JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

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19th January 2017 11:06
araucaria

JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

This thread is an offshoot of my Miles Mathis thread which started out defending some major writers against the accusation of working for intelligence, and for the wrong people, and for somehow been fakers writers, i.e. vastly overrated and destructive rather than creative. It later moved on to looking at how a wouldbe poet ended up in espionage: namely James Jesus Angleton of the CIA. Angleton befriended Ezra Pound, thirty years his senior, and whether deliberately or not, Mathis lays into Pound instead of Angleton...
This fascinating subject led to a couple of very lengthy posts that have probably finished off the last of my brave readers on that thread. What I have to say here is no easier than the rest, I’m afraid (not my fault), but I want to give the reader a chance by dividing it into six or seven posts. Take your time.
These last few posts
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1125347
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1126072
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1127054
segue into the material presented below and would likely explain any minor detail not clear here. This is standalone material regarding the JFK assassination with current relevance inasmuch as 22 November 1963 has been mentioned in connection with inauguration day; if anything happened tomorrow, then once again it would have nothing to do with the Russians.

So James Jesus Angleton had a middle name. It seems he also had, vicariously at least, another last name as ugly as the middle name was beautiful, that of his friend, colleague and possibly last surviving supporter, one R(obert) T(rumbull) Crowley.

We saw earlier how Chomsky’s reputation is by no means enhanced by his denial of CIA involvement in the JFK assassination, because any cogent explanation is going to state otherwise, albeit amid a shroud of lies. One such is supplied by Gregory Douglas in his book Regicide: The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy (Monte Sano Media, 2002), which names the chief plotters as Angleton and this Crowley. We’ve had several Joyces and Lewises (there were even two Wyndham Lewises): here’s another Crowley, like his namesake contending for the title of the world’s wickedest man by releasing for publication his own CIA papers self-confessedly purloined by himself upon his retirement.

What we have here is the equivalent of Crowley’s deathbed confession (postmortem embargo) which if true amounts to the deathbed confession that Angleton never had the guts to make – just as he never had the guts to kill himself. This is not a value judgment or a suggestion that the present writer is any braver, nor yet a pretence of knowing more about those circumstances than I actually do. Simply, Crowley’s placing ‘himself squarely in the middle of the conspiracy’ (p.112) did require great courage, and in the face of suicide, an act that also requires that the fear of death be somehow overcome, Angleton, for whatever reason, pulled up short. If he was lacking in bravery – no criticism intended – then no personal confession would ever be expected; meaning that Crowley’s story is the next best thing, and indeed the only alternative inasmuch as the CIA itself is unlikely ever to come forward. My point here relates to any assessment of the Crowley testimony. While little or nothing is known about Crowley, Angleton’s ‘unclassified’ bio in the declassified document I quoted earlier states that ‘Angleton is one of the most written about US intelligence figures ever’. If Crowley and Angleton were joined at the hip, then all the intel we have on the latter can be harnessed to form an opinion on the Crowley material (in which they feature prominently respectively as JJA (so he did use his middle initial at least) and RTC). On the one hand, how much sense does it make to view the JFK assassination as having been masterminded by JJA? And on the other, how much does this master work undermine or enhance the picture we have built up of the man JJA?

Obviously some of this story is going to be deliberately wrong: anything about the CIA will inevitably involve a plausible deniability getout clause. In this case, the author’s name says it all. Gregory Douglas is a pseudonym for Peter Stahl, who boasts authorship of the fake Hitler Diaries not the forged documents per se, but the research content that fooled some eminent historians. The trouble of course with fakers is that they have to be damned good at whatever they do; in a sense they need to know a lot more about their victim’s method than the victim ever consciously knew. We should not focus on the dishonesty to the point of ignoring the technical feat.

One anchor point in reality is of course Crowley himself; a good starting point regarding authentication of Douglas’s bona fides would be John Simkin at Spartacus educational.
Regarding the authenticity of the documents reproduced, which do not bear the usual SECRET or TOP SECRET at the top and bottom of each page, this is readily explainable if they did not pass through the CIA filing system. This would indeed explain why the one mention of TOP SECRET is punctuated with an ironic exclamation mark/point. The documents would be way above top secret simply because Angleton, Crowley, and maybe one or two others, had them hidden in vaults within vaults – until he and Crowley took them home.

Quote:

One CIA psychologist, Dr. Jerrold Post, who visited Angleton's office later, noted that the place felt like a fortress (...) Angleton also maintained his own special vault room just across the hall. Access to this secure chamber was granted only in the presence of Angleton or the indomitable Bertha. The vault had specially strengthened walls, an electronic pushbutton entry system for access during working hours, and a combination door lock for night security. This was the secret heart of Angleton's secret world... http://spartacus-educational.com/SSangleton.htm
(...)
David Wise, Molehunt (1992) (...)
It was a library like room with a door that had to be opened by a combination lock. There many of the materials he needed were at hand-the vault, for example, contained thirty-nine volumes on Philby alone, all the Golitsin "serials," as Angleton had called the leads provided by his prize defector, and all of the Nosenko files.
But even this secure vault had not been Angleton's sanctum sanctorum. Inside the vault was another smaller vault, secured by pushbutton locks, which contained the really secret stuff, on George Blake, Penkovsky, and other spy cases deemed too secret for the outer vault.
Kalaris thought Cram's study would be a one-year assignment. When Cram finally finished it in 1981, six years later, he had produced twelve legal-sized volumes, each three hundred to four hundred pages. Cram's approximately four-thousand-page study has never been declassified. It remains locked in the CIA's vaults.

Some of Douglas’s most virulent critics are Holocaust deniers, perhaps not the most reliable witnesses to call upon, shall we say, such as Mark Weber one of whose most virulent critics is another Holocaust denier, Robert Faurisson. So basically we are in the position of examining Douglas’s story mostly for internal consistency, much as a guy like Angleton would be doing in vetting a defector, and secondarily how, as possible fiction, it is stitched together with known realities. In Weber’s above-linked article, the title ‘Not Quite the Hitler Diaries’ is a giveaway: this is more of the same from Gregory Douglas. He may well be right, but reliance on the official story of Hitler’s last days is not the best way to refute the basic thesis that Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller worked for the CIA. Another thing, personal aversion is merely clouding his judgement: these are not nice people we are talking about; what did he expect?

The trouble with Heinrich Mueller/Müller stories is that there was not one man of that name, or two, but several, probably many. If people can confuse two Wyndham Lewises, one would expect all kinds of mistakes to be made, such as finding Mueller in a Jewish cemetery or his wife Sophie identifying a stranger as her husband (Wikipedia). Wikipedia, which makes no mention of Gregory Douglas’s work (although German Wiki does), passes on the CIA view that Mueller went to the Soviet Union, although it also describes his destruction of ‘Nazi opposition groups’ and his anti-communism (not much right-wing opposition in Nazi Germany I guess):

Quote:

Under his leadership, the Gestapo succeeded in infiltrating and to a large extent, destroying Nazi opposition groups like the underground networks of the left-wing Social Democratic Party and Communist Party.[39][40] Along these lines, historian George C. Browder asserts that Müller's "expertise and his ardent hate for Communism guaranteed his future"

Crowley cuts to the chase: a 2001 FOIA request notwithstanding (he was already dead by then), the CIA did have knowledge of Müller’s activity in the US since ‘he was the man who had worked with Müller when the former Gestapo chief arrived in Washington in 1948’ (Douglas’s emphasis, p.110). It was Crowley who approached Douglas in 1993, on learning that Douglas was in contact with Müller, ‘then a resident of Piedmont, California’ (p.109). Hence Crowley does not merely confirm Douglas’s Müller books (first publication in 1994); he actually ‘supplied the author with official documentation on Müller’s postwar employment by the American intelligence community’ (p.109). This is just Crowley’s first point of divergence with his former employer the CIA, and of convergence with Douglas, whose past as a faker he maybe felt as a layer of plausible deniability of his own – whether that would be comforting to him in his confession or simply done out of habit, I don’t know; maybe it was just because Douglas was in the right place at the right time.

So Douglas has a complex backstory to his research; this is not a briefcase of documents that someone conveniently forgot in the back of a taxi. If this is a forgery, then he is taking a lot of unnecessary risks instead of a few shortcuts. For example, he has also transcripts of his telephone ‘Conversations with the Crow’ in which the two discuss Roswell, UFOs and aliens.

Quote:

RTC: The Air Force would have it but we don’t. We had nothing to do with it but it was common knowledge that there were visitors not from this world.
GD: I don’t want to spend much time on this because if I do, the critics will jump on it and claim I’m a Flying Saucer Nut. They already hate me and this would only give them more ammunition.

The question here is, Why feed the trolls? Either this involves several layers of deception and a calculated high risk, or it is something that was actually said and simply not censored, in an attempt to set out the truth in a truthful manner.

The bottom line on this unending truth or hoax debate is that it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth and the overriding urge to steer well clear of the whole business. This urge is also created by the unsavouriness of the characters involved. Douglas admits in his conversation with Crowley to having participated in various termination operations, showing they are both on the same page. He also clearly makes stuff up in the same vein seemingly intending to make even Crowley uncomfortable, this a man who can describe how Corsican mobsters are cut up and fed to crabs in pots. This sickening urge is the opposite of the morbid fascination of the bystander. Between the two is an attitude of actively seeking to repair the real violent damage caused by a man’s brains being splashed across the public space. We cannot cross the road and disgustedly walk past on the other side.

.../...
19th January 2017 11:48
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

This being the aim, the actual details of the killing are relatively secondary. Douglas’s account is refreshingly brief. The CIA (Angleton, and Crowley) initiated the plot, enlisted the compliance of Hoover at the FBI, the military through a contact with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the vice-president for continuance of government, the Chicago mafia to bring in Corsican assassins, the Israelis to take them out. ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ with simple, effective coordination. And of course the false trail of the Soviet Union through Lee Harvey Oswald the patsy. Not to mention De Gaulle’s unheeded warning of incoming political assassins from Marseilles and the political upshot of that. All the theories neatly bundled together. The problem with this theory, unlike any other that has gone before it, would be its elegance in answering too many questions. In particular, in answer to their question Who did it? it says All of the above, except Khrushchev’s Russians, thereby stealing their thunder. Whomever one wants to incriminate after this book, the culprit will only be one part of Douglas’s story. His only new culprit is Angleton as initiator; his only cleared suspect is Khrushchev’s Russians, which only makes sense, because they were the beneficiaries of Kennedy’s alleged treason. And yet of course it raises a huge red flag: the Cold War enemy trying to set up nuclear missile bases in Cuba had nothing to do with all this? Really?

Leaving that matter aside for now, you then have a perfect match between the suspect and his victim through motive. Angleton’s anti-communist stance was so pronounced that he saw Soviet agents where there weren’t any, within his own agency, and perversely became joined at the hip with precisely the thing he feared most. This was worse than blindness. The blind are unselective in seeing nothing; they don’t start seeing things, even when there is something to see, and seeing nothing when there is nothing to see does not count as 20/20 vision. Angleton’s lack of vision meant that he was systematically wrong, both in what he saw and what he failed to see. His defining feature was that he was worse than any man in the street at assessing a Russian’s true motivations. That is his personal track record officialized by the CIA itself. We have seen how this was self-fuelling paranoia. To have such a sick man in such a position as his at a time when the president was negotiating the country and the world’s future eyeball to eyeball with of all people a Russian was a recipe for disaster. Angleton could be trusted to make the wrong call and wielded the influence to inflate his mistake all the way to Dealey Plaza.

That is the ‘truth’ I take from Douglas’s book. Is it the ‘whole truth'? Absolutely not.

If you read his ‘Conversations with the Crow’ these unsavoury characters appear almost likeable as they discuss over the phone how an innocent spouse is silenced or an agent is talkative to the point where his fate becomes sealed even as they speak. ‘Likeable’ is the wrong word: they command a form of respect because they are clearly very good at what they do (others much less so), and hint at a kind of morality, albeit a flawed or selective one. See this exchange:

Quote:

You know, some of these cretins and gross criminals ought to be taken out and shot, Robert, and I would be more than happy to oblige. They have dumped tons of drugs on the American people and the bureaucrats love it. They don’t touch the stuff and make sure their kids go to very expensive east coast establishment prep schools. Buggery after lights out but no drugs. I mean, after all, what pays for the expensive schools? The whole thing is rotten and eventually, it will collapse. Mark my words, it will come down. As the Bible says, it will fall and great will be the fall thereof. Ah well, you’re out of it now and the deluge may be years in coming but eventually the public will find out the truth, or at least some of it, and then we will see change.
RTC: As you say, Gregory, I’m well out of it but I can’t really complain too much. You get far too moralistic. You let it get in the way of clear thinking. One moment I wish I had you in the Company and the next you sound like a social worker. http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=9111

Crowley-Angleton’s notion of treason is so clearly and badly flawed, it really makes no sense. Can we believe for a minute that all these federal agencies allegedly involved have no legal department to advise them on such matters? I am no expert myself, but have thought enough about the subject to see that the charge of treason laid against JFK was no more than a projection of what the CIA itself was contemplating. Clearly, there were quite a few Crowleys and Angletons in high places.
William Colby (who fired Angleton) makes two remarks, one on subservience to the president, the other on killing people generally:

Quote:

I was always very conscious of the phrase on the commission, “You serve at the pleasure of the president.” Whenever he decided, I’d go.
(...)
You think you can solve something by eliminating a guy—it’s playing God. You have no idea who is going to succeed him, you have no idea what the repercussions will be, or, the worst, you getting caught doing it. The repercussions are potentially enormous.
For intelligence operations, it seems to me, that you have several simple questions to ask before you start one. One, how important is it? What are the risks? What is the impact if it goes sour? And on the last issue, it seems to me, you have to turn it down. Now that is being pragmatic, not moral. I think there are moral considerations, too; but being pragmatic, I just think that assassination doesn’t work. Politically, it’s dynamite. We may do dumb things, we chased all the Japanese-Americans off the west coast because we were scared. Countries do dumb things when they get scared.

