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http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/12/28/why-ci ... ld-part-3/December 28, 2015 | Peter Dale Scott
Why CIA’s Richard Helms Lied About Oswald: Part 3
Not Ancient History -- But Preamble to the Present
Former CIA Director Richard Helms Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from CIA Library
Former CIA Director Richard Helms Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from CIA Library
This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal, it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba.
The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and is based on a talk given by Peter Dale Scott.
Scott is the popularizer of the expression, “Deep Politics,” and a virtuoso when it comes to what sometimes seems like grabbing smoke — capturing proof, however elusive, of motives and objectives that could explain the machinations of US intelligence agencies — and then analyzing the residue.
Not all of the chicanery Scott describes is subtle. For example, in an apparent attempt to bring the Russians into the picture, someone delivered to the FBI’s Dallas office a purported audiotape of Oswald calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. That failed, though, when FBI agents decided that the voice did not seem to be Oswald’s.
Then, two days later, the FBI joined the subterfuge by falsely reporting that “no tapes were taken to Dallas.” Because of this lie, an investigation more than a decade later by the House Select Committee on Assassinations would erroneously declare that there was no “basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.” (The existence of an Oswald impersonator in the months before the president’s murder would in and of itself have been prima facie evidence of a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.)
And then there was the attempt to set up a Soviet agent…
You will probably not be able to keep up with each tall tale, nor does it matter. They have a cumulative effect, one that explains why it is impossible to study these documents without coming away believing in conspiracy.
There is dark humor here — reminiscent of the television sit-com of the 1960’s, “Get Smart” —
about a secret agent who was always telling one lie after another, blissfully unaware that each new lie not only undermined the last one, but any new one that came after:
Smart: I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it? Seven.
Mr.Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.
Smart: Would you believe six?
Mr.Big: I don’t think so.
Smart: Would you believe two cops in a rowboat?
Would you believe that the US intelligence community has been telling us the truth all of these years?
Essay based on talk given by Peter Dale Scott at Third Annual JFK Assassination Conference in Dallas, 2015. (Produced by TrineDay Books, Conscious Community Events, and the JFK Historical Group.)
—WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor
(This is Part 3 of a three-part series. For Part 1, please go here, and for Part 2, go here.)
The CIA’s Obstruction of Justice in 2015
Now let us compare the CIA’s lying performance in 1964 with its lying performance in 2015. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, members of many U.S. agencies, including also the FBI, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the U.S. Air Force, and the Secret Service, withheld relevant information from those investigating the murder.[1] But to my knowledge there is in 2015 only one U.S. agency that is still actively maintaining the cover-up – and that is the CIA.
I am referring to the CIA’s declassification and release of a previously classified CIA study by CIA historian David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”[2] The essay is worth reading, and it contains interesting information on such matters as McCone’s relationship with Robert Kennedy. It is also significantly selective: it does not mention for example that McCone only learned late on the night of November 22 that “the CIA had known beforehand of [the alleged] Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City,” nor that as a result McCone “was enraged, ripping into his aides, furious at the way the agency was run.”[3]
Buried within Robarge’s discussion of John McCone and the Commission – a pertinent but hardly central topic – are a more important thesis statement and conclusion about the CIA itself. In the light of what I have just said about Helms, I would charge that both of these statements are false – so false indeed as arguably to constitute, once again, obstruction of justice.
The thesis statement on page 8 is that “Under McCone’s and Helms’s direction, CIA supported the Warren Commission in a way that may best be described as passive, reactive, and selective.” This claims that the CIA’s deception of the Warren Commission was a sin of omission. But no, the CIA was not just passive. Helms perjured himself, just as he lied again in the 1970s.
Worse, the article focuses on the failure of the CIA to tell the Warren Commission about its plots to assassinate Castro, which may very well have been relevant; but in so doing it deflects attention away from the CIA’s suppression of its own LCIMPROVE operation in October involving “Lee Oswald” (or “Lee Henry Oswald”), which unquestionably was of very great relevance.
Worst of all is the article’s conclusion:
Max Holland, one of the most fair-minded scholars of these events, has concluded that “if the word ‘conspiracy’ must be uttered in the same breath as ‘Kennedy assassination,’ the only one that existed was the conspiracy to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after November 22nd.”
