Plain Luck Played a Role in the JFKA

[Benjamin Cole]

Plain Luck or Circumstance Played a Role in the JFKA

For years, left-wing ideologue CT'ers have concocted elaborate explanations ("the Deep State in action") of how LHO ended up in the TSBD on 11.22. None really hold water. Likely it was just circumstance.

But there is blame all around. The US right-wing largely went down the LN theory-rabbit-hole with the release of the WC report in 1964. In the right-wing of that era, there was a near-reflexive reverence for authority, and the WC represented authority.

In addition, the WC in 1964 struck exactly the tone the right-wing wanted to hear: a soured Marxist leftie-loser lone-nut perped the horrid JFKA, but not on instructions from Havana of Moscow. No nuke war with Russia needed (see LBJ's instructions to the Earl Warren and Richard Russell).

The modern-day right-wing is a different animal, and sometimes reflexively rejects authority, and so you get a different knee-jerk reaction to official JFKA theorizing, with just as much justification as the 1960's right-wingers.

The agenda writes the narrative. Mossad is the new JFKA villain in many crackpot quarters, left-wing and right-wing.

But...keep in mind you have former CIA Director James Woolsey's book, Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America, presenting the view that LHO was a Russian operative. Woolsey was a CIA director, and a right-winger.

Woolsey is a deeply knowledgable fellow when it comes to spy work. Participants in online forums are admitted hobbyists next to Woolsey.

So I defer to Woolsey...or online hobbyists? 

As for LHO being in the TSBD, almost surely that was luck or circumstance, as was the decision to have the JFK limo make a hairpin turn in front of the TSBD.

CT'ers make the obviously baseless assumption that a JFKA CT required the knowing placement of LHO in the TSBD in preparation for the motorcade.

Rather, LHO was there by chance, and G2'ers or KGB'ers took advantage of that situation.

IMHO, there was no elaborate JFKAC. Just some guys with guns.

There was no dragnet or roadblocks after the JFKA. The bad guys got away, except for LHO, who didn't even have a bicycle to his name.

Keep in mind, at anytime in the 1960s, the KGB and G2 had hundreds, maybe even thousands, of assets, plants, double-agents, agents, and informants in the US. It is legend how thoroughly Castro had infiltrated the Cuban exile community.

Moreover, some serious JFKA researchers posit the KGB had thoroughly penetrated the CIA. If true, that means all those CIA eyes and ears were also de facto KGB eyes and ears. LHO popped up on the radar when JFK's plan for a Dallas visit became generally known.

LHO appears to have been one of those G2-KGB assets, and by chance he had a job in the TSBD. So he was utilized.

[John Corbett]

Why did it have to be guys. Why couldn't it have just been one guy who got lucky. Why did he need G2-KGB help?

[Lance Payette]

It seems to me that Ben is grossly overstating Woolsey's expertise. He was CIA Director for less than two years under Clinton some 30 years after the JFKA. The rest of his career, before and after, seems to have little or nothing to do with spy work.

Here from the CIA-affiliated (but highly respected) professional journal Studies In Intelligence is an absolutely scathing review of Woolsey's co-authored JFKA tome, Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/volume-65-no-3-september-2021-special-issue/review-operation-dragon-inside-the-kremlins-secret-war-on-america/. Woolsey's book also did not fare well on the Ed Forum, where there are several threads discussing it.

Woolsey's claim is that Oswald was a "trained assassin" (WHAT???) personally sent back to America by Khrushchev to avenge the latter's fury over being humiliated by the Cuban Missile Crisis. YA THINK??? (Actually, Khrushchev was far from humiliated. There was a behind-the-scenes agreement to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. I actually think Khrushchev came out of the CMC seeming quite reasonable and statesmanlike.)

The review, by an unnamed officer in the CIA Directorate of Operations then assigned to the Center for the Study of Intelligence, makes the book sound like it would be right down the alley of a certain KGB-obsessed participant on this forum:

Contrary to press reports and even the book jacket’s claims, Operation Dragon is not a book especially focused on the Kennedy assassination. It is instead a near-relentless screed designed to illustrate the unsurpassed evil and treachery of Russia and the Soviet Union.

As to Ben's question, I think he probably should rely on online JFKA "hobbyists" if they've spent decades studying the JFKA, because Woolsey and his co-author (a Romanian defector) sure as hell hadn't. Are Jim DiEugenio, Larry Hancock, Pat Speer and at least 25 others I could mention even if I violently disagree with them mere "hobbyists"?

[Benjamin Cole]

Woolsey was a CIA director for "only" two years?

Surely an intelligent guy could soak up a lot info, culture and insights in two years at the top of the US's foremost spy agency.

Woolsey's co-author, Ion Mihai Pacepa, spent part of a lifetime behind the Iron Curtain working for a spy agency.

----

Woolsey was a Rhodes Scholar. Well, that's more than I ever accomplished in school. He is smart.

Woolsey was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the son of Clyde (Kirby) and Robert James Woolsey Sr.[2] He graduated from Tulsa's Tulsa Central High School. In 1963, he received his Bachelor of Arts from Stanford University with high honors and membership in Phi Beta Kappa, then was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study in England at the University of Oxford,

Then

Woolsey has served in the U.S. government as:

Advisor (during military service) on the U.S. Delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT 1), Helsinki and Vienna, 1969–1970
General Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, 1970–1973
Under Secretary of the Navy, 1977–1979
Delegate at Large to the U.S.-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Nuclear and Space Arms Talks (NST), Geneva, 1983–1986
Ambassador to the Negotiation on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), Vienna, 1989–1991
Director of CIA, 1993–1995

Although older now, Woolsey remains active in international affairs-security stuff.


Woolsey joined the board of directors for The Arlington Institute in 1992.[10][11]

He is currently a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) Board of Advisors, Advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, co-founder of the United States Energy Security Council, Founding Member of the Set America Free Coalition, and a senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security (since July 15, 2002).[12]

He is a Patron of the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank. Woolsey has had long-standing contact with Central and Eastern Europe and as a Member of the Board of Advisors for America of the Global Panel Foundation[13] based in Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, Sydney, and Toronto. He was formerly chairman of the Freedom House board of trustees. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.[14]

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I do not say Woolsey's book removes all reasonable doubt about the JFKA.

But Woolsey regards the KGB as a likely manipulator of LHO. Woolsey has street cred that online hobbyists and even JFK researchers such as James DiEugenio, do not have.  (BTW, many JFKA "researchers" have defecated on themselves lately, with wacky theories about UFOs and Mossad, Epstein, 9-11, and who knows what. CT'ers seem to believe every CT and and simultaneously.)

Woolsey's views are a little different from mine. But Woolsey cannot be easily dismissed.

I suspect LHO was in concert with low-level G2-Alpha 66 types who acted on their own. I can't prove that.