I have written about George Joannides before, on November 20, 2006, October 24, 2007, and August 17, 2013. Obviously, the man interests me, since I keep returning to him. I am not going to reiterate everything here today, except to encourage you to revisit those links and then read this James Rosen piece that has been published on the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s assassination. An anonymous CIA spokesman told Mr. Rosen that George Joannides “may have come into contact with Oswald.”
The context is that the CIA is still withholding records pertaining to Joannides’ work with the CIA in 1963 and 1964 despite a law that says those records should be turned over. Yet, they have to release everything by 2017, so this is a way of prepping people for the most explosive revelation they are likely to ever have to divulge.
Again, to understand the significance, you need to read my prior writings on the subject. Suffice to say, nothing could be more incriminating for the CIA than the revelation that the head of psychological warfare for their Miami JM/WAVE station was “in contact with Oswald.” If you don’t know why, start here.
Lots of interesting stories commemmorating Kennedy’s assassition. I was only 7 but remember it all pretty vividly. Never spent a whole lot of time on the various conspiracy theories, however, and pretty much assumed that Oswald was solely responsible. This story fills in a lot of blanks for me:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_spectator/2013/11/philip_shenon_s_a_cruel_and_sh
ocking_act_stunning_reporting_in_new_book.html
Basically, Kennedy’s ongoing efforts to overturn or kill Castro were Oswald’s inspiration. FBI was tracking him, and his visit to Mexico City may have prompted him to act.
What better way to understand the issue than to read Jim DiEugenio’s review of John Newman’s work.
It’s dated, but it will help introduce you to Oswald’s file.
You can scroll through the introduction if you are pressed for time.
And exactly how would Oswald come to be “read in” on JFK’s “ongoing efforts to overturn or kill Castro?”
What I’d guess is an unintended conclusion of that storyline is that Oswald succeeded beyond his wildest expectations to protect Castro from being killed or ousted by the US.
Does any JKF assassination researcher ever mention or give proper weight to JFK’s 10/28/62 statement:
Read through all the testimony of those from the Dallas White Russian community that had befriended Marina and Lee in that time period and not a single one mentions the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only alleged domestic disputes between Lee and Marina, Lee’s employment problem and their attempts to help. Very odd.
No doubt the surface policy statements are discounted because the memos elsewhere show that some parts, either with or without the President’s knowledge, decided to follow a different policy.
It is interesting how much this article focuses on Oswald’s being among major Mexican leftist and intellectual supporters of the Cuban revolution.
And that ignores Jack Ruby, doesn’t it?
Yes. And not a stretch at all considering that the USSR and New York office of the FPFC wanted nothing to do with Oswald.
Interesting in spite of Rosenbaum’s penchant for condescension.
Very sloppy
1)
Oswald left NOLA in late September and didn’t return. So, whatever NOLA newspapers reported in October, highly unlikely that Oswald would have seen it. (Don’t know what he means by “working in the city” — Oswald was fired from his job in mid-July and collected unemployment after that.)
2)
Nope — if we accept that Oswald went to Mexico City (which I tend not to dispute), he arrived on 9/27 and was back in Dallas on 10/2. Four days is not conventionally considered almost a week.
Oswald as the “toast of the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City?” From second and third hand reports decades after the fact and other post assassination documents is not compelling evidence. A poorly dressed stranger who had weak social skills (and couldn’t speak more than a few phrases in Spanish) would hardly be considered a suitable “date” for a party.
Your…and almost everybody else’s…naivete is simply astounding.
These people successfully ran an assassination-fueled coup in plain sight of the rest of the world and yet y’all actually believe that they are going to “release everything by 2017?”
Please.
If it has been successfully hidden since 1963, why on earth do you think that it has not been altered by the same people who have been spinning the tale?
PLEASE!!!
What bullshit!!!
Where is Snowden now that we really need him?
Can he time-travel back to the day?
The killers are lucky he can’t. But we’re not.
AG
Arthur, if you haven’t read HARVEY AND LEE, please do. It’s available free as a download. The address is elsewhere on this thread.
<www.krusch/book/kennedy/Harvey_And_Lee.pdf>
That link does not work. Try again?