Fidel Castro Photo credit: Library of Congress / Wikimedia
Fidel Castro Photo credit: Library of Congress / Wikimedia
Of the many things wrong with this sentence, the worst service to truth in my mind is the skillful effort to divert attention away from the Angleton operation involving Oswald, and to focus instead on plots to kill Castro. This is an old ploy dating back to 1965, following in the footsteps of old CIA veterans and friends like Brian Latell and Gus Russo. It allows a writer like Philip Shenon to quote from the Robarge study the old red herring question “Did Castro kill the president because the president had tried to kill Castro?”[4]
Public Attacks in 1963-64 on the CIA’s Operational Capacity
Some people have deduced, from the fact that CIA officials lied, that the CIA killed Kennedy. I myself believe only that some CIA individuals were involved, along with others in other agencies. As I indicated earlier, my working hypothesis is not that the killing was a CIA operation, but that the plot was piggy-backed on an authorized CIA covert operation that was not under secure control and may in part have been outsourced.[5] Some CIA actions before the assassination, notably the protection of Oswald by suppressing the reported allegation that he had been in contact with Kostikov, suggest to me that some members of the CIA CI staff, and in particular CI Chief James Angleton, may have participated to some degree in the piggy-backed plot.
At a minimum, we can say that the CIA, through its Oswald operation, was sufficiently involved in the facts of the assassination to have been embarrassed into a cover-up. We have to recall that in late 1963 the CIA’s covert operations were coming under increasing criticism and attack, initially because of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Operation against Cuba, a total fiasco, but now also because of the developing chaos in Vietnam, particularly after the assassination on November 1, 1963, of Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother.
We do not know just how aware the CIA was of Kennedy’s expressed vow to friends, first revealed a decade later, “to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”[6] But objections to the CIA’s covert operations were beginning, to an unprecedented degree, to be voiced in the U.S. media.
On November 20, 1963, the New York Times published a letter, dated November 7, that argued, as did some Congressmen of the period, that “One of the very first steps … should be to strip the CIA immediately of all operational and policy-making powers and confine it to its original function – namely the gathering of information.”[7]
One month earlier, on October 2, Washington News correspondent Richard Starnes had published a blistering attack on the CIA from Saigon (possibly inspired by U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who was already preparing to be a Republican candidate for president in 1964):
SAIGON, Oct.2 – The story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power….
Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA. “If the United States ever experiences a ‘Seven Days in May’ it will come from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon,” one U.S. official commented caustically. [“Seven Days in May” is a fictional account of an attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.][8]
These complaints swelled to a crescendo after November 22. Exactly one month later, President Truman himself wrote in the Washington Post,
“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency…. 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 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.”[9]
As David Talbot notes in The Devil’s Chessboard,
“Truman’s explosive piece in The Washington Post, which instantly caught fire and inspired similar anti-CIA editorials in newspapers from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Sacramento, California. Syndicated columnist Richard Starnes, a bête noire of the spy agency, used the Truman op-ed to launch a broadside against the CIA, calling it ‘a cloudy organism of uncertain purpose and appalling power.’ Meanwhile, Senator Eugene McCarthy, another agency critic, weighed in with an essay for The Saturday Evening Post… bluntly titled, ‘The CIA Is Getting Out of Hand.’”[10]
And by the time of Helms’s testimony even McCone, the outside CIA Director appointed by Kennedy, “kept saying that he wanted to get out of the cloak-and-dagger business.”[11]
In other words, Helms’s motives for perjury in 1964, involved far more than the technicality that he had sworn an oath to protect the agency’s secrets. At risk in these crucial months was the preservation of the agency itself, or at a minimum the preservation of its operational capacity. The choice confronting him was not between two conflicting oaths. It was a choice between the survival of the CIA as he knew it, or the survival of America’s justice system and the rule of law as we then knew them.
Helms’s choice was unambiguous, as it was again in 1973, when he “falsely testified [to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] that the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile”.[12] He lied, at the expense of justice, to ensure that the CIA would survive. In this he would assuredly have had the support of Angleton. Angleton later testified to the Senate Church Committee that “it is inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.”[13]
The 1960s and 1970s Conflict: Public State versus Deep State
In Dallas ’63 I argue that these two decades, the sixties and seventies, were a crucial period in American history, two decades in which the American constitutional state and its structural deep state (including the CIA) were opposing each other and struggling to see which power would prevail over the other.[14]
It is noteworthy that in 1973, when Helms perjured himself again, not only the agency’s but his own personal career were again at risk.[15] In December 1972, after the Watergate break-in, Nixon believed Helms “was out to get him;” and accordingly he banished Helms to be Ambassador in Iran. He then he gave orders to Helms’s replacement, James Schlesinger, “to turn the place inside out.”[16]
In The American Deep State, I argue that, by banishing Helms to Iran, Nixon had heightened a conflict between the two forms of power (the state and the deep state), a conflict in which he, and not Helms, would become the victim. I believe that Tehran became a new center for Helms’s machinations, in conjunction with the intelligence agencies of Iran, France, and Saudi Arabia.
In 1976, after it became evident the new president Carter would resume the efforts to trim the agency, Helms became part of an organized offshore network (the so-called “Safari Club”) of these foreign intelligence agencies, which resumed the covert operations (notably in Angola) that were being curtailed by the combined efforts of the president and Congress.[17] Then, in 1980 (in the so-called Republican October Surprise), CIA veterans combined with leaders of the Safari Club to defeat Carter’s bid for re-election, and elect instead Ronald Reagan,[18]
Given this evolution of events, I conclude that Helms’s perjuries significantly affected the history of this country. They were a vital part of an on-going process whereby, after the Reagan Revolution of 1980, the constitutional deep state was now subordinated to the needs and priorities of the structural deep state (including, but not limited to, the CIA). One of these needs, ever since 1963, has been to preserve the threadbare fiction that Lee Harvey Oswald by himself killed the president, and no one in the CIA was involved in any way.
How can we make the American people more aware that elements of the CIA lied about the assassination in 1964, and are still lying today? How are we to deal with the widespread climate of denial in our media and academies?
To pursue the truth about these matters is to position oneself outside the mainstream-supported structure of ideas. And we have learned from experience that there are severe limits to the amount of assistance we can expect in that pursuit from either Congress or the courts.
The truth, however, can be a powerful political weapon. So can justice. So I hope we will all continue to dedicate ourselves to this very slow, but undying and rewarding effort, to make truth and justice prevail.
.
[1] See Scott, Dallas ’63.
[2] David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol .57 No. 3 (September 2013),
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4 ... bb_026.PDF.
[3] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 224; cf. 239: “McCone kept saying that he wanted to get out of the cloak-and-dagger business.” The response of Thomas Karamessines, Helms’s Assistant Deputy Director of Plans, was to order that no more messages “to DCI [McCone]… too confusing” (Handwritten CIA record, “Document Concerning Name Trace Requests and Results,” NARA #104-10015-10013
[4] Philip Shenon, “Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK Assassination Cover-Up,” Politico, October 6, 2015,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... cia-213197. I have described this suggestion that the assassination was a plot that “backfired” as a “Phase Three” story, following (but not in time) the Phase One Story that Castro (or the KGB) did it, and gthe Phase Two Story that “Oswald acted alone.” See Peter Dale Scott, “William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate: TILT and the “Phase Three” Story of Clare Boothe Luce,” GlobalReseearch.ca, November 28, 2012,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/william-pa ... ce/5313486.
[5] For my similar hypothesis that the 9/11 plot was piggy-backed on an authorized operation, see Scott, The American Deep State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 133.
[6] Tom Wicker et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” New York Times, April 25, 1966; quoted in James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), 15; cf. Jack Anderson, San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967.
[7] New York Times, November 20, 1963, letter from Harold W. Thatcher, of Forty Fort, Pa,; cf.
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012 ... cover.html[8] Richard Starnes, Washington News, October 2, 1963. As James Douglass points out, the Starnes story was discussed at a National Security Council meeting the same day: “The President then asked what we should say about the news story attacking CIA which appeared in today’s Washington Daily News. He read a draft paragraph for inclusion in the public statement but rejected it as being too fluffy. He felt no one would believe a statement saying that there were no differences of view among the various U.S. agencies represented in Saigon. He thought that we should say that now we had a positive policy endorsed by the National Security Council and that such policy would be carried out by all concerned.”
[9] Harry S. Truman, “Limit CIA Role To Intelligence,” Washington Post, December 22, 1963,
http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman’s%20CIA%20article.html.
[10] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard (New York: Harper, 2015), 569.
[11] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 239.
[12] Melvin Allan Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 286.
[13] Mangold, Cold Warrior, 351.
[14] Scott, Dallas ’63, 170-78. Cf. Scott, The American Deep State, 101-08.
[15] President Nixon had long mistrusted both Helms and the CIA, and was looking for ways to be less dependent on them. Meanwhile Helms was very close to former CIA officer Howard Hunt, now working for Nixon; and Hunt may well have been informed Helms of Hunt’s trip to Miami in April 1971, to recruit Cuban exiles for a new operational group, outside the CIA, that would be backed by the Nixon White House. See Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate (New York: Knopf, 1990), 113, 200-03 (“close to Hunt); E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: A Memoir of an American Secret Agent (New York: Berkley, 1974), 144; cited in Lamar Waldron, Watergate, the Hidden History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), 472 (“operational group”).
[16] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: 374; Scott, Dallas ’63, 174.
[17] Scott, American Deep State, 26-27.
[18] Scott, American Deep State, 27-29, 103-06.
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Can FBI be held liable for targeting Irvine Muslims for surveillance?
Orange County Muslims
Orange County Muslims gather in prayer in the parking lot of Angel Stadium in Anaheim for Eid al-Adha to mark the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca known as Hajj on Sept. 23. 2015
http://www.latimes.com/local/orangecoun ... story.htmlCraig Monteilh told the imam that he wanted to embrace his French and Syrian heritage and convert to Islam.
Monteilh adopted an Islamic name, donned Muslim robes and a skull cap, and attended prayers vigilantly. The Islamic Center of Irvine embraced him — until he began talking of violent jihad.
Congregants reported him to the FBI and Irvine police, and then obtained a restraining order against him. Only later did they discover Monteilh was working for the FBI.
A federal appeals court is now considering whether the FBI can be held liable for allegedly indiscriminately targeting Muslims for surveillance. If the court decides the FBI cannot defend itself without revealing state secrets, the court likely would uphold the dismissal of a class-action lawsuit brought by Southern California Muslims.
The review by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals comes at a time of heightened fear of terrorism and incidents of backlash against innocent Muslims.
Judge Marsha Berzon, in a hearing this month, acknowledged the sensitivity of the matter as she struggled to understand what constituted a state secret. The state secrets doctrine bars litigation of a case if it would expose or threaten to expose matters of national security.
"I just am having real trouble seeing where the line is drawn in this very difficult situation we are in now," Berzon, a Clinton appointee, told a government lawyer.
The government argued it could not defend itself without disclosing state secrets. U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney agreed with the government in 2012, dismissing the bulk of the lawsuit on the grounds it would require disclosure of matters vital to national security. Carney reviewed classified information before his decision.
The Southern California Muslim community, represented by the ACLU of Southern California, believes the FBI targeted people solely because of their religion and should be held accountable.
Muslim leaders complained that the spying mission eroded trust in law enforcement at a time when the government needs help from the Muslim community to fight terror.
"The fundamental question is will we be viewed as partners or suspects?" said Edina Likovic, speaking for the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council. "The fear here is that we are being treated publicly as partners and privately as suspects."
About 500,000 Muslims live in Southern California, with more than 120,000 in Orange County, the second-largest population of Muslims in the United States.
Monteilh, who had a falling out with the FBI, has been working with the ACLU.
"I am the principal witness," said the Irvine resident, 53. "All the information they got came from me."
Monteilh said the FBI paid him $177,000 to infiltrate about 12 mosques in Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties over the course of 14 months, starting in June 2006. He said his job was to gather as many cellphone numbers and email addresses as possible and to find Muslims who could be compromised because of immigration, sexual or business issues.
Posing as a fitness consultant, Monteilh frequently worked out with Muslims at the gym and secretly recorded them, he said.
"This surveillance was so fruitful that Monteilh's handlers eventually told him they were seeking approval to have him open a Muslim gym," the suit said.
When he agreed to attend prayers at dawn four days a week, he received a pay increase, the suit said. His handlers told him to write down the license plate numbers of the cars in the parking lot, he said.
But at times his devotion raised eyebrows. He attended lessons in Arabic — a language he didn't speak.
He also appeared to be extremely absent-minded. Congregants remembered that he was forever leaving his keys or his cellphone behind. Monteilh later said his phone and a fob on his keys contained recording devices.
During the hearing, a lawyer for the FBI agents said Monteilh had signed a contract saying he would not leave listening devices unattended. Monteilh said he signed no such contract, and the agents knew what he was doing.
Monteilh said he secretly videotaped Muslims through a camera hidden in a button in the front of his shirt.
His identity was revealed during a court hearing. He had a criminal record, and the FBI helped him get off probation early, according to a court transcript.
Monteilh later accused the FBI of breaking promises to him. The FBI has said it does not target people because of their religion and that Monteilh signed a confidentiality agreement.
Monteilh, who unsuccessfully sued the FBI, said he has no regrets about his undercover work. He learned about FBI techniques and methods and policies and now works as a consultant on counterterrorism, he said. His mission unveiled the government's scrutiny of Muslims, he said.
"If I didn't work that case, they would never know they were being spied on 24 hours a day," Monteilh said.
He said his work identified terrorists overseas, although it did not lead to convictions of local Muslims. Monteilh also said he understands why the FBI conducted the surveillance.
"Let's face it, they have to," he said. "That is the only method they can use to be preemptive."
It could take several months before the 9th Circuit rules.
Berzon was the only judge on the panel who asked questions during the hearing. The other two reviewing the case are 9th Circuit Judge Ronald M. Gould and Judge George Caram Steeh III, a district judge from Michigan, both Clinton appointees.
Although she was skeptical of both sides, Berzon told attorneys for the government that their arguments were "circular."
She also observed that another circuit court had found that the government could not invoke the state secret privilege in a lawsuit unless the secrets were an integral part of the government's "meritorious defense," not just a possible defense, an issue a court would have to determine.
"We certainly can't do that if you can't tell us your defense," she said.
Monteilh said he has remained a Muslim, though his conversion initially was a ruse. He said he prays five times a day, studies the Koran and fasts.
But he does not attend a mosque.
"People would freak out if they saw me," he said. "I am a former FBI informant, and that will always be with me."q
