JFK Assassination Forum

"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.

Dear FPR,

It's clear to me that you don't have the "gonads" to actually read honored-by-CIA Bagley's 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars, or even his 2014 follow--up article, "Ghosts of the Spy Wars," or ... gasp ... even my Wikipedia article on him (which you or any other "useful idiot" can try to permanently edit).

Perhaps your wife told you not to? (wink-wink)

-- Tom

https://archive.org/details/SpyWarsMolesMysteriesAndDeadlyGames

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08850607.2014.962362

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennent_H._Bagley

Let’s examine this “Ruby foreknowledge” CT bombshell:

1. Our hero was Robert Murray Vanderslice, born in 1926 and died (in Dallas) in 1979.

2. He was an IRS tax informant, focusing on bookies, from 7/23/76 to 2/18/77 (six months). He was paid $135 for his services and $2.89 for expenses.

3. His last contact with the IRS was on 1/24/77. The IRS special agent to whom he was assigned, Lawrence Sandri, said he had never mentioned Ruby or anything about the JFKA.

4. At a restaurant lunch with the IRS local Intelligence Division Manager, Arlen Fuhlendorf, early in 1977 (some 14 years after the JFKA), he started talking about stripper Candy Barr (who did have a non-romantic, non-employment relationship with Jack Ruby a decade before the JFKA).

5. This somehow led to a discussion of Ruby. Vanderslice told Fuhlendorf that on the morning of the JFKA, Ruby had contacted him to watch the motorcade and had asked if he’d like to “watch the fireworks.” In CT world, this remark can have no meaning other than Ruby’s foreknowledge of the JFKA.

6. They watched the motorcade together from a corner near the Postal Annex. Following the JFKA, Ruby left, without comment, for the Dallas Morning News.

7. At the same lunch, Vanderslice divulged that he had been arrested and incarcerated at the Dallas County Jail at the same time Ruby was there. As a jail trustee, he said, he got to know Ruby better – but he said nothing further about the supposed foreknowledge or motorcade incident.

8.  Fuhlendorf told the FBI that “as far as he knew” Vanderslice had been a reliable tax informant, but he did not know if he was truthful about Ruby. He initially reported the lunch conversation in a memorandum to the IRS national office for transmission to the HSCA, but the IRS returned the memo and told him to contact the Dallas office of the FBI. (The memorandum never surfaced.)

9. Vanderslice went to astounding lengths to avoid repeated efforts by both the FBI and IRS to contact him about his Ruby tale. Fuhlendorf thought he might have “been untruthful” or perhaps had “second thoughts” and had gotten “cold feet” after being told he might have to testify before the HSCA.

10. Because Vanderslice’s tale was inconsistent with Ruby’s WC testimony and that of a Dallas Morning News advertising department employee concerning Ruby’s activities on 11-22-63, and because Vanderslice was clearly avoiding both the FBI and IRS, the FBI abandoned further efforts to contact him.

11. On the last attempted contact, his wife said he was in Wichita Falls, “trying to make a buck here and there.”

Ho-hum, such is the stuff of which conspiratorial bombshells are made in MTG’s goofy end of the CT spectrum.

“Foreknowledge of the assassination.” BWAHAHA. 

Not exactly a major exercise in factoid-busting, I’ll concede, but an interesting 30 minutes of mental exercise for your intrepid Factoid Buster.

See my earlier posts on J. Sloss.

Regarding your comment, ". . . if they are indeed the same people in his notes," Ernst Leibacker and Joseph Francis Davanon are unusual names, wouldn't you agree?

What's the probability that they just happened to have the same names of two LA CIA officers, but, in reality, were just too guys Nagell happened to know at his favorite bar or from his bowling league?

TG: See my earlier posts on J. Sloss.

The don't really pile up to much without a lot of supposition and innuendo.


TG: Ernst Leibacker and Joseph Francis Davanon are unusual names, wouldn't you agree?

Neither "Enrst" nor "Joseph Francis" appear in Nagell's notes, now do they? And I did note that the two men's last names are fairly uncommon. You seem to have missed that.  You also appear to have missed the significance of their working at a DCS field office in LA at the same time Nagell lived in the City of Angels. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could walk into a DCS office off the street and give information to a CIA officer. Therefore, even if  Ernst Leibacker and Joseph Francis Davanon are indeed the guys in Nagell's notes, their presence does not indicate any special relationship in and of itself. He could have just walked into the office and picked their names off the directory board Keyser Soze style.

Just why did he shoot Lee Harvey Oswald?

When are you going to address the disclosure, discovered by the ARRB, that Ruby had foreknowledge of the assassination?

The disclosure was made by a former informant for the Intelligence Division of the Dallas office of the Internal Revenue Service, Bob Vanderslice. When Vanderslice saw news reports in early 1977 that the HSCA was going to reinvestigate the JFK assassination, he decided he should tell his IRS contact about the incident. 

The Dallas FBI report noted that the IRS agent said Vanderslice was a reliable informant. The report also noted that Vanderslice’s undercover work involved gathering information on the “criminal element” in Dallas, and that he had known one of Jack Ruby’s nightclub strippers.

