JFK Assassination Forum

Three of the less pleasant years of my legal career had me representing the local mental health agency. I was the “prosecutor” (as it were) for the involuntary commitment of folks suffering from serious mental disorders. In every case, I had to present the testimony of two licensed psychiatrists. Hence, I eventually had a pretty good grasp of the medical issues. It was unpleasant because many of these folks were intelligent and had loving families; they just badly needed help and were incapable of facing this reality on their own.

As I’ve described in other posts, conspiracy-prone thinking is not necessarily pathological – but don’t kid yourself, much of it is. What passes for “normal” on a JFKA forum is definitely not normal in the outside world. I see little thinking in the CT community, even at the highest levels, that I wouldn’t describe as “highly aberrant” at best. (Some, yes.)

I won’t engage in amateur diagnosis* but anyone who can’t see that the posts of someone like MTG and several others here do not reflect a mind tracking in the channels of normality needs to take a hard look in the mirror at himself.

*With the exception of OCD/TDS Tom, of course – but that’s just so obvious it scarcely even requires an amateur diagnosis.

It is entirely rational to see that the LN narrative is less than watertight and to attempt to think through whether the holes can be plausibly plugged. It is entirely rational to entertain a conspiracy theory that bears at least some resemblance to what a real-world Presidential assassination might have looked like. To become caught up in the sort of nonsense propounded by MTG and his ilk, and to fail to recognize it for what it is, is ... well, an epistemological problem in itself. The sort of CT stuff propounded by MTG and his ilk actually does a disservice to serious, rational analysis of the JFKA.

The thought process seems to be, "If I can argue that absolutely everything associated with the JFKA was in furtherance of a conspiracy, then people are sure to believe that at least some of it was." Well, no, that's not how rational analysis works.

   

Inside the Mind of Jack Ruby 

Just why did he shoot Lee Harvey Oswald?

And here a few more examples:

-- If Arnold Rowland was telling the truth when he insisted he saw two men with rifles on the TSBD’s sixth floor 5-15 minutes before the shooting, the lone-gunman theory collapses.

The WC bent over backward to accept Howard Brennan’s problematic, contradictory testimony, but they looked for any excuse, no matter how lame or petty, to reject Rowland’s testimony, even though Rowland’s wife confirmed that he had immediately told her about seeing a man holding a rifle on the west end of the sixth floor (i.e., the opposite end of the building from the sniper’s nest). In a display of glaring bias, the WC not only rejected Rowland’s testimony but went to great lengths to discredit him as a witness and as a person.

By any reasonable standard, Rowland was a credible witness who had no reason to lie about seeing two men with rifles on the sixth floor shortly before the shooting. See chapter 4, pp. 19-21, in Hasty Judgment: Why the JFK Case Is Not Closed, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JuHmh8_AXyoKFyCt0RPXEUoHDPy-qakz/view.

Several men who were in the county jail in the Criminal Courts Building also saw two men on the TSBD’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. One of them was Johnny Powell. He said the men were handling a scope on a rifle. Powell logically assumed the men were security officers.

Ruby Henderson was another person in the plaza who saw two men on the Depository’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. In agreement with Rowland, she said one of the men had a dark complexion.

Carolyn Walthers was another witness who saw two men on the TSBD’s sixth floor shortly before the shooting. She said one of the men had a rifle. In agreement with four other witnesses, she said one of the men was wearing a light-colored shirt (but Oswald wore a brown, rust-colored shirt to work that day, and was seen wearing that shirt in the second-floor lunchroom less than 90 seconds after the shooting). It is instructive to note that Walthers reported that FBI agents tried to get her to change her story.

Powell’s, Henderson’s, and Walthers’ accounts are discussed in “Overlooked Witnesses,” https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth339748/.

-- If Secret Service agent Paul Landis was telling the truth when he reported, shortly before he died, that he found a virtually undamaged bullet in the back seat of JFK’s limo and placed it on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital, the lone-gunman theory collapses.

Dr. James Robenalt, a historian who worked with Landis to prepare him for the publication of his disclosure, believes the disclosure “is really the most significant news in the assassination since 1963.”

When Landis came forward with his disclosure, he knew he was dying. He had no reason to fabricate such an account.

-- If the three pathologists at Methodist Hospital in Dallas who actually handled and examined the Harper Fragment were correct in identifying it as occipital bone, the lone-gunman theory collapses. Occipital bone is located only in the back of the skull.