Actually, in this particular instance, they did have an idea on continuance of government, by co-opting Johnson. This is Douglas’s justification for describing the assassination on several occasions as a ‘coup d’état’ or ‘putsch’. Kennedy was allegedly behaving treasonously as the source of intelligence leaks to a foreign leader, namely Khrushchev. When the tail is not wagging the dog, this is generally known as international diplomacy, when heads of state get together and work out solutions to their issues notably by sharing and discussing information obtained from their subordinate agencies. While I do understand that agents’ lives may be at risk, the only treason can be towards the CIA, viewing itself as sole proprietor of said intelligence and therefore a law unto itself. The logical conclusion is indeed that they have to take the law into their own hands, because it is only too true that the normal democratic process of seeking a presidential impeachment was not going to work. The president had the backing of the Congress/Senate, and they all had the backing of the people; the damage to democracy is in direct proportion to the trauma caused by the assassination, still not healed after all these years. Beyond that, public martyrdom by triangulation if not by crucifixion was preferred over any of the more discreet alternatives, adding a ritual aspect inspiring an almost religious awe in all right-minded people. Execution by the Corsican mafia working, or so they thought, for the Chicago mafia from which the Kennedys originally came recalls the death of Jesus, killed by his own as the Roman authority looks on and washes its hands of the affair. A ritual murder of the greatest magnitude.

Hence the importance of a name. I am troubled by Mathis’s handling of Hemingway’s mention of the other Crowley (Aleister) because it resembles the guilty start that a CIA stooge might have on hearing a name that is supposed to be kept secret. We hear plenty about Angleton, but part of the credibility issue with the Gregory Douglas story is that hardly anyone has heard of Robert Crowley: his Wikipedia entry is just a stub, and some go as far as to suggest it is just another alias for Douglas himself. That does not preclude the opposite tack being employed simultaneously: diabolize the other Crowley to the point where any mention of the name is discreetly diverted away from RTC, one of the powers behind the throne. It makes sense to me at least. I have explained to my own satisfaction my initial puzzlement with Mathis’s association of ritual with Intelligence via secret societies. The mafia, with its deep ties to the CIA – reversibly, the CIA with its deep ties to the mafia – is of course the ultimate secret society, a fact encapsulated in a single word or notion: omerta.

Coming back to the notion of treason, what we see is an attempt to target the man as if he were distinguishable from the function. They went after JFK and they killed the President of the United States. This is very clear from Douglas’s exposition of the facts. It reads like something out of Finnegans Wake. In Joyce’s novel, the main character in his ‘Earwicker’ aspect represses incestuous feelings, and the word ‘incest’ comes out as ‘insect’. When we read that Kennedy is the source of the leaks to the Soviets, we expect to read next about how he couldn’t keep his files shut, but what we get is an explanation about how he couldn’t keep his flies shut. Those are not the actual words used, but the idea is behind Crowley’s choice of codename for ‘Operation ZIPPER’. What is espionage circles is known as ‘penetration’ takes on a decidedly sexual connotation. The central issue of ‘secret backstairs diplomacy’ only appears after a detailed discussion of sexual matters which does not so much as suggest a security concern – although that would be the only justification for prying into the president’s private life.

Quote:

Angleton and his inner circle of counterintelligence staff were horrified to discover that the leak was coming from the CIA reports given to the President himself.
It was a well-known Washington secret that the President entertained a steady stream of Washington prostitutes, party girls, and other women of easy virtue in the White House whenever his wife was absent. There were nude swimming parties in the White House pool with Kennedy and some of his aides cavorting with his female visitors. Drugs were used, including marijuana, cocaine, and finally LSD.
etc. etc. (p.82)

More on this later. There is no question of any of these women being investigated as a possible Soviet asset; mention is merely made of Angleton’s difficulty in investigating White House personnel loyal to JFK. Trying to make sense of this fly in the soup only leads back to the sexual phobias detected earlier. The hangout of documents from which I quoted Colby is called Family Jewels. For those unfamiliar with the expression, it refers to the male generative organs, or orchids. The CIA certainly seem hung up about sex and Hoover at the FBI seems to have been way beyond reasonably upset at being called an ‘old faggot’ by Bobby Kennedy. We are also told that Oswald’s CIA contact, De Mohrenschildt, became his lover. Given that many intelligence circles are clearly male homosexual in their personnel and indeed their modus operandi, the ‘buggery after lights out ‘ school – cf. Anthony Blunt and blackmail – then the horrifying thing about this Irish Catholic president was that he was openly cavorting with... women, for God’s sake. This is about as disgusting as talking openly to Russians. Strangely, sexual activity between consenting adults of the opposite sex was perfectly legal, indeed then the only legal configuration, which might inspire envy and guilt in others breaking the law in those less enlightened times.

Quote:

John Kennedy may have been a charismatic man, but neither he nor his family could be considered either ethical or moral. The President and his brother, the Attorney General of the United States, repeatedly betrayed their wives, their criminal associates, their loyal Cuban supporters, and many others with alacrity when it suited them to do so.
According to the CIA, the FBI, the Vice President, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, they also betrayed important intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union for political gain. Hence, John F. Kennedy had to die. (p.102)

This sounds like another CIA button that was suspiciously easy to push... Douglas’s presentation of Crowley’s (and vicariously Angleton’s) submission is even weaker than the treason count reformulated so as nobly to overlook the personal grudges of LBJ and others. Much worse, it also conveniently overlooks the highly ethical and statesmanlike speeches that had to be stopped but which have been heard by millions of people who were not even alive in 1963.

.../...
19th January 2017 22:04
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

There is another outstanding puzzle, and it concerns Robert Crowley’s endorsement of James Angleton, which is ostensibly the only reason Crowley’s material surfaced at all.

Quote:

During the author’s relationship with Crowley, the former CIA official began to express extreme annoyance with his former colleagues at Langley. The focus of his anger was directed at their ouster of his good friend, James Angleton, once head of CIA Counterintelligence.
Crowley felt that Angleton was a ‘great patriot’ who had been forced out of his position by younger men who saw in Angleton’s constant searches for moles in the CIA a disruptive and non-productive nuisance. Angleton had been correct in his assumptions, and at least one Russian agent, Aldrich Ames, was discovered after Angleton’s death, when it was too late for an apology.
When defending Angleton’s actions, Crowley began to speak of the Kennedy assassination and why it had proved to be necessary. Because the author was obviously skeptical, Crowley, defending his position, began to send papers to support his thesis that Kennedy had been practicing treason and endangering the American public by his reckless and ill-informed ventures into brinkmanship. (Regicide, p.111-2)

We are left with the fact that Crowley, a smart man, mistakenly thought his evidence would convince Gregory Douglas, no fool himself, of Angleton’s great patriotism. Case definitely not closed. If Angleton was truly a great patriot as Crowley claimed, his vindication, I suggest, could hardly come from the outing, after his time, of a money-grabbing drunkard like Aldrich Ames.
I think Crowley is hinting that Angleton had been right all along about his friend Golitsyn. Which throws us right back into ‘the Nosenko and Golitsyn crap’ that William Colby was appointed to extricate the CIA from. It means that if Angleton was somehow right and Colby and those that followed somehow wrong, the ‘plant’ Golitsyn was not a conventional mole, and Nosenko was not entirely the genuine defector either. We are back to square one, only this time we have to find a way through this mess instead of simply turning away from it or sweeping it under the carpet.

One indication lies in the dating of Angleton’s and the CIA difficulties from the period ‘1959-63’ discussed in the other thread. In terms of American politics, that period sits astride two different administrations. It is a much better fit with Golitsyn’s Soviet timeline when Khrushchev finally gained control and post-Stalinist policies were decided upon and began to be implemented. However, from Crowley and Angleton’s viewpoint, if Golitsyn was right, this means that then Senator Kennedy was not the cause of the problem and the subsequent elimination of a president who only took office in January 1961 was not the solution. Their logic was faulty and their thinking clouded by emotion – jealousy I would suggest.

The importance of this issue is clear from its ongoing relevance to the current situation. Alleged Russian interference in the recent presidential election follows the same pattern as the alleged Russian interference in the JFK assassination. Nosenko’s claim was that the Russians were not behind Lee Harvey Oswald, whom they had discarded as incompetent. That claim was rejected as being unbelievable. However, if false, it only leads to the lone gunman, when that theory was still remotely plausible. It would only mean that the Russians had, perhaps unwittingly, provided material with which to construct a coverup story. They could only be as guilty as Oswald himself. Nowadays, whistleblowers have largely replaced traditional agents. The Russians today disown Julian Assange. However, if that claim were false, it would only lead to authorship of the leak per se, not to responsibility for content; it would only mean that the Russians had, perhaps wittingly, provided material with which to construct a real story. The real story of course, as revealed in the leaked emails, has nothing to do with the Russians. To my knowledge, no one has claimed the content of the emails to be false, certainly not by quoting chapter and verse.

Nosenko’s case, whereby ‘Subject conclusively proved his bona fides’ by identifying a KGB penetration – one William Vassall – at the British Admiralty, (‘James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the “Monster Plot”: Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations’, p.47) simply showed that outing a fellow countryman is not conclusive proof of anything. This was Angleton’s position, but by this time he was using information from Golitsyn. The problem with Angleton’s position is that he does not take it all the way: if (examples in logical, not chronological, order) a subject’s positive performance in instance A (Vassall) does not preclude a negative in instance B (Oswald), then neither does this negative preclude a positive in instance C (Cherepanov). The above-quoted CIA document quotes the case of Alexandr Cherepanov who handed over documents to some Americans to hand in to the American Embassy. According to Nosenko, Cherepanov was ‘a legitimate volunteer and the materials he provided genuine’. He was totally vindicated ‘years later [by] an exhaustive CIA review of all reporting on Cherepanov’ (p.48); but in the meantime, ‘Angleton and Golitsyn would have none of it’. So the conclusion has to be that Nosenko was somewhat unreliable, and so were Angleton and Golitsyn. The difference being that the former was working on a case-by-case basis, voicing opinions about this, that and the other; whereas the latter were totally prejudiced: anything Nosenko (and others) said was false, without even listening to them. But the blanket treatment is precisely what they themselves were refuting from the outset.

Unreliability is a human enough failing even in the intelligence community, which is why Angleton’s problem was described as losing ‘his ability to live with uncertainty’. The question ‘Whose side is he on?’ presupposes a degree of complexity that had no place in Angleton’s ‘conviction that Nosenko was a provocation [and] it followed in his mind that Nosenko’s claims could not be taken at face value’ – ever. Such a black-and-white view seems hard to believe in these days when it is fairly well understood that disinformation will likely be shrouded in a good deal of reliable information, but much later, you had the George W Bush White House saying ‘those who are not with us are against us’, and people still like to say, You know X is lying because their lips are moving. Much more dangerous is a lying X who has first established credibility by telling the truth.

However, the ousting of Angleton follows the same principle of blanket assessment: ‘Master Plan theology’ (‘Monster Plot’, p.46); ‘Golitsyn and Angleton’s Fantasies Grow’ (p.48); ‘Golitsyn and Angleton’s convoluted logic and tortuous reasoning’ (p.51) the ‘master plan’ as overarching conspiracy theory: dots begging to be joined. The last concluding remark of this 2011 document makes a slightly different point that nonetheless admits that lessons had not been learnt nearly thirty years after Angleton’s sacking:

Quote:

Finally, this history illustrates the fallacy of making firm intelligence judgments based solely on analytic reasoning and in the absence of hard facts, a lesson that we only recently relearned when it was posited in 2002 without factual support that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program.