AG
Here is the link that works.
http://www.krusch.com/books/kennedy/Harvey_And_Lee.pdf
AG
Rabbit hole.
Agreed. There seems to be a lot of evidence that Oswald was a troubled man who was strongly pro Castro and was sympathetic to USSR goals. Cuba and the CIA and the mob had a lot of interconnecting strands. Kennedy pissed them all off to some degree. You’ve got to be able to read between a lot of lines – and have knowledge of the intracacies – to put it all together.
Couldn’t one be “strongly pro Castro and was sympathetic to USSR goals” without being “troubled?”
Absent the conclusion that he killed JFK and Tippet, the evidence that he was mentally unbalanced is somewhat weak. Much of that is also inconsistent and conflicting. Easy to forget or overlook how young he was. And that the longest he ever lived in one place was the two years he lived in Minsk.
Certainly one could be pro Castro and USSR without being troubled. But there is something unsettling in his behavior. Went to Russia for 2 years and renounced his US citizenship. Returned to the US and then apparently sought to return to Russia. Attempted to assassinate a general and then did kill the President. Seems his political beliefs became unhinged.
Or he was a spook, of course. Willing or mind-controlled? Who knows?
Somebody does, but they aren’t telling.
Bet on it.
AG
That’s just someone parroting the good old, reliable old media line, Marie. people who take action against the empire are always described as “troubled” in the news. Haven’t you noticed? “Troubled,” “disturbed,” “unbalanced,” “flaky,” “strange,” etc., etc., etc., from so-called “random” shooters right on up to People like Ron Paul, Noam Chomsky, Ross Perot, Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning and Julian Assange.
“Troubled.”
It’s what’s for supper.
Of course…there is never any attempt in the government media establishment at finding out exactly what is “troubling” these people. We wouldn’t want to go there, now would we? That might be very…”troubling”…eh?
AG
Noam Chomsky…whose real field of expertise is linguistics and the study semiotics… of “signs”, of the real meanings and usages of words…pretty well pins this whole media thing on another subject here.
Stability/instability, troubled/sane…same same in terms of how the media use the words to portray opponents as “unstable” and allies…no matter how criminally insane they may really be…as “stable.”
Thus a sociopath like Dick Cheney is treated as “stable” and an honest agent of real change like Ron Paul is labelled a “flake.” Our boy or girl gsp56 above? Just another sleeeple, deep in media-induced tranceland.
Bet on it.
AG
The problem is that “troubled” and committing a seemingly senseless act of violence is an almost everyday occurrence in the US. That’s a frame of reference that we live with. So, it’s easy for the public to accept that frame when it’s convenient and manipulated by the powers that be. When it seems “off” to some, the task is to challenge it in that instance. Hence, I pointed out that citing Oswald’s support for Castro and the USSR isn’t evidence that he was troubled.
A problem with all the evidence about Oswald that has been made public is that it doesn’t fit with integrated profile. Many reasons, most of them not nefarious at all, why that is what Oswald left behind. Or much of what we think are facts were concoctions of various government agencies and they didn’t act in concert.
For example, it was asked of a large number of the WC witnesses if they thought Oswald was intelligent. Most answered, “Yes.” Well read? They said that he always had his nose buried in a book that wasn’t easy reading. Yet, two college educated witnesses that had more than a chance encounter with him didn’t consider him to be particularly bright and one of those assessed Oswald’s understanding of Marxism was very superficial. Two others said they observed him reading only trash. The evidence released from his fourth grade and Marine IQ tests were consistent with each other and placed him well within the average range. Did his atrocious spelling indicate that he wasn’t really much of a reader or was he somewhat dyslexic? So, was he of average intelligence and clever and devious, or bright?
Why all the effort to get witnesses to support the latter view? An assessment that more easily conforms to a possibility that he was sent to Monterey to learn Russian and act in some intel capacity. Fodder for CT.
Nor bright enough to avoid being used as a patsy, that’s for sure.
Why did he kill Officer Tippit? Because he realized that he had been set up and he thought that his patsy standing would be reinforced by death if he was taken in. Smart enough to figure that shit out!!! Seems like he was right on that account, too.
