Wake up, CTers

[Lance Payette]

On the thread “And he said ‘I shot Walker’” an issue surfaced that should be Lesson No. 1 for CTers: You simply can’t trust the CT literature or the “facts” so confidently stated by even the most prominent members of the CT community.

This lesson is in danger of being lost as the thread evolves into the inevitable “did too, did not” debate as to whether Oswald actually shot at Walker.

Michael T. Griffith is a highly educated, longtime prominent voice in the CT community: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKgriffithM.htm. Yet on the Walker thread he made several blatant misstatements of fact about Oswald’s “Walker note” – literally JFKA 101 sort of stuff that are matters of indisputable historical record and that anyone who knows anything about the JFKA should know. My eyes almost popped out of my head.

I discovered that one of Michael’s untrue “facts” (about the HSCA’s handwriting analysis) is a conspiracy factoid found throughout the conspiracy literature. It took me no more than ten minutes to locate the actual HSCA handwriting analysis and write my little post exposing the truth.

What the HSCA panel actually said is less important than the reality that even someone of Michael’s experience and prominence repeats these bogus “facts” and that undiscerning CTers lap them up. They get repeated until they harden into conspiracy gospel.

My intent is not to pick on Michael personally. I have established this pattern, over and over, throughout the CT community, from Jim DiEugenio on down. You simply can’t trust what these folks say. They are betting you won’t check their “facts.” (A safe bet because, I can tell you, checking their “facts” is often a great deal more work than the HSCA handwriting analysis issue was.)

What’s the point of weaving a conspiracy narrative that is rife with falsehoods? The objective obviously can’t be historical truth if you’re peppering your narrative with flat-out falsehoods. There has to be another agenda. Some of these characters obviously enjoy being big fish in their little ponds (Jim D is on a first-name basis with Oliver Stone!). Some may be profit-driven, although my long experience with some of the big names in the UFO field tells me the profits are meager. Many (most?) have a political/ideological agenda in which the JFKA is just a means to an end.

To restate Lesson No. 1: If you immerse yourself only in the CT literature and community, and you trust the most prominent voices in this community, you are making a very big mistake (unless you accept it all as being tongue-in-cheek, sort of the way a Trekkie dives into the Star Trek community, in which case I suppose it can be fun if you’re aware of what you’re doing).

I performed an interesting little experiment yesterday: Because of the incessant drumbeat about “Newman,” “Popov,” “Solie,” etc., by a seemingly obsessed member of this forum, I did a number of Google searches. I started with Newman’s Uncovering Popov’s Mole, published in 2022. To start with, the book is self-published; this tells you something, and it isn’t good. By the fourth volume of your massive study, you can't find a publisher?

Know how many reviews this book has received outside of the CT community? None. Know how many mentions this book has received outside of the CT community? None. It has received zero, nada, zilch attention in the community of mainstream historians and historical journals. Know how much discussion the theory has generated? None. Zero, nada, zilch.

Oh, yes, there are mainstream, peer-reviewed historical journals. There is, for example, the Journal of Cold War History, published by MIT Press as part of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, https://direct.mit.edu/jcws. There is the scholarly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ujic20/about-this-journal#editorial-board. There is Studies in Intelligence, published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/. There is the Journal of American History, published by the Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/.

Does Newman take his work to respected, peer-reviewed outlets such as this? No, he self-publishes what have been aptly described as poorly edited document dumps. And the CT community laps them up.

On the Wikipedia entry, presumably written by our obsessed local hero, one will find that “no espionage writer or former intelligence agent has attempted to rebut Blunt's (September 2021) or Newman's (October 2022) evidence, or Bagley's (2012) suspicion that Solie was a KGB mole” – a CT euphemism for “no one has paid any attention to this stuff.” Indeed, my intrepid Googling revealed that by far the biggest promoter of this stuff is our obsessed local hero.

It’s all rather telling, is it not?

Really: Wake up, CTers. You’re being had. If this is all just your alternative to a Star Trek convention, fine. But if you think it’s something more, you’re being had.

(I’ll confess, I find the Popov’s Mole stuff boring and mind-numbing. In my Googling, however, I did stumble upon two documents you might find interesting. The first is a CIA-released draft of an article for the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Intelligence entitled "James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the 'Monster Plot': Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations" by longtime CIA official Barry J. Royden:  https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/JAMES%20J.%20ANGLETON%2C%20ANATOL%5B15725929%5D.pdf It apparently wasn’t published in the journal, probably due to the CIA redactions, but it’s an interesting overview of how Angleton’s KGB-obsessed paranoia affected CIA operations. Related are the proceedings of a 2012 Wilson Center symposium in which Royden (and Edward Epstein!) participated: Moles, Defectors and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/event/moles_defectors_and_deceptions_james_angleton_conference_report.pdf.)

