JFK Assassination Forum

Ben, I'm not violently arguing with you. I simply insist on approaching any CT scenario with the threshold question "What sense would that have made, assuming the conspirators were at least minimally rational?"

Your problem is you assume there were conspirators. Don't you think it would make more sense to establish that first.

"Modern AI—particularly large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems like OpenAI's Operator—is deliberately designed to be "eager to please" the user. This "people-pleasing" behavior is not born of emotion or desire, but rather through training techniques (such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) that reward the model for providing satisfying, relevant, and helpful responses."

  Leading A-I without first hand knowledge doesn't mean very much

Amen. I wish this "AI" and "Grok" crap would be banned from the forum.

OF COURSE, AI is going to pick up all the Armstrong-type stuff across the internet and indiscriminately make that its "answer." When challenged, it will find the Lance-type stuff - probably my first post here! - and rethink the issue. AI does no thinking at all.

I find it depressing that when an appellate lawyer with 40 years of experience spends probably 100 hours on this silly issue, with the work showing no signs of being anything other than rock-solid, someone is compelled to "check his work" with AI. Jesus Christ, what a world.

Run the Lamb Chop issue through AI just for fun. AI told me that SHARI LEWIS HANDED LAMB CHOP TO JACKIE at Love Field. Ya think???

"Modern AI—particularly large language models (LLMs) and agentic systems like OpenAI's Operator—is deliberately designed to be "eager to please" the user. This "people-pleasing" behavior is not born of emotion or desire, but rather through training techniques (such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) that reward the model for providing satisfying, relevant, and helpful responses."

  Leading A-I without first hand knowledge doesn't mean very much

You seem almost compelled to attempt kneejerk oneupsmanship on every thread. Your statement is simply wrong. I spent 20 of my 40 years as a lawyer working in offices that did little but criminal prosecution. The cui bono inquiry is often one of the initial stages in crime analysis and one of the most critical. Cui bono "is a foundational principle in crime analysis used to identify potential suspects and motives by determining who gains from a criminal act." Often, as in the Nancy Guthrie case, the evidence leads nowhere. Sometimes there is no meaningful evidence. Cui bono is a tool to identify those who had a motive, which the investigative process can then whittle down. For those not inclined to accept the LN verdict, cui bono would put LBJ and probably Carlos Marcello at the top of the list, even if neither actually had anything to do with the JFKA. As I said, with LBJ there is really no credible evidence, but this does not mean that a cui bono inquiry is illegitimate.

The investigation into the JFKA didn't start with looking at a motive. That was an afterthought. Had they started with who had a motive, they would have never gotten around to LHO. Instead they very quickly found forensic evidence to link him to the crime and his fleeing the TSBD and gunning down a cop a short time later made it even more clear that LHO was their man. D.A. Wade later that evening suggested a motive when he pointed out that Oswald had lived in the Soviet Union for a time, but that was not what the formal charges were based on. Had the case gone to trial, I doubt a possible motive would have even come up. Unless Oswald admitted to the crime and gave his reasons, they would have had no evidence of motive. Wade might have tried to slip it in during opening or closing arguments as he did in his presser and if he did, I'm going to take an educated guess that the defense would object. Oswald would have easily been convicted on the forensic evidence alone without the prosecution ever establishing what his motive was.

I liked this post on Ed Smith.

You probably know what follows below, but the little snippet on a fellow named Trousdale might be new to you. LHO was a KGB asset even before he went to Russia?

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There is an interesting footnote in “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” a book largely about Richard Case Nagell, written by veteran JFKA researcher Dick Russell:

“A May 15, 1973, memo in the files of researcher Richard Popkin recounts a conversation with former CIA official Victor Marchetti in which Marchetti reportedly offered "a theory he claimed to have heard that fits with his own picture of the chaos in the CIA; namely that the KGB has infiltrated the CIA and the CIA has infiltrated the KGB so it is impossible at the present stage to tell who is who (he mentioned a case of having been sent to meet somebody and being shown all sorts of identification and then being totally unable to tell whether he was dealing with a U.S. or Russian agent). Marchetti thinks it is the KGB branch of the CIA that killed Kennedy and that the U.S. CIA is too embarrassed to investigate and reveal the real state of affairs."