One of those pathologists, Dr. A. B. Cairns, was the chief of pathology at Methodist Hospital. The two other pathologists were Dr. Jack Harper and Dr. Gerard Noteboom. All three identified the fragment as occipital bone. Their identification confirms the dozens of eyewitness accounts of a large hole in the right-rear part of JFK’s skull.

When Dr. David Mantik interviewed Dr. Noteboom in a recorded interview in November 1992, Dr. Noteboom confirmed that the Harper Fragment was occipital bone and that he actually held the fragment in his hands as he examined it.

Predictably, the Harper Fragment disappeared after the FBI gave it to Dr. George Burkley. We have the two FBI photos of the fragment, but not the fragment itself. Drs. Cairns, Harper, and Noteboom were the only pathologists who actually held the fragment in their hands and examined it, and all three said it was occipital bone.

Dr. David Mantik has confirmed that the fragment was occipital bone. See his detailed analyses of the Harper Fragment in his book JFK Assassination Paradoxes and The Final Analysis. See also the segments on the Harper Fragment in Dr. Mantik’s online articles “The JFK Autopsy Materials,” https://themantikview.org/pdf/The_JFK_Autopsy_Materials.pdf, and “The Medical Evidence Decoded,” https://themantikview.org/pdf/The_Medical_Evidence_Decoded.pdf.

By the way, Dr. John Ebersole, the radiologist at the autopsy, told the HSCA that one of the skull fragments that arrived late at the autopsy was “a large fragment of the occipital bone” (Testimony of John H. Ebersole, Medical Panel Meeting, HSCA, 3/11/78, p. 5).

"Conspiracy theories can be terrifyingly effective at ensnaring anyone with OCD symptoms or obsessive tendencies. Conspiracies take advantage of a number of different patterns of thinking: relational framing, narrative psychology, apophenia, explanation-seeking, and experiential learning. And once they get in your head, they quickly become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing. These patterns are tricky to escape."

Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/triggered/202101/ocd-and-qanon-the-obsessive-appeal-conspiracy-theories.

Alas for OCD/TDS Tom, Royden served nearly 40 years with the CIA, was Director of Counterintelligence, and taught counterintelligence at the Joint Military College of the Department of Defense.

Alas for OCD/TDS Tom, Royden's article was published in Studies In Intelligence,, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the CIA-affiliated Center for the Study of Intelligence (https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/) and that serves as "the US Intelligence Community's professional journal," publishing pieces by "intelligence experts and scholars throughout the world." What I linked was not declassified until 2019. It was not a popular-level, hope-this-sells-and-makes-me-some-money-in-my-old-age grudge-settling fluff piece.

"Screed," indeed.

Tennent Bagley, not so much. His once-meteroic career stalled and he took "early retirement" (wink wink) at age 46 in 1972 precisely because his perspective on Nosenko and obsession with moles was deemed "just a bit" off-kilter. All of this, of course, makes him the voice of authority to OCD/TDS Tom, who occupies that curious end of the human psychology spectrum where white is black, truths are lies, up is down, speculation is fact - and the more preposterous a conspiracy theory is, the more likely it is to be true by virtue of its very preposterousness.

OCD/TDS Tom is, of course, the ultimate JFKA ideologue. Such is his TDS that he needs - NEEDS - his KGB stuff to be true in order to explain the rise of The Donald. This is true even though, even if the KGB stuff were true, it would not even vaguely explain The Donald. Indeed, OCD/TDS Tom's efforts to connect his KGB stuff to his TDS stuff are the most preposterous aspects of his theory.

As predicted in my original post, I have triggered OCD/TDS Tom. My folly, I suppose, but perhaps some of you had not seen Royden's piece.

There's a you-know-what load of lies (or "misstatements") by Fancy Pants Lance's hero, Barry Royden, in his anti-Golitsyn / pro-Nosenko "Monster Plot" screed that FPR posted on my other thread.

I might as well start off with one I found on page 9 (there are oodles and gob of other lies -- or "misstatements" if you prefer -- before this one).

My comments are in brackets.

Tennent “Pete" Bagley was one of two case officers who debriefed Nosenko in Geneva [the other was a probable mole, Russia-born George Kisevalter]. Bagley reportedly believed Nosenko was a legitimate volunteer until Angleton, using information from Golitsyn, convinced him that Nosenko had to be a provocation.[7] [7]That he ever believed in Nosenko as a genuine defector is an assertion Bagley vigorously denied in his book Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2007).