The whole setup stinks to high heaven, and it always will. It would take time-travel capabilities to get to the bottom of this rat’s nest of murderous hustles, and if there were such a thing as time-travel, guess who would own it? The same kinds of people who ran this game in the first place.
It’s over.
Bet on it.
AG
You, and nobody, knows what he would have been thinking if he in fact killed Tippit. We only know what he stated publicly a couple of days later. Plenty of time for him to either figure out that he’d been set-up to take the fall or concoct a pasty excuse — both well within the cognitive abilities of one with normal intelligence. (Not sure that generally smarter people are any, or much, less vulnerable to being played for a patsy than those that are less smart. Emotional intelligence may be a larger factor in such a situation. An argument for why Oswald would make a good patsy.) Also blaming others or “the system” and not himself was his usual way of being. That along with spontaneous and erratic major decisions was much like his mother.
Agree that it stinks, but you’re making the same mistake as those convinced that Oswald was the lone assassin/murderer. Drawing a conclusion from insufficient solid information. The difference is that those on the lone-gunman Oswald side can identify the perp and the other side can’t.
This all reminds me more of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express than anything else. The difference being that not all of them had to participate in the actual murder and it wasn’t a single conspiracy but several.
Why are you so sure that Oswald shot Tippet? One of those problems was that on that day Oswald left his wallet on his dresser in his boarding house. The Oswald who shot Tippet dropped his wallet in the street next to Tippet’s patrol car. The Oswald who was arrested in the movie theater had a wallet on him. Or maybe the better question is which Oswald?
More worms in the can.
As the plotters wanted.
AG
Oswald didn’t commit any “sense;ess act of violence”. He was a patsy, and he had been set up as a patsy.
No, you believe he was a patsy. Just as those on the other side of the story believe his was a killer. I’ll remain an agnostic unless or until one side or the other can provide more irrefutable evidence and evidence that clearly is real and not suspect.
Oswald wasn’t pro-Castro, he was an agent provocateur, pretending to be a Castro supporter, working on an FBI operation against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. There is so much documentary evidence on this I hardly know where to begin. A lot of it has been available for decades.
Probably a fake American defector to the Soviet Union too, as US intel was sending a number of supposedly disgruntled military defectors over there just before and after Oswald’s defection.
and as I think you noted in another article, the corporate media are united behind the official story and anything that questions that is a “conspiracy theory” that must be laughed at not discussed. Here’s just one example. http://www.sfgate.com/news/houston-texas/article/A-review-of-popular-JFK-conspiracy-theories-from-49
98914.php
Kennedy Week: JFK’s Uncertain Path in Vietnam
Interesting read^
If he’d been President, would Thomas Jefferson have started the War of 1812? The question is an unrealistic one to begin with. (But the answer is likely “Yes” if you consider the First Libyan War.)
Does the supposition of a CIA motive for assassination diminish with the debunking of the story of JFK’s decision to withdraw from Vietnam? Or are there other motives that can be asserted for a CIA plot?
about emotional frenzy over alleged rapes/murders
It was intense in 2006 in the alleged rape by Duke Lacrosse team members.
Silence or weak walkbacks from the mob on the left when the case fell apart.
Nothing from them today on Crystal Mangum found guilty of 2nd-degree murder.
And here is James Galbraith’s response to Perlstein.
Frankly, Galbraith gets the better of it, by far. Especially with the quote from LBJ’s deputy nat’l security advisor, who confirms Galbraith on the major point of Kennedy’s VN policy:
I’m sorry I don’t get this insistence on continuing to believe that there was a conspiracy behind the killing of JFK. It was a senseless and violent death in a violent American city in a violent America that even then fetishized guns. Conspiracy theories were then given an additional boost when Jack Ruby killed Oswald, depriving the country of the opportunity to get testimony from Oswald that would have answered the many questions about his involvement with other groups and/or countires.
I don’t think there was then or is now some sort of vast corporate cover-up. Sometimes we cede too much capability to corporations. They are not omnipotent even though money gives them power.
Two things are clear after spending the last few days revisiting that time 50 years ago: the conspiracy theories will never die and the fact that after 50 years NOT one has been proven to be credible is a pretty darn good indicator that there was never a conspiracy.
I personally think this is the most likely option.