This long-ago revelation of Marchetti’s, now more than five decades old, has been re-vivified in recent years by John Newman’s book, “Uncovering Popov’s Mole,” which posits that senior CIA’er Bruce Solie was a KGB asset, and was running LHO.

For background on Marchetti, see https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKmarchetti.htm. Some of you old heads may have memories jogged: Richard Popkin authored “The Second Oswald,” in 1966.

It is difficult to challenge Marchetti’s observations as the mere fluff of armchair historian or conspiracy buff.

Marchetti first worked for Army Intelligence in 1951, attended college, and then joined the CIA in 1955, rising to senior positions before retiring in 1969, and thereafter, perhaps most famously, writing about the JFKA for the dubious Liberty Lobby’s “The Spotlight” publication.

Marchetti’s also wrote the book “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” and appears to have bona fides as an earnest JFKA researcher, and one who had actual “street cred.”

Marchetti’s and Newman’s observations also resonate with the narrative of still-enigmatic Richard Case Nagell, who claimed to be a double-agent (US-Soviet) who was assigned to interdict LHO’s mission, on assignment from Moscow, to assassinate JFK.

In 1992, Carl Oglesby, the nearly iconic leftist and author of many books, including several on the JFKA, authored a forward to Russell’s book, in which he wrote, “We do not yet know for example, whether Oswald was being run by the CIA or KGB, by the ONI or GRU or some as of yet unknown bureau of the Cold War, one side of the other. Nor do we know for a fact who Oswald himself believed was running him. All we may guess at, according to Russell, is that what Oswald believed to be true and the actual truth might in fact have been two very different things.”

There are other murky details linking Lee Harvey Oswald to the KGB, especially the Russian intel agency in Minsk, less than a half-half-mile from where LHO lived for two years while in the Soviet Union.

A KGB officer there said that he “ran” LHO, and that Marina Oswald has been a KGB asset, but that she snapped her ties to the spy agency after marrying LHO and going to the US.

From CIA files:

“IJDECANTER (a CIA asset) knew Yurshak as Belorussian KGB in Minsk in the early 1980s. Yurshak was in his late 50s then. When asked if Yurshak was bragging, he said, "no...I think that 100 percent he was involved in this Oswald case...He was stuck to his one point of view. First, never had any kind of task for Oswald to kill Kennedy. Second, that he was actually recruited and he ran him. And third, Marina was our swallow and then she rejected cooperation.”

Of course, just as one might suspect the CIA would scrub its files of connections to LHO, so one would expect the KGB or Belarus intel agencies to do the same.

Gimlet-eyed fans and critics of the “limited hangout” defense-tactic might believe this KGB admission that it was running LHO, but not involved in the JFKA, was in that category of dissembling.   

Add to the bubbling stew the more-recent book “Operation Dragon” written by former CIA Director James Woolsey in 2021, along with former Romanian intel officer Ion Mihai Pacepa. The pair posit that LHO was KGB asset, had been brainwashed in Russia to perp the JFKA. Curiously, Woolsey and Pacepa echo Nagell’s narrative, that officials in Moscow wanted to recall LHO, but could not.

Of course, one could dismiss Woolsey’s book as written with a Cold War agenda in mind; indeed, it is the reverse mirror image of the Old Guard Left Wing and present-day MAGA-Moscow narratives of the JFKA, that blame the CIA and Western globalist cabals for the president’s murder.

In JFKA-land, too often the ideology writes the agenda, and the agenda writes the narrative.

But there is more on LHO as a KGB asset: During his visit to Mexico City in late September 1963, LHO met Valerie Kostikov, senior KGB’er said to be in charge of “wet work’ in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, that includes assassinations. (There were two other KGB’ers who met with LHO at the same time, all were filmed and recorded for a 1993 PBS special, in which they confirmed they met the real LHO).

Not only that, it is now known that Kostikov had assets in the US, assets that Kostikov also met down in Mexico.

“Kostikov himself was a known Soviet intelligence agent, suspected of contact with covert Soviet assets, including Americans, operating inside the United States. He had been under CIA observation and surveillance in Mexico City, as well as during his travels in Mexico, and was known to have met with a Soviet asset (designated as “Tumbleweed”/a European then living in the United States) that the FBI was monitoring inside the United States. As recently as September 1963, Kostikov had even been placed under surveillance while traveling in northern Mexico,” report Larry Hancock and David Boylan in their recent superb book, “The Oswald Puzzle.”