[Lance Payette]

To his credit, Michael now acknowledges his mistake. He says he got his information from the "usually reliable" site, 22November1963, http://22november1963.org.uk/did-lee-oswald-shoot-general-edwin-walker.

Here's what they say:

Although the FBI’s handwriting expert considered that the note was in Oswald’s handwriting (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.7, p.437), only one of the three experts who were consulted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations considered the note to be authentic (HSCA Report, appendix vol.8, pp.232–246).

Completely false! AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM: "Usually reliable" CT sites, literature and gurus AREN'T RELIABLE AT ALL.

[Michael T. Griffith]

On the thread “And he said ‘I shot Walker’” an issue surfaced that should be Lesson No. 1 for CTers: You simply can’t trust the CT literature or the “facts” so confidently stated by even the most prominent members of the CT community. [SNIP]

Oh my goodness. This is beyond silly. This gives new meaning to the terms "grandstanding" and "posturing." This is making a mountain out of a nearly flat mole hill. It is also very misleading. You lone-gunman theorists have made countless egregious errors and bogus claims in this forum and elsewhere, and when you're confronted with facts that refute your claims, you refuse to admit your error.

For the benefit of any guests/visitors, a little perspective will be helpful, in the form of these three points:

One, Lance Payette belongs to the 1/4 to 1/3 of adults in the Western world who still believe that Oswald shot JFK all by himself and had no accomplices before or after the shooting. For at least the last 20 years, numerous opinion surveys have found that 2/3 to 3/4 of those surveyed about the JFK case have said they do not believe only one person was involved in JFK's death. So it is a bit odd that so many lone-gunman theorists posture as though pro-conspiracy researchers belong to some kind of unserious fringe and that few experts support the conspiracy view.

Two, literally hundreds of accomplished people and experts in various fields have rejected the lone-gunman theory and have presented evidence that JFK was killed by multiple gunmen and that a cover-up followed. These people include history professors, law professors, medical professionals, former military snipers, attorneys, acoustical scientists, former staffers on government boards/committees, research scientists, and physicists. Pro-conspiracy experts have had articles published in several peer-reviewed professional and/or scientific journals, including the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Research Archives, and Science and Justice. 

Three, in 1979, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations formally concluded that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, that two gunmen fired at JFK, that a shot came from the grassy knoll, that Jack Ruby had Mafia ties, that Ruby stalked Oswald before killing him, that Ruby lied about why he killed Oswald, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police department basement to kill Oswald, that Silvia Odio's account is credible (her account shows someone was trying to frame Oswald before the assassination), that JFK was hit before frame 190 in the Zapruder film, that the autopsy doctors mislocated the back wound, that the autopsy doctors failed to follow basic autopsy procedures, that the back wound's abrasion collar proves the bullet hit at an upward angle, that the tunneling inside the back wound ranges upward, that the Secret Service protection of JFK in Dallas may have been "uniquely insecure," and that the Warren Commission failed to follow up on leads that indicated conspiracy, among other findings.

[Jarrett Smith]

Oh my goodness. This is beyond silly. This gives new meaning to the terms "grandstanding" and "posturing." This is making a mountain out of a nearly flat mole hill. It is also very misleading. You lone-gunman theorists have made countless egregious errors and bogus claims in this forum and elsewhere, and when you're confronted with facts that refute your claims, you refuse to admit your error.

For the benefit of any guests/visitors, a little perspective will be helpful, in the form of these three points:

One, Lance Payette belongs to the 1/4 to 1/3 of adults in the Western world who still believe that Oswald shot JFK all by himself and had no accomplices before or after the shooting. For at least the last 20 years, numerous opinion surveys have found that 2/3 to 3/4 of those surveyed about the JFK case have said they do not believe only one person was involved in JFK's death. So it is a bit odd that so many lone-gunman theorists posture as though pro-conspiracy researchers belong to some kind of unserious fringe and that few experts support the conspiracy view.

Two, literally hundreds of accomplished people and experts in various fields have rejected the lone-gunman theory and have presented evidence that JFK was killed by multiple gunmen and that a cover-up followed. These people include history professors, law professors, medical professionals, former military snipers, attorneys, acoustical scientists, former staffers on government boards/committees, research scientists, and physicists. Pro-conspiracy experts have had articles published in several peer-reviewed professional and/or scientific journals, including the Journal of Forensic Sciences, Medical Research Archives, and Science and Justice. 

