JFK Assassination Forum
The JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Discussion & Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on August 26, 2026, 03:29:36 AM
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U.C. Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott popularized the concept of the Deep State with his anti-Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex books and articles in which he wrote about pernicious “Deep Politics.”
A long-time JFK assassination researcher, Scott believed (if I understand him correctly) that the CIA sent Lee Harvey Oswald to Moscow in October 1959 as a “dangle” in a legitimate counterintelligence hunt for a Soviet mole. In his 1996 article, “Oswald and the Hunt for Popov’s Mole,” Scott argued that intentionally false details in pre-assassination CIA and State Department cables and memoranda about Oswald were “barium meal” or “marked card” devices planted in said inter and intra communications in an effort to flush out the mole who had betrayed CIA's spy, GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov. He further believed that unknown and therefore unidentified-by-him CIA bad actors became aware of the operation and "piggybacked" it to frame Oswald for President Kennedy’s upcoming assassination.
Twenty-two years later, in March 2018, Scott learned at a presentation by John M. Newman on Tennent H. Bagley’s 2007 book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games, that Popov, wasn’t uncovered by the KGB due to sloppy CIA tradecraft and superior KGB surveillance in early 1959, as it came to be commonly believed, but was betrayed by a mole in January 1957 in Washington, D.C., movie houses, and that, in the interest of “source protection,” the KGB had allowed him to continue spying for the CIA until it secretly arrested him in Moscow in December 1958 and very cleverly (and still in the interest of "source protection") played-him-back against the Agency until he was publicily arrested on 16 October 1959 (the same day that Oswald arrived in Moscow).
When Scott heard this, he had a near rapturous epiphany, as recorded at 09:07 in Part 1 of John M. Newman’s 3 March 2018 “Spy Wars” presentation.
(You can witness it by googling “newman” “spy wars” and “2018” simultaneously and clicking on Videos.)
Bagley (RIP) thought the mole was Edward Ellis Smith — Popov’s recently fired-by-CIA incompetent and honey-trapped dead drop setter-upper in Moscow, but Newman thinks it was father-figure-requiring James Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole hunting superior, Bruce Solie in the Office of Security — with logistical support from Smith and future Watergate burglar, James McCord, also from the Office of Security.
At the conclusion of the two-part presentation, Scott told Newman that he had convinced him that Yuri Nosenko was a false defector and asked him if he was convinced that Oswald who returned to the U.S. from Russia in June 1962 was the same one who had defected to it in October 1959.
Newman replied, “No, not at all.”
Then Scott shared the following anecdote:
He was talking with Oswald’s widow, Marina, on the phone one day when he happened to mention the Russian writer, Turgenev, and Marina exclaimed, "Oh! Alek LOVED Turgenev!"
In a conspiratorial tone of voice, Scott told the assembled group, "Oswald didn't check out any books by Turgenev from the library."
You can read into it what you will.