I discuss the Vanderslice disclosure at length in A Comforting Lie: The Myth that a Lone Gunman Killed President Kennedy (pp. 28-30).

"If there had been conspiracy, someone would have talked." A number of people did talk, including Bob Vanderslice.

No one will believe me, but this is completely true: Last night, I actually had my first-ever JFKA-related dream. Oswald, JFK and Dealey Plaza weren't in it. I wasn't even in it. I was just the audience. Some guy was engaged in a comical effort to frame a bizarre cast of characters for the JFKA. When I awoke at 2 AM and could actually remember some of the details, I was laughing at the sheer cleverness. It then occurred to me: Wouldn't that make a great counterpart to "JFK" - i.e., an intensely serious black comedy portraying all the insane stuff that people like MTG believe? Instead of just talking about this nonsense, which gives it a sort of quasi-credibility, partly because you can focus on each insane claim in isolation and don't have to think about it in context, actually portray it all on the screen! Every facet of the elaborate, multi-facted conspiracy, from the grooming and framing of Oswald, to the battle scene in Dealey Plaza, to the Tippit murder, to the two autopsies, to the massive cover-up, to the mystery deaths, to ... well, you get the idea. I promise you, people would be holding their sides and rolling in the aisles. If I were younger, and Harry Dean Stanton were still around to play Oswald, I think I might actually get to work on a screenplay. In the meantime, people, just try to use your imaginations and think through what the events so seriously hypothesized by CTers like MTG would actually have looked like.

Oh, so now you're appealing to your dreams to bolster your minority viewpoint, while still pretending that people who disagree with you believe "insane stuff"! I guess you just don't realize the embarrassing irony of your posturing.

Are you ever going to get around to explaining how you guys can still believe Howard Brennan's identification of Oswald given the gaping holes and contradictions in Brennan's story? Let me refresh your memory:

You must be kidding. You simply must be kidding. It's 2026, and you're still defending Brennan's "identification" of Oswald? Just unbelievable. Again, you guys exhibit a cult-like mentality when it comes to dealing with the JFK case. You just can't bring yourselves to deal with contrary evidence in a rational, credible manner.

Have you ever stood where Brennan was standing and looked up at the sixth-floor window at around noon? I have. I say "total hogwash" to anyone who claims they could see someone clearly enough from that position, at that distance, while he was firing from behind the window, to ID him in a police lineup. Hogwash. Even the HSCA's chief counsel, who was anxious to accept any evidence against Oswald, did not buy Brennan's ID.

For starters, Brennan couldn't even identify which sixth-floor window he supposedly observed, and the Zapruder film shows he was not even looking up until after Z207.

Brennan said the man he saw in the window was standing when he fired each of the shots, a fanciful proposition that even the Warren Commission rejected.

In addition, Brennan failed to positively identify Oswald in a police line-up on November 22, even though he had seen Oswald's picture beforehand. Posner deals with this problem by advancing Brennan's claim that he could have identified Oswald in the November 22 line-up but was afraid to do so because he feared Oswald had accomplices who would kill him if he made the identification! Yet, on November 22, Brennan spoke with reporters about the assassination, and he even gave them his name--strange behavior for a man who supposedly feared he would be killed if he identified Oswald in a police station.

Moreover, Brennan said that when he looked up after the presidential limousine had driven away, he still saw Oswald in the sixth-floor window. Brennan added that Oswald remained at the window for at least a few seconds after that. Then, said Brennan, Oswald "simply moved away from the window until he disappeared from my line of vision. He didn't appear to be rushed," recalled Brennan. Really? Do you buy that nonsense?

To have had any remote chance of getting to the sixth-floor lunchroom before Roy Truly reached the second-floor landing, Oswald could not possibly have lingered at the window in the manner described by Brennan.

Yet another often-overlooked problem with Brennan's testimony is that Brennan said he saw three-fourths of the rifle in the sixth-floor window and that he saw no scope on it. But if the rifle had been the alleged murder weapon, the scope would have been visible to Brennan.

Brennan may well have seen someone firing from the sixth-floor window, but the gunman he saw was not Oswald. Brennan's description of the gunman's clothing matches that given by four other witnesses who reported seeing a man in the window. Brennan and the other witnesses described the man's shirt as a regular "light-colored" shirt. However, Oswald did not wear a light-colored shirt to work that day. He wore a brown, rust-colored shirt that day, and he was seen in that shirt in the second-floor lunchroom less than ninety seconds after the shots were fired.

I should add that two witnesses who saw the sixth-floor gunman said his hair was light-colored or light-brown, whereas Oswald's hair was solid brown and not light-colored at all.

Howard Brennan's specious ID of Oswald and his dubious claims about what he saw during and after the shooting are another prime example of why discussions with you guys go nowhere. You guys won't admit anything, no matter how obvious it is, if it contradicts the lone-gunman theory. It's 2026, and yet, incredibly, here you are still claiming that Howard Brennan's ID of Oswald was credible. Brennan's ID of Oswald would have been torn to shreds in a trial, partly for the reasons discussed above, as well as other reasons.