My comment:

At no point in Spy Wars does Bagley deny (much less vigorously deny) that he originally thought Nosenko was a true defector.

In fact, this is what he wrote on page 9:

When the door closed behind Yuri Nosenko [after the first 1962 meeting], I hardly caught my breath before jotting notes on highlights and my initial impressions for a priority cable to Headquarters. It would go with an extra code word to limit its distribution there. This affair was promising enough to merit special security precautions. First, I noted, Nosenko gave every indication that he was really a KGB officer. Only an insider could have spoken so easily about secret Soviet places, KGB people unknown to the general public, and secret operations like Popov. This, to me, seemed to establish his bona fides. Second, he had not yet indicated any significant interest in or access to military or political information. I would mention some of the specifics Nosenko had reported and close with the suggestion that Headquarters pack a more fluent Russian speaker [Kisevalter] onto the next flight to Geneva. At no time had we had the slightest communication problem; he never had trouble finding words and never had to ask me to repeat anything. But I did not want to risk losing nuances when he slipped into Russian.

Regarding the same issue, this is what Bagley wrote on page 17:

"We never managed to recruit any American code clerk,” Nosenko said [during the second meeting]. “The closest we ever came was ‘Andrey.’” He was referring to the cipher machine mechanic whom he had mentioned in our first meeting. Kisevalter remembered that CIA’s first representative in Moscow, years before, had reported that the KGB tried to recruit him. He asked Nosenko, "Do you know about the approach to Ed Smith?” "Sure,” he responded without hesitation, "I even took part in it. We gave him the code name ‘Ryzhiy’ [Redhead].” He paused and chuckled. “We used to call him ‘Ryzhiy Khui.’” Turning to me he translated (unnecessarily in this case), “red-headed prick. He went to bed with his Russian maid, our agent, and we staged a scene that made it look like a criminal offense. You know.” Yes, we knew. The KGB did not always use the classical approach of presenting, after the event, clandestinely taken pictures or films that would compromise a marriage or a career. Sometimes, for shock effect, an indignant “husband” (or wife) or local authorities would break into the love nest at a key moment and threaten punishment under Soviet laws. A benevolent “uncle” might appear in time to smooth things out with the law — if the Westerner would demonstrate his friendship toward his hosts. We waited, expectantly. “Well,” Nosenko shrugged, “nothing doing. Ryzhiy refused, reported it to the ambassador, and was pulled back to the States. Case closed.” This squared with what Kisevalter knew and testified once again to Nosenko’s inside knowledge and authority. He grew further in our esteem.


And regarding Royden's insinuation that Angleton convinced Bagley that Nosenko was fake, the following is what Bagley wrote on pages 22–28. As you can see, Bagley convinced Angleton that Nosenko was fake, not the other way around.

