Anyone but Tom understand what the "KGB stuff" is all about?

[Lance Payette]

Is anyone other than Tom able to follow the logic of what I lovingly call the “KGB stuff?" It quickly loses me.

As I understand it (while not pretending to actually understand it) ...

LHO is dispatched to the USSR, apparently unwittingly, to ferret out moles (I love saying that!  ). While there, he attends the mysterious “KGB school” in Minsk and is somehow trained for an eventual mission (what mission?) in the U.S., even though those closest to him have absolutely no clue that this is going on. He returns to the U.S., presumably at the behest of his KGB masters, with his KGB-indoctrinated wife Marina (indoctrinated when and for what purpose?), and they proceed to live pretty much like impoverished bums (their KGB cover?).

LHO then engages in activities and writes things that are hard to square with any KBG mission (proof of just how clever the KGB is?). The time finally arrives for LHO to assassinate JFK (for what KGB-related purpose?), and Marina then lives the next 60+ years in pretty thorough Texas-housewife obscurity (for what KGB-related purpose?), evolving from a veritable LNer to a CTer (for what KGB-related purpose? was this her KGB mission?).

The supermen of the KGB then spend the next 50+ years destroying America from within via their infiltration of the CIA, the proverbial “long march through the institutions” and whatnot (and having rather astonishing success as far as I can tell). The chaotic Monty Python skit that calls itself the “JFKA research community” is apparently part of this dastardly plot (how? why?).

In 2016, the KGB, or at least KGB guy Putin, then causes Kremlin stooge The Donald to defeat Hillary Clinton, even though Hillary is a card-carrying "Rules for Radicals" sort of leftie and The Donald’s platform consists mostly of promises to unravel all that the KGB has accomplished over the past 50+ years (how does that work?). But wait, then Putin and the supermen of the KGB fumble the ball and Team Biden is somehow elected in 2020 (what the heck?). Team Biden, which apparently doesn't grasp the KGB's new Trumpian agenda, then does its best to restore the long march through the institutions, doing quite an excellent job of it, and Team Kamala promises to pretty well finish off the destruction of America (why would Putin and the supermen of the KGB not want this?).

But, no, Vladimir and the gang once again step in and cause their stooge The Donald to be elected in 2024, even though The Donald is now even more hellbent to stop the long march through the institutions and restore America to its former glory as a chest-thumping, war-mongering capitalist state and may be slightly unhinged to boot (the KGB wants this – why?).

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the Big Picture. Or perhaps I'm actually an unwitting KGB stooge, sent here to ferret out moles! I have literally no idea what the “KGB stuff” is all about or how it makes any sense at all. Anyone seeing it more clearly than I am?

[Tom Graves]

Is anyone other than Tom able to follow the logic of what I lovingly call the “KGB stuff?" It quickly loses me. (Don’t bother, TG. You’re on Eternal Ignore. I now wear a COVID mask to avoid being exposed to even the tiniest micro-nuttiness from your invisible posts. I’m just wondering if anyone else can actually follow whatever it is TG is talking about.)

As I understand it (while not pretending to actually understand it) ...

LHO is dispatched to the USSR, apparently unwittingly, to ferret out moles (I love saying that!  ). While there, he attends the mysterious “KGB school” in Minsk and is somehow trained for an eventual mission (what mission?) in the U.S., even though those closest to him have absolutely no clue that this is going on. He returns to the U.S., presumably at the behest of his KGB masters, with his KGB-indoctrinated wife Marina (indoctrinated when and for what purpose?), and they proceed to live pretty much like impoverished bums (their KGB cover?).

LHO then engages in activities and writes things that are hard to square with any KBG mission (proof of just how clever the KGB is?). The time finally arrives for LHO to assassinate JFK (for what KGB-related purpose?), and Marina then lives the next 60+ years in pretty thorough Texas-housewife obscurity (for what KGB-related purpose?), evolving from a veritable LNer to a CTer (for what KGB-related purpose? was this her KGB mission?).

The supermen of the KGB then spend the next 50+ years destroying America from within via their infiltration of the CIA, the proverbial “long march through the institutions” and whatnot (and having rather astonishing success as far as I can tell). The chaotic Monty Python skit that calls itself the “JFKA research community” is apparently part of this dastardly plot (how? why?).

In 2016, the KGB, or at least KGB guy Putin, then causes Kremlin stooge The Donald to defeat Hillary Clinton, even though Hillary is a card-carrying "Rules for Radicals" sort of leftie and The Donald’s platform consists mostly of promises to unravel all that the KGB has accomplished over the past 50+ years (how does that work?). But wait, then Putin and the supermen of the KGB fumble the ball and Team Biden is somehow elected in 2020 (what the heck?). Team Biden, which apparently doesn't grasp the KGB's new Trumpian agenda, then does its best to restore the long march through the institutions, doing quite an excellent job of it, and Team Kamala promises to pretty well finish off the destruction of America (why would Putin and the supermen of the KGB not want this?).

But, no, Vladimir and the gang once again step in and cause their stooge The Donald to be elected in 2024, even though The Donald is now even more hellbent to stop the long march through the institutions and restore America to its former glory as a chest-thumping, war-mongering capitalist state and may be slightly unhinged to boot (the KGB wants this – why?).

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the Big Picture. Or perhaps I'm actually an unwitting KGB stooge, sent here to ferret out moles! I have literally no idea what the “KGB stuff” is all about or how it makes any sense at all. Anyone seeing it more clearly than I am?

Dear FPR,

All you've got to do is read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and John M. Newman's 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole (but disregard the part where he says high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Peking and Moscow in 1963).

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

Newman and I believe that James Angleton's confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the mole-hunting Office of Security, Bruce Leonard Solie, instead of recently-fired-by-CIA Edward Ellis Smith, was the mole who betrayed CIA's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov, to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk (aka Vladimir Komarov) in early 1957 in D.C. movie houses. Newman believes Smith (who went on to become a scholar at the Hoover Institution and a San Francisco banker) and James McCord (of future Watergate notoriety) provided logistical support to Solie.

Factoid: False defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 Yuri Nosenko, a putative KGB staff officer, said to Bagley during their first meeting that the most important thing he could tell him was that his putative boss, Kovshuk, had made a special two-week trip to the U.S. in early 1957 to "reestablish contact with 'Andrey,'" a cipher machine mechanic he'd recruited in Moscow in "1949 or 1950." Problem is, it turns out that Kovshuk was in Washington (as a "diplomat" on a two-year gig) for ten months and waited until the ninth one to visit "Andrey" -- burnt out Army Seargent Dayle W. Smith -- whose phone number and address were in the phone book and who never did have access to the cipher machines' rotors or any other classified information.

Newman believes Solie also gave the Soviets the U-2's top-secret specifications in those D.C. movie houses, and that when Popov told his handler in West Berlin in April 1958 that he'd heard a drunken GRU colonel brag at a New Years Eve party that the Kremlin had the U-2's secrets, Solie decided to send someone like (unwitting as to the true nature of the mission) Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a planned to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (Solie) in the wrong part of the CIA -- the Soviet Russia Division.

The only problem I have with that part of Newman's theory is that there's an eighteen month gap between the betrayal of Popov and Oswald's arrival in Moscow (ironically(?) on the same day that Popov was publicly arrested after being "played back" against the CIA for a year) where all he had to do was toss his passport on Richard Snyder's desk, announce that he wanted to renounce his American citizenship, become a USSR citizen, and declare to Snyder and the microphones in the walls that he planned to commit espionage against the U.S. -- including telling the Soviets "something of special interest." Newman's reasoning for such a long hiatus is that Solie first had to screen for and recruit Oswald and then Oswald had to learn Russian, but I don't see how being fluent in Russian was a prerequisite for the simple tasks I mentioned above.

Unless, perhaps, Solie intended Oswald to stay in The Worker's Paradise for an extended period of time.

Perhaps . . . gasp . . . within half-a-mile of a KGB school in Minsk.


-- Tom

[Lance Payette]

Obviously, the "KGB stuff" makes sense to TG, which is not to say that it makes sense to anyone else. My question is: Does it?

We could expand the discussion - if there is to be any discussion - to the larger topic of what percentage of posts by the most active members of this forum strike you as literally making no sense at all? 70%, 80%, higher? (If you'd like to increase the percentage by including my posts, be my guest.)

[Fred Litwin]

Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.

fred

[Tom Graves]

Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.

fred

Dear Fred,

I admit that it's complicated (that's the nature of KGB versus CIA counterintelligence) but is internally consistent and I can explain it to you.

What would you like to know?

Fire away.

-- Tom

[Lance Payette]

Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.

fred

Well, that's one vote for my sanity.

To TG: I am not interested in being "convinced." I am not interested in how the KGB stuff makes sense to you, because that would tell me nothing.

I simply wish to know if this KGB stuff actually makes sense to anyone else and, if so, whether that individual would care to explain it in 200 words or less of plain English, without reference to Bagley, Solie and the rest of TG's pantheon.

Here, I'll make it easy: We will assume arguendo, for purposes of this post only, that everything TG says is absolutely true. Please, just connect the dots in plain English in a way that makes any rational sense at all. Just do that. What would it have looked like, out there in the real world? How would it have worked, out there in the real world?

This is pretty much the challenge I issue to every Gee-Whiz True Believer in some notion that strikes me as nonsense.

[Tom Graves]

Is anyone other than Tom able to follow the logic of what I lovingly call the “KGB stuff?" It quickly loses me. (Don’t bother, TG. You’re on Eternal Ignore. I now wear a COVID mask to avoid being exposed to even the tiniest micro-nuttiness from your invisible posts. I’m just wondering if anyone else can actually follow whatever it is TG is talking about.)

As I understand it (while not pretending to actually understand it) ...

LHO is dispatched to the USSR, apparently unwittingly, to ferret out moles (I love saying that!  ). While there, he attends the mysterious “KGB school” in Minsk and is somehow trained for an eventual mission (what mission?) in the U.S., even though those closest to him have absolutely no clue that this is going on. He returns to the U.S., presumably at the behest of his KGB masters, with his KGB-indoctrinated wife Marina (indoctrinated when and for what purpose?), and they proceed to live pretty much like impoverished bums (their KGB cover?).

LHO then engages in activities and writes things that are hard to square with any KBG mission (proof of just how clever the KGB is?). The time finally arrives for LHO to assassinate JFK (for what KGB-related purpose?), and Marina then lives the next 60+ years in pretty thorough Texas-housewife obscurity (for what KGB-related purpose?), evolving from a veritable LNer to a CTer (for what KGB-related purpose? was this her KGB mission?).

The supermen of the KGB then spend the next 50+ years destroying America from within via their infiltration of the CIA, the proverbial “long march through the institutions” and whatnot (and having rather astonishing success as far as I can tell). The chaotic Monty Python skit that calls itself the “JFKA research community” is apparently part of this dastardly plot (how? why?).

In 2016, the KGB, or at least KGB guy Putin, then causes Kremlin stooge The Donald to defeat Hillary Clinton, even though Hillary is a card-carrying "Rules for Radicals" sort of leftie and The Donald’s platform consists mostly of promises to unravel all that the KGB has accomplished over the past 50+ years (how does that work?). But wait, then Putin and the supermen of the KGB fumble the ball and Team Biden is somehow elected in 2020 (what the heck?). Team Biden, which apparently doesn't grasp the KGB's new Trumpian agenda, then does its best to restore the long march through the institutions, doing quite an excellent job of it, and Team Kamala promises to pretty well finish off the destruction of America (why would Putin and the supermen of the KGB not want this?).