My own point is that why ‘Master Plan theology’ (i.e. analytic reasoning minus hard facts) lasted so long – up until 1974 and so very far beyond – was because the CIA had become a ‘church’, and the above account given with hindsight merely expresses the ‘Monster Plot theology’ of a breakaway ‘protestant church’ that eventually held sway. Hence David Murphy, cited as a ‘victim’, ‘ironically (...) had been a convert to the Angleton-Golitsyn theology’ (p.52) – notice the additional religious terminology, ‘convert’ – producing lengthy studies in this vein ‘as late as 1967’. The Crowley papers and Gregory Douglas’s book show that the second-in-command at Clandestine Operations was another faithful supporter, and that this religion could be acted upon in major ways such as the Kennedy assassination, just as was later the case with the Iraq War.

What I am saying is that this report is itself heavy on analytic reasoning and short on hard facts. It is book-ended by two indications that are never really joined together. The former concerns ‘Indications of Mindset’ and indicates that even during the war

Quote:

Angleton had become convinced that the KGB was an extremely capable organization and that it had successfully penetrated Western governments at high levels and for many years had successfully run strategic deception operations against the West.
One indicator of this is the importance Angleton attached to the so-called Trust Operation as a forerunner of KGB strategic deception operations. Trust was a brilliantly successful operation run in the early 1920s by the KGB's predecessor organization, the Cheka (p.41)

Further on, Angleton is quoted as saying ‘"we were so goddamned proliferated {sic) with Communist Party members.”’ His ungrammatical misuse of the wrong word (you cannot ‘be proliferated’, and he seems to be confusing espionage with the nuclear arms race) is quoted mercilessly; what else proliferates? Disease, including in the mind, ‘even before the defection of Anatoliy Golitsyn’ (p.43).
The other bookend is the following statement about Golitsyn (p.51):

Quote:

Remarkably and tragically, all of Golitsyn's "leads" to KGB moles in CIA except for Orlov [Sasha] (...) were based not on sensitive information he had acquired as a KGB officer but from postulations based on his knowledge of KGB modus operandi and his review of CIA personnel and operational files.
Moreover, in view of the fact that upon his defection, Golitsyn had claimed to be unaware of any penetration of CIA beyond Sasha, it seems reasonable to speculate that Angleton's own predilections about KGB deception operations and penetrations were the foundation of Golitsyn's assertions. [my emphasis]

‘It seems reasonable to speculate’ that the roles had been reversed: Golitsyn was getting his intel from Angleton, not the other way around. What might be established beyond mere speculation (which obviously I cannot do) would be that Golitsyn was getting his intel from Angleton all along. The above quotes show that Angleton had already had the thoughts that Golitsyn was later to voice. He defected on the basis of Angleton’s KGB file; thereafter, being in close contact with Angleton, we are told that he had access to sensitive CIA material, with which he could fuel his story. Take this quote:

Quote:

Golitsyn was very demanding and very much a prima donna from the beginning. Although he never met Kennedy or Hoover, at his insistence he did meet twice with Attorney General Robert Kennedy and multiple times with DCI John McCone (a total of 11 times starting in July 1962).
Golitsyn also demanded access to CIA and FBI files. At first, his request was denied.
[7 column lines redacted]

What is missing here? After the phrase ‘at first...denied’, the expected follow-up would be to say, ‘Subsequently however he was cleared to access X, Y and Z.’ In that blank space is some hard evidence of what material Golitsyn was accessing: the above indication suggests ‘personnel and operational files’. The hard evidence I do have however is to the way he could pick a person’s brain and hold up what they were saying as a mirror to them.

Quote:

Oddly, in light of his later conspiracy theories, in August 1962, Golitsyn reportedly told debriefers that the Sino-Soviet split was real. However. in discussing the matter with Golitsyn, one of the debriefers speculated on the possibility that the Sino-Soviet split might be a sophisticated Soviet disinformation operation. Not long after, Golitsyn began to espouse that position.

So someone caught that one glimpse into Golitsyn’s modus operandi, which he must have been using all the time on the unsuspecting Angleton. He will have arrived with a working knowledge of Angleton’s prior mindset used as his initial data dump, and taken it from there. He will presumably have had access to Angleton’s huge vaults of paperwork that he withheld from the CIA system, as we saw earlier. This meant that Golitsyn’s standing was equal to, indeed almost indistinguishable from, Angleton’s own. He had successfully short-circuited the system. In other words, Golitsyn was working for the Soviet Union, and Angleton had indeed been taken in. However, that does not mean Golitsyn was a Soviet agent; he may have been a bona fide but incompetent defector in the Oswald mould. The Soviets’ description of him as being disgruntled on being demoted would thus be correct, and they would have taken the decision simply to keep an eye on him.

.../...
20th January 2017 09:07
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

Hence you have a configuration of two agents, Angleton and Golitsyn, and two agencies, the CIA and the KGB. While none of the four could fully trust any of the others, the most trusting was Angleton of Golitsyn. It seems he had also been too trusting of the British Soviet spy Kim Philby:

Quote:

Records show that during the period Philby visited CIA 113 times, 22 of which involved meetings with Angleton.
Many of these meetings reportedly were followed by long lunches over cocktails, and, given the fact that Angleton either didn't keep or later destroyed any record of their discussions, it seems highly likely that there were many more meetings with Philby that weren’t documented.

Golitsyn was trying to gain the confidence of the CIA; one of the ways he did this was by predicting that other defectors would follow to discredit him. That would not mean much if he and they were part of the same KGB plan. Such a plan would actually make more sense than allowing Golitsyn to persuade the Americans of the truth of his claims. For him to be both correct and believed would expose Soviet weakness; for him to be disbelieved would remedy Soviet weakness. As I suggested earlier, it is likely that the KGB did not trust him, and sent a man after him to neutralize his message.

This explanation removes at least one paradox. Golitsyn was allegedly at the top of a Soviet hitlist for thirty years and was never taken out? He describes long-term planning dating back to Lenin’s New Economic Plan (NEP) such that a Gorbachev-type liberal leader was planned for the eighties back in the 1950s. And yet ‘the most important defector ever to have reached the West’ (Christopher Story) was allowed to do his worst, and when he failed to convince the CIA, to publish his theories in two books.
As Story says:

Quote:

Basically, what Golitsyn taught and revealed was that these, all Soviet governments are Leninist governments. They’re driven by the deception strategy perfected by Lenin, which is aimed at achieving a long-range strategy, namely: Control the whole world!

Control the whole world; provoke fake anticommunist revolutions to make the Soviet bloc appear to crumble – and allow Anatoliy Golitsyn to expose the whole dastardly plot! Whether or not he was a Soviet mole, you have to think that he was in no way harming the Soviet cause, and may actually have been allowed to continue because he was helping that cause. It ultimately matters not how he was setup, whether as a defector or a mole: if he was advancing the Soviet cause, then the impression that he was helping the CIA had to be a false one. And notice, it ultimately matters not how inaccurate the picture he painted actually was. He was not really harming the Soviet cause, because basically all he was doing was, without necessarily betraying his country at all, to confirm Angleton’s wild conspiracy theories and thereby tie the agency in knots:

Quote:

CIA's operations against the critically important Soviet target were adversely affected in the 1960s and 1970s as the result of Angleton's insistence that the KGB controlled virtually every source that CIA handled. This made difficult–even paralyzed, said veterans of period–efforts to recruit Soviet agents and diminished CIA ability to produce intelligence from human sources on the subject of most importance to US poilcymakers. (p.54)

So Golitsyn later published two books; one, New Lies For Old came out in 1984 and made a whole string of predictions for the momentous years that followed that mostly proved correct. The basis for his predictions was his understanding of perestroika as a restructuring not of Soviet thinking but of Western thinking, a time of apparent weakness papered over by the West’s failure to recognize it as a hostile move. His second book is The Perestroika Deception.
He uses two tools of communist strategic thinking: dialectics and Sun Tzu's treatise on strategy and deception, The Art of War:

Quote:

Dialectics of the strategy and the predictive power of the new method Correct
understanding of the strategy and the application of that understanding to the
analysis of events enables one to predict otherwise surprising Soviet actions. Since
the strategy is long-range, it has several phases. The strategists plan their actions in
the early phases in preparation for the final phase. They conceive Soviet reforms in
the initial phase, they rehearse them in the preparatory phase and they introduce
them in the final phase. Because of this planning framework, the strategy has its own
dialectic. It has its thesis - the Stalinist regime: its antithesis - criticism and rejection
of the Stalinist regime: and its synthesis - a new, reformed model which
'perestroika' is designed to create, and which will be the product of 'convergence' (the
joining of the two opposites). Understanding the dialectic and logic of the strategy is
crucial for prediction: it enables one to see how the situation in one phase will
develop in the next phase.

For instance, it enables one to predict the change in the role and status of
Soviet 'dissidents'. In the initial phase, they were recruited and trained by the KGB. In
the preparatory phase, they were 'criticised' and 'persecuted' by the KGB. In the final
phase, they are accepted and even incorporated into 'perestroika'. It was through
understanding this dialectic that the Author was able to predict the simple fact that
Sakharov 'might be included in some capacity in government'. In the event, he
became one of Gorbachev's chief advisers. (THE PERESTROIKA DECEPTION p.26)

Quote:

Lenin and Chicherin were not the only sources of inspiration for the revival of strategic disinformation. The ancient Chinese treatise on strategy and deception. Sun Tzu's The Art of War, translated into Russian by N. I. Konrad in 1950 (shortly after the communist victory in China), was retranslated into German in 1957 by the Soviet specialist Y. 1. Sidorenko, with a foreword by the Soviet military strategist and historian General Razin.^ It was published in East Germany by the East German Ministry of Defense and was prescribed for study in East German military academies. (NEW LIES, p.42-3)

Sun Tzu's strategy of deception involves reversing reality vs appearances at all times; strength for weakness, weakness for strength.

Quote:

“All warfare is based on deception. Therefore, when capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity.
Offer the enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. One who wishes to appear to be weak in order to make his enemy arrogant must be extremely strong. Only then can he feign weakness.” (THE PERESTROIKA DECEPTION p.247)

It is not difficult to see this aspect of the art of war in dialectical terms. What this involves is the conundrum that we need to resolve, or at least take to another stage. Why? Because it is my contention that not only was this tying the Americans in knots, at some stage at least it was tying the Soviets in knots as well. Not being trained in philosophy, I am of course in danger of tying myself in knots while I am at it; that is a risk I shall have to take, in the knowledge that trained philosophers often also succumb.

Let me start by cutting one Gordian knot: Sun Tzu deals with one situation: warfare. Like Blair and Bush, he has no postwar exit plan. He does not apply dialectics to war itself by introducing the antithesis, rejection of war/peacemaking. If you do that, and do it persistently, then Cold Warfare might be a logical next step on the way to reducing conflict to negotiable disagreement. Except that the Cold War was the work of the Gehlen Org of Nazis ‘working with’ the newly formed CIA against the Soviets for the precise purpose of avoiding any such reduction.
Gregory Douglas, who also refers to Christopher Simpson’s 1988 book Blowback, puts it this way:

Quote:

The Cold War was an engineered affair, and its chief architect was former German Army General Reinhard Gehlen, a former head of the Soviet military intelligence section of the Wehrmacht. In 1948, at the request of his superiors, Gehlen concocted a lengthy pseudo-informational report stating that 135 Soviet armored divisions were poised to strike into Central Europe.
This report was a complete fiction and was prepared solely to create a situation wherein the American military could legitimately increase its size, and American business, in a slump after the end of the boom years of World War II, would once again gear up for a highly profitable wartime economy. (...)
At the time of his devastating essay into creative writing, former General Gehlen was a paid employee of the CIA. (Regicide, p.73-4)

Hegel in his Science of Logic (an online version, with passages highlighted by Lenin himself, is available here) begins by identifying an identity between being and nothing, which are unified in Becoming. Hence the importance I place on process as opposed to static situations.

Quote:

Pure Being and pure nothing are, therefore, the same. What is the truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being — does not pass over but has passed over — into nothing, and nothing into being. But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore, this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself. §134

Hence, a something is what it is in relation to what it is not, the other, confronted with its own finitude. ’ Something with its immanent limit posited as the contradiction of itself, through which it is directed and forced out of and beyond itself, is the finite’ (§247). Hence the contradiction is internalized confrontation and sees immediate resolution: ‘the very fact that something is determined as a limitation implies that the limitation is already transcended. For a determinateness, a limit, is determined as a limitation only in opposition to its other in general, that is, in opposition to that which is free from the limitation; the other of a limitation is precisely the being beyond it’ (§265).

