JFK Assassination Forum

To be fair to those of the CT persuasion, Ruby is the perfect illustration of what we find at every twist and turn of the JFKA.

He could have been someone’s garden-variety grandfather who owned a laundromat, had an entirely ordinary background and nice family, simply lost it when JFKA was assassinated, shot Oswald in the hallway of the DPD, and was sentenced by a sympathetic jury to 15 years in prison. No mystery, just one of those things.

But noooo, Ruby is a shady character with DPD connections, mob connections and Cuban connections; his supposed motive for killing Oswald seems iffy at best; he enters the garage under mysterious circumstances that practically scream “he had help”; he murders Oswald on national TV while Oswald is shackled to Leavelle in circumstances that practically scream “how was that impossible?”; he quickly morphs into a bizarre psychotic who says all sorts of weird things; and he’s represented by a celebrity tort lawyer who’s interested mostly in self-publicity and pretty well mangles the defense.

Like almost every aspect of the JFKA, it almost seems to have been designed to be and to remain forever puzzling. Yes, CTers like MTG and many others turn these puzzles into scenarios Agatha Christie could never have imagined, but they are puzzles that have a strange, almost designed quality to them. Is it really possible that we "just happen" to have these puzzles at every twist and turn? I suppose it is, but it's ... puzzling.

Dear FPR,

A laundromat with a strip joint in the back?

Reminds me of the performance by an aging stripper I and the dressed-in-their-Sunday-Best, going-home-from-church families were subjected to on Kodiak in 1973 while chowing down on the all-you-can-eat buffet-style lunch in the [the name escapes me now] bar.

Thanks for jogging that memory.

I've led an interesting life, with alleged-by-you "OCD" and all.

That "OCD" must explain why I kept going back for more fried chicken that day.

I just had to do it.

-- Tom

I mean Tom ... Tom  ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ... Tom ..................

[...]

Dear Fancy Pants Rants,

Some quick, “tip of the iceberg,” points:

1) The position of Deputy Chief of the Soviet Russia Division (in all its incarnations) was a two-year one for everybody, ergo, Bagley's tenure there was planned-in-advance to end when it did. Furthermore, he chose to be Chief of Station in Brussels when that time came.

2) Regarding the fact that Bagley was once considered to be a possible “mole” by one person in the Agency, the following is what Angleton-and-Golitsyn-hating David Wise wrote in his 1992 book, Molehunt, about that allegation.

My comments are in brackets.