"[At CIA headquarters a couple of days later, Soviet Russia Division Chief Jack Maury said,] “Before you leave, Pete, you’ll want to look into some new information we’ve got. There’s been an important defection from the KGB. He’s here in Washington.” This was Anatoly Golitsyn, the KGB officer whose name Nosenko had tossed at me on the balcony in Geneva. He had defected to CIA in Helsinki six months before Nosenko had walked in. “And do check in with Jim Angleton. He’s aware of Nosenko’s contact with us but he’ll want to have your details. He has all the Golitsyn data, too. You could read that here, but you might as well get it from Jim.” James Angleton, chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, was not above an occasional bit of drama, but his office was less a stage setting than it appeared. The drawn Venetian blinds covering the wide windows behind his desk were a shield against the summer sun and not a dramatic artifact. A table lamp on the long oak desk provided the necessary light. A pile of thick hies on each end of the desk framed the scene. Angleton’s bony thinness emphasized his sharp-hewn features. With his piercing eyes behind horn-rimmed spectacles, and his large, expressive mouth, it was not hard to understand why one of CIA’s early leaders, thinking about a design for the new intelligence agency’s official seal, pointed at Angleton and exclaimed "Hah! I have it! That face!” In the event, other designs prevailed for the seal, but Angleton’s striking appearance, his habit of rather formal dress in dark colors, the air of mastery of recondite matters that hung about him, and the quick mind with which he absorbed and synthesized facts into complex perceptions embodied CIA counterintelligence of that time. Angleton and I had built a relationship of friendly mutual trust during the years when I had supervised operations against Polish Intelligence. There had been the long, Martini-eased lunches for which he was well known, and dinner parties. Charades were often played in those days, and I still remember the desperate antics of one guest trying to convey an obscure line from Jim’s favorite poet, T. S. Eliot, “clot the bedded axle tree.” Jim had a select inner circle of friends, including Dick Helms and other veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that he had served in its counterintelligence branch, X-2. That I was among them despite my relatively recent arrival on the CIA scene I owed to a warm introduction years earlier by William Hood, who had been my boss in CIA’s Vienna Station in the early 1950s. Hood cared deeply for the counterintelligence aspect of American Intelligence-handling its clandestine operations with realistic appreciation of the hazards, while exploiting the openings offered by the clandestine work of our adversaries. In Vienna he had recognized and fostered my interest in this field and brought me into this personal relationship with the otherwise closeted and very busy counterintelligence staff chief. My confident relations with Angleton were to play a role in what was to come. It was no small matter at the CIA to get the attention of the right senior officers to the right matters. Jim listened with evident interest to my account of the meetings with Nosenko and was upbeat about the possibilities. All the while his attention seemed fixed on penciling an elaborate geometric design on notepaper. As I finished, Jim dropped his pencil into his out-tray, glanced approvingly at his completed doodle, tore it to bits, and dropped the remains in the classified trash box at the corner of his desk. He reinforced Maury’s suggestion that for future meetings with Nosenko I would do well to take aboard the Golitsyn data. Jim summoned Bertha, nominally his secretary but in actuality his de facto office manager and personal assistant, handed me an armload of files, and asked her to take me across the hallway to what he referred to as the counterintelligence conference room, where I could study the new defector’s reports in complete privacy. Conference room, indeed. It was windowless, with barely space for the worn table and six government-issue, straight-back chairs. I suspected that before its christening as a conference room it had been a comfortable closet. The fascinating sweep and detail of Golitsyn’s revelations offset the absent creature comfort. My hours there were, as Maury and Angleton had foreseen, an essential background for any future Nosenko meetings. But the reports were also unsettling. They contained repeated references to incidents and operations that Nosenko had just described in Geneva. Reading one after another I began to feel uneasy. I knew from experience that any two colleagues working in different sections of an intelligence service might glean knowledge of the same secret operations. But it stretched coincidence that two officers from such separated elements of the KGB would both know of so many, especially of a kind unlikely to be widely known within a service as tightly disciplined as the KGB. It seemed even more of a coincidence that one of these overlapping sources arrived almost on the heels of the other. And strikingly, and all too often, Nosenko’s versions differed from Golitsyn’s with the effect of dismissing or diverting suspicions that the earlier reports had evoked. Golitsyn was the first source to reveal — five years after the fact — Vladislav Kovshuk’s trip, the same trip that Nosenko had described at our first meeting. Had it been known at the time that the chief of KGB operations against the American Embassy in Moscow had traveled to Washington, the question would have screamed— as it still did— “Why?” It seemed more than fortuitous that shortly after Golitsyn’s revelation, Kovshuk’s deputy Nosenko had come and explained that long-ago trip — authoritatively, but in a banal, almost benign light. Concerning the KGB discovery of CIA’s contact with Pyotr Popov, Golitsyn’s version did not square with Nosenko’s. Golitsyn placed it so much earlier that it could not have resulted from the KGB’s chance surveillance of a diplomat [George Winters] mailing a letter in Moscow. Here, too, in these files was the KGB recruitment of the British naval attaché office member in Moscow. Golitsyn in KGB Headquarters had been handling reports from spies in NATO, and among these papers were secret documents from that office. So accurately had he described them after his defection that already, according to a note in this file, the British were on the heels of the traitor, having narrowed their list of suspects to three. Nosenko had given us something we were about to learn anyway. There were many more similarities. Golitsyn reported that a certain Canadian ambassador had been recruited. Nosenko reported the same case. Golitsyn, while in Vienna, had known that Gribanov came there to meet an agent, a French businessman. The French had identified him as Frangois Saar Demichel— whom Nosenko had just named to us. Golitsyn had studied the hie of the KGB’s double agent case against CIA using Soviet radio journalist Boris Belitsky. Golitsyn would have had to sign, per KGB regulations, for accessing it, and after his defection KGB investigators dredged up any such hies. Quite a coincidence that a few months later an unidentified KGB man in Geneva is seized by such a fit of indiscretion that he tells Nosenko, a visiting delegation watchdog, about that tightly held operation. All in all, this was hard to believe. Even more striking was the next coincidence, fact for fact. Golitsyn recounted a visit to his KGB residency in Helsinki by Gennady Gryaznov, a KGB officer from Moscow who was targeting the American Embassy there. To facilitate his development for recruitment of an American code clerk (unnamed), Gryaznov wanted to borrow an agent. Because the American Embassy restricted socialization between its code clerks and Russians, he knew that this Finn agent, a businessman who traveled occasionally to Moscow, could more easily make friends with the American target. Golitsyn agreed and lent Moscow the agent — a certain Preisfreund. Preisfreund? That’s an unusual name for a Finn, and easy to remember. Nosenko not only had met Preisfreund but had made a drinking buddy of him in Moscow, the only such foreign friend Nosenko had mentioned. In Geneva he had recounted the same operation against the code clerk, whom he named (and whom I here call “Will”). It was only on the outcome of the venture that Golitsyn and Nosenko differed. Gryaznov later told Golitsyn that the KGB’s attempt succeeded. But Nosenko reported— having been personally involved and supervising Gryaznov — that the operation had failed. Of course, I thought, Gryaznov may have simply been exaggerating or inventing to impress his colleague Golitsyn. But even so, the coincidence of such parallel reporting by two volunteer sources from widely separated elements of the KGB was enough to stir an ugly question. On top of all that: I now saw that what I had thought to be Nosenko’s unique and fresh information about KGB operations against tourists in the USSR had already been exposed. Golitsyn had reported in great detail on this subject, having had on-the-job training in early 1959 in the Second Chief Directorate’s Tourist Department and long talks with an officer of the department. In addition, Golitsyn had received at his rezidentura in Helsinki a KGB Moscow study dated 7 April 1961 detailing its work against foreign visitors to the USSR — and had given CIA a copy. It was in that tiny room, poring over thick files and busily penciling page after page of notes on a lined yellow pad, that doubts began to arise that had not occurred to me in Geneva. Might the KGB have sent Nosenko to CIA to divert Golitsyn’s leads? On the face of it, that seemed hardly conceivable. The Soviet bloc counterintelligence services had been sending scores of false refugees to the West to mislead us, but never in the KGB’s forty-five years — at least, to my knowledge — had they sent one directly out of their own halls. To do that, I thought, they must have powerful reasons. Deception is risky: if the intended dupe recognizes it he may ask himself why the opposition went to such a bother, and may perceive the truth it was designed to hide.

The morning after my final night of study, after long reflection that had left me little sleep, I went back to Angleton. "Thanks, Jim. You were right. I needed this information. But at the same time, I’ve got to tell you something. We may have a problem.” I told him about the curious coincidences and persistent overlapping of the two men’s reports. Jim frowned, thought for a moment, shook his head and said, “Please jot down these points for me. I want to look carefully at this.” The next day I gave Bertha an envelope with my handwritten list of the most significant fourteen points of parallel reporting. I could have listed more, but it did not seem worth mentioning the many events and people that both sources had reported but that any two KGB officers could be expected to know. That afternoon Jim called me back to his office. “You may be on to something here,” he said. “As a matter of fact, Golitsyn himself said he expected the KGB to make some effort to divert the leads he could give us. Maybe that’s what we’ve got on our hands now.”

We agreed that there wasn’t enough data to make a case and that Nosenko was to be handled as if there were no doubts.“Just leave this with me,” Jim said. “We can look deeper into it when you come on duty this fall.” He shook his head and added, "Pity. You’d be in for a medal for this, but that wouldn’t be appropriate in this new light, would it?” Indeed it would not. I shrugged. “Easy come, easy go.” Jim tossed another pencil aside and stood to shake hands. "Meanwhile, let’s not tell anyone else about this problem.” "I have to tell Jack,” I said. "Of course.” Jack Maury had too many other operations on his mind to have absorbed the details of Golitsyn’s reporting and he cared little about the practices of Soviet counterintelligence. I painted the picture for him, but because it was too early to ring alarm bells I closed on a high note. "What the hell, there’s probably some innocent explanation. We should be able to clear it up next time we meet Nosenko.” "Good.” Jack seemed relieved. Like many other senior officers, he disliked dealing with the minutiae of counterintelligence and viewed them as time-wasting impediments to what he considered a different and higher priority, the task of collecting "positive” intelligence. He was happy to let me cope with those details. "Okay, you work it out with Jim and we’ll go on handling the case as if it’s straight. George seems to be happy with it. If he should mention any doubts of his own, I'll let you know.”


https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames