JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Lance Payette on January 21, 2026, 05:40:55 PM
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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! :D). 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?
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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! :D). 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
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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.)
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Tom explained it but I still don't understand it.
fred
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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
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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.
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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! :D). 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
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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.
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Once again quoting myself - the sincerist form of flattery - but I was struck by how apt this post from six months ago still is.
Ah, what a small world it is. Tom embarked on what eventually became his KGB mania in 2007, when Douglas Caddy posted at the Ed Forum a Washington Post review of Bagley’s book Spy Wars. "Interesting stuff!" Tom said back then. Ironically, the review concluded “Take a stroll with Bagley down paranoia lane …” Even more ironically, Caddy is the leading proponent of the theory that JFK knew the dark truth about UFOs and was killed because he was going to reveal the Alien Secret. But now Tom takes his little dig at my longtime interest in UFOs. And so it goes.
I know the rudiments of the Nosenko affair and the Angleton/Bagley KGB paranoia. I have no idea what Nosenko was all about and really don't care. My guess would be, a genuine defector who pretended to be more than he was. He certainly didn’t defect for any reason directly related to the JFKA.
Regardless of what, if anything, Nosenko actually knew about Oswald, what he had to say is surely pretty close to the truth even if he was operating on the basis of nothing more than common sense and guesswork. In the preparation of Oswald’s Tale, Norman Mailer spoke with KGB officers and viewed KGB files. The portrait of Oswald that emerged was entirely consistent with what Nosenko said and what common sense would tell us: The KGB quickly realized Oswald was a pathetic loser, of no conceivable intelligence use.
Certainly, the KGB would have assessed and monitored Oswald. Pretty much everyone from Rimma (his Intourist guide) on down had some KGB affiliation. Were there really no formal intelligence-type interviews, as Nosenko said? Quite possibly. Oswald had nothing to offer them about the U-2 program they didn’t already know; their only puzzle was how to reach, with aircraft or missiles, the height at which they knew the U-2 was flying. Apart from the U-2 stuff they already knew, Oswald had nothing to offer them. Indeed, he was such unlikely intelligence material that the KGB at one point speculated as to whether weirdos like him were some new CIA program (so obviously not intelligence material that he actually was intelligence material!).
Does it make any rational sense that the Soviets would send a false defector, and that Nosenko would endure all he endured (dying as a U.S. citizen in 2008), to spread the tale that “We really had no interest in Oswald” when pretty much no one thought they did? Since Nosenko defected at just about the time the WC was getting rolling, I would assume he included his Oswald material because he knew ears would perk up.
When I first joined this forum several months ago, I and my especially my wife, who lived in Minsk for decades and was in a responsible position with the city until 2008, helped Tom identify the KGB school that Oswald supposedly lived near. It was a graduate-level training academy that began in Gomel in 1946 for those who wanted to join the KGB in any capacity. It was not a school for spies. There is a description of it beginning on page 20 of this document: https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32989481.pdf.
My wife tells me it’s “invisible” in the sense that Minsk citizens like her never give it a thought (she didn’t even know what the building was until she started trying to help Tom!). Ernst Titovets said in a fairly recent interview that he had no awareness of it and that it had only been brought to his attention in connection with questions about Oswald. No one – Marina, Titovets or anyone else in Minsk – has ever suggested any connection whatsoever between Oswald and this school.
Yet, all over the internet, Tom continues to trumpet the fact that “Oswald lived within a half mile of a KGB school” as though this were some major smoking gun. The fact is, Oswald was given an extremely nice (by Soviet standards) apartment near the Svisloch River (yes, I’ve seen it). It’s in midtown Minsk. One walks from the apartment, across Victory Square (which is the center of Minsk), and either walks or takes the bus down the main street to the radio factory (two bus stops down the road but within easy walking distance). The KGB school is on the other side of the main street – i.e., separated from Oswald’s apartment by Victory Square.
This would be like saying that everyone living within a half mile of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington is somehow suspicious, with utterly no connection apart from the bare fact of this proximity. Or, as CTers are wont to do, like saying that someone whose distant second-cousin Shirley is a secretary in building maintenance at Langley has, on this basis alone, “suspicious CIA connections.”
Tom, I now realize, is in the grip of some obsessive KGB fixation that I was not aware of when I joined. This is a different Tom than I had encountered at the Ed Forum years ago, who was goofy but kind of fun (like me!). I find his KGB mania boring and slightly scary.
Here’s the school in its present incarnation as the National Security Academy. They even have a website: https://aml.university/en/uchastniki-aml/akademiya-nacional-noy-bezopasnosti-respubliki-belarus. If you visit, tell them Comrade Lance sent you.
(https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-altay/5106183/2a000001807f270ed13877881b7a968e737a/L_height)
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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+ = 26%; Mafia = 14%; everything else, including the KGB stuff = fuggedaboudit.
Trying to make the location selection of Dealey Plaza make sense seems problematic to me for anyone other than LHO to be involved. I doubt that anyone else would have chosen Dealey Plaza for a hit. There were way too many people and law enforcement officers present. However, since he worked there, it makes perfect sense for LHO. It just seems to have been a coincidence that everything essentially fell into LHO’s lap. I do give LHO credit for planning and executing an effective surprise ambush from behind and above.
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LP--
I admire TG's command of all things KGB, and he is a tonic to all the lefties that usually flood the JFKA zone.
I have refreshed my understanding of G2/KGB thanks to TG, reviewing Tennent Bagley, Gus Russo and John Newman, and TG's writing.
I still don't know who perped the JFKA, and I still suspect a very small conspiracy, literally three guys, including LHO. No one above them.
