Degree Absolute and the JFK Assassination Conspiracy

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Degree Absolute and the JFK Assassination Conspiracy

Having recently been turned on to the joys of internet TV, I spent the early part of autumn with my family watching The Prisoner on Crackle. This is a British TV series that ran just one season, 17 episodes from 1967-68, but I've had a number of people recommend it over the years. Now that I've seen every episode from start to finish, I understand why it got so many raves. It was groundbreaking, truly ahead of its time, not just for its presentation but also its content. The presentation has its origins in the creator and star (and producer, director and writer of many of the series episodes, often under an alias) Patrick McGoohan, who had risen to fame from 1960-62 for his role as John Drake in Danger Man, playing a secret agent. Three years later, the series was revamped as Secret Agent. While this was one of the first British TV series to gain fame in the United States, by 1966, McGoohan yearned for something a little different.

The Prisoner, like Danger Man, has a British secret agent played by McGoohan as the lead character. This secret agent (there is much debate among fans as to whether it is the same character in both series or not) abruptly turns in his resignation. However, the agency he works for is not so eager to accept his resignation. While packing his bags in preparation for departure, his home is gassed and McGoohan passes out. When he comes to, his home seems just as it was, completely undisturbed. When he opens the window, he is startled to discover that instead of London skyscrapers, he has the view of a garden. Upon further investigation, he finds he is in a secluded coastal place called The Village where everyone is either a prisoner or a warden, but there are no identities; everyone is assigned a number. McGoohan is assigned Number Six (which he resists proclaiming, "I am not a number! I am a free man!") and is constantly kept under surveillance by Number Two. In almost every episode, Number Two is replaced by a "new Number Two", either to confuse Number Six or because the 'old' Number Two was outsmarted by Number Six.







I loved every episode from the pilot to the finale, even the episode set in the Wild West, which actually fit into the pattern of interrogation perfectly. My favorite episode was the penultimate titled Once Upon a Time. It begins with Leo McKern, who had previously played Number Two in the second episode of the series, The Chimes of Big Ben, returning to the role for one last shot at breaking Number Six. He asks on the phone to his superior and gets approval to use "Degree Absolute" on Number Six. Degree Absolute is an extreme form of regressive therapy in which Number Two guides Number Six, who has mentally regressed to a child, through Shakespeare's Seven Ages of Man in the hopes of discovering, as every Number Two throughout the series has attempted, why Number Six resigned. Throughout these seven ages, Number Two conducts tests in which he plays an authority figure and Number Six must react in a subordinate role. However, Number Six turns the tables eventually locking Number Two in a room for torment as time for the session runs out. Number Two collapses, apparently dead, and when the Supervisor played by Peter Swanwick enters to ask what Number Six wants, he agrees to give Number Six an audience with the figure he's been asking to confront ever since his imprisonment in The Village: the elusive Number One.

What makes this episode both ahead of its time and incredibly relevant to today is in illustrating how the combination of torture and drugs have been used in the pursuit of mind control. I've written previously on this blog about the subject of MK-ULTRA, the CIA mind control program conducted in secret during the 1950s. Yet knowledge of this classified program did not become public until the 1970s. So in that regard, McGoohan seems to be extremely prescient (or extremely connected) in his enactment of mind control techniques. As for contemporary relevance, one need only read Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine to understand that these same techniques have become the favored method of pressure on "enemy combatants" kept prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Not only has this "enhanced interrogation" been applied to foreign detainees, but in the case of Bradley Manning we have an American citizen whose lawyers alleged that while in solitary confinement at Fort Quantico, Manning was alternately kept naked and forced to sleep in a straitjacket, while being "drugged heavily with antidepressants." Whatever you may think of what Edward Snowden did with his subsequent leak, in the wake of these allegations, can you blame him for escaping from the USA and preferring to spend the rest of his life in exile?


But I digress. We're approaching another anniversary where JFK's assassins have escaped justice. Strangely enough, there is an incident where an intelligence operative who sought to expose part of the charade erected by the conspirators faced his own Degree Absolute.


In January 1964, Yuri Nosenko, a KGB agent who had been selling secrets to the CIA while stationed in Geneva since 1962, asked to defect to the United States because he feared Moscow was aware of his relationship to US intelligence. While one of his CIA handlers George Kisevalter tried to talk him into remaining in place since he was Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko's "watchdog", Nosenko reminded him that he had been in charge of recruiting Americans in Moscow and that he had detailed knowledge of the KGB's relationship to Lee Harvey Oswald during the time Oswald was in the Soviet Union. The CIA brought Nosenko to the US, much to the consternation of James Jesus Angleton. As chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Staff, Angleton was convinced Nosenko was a fake defector. According to Joseph Trento's The Secret History of the CIA, Angleton's favored defector Anatoly Golitsyn had convinced him that the KGB would send false defectors for the "fools at the CIA" to discredit him. Angleton then uncovered tiny holes in Nosenko's story: he lied about his rank to inflate his status, plus the NSA was unable to intercept a recall message from Moscow. As Trento writes on page 285-286:


It was this last bit of evidence that Angleton used to convince Richard Helms and others in the CIA hierarchy that Nosenko should be incarcerated until his reliability could be determined.

At Camp Peary, the CIA's training base for new agents outside Williamsburg, Virginia, construction began on a tiny cement-block house for Nosenko. Under the supervision of the Office of Security and Pete Bagley from the SR Division, Nosenko was incarcerated under harsh conditions. He was not permitted outside at night because the CIA feared that, with his naval training, he would be able to look at the stars and figure out where he was. Nosenko, then 36, spent the next three years being sweated by experts from the Office of Security. Everything he said, every answer he gave, was picked apart.

For George Kisevalter and others in the Soviet Division, the treatment of Nosenko was shameful. "What he [Angleton} had done to Nosenko," said Kisevalter, "is a crime beyond anything that we, as Americans would stand for ... to torture a person for nothing." To Kisevalter, the irony of the United States using Soviet methods to force a confession that never came was something he could never forgive.


The irony gets even thicker when we discover one page later that Nosenko was able to finger a KGB agent that Golitsyn was unable to, which Golitsyn then proceeded to resell as new information to British intelligence. How bad was the torture? In his book Plausible Denial, Mark Lane writes, "during the process many of his teeth were knocked out." Former director of the CIA Stansfield Turner goes into more details about Nosenko in his book Secrecy and Democracy, which like The Prisoner (and allegedly Bradley Manning) also, not surprisingly, includes Nosenko being drugged against his will:


"His prison cell was concrete, about eight feet square, with no windows, only an opening with steel bars in the top half of the door. A single steel bed with a mattress but no pillow or sheets and an occasional blanket were the only furnishings. From time to time he was allowed to go outside into a small compound surrounded by walls so high that he could see only the sky. His clothing was inadequate for the Virginia winters. He was denied toothpaste and a toothbrush and was permitted to shave and shower only once a week. During the entire period he was administered one or more of four drugs on seventeen occasions. Doctors periodically also pressured him psychologically."



What exactly was the nature of the information Nosenko had on Oswald that resulted in his incarceration and torture? It was that Oswald was definitely not a KGB agent. This fact ran contrary to the story the CIA, particularly Angleton, was trying to push in getting the Warren Commission to close the case and cover up the truth about the JFK assassination. The CIA story revolved around Oswald's alleged visit to Mexico City in September through October 1963. The objective of the story was to show that when Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy there, he met with Valery Kostikov, a KGB operative responsible for planning assassinations in the Americas. Doing so would insure that any investigation uncovering this information would risk starting a World War III nuclear holocaust if made public, thus necessitating a cover-up. One problem negating the veracity of this scenario: the phone call in which Oswald allegedly spoke of meeting with Kostikov was proved by the FBI the day after JFK was killed to be someone impersonating Oswald. We know this because J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson this in a phone call on November 23, 1963:







So who was impersonating Oswald? This question, along with other inconvenient details, were purposely swept under the rug by the Warren Commission. LBJ appointed the Warren Commission for the express purpose of avoiding the prospect of World War III and assuring the public that Oswald acted alone, Ruby acted alone, move along, nothing more to see. Once again, we have a transcript of a phone call as proof, this time between LBJ and Senator Richard Russell, who LBJ appointed to the Warren Commission. In this conversation, LBJ explains that playing the World War III trump card is how he got Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had previously turned down the request, to head the Commission:







Do you notice any contradiction within the chronology? Why would President Johnson be warning Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren about the specter of World War III and 40 million Americans dead in an hour if KGB complicity in the JFK assassination were made public on November 29 when J. Edgar Hoover told him on November 23 that the damning phone call came from an Oswald impersonator? John Newman examines this conundrum in his book Oswald and the CIA and what that implies on page 633:


There was a darker purpose, however, for the suppression of the tapes. As long as the tapes survived, the story in them was undermined by the fact that Oswald's voice was not on them. The cover-up of the Mexico tapes began three hours after Hoover told Johnson that the voice on them was not Oswald's. If this dark detail became widely known, LBJ would not be able to play the WWIII trump card on leaders like Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren. It is possible that the order to concoct a cover story saying that the tapes were erased before the assassination came from the White House.


With that loose end tied, the Warren Commission then followed the CIA story about the "little incident in Mexico City" President Johnson described exactly as the CIA and LBJ intended. Conveniently, Nosenko was never called to testify.

However Nosenko, like The Prisoner's Number Six, was able to achieve a victory, albeit a somewhat Pyrrhic victory, over his Degree Absolute. After three and a half years of incarceration, interrogation and torture, he was released. The CIA concluded in 1967 that he was a genuine defector and that the information he provided, both prior to his defection and while incarcerated, was truthful and important. They purchased a home for him in North Carolina and arranged for him to become a US citizen with an annual allowance of $30,000.

Victory in the form of a courtroom validation came courtesy of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which attorney Mark Lane successfully defended Liberty Lobby against E. Howard Hunt, who was suing their publication the Spotlight for defamation after they published an article alleging that Hunt was involved in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy. Lane wrote an entire book about the case, Plausible Denial, in which he details his defense strategy: for the first time since Jim Garrison in 1969, Lane would try the CIA in open court and prove for the benefit of his client that there was no defamation because the CIA, which employed Howard Hunt, did in fact conspire to assassinate JFK. Lane was successful, first, because while cross-examining Hunt, he was able to trip him up on his own sworn testimony. Lane details this exchange on pages 282-283:


At this trial he acknowledged the accuracy of that deposition transcript and asserted that his statements were truthful. I then asked him about the testimony he had offered at the first trial of the Liberty Lobby case, on December 16, 1981.

Q. Do you recall testifying back on December 16, 1981, that when the allegation was made that you were in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, your children were really upset? Do you recall testifying to that?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you recall testifying that you had to reassure them that you were not in Texas that day?
A. Yes.
Q. That you had nothing to do with the Kennedy assassination?
A. That's right.
Q. And that you were being persecuted for reasons that were unknown to you?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you say that the allegation that you were in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, was the focus of a great deal of interfamily friction, and tended to exacerbate difficulties in the family?
A. I did.

Although neither Hunt nor his attorneys seemed to sense what danger was about to befall them, it appeared that the jurors were anticipating the next question, confident that they knew what it would be.

I put down the dog-eared copy of the 1981 trial transcript. I looked at Hunt and softly asked the most difficult question he was going to face at this trial:

"Mr. Hunt, why did you have to convince your children that you were not in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, if, in fact, as you say, a fourteen-year-old daughter, a thirteen-year-old daughter, and a ten-year-old son were with you in the Washington, D.C., area on November 22, 1963, and were with you at least for the next forty-eight hours, as you all stayed glued to the T.V. set?"

If someone had struck Hunt in the face his reaction would not have been more physical. His head jerked back. He stared at his attorneys. Snyder and Dunne, apparently thunderstruck, began to speak to each other in whispers. The delay before Hunt responded seemed interminable. In absolute time it probably was not more than half a minute.


Hunt then proceeded to waver and dissemble before the court. Lane summarizes the full impact of this response on page 285:


Hunt had told so many stories, and given so many differing versions of his actions and whereabouts on November 22, 1963, that he had apparently failed to realize that two sets of stories - that he had been with his children the whole time and that his children did not know were he had been at the time - were mutually exclusive explanations.

The jurors understood, however, and in my view before Hunt's cross-examination had concluded his cause had been lost. Yet ours had just begun.


What had "just begun" was sworn testimony proving CIA complicity in the assassination of JFK. Lane did so in the form of a deposition reading of the sworn testimony of Marita Lorenz. She detailed how she had worked with Frank Sturgis, who along with Hunt was later convicted for his role in the Watergate burglary, during November 1963. She witnessed Hunt, operating under the alias Eduardo, making payments to Sturgis in a motel room in Dallas, Texas, on November 21, 1963. Was there anyone else she and Sturgis met at the motel room besides Hunt? Lorenz testified that after Hunt left, one other person came to their room the day before JFK was assassinated: Jack Ruby. When Lorenz was cross-examined, she not only stood by her statements, but added upon request the names of others that were in the car with them on the way to Dallas, such as Pedro Diaz Lanz and Gerry Patrick Hemming.

To try to undermine this testimony, Hunt's lawyers brought the deposition of Newton Miler. Miler testified that as a CIA founder who served under Ray Rocca, who reported only to James Jesus Angleton, he had no knowledge of Marita Lorenz or Frank Sturgis being employed by the CIA. Hunt's attorney Kevin Dunne tried to make it look as if Miler's credentials were impeccable. But when Lane cross-examined Miler, he admitted that he couldn't prove either Lorenz or Sturgis were not employed by the CIA. Then Lane went in for the kill to completely dismantle Miler for having any credibility as an upstanding citizen with his trump card: the story of Yuri Nosenko. From pages 311 and 314-315 of Plausible Denial:


For years Miler had controlled that interrogation, preparing questions, analyzing the responses and determining, with others including Angleton, that Nosenko should be illegally arrested, imprisoned without access to the judicial system, and routinely tortured.

Q. Have you ever played any part in the interrogation of Nosenko in terms of reading reports or suggesting questions for him?
A. Yes sir.

______________________________________________________________________________
I questioned Miler about Nosenko, not really in the belief that he would provide truthful answers, but rather to permit the jury to hear him discredit himself. The deposition concluded with Miler becoming increasingly uncomfortable. He perspired profusely in the temperature controlled room, continually looked to his attorneys for help and bolted out of the room the moment the deposition was completed.

Q. Was Nosenko held illegally under arrest for more than three years by the Central Intelligence Agency?
A. I would object to the term illegally under arrest. According to the House Assassination Committee, according to the Church Committee and so forth, he was held - incarcerated.
Q. Did the House Select Committee on Assassinations find that the holding of this man for some three years was improper?
A. Was it the House Assassinations Committee that did that? I don't know whether it was that or one of the other Committees. Yes, they did.
Q. And did the Central Intelligence Agency admit that this was an illegal action by the CIA?
A. That I am not certain of what it admitted to.
Q. Did Mr. Nosenko agree to be locked up in a cell for three years?
A. I do not know that from my knowledge of Nosenko.
Q. Was he ever charged with a crime after he came to the United States?
A. Not to my knowledge - not under U.S. law.
Q. Well, he was in the United States after he came here wasn't he? Did any court in the United States order him to be held in a cell?
A. Not to my knowledge.
Q. You were involved then in an illegal operation against the rights of Mr. Nosenko?
A. How do you mean involved in the illegal rights of Mr. Nosenko?
Q. Did you know that he was being held during that period of time?
A. Yes.
Q. Were you not an accessory after the fact in the destruction of the rights of Mr. Nosenko?
A. I can not interpret that in a legal way.
Q. I have no further questions.



After these revelations, Hunt's lawyers called no more witnesses and closing arguments were made. Unlike the Garrison trial on March 1, 1969, in which Clay Shaw, and by extension the CIA, was acquitted of the charges of conspiring to assassinate President Kennedy, on February 6, 1985, the verdict was for the defendant, Liberty Lobby, and against the plaintiff, E. Howard Hunt. While there was concurrence in the unanimous decision as to the reason for finding for the defendant, the forewoman Leslie Armstrong was clear that the evidence presented showed the CIA had killed President Kennedy.

How far above Hunt does responsibility with the CIA lie? In the 2008 Epilogue to his book Oswald and the CIA, John Newman offers his views on page 636:


It is now apparent that the WWIII pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy. The plot required that Oswald be maneuvered into place in Mexico City and his activities there carefully monitored, controlled, and, if necessary, embellished and choreographed. The plot required that, prior to 22 November, Oswald's profile at CIA HQS and the Mexico station be lowered; his 201 file had to be manipulated and restricted from incoming traffic on his Cuban activities. The plot required that, when the story from Mexico City arrived at HQS, its significance would not be understood by those responsible for reacting to it. Finally, the plot required that, on 22 November, Oswald's CIA files would establish his connection to Castro and the Kremlin.

The person who designed this plot had to have access to all of the information on Oswald at CIA HQS. The person who designed this plot had to have the authority to alter how information on Oswald was kept at CIA HQS. The person who designed this plot had to have access to project TUMBLEWEED, the sensitive joint agency operation against the KGB assassin, Valery Kostikov. The person who designed this plot had the authority to instigate a counterintelligence operation in the Cuban affairs staff (SAS) at CIA HQS. In my view, there is only one person whose hands fit into these gloves: James Jesus Angleton, Chief of CIA's Counterintelligence Staff.


Does the buck stop with Angleton, or was there a 'maestro' in the conspiracy that he answered to? I believe the answer to that question is that he did answer to someone above him in the top levels of the Military-Industrial Complex. The most likely candidate would be Angleton's former boss, Allen Dulles. As the DCI fired by President Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs, along with his deep ties with the triumvirate that ran the DIA, as well as being the architect of Operation Gladio, swimming with the financial elite as a partner with his brother of the Wall Street law firm Sullivan and Cromwell and initiating talks while head of the CIA with the criminal elite of Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, Dulles had the means, motive and opportunity to pull it off. As the most active member of the Warren Commission, he had the means, motive and opportunity to cover it up.

Perhaps in some alternate reality, Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton are facing their own Degree Absolute - and hopefully losing the battle.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Just wanted to post this for seemslikeadream and other current and former DUers posting here: I put this link in General Discussion over there. Two hours later, I got this reply:

Sissyk (6,415 posts)
35. Locking.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

•Threads promoting so-called "conspiracy theories" are not permitted and should be posted in the Creative Speculation Group.

Please feel free to post this in in Creative Speculation Group. Thanks!

I immediately wrote two protest emails. They have yet to reply.

[Elvis]

Great piece, Robert. The Prisoner is my all-time favorite TV show!

•Threads promoting so-called "conspiracy theories" are not permitted and should be posted in the Creative Speculation Group.

should be posted in the WHAT?!

[Wombaticus Rex]

Is "Creative Speculation" essentially a word pretzel attempt at de-stigmatizing "Conspiracy Theory," though?

I don't even understand where such an awkwardly clunky phrase would originate, if not a bid to work around the "CT" label.

Anyways, thanks for the periscope into a parallel universe, a short perusal of that thread has given me a rejuvenated appreciation for our watering hole here. Damn yo.

Also: this was a nicely written piece, and I have to admit, the most direct and succinct assessment of this connection I've found online.

Please continue to write.

[Iamwhomiam]

Thank you Robert. Great find!

I don't believe Creative Speculations translate well, Rex. Sounds to me like "Read what this "wild dreamer" thunk up. Creative suspicions? Not any better.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Thanks guys! I really appreciate the encouragement. I feel truly free to be myself here. Well, as much as I know myself; still growing in that never-ending department.

I came to RI through DU largely due to Jeff Wells posting links circa 2004, back when 'conspiracy theory' was not a dirty word there. In fact, I recall that he wrote to the mods when they were going through a 'troofer' crackdown by recommending that instead of a 9/11 conspiracy dungeon, there should be an all-purpose 'Parapolitics Forum' where members interested in discussing such subjects could do so in a less hostile environment. The self-styled 'Skeptics' had their forum, so it would only be fair that we have ours. Fairness was not in the cards. Jeff's idea was rejected and Jeff himself was later banned.

[Joao]

These scenes from the 1968 Soviet film The Secret Agent's Blunder appear to intentionally echo the treatment received by Nosenko (to some extent, anyway), or perhaps such treatment was standard procedure for all suspect defectors.

[NeonLX]

It's nice to find a place like this, ain't it SRP? I've known deep inside for a long time that "truth" was far different than the crap being catapulted at us by commercial media (and that includes "public" teevee and radio, too). Even as a kid, I felt like I was being misled. I couldn't force myself to like things that my friends thought were great--especially playing war with plastic army men. I remember this one dude I was playing with faked a napalm attack on some army men by dousing them with lighter fluid and setting them ablaze with a match. I was so horrified that I got up and ran. I was 7 or 8 when this happened.

I can come in here and admit I'm a weirdo. Of course, I can do that even in real life. But there are potentially severe consequences for doing that in the non-virtual world.

[Rory]

Great article, RP - you're style of writing is very accessible and it's easy to follow your train of thought. You have a knack for the layout and organization of your ideas.

[Lord Balto]

Just wanted to post this for seemslikeadream and other current and former DUers posting here: I put this link in General Discussion over there. Two hours later, I got this reply:

Sissyk (6,415 posts)
35. Locking.

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

•Threads promoting so-called "conspiracy theories" are not permitted and should be posted in the Creative Speculation Group.

Please feel free to post this in in Creative Speculation Group. Thanks!

I immediately wrote two protest emails. They have yet to reply.

As someone once opinied, Democratic Underground is neither.

The last time I signed up there with a new pseudonym, no one got the literary reference to Hassan Sabbah (and William Burroughs). They immediately started mocking me as if I were really an Arab. The ignorance level there is off the charts, as a character in Avalon would say. I lasted there about 24 hours, after I had questioned their knee jerk global warming position and their inability to write a coherent headline. Using cryptic headlines at this point in the development of the web is like the Classical Greeks using pillars made to look like tree trunks. Seriously retro.

[semper occultus]

..yep...nice one Robert....this place sometimes seems to flirt with unviability but we make up in quality what we lack in quantity....

[Nordic]

DU still exists?

I'm surprised by this. I guess because it's such ancient history in my own life. I, too, found this place because of it, seemslikeadream and MinstrelBoy and Starroute (I think that was the name). Those people blew me away and I realized "I want to know what they know".

But yeah, it's so far in the rearview mirror it's like the other side of the planet. I'm almost tempted to visit but I know it'll just piss me off.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

DU still exists?

I'm surprised by this. I guess because it's such ancient history in my own life. I, too, found this place because of it, seemslikeadream and MinstrelBoy and Starroute (I think that was the name). Those people blew me away and I realized "I want to know what they know".

But yeah, it's so far in the rearview mirror it's like the other side of the planet. I'm almost tempted to visit but I know it'll just piss me off.

It's become one of those places I visit about once a year, then retreat with the observation, "Oh yeah, that's why I don't post there anymore." Octafish and bobthedrummer, along with starroute are among the few still posting there who make it worth my time. The rest is just a cesspool of bloviating ignorance.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Fucking Alternet. In their desperate attempt to co-opt the tone and perspective of the Radical Establishment Media, they've done what I thought was impossible: put out a story that makes me side with Donald Trump. I hope the "Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief" is successful in releasing these important JFK records. In spite of my disdain for Alternet's approach, I appreciate all the good links, so I'm including them here.

The Conspiracy Theorist-in-Chief Will Decide the Fate of Secret Documents on JFK's Assassination
Trump's Twitter fingers and the Grassy Knoll.
By Jefferson Morley, Rex Bradford / AlterNet
June 21, 2017, 7:09 AM GMT

A version of this story first appeared in Newsweek.

He’s called global warming a hoax, suggested that Barack Obama was not an American and linked autism to childhood vaccinations. And soon, President Donald Trump, America’s most powerful conspiracy theorist, will decide the fate of more than 113,000 pages of secret documents about the ultimate conspiracy theory: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.

Ever since JFK was shot and killed on that fateful Friday afternoon in Dallas, theories have abounded about who really did it. The Russians? The Cubans? The CIA? During the 2016 campaign, Trump even claimed, without evidence, that the father of his Republican rival Ted Cruz might have been involved.

Now, on the year marking the 100th anniversary of Kennedy’s birth, the conspiracy theorist in the White House will have to decide whether highly anticipated secret JFK assassination files can be released in October as planned. By law, federal agencies such as the CIA and FBI may contest the release of these records, but in that case, the president would make the final call.

A new forensic investigation reveals that the files are twice as voluminous as previously estimated. Metadata analysis of the government’s JFK database reveals the coming files contain more than 113,000 pages of material, ranging from trivial to sensational. This trove will likely illuminate many of the events leading up to Kennedy’s murder in 1963 and other pivotal episodes in the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Credit for this goes to the JFK Assassination Records Act of 1992. Passed by the U.S. Congress in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie, JFK, the law mandated that all assassination-related records in the government’s possession had to be made public within 25 years. The measure was approved unanimously and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, a former CIA director, and set the statutory deadline, which arrives later this year.

The Cold War conspiracies documented in the coming records include:

Transcripts of the interrogation of a Soviet defector at a CIA black site
A report on a suspected KGB assassin in Mexico
The CIA connections of four Watergate burglars
The operational files of two CIA assassination planners

Over the years, opinion polls have consistently shown that more than 60 percent of Americans don’t believe the official story, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy. To their disappointment, this coming trove of JFK documents isn’t likely to contain any “smoking guns.” But, as Politico noted in 2015, there will be plenty of potentially embarrassing information about the CIA—an institution Trump and his supporters have denigrated as part of the “Deep State.”

Russia, Cuba and Jack Ruby

The contents of the trove can be gleaned from metadata in the National Archives and Record Administration online database of JFK records. That repository catalogs the secret JFK files by document type, agency, title, subject field keywords and other metadata, including the page count for each document.

The Mary Ferrell Foundation, a non-profit that publishes government records related to the assassinations of JFK, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., obtained a copy of the full database of JFK records metadata from Ramon F. Herrera, programmer in Houston, who scraped it from the public pages of NARA’s website and donated it to the foundation.

About a third of the records are CIA documents, and another third are from the FBI. The remaining third is divided among several agencies—the Justice Department, the State Department and the Internal Revenue Service—as well as investigative bodies such as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Some documents are duplicates; others may have already been released. In an email, Martha Murphy, chief of JFK records at the National Archives, said she could not confirm the figure of 113,000 pages.

The JFK database provides many clues about what’s coming. It cites 44 memoranda, 34 reports, 19 cables, 62 letters and three affidavits, as well as 12 audio cassettes, 23 magnetic tapes, 10 sound recordings and a batch of photographs, apparently taken in Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where JFK was pronounced dead.

Among the keywords found most frequently in the records: “Jack Ruby,” the Dallas nightclub owner who killed suspected assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in police custody. Ruby is mentioned 119 times, mostly in IRS records. Other common tags in the JFK metadata: “Russia“ (71), “Cuba” (68) and “Cuban Revolutionary Council” (68)—that’s the Miami-based CIA front group that sought to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro during JFK’s presidency.

There are also 48 documents about Mexico and Mexico City, which accused assassin Lee Oswald visited six weeks before the assassination. And there are 47 documents that mention Fidel Castro, the charismatic Cuban strongman the CIA plotted to kill, beginning in the Eisenhower administration. Five documents contain information about Rolando Cubela, a disaffected Cuban official, known by the code name AMLASH, whom the agency recruited to assassinate Castro in late 1963. Five documents reference the KGB, the Soviet intelligence service.

Among other mysteries, the metadata identifies a series of Cold War spy tales that shaped American history.

An Infamous Mole Hunt

The records are sure to illuminate the ordeal of Yuri Nosenko, a KGB officer whose defection to the United States in January 1964, set off a bitter power struggle in the CIA that paralyzed its Soviet operations until 1970.

The agency’s chief of counterintelligence, James Angleton, claimed that Nosenko was a false defector. Angleton, the agency’s leading expert of Soviet intelligence operations, argued that Nosenko had been sent to protect a “mole” at CIA headquarters and hide a possible Soviet connection to Oswald. Nosenko was detained and interrogated at secret “black” sites in Maryland and Virginia. Held for more than four years without legal charges, Nosenko never confessed, despite Angleton’s efforts to break him. Nosenko was not tortured, but he told a 1991 Frontline TV documentary he was dosed with LSD while in detention. He died in 2011.

The secret JFK files include transcripts of Nosenko’s interrogation, several lengthy reports and even a number of audio tapes. In 1968, the CIA’s Office of Security concluded that Nosenko was a bona fide defector; so did three subsequent agency investigations. Yet that conclusion is still controversial among intelligence historians. Some cite Russia’s intervention in the 2016 presidential election as evidence that the CIA counterintelligence has consistently underestimated Russian penetration efforts.

The 42 records on Nosenko, including more than 2,000 pages of material, will almost certainly help clarify a central mystery of the mole hunt some say drove Angleton mad.

Oswald and a KGB Assassin?

In the History Channel’s new documentary series, "JFK Declassified," former CIA officer Robert Baer tells the story of talks about a meeting between accused assassin Lee Oswald and Valery Kostikov, a Soviet diplomat in Mexico City six weeks before JFK was killed. Baer identified Kostikov as “the head of KGB assassin operations.”

The CIA had touted this identification of Kostikov to the White House the day after Kennedy’s assassination, and it may have played a role in Lyndon Johnson’s decision to support a presidential commission to tamp down allegations of Kremlin involvement in the Dallas gunfire. The Warren Commission received an ominous CIA memo that repeated the allegation Kostikov was "believed to work for Department Thirteen...of the KGB...responsible for executive action, including sabotage and assassination."

The JFK metadata shows that the CIA has a secret 167-page file on Kostikov, which could clarify who he really was. In May 1963, counterintelligence chief Angleton had discounted him as a threat, telling FBI director J. Edgar Hoover that he had "no information" that Kostikov was associated with the KGB’s 13th Department. The Kostikov file may also reveal more about his contact with Oswald in Mexico City six weeks before JFK was killed.

The Plumbers Plunge

The arrest of seven burglars at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in June 1972 was the beginning of the scandal that ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

A search of the online JFK database reveals the existence of more than 700 pages on the CIA connections of four of the Watergate burglars. The most notorious was Howard Hunt, a career CIA officer, prolific novelist and acerbic conservative critic of JFK’s Cuba policy. The agency has three operational files, three folders and two interviews concerning Hunt, a total of 391 pages of material.

Late in life Hunt made some murky statements that seemed to implicate some of his CIA colleagues in a JFK conspiracy. Hunt’s remarks were not quite a "deathbed confession" as some claim, but his use of the phrase “the big event” to describe JFK’s murder did renew questions about what he knew about what happened in Dallas.

A CIA file on James McCord, former chief of the agency’s Office of Security, runs to 267 pages. He was the burglar closest to CIA director Richard Helms, according to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward. There are also withheld files on burglars Bernard Barker (84 pages) and Frank Fiorini, a.k.a. Frank Sturgis (35 pages).

Senator Howard H. Baker Jr., vice chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, famously likened the role of the CIA in the Watergate affair to "animals crashing around in the forest—you can hear them but you can't see them." As Woodward wrote in 2007, “Baker and many Watergate investigators came away with the sense that senior CIA officials knew more than was ever revealed.”

Seven-hundred pages of what the CIA knew about the burglars are scheduled to be revealed in October.

Flawed Patriots

William K. Harvey and David Atlee Phillips were decorated CIA officers who conducted authorized assassination operations for the agency in the 1960s. The metadata show that the JFK files include nearly 500 pages of material on their activities in the 1950s and 1960s.

Previously declassified CIA records disclosed that Harvey ran the agency’s assassination program from 1960-'63. It was known by the unsubtle code name ZR-RIFLE. Harvey was one of the agency’s legendary operators: a fat, shrewd, gun-toting man with a prodigious work ethic, memory and appetite for booze. He was known to despise President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Harvey’s admiring but appalled biographer called him a “flawed patriot,” with one of his CIA colleagues, John Whitten, calling him “a thug.” Another CIA colleague, Mark Wyatt, told a journalist that he encountered Harvey flying to Dallas on a commercial flight in November 1963, an unusual destination for the chief of the CIA’s station in Rome.

Harvey inevitably pops up in conspiracy theories about CIA involvement in Kennedy’s murder, and the agency is due to declassify 123 pages of his operational files in October, which has some salivating. “Do the Harvey files contain travel records?” asks author David Talbot, who reported Wyatt’s story in his recent biography of Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard. “That’s what we’ll find out.”

Many are also eager to find out what the files say about David Atlee Phillips, another decorated CIA veteran, who rose to become chief of the Latin America division of the clandestine service. Acting on orders of President Nixon, Phillips ran a covert operation against leftist Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1970 that ended with the assassination of a top Chilean general and the bloody overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected government three years later.

Phillips was a person of interest for JFK investigators. When Congress re-opened the JFK inquiry in the 1970s, some House Select Committee on Assassinations investigators thought Phillips perjured himself in closed-door testimony about Oswald. Before his death in 1988, Phillips denied any role in a JFK conspiracy, but did say on at least one occasion what Howard Hunt insinuated late in life: that JFK was ambushed by gunmen working for rogue CIA officers who used Oswald as their patsy.

Conspiracy theories aside, the new records, if released, could expose new details of the exploits of two famed undercover operatives.

‘Let’s Clear This Up’

So what will Trump do with all that tantalizing material? The CIA has not committed to releasing the files, and a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Politico in May that the administration “is familiar with the requirements” of the law mandating full disclosure.

The issue White House counsel Donald McGahn will have to resolve pits congressional and public interest in full disclosure against the government’s claims of secrecy. Under the JFK Records Act, the CIA and other federal agencies have the right to postpone release of any records whose disclosure would cause “an identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement or conduct of foreign relations.” The law requires the agency seeking to maintain secrecy to prove that “the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” That is a high bar.

Judge John Tunheim, chairman of the civilian review panel that declassified most of the government’s JFK files, has called for release of all the remaining records. “This is all stuff from 50 years now, folks,” he said in a speech at the National Press Club in March. “It’s not that important to keep protecting it.”

Bob Baer, the former undercover CIA officer, has said the same. “There’s no sources and methods involved. Release [the records] and let’s clear this up.”

Et tu, Donald?

[seemslikeadream]

THE DEVIL’S CHESSBOARD: ALLEN DULLES, THE CIA, AND THE RISE OF THE AMERICAN SECRET GOVERNMENT

President Harry S. Truman at his desk aboard USS Augusta, September 14, 1945. Photo credit: National Museum of the U.S. Navy / Flickr
Exactly 70 years ago today, President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Sixteen years later — just one month after the Kennedy assassination — Truman published a bombshell in The Washington Post: “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations… It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of Government… so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”

When it comes to behind-the-scenes intrigue, no one could out-sinister Allen Dulles, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. Dulles’s job, simply put, was to hijack the US government — for the benefit of the wealthy.

What he did, and how he did it, has never been more relevant, given the state of the nation in 2017. That’s why we are excerpting some revelatory chapters from David Talbot’s recent Dulles biography, “The Devil’s Chessboard.”

The focus here is on Dulles’s deeply troubling behavior around the time that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Although Kennedy had fired him in 1961, Dulles basically kept, de facto, running the CIA anyway. And, even more ominously, after Kennedy was killed in Dallas on Friday, November 22, 1963, Dulles moved into The Farm, a secret CIA facility in Virginia, where he remained for the weekend — during which time the “suspect,” Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot to death in a Dallas police station, and a vast machinery was set in motion to create the “lone gunman” myth that has dominated our history books to the present.

By no coincidence, that same machinery worked to bury evidence that Oswald himself had deep connections into US intelligence.

Throughout all this, one thing is clear: Dulles was no rogue operative. He was serving the interests of America’s corporate and war-making elites. And he went all out.

The “former” CIA director was so determined to control the JFK death-story spin, as Talbot chronicles below, that he even tried to strong-arm former president Truman, when the plain-spoken Missourian dropped hints that an out-of-control CIA might have been involved in Kennedy’s murder.

— WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Russ Baker.

First part of a compressed Excerpt of Chapter 20, “For the Good of the Country” from The Devil’s Chessboard. Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of the American Secret Government. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.

Allen Dulles
Bas-relief of Allen Dulles. Main lobby of Original Headquarters Building. Photo credit: Central Intelligence Agency / Flickr

For the Good of the Country
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Over the final months of JFK’s presidency, a clear consensus took shape within America’s deep state: Kennedy was a national security threat. For the good of the country, he must be removed. And Dulles was the only man with the stature, connections, and decisive will to make something of this enormity happen.

He had already assembled a killing machine to operate overseas. Now he prepared to bring it home to Dallas. All that his establishment colleagues had to do was to look the other way — as they always did when Dulles took executive action.

In the case of Doug Dillon — who oversaw Kennedy’s Secret Service apparatus — it simply meant making sure that he was out of town … If he was later asked to account for himself, Dillon would have a ready explanation. The tragic events in Dallas had not occurred on his watch; he was airborne over the Pacific at the time.

There is no evidence that reigning corporate figures like David Rockefeller were part of the plot against President Kennedy or had foreknowledge of the crime. But there is ample evidence of the overwhelming hostility to Kennedy in these corporate circles — a surging antagonism that certainly emboldened Dulles and other national security enemies of the president. And if the assassination of President Kennedy was indeed an “establishment crime,” as University of Pittsburgh sociology professor Donald Gibson has suggested, there is even more reason to see the official investigation as an establishment cover-up.

Dallas DA: Oswald Seemed “Programmed”
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Oswald was still alive, and that was a problem. He was supposed to be killed as he left the Texas School Book Depository. That’s what G. Robert Blakey, the former Kennedy Justice Department attorney who served as chief counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, later concluded about the man authorities rushed to designate the lone assassin. But Oswald escaped, and after being taken alive by Dallas police in a movie theater, he became a major conundrum for those trying to pin the crime on him.

“It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he found himself in.”

To begin with, Oswald did not act like most assassins. Those who decapitated heads of state generally crowed about their history-making deeds (Sic semper tyrannis!). In contrast, Oswald repeatedly denied his guilt while in custody, emphatically telling reporters as he was hustled from one room to the next in the Dallas police station, “I don’t know what this is all about … I’m just a patsy!”

And the accused assassin seemed strangely cool and collected, according to the police detectives who questioned him. “He was real calm,” recalled one detective. “He was extra calm. He wasn’t a bit excited or nervous or anything.” In fact, Dallas police chief Jesse Curry and district attorney William Alexander thought Oswald was so composed that he seemed trained to handle a stressful interrogation. “I was amazed that a person so young would have had the self-control he had,” Alexander later told Irish investigative journalist Anthony Summers. “It was almost as if he had been rehearsed or programmed to meet the situation he found himself in.”

Oswald further signaled that he was part of an intelligence operation by trying to make an intriguing phone call shortly before midnight East Coast time on Saturday, November 23. The police switchboard operator, who was being closely monitored by two unidentified officials, told Oswald there was no answer, though she actually did not put through the call. It was not until years later that independent researchers traced the phone number that Oswald tried to call to a former US Army intelligence officer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

CIA veteran Victor Marchetti, who analyzed the Raleigh call in his book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, surmised that Oswald was likely following his training guidelines and reaching out to his intelligence handler. “[He] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer.”

The Raleigh call probably sealed Oswald’s fate, according to Marchetti. By refusing to play the role of the “patsy” and instead following his intelligence protocol, Oswald made clear that he was trouble.

What would be the CIA procedure at this point, Marchetti was asked by North Carolina historian Grover Proctor, who has closely studied this episode near the end of Oswald’s life? “I’d kill him,” Marchetti replied. “Was this his death warrant?” Proctor continued. “You betcha,” Marchetti said. “This time, [Oswald] went over the dam, whether he knew it or not…. He was over the dam. At this point it was executive action.”

Oswald was not just alive on the afternoon of November 22, 1963; he was likely innocent. This was another major problem for the organizers of the assassination. Even close legal observers of the case who continue to believe in Oswald’s guilt — such as Bob Blakey who, after serving on the House Assassinations Committee, became a law professor at Notre Dame University — acknowledge that a “credible” case could have been made for Oswald’s innocence based on the evidence. (The 1979 congressional report found that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy involving Oswald and other unknown parties.) Other legal experts, like San Francisco attorney and Kennedy researcher Bill Simpich, have gone further, arguing that the case against Oswald was riddled with such glaring inconsistencies that it would have quickly unraveled in court.

Fortunately for the conspirators, the deeply flawed case against Lee Harvey Oswald never made it to court….Oswald’s shocking murder — broadcast live into America’s homes — solved one dilemma for Dulles, as he monitored the Dallas events that weekend from the Farm, his secure CIA facility in Virginia. But it soon became apparent that Oswald’s murder created another problem — a wave of public suspicion that swept over the nation and beyond…. To many people who watched the horrifying spectacle on TV, the shooting smacked of a gangland hit aimed at silencing Oswald before he could talk.

In fact, this is precisely what Attorney General Robert Kennedy concluded after his investigators began digging into Ruby’s background. Bobby, who had made his political reputation as a Senate investigator of organized crime, pored over Ruby’s phone records from the days leading up to the Dallas violence.

“The list [of names] was almost a duplicate of the people I called before the Rackets Committee,” RFK later remarked. The attorney general’s suspicions about the death of his brother immediately fell not just on the Mafia, but on the CIA — the agency that, as Bobby knew, had been using the mob to do some of its dirtiest work….

Truman: CIA “Sinister and Mysterious”
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Meanwhile, down in Independence, Missouri, another retired president, Harry Truman, was fuming about the CIA. On December 22, 1963, while the country was still reeling from the gunfire in Dallas, Truman published a highly provocative op-ed article in The Washington Post, charging that the CIA had grown alarmingly out of control since he established it.

His original purpose, wrote Truman, was to create an agency that simply coordinated the various streams of sensitive information flowing into the White House. “I have never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” he continued. But “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.” The CIA had grown “so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue.”

But the increasingly powerful agency did not just menace foreign governments, Truman warned — it now threatened democracy at home. “There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position [as a] free and open society,” he concluded ominously, “and I feel that we need to correct it.”

The timing of Truman’s opinion piece was striking. Appearing in the capital’s leading newspaper exactly one month after the assassination, the article caused shock waves in political circles. There was a disturbing undertone to the straight-talking midwesterner’s warning about the CIA. Was Truman implying that there was “sinister and mysterious intrigue” behind Kennedy’s death? Could that have been what he meant when he suggested that the agency represented a growing danger to our own democracy?

Dulles Lies to Discredit Truman
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Allen Dulles knew the danger of words, the wrong kind of words. As CIA director, he had spent an untold fortune each year on countering the Soviet propaganda machine and controlling the world’s conversation, including the political and media dialogue in his own country. Within minutes of the Kennedy assassination, the CIA tried to steer news reporting and commentary about Dallas, planting stories that suggested — falsely — that Oswald was a Soviet agent or that Castro was behind JFK’s murder.

Still, Dulles would not accept defeat. Unable to alter reality, he simply altered the record, like any good spy.

In actuality, both Khrushchev — who broke down weeping in the Kremlin when he heard the news — and Castro were deeply distressed by Kennedy’s death. Both men had been greatly encouraged by Kennedy’s peace initiatives in the final year of his presidency, and they feared that his assassination meant that military hard-liners would take control in Washington …

But despite the CIA’s strenuous efforts, press coverage of the Kennedy assassination began spinning out of its control. Dulles knew that immediate steps must be taken to contain the conversation…. If Harry Truman — the man who created the CIA — was worried that it had become a Frankenstein, it might be only a matter of time before prominent European figures, and even some stray voices in America, began to question whether the agency was behind JFK’s murder.

It was Dulles himself who jumped in to put out the Truman fire. Soon after the Post published Truman’s diatribe, Dulles began a campaign to get the retired president to disavow his opinion piece. The spymaster began by enlisting the help of Washington power attorney Clark Clifford, the former Truman counselor who chaired President Johnson’s intelligence advisory board. The CIA “was really HST’s baby or at least his adopted child,” Dulles pointed out in a letter to Clifford. Perhaps the attorney could talk some sense into the tough old bird and get him to retract his harsh criticisms of the agency.

Dulles also appealed directly to Truman in a strongly worded letter, telling the former president that he was “deeply disturbed” by his article. In the eight-page letter that he mailed on January 7, 1964, Dulles tried to implicate Truman himself. Calling Truman the “father of our modern intelligence system,” Dulles reminded him that it was “you, through National Security Council action, [who] approved the organization in CIA of a new office to carry out covert operations.” So, Dulles continued, Truman’s ill-advised rant in the Post amounted to “a repudiation of a policy” that the former president himself “had the great courage and wisdom to initiate.”

To an extent, Dulles had a point. As the spymaster pointed out, the Truman Doctrine had indeed authorized an aggressive strategy aimed at thwarting Communist advances in Western Europe, including CIA intervention in the 1948 Italian elections. But Truman was correct in charging that, under Eisenhower, Dulles had led the CIA much deeper into skulduggery than he ever envisioned.

Unmoved by Dulles’s letter, Truman stood by his article. Realizing the threat that Truman posed, Dulles continued his crusade to discredit the Post essay well into the following year. Confident of his powers of persuasion, the spymaster made a personal trek to Independence, Missouri, in April, arranging to meet face-to-face with Truman at his presidential library. After exchanging a few minutes of small talk about the old days, Dulles mounted his assault on Truman, employing his usual mix of sweet talk and arm-twisting. But Truman — even on the brink of turning eighty — was no pushover, and Dulles’s efforts proved fruitless.

Still, Dulles would not accept defeat. Unable to alter reality, he simply altered the record, like any good spy. On April 21, 1964, upon returning to Washington, Dulles wrote a letter about his half-hour meeting with Truman to CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston. During their conversation at the Truman Library, Dulles claimed in his letter, the elderly ex-president seemed “quite astounded” by his own attack on the CIA when the spymaster showed him a copy of the Post article. As he looked it over, Truman reacted as if he were reading it for the first time, according to Dulles. “He said that [the article] was all wrong. He then said that he felt it had made a very unfortunate impression.”

The Truman portrayed in Dulles’s letter seemed to be suffering from senility and either could not remember what he had written or had been taken advantage of by an aide, who perhaps wrote the piece under the former president’s name. In fact, CIA officials later did try to blame a Truman assistant for writing the provocative opinion piece. Truman “obviously was highly disturbed at the Washington Post article,” concluded Dulles in his letter, “… and several times said he would see what he could do about it.”

The Dulles letter to Houston — which was clearly intended for the CIA files, to be retrieved whenever expedient — was an outrageous piece of disinformation. Truman, who would live for eight more years, was still of sound mind in April 1964. And he could not have been shocked by the contents of his own article, since he had been expressing the same views about the CIA — even more strongly — to friends and journalists for some time.

After the Bay of Pigs, Truman had confided in writer Merle Miller that he regretted ever establishing the CIA. “I think it was a mistake,” he said. “And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it…. [Eisenhower] never paid any attention to it, and it got out of hand…. It’s become a government all of its own and all secret…. That’s a very dangerous thing in a democratic society.” Likewise, after the Washington Post essay ran, Truman’s original CIA director, Admiral Sidney Souers — who shared his former boss’s limited concept of the agency — congratulated him for writing the piece. “I am happy as I can be that my article on the Central Intelligence Agency rang a bell with you because you know why the organization was set up,” Truman wrote back to Souers.

In a letter that Truman wrote to Look magazine managing editor William Arthur in June 1964 — two months after his meeting with Dulles — the ex-president again articulated his concerns about the direction taken by the CIA after he left the White House. “The CIA was set up by me for the sole purpose of getting all the available information to the President,” wrote Truman. “It was not intended to operate as an international agency engaged in strange activities.”

Dulles’s relentless effort to manipulate Truman — and failing that, the Truman record — is yet one more example of the spymaster’s “strange activities.” But Dulles’s greatest success at reconstructing reality was still to come. With the Warren Report, Dulles would literally rewrite history. The inquest into the death of John F. Kennedy was another astounding sleight of hand on Dulles’s part. The man who should have been in the witness chair wound up instead in control of the inquiry.
https://whowhatwhy.org/2017/07/26/devil ... overnment/