Quote:

The proposition that the finite is ideal [ideel] constitutes idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognising that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. This is as true of philosophy as of religion; for religion equally does not recognise finitude as a veritable being, as something ultimate and absolute or as something underived, uncreated, eternal. Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no significance. A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, that is, in their sensuous individuality — not even the water of Thales. §316

From here on, I am going to try and work this out in my own words. The reference to oriental thought, if only through the art of war, makes sense inasmuch as what is being described is the yin-yang relation. The process can of course be applied to itself as well as to every other layer of reality/non-reality. Since this and any other philosophy is about being and involves the action of being upon itself, it is materialistic in outlook, focussing on substance. And yet it is idealistic (idealistic = relating to ideas, not necessarily ideals) in that it includes nothing as part of all that is. Actually the whole construction is idealist in that it deals only with abstract concepts. To illustrate this point, if you can talk of elephants and unicorns in the same way, then this is idealist, since the actual existence or otherwise of such creatures is irrelevant. The difference between the two categories is by no means imaginary; on the contrary it is material: elephants have substance, unicorns do not. Unicorns take on a fake substance when people start agreeing on descriptions in words and drawings. Elephants lose substance by being rare and exotic and threatened with extinction. Our ideas themselves vibrate between being and nothing states: we can imagine a time when elephants did not or will not exist and unicorns maybe did or will.

Hence if dialectics are idealist, then the ‘dialectical materialism’ of Marxist-Leninist philosophy is not so much a contradiction in terms as a live unicorn, or perhaps a chimera, i.e. ‘an imaginary monster made up of incongruous parts’, or metaphorically ‘an illusion or fabrication of the mind’ (dictionary definitions). I guess all of our concepts suffer from a similar ‘disease’. Take capitalism: from the hard cash in your pocket to the materialism of a different kind exhibited by consumers, there is the soft centre of nothing, the nothing of fiat money. See Joseph P. Farrell’s book Financial Vipers of Venice. Dialectical materialism, opposing all forms of skepticism denying that science can know the nature of reality, is potentially at war with this idealist other that it carries within itself, just as particle physics is haunted by and tries to suppress wave physics.

.../...
20th January 2017 14:52
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

We see then how the very concept of dialectics already contains the ideas of truth (being) and fakery (nothing), extending to the field of espionage with deception as the self in the other (the spy or defector) or the other in the self (the mole, the deluded agent) – and then endless mirror imaging that ties everyone in knots. Where does this take us? It takes us back to Stalinism:

Quote:

the strategy has its own dialectic. It has its thesis - the Stalinist regime: its antithesis - criticism and rejection of the Stalinist regime: and its synthesis - a new, reformed model which 'perestroika' is designed to create, and which will be the product of 'convergence' (the joining of the two opposites). (THE PERESTROIKA DECEPTION p.26)

To return to a formula I used much earlier (on the other thread): When is Communism not Communism? Answer, when it is Stalinism. Communism without Stalinism was Leninism; nonetheless, as any parent will know, the generative process always involves this element of strangeness consubstantial with the element of sameness. (How much this overlaps with strengths and weaknesses remains to be seen.) However, although inspired by Leninism, inasmuch as it was dialectical, perestroika was not a reactionary return to Leninism; it may have been inspired by a restructuring of Western thinking disguised as a restructuring of Soviet thinking experimented under Vladimir Illich, but being conducted on this altogether more massive scale, what you would expect to see would be a phenomenon that, quoting Hegel, ‘immediately vanishes in its opposite’ (an idea similar to Jung’s concept of enantiodromia): in other words a restructuring of Soviet thinking disguised as a restructuring of Western thinking. This may be an example of deception according to Golitsyn: ‘to be credible and effective, a deception should accord as far as possible with the hopes and expectations of those it is intended to deceive’ (OLD LIES, p.43). That is what he was doing so successfully with Angleton, until that debriefer caught him short-circuiting the process. This amounts to saying that the Soviets were adding another layer to this process with a deception of their own according as far as possible with the hopes and expectations of the man they intended to deceive: Golotsyn!

The idea here is that by simulating a Western-style life on such a vast scale, the people of the Soviet bloc were deceived by their own play-acting. Just as actors work themselves physically into a role, and then maybe carry some of it back into their real-life persona, many will have been caught up in the spirit of the times, especially of course the common folk who were not play-acting at all but enjoying newfound freedoms, but also perhaps not a few loyal party members, not least those who only just saved their skins under Stalin. This cannot be quantified (by me at least), but the principle of process dictates that this would be happening to some degree. We saw how static Leninism would have been reactionary, i.e. something contrary to Leninism; the same principle holds here. In other words, nothing went entirely to plan. Nothing ever does.

There is a fundamental problem here. Planning is not dialectical in nature. Dialectics are all about process; planning is teleological, you set yourself an objective to work towards, then determine intermediate goals or milestones and a timetable to reach that end. Sun Tzu’s warfare is of this kind; you devise and apply a strategy to win a war, and tactics to win each battle. Communism according to Golitsyn has such an agenda: to defeat capitalism and play a dominant role in a Communist world order. This is a closed system approach where everything and everyone becomes a milestone or stepping-stone with a fixed position in relation to the whole, the whole being everything up to the end point of final victory as defined on the basis of the initial criteria. Dialectics on the other hand offer an open-ended system, a work in progress; a truly dialectical approach would be to start with a dissatisfaction with capitalism, confront it with something else, and take whatever comes next in order gradually to refine the system towards a better place to be that will itself always be in process. There is no end goal per se and the better place to be will potentially be a whole lot better than anything that could have been imagined from the outset. It is fairly easy to see how this would work; capitalism is not all bad inasmuch as it taps into free enterprise or personal initiative whereby everyone can make their individual contribution, not just economically and culturally, but also politically (democratically). Clearly from the outset, by discounting its own mine of personal initiative by enforcing centralized control, Communism was set on a road to impoverishment.

Stalin was the return of suppressed personal initiative at the only place where it was still possible: at the very top; and as such, disregarding for a moment the large-scale loss of life at grassroots level, his rule meant large-scale loss of life at the top, was life-threatening to the surviving leadership, and hence a return to a form of democracy at the top was the only truly ‘viable’ solution. This was a major reminder of what Communism could not be: whatever ‘the dictatorship of the people’ was supposed to mean, it could not mean the dictatorship of a despot, i.e. personal initiative restricted to a single individual. Autocrats are never viable beyond the short-term: the autocrat dies, après moi le déluge, end of story. In other words, they cannot be a part of any long-term planning, they are the unplanned sabotaging of any plan. Seen in this light, you don’t need dialectics to understand that Stalinism was a dead-end and some form of collegiality and better forward-planning absolutely vital; and since the aim was to get the plan back on track, the result, perestroika, may therefore be seen as a restructuring of the Soviet leadership, as correctly understood in the West. Communism had nearly killed itself precisely without reference to the West. Stalinism caused such things as ‘deepening discontent in the Soviet Union and its satellites, leading to explosive revolutionary situations in East Germany, Poland, and Hungary’ (NEW LIES, p.24). Perestroika solved those problems, again with no reference to the West.

As a more theoretical tool, dialectics might be more of a hindrance than a help in de-Stalinization. Rather than synthesize Stalinism and rejection of Stalinism, you would want to theorize how this monster entered the system in the first place, by going back to where it came from, namely the thesis of Capitalism and the antithesis of anti-Capitalism. There you might find that the rejection en bloc of an economic system and its replacement with an alternative economic system called Communism in head-to-head conflict is simply not dialectical thinking at all: it is contradictory, reverse thinking. The thesis of Capitalism and the antithesis of anti-Capitalism on the other hand should lead to a synthesis that does not have a label but would involve the elimination of the most egregious aspects of Capitalism. This is how ‘dialectical materialism’ is at all feasible.

Capitalism is an idealist concept, Communism is just another idealist concept. As an idealist concept, Capitalism blurs the material distinctions to be made between the beneficial aspects and the negative aspects of the flesh-and-blood capitalist. To give a very concrete example, many of the richest flesh-and-blood capitalists are the biggest philanthropists: their money-making causes all kinds of grief including wars, yet their generosity serves many truly worthwhile and charitable causes. That has to be understood, instead of being met with shock at the hypocrisy. You have good people working within the capitalist system who are undermining its nefarious effects from within. See this.The dialectical approach will seek to tap into and develop this kind of resource which would otherwise become collateral damage in the event of the downfall of capitalism.

Communism is just another idealist concept. Hence the materialist approach needs to deal with its own internal contradiction whereby pure unadulterated materialism is a chimera. The problem with the flesh-and-blood materialist is that there is no place for idealism, which is a rather strange idea, or as a planned goal a rather strange ideal. Idealism and materialism are themselves dialectically intertwined notions. Without the one, the other does not really get off the ground at all. Also this Russian-based philosophy goes radically against the nuts and bolts of the flesh-and-blood peoples on either side of this conflict. Westerners are typically materialists in the sense of down-to-earth no-nonsense types, while Slavs are typically more spiritually oriented in their methods and aims. See this post:

Quote:

Posted by araucaria

(...)

Quote:

Posted by araucaria

One area in which there is a huge cultural difference is the approach to space exploration between the American can-do display of massive technology and the Slav soul mentality behind the Russian campaign.

According to Victor Shklovsky, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was the pioneering author of the Elementary Course on the Spaceship and its Construction in 1894, and his inspiring teacher was Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, the author of The Philosophy of the Common Task.

Quote:

Fyodorov wanted to create an ideal for technology. He had dreams of the resurrection of the dead, physical resurrection, and was already worrying over where this resurrected mankind would be going to settle. This is why he considered it an absolute necessity to colonize the stars. Fyodorov was the learned head librarian at the Rumantsiev Library. A lot of people in Moscow knew him.

Shklovsky quotes Tolstoy on Fyodorov:

Quote:

He has developed the programme of the common task of all mankind, the purpose of which is the resurrection of all men, in their flesh. Firstly it is not as crazy as it sounds. (Not to worry, I do not share and never will share his views, but I have understood them so well that I feel up to the task of defending these ideas against any other beliefs having a superficial goal.) He is 60 years old, he is poor and gives away everything, he is always gentle and cheerful.

Of course, NASA’s “superficial goal” is just a façade, but for something definitely not “the common task of all mankind”

This post came up in third place in a google search, so clearly this is a subject that is not being adequately discussed; accordingly I am taking the liberty of quoting Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) for his spiritual approach to the exploration of cosmic infinity (notably in The Future of Earth and Mankind) at greater length here: :)

Quote:

Each part of the Universe, that is each matter, can take the form of a living and even an immortal being.
(…)
Since time is infinite and there is no end and no beginning, the number of moments in life in unlimited in both the past and the future. And the number of intervals connecting them is also infinite. Life’s moments are all subjectively linked together and their sum is just as infinite as the entire time of the Universe. Indeed, even the tiniest part of infinity is itself infinite. We have to conclude from this that there is one and only one life that has never ended and will never end. My ‘Me’ belongs to matter as does any atom and it wanders endlessly, with no beginning nor end, throughout the Cosmos in connection with all the other ‘Mes’, with all the other atoms.
(…)
Many think that I am interested in rockets and am concerned with their fate for the rockets themselves. This would be a huge mistake; rockets for me are no more than a means, just a method in order to reach the depths of the Cosmos, but they are not a goal in themselves. Unfortunately that is what many people who write and talk about rocketry think. I am not disputing the importance of having rockets, for they will help mankind to study cosmic space and set foot in the Galaxy. I too am doing research with that goal in mind. If there was another way of getting around the Cosmos, I would take it… The main thing is to take off away from the Earth and go and inhabit the Cosmos, not the planets of the solar system, but the planets of other systems. We have to reach out, as it were, to cosmic philosophy. But our philosophers have no thoughts of this. And yet, who else but philosophers should be looking into this question? But either they refuse or they fail to understand the crucial importance of this problem, or quite simply it scares them. (“L’Attraction de l’espace”, exhibition catalogue, MAM St Etienne, 2009, p. 210)

Basically what he saying is, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a huge mistake (but it helps!): all you need is a philosopher running scared. Or, I might add, a bankster/politician throwing ‘money’ at the problem. Interestingly, Nikolai Fyodorov was scared of money, living off less than 17 roubles a month and saying, ‘Even if you spend it, there is always some of the damned stuff left!’
I imagine on the other hand that if Vladimir Putin is receiving outside help, it will be from entities in tune with the fearless Russian philosopher mindset, ready to explore “another way of getting around the Cosmos”.

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20th January 2017 15:01
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

Golitsyn presumably learned the defective materialist dialectics that were at the basis of the communist revolution. Whether or not the Party had meanwhile produced philosophers capable of refining their analysis is something I am not in a position to tell. If they were, however, that would enable them to leave Golitsyn alone to spout his theories as he saw fit to whomever he saw fit. He would not thereby be dangerously exposing a weakness in the way he would otherwise have been. We can see the difference by applying Golitsyn himself to a dialectical analysis.