But, no, Vladimir and the gang once again step in and cause their stooge The Donald to be elected in 2024, even though The Donald is now even more hellbent to stop the long march through the institutions and restore America to its former glory as a chest-thumping, war-mongering capitalist state and may be slightly unhinged to boot (the KGB wants this – why?).

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the Big Picture. Or perhaps I'm actually an unwitting KGB stooge, sent here to ferret out moles! I have literally no idea what the “KGB stuff” is all about or how it makes any sense at all. Anyone seeing it more clearly than I am?

Dear FPR,

All you've got to do is read Tennent H. Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, his 2014 follow-up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and John M. Newman's 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole (but disregard the part where he says high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Peking and Moscow in 1963).

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

Bagley, who was Yuri Nosenko’s primary case officer from June 1962 to September 1967, details how he came to realize that Nosenko was a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962, sent to the CIA there to discredit what a recent true defector, Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible KGB penetrations of the CIA, the FBI, and the intelligence services of our NATO allies and thereby protect a high-level mole or two in the Agency.

Are you with me so far?

Although the CIA believed Nosenko was fake -- after Bagley had been given the opportunity right after the 1962 meetings to read Golitsyn’s thick file and realized in-so-doing that Nosenko had said many things that overlapped what Golitsyn had said six months earlier (even though they had worked in different parts of the highly compartmentalized KGB) and that what Nosenko said invariably contradicted what Golitsyn had said -- it allowed him to physically defect to the U.S. when he recontacted Bagley and (probable mole, imho) George Kisevalter in Geneva in February 1964 because he claimed to have read Oswald’s file on four different occasions and especially because he claimed he’d just received a “Return To Moscow Immediately” telegram from KGB headquarters (Nosenko later admitted that he’d “made it up to improve my chances of being allowed to go to the U.S.” after NSA had determined that no such cable had been sent).

The reason all of this is important – British researcher Malcolm Blunt says “Nosenko is MEGA” – is because the mole or moles Nosenko was protecting were never uncovered, and because lots of other false defectors and Kremlin-loyal double and triple agents were sent to the U.S. or otherwise contacted the CIA and/or the FBI over the years in order to “verify,” in a multi-tasking kind of way, Nosenko’s bona fides.

That, and the fact that Nosenko was eventually “cleared” by the very same "probable" mole he'd been sent to the CIA in 1962 to protect -- the aforementioned Bruce Solie -- via a bogus polygraph exam and a specious report, and was . . . yep . . . hired by the Agency a few years later to teach “counterintelligence” to its and the FBI’s new recruits.

Any questions so far?

In addition to the warnings that the aforementioned true defector, KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, tried to give to the CIA and the FBI (and to MI5 and MI6 in late 1962) about possible KGB penetrations of those services and the intelligence services of our NATO allies, he also tried to warn them about the KGB’s 1959-on deception-based “Master Plan,” which Nosenko-protectors came to derisively refer to as the “Monster Plot.”

Said “Master Plan” is explained in Golitsyn’s book, New Lies for Old, and in Edward J. Epstein’s book, Deception.

https://archive.org/details/newliesforoldcom0000goli/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/Deception-TheInvisibleWarBetweenTheKGBAndTheCIA

It was created in the late 1950s in the KGB “think tank” that Golitsyn worked in, and it involved a return to Sun Tzu’s strategy of defeating one’s enemies through deception, as Operation Trust had done so effectively in the 1920s and WiN had done in Poland in the early 1950s, i.e., to defeat them by getting them to tear themselves apart. Under this new “Master Plan,” the KGB set up a top-secret deception-based Department D in the First Chief Directorate (today’s SVR) to wage disinformation, “active measures,” and mole-based strategic deception counterintelligence operations against the U.S. and our NATO allies. Not to be outdone, General Oleg Gribanov, head of the Second Chief Directorate (today’s FSB) set up Department 14 in that part of the KGB, and as soon as CIA’s spy Lt. Col. Oleg Penkovsky had been “trapped like a bear in its cave” in Moscow in such a way that wouldn’t  reveal  who in the CIA or British Intelligence had betrayed him in April 1961, sent GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Polyakov and KGB Major Aleksei Kulak to the FBI’s NYC field office to “volunteer” to spy for it at the U.N. Golitsyn and Angleton realized the “Master Plan” included  the idea that feedback loops would be established between Kremlin-loyal triple agents like Polyakov and Kulak and a mole or two (Solie and Leonard V. McCoy?) so that the KGB could constantly modify what those “outside men” were telling their CIA case officers and ensure that the KGB would effectively control the CIA by telling it what the CIA wanted to hear.