However, whereas before I tended to lean towards Alpha 66, I am now open to a G2-KGB (likely, lower level dudes) plot.
Interestingly, many Cuban exiles were thought to be double agents, including Rolando Cubela.
That leaves open the possibility of G2 assets, who appeared to anti-Castro exiles, linking up with LHO.
I advise TG to be more civil in his commentary, and avoid current-day politics, but there are far worse, such as the leftist anti-Semitic crackpots running the Education Forum.
I will take TG by a country mile over the Education Forum ghouls.
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I admire TG's command of all things KGB, and he is a tonic to all the lefties that usually flood the JFKA zone.
And all of the Far-Righties here who don't have the courage to contemplate the possibility that the KGB* (and the GRU) is so powerful that it could, in order to get us to tear ourselves apart, install The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") as our "president."
(Sorry, "BC," I couldn't help it.)
*Today's SVR and FSB
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LP--
I admire TG's command of all things KGB, and he is a tonic to all the lefties that usually flood the JFKA zone.
I have refreshed my understanding of G2/KGB thanks to TG, reviewing Tennent Bagley, Gus Russo and John Newman, and TG's writing.
I still don't know who perped the JFKA, and I still suspect a very small conspiracy, literally three guys, including LHO. No one above them.
However, whereas before I tended to lean towards Alpha 66, I am now open to a G2-KGB (likely, lower level dudes) plot.
Interestingly, many Cuban exiles were thought to be double agents, including Rolando Cubela.
That leaves open the possibility of G2 assets, who appeared to anti-Castro exiles, linking up with LHO.
I advise TG to be more civil in his commentary, and avoid current-day politics, but there are far worse, such as the leftist anti-Semitic crackpots running the Education Forum.
I will take TG by a country mile over the Education Forum ghouls.
To paraphrase: You have no idea what he's talking about either.
TG's "grasp of all things KGB" is, of course, completely at odds with the CIA's own analyses in 1976 (Hart) and 2011 (Royden), as well as the many CIA colleagues who derided Angleton and Bagley's obsession with the imaginary "Monster Plot," and is derived almost entirely from the dubious sources he cites ad nauseam, which are rejected by the majority of intelligence scholars. I don't see that they add anything whatsoever to an analsysis of the JFKA.
Oswald was sent to Moscow to ferret out moles: Pure speculation. Oswald engaged heavily with the KGB in Russia: Pure speculation and at odds with all known facts. Oswald came back to the U.S. for some KGB-related purpose: Pure speculation. Marina was a KGB sleeper agent: Pure speculation and at odds with all known facts. The election of The Donald was somehow Putin-orchestrated and The Donald's presidency is in furtherance of some KGB objective extending back to the origin of the Monster Plot: Patent nonsense.
I submit that absolutely no one can actually articulate a version of TG's narrative, from the Angleton years through the Trump presidency, that comes close to making sense. If someone can, go for it! That's the challenge posed by this thread.
The KGB folks were and are rather nasty specimens: Sure, no breaking news there. They would have loved to, and surely did, plant moles in the CIA: Sure. They attempted to ferret out CIA moles in their organization: Sure. They made use of events like the JFKA to foment unrest and plant disinformation that served their purposes: Undoubtedly.
I see no substantive difference between the CIA and KGB in respect to these things, and it is absurd to think the KGB had "10 feet tall" superhuman abilities that the CIA lacked.
I see nothing in TG's posts that actually has anything at all to do with Oswald or the JFKA, except in the most tangential sense (e.g., the "Dear Mr. Hunt" KGB ploy). TG's posts seem to me virtually NOTHING but expressions of his TDS. A not-completely-irrational description of his KGB stuff might have been possible if he had focused his wrath on Clinton, Obama, Biden and Harris as examples of the KGB's efforts, but to try to fit Trump into this narrative seems just flat-out nutty. He must do this, however, because his TDS is his overriding motivation; everything else flows backwards from that. (All IMHO, of course, and I invite anyone who cares to dispute it to do so.)
At the Ed Forum this morning, Sean Coleman (a devout CTer, as I recall) posted the following - which, thanks to TG, is equally apt here:
This is not JFK.
This is political pie throwing.
It’s left wing spouting. Soap box shouting.
Opinionated bluff.
If we want this tripe we’ll watch the news, read the papers, catch up on our devices.
John [Simkin], this is your doing. Since you returned to comment you have strayed from the wonders of the assassination and gone all non relevant massively left wing biased political. I suppose this is your site though.
Again, I mention “Theories on the assassination” is parked in the waiting room, all Trump/Epstein crap gets centre stage!!?? Wrong way round innit!!
I think I’ve donated 150 to 250 clams to this site over the years because of its awesomeness. Which has gone.
Ps. My political views span both L & R. I subscribe to neither. More logical realist than rabid politico.
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Trying to make the location selection of Dealey Plaza make sense seems problematic to me for anyone other than LHO to be involved. I doubt that anyone else would have chosen Dealey Plaza for a hit. There were way too many people and law enforcement officers present. However, since he worked there, it makes perfect sense for LHO. It just seems to have been a coincidence that everything essentially fell into LHO’s lap. I do give LHO credit for planning and executing an effective surprise ambush from behind and above.
Charles, you underestimate the KGB's abilities! They chose Dealey Plaza precisely BECAUSE it was so unlikely! :D :D :D (See what I did there? Of course, you do - because it's what CTers do with every inconvenient fact.)