Take as your thesis a defector and as your antithesis a mole. A defector is someone who changes sides on bona fide grounds; a mole someone who changes sides for treacherous reasons, i.e. only pretends to change sides, defining him as a non-defector. Your synthesis, intended to help you decide what to think of the man sitting on the other side of your desk, is then going to be a kind of hybrid who would inspire a good deal of mistrust in proportion to the enticing intelligence he has, which may or may not be true. This is somewhat counter-intuitive; common sense tells you that the man is going to be predominantly one thing or the other: counterintelligence operates on the basis that it is going to find out which it is. But this synthesis hints that he may be duplicitous to the point where nothing useful can be got out of him. Rinse and repeat: you now have two men contradicting each other, Golitsyn and Nosenko. Take as your thesis the hybrid defector-mole Golitsyn, as characterized by Golitsyn and Nosenko. Take as your antithesis the hybrid mole-defector Nosenko, as characterized by Golitsyn and Nosenko. What you now have is two mirror-images of the same synthesis obtained previously. There is no contradiction here and the dialectic breaks down. The two men are contradicting each other, of course, which is what makes them the same. The same symmetry affects the debriefers, Angleton and Co, leading to the situation described by Colby as ‘tying the agency in knots’.

Clearly the KGB gains from this situation, sending the CIA into turmoil regardless of whether or not Golitsyn was a defector or a mole. Peter Wright: ‘the CIA decided the only way of purging the doubt was to disband the Soviet Division, and start again with a completely new complement of officers. It was obviously a way out of the maze, but it could never justify the damage to the morale in the Agency as a whole.’ This strength is offset by the weakness of having handed over a number of Soviet secrets in the process, a weakness offset by the accompanying disinformation. But to gain this overall advantage from the two-man scenario, the second man Nosenko had to be a plant, even though he was globally more credible than the possible bona fide defector! So, with hindsight, we can say that there was indeed a contradiction between the two men, which has been synthesized into two unlikely novelties: a credible plant, and an untrustworthy defector.

We can now take another look at something Nosenko said that was not believed, namely that the Soviets had discarded Lee Harvey Oswald and had therefore no hand in the JFK assassination. Jim Marrs: ‘The counterintelligence faction, led by Angleton, still believes that Nosenko's defection was contrived by the KGB for two purposes: to allay suspicions that the Soviets had anything to do with the JFK assassination [and] to cover for Soviet "moles," or agents deep within US intelligence.’ What has been overlooked here is the fact that, being to Kennedy’s rear, he could not have caused the president’s head to fall back towards himself: the laws of physics do not take kindly to that notion. Hence Oswald was a patsy, and hence even if the Soviets had been involved with him they still had no hand in the JFK assassination – except, that is, perhaps by getting Angleton into such a state that his CIA had him killed (this despite the fact that Angleton and Crowley, who claim responsibility for involving the Chicago Mafia in the assassination, were doubtless also responsible for getting that same Chicago Mafia voting early and often for that same JFK). This would in turn lead to the necessity for Angleton’s CIA to allege KGB responsibility through the lone gunman theory. But even if one accepted the magic bullet theory, why would the Russians want to kill the one man they could do business with? The stated motive, to cover for Soviet ‘moles’, would only hold water to the extent that such moles existed outside of the minds of Angleton and Golitsyn. I have shown how the presence of Golitsyn and Nosenko alone is probably enough to have generated the suspicion of these moles without the need for any such to have existed. Hence not only the Soviet method (operating through Oswald) but also their motive, offer Angleton plausible cover for his own culpability.

Quote:

Arkady Shevchenko, Breaking With Moscow (1985)
In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Everyone in the (Soviet) mission was stunned and confused, particularly when there were rumors that the murder had been Soviet-inspired... Our leaders would not have been so upset by the assassination if they had planned it and the KGB would not have taken upon itself to venture such a move without Politburo approval. More important, Khrushchev's view of Kennedy had changed. After Cuba, Moscow perceived Kennedy as the one who had accelerated improvement of relations between the two countries. Kennedy was seen as a man of strength and determination, the one thing that Kremlin truly understands and respects. In addition, Moscow firmly believed that Kennedy's assassination was a scheme by "reactionary forces" within the United States seeking to damage the new trend in relations. The Kremlin ridiculed the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald had acted on his own as the sole assassin. There was in fact widespread speculation among Soviet diplomats that Lyndon Johnson, along with the CIA and the Mafia, had masterminded the plot. Perhaps one of the most potent reasons why the U.S.S.R. wished Kennedy well was that Johnson was anathema to Khrushchev. Because he was a southerner, Moscow considered him a racist (the stereotype of any American politician from below the Mason Dixon line), an anti-Soviet and anti-Communist to the core. Further, since Johnson was from Texas, a center of the most reactionary forces in the United States, according to the Soviets, he was associated with the big-time capitalism of the oil industry, also known to be anti-Soviet. http://spartacus-educational.com/SSgolitsin.htm

Quote:

I was impressed with Kennedy. I remember liking his face, which was sometimes stern but which often broke into a good-natured smile. As for Nixon... he was an unprincipled puppet, which is the most dangerous kind. I was very glad Kennedy won the election... I joked with him that we had cast the deciding ballot in his election to the Presidency over that son-of-a-bitch Richard Nixon. When he asked me what I meant, I explained that by waiting to release the U-2 pilot Gary Powers until after the American election, we kept Nixon from being able to claim that he could deal with the Russians; our ploy made a difference of at least half a million votes, which gave Kennedy the edge he needed. (Nikita Khrushchev in his autobiography) http://spartacus-educational.com/USAkennedyJ.htm

Wow, the Russians admit to influencing a US presidential election! Should we be shocked? Not necessarily. They did so by taking a decision within their jurisdiction, and timing that decision in the way that best suited their domestic needs. Arguably foreign leaders ought to be consulted as to who should be elected to deal with them. I guess no formal consultation or vote-rigging was necessary for the American people to decide which of Trump and Hillary Clinton was better suited to negotiating with Putin. Hillary’s mistake was to underestimate it as a campaign issue and in fact make sure everyone understood that negotiating with Putin was not what she had in mind at all.

It may be said that dialectics are a tool for resolving conflicts by bringing opposites closer together and finding the common ground. It is dangerous because the concepts used are never fully adequate to the real-life person or thing they refer to. Hence interpersonal confrontation and negotiation is the best we can do to reap the benefits and limit the disadvantages. And peaceful sharing from the heart is going to achieve that better than bellicose rhetoric and deception. The difficult part of putting this into action is in realizing that the other party is ready to respond: it may actually be the other way round.

Here is an interesting example from today’s papers of what belligerent leaders (full-blooded Irishmen!) can achieve together: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/...-a7537056.html
22nd January 2017 19:06
Foxie Loxie

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

I have to be in the right "mood" in order to read your writings; but I do enjoy them! Are you a politician? :confused:
23rd January 2017 21:24
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

.../...

If you apply dialectics, which Hegel himself stated was NOT a method, with a man as your thesis, then, as an example, a woman might be your antithesis, and their children would be several of countless potential syntheses of this marriage of opposites. The emphasis on Jack and Bobby Kennedy as the sons of their gangster father Joe Kennedy, who seems to have been chiefly responsible for the boys’ education, shows what happens when the full equation is ignored. The sons inherited the womanizing from their father, but clearly the moral sense that no one seems to have bargained for came from their mother’s side, putting the Fitzgerald in to JFK and RFK. Everything and everyone is much more than the sum of the parts we each interact with, but even on the simplest level, when you deal with the son, you are not dealing with the father; you could not kill John Kennedy without assassinating the POTUS; when fighting rabies you are going to put down some beautiful dogs. This is how psychopathy works with its human shield; like idealism embedded materialism, either real people get killed or the intangible virus survives. I would suggest, however, that what we are seeing here is not some viral add-on to our human nature, but something missing, and therefore something that can be worked at.

You don’t need dialectics to detect the deactivation of the inner feminine, what Jung calls the anima (the animus being the masculine equivalent in the female). I suggested earlier that the nickname ‘Mother’ ascribed to Angleton by Aaron Latham in his not entirely spoof spook thriller-cum-roman à clefs Orchids for Mother was genuine, despite CIA claims to the contrary.
Having now read the book, it is not so much about ‘mummy’s boy’ as I tentatively suggested, but about a sibling rivalry between Angleton and Colby in relation to Angleton senior (somewhat reminiscent of Joyce’s feuding twins, Shem and Shaun). Agents are presented as overgrown schoolboys, with ‘Mother’ acting as a father to a new recruit, or rather like a school prefect looking after a younger pupil at a boarding school (what the Brits call a public school and everyone else a private school – Angleton attended one in England), in other words a highly distorted version of anything remotely feminine. There are other possibilities, including the obscene abbreviation for ‘a contemptible or offensive person’ with or without an Oedipus complex, or alternatively, according to one dictionary at least, ‘an exceptional, formidable or impressive person’. However, the above mention of Rose Kennedy hints at another idea: JFK’s mother, we read, was a kind of saint but one unable to tell her kids she loved them, carrying out her maternal role with great efficiency by keeping files on the nine of them. Since Angleton was notorious for spying on everyone, including his own people at the CIA, then that might have been viewed as a perverse form of mothering.

This is just speculation of course, but not idle speculation. What happens when one tries to inject a genuinely feminine component into this story is not hard fact either, but a reported confession and vicarious confession made in Angleton’s defence, namely that he and Robert Crowley ordered the termination of JFK’s mistress Mary Pinchot Meyer, an admission recorded in Gregory Douglas’s book Regicide, but is also the subject of several of his ‘Conversations with the Crow’. These conversations do however likely contain some verifiable information; below is a quote from a conversation worth reading in its entirety and containing this verifiable claim regarding Oswald’s rifle, a Carcano as we all know – or perhaps not:

Quote:

GD: I was watching the telly and I saw them bring out the rifle. I know a great deal about guns, Robert, and they showed very clear shots of it. Besides, the local cop who found it ran a gun shop and he must have known it was an Argentine Mauser and not a worthless Carcano 6.5mm. Why did they make the change?
RTC: As I recall it, they had ordered the smaller piece through the mail to a fake PO box in Oswald’s fake name. Oswald worked for ONI and used several names. http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=9356

Here is another blog assessing the validity of the Gregory Douglas material notably with this interesting comment:

Quote:

To compare: two hour conversations with generally very unknown "insiders" on Coast to Coast AM, Disclosure Project, Project Camelot and Project Avalon always put me to sleep with warning bells ringing in the back of my head within seconds. In the end these people never give you anything solid, apart from the fact that most of what they claim are total inventions. The Crowley transcripts are very different. There's the usual BS, but then there is all the rest. https://isgp-studies.com/Conversatio..._Joseph_Trento

However, we may not need watertight insider intel given the amount of info on Mary Pinchot Meyer from Wikipedia of all places.The first important aspect here is the change Pinchot brought about in JFK was a move away from promiscuity to a one-on-one relationship: he fell in love with her. This is a much surer way of connecting with one’s feminine side that cavorting in swimming pools with multiple prostitutes. Meanwhile, here is some of the Crowley material on the same subject.

Quote:

GD: You mentioned his wife…
RTC: Ah yes. He married the daughter of Pinchot just after the war…
GD: Gifford?
RTC: Correct. The governor. Very attractive woman but her sister was even better. She married Bradlee who is one of the Companies men. He’s on the ‘Post’ now. Cord’s wife was what they call a free spirit…liked modern art, runs around naked in people’s gardens and so on. Pretty but strange and unstable. She and Cord got along for a time but time changes everything….they do say that, don’t they?…They broke up and Cord was so angry at being dumped, he hated her from then on. She took up with Kennedy. Did you know that?
GD: No.
RTC: Oh yes indeed. Kennedy had huge orgies out at 1600 with nude women in the pools and all that. Even had a professional photographer come in and take pictures of him in action. Old Jack loved threesomes, the occasional dyke and God knows what else. It was Joe’s money that shut people up, including his nasty wife…
GD: I thought she was a saint. Old family…
RTC: Bull****! Family is Irish, bog trotters, like Kennedy. Not French at all. A greedy, lying and completely nutty woman. Never liked her. One generation here and they give up washing clothes and put up the lace curtains in the family parlor. What was I saying?
GD: About Cord’s wife…
RTC: Oh yes. After Mary…that was her name…Mary. You haven’t heard about her?
GD: No.
RTC: After Kennedy bought the farm, ex-Mrs. Meyer was annoyed. She became the steady girlfriend and he was very serious about her. Jackie was brittle, uptight and very greedy. Poor people usually are. Mary had money and far more class and she knew how to get along with Jack. Trouble was, she got along too well. She didn’t approve of the mass orgies and introduced him to pot and other things. Not a good idea. Increased chances for blackmail or some erratic public behavior. But after Dallas , she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.
GD: What was the outcome?
RTC: We terminated her, of course.
GD: That I didn’t know. How?
RTC: Had one of our cleaning men nail her down by the towpath while she was out for her daily jog.
GD: Wasn’t that a bit drastic?
RTC: Why? If you knew the damage she could cause us…
GD: Were you the man?
RTC: No, Jim Angleton was. And Bradley, her brother-in-law was in the know. After she assumed room temperature, he and Jim went over to Mary’s art studio to see if she had any compromising papers and ran off with her diary. I have a copy of it…
GD: Could I see it?
RTC: Now, Gregory, don’t ask too many questions. Maybe later.
(..)
GD: What did he think about doing his wife?
RTC: Ex-wife. Let’s be accurate now. Ex-wife. When Jim talked to Cord about this, Cord didn’t let him finish his fishing expedition. He was in complete agreement about shutting her up. Gregory, you can’t reason with people like her. She hated Cord, loved Kennedy and saw things in the Dallas business that were obvious to insiders or former insiders but she made the mistake of running her mouth. One of the wives had a talk with her about being quiet but Mary was on a tear and that was that.
(..)
GD: Think they’ll shoot me? A boating accident? Something like that?
RTC: When I was in harness, yes, they would. A bungled robbery or a rape like Kennedy’s lady friend but not now. https://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php?topic=25358.0

This last quote offers an answer to an attempt by one Ben Hayes to dismiss the Meyer murder as an ordinary run-of-the-mill killing. According to Hayes, a rape, botched or otherwise, could not be a professional hit. But he does not explain why the ‘disturbed young man’ who was arrested would fire a bullet to the head and another to the heart, which was standard CIA procedure. The actual murder then was done according to the book, with redundant efficiency; the bungled rape would be in addition, presumably to disguise the real motive for the murder and incriminate the innocent bystander, who would need a disturbed young man’s motive.