Three, in 1979, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations formally concluded that JFK was probably killed by a conspiracy, that two gunmen fired at JFK, that a shot came from the grassy knoll, that Jack Ruby had Mafia ties, that Ruby stalked Oswald before killing him, that Ruby lied about why he killed Oswald, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police department basement to kill Oswald, that Silvia Odio's account is credible (her account shows someone was trying to frame Oswald before the assassination), that JFK was hit before frame 190 in the Zapruder film, that the autopsy doctors mislocated the back wound, that the autopsy doctors failed to follow basic autopsy procedures, that the back wound's abrasion collar proves the bullet hit at an upward angle, that the tunneling inside the back wound ranges upward, that the Secret Service protection of JFK in Dallas may have been "uniquely insecure," and that the Warren Commission failed to follow up on leads that indicated conspiracy, among other findings.

Bingo

[Tim Nickerson]

To his credit, Michael now acknowledges his mistake. He says he got his information from the "usually reliable" site, 22November1963, http://22november1963.org.uk/did-lee-oswald-shoot-general-edwin-walker.

Here's what they say:

Although the FBI’s handwriting expert considered that the note was in Oswald’s handwriting (Warren Commission Hearings, vol.7, p.437), only one of the three experts who were consulted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations considered the note to be authentic (HSCA Report, appendix vol.8, pp.232–246).

Completely false! AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM: "Usually reliable" CT sites, literature and gurus AREN'T RELIABLE AT ALL.

Griffith regularly makes false claims. He's also prone to exaggeration. He claimed that three renowned handwriting experts examined the "Dear Mr. Hunt" note and concluded it was written by Oswald.

[Tom Graves]

[...]

I performed an interesting little experiment yesterday: Because of the incessant drumbeat about “Newman,” “Popov,” “Solie,” etc., by a seemingly obsessed member of this forum, I did a number of Google searches. I started with Newman’s Uncovering Popov’s Mole, published in 2022. To start with, the book is self-published; this tells you something, and it isn’t good. By the fourth volume of your massive study, you can't find a publisher?

Know how many reviews this book has received outside of the CT community? None. Know how many mentions this book has received outside of the CT community? None. It has received zero, nada, zilch attention in the community of mainstream historians and historical journals. Know how much discussion the theory has generated? None. Zero, nada, zilch.

Oh, yes, there are mainstream, peer-reviewed historical journals. There is, for example, the Journal of Cold War History, published by MIT Press as part of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies, https://direct.mit.edu/jcws. There is the scholarly International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ujic20/about-this-journal#editorial-board. There is Studies in Intelligence, published by the Center for the Study of Intelligence, https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/studies-in-intelligence/. There is the Journal of American History, published by the Organization of American Historians, https://www.oah.org/publications/jah/.

Does Newman take his work to respected, peer-reviewed outlets such as this? No, he self-publishes what have been aptly described as poorly edited document dumps. And the CT community laps them up.

On the Wikipedia entry, presumably written by our obsessed local hero, one will find that “no espionage writer or former intelligence agent has attempted to rebut Blunt's (September 2021) or Newman's (October 2022) evidence, or Bagley's (2012) suspicion that Solie was a KGB mole” – a CT euphemism for “no one has paid any attention to this stuff.” Indeed, my intrepid Googling revealed that by far the biggest promoter of this stuff is our obsessed local hero.

It’s all rather telling, is it not?

Really: Wake up, CTers. You’re being had. If this is all just your alternative to a Star Trek convention, fine. But if you think it’s something more, you’re being had.

(I’ll confess, I find the Popov’s Mole stuff boring and mind-numbing. In my Googling, however, I did stumble upon two documents you might find interesting. The first is a CIA-released draft of an article for the peer-reviewed journal Studies in Intelligence entitled "James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the 'Monster Plot': Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations" by longtime CIA official Barry J. Royden:  https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/JAMES%20J.%20ANGLETON%2C%20ANATOL%5B15725929%5D.pdf It apparently wasn’t published in the journal, probably due to the CIA redactions, but it’s an interesting overview of how Angleton’s KGB-obsessed paranoia affected CIA operations. Related are the proceedings of a 2012 Wilson Center symposium in which Royden (and Edward Epstein!) participated: Moles, Defectors and Deceptions: James Angleton and His Influence on US Counterintelligence, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/event/moles_defectors_and_deceptions_james_angleton_conference_report.pdf.)

Dear Fancy Pants Lance,

What do you know about Tennent H. Bagley?

