Wednesday, February 15, 2017

A New History Based Model of the Assassination

A New Model of the Assassination at Dealey Plaza

By William Kelly 

Previous models of the assassination of President Kennedy have failed to provide a comprehensive narrative of events - explaining how he was killed, and instead usually focus on who did it and why.

The previous models also assume a specific role for the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who is usually portrayed either as the deranged loner who committed the act alone or a patsy in a much bigger conspiracy engineered by the CIA, Mafia, LBJ, Cubans or Soviets. But they all fail to adequately explain how the murder actually took place.

The one thing all Lone Nutters and Conspiracy Theorists have in common is that they all know who killed JFK with a positive certainty, and assemble all of the facts and evidence to support their view, like pinning the tail on a donkey. 

Instead, the quite different and correct approach to any crime is to assume the role of a Crime Scene Investigator, though one with an historical background, keep an open mind and accept, review and confirm all of the facts and evidence in the case, following it where ever it goes. This model must include all the pieces to the puzzle and when assembled must reflect all of the facts and evidence. 

In addition, this model must be one in which it doesn't matter whether the accused assassin was a shooter or the fall guy, but explain all of his known behavior and activities. 

In taking a different approach to the crime, an historical model of the crime can be based on a number of previous well documented assassination attempts beginning with the assassination of Archduke Ferdenhand, that sparked World War I a hundred years ago. 

Then there's the June 4, 1942 ambush on Nazi Reinhard Tristan Heydrich by resistance commandos trained by the British, which was made into a movie -   

The July 20, 1944 attempt to kill Hitler has also been the subject of books, a CIA "study" and movies, most recently the film Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruse as Colonel von Stauffenberg. 

Also included in this approach is the 1962 failed attempt to assassinate deGaul, an attack on his motorcade that was immediately recognized by the French investigators as a "military style ambush," which led them to the OSS officers responsible. 

This historical model provides for easy comparing and contrasting different techniques and styles, as not all were successful, not all involved sniper attacks on motorcades, not all provided for a patsy to take the rap, but they all have one thing in common - their MO - Modus Operandi. 


The MO of what happened at Dealey Plaza was that of a covert intelligence operation, one designed to be hidden and shield those actually responsible. 

All of the perpetrators of each of the historical assassination case studies used the same covert operational techniques that were used at Dealey Plaza and are used by all intelligence networks, a strict code of policy and procedures that haven't changed in thousands of years. 

If you want to know how JFK was killed you must become familiar with the language and lingo of spies - codes, ciphers, acronyms and covert operational procedures - what Allen Dulles calls in the title of his book The Craft of Intelligence - America's Legendary Spy Master on the fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World (Harper & Row, 1963).

At the very first meeting of the Warren Commission Dulles passed around a copy of a book The Assassins (Popular Library, 1964) on American assassins by the author of PT-109 Robert J. Donovan, who conveyed the idea that American assassins, unlike their more conspiratorial European counterparts, were for the most part deranged lone nuts. Commissioner John McCloy took exception to this idea, pointing out that a number of conspirators were hung for their role in the murder of President Lincoln. 

If Dulles wanted his fellow commissioners to learn more about political assassinations, he should have given them each a copy of his own book, The Crafts of Intelligence, which is said to have been ghost written by E. Howard Hunt, calls attention to Sun Tzu's ancient book The Art of War, that details the descriptions of five types of secret agents who, when working together, form a net - a network of spies that Sun Tzu calls the 'The Divine Skein," - a skein being a net, and the information they provide is "treasure of the sovereign." 

Sun Tzu said: "Thus, what enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge.  Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation. Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men."

"Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local - native spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies or double-agents; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving living spies.When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system.  This is called  "divine skein" or the divine 'manipulation of the threads." It is the treasure of the sovereign."

"Having local native spies means employing the services of the inhabitants of a district. Having inward spies in place is making use of officials of the enemy. Having converted spies, or double-agents is getting hold of the enemy's spies and using them for our own purposes. Having doomed spies, doing certain things openly for purposes of deception, and allowing our own spies to know of them and report them to the enemy.  Surviving spies, finally, are those who bring back news from the enemy's camp."
.
"Whether the object be to crush an army, to storm a city, or to assassinate an individual, it is always necessary to begin by finding out the names of the attendants, the aides-de-camp, the door-keepers and sentries of the general in command. Our spies must be commissioned to ascertain these."

Because they can take actions that appear miraculous, or an act of God, he calls such a network 'the Divine Skein," the skein being a net. 

When a covert operation is successful you never usually hear about it, and we only stumble across them when they fail, ala Watergate. But even the successful unheralded operations are man-made, and only seem to be of divine origin to those who are amazed at the illusions like a magic trick. And indeed, such shenanigans were used at Dealey Plaza, and when they fail, the man behind the curtain is exposed, and then we can see and learn how Houdini, Mandrake and Kreskin pulled off their tricks. 


French Intelligence officers wrote a book Farewell America under the pseudonym James Hepburn, believed to have been either Philippe thyraud de Vosjoli, who defected to the CIA in 1963, or Andre Ducret, who briefed the U.S. Embassy in Paris on the 1962 assassination attempt on President deGaulle. 

In the book they wrote: “President Kennedy's assassination was the work of magicians. It was a stage trick, complete with accessories and false mirrors, and when the curtain fell the actors and even the scenery, disappeared. But the magicians were not illusionist but professionals, artists in their own right.”  

To the covert operators the Crafts of Intelligence are called psychological warfare, disinformation or black propaganda,

In his book “Intelligence Wars – American Secret History From Hitler to Al-Qaeda,” Thomas Powers relates a story of how at a birthday party for retired intelligence officer Haviland Smith he met Smith's mentor General William Odom, the former Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) and director of the National Security Agency (NSA), who asked Powers, “Should the Army be trying to run agents at all?”

In the course of the party Powers asked Haviland another question - “What makes a good case officer?”

Haviland thought for a second and then answered the question with a question of his own: “Did you see that movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman – The Sting?”

“That's it!” said Haviland, “ - the con!.”



And what happened at Dealey Plaza was not just a magic trick with disappearing props, but a very particular magic trick – The Big Con – the confidence trick used in the popular movie The Sting.

The movie The Sting was based on a book called The American Confidence Man - and later The Big Con by David W. Maurer, a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Kentucky. 

Maurer was devoted to a study of street slang, which allowed him to meet an assortment of pick pockets, card sharks, street gangsters and whores working his way up the criminal chain until he got to the confidence men who ran The Big Con, cataloging their unique vocabulary along the way.

The Big Con, as opposed to the short con, utilized elaborate props and actors who took their victims for hundreds of thousands of dollars. And when it was over they didn't even know how it was done.

When I first read an early edition of The American Confidence Man in the early 1990s I called Professor Maurer at his school but he had passed away. His assistant professor however confirmed what Luc Santi says in later paperback editions of The Big Con that the movie The Sting was based on Maurer's book.

But that's not the whole story. When Maurer saw The Sting when it first came out he too recognized his story was used in the screenplay without credit or attribution, and he felt stung.

The Hollywood screenwriters who stole his story denied ever reading Maurer's book -,a non-fictional work, but they couldn't account for using the name Gondorf as a main character as played by Paul Newman.Gondorf was a real person and hi
s name does not appear in print anywhere but in Maurer's book, so Maurer won the judgement.

While Maurer's book and the movie detail how such Big Confidence games are pulled off, without the Mark knowing he was swindled, such tricks are closely held secrets and like magic tricks, must be passed on by teachers who know them to students who want to learn them, just as the techniques of psychological warfare are taught. 

When a CIA agent or operative is recruited, as Antonio Veciana was recruited by David Phillips, the new agent must take a lie detector test, sign a contract and take classes in psychological war fare and the "crafts of intelligence," as Veciana did in the offices of the Berlitz language school in Havana and at the Pan Am bank in Miami. 

James Jesus Angleton learned the crafts of intelligence from the British, Kim Philby, a notorious KGB-MI6 double-agent. 

Others however, Ed Lansdale, E. Howard Hunt, David Phillips and Joseph B. Smith all learned their crafts from the same teacher - Paul Linebarger. 

 Joseph B. Smith in “Portrait of a Cold Warrior” (Ballantine 1976, p. 75) writes: "….In the early winter of 1952…I got the chance to attend Paul Linebarger’s seminar in psychological warfare. Linebarger had served as an Army psychological warfare officer in Chungking during the war. He had written a textbook on the subject in 1948. In 1951 he was serving as the Far East Division’s chief consultant. He also served as the Defense Department in the same capacity, giving advice on U.S. psychwar operations in Korea, and he was a professor of Asian politics at the School for Advanced International Studies of the John Hopkins University. His book by this time had gone through three American editions, two Argentine editions, and a Japanese edition."

"He was far from a textbook warrior, however. He best described himself when he wrote in the introduction to his book, “Psychological warfare involves exciting wit-sharpening work. It tends to attract quick-minded people – men full of ideas.” His wits scarcely needed sharpening, and he was never at a loss for an idea."


"Linebarger undertook a kind of group therapy approach to try to show us that tricking someone into believing black is white comes naturally to everyone and is something that is practiced from childhood."

“'Look,'” he began, “'can’t you remember how you fooled your brothers and sisters and your father and mother? Try to remember how old you were when you first tricked one of them.'”

“'I want you all to go out and get a copy of David Maurer’s classic on the confidence man. It’s called ‘The Big Con,’ and its available now in a paperback edition,'” Paul continued. “'That little book will teach you more about the art of covert operations than anything else I know. Your job as an intelligence officer and the con man are identical...'”

“'Maurer’s book will give you a lot of ideas on how to recruit agents, how to handle them and how to get rid of them peacefully when they’re no use to you any longer. Believe me, that last one is the toughest job of all.'”

"We were all soon reading 'The Big Con.' The tales it told did, indeed, contain a lot of hints on how to do our jobs. For me one sentence seemed to sum it all up beautifully, 'The big-time confidence games,'wrote Maurer, 'are in reality only carefully rehearsed plays in which every member of the cast EXCEPT THE MARK knows his part perfectly.'” 

 "A note of caution that Linebarger added to these discussions of black operations sounds like a bell down the years. He would explain that there should be limits to black activities. 'I hate to think what would ever happen,' he once said with a prophet’s voice, 'if any of you ever got out of this business and got involved in U.S. politics. These kinds of dirty tricks must never be used in internal U.S. politics. The whole system would come apart.'” 

Well the whole system fell apart at Dealey Plaza and while we can still argue over who was responsible, it can be clearly demonstrated that the MO - Modus Operandi was that of a covert intelligence operation. It was a covert intelligence operation based on previous historical European assassination attempts and one that included the black prop op cover story that Oswald and Castro were behind the murder, The crafts of intelligence are the fingerprints that prove how The Dealey Plaza Operation was planned and successfully conducted as will be shown in The Divine Skein at Dealey Plaza. 










1 comment:

William Kelly said...

I accidentally erased the comment that the RFK, MLK and Malcolm X assassinations should be included - but they are being studied by CAPA members - and not included in this study because they don't involve the murder of a head of state, a sniper attack on a moving motorcade or the same MO.