However, there was also a collective aspect to the undermining of machismo in the corridors of power:

Quote:

In 1983, former Harvard University psychology lecturer Timothy Leary claimed that in the spring of 1962, Pinchot Meyer, who, according to her biographer Nina Burleigh "wore manners and charm like a second skin",[23] told Leary she was taking part in a plan to avert worldwide nuclear war by convincing powerful male members of the Washington establishment to take mind-altering drugs, which would presumably lead them to conclude that the Cold War was meaningless.
According to Leary, Meyer had sought him out for the purpose of learning how to conduct LSD sessions with these powerful men, including, she strongly implied, President John F. Kennedy, who was then her lover. Leary alleged that Pinchot Meyer told him she had shared in this plan with at least seven other Washington socialite friends who held similar political views and were trying to supply LSD to a small circle of high-ranking government officials. Leary also claimed that Pinchot Meyer had asked him for help while in a state of fear for her own life after the assassination of President Kennedy.
In his biography Flashbacks (1983), Leary claimed he had a call from Pinchot Meyer soon after the Kennedy assassination during which she sobbed and said, "They couldn't control him any more. He was changing too fast...They've covered everything up. I gotta come see you. I'm afraid. Be careful."

Certainly, Kennedy was not the first or only leader of a superpower to be taken out of the equation by the CIA: according to Crowley, they finished off Stalin in 1953, and later Pope John Paul I in 1978, offering a variant in the case of Richard Nixon:

Quote:

[Taiwan’s response to Nixon’s rapprochement with China:] ‘No, just removed so he couldn’t do them any more damage. We later did discuss killing him but two dead presidents in ten years was a bit much so we hit on another ploy. We would discredit him.’ http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=8904 (...)

But none of the above leaders were itching to start World War III; and it wasn’t just presidents who had their fingers on the nuclear button:

Quote:

GD: That I agree with but the concept of one man, Jim Angleton, having the power to start a nuclear war is horrifying to me and I assume it will be to others. This is a manifestation of far too much power concentrated in too few hands. What kind of oversight was there? How many wars and assassinations were caused by someone’s upset stomach or throbbing piles? http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=9446

Mary Pinchot was a close friend of Cicely Angleton. Her murder was no drone strike on some anonymous Arab halfway round the world. And conversely, she would not be at all reassured at knowing the type of character wielding that power, this family friend and colleague of the husband she had divorced. As an artist and CIA wife, her failed marriage combined the same explosive ingredients that were the two sides of Angleton’s own character, so she knew exactly how she had been edged out of the equation, and obviously this had become the vital combat for herself and some friends.

The drugs aspect meant open conflict with the CIA on two counts. First, as we saw earlier, the drugs market was very much an affair of supply and demand: pushers and users; Meyer and friends were on the wrong side of this divide.

Quote:

You know, some of these cretins and gross criminals ought to be taken out and shot, Robert, and I would be more than happy to oblige. They have dumped tons of drugs on the American people and the bureaucrats love it. They don’t touch the stuff and make sure their kids go to very expensive east coast establishment prep schools. Buggery after lights out but no drugs. I mean, after all, what pays for the expensive schools? The whole thing is rotten and eventually, it will collapse. Mark my words, it will come down. As the Bible says, it will fall and great will be the fall thereof. Ah well, you’re out of it now and the deluge may be years in coming but eventually the public will find out the truth, or at least some of it, and then we will see change.

Secondly, this was a kind of anti-MKUltra operation; the CIA were okay with administering drugs as a means of mind control for nefarious purposes. This was just the opposite, making JFK doubly uncontrollable. Am I suggesting that flower power in the White House was a good idea? Absolutely not; but it was a totally logical thing for disempowered women to attempt in the face of imminent nuclear warfare. The good idea still to be implemented will be when men and women who have overcome this struggle of masculine and feminine within themselves will be able together to face and overcome the challenges of the world at large and international politics. We are yet to catch up with princess Scheherazade, who went to bed with a despotic husband in the knowledge that he intended to have her executed first thing in the morning, and who contrived to save her life and the lives of other women next in line. See this post.

Finally, here is the end of the speech JFK was due to give on the day of his assassination.

Quote:

Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom.
So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation’s future is at stake.
Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause — united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future — and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance. (...) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/1...n_4233535.html

This is the last post in the half dozen or so I announced in the opening post. The ‘last post’, as you know, has a special meaning with regard to war and death: remembrance and.... never again.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=e4NtSqZcT_4
23rd January 2017 23:19
Flash

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

Quote:

Posted by Foxie Loxie

I have to be in the right "mood" in order to read your writings; but I do enjoy them! Are you a politician? :confused:

definitely not, politicians do not write that well, and often do not think much either.

My bet: PhD and post doc in history, or in political science, or both. Or again, a renown writer - gosh you write well Araucaria, it is a real pleasure to read you.... when i understand;)

(most of the time I do)
28th January 2017 09:53
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

Quote:

Posted by Foxie Loxie

I have to be in the right "mood" in order to read your writings; but I do enjoy them! Are you a politician? :confused:

Quote:

Posted by Flash

Quote:

Posted by Foxie Loxie

I have to be in the right "mood" in order to read your writings; but I do enjoy them! Are you a politician? :confused:

definitely not, politicians do not write that well, and often do not think much either.

My bet: PhD and post doc in history, or in political science, or both. Or again, a renown writer - gosh you write well Araucaria, it is a real pleasure to read you.... when i understand;)

(most of the time I do)

None of the above, ladies, but thanks for trying – made me laugh. :) Just an anonymous poster – although given a recent post of mine, that might be taken as highly pretentious. :)

I would make a useless politician because I am not particularly keen on the ‘sound’ of my own voice, but unfortunately I can’t wait till I’m in the mood to satisfy the need to speak out. Also politicians are some of the agenda-oriented people I have been criticizing here. When you start acting in a process-oriented way, you end up with someone like Donald Trump, who is precisely not a politician, or wasn't until recently. You may not like his politics, but the interesting thing is where this open-ended process will lead. There are huge dangers involved, but we have no choice: increasingly unambitious reactionary conservatism has got us in our present mess and something possibly desperate has to be tried. When I started the other thread I had my little agenda, a few things I wanted to say; but I did not expect to be posting over 60K words (not all my own of course). This is what happens personally, and it needs to happen collectively as well: to that extent, we are indeed talking politics.

Being an occasional poster and no more than that is why I object to real writers being categorized as ‘intelligence assets’ of some minor subgroup such as the CIA. They are ‘intelligence assets’ to humanity itself, only covert to the extent that they are not understood; seeking publication and publicity is a very perverse way to act covertly, but a very natural thing to do overtly. All we have to distinguish between the two is words on the page or screen. This is the coalface we are working: I try to focus on that and encourage others to do likewise. Anything extraneous such as who one is and what one does elsewhere is either irrelevant or if it is relevant, I for one would (and do) include it in my material.
1st March 2017 10:09
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

There is a way of seeking further authentication of the Gregory Douglas material. As I explained, it comes from the boxes of ‘personal’ files that Robert Crowley took home on his retirement from the CIA, as Angleton did before him. The Crowley Papers and the Angleton Papers eventually made their way to Joseph J. Trento, who used them along with numerous interviews with both men (in addition to much other source material) for his book The Secret History of the CIA, published shortly before the September 2001 attacks. I briefly discuss his 2005 sequel Prelude to Terror: the Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network here.

As I understand the situation, at some stage the Douglas material went missing from the aforementioned purloined papers, causing huge panic, but eventually turned up and was promptly burnt, causing much misplaced relief, because Douglas had his copy anyway. There is a slightly different account here. This is an introduction to Douglas’s Conversations with the Crow supposedly by Dr. Peter Janney, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Janney the author of a book I have only just discovered, Mary's Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace (2012); http://www.marysmosaic.net/
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1...-mary-s-mosaic
I say supposedly because Janney is referred to in the third person, and the dismissal of Trento as a ‘light-weight’ author is definitely something Douglas himself might do. This is only a minor quibble, because Janney, himself from a CIA family, it would seem, is very much in agreement with Douglas. I personally am not interested in value judgments, merely in what is said and what is not said, what is corroborated and what is contradicted. The personal issue one may have with Douglas (who is he? is he a fraud? etc.) is completely swept away by Dr. Peter Janney, who is as genuine as they come.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZjtigDOEIeo

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=fY9roQuDoJo

Trento’s account (542 pages) paints a very different picture; the question is whether this is because it is based on slightly less than the complete documentation. He may or may not be consciously colluding with the CIA: he may simply be blinkered by not having all the information. The idea is to look at the discrepancies to see how this extraneous data might fit, while of course remaining open to the possibility that it doesn’t. However, the overall first impression is that Trento is definitely not colluding with the CIA to the extent that he offers a withering critique of the company from even before its inception. The ‘secret’ in the title refers not to matters of national security but the dirty little secrets of a bunch of murderous incompetents who keep shooting themselves in the foot and never learn from their mistakes. The way I see it, the CIA itself is the light-weight, and to that extent, I would actually posit a degree of agreement between Trento and Douglas, inasmuch as, as I hinted earlier in this thread, the killing of one’s own president was more like shooting themselves in the stomach – very much in line with the detailed backstory of the Sasha penetration and other aspects of Angleton’s ‘monster plot’ I analyze here, here and here.

My next post may seem out of place here, but it is not. It covers aspects not of the spy, but of the voyeur (viewer), not necessarily with the sexual connotation of the peeping-tom, nor with the prophetic connotation of the seer or the watcher: just a seeing eye. How this relates to the spy will be examined in subsequent posts.
1st March 2017 10:26
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

Before I come to this comparative appraisal of the writings of Trento, Douglas, and an anonymous CIA author, I am restricting this post to a complex analogy based on a work of fiction, illustrating from a perspective familiar to myself how this might pan out. In 1955 the leading French New Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet published Le Voyeur, which I describe here as ‘the narrator’s attempt at giving an innocent account of a sexual murder committed by himself. Not by chance, he is a door-to-door salesman selling wristwatches. In other words, he is selling, in the present tense, a version of time that does not actualize the past as the true present is bound to do’. I propose to expand on that analysis with reference to the CIA story. An account of another similar plot is in this post, describing Mary McGarry Morris’s first novel, Vanished, published in 1988.

There are two kinds of discrepancies in Robbe-Grillet’s novel: objective ones involving things he does or that happen to the protagonist, and subjective ones involving his mental state. Discrepancies arise from deception, or possibly some kind of guilty amnesia, owing to a subjective overlay of outward calm dominating inner turmoil (a mild or not so mild form of schizophrenia), leading to and betrayed by an objectively normal situation of things going more or less to plan being dominated by inner turmoil, thereby causing things to go wrong.

OBJECTIVE DISCREPANCIES. The term ‘narrator’ used above is somewhat misleading (and actually, his guilt is not established either). The story is told through the eyes of one Mathias, a travelling salesman (voyageur de commerce), who catches a ferry to the island of his birth, which he tours on a bicycle selling wristwatches. He does a ‘double circuit’ comprising two loops either side of the ferry landing, which he passes at his midway point. (This topology corresponds in the real world to the island of Belle-Ile in Brittany, which the author notably had in mind.) The day across familiar territory is well planned and calculated to bring him back in time for the boat home. He has a fairly uneventful first leg, but in the afternoon, he appears to have a missing time episode that causes him to accelerate his ride and speed up his sales pitch, to the point where he becomes garbled and ineffectual as he races to catch his ferry. The road becomes potholed, causing the chain on his brand new bike to keep coming off (just as the chain of events has a missing link), and ultimately he misses the boat. This is the sort of thing that happens when you are making up for lost time after an unscheduled stop or hiding some guilty secret. It is a literal example of ‘two-timing’: he has a theoretical schedule to keep to, and a secret agenda to stop him keeping to it. He sells time-keeping devices, but his own timepiece is malfunctioning. This translates into spatial terms as never being where he is supposed to be.

What happened during the missing time mostly emerges in the sequence between missing the boat and catching the ferry the next day. A young girl whose family bought her a watch is found dead at the foot of a cliff bearing marks of torture (cigarette burns and marks on the wrists showing she had been handcuffed with string).

However, these objective facts, providing no more than circumstantial evidence, really illustrate the malleability of the material world when moulded by consciousness. Robbe-Grillet stated early on, “The New Novel aims only at total subjectivity.” This is what made his novels so disturbingly new. In the above-referenced interview, he reverses the conventional wisdom whereby important things come in for repetition, stating that things become important through repetition or sustained scrutiny. The process is also reversed with respect to the outside world. We normally tend to think of people reacting to external circumstances, although nowadays we are beginning to understand how they shape them – and how the spectator shapes them too. This is the subject of the Alain Resnais movie Last Year at Marienbad for which Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay.
For Robbe-Grillet, the spectator/reader plays an active role in the process – notably in the legal sense of the word process, acting like the jury listening to conflicting narratives before reaching a verdict. They are the interface between the mental world and the real world, since their possibly life-or-death decision transforms words into actions. Hence while the traditional novel presents a fixed (objective) history that can be either understood or misunderstood, the new novel offers a dossier of evidence to be interpreted (subjectively).

SUBJECTIVE DISCREPANCIES. Let’s start with the most straightforward aspect. The narrator describes what the main character sees and does, most of the time. Objective description is mixed with contradictions and personal memories, indicating a degree of instability. See this critique by Ted Gioia, himself not too reliable, notably when talking of an ‘omniscient narrator’. From the outset, Mathias has a thing about the figure eight on its side: first he gazes at the mooring ring on the wharf, alongside the mark it has carved into the stonework. Then he picks up a piece of string coiled into a figure eight, leading to sadistic fantasies of tying someone’s hands. We learn that as a boy he would sit on two dictionaries, and gradually the story drifts into double vision, sometimes with two words denoting the same thing. For example, he sells ‘bracelets-montres’ which are also called ‘montres-bracelets’, which is harmless enough, except that ‘he’ himself is split into Mathias and ‘le voyageur’, ending with a hallucinatory scene of full-blown schizophrenia in a crowded bar, where someone actually steps across between the two of them.

Again, this is no more than circumstantial evidence, of the subjective variety, which all builds up the picture of a likely suspect, but stops short of securing a conviction.

The protagonist is not the narrator, and the narrator is not the author. The narrator experiences missing time, but the protagonist does not: he is doing something unseen by the narrator, the question being what? Otherwise the two mostly overlap, the one describing what the other sees and does. But the two are not identical: the seeing (the saying) is not the doing, the description is not the action. The relationship is in fact schizophrenic, whereby the ‘voyageur’ becomes distinct from the ‘voyeur’ (a word that only appears as an afterthought in the novel’s title, which was originally Le Voyageur). The latter is an incomplete version of the former: what is missing from ‘voyeur’ (the word) compared with the word ‘voyageur’ is ag- as in ‘agent’, i.e. from the Latin verb to act (ago, agere, egi, actum). What this implies is that the doing function is able at some point to give the seeing function the slip. By definition we don’t know what it gets up to at that moment, we can only surmise and extrapolate from what we do know. Hence the notion of the omniscient narrator which characterized the traditional novel is exactly wrong for this new novel. The narrator has reported a likely murder scene as if it were just a ‘bad day at the office’ for a travelling salesman, who sails away unhindered. In other words, the protagonist has a degree of freedom that is mirrored by the degree of freedom given to the reader, who has to exercise that freedom.

Notice in passing how much ink was spilt over the possible collusion of the narrator, since the missing time happens to coincide with a blank page between chapters – a simple printing artefact aggravated by the fact that it landed on page 88... Despite this false indication, the narrator is not the protagonist.

Neither is the narrator the author: the narrator is both inside and outside of the protagonist, able to see/report but powerless to act. The author is both inside and outside of the narrator, governing both the seeing and the doing; he is making them both up as he goes along. He is not telling the story of a psychopath, he is telling the story of the novelist, his own story. While the novelist is generally not a psychopath, the psychopath is well known for being a story-teller, whose tales are divorced from his own and other people’s reality. The novelist may also use deceit, but not for deceitful purposes: quite the contrary in this particular instance. For the avoidance of doubt, many French books, particularly novels, indicate the book category (roman, récit, poésie, essai, etc.) on the front cover. The new novel in fact guides us with unusual honesty through the process of the split between the character and the story-telling function by laying both bare, whereas a more conventional approach would be to blur the boundaries with a narrator telling the author’s own story as disguised autobiography, papering over all the cracks. Instead of following the process, the reader is beguiled by the ‘what-happened-next’ page-turner experience.

Hence we see in the present instance how the author builds on the initial description of the mooring ring that morphs deceptively into a piece of string, and on to the double island tour on a bi-cycle selling two-timing watches. The ‘truth’ of this starting-point is a single metal circle but which has a ghostly negative counterpart in the hollow on the wall. You have the floating, liquid aspect of the man on the ferry literally tied to terra firma through the solid fixture, but continuing to operate with the help of this other unstable function placed on an equal footing. Reference is made on several occasions to an advertisement saying ‘Une montre s’achète chez un horloger’ (you should buy your watch from a watchmaker). Here there is a pun horloger/hors logé (an outsider, literally one lodged elsewhere). Of course Mathias is neither a watchmaker (he is a salesman) nor a complete outsider (he does come in from the sea, and indirectly from the mainland, but he is actually returning home; and to the extent he is a traveller, he is not really lodged in any one place at all), hence what he is selling we surmise must be fake; it looks like the genuine article, but is a cheap imitation made in Taiwan that won’t last five minutes.

So the major difference between the author and his protagonist is that the former has some understanding of the linear nature of time; his story goes with the flow in an open-ended fashion, one sentence after the next. His protagonist on the other hand follows a plan that inevitably goes wrong; this plan covers his daytime job (same day round trip on and off the island) except that he is forced to stay overnight, visit his dark side. The plan goes awry not because the author has a master plan to thwart it, but precisely because he does not: it collapses under its own weight trying to control the uncontrollable through the narrator function. What happens in the gap that is opened up is moot; a death is recorded, but the issue of individual responsibility remains unexplained; in fact it is not addressed at all. What is shown however is the mechanism of how stuff happens while life goes on, even in the innocent process of writing a novel.
16th March 2017 18:19
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

I come now to an examination of how Joseph Trento’s The Secret History of the CIA may be read as a seemingly seamless construction largely built from a corpus of material supplied by James Angleton and Robert Crowley from which the crucial JFK material has been excised before ending up in Gregory Douglas’s Regicide (and future titles). Before I start, there is an interesting cross-symmetry between the two books. While Trento is, as noted earlier, scathing about the CIA in general and Angleton in particular, his presentation is ultimately protectively sympathetic to both inasmuch as it is faithful to the mainstream narrative of Soviet responsibility through Lee Harvey Oswald. And while we know from his Conversations with the Crow that Douglas’s underlying position is unsympathetic to Crowley/Angleton (he disagrees with their conclusion, based on their own evidence, that Kennedy had to ‘buy the farm’, as Crowley euphemistically puts it), it does not get in the way of his understanding with Crowley, such that he can present the material from their standpoint, much as a barrister might defend a client filing a guilty plea.

Trento begins with a meeting between Beria and Stalin in 1942 in the almost invisible presence of Beria’s assistant. This one event is so full of implications that I shall go no further in this post. The content of this wartime meeting was leaked to British and US intelligence directly by the assistant, with the best of patriotic intentions, since this was wartime and those countries were the Soviets’ allies. Such leaks were made with Beria’s blessing, but for plausible deniability they were carried out by his henchman, who would take the rap in his place if ever Stalin found out. At this particular meeting, Beria was reporting on the numbers of Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian expatriates (up to 150,000) who had formed a Russian Army of National Liberation under General Andrei Vlasov to fight alongside the Nazis against the Soviet regime, Stalin’s response being to order infiltration of the Gehlen Organization by his agent Igor Orlov in order to at least prevent these troops being used directly against the Soviets. Orlov has demonstrated his loyalty to Stalin in person by having his own father deported to Siberia for some negative comment he made about the leader in the privacy of his own home.

First off, this demonstrates the elasticity of notions like ‘Soviet Union’. The notion changes meaning over time, depending on outside circumstances, and also internal circumstances such as successive leaderships. We saw earlier how the term was used by the CIA to refer to the power based in Moscow extending anachronistically all the way back to the czar. Here we have exceptional outside circumstances whereby Soviet patriotism involves doing something later rightly regarded as high treason. I shall come back to the point about successive leaderships later. But already we take away the idea that we are not dealing with timeless monolithic abstractions. The name of any nation may stay the same, but the entity thereby designated does not. Failure to keep up with this ongoing process leads to responses that are inappropriate for being belated, or to use the political term, reactionary. In this particular instance, we see that a nation is also defined by its current allies. Again the situation is in flux, which notions like ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ are attempts at freezing in two antagonistic camps.

The principles I am exploring here are so utterly obvious that I can’t believe they need to be stated. Yet, they are totally flouted by James Angleton’s ‘monster plan’ which sought to solidify Soviet policy over the entire 20th century to date and succeeded in holding sway over CIA policy for decades.

My second point is about leaders. The Soviet Union was one thing under Lenin, it was another under Stalin. And it would be something else again after Stalin was gone. The main characteristic of Stalinism was Uncle Joe’s inability to accept the fluidity of this situation; hence much effort for him went into bolstering Stalinist Russia by eliminating all and any opposition to his person, always a losing battle since even if no one removed him, he could not fail to meet his appointment with death. Remember, Lenin himself was anti-Stalinist, warning the Party against appointing Stalin as his successor. Hence it could only be a mistake to lump the two together under the Communist umbrella.

Taken together, these two aspects point to a broad range of components going into the notion ‘Soviet Union’. A Georgian such as Stalin was not a Russian, a Leninist not a Stalinist, an opponent not necessarily a royalist, a loyalist not necessarily a political ally of the current leader. This should be particularly blindingly obvious to anyone belonging to the melting-pot culture par excellence, the USA; the fact that some don’t, or didn’t, see it suggests to me that you can be fiercely anti-communist in your thinking and yet Stalinist in your unconscious perspective, and ultimately anti-American in your actions.

My third point is therefore about loyalty. It was a life-and-death issue under Stalin: the slightest hint of disloyalty and you were purged. Hence Trento exemplifies the vileness of Beria’s loyalty for his ruthless role in those purges. (He also mixes in vileness of another sort, as a serious rapist of underage girls, but that is another matter.) The thing here is that while Beria’s assistant acted patriotically by betraying Uncle Joe, and did so without betraying his boss, Beria, what was actually happening was that in condoning the leaks, Beria was himself secretly acting disloyally towards Stalin – whether or not this was patriotic does not even come into it. The difference between patriotism and personal loyalty being that there may be several ways of objectively showing patriotism, but undivided loyalty to a single person is insanely subjective and indeed taken out of one’s own hands by that person. It becomes almost impossible to gain the trust of a paranoid leader, which is why the Roman emperor Caligula appointed his horse Incitatus to the Senate, the one and only senator he could fully trust. How at odds such fidelity is with sane objective reality is to be seen in the fact that Igor Orlov establishes his loyalty to Stalin by demonstrating the most utterly disgusting disloyalty towards the man most deserving of his loyalty, namely his own father. We know the inherent danger of surrounding oneself with yes men: they have to hide the truth... until it bites you in the rear. So this first chapter, in what it says, and in what it doesn’t say, perfectly encapsulates the entire history of the CIA to follow.

My fourth point is that this story establishes once and for all and beyond any doubt that Western intelligence, and presumably the American OSS, learned of Igor Orlov’s infiltration of the Nazi Gehlen Organization in realtime, actually before Igor Orlov himself! Sure, the man’s name was patriotically withheld, but nonetheless, the information was already available to the CIA five years before its inception! Hence Angleton’s searching, decades later, for ‘Sasha’ is now to be seen in a different light: did not need any great spycatcher skills or help from Golitsyn for this pantomime; he had to have known all along about Sasha, and instead of taking immediate corrective action, made matters worse by bringing over Gehlen and his friends. It doesn’t really matter whether we view Angleton as being himself the Soviet spy he was looking for, or as the ultimate dumb American secret agent doing something he was not hardwired to do; the bottom line is that we are dealing with a hardboiled case of the insanity of Stalinian total self-loyalty, with its inevitable flip side, the ultimate perversity of betrayal and treason. Either way, Trento’s incredible story of endless Agency bungling – it is just one intelligence disaster after another – certainly comes into focus as a single coherent data point.