Hint: He was from an illustrious Navy family, he attended USC and Princeton, he earned a PhD in political science from the University of Geneva after WW II (during which he was a Marine Lieutenant on an aircraft carrier), he joined the CIA in 1951, he helped handle GRU Lt. Col. Pyotr Popov when he defected to the U.S. in 1952, he helped exfiltrate KGB Major Pyotr Deriabin in 1954, he was instrumental of the defection of Polish KGB officer Mikhail Goleniewski to the U.S. in January 1961, etc., etc., he became the primary case officer of false-defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko when he "walked in" to the CIA in Geneva in June 1962 "desperately needing to exchange some KGB secrets for $300 worth of Swiss francs," and he was on the fast-track to become Director of CIA until January 1964, at which time Nosenko recontacted Bagley and (probable "mole") George Kisevalter in Geneva, saying that he now wanted to physically defect to the U.S (and leave his beloved-in-1962 wife and two daughters behind in Moscow to fend for themselves), that he . . . gasp . . . had been Lee Harvey Oswald's case officer in Moscow (how fortunate for J. Edgar Hoover!) and therefore knew for a fact that the KGB had absolutely nothing to do with Oswald in the USSR!

And . . . gasp redux . . . that he had just received a "Return to KGB Headquarters Immediately" telegram! (Later disproved by the NSA.)

In 2012 or so, JFKA CT Malcolm Blunt showed retired-from-CIA-in-1972 JFKA LN Bagley some CIA documents that he hadn't been privy to in 1959-60. These documents led Bagley to proclaim that Oswald had to have been a "witting defector," i.e., that he had knowingly been sent by the CIA to Moscow in 1959. Blunt shared this information with his JFKA CT colleague, John N. Newman (a former high-level Army Intelligence analyst and Executive Assistant to the Director of NSA). As a result of this, Newman stopped blaming evil, evil, evil James Angleton for the JFK assassination, proclaimed Yuri Nosenko a false defector, revealed that Bruce Leonard Solie was a KGB "mole," and dedicated his book to JFKA LN Bagley.

Newman points out in his 2022 self-published book, Uncovering Popov's Mole, that CIA's spy, the aforementioned Pyotr Popov, told his CIA case officer (the aforementioned George Kisevalter) in West Berlin in April 1958 that he had recently heard a drunken GRU Colonel brag that the Kremlin had all of the top-secret specifications of the U-2 spy plane (this is written about in former high-level CIA officer William Hood's book, "Mole"), and when word of this got back to CIA headquarters, James Angleton and his mole-hunting superior, Bruce Solie in the mole-hunting Office of Security (which just happened to have the specifications of the U-2), had to organize a hunt for the traitor in the CIA who had revealed the spy plane's secrets to the Ruskies. Newman concludes that Solie, himself, was the traitor -- as suggested by all of the negative things Bagley says about him in his 2007 Yale University Press book, "Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games," and the fact that he had apparently visited Kim Philby in Beirut in February 1957, definitely flown to Paris twice in mid-1962 -- before and after he showed up unexpectedly at the Geneva safe house to "ask" Nosenko about the names of possible moles that Golitsyn had recently told Angleton about -- and concluded that Solie had not only leaked the U-2 secrets, but betrayed Popov to KGB General Vladislav Kovshuk in Washington, D.C., movie houses in very early 1957. (One of the bits of disinformation Nosenko was to tell Bagley about during their first meeting in Geneva in 1962 was that "his boss," Kovshuk, had gone the U.S. in early 1957 to "reestablish contact with our most important American recruit, a cipher machine mechanic by the name of Andrey who had been posted at the American Embassy in Moscow."

This "Andrey" turned out to be a never-important-and-now-worthless-to-KGB dude by the name of Dayle W. Smith, whom Kovshuk didn't bother to visit for ten months even though he was listed in the D.C. phone book.

So, Newman logically concludes that Mole Solie sent, or duped his confidant, protege, and naive mole-hunting subordinate, James Angleton, into sending Oswald to Moscow as an ostensible "dangle" in a (unbeknownst to Angleton and Oswald) planned-to-fail hunt for "Popov's U-2 Mole" (solie) in the wrong part of the CIA.

I could go on and on, Fancy-Pants Lance, but I suspect that this is too complicated for you and/or it causes too much cognitive dissonance in your conspiracy-eschewing / "The KGB is a World-Class Humanitarian Organization Compared to the Evil, Evil CIA" / "The Cold War Is Over And We Won!" / "I Wuv Donald Trump!" mind.

Tak.

Regarding "The Monster Plot" (John L. Hart's derogatory term for true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn's warning of the KGB's 1959-on Sun Tzu-based "Master Plan" to get us to defeat ourselves by waging disinformation, "active measures," and mole-based (can you say "Bruce Solie" and "Leonard V. McCoy"?) strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us and our NATO allies (Hmm ... can you say "Donald J. Trump"?), Bagley ripped Hart "a new one" during his 170-page HSCA testimony in 1978.