There is also a curious snippet from a man named Bill Trousdale, who happened to share a train from Helsinki into Russia with LHO. Fellow Americans, the pair bantered a bit on the train.

According the JFK Facts, “Trousdale saw Oswald get special treatment from the Russian border guards: “At the border my bags were given pretty thorough going over,” Trousdale wrote, “but they scarcely looked at Lee’s.’”

Was LHO already a de facto KGB asset, and waved through the border?

(It should be noted that Alan Dale recently related, within the EF-JFKA forum, that Newman does not suspect LHO of a role in the JFKA. Additionally Hancock and Boylan do not regard LHO as a suspect in the JFKA, although he may have been manipulated in surrounding events.)

A circumspect JFKA assassination buff does not blithely challenge John Newman, nor Larry Hancock and David Boylan, the latter two who contend LHO was not a CIA asset, but only a misfit and a Marxist who wanted transit to Cuba. All three are serious researchers, intelligent, earnest and non-partisan, and appear lacking in agendas and biases—the best investigators we have, IMHO.

And now Newman says Solie, KGB mole, may have been running LHO, and Hancock and Boylan say LHO was not a CIA asset. Or anyone’s asset.

And yet—how it is possible to understand the JFKA without explaining LHO’s involvement in the JFKA?

LHO's behavior, in the immediate-post JFKA moments, was of one who was complicit, or believed he had been framed. And indeed, LHO did not say he must be a victim of circumstance, or he must have only matched the description of a JFKA and Tippit-killer suspect. Instead, addressing reporters, LHO himself said he was a "patsy." 

Bur after 60 years of researchers hunting for the CIA’s operational connection to LHO or the JFKA, why has nobody found one?

One might also ponder why does the pub crawler, returning to home at night, look for his lost keys under the street lamps? Because that’s where the light is. But perhaps not where the keys are.

JFKA researchers pursue leads under the CIA street lamp—because there is no light under the KGB street lamp, or that of G-2, the Cuban intel service said to have riddled the leaky Cuban exile community with agents (or double agents). But the keys could be there, in the dark.

Even Marchetti, embedded with the CIA during the very years that, some contend, elements with the agency had plotted JFK’s demise, was unsure if the CIA had been involved in the JFKA, or CIA assets working for the KGB.

Angleton

As noted by many, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s counterintelligence chief and putative mole-hunter, was the WC’s main contact or source of information at the intel agency. This has raised suspicions, but also makes sense in light of the observations of Newman and Marchetti.

If LHO was being run by KGB moles inside the CIA, then it would be Angleton who could best find that out, and massage information flowing to the WC to hide that reality—as suggested by Marchetti.

The dubious appointment of Allen Dulles to the WC also might be explained as the CIA wanting to close off inquires into KGB infiltration of the CIA, and Russian links to LHO. Was the CIA sitting on a power-keg—KGB operatives within the CIA had manipulated LHO?

Conclusion

At the end of the day, there are many captivating versions of the JFKA, both LN and CT, but none compelling. There are as many JFKA narratives as there are narrators.

The problem started on 11/22, when LHO’s confederates (I suspect he had two) were not apprehended, and the problem was compounded on 11/24, when LHO was murdered. Dead men tell no tales.

The only JFKA suspect known beyond reasonable doubt to be in Dealey Plaza on 11/22 was LHO, so this leaves open speculation as to the ID of his co-conspirators or manipulators.

Serious researchers have ventured LHO’s confederates or handlers on 11/22 were Mafia, CIA, KGB, G-2, working for LBJ, anti-Castro exiles, splinter groups such as Alpha 66, or former spook Ed Lansdale on a revenge mission for the Kennedy Administration-backed Diem assassinations.

After 60 years of reading about the JFKA, and maybe a dozen years reading primary documents, I have never reached a conclusion. Or perhaps I have reached many conclusions, but none really hold water.

CIA files may be opening up (with exceptions). It is an interesting time.

Great caution is urged on the use of KGB files. Moscow and Tehran have been busy in promoting JFKA narratives in recent years.

In the murky world of the JFKA, I am only certain that nothing in the KGB files will show that LHO was an actual, or de facto, Russian asset.