What Trento has unwittingly done therefore is to present Beria as a kind of template for CIA behaviour, of which Angleton may be seen as the American prototype; someone of such extreme loyalty as to be capable of total betrayal. One omission one would expect on Trento’s part, if we are looking to validate the idea that his history is a version of the Angleton/Crowley material MINUS the Gregory Douglas dossier, would be the capstone of this Beria/Stalin relationship, namely, as Douglas learned from his ‘Conversations with the Crow’, that Beria himself actually poisoned Stalin with the help of the CIA. And Trento does indeed stop short, merely recording Khrushchev’s shock at Beria’s hatred at Stalin’s deathbed:

Quote:

Beria shocked Khrushchev with the hatred he demonstrated for the man he had served so long. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that whenever Stalin showed signs of recovering, Beria “threw himself on his knees, seized Stalin’s hand, and started kissing it. When Stalin lost consciousness again and closed his eyes, Beria stood up and spat. (p.99-100)

The shock indicates on Khrushchev’s part a degree of surprise and incomprehension that both leads him towards and pulls him up short of a full understanding of the paradox whereby service implies both loyalty (active love or respect) and unwillingness (passive hatred), and that it can go into reverse (passive , hence exaggerated respect; active hatred). My fifth point is therefore that Trento’s first chapter establishes a definite link between Beria (through his assistant) with Allied intelligence, which if maintained after the war – and why wouldn’t it be? – would have provided the channel for the CIA to exert its influence upon Beria, leading to... the death of a president, and thereby starting a trend. It just makes the idea that much more plausible.

I’ll end here this example of how a truncated picture might be contaminated by what is missing. As we saw with the Robbe-Grillet novel, there are both factual pointers and psychological clues which function in a manner that might be described as holographic: since any part of the whole is a microcosm of the whole, the macrocosm cannot be hidden in any of its parts. I have said enough about the psychological aspect; now consider this fact: Trento indicates in an endnote that the reports from Beria’s ‘assistant’ were submitted ‘on a weekly basis to a U.S. Army intelligence officer’ and ‘eventually ended up in the files of former CIA officials Robert Crowley and the late James Jesus Angleton’ (p.481). So we have proof that Angleton’s Soviet master plan was neither a delusion nor a fact as such: it was a one-off Soviet initiative designed to address one specific wartime difficulty, creating a situation that was (deliberately?) allowed to continue and to fester. As a ‘monster plan’, it was entirely a deception on the part of Angleton; the Russians had no such overarching plan, but of course they continued to benefit from their agent Orlov. We know for a fact that Angleton was in the picture from day one since Trento not only tells us so, he demonstrates this to be the case by building up the story from those selfsame files, and he does so in a manner precisely intended NOT to incriminate their owners.
21st March 2017 20:28
araucaria

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

If agent Orlov was an out-an-out Stalinist, when he worked for/against the Nazi Gehlen he became an unsung hero of the western Allies’ cause. Since the Allies depended on the Soviets to defeat the Germans (this largely being a war of German expansion into what was later to be Iron Curtain territory (see this post)), to remove an army of 150,000 men from direct confrontation with the Red Army was no small contribution to the war effort. Add to this a second paradox whereby, to ally themselves with the Soviet Union, which was desirable, was de facto to ally themselves with Joseph Stalin, which was not. Add to this a third paradox whereby, after eliminating Stalin, Beria conducted a purge of his own. According to Trento, on being recalled, Orlov returned to Moscow in trepidation, fearing for his life, only to be told to carry on and given a general’s outfit to wear whenever he was supposed to be a Soviet.

What this meant was that once Stalin had been removed, and Beria had been removed, the Stalinist ‘Sasha’ Orlov continued to flourish. This was one exception to Trento’s overall assessment that ‘Beria and Stalin had ruined what was once the world’s greatest intelligence service, a legacy of Peter the Great’ (p.3). One aspect of how he flourished resolves a source of puzzlement I expressed in an earlier post, namely regarding the sexual aspect of Operation ZIPPER. Trento describes how Orlov ran a brothel out of Berlin in order to catch Soviet spies, on the basis that the Americans thought philandering was a major security issue. Actually, from the Soviet viewpoint, that was nonsense and he was just giving his comrades a good time at huge expense to the US taxpayer. But notice how acting upon and materializing a myth that truthseekers would be attempting to debunk in fact consolidates the fake truth of that myth. The real security issue was the homosexuality learnt in British public schools by the likes of Philby, and notoriously Anthony Blunt, but probably also, something less well known, by James Angleton, who himself attended one of these schools (Malvern College).

Hence if the Americans thought philandering was a major security issue, this view was bolstered by the very fact of having a Berlin agent running a brothel to catch spies (although he never did catch one). This of course explains the puzzling attitude of Robert Crowley telling Gregory Douglas, ‘I did not hate [Kennedy], but he couldn’t keep it in his pants...’ and so he had to be terminated. In other words, Kennedy the womanizer was behaving exactly as a Soviet spy was expected to behave. This is where a second reinforcement, synergy or tautology comes into play: why Soviet spies were expected to be philanderers was partly due to the fact that when whores were laid on for them, they made the most of it – exactly like Kennedy in the White House! Hence the real battle lines were drawn, not between Soviets and Americans, but between relaxed (very possibly oversexed) heterosexuals, and puritanical Anglo-Saxons drawn to repressed sexuality, tending towards homosexuality, the real security risk.

This episode explains not only something about how the CIA viewed JFK but also says something about how Angleton functioned. Bill Harvey ‘suspected that either there was a homosexual relationship between Angleton and Philby, or that the two were such good friends that Angleton just could not bring himself to face the possibility that Philby was a spy’ (p.82). Certainly, Angleton himself admits that Philby caused the breakdown of a very good marriage:

Quote:

Cicely and Jim Angleton appeared to families and friends to be very much in love. But “once I met Philby, the world of intelligence that had once interest me consumed me. The home life that had seemed so important faded in importance,” Angleton admitted. Angleton nearly ignored the birth of his son, James... (p.38)

Clearly, it was some form of seduction that caused this change, if only a question of trust. Trento indicates that Philby taught Angleton his trade, except for one thing: ‘Trust no one’, including himself, Philby.

These two data points – JFK’s womanizing and Angleton’s turning away from a woman – mesh together in a way that provides a spark of new information. Angleton’s mindset was precisely of the kind likely to see a problem with Kennedy, which, as Crowley tells Douglas, he certainly did. Trento gives an example of the opposite viewpoint. When Allen Dulles hires former OSS men to the new CIA, he includes six ‘serious security risks’ (p.87), who are identifiable as such for being homosexuals; Dulles, described as a womanizer, has to have the situation spelled out for him, he just doesn’t see it. What we have here is the exact reverse of that: a security risk being projected onto the other. One sees how the twisted logic would make no sense to anyone who is totally straight, but the picture comes into focus if we remove those spectacles and see it from another perspective. This is the perspective of Angleton/Crowley as claimed by Gregory Douglas, and which suddenly makes a whole lot more sense.

This leads to one final synergy: when Sasha Orlov launched his brothel to catch Soviet spies, he made himself invisible to the likes of Angleton, which explains his longevity. He was playing to Angleton’s mindset, and confirming him in his ways; what the CIA’s George Kisevalter later said of Golitsyn also applies to Orlov: ‘he’s a con man... He thought, “I could bull**** Americans.” And he did. And he decided, “I’ll use Angleton because he’s the softest;” he’s a con artist. And a con artist is always the biggest sucker for another con artist’ (p.286).
21st August 2020 11:29
mountain_jim

Re: JFK, the CIA, the KGB and Russia today

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cia-versus-kennedys

Quote:

The CIA Versus The Kennedys

Former Congressman Ron Paul and his colleague Dan McAdams recently conducted a fascinating interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which focused in part on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who was Kennedy Jr.’s uncle. The interview took place on their program the Ron Paul Liberty Report.

Owing to the many federal records that have been released over the years relating to the Kennedy assassination, especially through the efforts of the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s, many Americans are now aware of the war that was being waged between President Kennedy and the CIA throughout his presidency. The details of this war are set forth in FFF’s book JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.

In the interview, Robert Kennedy Jr. revealed a fascinating aspect of this war with which I was unfamiliar. He stated that the deep animosity that the CIA had for the Kennedy family actually stretched back to something the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, did in the 1950s that incurred the wrath of Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA.

Kennedy Jr. stated that his grandfather, Joseph P. Kennedy, had served on a commission that was charged with examining and analyzing CIA covert activities, or “dirty tricks” as Kennedy Jr. put them. As part of that commission, Kennedy Jr stated, Joseph Kennedy (John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy’s father) had determined that the CIA had done bad things with its regime-change operations that were destroying democracies, such as in Iran and Guatemala.

Consequently, Joseph Kennedy recommended that the CIA’s power to engage in covert activities be terminated and that the CIA be strictly limited to collecting intelligence and empowered to do nothing else.

According to Kennedy Jr.,

“Allen Dulles never forgave him — never forgave my family — for that.”

I wasn’t aware of that fact.

I assumed that the war between President Kennedy and the CIA had begun with the CIA’s invasion at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. The additional information added by Kennedy Jr. places things in a much more fascinating and revealing context.

Upon doing a bit of research on the Internet, I found that the commission that Kennedy Jr. must have been referring to was the President’s Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities, which President Eisenhower had established in 1956 through Executive Order 10656. Eisenhower appointed Joseph Kennedy to serve on that commission.

That year was three years after the CIA’s 1953 regime change operation in Iran which destroyed that country’s democratic system. It was two years after the CIA’s regime-change operation in Guatemala that destroyed that country’s democratic system.

Keep in mind that the ostensible reason that the CIA engaged in these regime-change operations was to protect “national security,” which over time has become the most important term in the American political lexicon. Although no one has ever come up with an objective definition for the term, the CIA’s power to address threats to “national security,” including through coups and assassinations, became omnipotent.

Yet, here was Joseph P. Kennedy declaring that the CIA’s power to exercise such powers should be terminated and recommending that the CIA’s power be strictly limited to intelligence gathering.

It is not difficult to imagine how livid CIA Director Dulles and his cohorts must have been at Kennedy. No bureaucrat likes to have his power limited. More important, for Dulles and his cohorts, it would have been clear that if Kennedy got his way, “national security” would be gravely threatened given the Cold War that the United States was engaged in with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and other communist nations.

Now consider what happened with the Bay of Pigs. The CIA’s plan for a regime-change invasion of Cuba, was conceived under President Eisenhower. Believing that Vice President Nixon would be elected president in 1960, the CIA was quite surprised that Kennedy was elected instead. To ensure that the invasion would go forth anyway, the CIA assured Kennedy that the invasion would succeed without U.S. air support. It was a lie. The CIA assumed that once the invasion was going to go down in defeat at the hands of the communists, Kennedy would have to provide the air support in order to “save face.”

But Kennedy refused to be played by the CIA. When the CIA’s army of Cuban exiles was going down in defeat, the CIA requested the air support, convinced that their plan to manipulate the new president would work. It didn’t. Kennedy refused to provide the air support and the CIA’s invasion went down in defeat.

Now consider what happened after the Bay of Pigs: Knowing that the CIA had played him and double-crossed him, John Kennedy fired Allen Dulles as CIA director, along with his chief deputy, Charles Cabell. He then put his younger brother Bobby Kennedy in charge of monitoring the CIA, which infuriated the CIA.

Now jump ahead to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which Kennedy resolved by promising that the United States would not invade Cuba for a regime-change operation. That necessarily would leave a permanent communist regime in Cuba, something that the CIA steadfastly maintained was a grave threat to “national security”— a much bigger threat, in fact, than the threats supposedly posed by the regimes in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954.

And then Kennedy did the unforgivable, at least insofar as the CIA was concerned. In his famous Peace Speech at American University in June 1963, he declared an end to the entire Cold War and announced that the United States was going to establish friendly and peaceful relations with the communist world.

Kennedy had thrown the gauntlet down in front of the CIA. It was either going to be his way or the CIA’s way. There was no room for compromise, and both sides knew it.

In the minds of former CIA Director Allen Dulles and the people still at the CIA, what Kennedy was doing was anathema and, even worse, the gravest threat to “national security” the United States had ever faced, a much bigger threat than even that posed by the democratic regimes in Iran and Guatemala. At that point, the CIA’s animosity toward President Kennedy far exceeded the animosity it had borne toward his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, several years before.