Have you read it, yet, Fancy Pants?

Here’s how to find it if you haven’t:

Google “Mary Ferrell Foundation,” click on “Documents” in the upper right-hand corner, choose “House Select Committe on Assassinations (HSCA)” on the left side, type in the name “Bagley” in the search box in the upper right-hand corner, click on it, and then click on the top document in the “hit list — it’s Bagley’s 172-page 11/16/78 HSCA testimony. (The first three searches for non-members are free.)

Enjoy!


— Tom

PS Although I think Newman’s a kook for believing that some high-level military officers killed JFK because he was refusing to nuke Moscow and Peking during the “closing window of opportunity” year of 1963, there’s no particular shame in his having to self-publish his book.

After all, Wikipedia, which published my article on Tennent H. Bagley (have you read it yet?), refused to publish my article on Bruce Leonard Solie because . . . gasp . . . “not enough established authors have written about him.”

LOL!

You can still read a form of it for free on the Internet, though.

Just google “Bruce Leonard Solie.”

[Tom Graves]

On the Wikipedia [sic] entry [on Bruce Leonard Solie], presumably written by our obsessed local hero, one will find that “no espionage writer or former intelligence agent has attempted to rebut Blunt's (September 2021) or Newman's (October 2022) evidence, or Bagley's (2012) suspicion that Solie was a KGB mole” – a CT euphemism for “no one has paid any attention to this stuff.” Indeed, my intrepid Googling revealed that by far the biggest promoter of this stuff is our obsessed local hero.

Dear Fancy Pants Lance,

One won't find that fine excerpt in a Wikipedia article (you found it in something called EverybodyWiki (didn't you notice?), which Australia-based company stole my draft of the article from the Wikipedia site and published it, without my permission, on its site), for the simple reason that Wikipedia declined to publish the article it came from. Why? Because . . . gasp . . . "not enough established authors have written about him," a testament, I suppose, to the fact that the probable KGB "mole" was highly secretive (e.g. he has no online obituary), and was, according to Tennent H. Bagley (have you read my Wikipedia article on HIM yet?), not a James Bond kinda guy, but "dour, plodding, and risk-averse." Several zombified-by-KGB-disinfo "espionage writers" have written about him (in a positive light, of course), however, and at least two bona fide historians have written about him more negatively in their books. The espionage writers are Tom Mangold (whose main source was probable "mole" Leonard V. McCoy), David Wise (whose main source was probable "mole" George Kisevalter), Joseph Trento, Susan Trento, and William Corson (need I say more?) in their book, Widows (because Solie evidently helped the aforementioned Leonard V. McCoy lose CIA's spy, Nicholas Shadrin, to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975). The bona fide historians were Mark Riebling, who in 1994 published (or, rather, Alfred A. Knopf published for him) a very interesting book titled Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA, and the other, of course, Tennent H. Bagley, PhD., in his fine 2007 Yale University Press book, Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games (when are you going to get around to reading it, FPL?).

Here's a rhetorical question for Fancy Pants Lance:

Given the fact that, among other things, Solie apparently arranged with the Office of Mail Logistics and the Records Integration Division for all incoming non-CIA cables on Oswald's defection to be sent to his office instead of the Soviet Russia Division, given the fact that Solie hid information on defector Oswald from the FBI's Sam Papich (the Bureau's liaison to the CIA) on 11/4/59, given the fact that Solie apparently tricked true defector Anatoliy Golitsyn into choosing Peter Karlow instead of Igor Orlov as the mole SASHA, given the fact that Solie pleaded with Warren Commission attorney W. David Slawson to allow Yuri "The KGB Had Absolutely Nothing to Do with Former Marine U-2 Radar Operator Oswald During the Two-and-One-Half Years He Lived in the USSR" Nosenko to testify to the Warren Commission right at the time his hostile (but not tortuous) interrogations were beginning, given the fact that Solie "cleared" false-defector-in-place-in-June-1962 and false (or rogue) physical-defector-to-the-U.S.-in-February-1964 Nosenko in October 1968 via a bogus polygraph exam (one of the worst ones that polygraph expert Richard O. Arther had ever seen) and a specious report, given the fact that Solie helped Leonard V. McCoy and his loyal sidekick, Cynthia Hausman, lose Shadrin to KGB kidnappers in Vienna in 1975, and given the fact that, according to National Archives denizen Malcolm Blunt, Solie hid Office of Security files on Oswald from the Church Committee, . . . gasp . . . well, don't you think it's logical to conclude that Solie was a KGB "mole"?