Earlier I said that the 1959-on “Master Plan” involved waging disinformation and “active measures” ops against the U.S. and its NATO allies so as to defeat them by getting them to tear themselves apart.

Several examples of these kinds of ops have been identified. Operation INFEKTION, for example.

Another example was when a KGB article was published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Paese Sera, four days after Jim Garrison had arrested Clay Shaw on suspicion of organizing a “homosexual thrill-kill” assassination of JFK.* Said article motivated Garrison to change his theory against Shaw to “he organized it for the CIA.”

Oliver Stone partially based his 1991 anti-Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex film, “JFK,” on Garrison’s book, On the Trail of the Assassins. That movie, which Stone admitted was mythological (“to counteract the myth of the Warren Report”) was instrumental in my becoming, for several years, a tinfoil-hat JFKA conspiracy theorist, and I believe it had a similar effect on millions of other people.

I believe that the effect of the disinformation and “active measures” ops the KGB has waged against us since late 1961 (when Gribanov sent Polyakov to the FBI) have had such a deleterious effect on our body politic that it enabled “former” SVR counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin to install, with help from even more disinformation and “active measures” ops, "spotted"-by-KGB-in-1980 Donald J. Trump as our “president” in January 2017 and January 2025, which helps to explain why we find ourselves in an Incipient Civil War II / Incipient NATO-Unraveling / Incipient Avian Flu Pandemic moment as I type this.

-- Tom

*The last time I mentioned this to you, you were incredulous that Garrison would actually consider charging anyone with conspiring in a homosexual "thrill-kill." The following is a conversation I just now had with GROK on the subject. Note that our very own Fred Litwin is mentioned.

Me: In which book can we read about Jim Garrison and his original intention to charge Clay Shaw with organizing a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK?

GROK: The specific claim—that Garrison originally intended to charge Clay Shaw (or framed his suspicions around Shaw) with organizing a homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK—stems from contemporary reporting on Garrison's private statements during the early phase of his investigation (around late 1966 to early 1967, before the formal charges shifted emphasis).This is most directly and prominently documented in journalist James Phelan's accounts. Phelan, who met with Garrison in Las Vegas to discuss the case, quoted him describing the assassination as a "homosexual thrill killing," akin to the Loeb-Leopold murder, motivated by envy of JFK's virility and the thrill of a perfect crime, involving figures like David Ferrie, Clay Shaw, and Jack Ruby (all alleged to be homosexual in Garrison's view at the time). Phelan's recollection appears in his writings, including articles for "The Saturday Evening Post" (where he published on Garrison) and later referenced in books and critiques of the Garrison probe.

This anecdote is widely cited in secondary sources analyzing Garrison's investigation, such as:

•   Dave Reitzes' detailed essay "Jim Garrison's Bizarre Behavior — JFK Assassination a Homosexual Thrill Killing" (on jfk-assassination.net), which quotes Phelan extensively and contextualizes it as Garrison's early fixation before "sanitizing" it in favor of the CIA narrative.

•   Fred Litwin's On the Trail of Delusion: Jim Garrison—The Great Accuser (2020), which discusses this phase of Garrison's thinking.

•   Other critical works like Patricia Lambert's False Witness or discussions in Wikipedia entries and articles (e.g., Newsweek, New York Times pieces on the Shaw trial) that reference Phelan's quote to highlight the homophobic and speculative origins of the probe.