If I put on my CT propeller beanie, it would have to be some plan (we'll say Mafia) where Oswald was on the radar screen by virtue of his activities in New Orleans, the plan started to come together after his employment at the TSBD and the announcement of JFK's trip to Texas, and the plan crystallized at the last minute when it became clear JFK would pass directly in front of the TSBD. Then, Dealey Plaza with Oswald in the TSBD and a pro in the Dal Tex or County Records building wouldn't be too bad.
Alas, the obstacles in trying to make that scenario plausible are near-insurmountable. It really just doesn't work, which requires CTers to expand the scenario to Oswald being "planted" in the TSBD, JFK's motorcade route being "manipulated" to pass in front of the TSBD, yada yada. John Orr cleverly avoids most obstacles by having Oswald being in active cooperation with the Mafia - but this itself is (to me) an insurmountable obstacle. Moreover, I really can't think of ANY plausible CT scenario that has Oswald going to Ruth Paine's with Frazier to retrieve his rifle the evening before the assassination (hence CTer's enthusiasm for the curtain rods tale - which then requires Oswald to be a completely unknowing patsy, and off we go).
Always, always, always, the fly in the CT ointment is the actual man Lee Harvey Oswald. He really just doesn't "work" as either a conspirator or a patsy, with the exception of a small, genuinely pro-Castro plot (LN+, as I call it). Pro-Castro incitement actually makes sense; KGB incitement, even in isolation completely apart from TG's grand narrative, simply does not.
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[Tom's] "grasp of all things KGB" is, of course, completely at odds with the CIA's own analyses in 1976 (Hart) and 2011 (Royden), as well as the many CIA colleagues who derided Angleton and Bagley's obsession with the imaginary "Monster Plot," and is derived almost entirely from the dubious sources he cites ad nauseam, which are rejected by the majority of intelligence scholars.
Dear FPL,
John L. Hart, former COS Saigon and the guy for whom Tennent H. Bagley "ripped a new one" during his HSCA testimony?
That John L. Hart?
https://www.archives.gov/files/research/jfk/releases/docid-32273600.pdf
-- Tom
PS "Mr. X" is KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn who defected to the U.S. on 15 December 1961.
PPS You should check out my new post at my Substack page, "How the KGB Zombified the CIA and the FBI."
It's titled "Fancy Pants gets a whuppin'"
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Hey, hey, hey, people, Serious Researcher Lance has done what we serious researcher types do: I went to the Ed Forum and quickly skimmed all 405 posts in which the term "Bagley" is mentioned. I even found a few by me, in which I (in 2018) apparently knew more about this Bagley-Nosenko-KGB stuff than I recall now. I pointed out that the CT enthusiasm for Bagley seems almost entirely to relate to his very latter-day revelations to Blunt and Newman that Oswald was a "witting asset" of the CIA, which he (Bagley) seemed to know nothing about while he was employed by the CIA or, indeed, until he encountered Blunt at age 85.
Overall, the enthusiasm for Bagley at the Ed Forum was distinctly muted. Some enthusiasm, yes (on the part of "witting asset" fans), but little for the Monster Plot and even considerable skepticism that Bagley himself was a disinformation agent. My skepticism relates primarily to the reality that (1) he had pretty obvious monetary incentives for the bombshells he revealed long after he had been given the boot by the CIA, and (2) it's pretty easy to view those bombshells as late-in-life grudge-settling efforts. But I digress ...
What I found was the VERY FIRST thread in which TG floated his "KGB stuff." It was in 2018, and he called it a "Theory in Progress." The responses were not kind. Jim Di dismissed it as "Tommy's mole madness." Kirk G. said any KGB theory was way out of the ballpark because the Soviets had "no motive." But I disgress again ...
The value is that TG actually explained his fledgling theory fairly succinctly, as set forth below. I now understand the Trump tie-in. It seems goofy to me, but at least I understand it.
Here ya go, from the keyboard of TG in 2018:
Now let me ask YOU a question:
*IF* there was a mole or a network of embedded KGB-types, would they have been willing to kill JFK (or any other U.S. president for that matter) if they had been instructed by their KGB / GRU handler(s) to do so, to enable ever-increasing KGB / GRU influence on our country through "active measures counterintelligence operations" (which started in 1921) and "strategic deception operations" (which started in 1959), thereby giving rise to paralyzing, cancer-like propaganda and disinformation (e.g., "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK," and "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK via the 'Harvey & Lee and Two Marguerites Program,'" and "The evil, evil CIA and the Mafia ... ")?
So that, you know, ..... EVENTUALLY a Russian Mafia-compromised (and therefore eminently blackmail-able) anti-NATO "useful idiot" like Donald James Trump could be installed as our president?
(Or do you believe that some disgruntled DNC or NSA insider not only hacked the DNC's and Podesta's e-mails, but gave said e-mails to Julian Assange and DNCLeaks? And that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 are just an evil, evil CIA "cover story" or "fantasy"?)
LOL
-- Tommy
PS: I would suggest that pieces of the puzzle lie in Bill Simpich's "State Secret," John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA," and Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars" and "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and Mark Riebling's "Wedge".
Still, someone needs to clarify for me: First, what did the KGB gain by offing JFK in favor of LBJ? Second, if the KGB had been almost fantastically successful over a period of more than 100 years in virtually deconstructing America, culminating in the election of a left-leaning president like Obama and the candidacies of lefties like Hillary and Kamala, why would said KGB have done an about-face and blessed us with The Donald? Why would Hillary, Biden and Harris not have meshed perfectly with the deconstruction of America via the continuing long march through the institutions? If the KGB actually thought installing The Donald would advance their deconstruction agenda more than Hillary and Kamala, one can only conclude that, far from being supermen, they were dolts.