The physical evidence. The magic bullet. The blood and brains shooting back towards the supposed shooter. The short time lapse between the last shot and Oswald calmly entering the lunch room after packing up the rifle and waiting for an elevator.
I don’t know who killed JFK or why. I do know that it wasn’t Oswald.
If the victim wasn’t the President and Oswald had a good modern defense attorney and a fair jury, he could never be convicted based on reasonable doubt.
Yep. I think it was DPD motorcycle patrolman Bobby Hargis, riding to the left rear of the president’s car, who got hit sharply by so much brain matter that he thought he had been shot.
And the lack of any credible witnesses to put Oswald in the 6th floor window at the time of the shooting — Howard Brennan, the WC’s sole witness, not being credible at all.
And no one saw or heard Oswald as he scrambled hurriedly down the stairs, after carefully placing the alleged murder weapon in a hard to reach place behind a high stack of boxes. The recent book by Barry Ernst, THe Girl on the Fifth Floor, nails this aspect of the story.
I’m very skeptical though that LHO either could have found a good, honest and competent atty, or a fair jury that wouldn’t have been mightily tainted by all the anti-Oswald propaganda in the media.
Yes, those are big “ifs”.
I guess you really don’t understand anything I am saying, which is partly my fault since I am referring you to other articles and links rather than spelling out my case here.
But I’m talking about the revelation that the man who was in charge of misinformation and psychological warfare against Castro was in “contact” with Oswald, and fingered him as a commie on the afternoon of the assassination, and was put in charge of records for the CIA during the HSCA investigation in 1978.
That’s a conspiracy.
I guess I don’t get it, because in truth I am absolutely sick of the conspiracy theories and believe there is no there there. I’m not nearly as cynical as so many of the posters I’ve read here and in other blogs these past few days. I was of age at the time of the assassination and remember clearly all the events of the tumultuous 60’s. While I’ve not read any of your links, have you read Bugliosi’s “Reclaiming History” or even the condensed recent version, “Parkland”, particularly the parts about Oswald’s family and his brother, Robert, who believed his brother killed Kennedy?
Sometimes the simplest explanations are indeed the most plausible and likeliest to have happened.
It’s difficult to have a conversation with someone who declines to read your links and tells you that they are sick of thinking about the issue and then appeals to another authority.
The only thing I am willing to say in response to you, prior to you looking into what I’ve provided, is that books like Posner’s or Buglioisi’s are dedicated to debunking bad or sloppy conspiracy theories and providing plausible explanations for glaring oddities. They are useful exercises, but they have little bearing on what I am discussing here.
I am not proposing some alternative explanation of the assassination. I am saying that an actual conspiracy has been exposed. And it’s such a significant conspiracy that it is the strongest evidence yet that Oswald was working closely with the CIA. Whether he was being set up as a patsy, was diverted to another (from the original) purpose, or simply went off the rails, the fact that Joannides had “contact” with him is an absolutely electric revelation.
I’ll second that.
People have been figuring this stuff out for a long time, but what was lacking was a smoking gun. We may have that now.
I can’t think of one single more incriminating thing than Joannides having any contact with Oswald, ever, for any purpose.
JM/WAVE has always been the number one suspect in the assassination (because of anger about the Bay of Pigs/Resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis), and the DRE/New Orleans has always been the connection between Oswald and the CIA.
Joannides not only intersects with both but he obstructed the HSCA investigation in 1978.
Also, it’s clear that the original idea was to pin the JFK assassination on Castro; Oswald was not just any patsy, he was a patsy who had spent the last four years working with the CIA and FBI to develop a “Marxist”, pro-Soviet, pro-Castro persona. That also explains Mexico City.
Sure Joannides’ having contact with Oswald is highly incriminating, but it’s already been known for a long time that David Atlee Phillips, who was probably Joannides’ field supervisor, was in contact with Oswald in New Orleans. It’s only just been discovered (by Jefferson Morley) that Joannides had an address in New Orleans at that time as well.
Morley is definitely the man of the hour right now on this crucially important aspect of the case.
Here are a couple of good links:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/national-archives-to-jfk-file-seekers.html
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/22/the_holy_grail_of_the_jfk_story/
(specifically, the second half of the piece)
What worries me deeply, and I have seen it exemplified in this case, is that we in America are in great danger of slowly evolving into a proto-fascist state. It will be a different kind of fascist state from the one of the Germans evolved; theirs grew out of depression and promised bread and work, while ours, curiously enough, seems to be emerging from prosperity.
But in the final analysis, it’s based on power and on the inability to put human goals and human conscience above the dictates of the state. Its origins can be traced in the tremendous war machine we’ve built since 1945, the “military-industrial complex” that Eisenhower vainly warned us about, which now dominates every aspect of our life. The power of the states and Congress has gradually been abandoned to the Executive Department, because of war conditions; and we’ve seen the creation of an arrogant, swollen bureaucratic complex totally unfettered by the checks and balances of the Constitution. In a very real and terrifying sense, our Government is the CIA and the Pentagon, with Congress reduced to a debating society.
Of course, you can’t spot this trend to fascism by casually looking around. You can’t look for such familiar signs as the swastika, because they won’t be there. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes; the clever manipulation of the mass media is creating a concentration camp of the mind that promises to be far more effective in keeping the populace in line. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose-stepping off to work. But this isn’t the test. The test is: What happens to the individual who dissents? In Nazi Germany, he was physically destroyed; here, the process is more subtle, but the end results can be the same.
Jim Garrison, 1967
But we know that Congress has not been reduced to a debating society, right?
Garrison was an extraordinarily far-sighted and clear-sighted man, especially for someone with only brief (FBI) experience in Washington. Eerily so. And still true today, even if Congress isn’t even much of a debating society either, except on procedural matters.
I just wish JG had applied some of that clear thinking to taking care to secure his investigative team from govt infiltration. He seemed rather careless, or naive, on that score.
His FCC-granted 1/2 hour to make his case on nat’l tv in 1967, following a defamatory and false NBC documentary about him and his investigation (per the then-existing Fairness Doctrine), still stands as perhaps the greatest sustained truth-telling on American television ever. Certainly the boldest..
A few months later, in early 1968, he again spoke truth to the public in his Tonight Show appearance with an FBI-prepped Johnny Carson — a rare moment in television history where an entertainment show was given over entirely to the discussion and debate of an important public issue, namely whether America’s president was killed by a high-level govt/CIA conspiracy. Garrison clearly won over the studio audience, as he niftily rebutted all of Johnny’s packaged objections.
I understand that the man responsible for getting Garrison on Carson, satirist Mort Sahl, who until then had been a frequent guest of Johnny’s, was thereafter blackballed from the show, likely on orders from a miffed Johnny.
I hope you got a screenshot of that sentence because it’s gone gone gone. Even the Google cache has the sentence disappeared.
A “limited hangout” is used by Intelligence Organization’s when a clandestine operation goes bad; or, a phoney cover story blows up. When discovered the Intelligence Organization volunteers some of the truth while still managing to withhold key and damaging facts in the case.
________
Tattoo Designs
http://www.krusch/book/kennedy/Harvey_And_Lee.pdf
The book, HARVEY AND LEE by John Armstrong, is out of print but is available at the above site as a pdf download. With footnotes it’s over a thousand pages, and exquisitely documented, Armstrong has read just about every document released, from the full Warren Report (26 volumes?) but the huge document dump under the ARRB.
The book’s theme is that there was an Oswald project in the CIA from the early fifties, using the actual LHO and another boy, born in a Russian-speaking family in NYC, who had a striking resemblance to the actual Oswald. He documents when Oswald was enrolled in two schools at once, how he was both a truant and had great attendance one year, different heights at the same time, how one Oswald lost a tooth in a fistfight in high school and the Oswald we know having all his teeth. One Oswald had a tonsillectomy while the other one had his tonsils at burial. Armstrong also breaks down all the problematic double Oswald sightings, where one is in the Soviet Union while the other is working with anti-Castro groups in NO.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the JFK assassination, to include you BOOMAN.
Once you read this you will pretty much understand the workings of the assassination (other than the details of the actual shooting).
By the way, these two Oswalds do not include the Oswald impersonator in front of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. But the imposter became a real problem. J. Edgar Hoover and Johnson discussed the problem of the false Oswald the morning after the assassination.
Remember, