Connell answered.

"And obviously no one said stop—and you went ahead."

"Yes."

"Did it bother you at all?"

"No," O'Connell answered, "it didn't."

CONTINUED...

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2007/How-the-CIA-Enlisted-the-Chicago-Mob-to-Put-a-Hit-on-Castro/index.php?cparticle=4&siarticle=3

To show the lasting power of those who benefited from the assassination, the Mighty Wurlitzer plays the false tune that the Kennedy brothers -- not Dulles and Nixon -- were the ones who wanted Castro dead.

Spies: Ex-CIA Agent In Raleigh Says Castro Knew About JFK Assassination Ahead Of Time

Former CIA agent and author Brian Latell in Raleigh

By The Raleigh Telegram

RALEIGH – A noted former Central Intelligence Agency officer, author, and scholar who is intimately knowledgeable about Cuba and Fidel Castro, says he believes there is evidence that Castro’s government knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ahead of time.

SNIP...

Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General of the United States, was in charge of the operation, said Latell. Despite the United States’ best efforts, the operation was nonetheless penetrated by Cuban intelligence agents, said Latell.

Latell said there were two serious assassination attempts by the United States against Castro that even used members of the mafia to help, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful.

He also said that there was a plot by the United States to have Castro jabbed with a pen containing a syringe filled with a very effective poison. Latell said that he believes the experienced assassin who worked for Castro who originally agreed to the plan may have been a double agent. After meeting with a personal representative of Robert Kennedy in Paris, the man knew that the plan to assassinate Castro came from the highest levels of the government, including John F. and Robert Kennedy.

The plan was never carried out, as the man later defected to the United States, but with so many double agents working for Castro also pledging allegiance to the CIA, Latell said it was likely that the information got back to Havana that the Kennedy brothers endorsed that plot with the pen.

CONTINUED...

http://raleightelegram.com/201209123311

Odd for someone claiming to be a "democrat," your ridicule for those interested in pursuing truth about a political crime that still damages the United States.

[SidDithers]

43. ...

Sid

[Octafish]

44. Making light of political assassination only serves to protect Bush, siddithers of DU.

See post #20 about murderous Nixon
wouldn't mind a murderous Secret Service agent putting a bullet into Teddy
someone from a family you ridicule
That's also what Nixon and BFEE do.

[SidDithers]

45. See #26 again...

Sid

[Octafish]

46. Disinformation. It adds noise and drowns out the signal.

The author is an eyewitness, serving as a staff member of the House Select Committee on Assassination in the mid-1970s. Today an attorney, Hardway has gone on-record to detail how CIA went out of its way to obstruct Congress:

A CRUEL AND SHOCKING MISINTERPRETATION

by Dan Hardway, (c) 2015

EXCERPT...

To fully appreciate why I say that, a little background from Washington in 1978, is necessary. In 1978 the CIA resisted the HSCA’s inquiry into Mexico City more than any other area of inquiry. The chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, told the Committee on August 15, 1978, “(T)he deeper we have gotten into the Agency’s performance in Mexico City, the more difficult they have gotten in dealing with us, the more they have insisted on relevance, the more they have gone back in effect on their agreement to give us access to unsanitized files. For a while we had general and free access to unsanitized files. That is increasingly not true in the Mexico City area….” And we have since learned that they used George Joannides to shut down the investigation into Oswald and Mexico City. In doing so, they lied to us about who he was. He ran propaganda operations in

Miami in 1963-64 and was the case officer for DRE, the anti-Castro group that scored the anti-Fair Play for Cuba Committee coup using Oswald in New Orleans in August of 1963. As G. Robert Blakey has since acknowledged, “The CIA not only lied, it actively subverted the investigation.” I think the CIA expected we would take the superficial approach of considering the “Castro did it” theory, but when we went beyond the initial appearances and began pushing our investigation into the propaganda sources, seeking interviews with the actual penetration and surveillance agents, seeking to find others in Mexico City who may have seen Oswald, then the Agency resistance to our investigation turned to a stonewall. Shouldn’t it be enough to raise serious questions that when a Congressional Committee investigating specific disinformation operations ran by the CIA, the CIA brings one of those involved in the operation being investigated and uses him in an undercover capacity to forestall and subvert the investigation? But that’s not all.

Consider the scenario of U.S. intelligence involvement in Oswald’s activities in Mexico City that we were not able to fully investigate in 1978. Let’s start with some background on David Phillips. David Phillips was one of, if not the, most experienced, ingenious, respected, and qualified disinformation officers in the CIA. In 1963 he was stationed in Mexico City, but, in early October, he was temporarily assigned to duty at Headquarters because he was being promoted from running anti-Castro propaganda operations to overseeing all anti-Castro operations in the Western Hemisphere. He was an experienced hand. In the late 1950’s he had been under non-diplomatic cover in Havana, where he worked with student leaders who would eventually form the Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (“DRE”). During the Bay of Pigs, Phillips was stationed at CIA Headquarters where he had responsibility for the propaganda and psychological warfare aspects of the antiCastro operations. In running those operations he not only oversaw the operations he ran personally from Headquarters, he was also the supervisor of the propaganda operations flowing out of the JMWAVE station in Miami by William Kent (aka Doug Gupton, William Trouchard). When the students who had been recruited by Phillips fled Cuba, they were reorganized under Kent’s tutelage into the DRE based in Miami.

Phillips was transferred to Mexico City later in 1961 after the Bay of Pigs. Kent was promoted to Headquarters, and George Joannides took over Kent’s position in Miami, including supervision of DRE. While still stationed in Headquarters in the early 60’s, David Phillips had worked with Cord Meyer to develop the first disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting and disrupting a group of Castro sympathizers who had organized themselves into the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). In the summer of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald formed a chapter of the FPCC in New Orleans. In August of 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, still in New Orleans, had an encounter with DRE which led to a lot of publicity linking Oswald to communists, labeling him as pro-Castro, and discrediting the FPCC. In July and August of that year there is strong evidence that Oswald was used to identify and contact pro-Castro students at Tulane University. In early September, Oswald was seen with David Philips in Dallas.

On September 16, 1963, the CIA informed the FBI that it was considering action to counter the activities of the FPCC in foreign countries. To my knowledge, the operational files on this new anti-FPCC operation have never been released by the CIA. In New Orleans, on September 17, 1963, Oswald applied for, and received, a Mexican travel visa immediately after William Gaudet, a known CIA agent, had applied for one. On September 27 Oswald arrived in Mexico City. This activity did not occur suddenly or in a vacuum. Oswald had started establishing his pro-Castro bona fides earlier that summer in New Orleans, including establishing an FPCC chapter there.

CONTINUED...

http://aarclibrary.org/a-cruel-and-shocking-misinterpretation/

It's no joke, SidDithers of DU. Whoever was behind the assassination went to extraordinary lengths to make it look like Castro-did-it.

[Hortensis]

47. My interest in the papers didn't leap assassination to mind,

but here it is all over this thread. Conspiracy theories verwhelming all other topics.

Look, perhaps somehow something sinister is being hidden, but almost certainly anyone who would have been involved is dead now or at best drooling over his lunch tray in a skilled nursing facility. Not that it wouldn't matter, it would, but I question that for some the mere mention of Kennedy's name diverts all thought from all other history to conspiracy.

Like the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was a child in L.A. in those days. Practicing kiss-ass-goodbye under our desks was as normal as fire drills, and I don't think it bothered most of us. THE day, though, tension was so palpable in the air that I felt it, even out walking down a sunny sidewalk, although I didn't understand what was happening. Sure, we'd all been hearing about impending crisis with Cuba for a while, but my mom didn't explain that everyone we saw was wondering if we would all die that day.

I just read the briefing for President Johnson, what wasn't redacted, for the day of the Tet Offensive. No mention of the taking of our embassy in Saigon then or the next day. Maybe it wasn't that significant because it had been retaken. The human drama behind these brief notes...

[grasswire]

2. thanks for that news nt

[Octafish]

4. Agency continues to provide disinformation on Dallas.

These documents released yesterday act to reinforce the notion that there was nothing anybody could do. They don't mention what is never mentioned: CIA hired Mafia to murder -- ostensibly Castro and others in Cuba. The disinformation comes in by making it out that it was Kennedy's idea -- when it was CIA director Allen Dulles' idea in 1960 -- when he was working for Eisenhower (and Nixon was presumed to be the next-president).

From more recent days, we see how the Agency continues to spread this disinformation:

Spies: Ex-CIA Agent In Raleigh Says Castro Knew About JFK Assassination Ahead Of Time

Former CIA agent and author Brian Latell in Raleigh

By The Raleigh Telegram

RALEIGH – A noted former Central Intelligence Agency officer, author, and scholar who is intimately knowledgeable about Cuba and Fidel Castro, says he believes there is evidence that Castro’s government knew about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 ahead of time.

SNIP...

Robert Kennedy, as the Attorney General of the United States, was in charge of the operation, said Latell. Despite the United States’ best efforts, the operation was nonetheless penetrated by Cuban intelligence agents, said Latell.

Latell said there were two serious assassination attempts by the United States against Castro that even used members of the mafia to help, but both of them were obviously unsuccessful.

He also said that there was a plot by the United States to have Castro jabbed with a pen containing a syringe filled with a very effective poison. Latell said that he believes the experienced assassin who worked for Castro who originally agreed to the plan may have been a double agent. After meeting with a personal representative of Robert Kennedy in Paris, the man knew that the plan to assassinate Castro came from the highest levels of the government, including John F. and Robert Kennedy.

The plan was never carried out, as the man later defected to the United States, but with so many double agents working for Castro also pledging allegiance to the CIA, Latell said it was likely that the information got back to Havana that the Kennedy brothers endorsed that plot with the pen.

CONTINUED (Wayback cache)...

https://web.archive.org/web/20120915095137/http://raleightelegram.com/201209123311

What we now know, but never seems to get on tee vee or into Corporate Owned Newsprint, is that CIA knew all about what LBJ called "A little incident in Mexico."

[Holly_Hobby]

7. KnR!

Nothing to see here, move along

[Octafish]

9. The pickle.

The CIA’s Historical Review Program on 16 September 2015 released a collection of presidential briefing products written during the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations. This large-scale release of The President’s Intelligence Checklists (PICLs) (an acronym pronounced “pickles”) and The President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) includes almost 2,500 documents exclusively written for the president each day except Sunday. They summarized the day-to-day intelligence and analysis on current and future national security issues. President Kennedy received the first PICL -- a seven-page 8 ½- by 8-inch booklet -- on Saturday, 17 June 1961 at his country home near Middleburg, Virginia. The PICL was replaced by the PDB on 1 December 1964, during the Johnson administration. In addition to the PDBs and PICLs, the collection includes The President’s Intelligence Review and its replacement, Highlights of the Week, as well as ad hoc supplemental products and annexes that featured topics of presidential interest. The CIA originators of the PICL, and later the PDB, strove to craft a daily current product that was true to sensitive source reporting and yet was easily readable by the president and his advisors.

http://www.foia.cia.gov/collection/PDBs

Fascinating peek into history, what before the creation of the National Security State was called the People's business.

Here's something that more people interested in democracy should know:

Truman criticized CIA after the assassination of President Kennedy and Dulles asked for retraction.

Truman's column on CIA cloak and dagger got published in the Washington Post and, evidently, few other newspapers at the time. What could have bugged Dulles -- who was no longer DCI -- so much that he got the Mighty Wurlitzer to hum a different tune?

Limit CIA Role To Intelligence

By Harry S Truman
The Washington Post, December 22, 1963 - page A11

INDEPENDENCE, MO., Dec. 21 — I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—CIA. At least, I would like to submit here the original reason why I thought it necessary to organize this Agency during my Administration, what I expected it to do and how it was to operate as an arm of the President.

I think it is fairly obvious that by and large a President's performance in office is as effective as the information he has and the information he gets. That is to say, that assuming the President himself possesses a knowledge of our history, a sensitive understanding of our institutions, and an insight into the needs and aspirations of the people, he needs to have available to him the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world, and particularly of the trends and developments in all the danger spots in the contest between East and West. This is an immense task and requires a special kind of an intelligence facility.

Of course, every President has available to him all the information gathered by the many intelligence agencies already in existence. The Departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Interior and others are constantly engaged in extensive information gathering and have done excellent work.

But their collective information reached the President all too frequently in conflicting conclusions. At times, the intelligence reports tended to be slanted to conform to established positions of a given department. This becomes confusing and what's worse, such intelligence is of little use to a President in reaching the right decisions.

Therefore, I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department "treatment" or interpretations.

I wanted and needed the information in its "natural raw" state and in as comprehensive a volume as it was practical for me to make full use of it. But the most important thing about this move was to guard against the chance of intelligence being used to influence or to lead the President into unwise decisions—and I thought it was necessary that the President do his own thinking and evaluating.

Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being "upset."

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.

With all the nonsense put out by Communist propaganda about "Yankee imperialism," "exploitive capitalism," "war-mongering," "monopolists," in their name-calling assault on the West, the last thing we needed was for the CIA to be seized upon as something akin to a subverting influence in the affairs of other people.

I well knew the first temporary director of the CIA, Adm. Souers, and the later permanent directors of the CIA, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg and Allen Dulles. These were men of the highest character, patriotism and integrity—and I assume this is true of all those who continue in charge.

But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.

SOURCE: http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

So. One month after the assassination, President Truman expressed public concern CIA had strayed off the reservation from intelligence gathering of foreign news sources to cloak-and-dagger operations. Time -- and the Church Committee -- has since shown CIA operated, illegally, domestically.

Allen Dulles, on behalf of CIA, even asked Truman to retract it. From Ray McGovern...

Fox Guarding Hen House

The well-connected Dulles got himself appointed to the Warren Commission and took the lead in shaping the investigation of JFK’s assassination.

Documents in the Truman Library show that he then mounted a small domestic covert action of his own to neutralize any future airing of Truman’s and Souers’s warnings about covert action.

So important was this to Dulles that he invented a pretext to get himself invited to visit Truman in Independence, Missouri. On the afternoon of April 17, 1964, Dulles spent a half-hour trying to get the former President to retract what he had said in his op-ed. No dice, said Truman.

No problem, thought Dulles. Four days later, in a formal memo for his old buddy Lawrence Houston, CIA General Counsel from 1947 to 1973, Dulles fabricated a private retraction, claiming that Truman told him the Washington Post article was “all wrong,” and that Truman “seemed quite astounded at it.”

No doubt Dulles thought it might be handy to have such a memo in CIA files, just in case.

A fabricated retraction? It certainly seems so, because Truman did not change his tune. Far from it.

In a June 10, 1964, letter to the managing editor of Look magazine, for example, Truman restated his critique of covert action, emphasizing that he never intended the CIA to get involved in “strange activities.”

CONTINUED...

SOURCE: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/122909b.html

Thanks for grokking, Holly_Hobby! Democracy depends on the People knowing what their elected representatives are doing, not the other way around.

[hifiguy]

15. That Truman letter about the CIA's "strange activities"

was largely scrubbed from the public record for years.

And I've always been willing to bet fifty bucks that Dulles was one of the people who gave the final order, if not the sole one.

[Octafish]

21. The Devil's Chessboard

...is the title of David Talbot's upcoming book. Talbot spoke at the JFK "Passing the Torch" Conference at Duquesne. He did not mince words in his presentation. He publicly named former CIA director Allen Dulles not only as participant in the cover-up of events concerning CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy, Talbot said Dulles was the chief architect of the assassination.

Here are some of Mr. Talbot's words outlining what he learned and will detail in the book:

...I think what we're going to show over the next few years is that Allen Welsh Dulles was much more centrally involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, and its cover-up, than Lee Harvey Oswald.

Fifty years later, it's finally time to give the man his rightful place in history. In his day, Allen Dulles was America's most legendary spymaster, the longest-serving director of the CIA. He took great pleasure in regaling the public about his espionage triumphs. But, for obvious reasons, he could never take credit for his biggest and boldest covert operation:
the killing of the President of the United States in broad daylight on the streets of an American city.

I hope that my forthcoming book, which will be titled "The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, JFK and the Epic Battle for America's Soul" will at long last give Mr. Dulles his due. As I say in my title of my remarks this morning, I believe Allen Dulles truly was the "Chairman of the Board of the Kennedy Assassination."

In September 1965, nearly two years after Kennedy was violently removed from office, Allen Dulles went for a stroll near his home in Georgetown with a young magazine editor named William Morris. The old spymaster, long since retired, struck Morris as an amiable, avuncular character until the name Kennedy suddenly came up in the conversation. Suddenly a dark cloud crossed the old man's brow.

"That little Kennedy," he spat out. "He thought he was a god."

Allen Dulles knew who the true overlords of American power were. (They were) men like him and his brother, not Jack and Bobby Kennedy. The Kennedys were mere upstarts in comparison to the Dulles family. The Dulles dynasty boasted diplomats and international bankers and three secretaries of state. The Kennedy clan, by comparison, was distinguished by saloon keepers and ward healers. When paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy was amassing his fortune as a movie mogul and stock gambler, Dulles and his older brother were running Wall Street from their perch at the world's largest law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell and creating a new global financial order.

During the Cold War, President Eisenhower outsourced the country's foreign policy to the Dulles Brothers, with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles serving as the architect of Washington's global crusade against communism, and Allen Dulles carrying out the darker chores of empire.

Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev who kept looking for a way out of the Cold War noose but found himself repeatedly checkmated by the Dulleses remarked at one point, "One shuddered at what great force was in the Dulles Brothers' hands."

The Dulles Brothers stood at the very apex of American power, straddling an elite network that connected Wall Street, Washington, big oil and international finance. John Foster Dulles was the ultimate counselor for that overworld that ruled the country's government and business, and his younger brother Allen was at privileged circles master of intrigue and subversion, its enforcer...

Please let me know your thought after reading, hifiguy. Leaders are readers, as they say, and I have always thought you were a leader.

[hifiguy]

30. Welp, that is a Must Read.

Ever since I became aware of the fact that Dulles was one of the prime movers behind the Bay of Pigs - probably when I read Schlesinger's bio of RFK in the early 1980s, he has been at the top of my suspects list. JFK demanded, and got, Dulles' head for that fiasco. That he was subsequently named to the commission that investigated the death of the man who ended his career as Chief Spook seemed beyond fishy to me.

Reading Kinzer's The Brothers recently rekindled my suspicions. The intimate, lengthy connections between the Dulles brothers and the Real Power in the US is undeniable. Allen Dulles had already removed or otherwise dispatched Mossadegh, Arbenz and Lumumba. Why wouldn't he think he could remove a POTUS that stood in the way of his designs? Particularly one against whom he had a decided personal animus for being an arriviste and a threat to his entire worldview (which Douglass details at some length - the American University speech in particular, which probably sealed JFK's fate), not to mention the man who fired him for enactment of a blown, and insane, operation, to wit the BoP. Dulles had also doubtless been informed of JFK's very serious threat "to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

And anyone who thinks he didn't retain at least some functional control over the CIA after he was sacked is naive beyond words.

If he wasn't the sole person who signed off on the hit on Kennedy he was one of no more than two or three, and I'd bet something substantial that it was Dulles himself who gave the final go-ahead.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. Synopsis of LATEST Intelligence Items Reported to the President = SLIIRP, problem solved ! :D nt

[Octafish]

10. Good one! Thanks!

I tried using SLIIRP in the same sentence as "pickle" and I couldn't even think about it, let alone say it.

SLIIRP slipped seamlessly into the PICL information product and from there to the appropriate channels...AAAGH! It's best I focus.

The new archive at CIA is pretty amazing. It's a window into a world we can only imagine, even if we have to pay for it.

Here's what President Lyndon B. Johnson received for, supposedly, his first CIA morning brief on Nov. 23, 1963:

In honor of President Kennedy for whom the President's Intelligence Checklist was first written on 17 June 1961

For this day, the Checklist Staff can find no words more fitting than a verse quoted by the President the day he learned of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Bullfight critics ranked in rows
Crowd the enormous plaza full;
But only one is there who knows
And he's the man who fights the bull.

Some of the documents indicate they were "sanitized" in 1993...whatever that means. I know what not knowing means for democracy.

[WillyT]

11. K & R !!!

[Octafish]

20. Something else never on TV: Nixon assigned a murderous Secret Service agent to protect Ted Kennedy.

The history is why I never denigrate people with labels, like "CT." It is a loaded term, designed to poison the person as a source of information and news. Here's the treasonous, murderous reality of the "Unindicted Co-Conspirator" of Watergate fame:

Nixon approved hiring a Secret Service man who said he'd 'kill on command' to guard Ted Kennedy. You can hear Nixon and Haldeman discuss it, about 40 minutes into the HBO documentary "Nixon by Nixon." While I had read the part of the transcript available years ago, and wrote about it on DU, almost no one I know has heard anything about it.

Ted Kennedy survived Richard Nixon's Plots

By Don Fulsom

In September 1972, Nixon’s continued political fear, personal loathing, and jealously of Kennedy led him to plant a spy in Kennedy’s Secret Service detail.

The mole Nixon selected for the Kennedy camp was already being groomed. He was a former agent from his Nixon’s vice presidential detail, Robert Newbrand—a man so loyal he once pledged he would do anything—even kill—for Nixon.

The President was most interested in learning about the Sen. Kennedy’s sex life. He wanted, more than anything, stated Haldeman in The Ends of Power, to “catch (Kennedy) in the sack with one of his babes.”

In a recently transcribed tape of a September 8, 1972 talk among the President and aides Bob Haldeman and Alexander Butterfield, Nixon asks whether Secret Service chief James Rowley would appoint Newbrand to head Kennedy’s detail:

Haldeman: He's to assign Newbrand.

President Nixon: Does he understand that he's to do that?

Butterfield: He's effectively already done it. And we have a full force assigned, 40 men.

Haldeman: I told them to put a big detail on him (unclear).

President Nixon: A big detail is correct. One that can cover him around the clock, every place he goes. (Laughter obscures mixed voices.)

President Nixon: Right. No, that's really true. He has got to have the same coverage that we give the others, because we're concerned about security and we will not assume the responsibility unless we're with him all the time.

Haldeman: And Amanda Burden (one of Kennedy’s alleged girlfriends) can't be trusted. (Unclear.) You never know what she might do. (Unclear.)

Haldeman then assures the President that Newbrand “will do anything that I tell him to … He really will. And he has come to me twice and absolutely, sincerely said, "With what you've done for me and what the President's done for me, I just want you to know, if you want someone killed, if you want anything else done, any way, any direction …"

President Nixon: The thing that I (unclear) is this: We just might get lucky and catch this son-of-a-bitch and ruin him for '76.

Haldeman: That's right.

President Nixon: He doesn't know what he's really getting into. We're going to cover him, and we are not going to take "no" for an answer. He can't say "no." The Kennedys are arrogant as hell with these Secret Service. He says, "Fine," and (Newbrand) should pick the detail, too.

Toward the end of this conversation, Nixon exclaims that Newbrand’s spying “(is) going to be fun,” and Haldeman responds: “Newbrand will just love it.”

Nixon also had a surveillance tip for Haldeman for his spy-to-be: “I want you to tell Newbrand if you will that (unclear) because he's a Catholic, sort of play it, he was for Jack Kennedy all the time. Play up to Kennedy, that "I'm a great admirer of Jack Kennedy." He's a member of the Holy Name Society. He wears a St. Christopher (unclear).” Haldeman laughs heartily at the President’s curious advice.

Despite the enthusiasm of Nixon and Haldeman, Newbrand apparently never produced anything of great value. When this particular round of Nixon’s spying on Kennedy was uncovered in 1997, The Washington Post quoted Butterfield as saying periodic reports on Kennedy's activities were delivered to Haldeman, but that Butterfield did not think any potentially damaging information was ever dug up.

SOURCE:

http://surftofind.com/tedkennedy

Why does that matter? The Warren Commission, and the nation's mass media, never heard about the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro until the Church Committee in 1975. You'd think that would be a matter of concern to all Americans, especially considering how then-vice president Nixon was head of the "White House Action Team" that contacted the Mafia for murder.

This is the sort of information citizens of a democracy shouldn't have to search ConsortiumNews or CounterPunch to learn. It should be taught in school, or at the least, discussed in the nation's mass media. I certainly think it's unfair for people -- especially those who consider themselves Democrats or democrats -- to label those interested in such subjects "Conspiracy Theorists" and whatever else the haters and the asshats of the emoticon brigade can think of.

Great to see ya, WillyT! Thank you for grokking!

[Omaha Steve]

12. Thanks for posting

K&R!

[Octafish]

24. CIA director Allen Dulles and JCS Chairman Lemnitzer counseled all-out nuclear sneak attack on USSR.

At a meeting in July 1961 they counseled JFK to attack in the Fall of 1963, when the USA would enjoy optimum strategic and tactical superiority. It's something important that's been missed by journalists and historians due to all copies but one getting burned...

Did the U.S. Military Plan a Nuclear First Strike for 1963?

Recently declassified information shows that the military presented President Kennedy with a plan for a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union in the early 1960s.

James K. Galbraith and Heather A. Purcell
The American Prospect | September 21, 1994

During the early 1960s the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) introduced the world to the possibility of instant total war. Thirty years later, no nation has yet fired any nuclear missile at a real target. Orthodox history holds that a succession of defensive nuclear doctrines and strategies -- from "massive retaliation" to "mutual assured destruction" -- worked, almost seamlessly, to deter Soviet aggression against the United States and to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.

The possibility of U.S. aggression in nuclear conflict is seldom considered. And why should it be? Virtually nothing in the public record suggests that high U.S. authorities ever contemplated a first strike against the Soviet Union, except in response to a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or that they doubted the deterrent power of Soviet nuclear forces. The main documented exception was the Air Force Chief of Staff in the early 1960s, Curtis LeMay, a seemingly idiosyncratic case.

But beginning in 1957 the U.S. military did prepare plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., based on our growing lead in land-based missiles. And top military and intelligence leaders presented an assessment of those plans to President John F. Kennedy in July of 1961. At that time, some high Air Force and CIA leaders apparently believed that a window of outright ballistic missile superiority, perhaps sufficient for a successful first strike, would be open in late 1963.

The document reproduced opposite is published here for the first time. It describes a meeting of the National Security Council on July 20, 1961. At that meeting, the document shows, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of the CIA, and others presented plans for a surprise attack. They answered some questions from Kennedy about timing and effects, and promised further information. The meeting recessed under a presidential injunction of secrecy that has not been broken until now.

CONTINUED...

http://prospect.org/article/did-us-military-plan-nuclear-first-strike-1963

''And we call ourselves the human race.'' - President John F. Kennedy, after walking out of that briefing.

Thank you for caring about these important histories "Left Out" of the official narrative, Omaha Steve. That you care means the world to me.

[Dont call me Shirley]

13. This could possibly lead to the truth about who conspired to kill our beloved President Kennedy.

Albeit though no doubt much has been sanitized from these records. The bushes can't have their dirty laundry hanging out on the line, especially with another potential King waiting in the wing.

Thanks for posting, Octafish.

[Octafish]

27. We have to do it, Dont call me Shirley.

Corporate Owned News won't. For instance...

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.

That's what his son and daughter, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Rory Kennedy, reported in an interview with Charlie Rose last weekend in Dallas.



It's also what author and Salon founder David Talbot reported, when he called Robert F. Kennedy the "first conspiracy theorist" in 2007.

Here's why the news from Robert and Rory is so important:

The important issue is that he and his sister reported their father -- the president's principal counselor and the nation's chief law enforcement officer -- privately thought a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

RFK called the Warren Commission report "shoddy workmanship."

Attorney General Kennedy knew about the Ruby-Mafia connections immediately, which is vital when considering the Mafia were hired by Allen Dulles and the CIA during Eisenhower's administration to murder Fidel Castro -- an operation which the CIA failed to inform the president and attorney general.

The interview with Charlie Rose marked the first time members of the immediate Kennedy family have voiced the attorney general's doubts about the Warren Commission and its lone gunman theory.

Those are the facts we learned Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. It is important history for anyone who cares about democracy and justice and the United States. Yet, for some reason, WHAT ATTORNEY GENERAL ROBERT F. KENNEDY THOUGHT ABOUT CONSPIRACY HAS NOT BEEN MENTIJONED ON NATIONAL TELEVISION.



Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his sister Rory Kennedy told Charlie Rose that their father, the Attorney General of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy, believed there was a conspiracy behind the death of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. For the first time in almost 50 years, members of the slain president's family were on the record about their father's thoughts about the assassination.

The story made news, as it were, for a day or two -- it was on page 8 here in Detroit (try finding it using The Free Press or Detroit News web site search engines) -- and apart from several threads on DU, that's about it as coverage goes. The Charlie Rose interview was part of a program put together by the media and good people in Dallas to celebrate JFK's life.

What bothers me about the media coverage is the constant attack, not on the government's lousy investigation of the assassination and its attendant cover-up, but, rather, the attack on anyone who brings up the subject of conspiracy in the death of the president, even when it's children of attorney general who also was the brother of the slain president.

Check out this condescending piece of opinion from the Dallas Observer:

Not Even Charlie Rose Could Rein in RFK Jr. in Dallas Last Night. Also: Conspiracy Theories!

By Betsy Lewis Sat., Jan. 12 2013 at 11:01 AM

It got weird when he went into a historical lecture about his father's investigation into the JFK assassination. He was speaking about it as if he had been part of it, then cited a book called The Unspeakable by Jim Douglas (sic - actually "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James Douglass) as being the best book on the subject, then kept referencing things from the book. He was losing the audience, so he burst out, "My father believed that the Warren Report was a shoddy piece of craftsmanship," to the delighted applause of the mostly Baby Boomer audience.

Whenever Charlie Rose would ask about the family, RFK Jr. would evade the question until he heard either delighted Boomer applause or delighted Boomer laughter. One of his responses to a family question was an unrelated story about World War II. A lady behind me who must have recently Netflixed The Iron Lady kept saying, "Here here!" for the benefit of us unfortunate people around her.
Some of the strangest RFK Jr. outbursts with the biggest applause were:

"We're becoming a national security state!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Corporations want profits!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Corporations are great things, but we'd be nuts to let them run our government!" (applause, "Here here!&quot

"Nationalism in Africa! The end of colonialism!"

At this point, I don't think anyone knew what the hell he was talking about. It was something about the Kennedy family airlifting President Obama's father out of Kenya to begin a new life in America.

RFK Jr.: "Yes."

CONTINUED...

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/mixmaster/2013/01/charlie_rose_live_the_kennedy.php

Me, I don't believe any of that stuff was "out there." Why writer Betsy Lewis chooses to believe what the media tell her is true I'll guess lies in allegiance to a pay check.

Likewise for the lack of coverage given the story in the national media, where the same few corporations that swore up and down there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, both in 1990 and 2002, now want no part of "conspiracy talk" during the 50th anniversary observance. So far, as far as I'm aware, the Charlie Rose program has not aired.

What's more telling is what didn't get noted in the nation's corrupt mass media at all: The fact that Attorney General and later Senator Robert F. Kennedy also was assassinated. Some think that was a coincidence, because the mass media told them so. One thing's for certain, the questions still surrounding the deaths of two liberal icons doesn't get discussed at all today in our supposedly "free press."

Thank Gore for the Internet.

[IcyPeas]

16. Rachel Maddow covered this

Last night in all her wonderful geekiness. Maybe online somewhere.

[Octafish]

31. She focused on the PICL and how JFK liked his PICL.

"No gobbledygook."

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/declassified-cia-papers-offer-new-view-on-jfk-527023171813

Thank you for the heads-up, IcyPeas! The more I hear Brennan speak, the more I really appreciate the guy.

[Boomerproud]

17. The spooks are in the business of lying.

Why would anyone believe that whatever is "declassified" and released for public consumption isn't total B.S.?

[Octafish]

34. We used to rely on Congress and the press...so Congress and the press got co-opted.

Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years

Files On Citizens; Helms Reportedly Got Surveillance Data in Charter Violation

By SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Special to The New York Times, Dec. 22, 1974

WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 -- The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in the United States, according to well-placed Government sources.

An extensive investigation by The New York Times has established that intelligence files on at least 10,000 American citizens were maintained by a special unit of the C.I.A. that was reporting directly to Richard Helms, then the Director of Central Intelligence and now the Ambassador to Iran.

In addition, the sources said, a check of the C.I.A.'s domestic files ordered last year by Mr. Helms's successor, James R. Schlesinger, produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities by members of the C.I.A. inside the United States, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping and the surreptitious inspection of mail.

SNIP...

The disclosure of alleged illegal C.I.A. activities is the first possible connection to rumors that have been circulating in Washington for some time. A number of mysterious burglaries and incidents have come to light since the break-in at Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972.

Duping Charged

Throughout the public hearings and courtroom testimony on Watergate, Mr. Helms and other high-level officials said that the C.I.A. had been "duped" into its Watergate involvement by the White House.

As part of its alleged effort against dissident Americans in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, The Time's sources said, the C.I.A. authorized agents to follow and photograph participants in antiwar and other demonstrations. The C.I.A. also set up a network of informants who were ordered to penetrate antiwar groups, the sources said.

At least one avowedly antiwar member of Congress was among those placed under surveillance by the C.I.A., the sources said. Other members of Congress were said to be included in the C.I.A.'s dossier on dissident Americans.

CONTINUED...

http://goodtimesweb.org/covert-operations/2013/nyt-cia-operation-antiwar-forces-dec-22-1974.html

[CanSocDem]

33. Why does your government hate Americans?

Kicking as a reminder....


.

[Octafish]

39. Top Secret Beneficiaries: Let the Profits Soar, Sir!

Thank you for noticing, McMike! Sometimes a fortune rests on a mere scrap of information, like in a "Fistful of Dollars."

CIA moonlights in corporate world

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Then there's the signature tradition of playing both sides off the middle, like selling rifles to both the Allies and the Central Powers during World War I, or the bounty hunters in "For a Few Dollars More" getting one inside to work out.

Stratfor: executive boasted of 'trusted former CIA cronies'

By Alex Spillius, Diplomatic Correspondent
9:08PM GMT 28 Feb 2012
The Telegraph

A senior executive with the private intelligence firm Stratfor boasted to colleagues about his "trusted former CIA cronies" and promised to "see what I can uncover" about a classified FBI investigation, according to emails released by the WikiLeaks.

Fred Burton, vice president of intelligence at the Texas firm, also informed members of staff that he had a copy of the confidential indictment on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks.

The second batch of five million internal Stratfor emails obtained by the Anonymous computer hacking group revealed that the company has high level sources within the United States and other governments, runs a network of paid informants that includes embassy staff and journalists and planned a hedge fund, Stratcap, based on its secret intelligence.

SNIP...

Mr Assange labelled the company as a "private intelligence Enron", in reference to the energy giant that collapsed after a false accounting scandal.

CONTINUED...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9111784/Stratfor-executive-boasted-of-trusted-former-CIA-cronies.html

Then, there's Booz Allen, NSA's go-to private spyhaus, vacuums and filters the right stuff for Carlyle Group, a buy-partisan business which always seems to know where and what to bomb and make a buck, but the lines between sides turned out be fuzzy and amorphous nebula-like -- like in "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."

The Knights of the Revolving Door

When War is Swell: the Carlyle Group and the Middle East at War

by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
CounterPunch, Weekend Edition September 6-8, 2013

Paris.

A couple of weeks ago, in a dress rehearsal for her next presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, the doyenne of humanitarian interventionism, made a pit-stop at the Carlyle Group to brief former luminaries of the imperial war rooms about her shoot-first-don’t-ask-questions foreign policy.

For those of you who have put the playbill of the Bush administration into a time capsule and buried it beneath the compost bin, the Carlyle Group is essentially a hedge fund for war-making and high tech espionage. They are the people who brought you the Iraq war and all those intrusive niceties of Homeland Security. Call them the Knights of the Revolving Door, many of Carlyle’s executives and investors having spent decades in the Pentagon, the CIA or the State Department, before cashing in for more lucrative careers as war profiteers. They are now licking their chops at the prospect for an all-out war against Syria, no doubt hoping that the conflagration will soon spread to Lebanon, Jordan and, the big prize, Iran.

For a refresher course on the sprawling tentacles of the Carlyle Group, here’s an essay that first appeared in CounterPunch’s print edition in 2004. Sadly, not much has changed in the intervening years, except these feted souls have gotten much, much richer. – JSC

Across all fronts, Bush’s war deteriorates with stunning rapidity. The death count of American soldiers killed in Iraq will soon top 1000, with no end in sight. The members of the handpicked Iraqi Governor Council are being knocked off one after another. Once loyal Shia clerics, like Ayatollah Sistani, are now telling the administration to pull out or face a nationalist insurgency. The trail of culpability for the abuse, torture and murder of Iraqi detainees seems to lead inexorably into the office of Donald Rumsfeld. The war for Iraqi oil has ended up driving the price of crude oil through the roof. Even Kurdish leaders, brutalized by the Ba’athists for decades, are now saying Iraq was a safer place under their nemesis Saddam Hussein. Like Medea whacking her own kids, the US turned on its own creation, Ahmed Chalabi, raiding his Baghdad compound and fingering him as an agent of the ayatollahs of Iran. And on and on it goes.

Still not all of the president’s men are in a despairing mood. Amid the wreckage, there remain opportunities for profit and plunder. Halliburton and Bechtel’s triumphs in Iraq have been chewed over for months. Less well chronicled is the profiteering of the Carlyle Group, a company with ties that extend directly into the Oval Office itself.

Even Pappy Bush stands in line to profit handsomely from his son’s war making. The former president is on retainer with the Carlyle Group, the largest privately held defense contractor in the nation. Carlyle is run by Frank Carlucci, who served as the National Security advisor and Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan. Carlucci has his own embeds in the current Bush administration. At Princeton, his college roommate was Donald Rumsfeld. They’ve remained close friends and business associates ever since. When you have friends like this, you don’t need to hire lobbyists..

Bush Sr. serves as a kind of global emissary for Carlyle. The ex-president doesn’t negotiate arms deals; he simply opens the door for them, a kind of high level meet-and-greet. His special area of influence is the Middle East, primarily Saudi Arabia, where the Bush family has extensive business and political ties. According to an account in the Washington Post, Bush Sr. earns around $500,000 for each speech he makes on Carlyle’s behalf.

One of the Saudi investors lured to Carlyle by Bush was the BinLaden Group, the construction conglomerate owned by the family of Osama bin Laden. According to an investigation by the Wall Street Journal, Bush convinced Shafiq Bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, to sink $2 million of BinLaden Group money into Carlyle’s accounts. In a pr move, the Carlyle group cut its ties to the BinLaden Group in October 2001.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/09/06/when-war-is-swell-the-carlyle-group-and-the-middle-east-at-war/

This barely scratches the surface. The reality is that underneath what shows for public navigators is one enormous iceberg made from blood-red ice, invisible to the proles and serfs who are doing their best to keep afloat in a frozen sea of austerity, endless war and debt servitude. And these are, by far, the wealthiest times in human history.

Remember [link:http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026939527|that General Walker fellah], CanSocDem? The guy's almost forgotten these days.

[KoKo]

41. Kick & Bookmark to catch up later!

[Octafish]

48. CIA disclosures bare the origins of the JFK cover-up

by Jefferson Morley
JFKfacts.org, Sept. 17, 2015

Three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the CIA told his successor Lyndon Johnson a bit of news: the agency’s sources had just confirmed press reports that accused assassin Lee Oswald had visited the Cuban and Soviet Embassies in Mexico City two months before.

Here’s what the President’s Intelligence Checklist (TPIC)– just released by the CIA and LBJ Library–reported on November 25, 1963.



SNIP...

So as the CIA touts its revelations online, the November 25, 1963, presidential briefing illuminates a dark truth about the history of the agency.

Within days of JFK’s assassination, senior CIA officials were concealing their knowledge of JFK’s accused assassin from their colleagues, from the American people, and from the new president.

In other words, the newest evidence shows hat the JFK assassination cover-up originated in the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and Counterintelligence Staff.

SOURCE: http://jfkfacts.org/assassination/news/in-newly-released-presidential-briefing-papers-cia-bares-the-origins-of-its-jfk-coverup/

Thank you for caring, KoKo! For those who care about democracy, justice and the USA, this is major.