Is it possible I'm just not clever enough to grasp the nuances of TG's KGB stuff?
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No, wait, there's more! The genesis of TG's theory actually predates the election of The Donald.
Here is TG floating his "joint KGB / CIA assassination" theory in 2012:
Did They "Do It" Together?
I mean, of course, the KGB and the CIA and the assassination of JFK, not something of a kinkier nature, you naughty boys and girls!
You know, maybe they had some common "vested interests" --- that sort of thing?
Or, maybe it was a case of "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, and we'll both get filthy rich ...
... or at least a shiny new Lada / Ferrari and a dacha / house on the Black Sea / in La Jolla!)".
--Tommy
David Josephs of Harvey & Lee fame then fleshed it out, to which TG replied "Exactly!":
Hold up a second Robert [Morrow, who had described TG's idea as having a one-in-a-trillion chance of being correct] ...
Are you trying to tell us that you cannot see how HAWKS in the KGB as well as the ruling economic elite in Russia (yes virginia, there really are wealthy people in communist nations) would not want to perpetuate the Cold War and avoid peace at all costs...? Yet you have no problem with the HAWKS of the USA, in the Military and CIA, to perpetuate the Cold War?
I think you are missing the role of the emerging global corporations, financed by the international banks and the benefit derived by the constant state of Cold (and Hot) War.
Billions upon billions of "officially spent money" was lost in Russia when the Cold War finally ended... Where the US government & companies just shifted focus from the WAR on Communism to the WAR on Terrorism and continued to spend accordingly, the Russian economy was corrupted by organized crime taking on all shapes and persona.
Richard Case Nagell was not even sure which side was ordering him to kill Oswald...
I believe if you step back and see the overriding focus was on MONEY and POWER... and that the groups that desired control of such things continue regardless of ideology, theology, political party or any other such nonsense... AND add that the CIA as well as a number of other agencies were choked full of "communists" who thought it crucial NEVER to give in to the USA..
It is not such a stretch to see cooperation among thieves to keep their livlihoods AND organizations intact.
To dovetail back to your thesis - LBJ - he cooperated cause of all the money involved, and his freedom. "None Dare Call It a Conspiracy" helps in this question to see that the CIA and KGD were in the same business... perpetuate the organization, protect the organization, expand the organization so that a state of fear persists and people will be more and more willing to give up personal freedoms and liberty to FEEL protected...
JFK's future dictated that these two agencies would no longer be needed - or at least be seriously curtailed... and they both knew it.
And this is why men like Dub'ya Bush do not get executed... He's one of THEM.
Now you can see where I have gone awry: Silly me thought TG's notion of the superman-level success of the KGB in deconstructing America related to the long march through the institutions and the election of lefties such as Obama, Biden, Hillary and Kamala. Silly me thought it had something to do with advancing Marxist/socialist ideology and that sort of thing. No, no, no - it was all about the Benjamins from the get-go - or at least that was the theory in 2012 - and Dubya was as much of a useful idiot as The Donald.
I can't even begin to keep this stuff straight. I won't bore you further. If it all makes sense to you, keep it to yourself because I no longer care.
Breaking news: Jim Di started a thread specifically to deal (not kindly) with TG's KGB stuff. It isn't worth reading, but at last I understand: EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENDED IN AMERICA since 1921 has been KGB-orchestrated. Trump, Biden, the collapse of the educational system, my Milwaukee Braves winning the World Series in 1957, everything. At least that narrows it down.
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Hey, hey, hey, people, Serious Researcher Lance has done what we serious researcher types do: I went to the Ed Forum and quickly skimmed all 405 posts in which the term "Bagley" is mentioned. I even found a few by me, in which I (in 2018) apparently knew more about this Bagley-Nosenko-KGB stuff than I recall now. I pointed out that the CT enthusiasm for Bagley seems almost entirely to relate to his very latter-day revelations to Blunt and Newman that Oswald was a "witting asset" of the CIA, which he (Bagley) seemed to know nothing about while he was employed by the CIA or, indeed, until he encountered Blunt at age 85.
Overall, the enthusiasm for Bagley at the Ed Forum was distinctly muted. Some enthusiasm, yes (on the part of "witting asset" fans), but little for the Monster Plot and even considerable skepticism that Bagley himself was a disinformation agent. My skepticism relates primarily to the reality that (1) he had pretty obvious monetary incentives for the bombshells he revealed long after he had been given the boot by the CIA, and (2) it's pretty easy to view those bombshells as late-in-life grudge-settling efforts. But I digress ...
What I found was the VERY FIRST thread in which TG floated his "KGB stuff." It was in 2018, and he called it a "Theory in Progress." The responses were not kind. Jim Di dismissed it as "Tommy's mole madness." Kirk G. said any KGB theory was way out of the ballpark because the Soviets had "no motive." But I disgress again ...
The value is that TG actually explained his fledgling theory fairly succinctly, as set forth below. I now understand the Trump tie-in. Yeah, it's nuts, but at least I understand it. As you can see, TDS was the motivating factor from the get-go.
Here ya go, from the keyboard of TG in 2018:
Now let me ask YOU a question:
*IF* there was a mole or a network of embedded KGB-types, would they have been willing to kill JFK (or any other U.S. president for that matter) if they had been instructed by their KGB / GRU handler(s) to do so, to enable ever-increasing KGB / GRU influence on our country through "active measures counterintelligence operations" (which started in 1921) and "strategic deception operations" (which started in 1959), thereby giving rise to paralyzing, cancer-like propaganda and disinformation (e.g., "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK," and "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK via the 'Harvey & Lee and Two Marguerites Program,'" and "The evil, evil CIA and the Mafia ... ")?