Garrison's public and published case evolved away from this (especially after Perry Russo's testimony and the arrest of Shaw in March 1967), focusing instead on conspiracy with intelligence ties. The "thrill-kill" phrasing does not appear in Garrison's books like On the Trail of the Assassins or A Heritage of Stone (1970), which omit or downplay it.

For primary sourcing on this original intention/motive attribution, look to Phelan's contemporaneous reporting and interviews rather than a single book by Garrison. If seeking a book-length treatment covering this detail critically, Reitzes' analysis or Litwin's On the Trail of Delusion captures it well.

. . . . . . .


Tangentially,

Given the fact that Kim Philby started spying for the NKVD in England in 1934 and was soon followed by Guy Burgess, Donald MacLean, Anthony Blunt, John Cairncross, and, in 1950-51, George Blake, do you think they did any damage to British and U.S. Intelligence, or do you think it was just a big “hoot” for everybody?

Concomitantly, do you think there were probably some moles in the CIA before Aldrich Ames started spying for the KGB in 1985?

If not, why not?

Do you find it interesting that a false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and false (or perhaps “rogue”) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964, Yuri Nosenko, told his CIA case officers and interrogators and the HSCA that the KGB didn’t even interview Oswald during the two-and-a-half years he lived in the USSR, but Oleg Nechiporenko (who had allegedly met with Oswald in Mexico City in September 1963) wrote in his book, Passport to Assassination, that the KGB interviewed Oswald twice in Moscow?



-- Tom

[Lance Payette]

Now that I think about it, this is the virtue of the LN narrative: It actually makes sense, from A to Z. It is quite easy to state in 200 or so words of plain English. The "problems" tend to be technical/forensic ones within the context of Dealey Plaza - the timing and number of shots, the holes in the clothing vis-a-vis the throat wound, the SBT, etc., etc. None of those is an absolute LN deal-breaker, and the overarching LN narrative simply makes sense, with the need for an absolute minimum of speculation, mental gyrations and implausible, non-real-world aspects. Even such cover-up as their actually was makes entire sense for reasons that do no damage to the LN narrative (an epiphany for which I must give credit to Larry Hancock).

Ditto with the LN+ narrative: It's merely the LN narrative with Oswald perhaps having been encouraged by or even having "conspired" with one or more fellow pro-Castroites. It makes as much sense (perhaps more) than the LN narrative, but the "conspiracy" aspects are pure speculatiion and probably always will be.

One step down is my Marcello/Mafia scenario with Oswald as a pro-Castro patsy. Tidy as this is, it EXPONENTIALLY increases the complexity and risk. It has VASTLY more problems than the LN scenario (and, of course, bumps its head on the very things that make the LN narrative most plausible).

EVERY OTHER conspiracy scenario, it seems to me, borders on science fiction: Utterly implausible in any real-world sense, filled with fantastic risks at every turn, and just simply not the way a Presidential assassination would ever have been carried out by anyone this side of the Three Stooges. These scenarios inevitably involve massive cover-up activities that are simply silly. Even a more limited scenario such as Larry Hancock apparently posits would have been exponentially more complex and risky than even my Mafia scenario, and it posits events in Dealey Plaza for which there is simply no good evidence.

To the extent I understand the KGB stuff at all, the JFKA doesn't really seem to have been a conspiracy per se. It was more just an LN cog in a Monster Plot dating back to long before the JFKA and extending to the election of Trump, with the entire 62-year JFKA "conspiracy" brouhaha likewise being mostly just a KGB-fueled cog in the Plot. As with many conspiracy theories, this more-or-less LN scenario strikes me as more in the vein of science fiction and simply not plausible.

Ergo, my little Bayesian probability analysis says something like LN = 60% probability; LN+ = 36%; Mafia = 4%; everything else, including the KGB stuff = fuggedaboudit.