Early in 1967, Bagley, then the Deputy Chief of the Soviet Bloc Division, was offered the post of Chief of Station in Brussels. By September, he was in place. Bagley's exit was soon followed by David Murphy's departure for Paris. But no one was safe from the suspicion pervading the CIA. Now, Bagley himself became a target of Angleton’s mole hunters. Ed Petty, a member of the SIG [Angleton’s Special Investigation Group] began digging into his background. Petty fastened on an episode that had taken place years earlier, when Bagley had been stationed in Bern, handling Soviet operations in the Swiss capital. At the time, Bagley was attempting to recruit an officer of the UBC, the Polish intelligence service, in Switzerland. Petty concluded that a phrase in a letter from Michal Goleniewski, the Polish intelligence officer who called himself Sniper and who later defected to the CIA, suggested that “two weeks after approval of the operation by headquarters,” the KGB had advanced knowledge of the Swiss recruitment attempt --  the advance knowledge that could only have come from a mole in the CIA. Bagley said it proved nothing of the sort. “I was running the correspondence phase of Sniper in Switzerland,” he said. “We wrote a letter to a Polish security officer when I was in Bern station.” The letter, an attempt to recruit the Pole to work for the CIA, “mentioned the man's boss. Sometime later, Goleniewski wrote again, mentioning the name of the UB chief in Bern, “whose name you already know,” which meant that Goleniewski knew of our letter. But that doesn't mean that there was a mole in CIA. It means the target turned the letter into his service and our guy [Sniper] was high up enough to know about it.” Bagley said that Petty had interpreted the episode to mean that “the UB knew of the recruitment attempt in advance, which is quite different.” Petty, nevertheless, wrote an analysis of the Swiss recruitment episode, and of Bagley’s file, and concluded that “Bagley was a candidate to whom we should pay serious attention.” The study gave Bagley the cryptonym GIRAFFE. Petty said he submitted his paper “with some trepidation” because “I was well aware that Bagley had long been a protégé of Jim Angleton. Petty turned in his report to James Ramsay Hunt, Angleton’s deputy. “Hunt said, ‘This is the best thing I've seen yet.’” But, Petty added, he heard nothing from Angleton. “The Bagley report stewed in Angleton's inbox for a considerable time,” Petty said. “Then one day he called me in to discuss the Nosenko case. He brought up some of the points in Bagley's 900-plus-page [sic; 835-page] study. “And I said, ‘If there is a penetration [there probably was – Bruce Solie and/or Leonard V. McCoy], then Nosenko could not have been genuine.’” A mole in the CIA, Petty argued, would have told the KGB of Nosenko’s initial contact with the agency in 1962, and, Nosenko, had he been a true asset, would never have come back in 1964. “I said to him, ‘You don't need all these points in Bagleys 900-pager -- it's much simpler than that.” “Angleton sat there and mulled this point over for some time. Then he said to me, ‘Pete is not a Soviet spy.’” At that moment, Petty saw the light, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus. It suddenly hit him; not Bagley but Angleton himself was the mole. “I was flabbergasted,” Petty said. “Because the subject of my paper about Pete had not arisen. It was at that point that I decided I'd been looking at it all wrong by assuming Golitsyn was good as gold. I began rethinking everything. If you turned the flip side, it all made sense. Golitsyn was sent to exploit Angleton. Then the next step, maybe not just an exploitation, and I had to extend it to Angleton. Golitsyn might have been dispatched as the perfect man to manipulate Angleton or provide Angleton with material on the basis of which he [Angleton] could penetrate and control other services.” [Either that, or Petty was all wet, and the mole was father-figure-requiring Angleton’s confidant, mentor, and mole-hunting superior in the mole-hunting Office of Security, Bruce Leonard Solie -- look him up.]

3) Regarding your hero, John L. Hart, read his lie-filled HSCA testimony and then read Bagley’s in which he rips Hart the proverbial new one.

4) It’s funny how far-right you and far-left Mike Clark (you can look up his posts on this forum) both denigrate Bagley’s character. You because you're secretly scared to death that KGB-trained-but-fascistic Vladimir Putin may have installed your fascistic buddy, The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") in 2017 and 2025. Smith because Bagley knew that Yuri “The KGB Had Nothing To Do With Oswald In The USSR” Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place-in-Geneva-in-June-1962 and a false (or perhaps rogue?) physical defector to the U.S. in February 1964.

5) I'm happy to see that you finally bucked up enough courage to read my Wikipedia article on Tennent H. Bagley. Feel free to permanently edit it if you can.

6) You really should start saving your money up so you can afford to pay Substack six bucks a month because then you'll be able to read my 500 free-to-read articles there -- two very recent ones of which are titled "The Convulsive Dance of Fancy Pants Lance" and "FPR 'discredits' Golitsyn's warnings re KGB's 1959-on Master Plan."

That's all for now, FPR, but be forewarned that the above list is subject to expansion after I'd had a cup of coffee . . .

-- Tom

[...]

Dear Comrade Griffith,

How many evil, evil "Deep State" bad guys and bad gals do you figure were involved, altogether, in the planning, the "patsy-ing," the planting of false evidence, the shooting, the getting-away, the altering of all of the Dealey Plaza films and photos / Bethesda photos and X-rays, and the all-important (and continuing!!!) cover up?

Thirty?

-- Tom

Zowie wowie!

Cowabunga, it looks as though Fancy Pants Rants is gonna post!

TG--

I have wondered why Trump kowtows to Putin, and won't put down the Ayatollah, Russia's sole remaining client state thug-leader and provider of drones that murder Ukrainians.

Wowie zowie.