So that, you know, ..... EVENTUALLY a Russian Mafia-compromised (and therefore eminently blackmail-able) anti-NATO "useful idiot" like Donald James Trump could be installed as our president?
(Or do you believe that some disgruntled DNC or NSA insider not only hacked the DNC's and Podesta's e-mails, but gave said e-mails to Julian Assange and DNCLeaks? And that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 are just an evil, evil CIA "cover story" or "fantasy"?)
LOL
-- Tommy
PS: I would suggest that pieces of the puzzle lie in Bill Simpich's "State Secret," John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA," and Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars" and "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and Mark Riebling's "Wedge".
Still, someone needs to clarify for me: First, what did the KGB gain by offing JFK in favor of LBJ? Second, if the KGB had been almost fantastically successful over a period of more than 100 years in virtually deconstructing America, culminating in the election of a left-leaning president like Obama and the candidacies of lefties like Hillary and Kamala, why would said KGB have done an about-face and blessed us with The Donald? Why would Hillary, Biden and Harris not have meshed perfectly with the deconstruction of America via the continuing long march through the institutions? If the KGB actually thought installing The Donald would advance their deconstruction agenda more than Hillary and Kamala, one can only conclude that, far from being supermen, they are in fact more like - yep - the Three Stooges.
Is it possible I'm just not clever enough to grasp the nuances of TG's KGB stuff?
Dear Fancy Pants Rants,
Why didn't you include the first two sentences (in bold, below) in my reply to Sandy Larsen (RIP) on 15 January 2018 at the so-called JFK Assassination Debate - Education Forum when he asked me,
Tommy,
What makes you think that a mole might have had something to do with the assassination? Or with Oswald? Or is this sheer speculation?
[Dear Sandy,]
Pure speculation in a wilderness of mirrors, Sandy.
All hypothetical at this point, but a paradigm that might help to explain some apparent anomalies ...
Now let me ask YOU a question:
IF there was a mole or a network of embedded KGB-types, would they have been willing to kill JFK (or any other U.S. president for that matter) if they had been instructed by their KGB / GRU handler(s) to do so, to enable ever-increasing KGB / GRU influence on our country through "active measures counterintelligence operations" (which started in 1921) and "strategic deception operations" (which started in 1959), thereby giving rise to paralyzing, cancer-like propaganda and disinformation (e.g., "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK," and "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK via the 'Harvey & Lee and Two Marguerites Program,'" and "The evil, evil CIA and the Mafia ... ")?
So that, you know, ..... eventually a Russian Mafia-compromised (and therefore eminently blackmail-able) anti-NATO "useful idiot" like Donald James Trump could be installed as our president?
Or do you believe that some disgruntled DNC or NSA insider not only hacked the DNC's and Podesta's e-mails, but gave said e-mails to Julian Assange and DNCLeaks? And that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 are just an evil, evil CIA "cover story" or "fantasy"?
LOL
-- Tommy
PS: I would suggest that pieces of the puzzle lie in Bill Simpich's "State Secret," John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA," and Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars" and "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and Mark Riebling's "Wedge".
. . . . . . .
Fancy Pants Rants asks:
Still, someone needs to clarify for me: First, what did the KGB gain by offing JFK in favor of LBJ? Second, if the KGB had been almost fantastically successful over a period of more than 100 years in virtually deconstructing America, culminating in the election of a left-leaning president like Obama and the candidacies of lefties like Hillary and Kamala, why would said KGB have done an about-face and blessed us with The Donald? Why would Hillary, Biden and Harris not have meshed perfectly with the deconstruction of America via the continuing long march through the institutions? If the KGB actually thought installing The Donald would advance their deconstruction agenda more than Hillary and Kamala, one can only conclude that, far from being supermen, they are in fact more like - yep - the Three Stooges.
Fancy Pants Rants should google the words "riebling" "wedge" and "archive" simultaneously, click on "Full Text", then press on "ctrl" and "F" simultaneously and enter the word "sinister" in the search box and press on the down arrow a few times until he gets to "Chapter 11: Sinister Implications" and read the whole chapter, but especially the paragraph that begins with the sentence, "But what would the Soviets possibly gain from Kennedy’s death that would be worth the risk of U.S. retaliation?" and the paragraphs following it.
If Fancy Pants Rants had read my reply to Sandy Larsen more carefully, he would have realized that I'd already referred to Riebling's 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, and he might even have read it and actually learned something,
But I doubt it.
Fancy Pants Rants makes the brilliant observation:
[My comments are in brackets.]
The CT enthusiasm for Bagley ...
[at the CT-dominated Ed Forum]
... seems almost entirely to relate to his very latter-day revelations to Blunt and Newman that Oswald was a "witting asset"...
[sic; Bagley told Blunt that Oswald had to be a "witting defector," not a "witting asset," and did so upon reading some CIA documents that Blunt volunteered to him that he hadn't been privy to in 1959 and 1960 -- which documents showed that all of the incoming non-CIA cables on his defection were sent to Bruce Solie's office in the Office of Security instead of where they would normally go -- the Soviet Russia Division -- suggesting that someone in Solie's office had arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics for them to be routed that way, which in turn suggests that the person who requested said rerouting knew that Oswald would be "defecting"]
... of the CIA, which he (Bagley) seemed to know nothing about while he was employed by the CIA or, indeed, until he encountered Blunt at age 85.
[sic; since Bagley was born on 11 November 1925 and met Blunt at the March 2008 Raleigh Spy Conference, he was 82 years old when he "encountered Blunt"]
Overall, the enthusiasm for Bagley at the Ed Forum was distinctly muted.
[What do you expect?]
Some enthusiasm, yes (on the part of "witting asset"...
[sic; see above]
... fans), but little for The Monster Plot and even considerable skepticism ...
[by whom?]
... that Bagley himself was a disinformation agent.
[Sounds like typical paranoia of tinfoil-hat JFKA conspiracy theorists, be they far-left or far-right]
My skepticism relates primarily to the reality that (1) he had pretty obvious monetary incentives for the bombshells he revealed long after he had been given the boot by the CIA, and (2) it's pretty easy to view those bombshells as late-in-life grudge-settling efforts
[I suspect that you're projecting your character onto Bagley, Fancy Pants Rants].
-- Tom
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TG has apparently spoken. Did he say anything I should know?
Discerning readers may note that I went back through all my posts on this thread and removed most of the TG-oriented snarkiness. This thread is not about TG per se, although he does seem to be the only purveyor of what I have called the KGB stuff and shall henceforth call the KGB Deconstruction of America, Including Without Limitation the JFKA. We lawyers love to say "including without limitation" almost as much as "ferret out moles."
Carry on, TG. I am forced to conclude that no one else, without limitation, has a clear grasp of what you're talking about either. I see that you appear to still be an active member at the Ed Forum, albeit limited to two posts per day. Perhaps you could reintroduce the KGB stuff there and see if anyone bites.
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TG has apparently spoken. Did he say anything I should know?
Dear Fancy Pants Rants,
Knowing you, you'll get so antsy that you'll have to read this:
Why didn't you include the first two sentences (in bold, below) in my reply to Sandy Larsen (RIP) on 15 January 2018 at the so-called JFK Assassination Debate - Education Forum when he asked me,
Tommy,
What makes you think that a mole might have had something to do with the assassination? Or with Oswald? Or is this sheer speculation?
[Dear Sandy,]
Pure speculation in a wilderness of mirrors, Sandy.
All hypothetical at this point, but a paradigm that might help to explain some apparent anomalies ...
Now let me ask YOU a question:
IF there was a mole or a network of embedded KGB-types, would they have been willing to kill JFK (or any other U.S. president for that matter) if they had been instructed by their KGB / GRU handler(s) to do so, to enable ever-increasing KGB / GRU influence on our country through "active measures counterintelligence operations" (which started in 1921) and "strategic deception operations" (which started in 1959), thereby giving rise to paralyzing, cancer-like propaganda and disinformation (e.g., "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK," and "The evil, evil CIA killed JFK via the 'Harvey & Lee and Two Marguerites Program,'" and "The evil, evil CIA and the Mafia ... ")?
So that, you know, ..... eventually a Russian Mafia-compromised (and therefore eminently blackmail-able) anti-NATO "useful idiot" like Donald James Trump could be installed as our president?
Or do you believe that some disgruntled DNC or NSA insider not only hacked the DNC's and Podesta's e-mails, but gave said e-mails to Julian Assange and DNCLeaks? And that Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0 are just an evil, evil CIA "cover story" or "fantasy"?
LOL
-- Tommy
PS: I would suggest that pieces of the puzzle lie in Bill Simpich's "State Secret," John Newman's "Oswald and the CIA," and Tennent H. Bagley's "Spy Wars" and "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," and Mark Riebling's "Wedge".
. . . . . . .
Fancy Pants Rants asks:
Still, someone needs to clarify for me: First, what did the KGB gain by offing JFK in favor of LBJ? Second, if the KGB had been almost fantastically successful over a period of more than 100 years in virtually deconstructing America, culminating in the election of a left-leaning president like Obama and the candidacies of lefties like Hillary and Kamala, why would said KGB have done an about-face and blessed us with The Donald? Why would Hillary, Biden and Harris not have meshed perfectly with the deconstruction of America via the continuing long march through the institutions? If the KGB actually thought installing The Donald would advance their deconstruction agenda more than Hillary and Kamala, one can only conclude that, far from being supermen, they are in fact more like - yep - the Three Stooges.
Fancy Pants Rants should google the words "riebling" "wedge" and "archive" simultaneously, click on "Full Text", then press on "ctrl" and "F" simultaneously and enter the word "sinister" in the search box and press on the down arrow a few times until he gets to "Chapter 11: Sinister Implications" and read the whole chapter, but especially the paragraph that begins with the sentence, "But what would the Soviets possibly gain from Kennedy’s death that would be worth the risk of U.S. retaliation?" and the paragraphs following it.
If Fancy Pants Rants had read my reply to Sandy Larsen more carefully, he would have realized that I'd already referred to Riebling's 1994 book, Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, and he might even have read it and actually learned something,
But I doubt it.
Fancy Pants Rants makes the brilliant observation:
[My comments are in brackets.]
The CT enthusiasm for Bagley ...
[at the CT-dominated Ed Forum]
... seems almost entirely to relate to his very latter-day revelations to Blunt and Newman that Oswald was a "witting asset"...
[sic; Bagley told Blunt that Oswald had to be a "witting defector," not a "witting asset," and did so upon reading some CIA documents that Blunt provided to him that he hadn't been privy to in 1959 and 1960 -- which documents showed that all of the incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald's defection were sent to Bruce Solie's office in the Office of Security instead of where they would normally go -- the Soviet Russia Division -- suggesting that someone in Solie's office had arranged in advance with the Records Integration Division and the Office of Mail Logistics for them to be routed that way, which in turn suggests that the person who requested said rerouting knew in advance that Oswald would be "defecting"]
... of the CIA, which he (Bagley) seemed to know nothing about while he was employed by the CIA or, indeed, until he encountered Blunt at age 85.
[sic; since Bagley was born on 11 November 1925 and met Blunt at the March 2008 Raleigh Spy Conference, he was 82 years old when he "encountered Blunt"]
Overall, the enthusiasm for Bagley at the Ed Forum was distinctly muted.
[What do you expect?]
Some enthusiasm, yes (on the part of "witting asset"...
[sic; see above]
... fans), but little for The Monster Plot and even considerable skepticism ...
[How many and whom?]
That Bagley himself was a disinformation agent.
[Sounds like typical paranoia of tinfoil-hat JFKA conspiracy theorists, be they far-left or far-right]
My skepticism relates primarily to the reality that (1) he had pretty obvious monetary incentives for the bombshells he revealed long after he had been given the boot by the CIA, and (2) it's pretty easy to view those bombshells as late-in-life grudge-settling efforts
[I suspect that you're projecting your character onto Bagley, Fancy Pants Rants].
-- Tom
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Since TG just keeps posting, he is quite correct: I did look at this post and will respond as follows to the following. Then I, at least, am done.
Dear Fancy Pants Rants,
Knowing you, you'll get so antsy that you'll have to read this:
Why didn't you include the first two sentences (in bold, below) in my reply to Sandy Larsen (RIP) on 15 January 2018 at the so-called JFK Assassination Debate - Education Forum when he asked me,
Tommy,
What makes you think that a mole might have had something to do with the assassination? Or with Oswald? Or is this sheer speculation?
[Dear Sandy,]
Pure speculation in a wilderness of mirrors, Sandy.
All hypothetical at this point, but a paradigm that might help to explain some apparent anomalies ...
Well, let's see: TG's exchange with the late Sandy was in 2018, more than eight years ago. Since the KGB stuff - oops, sorry, the KGB Deconstruction of America, Including Without Limitation the JFKA stuff - now appears to occupy TG's every waking hour, I assumed he would no longer characterize it as "pure speculation."
If he does still characterize it as pure speculation ... well, I for one am heartened to learn this.
Now we are really done. My current fascination is with Royell's One Glove Cop, which would make a great name for a rock group or perhaps a rapper: "Appearing together, one night only, Bad Bunny and One Glove Cop." Yeah, I like it.
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No, wait, there's more! The genesis of TG's theory actually predates the election of The Donald.
Here is TG floating his "joint KGB / CIA assassination" theory in 2012:
Did They "Do It" Together?
I mean, of course, the KGB and the CIA and the assassination of JFK, not something of a kinkier nature, you naughty boys and girls!
You know, maybe they had some common "vested interests" --- that sort of thing?
Or, maybe it was a case of "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, and we'll both get filthy rich ...
... or at least a shiny new Lada / Ferrari and a dacha / house on the Black Sea / in La Jolla!)".
--Tommy
David Josephs of Harvey & Lee fame then fleshed it out, to which TG replied "Exactly!":
Hold up a second Robert [Morrow, who had described TG's idea as having a one-in-a-trillion chance of being correct] ...
Are you trying to tell us that you cannot see how HAWKS in the KGB as well as the ruling economic elite in Russia (yes virginia, there really are wealthy people in communist nations) would not want to perpetuate the Cold War and avoid peace at all costs...? Yet you have no problem with the HAWKS of the USA, in the Military and CIA, to perpetuate the Cold War?
I think you are missing the role of the emerging global corporations, financed by the international banks and the benefit derived by the constant state of Cold (and Hot) War.
Billions upon billions of "officially spent money" was lost in Russia when the Cold War finally ended... Where the US government & companies just shifted focus from the WAR on Communism to the WAR on Terrorism and continued to spend accordingly, the Russian economy was corrupted by organized crime taking on all shapes and persona.
Richard Case Nagell was not even sure which side was ordering him to kill Oswald...
I believe if you step back and see the overriding focus was on MONEY and POWER... and that the groups that desired control of such things continue regardless of ideology, theology, political party or any other such nonsense... AND add that the CIA as well as a number of other agencies were choked full of "communists" who thought it crucial NEVER to give in to the USA..
It is not such a stretch to see cooperation among thieves to keep their livlihoods AND organizations intact.
To dovetail back to your thesis - LBJ - he cooperated cause of all the money involved, and his freedom. "None Dare Call It a Conspiracy" helps in this question to see that the CIA and KGD were in the same business... perpetuate the organization, protect the organization, expand the organization so that a state of fear persists and people will be more and more willing to give up personal freedoms and liberty to FEEL protected...
JFK's future dictated that these two agencies would no longer be needed - or at least be seriously curtailed... and they both knew it.
And this is why men like Dub'ya Bush do not get executed... He's one of THEM.
Now you can see where I have gone awry: Silly me thought TG's notion of the superman-level success of the KGB in deconstructing America related to the long march through the institutions and the election of lefties such as Obama, Biden, Hillary and Kamala. Silly me thought it had something to do with advancing Marxist/socialist ideology and that sort of thing. No, no, no - it was all about the Benjamins from the get-go - or at least that was the theory in 2012 - and Dubya was as much of a useful idiot as The Donald.
I can't even begin to keep this stuff straight. I won't bore you further. If it all makes sense to you, keep it to yourself because I no longer care.
Breaking news: Jim Di started a thread specifically to deal (not kindly) with TG's KGB stuff. It isn't worth reading, but at last I understand: EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENDED IN AMERICA since 1921 has been KGB-orchestrated. Trump, Biden, the collapse of the educational system, my Milwaukee Braves winning the World Series in 1957, everything. At least that narrows it down.
Dear Fancy Pants Rants,
As I've already revealed, Oliver Stone's self-described mythological ("to counter the myth of the Warren Report") film "JFK" (the genesis of which was a KGB article published in the Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Paese Sera, four days after overly ambitious, scandal plagued, and revengeful Jim Garrison arrested Clay Shaw on suspicion of having organized a homosexual "thrill-kill" assassination of JFK) had a big influence on me . . . as it did, unfortunately, on millions of other impressionable Americans.
Although I started to "see the light" when a West-looking Ukrainian politician, Viktor Yuschenko, was poisoned with dioxin in 2004, it took me a long time to get over that bit of 1991 KGB-encouraged celluloid disinformation, and my return to "sanity" was slowed down considerably by my naively joining, in 2005, the far-left JFKA CT web site ironically called the JFK Assassination Debate - Education Forum, where I fell under the influence of the likes of Comrade Jim DiEugenio and all of the other far-left CTs who were there at that time, and most of whose names I no longer remember (although I must say that Dawn Meridith and a few others do come to mind).
The fact that by 2012, as evidenced above, I no longer thought the evil, evil, evil CIA-Mafia alone had killed JFK, but that the hit may have been a joint op between them and your beloved (or at least de-emphasized) KGB* is evidence that I'd actually come a long way, baby.
What's ironic is that I now think it's possible that the assassination was a joint effort by a KGB*-controlled part of the CIA and the KGB*, proper.
How you like Dem apples, Fancy Pants Rants?
*Today's SVR and FSB
-- Tom
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Since TG just keeps posting, he is quite correct: I did look at this post and will respond as follows to the following. Then I, at least, am done.
Well, let's see: TG's exchange with the late Sandy was in 2018, more than eight years ago. Since the KGB stuff - oops, sorry, the KGB Deconstruction of America, Including Without Limitation the JFKA stuff - now appears to occupy TG's every waking hour, I assumed he would no longer characterize it as "pure speculation."
If he does still characterize it as pure speculation ... well, I for one am heartened to learn this.
I hate to bum you out, Fancy Pants Rants, but I hadn't yet read John M. Newman's 2022 book, Uncovering Popov's Mole (which he dedicated to your bugbear, Tennent H, Bagley, btw), which I highly suggest that YOU read (but disregard the part where he says some high-level military officers killed JFK because he refused to nuke Peking and Moscow in 1963).
Whether or not the Ruskies were behind the JFKA, I like Newman's idea that Bruce Solie sent LHO to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" in the wrong part of the CIA.
-- Tom
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LP-
You may have overstated the case against Bagley/Angleton. There were (and are?) plenty of people in the CIA skeptical about Nosenko.
In addition, John Newman is a serious researcher, and he has posited Bruce Solie was a KGB mole and running LHO.
There was a KGB'er in Minsk who said he was running LHO, but stopped once LHO returned to the US, and that yes, Marina was a "swallow." She lso stopped being of service upon departing the SU.
LHO contacted not only KGB, but G2 assets in Mexico City. LHO spoke of assassinating JFK while in MC. Castro spoke of revenge assassination attempts on the Kennedy brothers, in September of 1963.
TG is roughly right that the KGB, or other Soviet assets, have been running disinformation campaigns in the US during the entire postwar era, and surely they often manipulated left-wing assets in doing so.
TG now contends Moscow is manipulating right-wing assets also. Tucker Carlson anyone?
As to any particular arcane detail about the KGB in the postwar era, or some obscure name or reference...sure, I may be lost.
I agree with the summation of Sean Coleman on the Ed Forum, and even worse, it has an anti-Semitic crackpot, William N. as its primary "moderator." How low can you go?
I rather suspect John Simkin is in his dotage....like deep into his dotage....
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[LP] may have overstated the case against Bagley/Angleton. There were (and are?) plenty of people in the CIA skeptical about Nosenko.
FPR doesn't want to learn about mole-protecting putative KGB staff officer / false defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 / false (or perhaps rogue) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964 Yuri Nosenko because Nosenko isn't a "hoot" and because he intuits that if he did learn about him, he'd have to consider the possibility that the KGB* really DID install The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") as our "president."
*Today's SVR and FSB
John Newman is a serious researcher, and he has posited Bruce Solie was a KGB mole and running LHO.
Dear "BC,"
Please remember to say, "Probable KGB mole Bruce Leonard Solie (look him up) in the mole-hunting Office of Security was father-figure-requiring James Angleton's confidant, mentor, and mole hunting superior."
-- "TG"
LHO spoke of assassinating JFK while in MC.
Correction:
The allegation that Oswald spoke in Mexico City of killing JFK comes from Fidel Castro and his interviewer(s), Kremlin-loyal quadruple-agent(s) Morris and /or Jack Childs (aka the gumshoe-FBI's "SOLO").
Tom is roughly right that the KGB, or other Soviet assets, have been running disinformation campaigns in the US during the entire postwar era, and surely they often manipulated left-wing assets in doing so.
"Roughly right"?
"Surely"?
Tom now contends Moscow is manipulating right-wing assets also. Tucker Carlson anyone?
The KGB* has been manipulating everyone for several decades, e.g., Oliver Stone AND us through his self-described mythological ("to counter for the myth of the Warren Report") movie (sic), "JFK."
*Today's SVR and FSB
I rather suspect John Simkin is deep into his dotage.
I rather suspect John Simkin is an aging Trotskyite.
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TG--Good points.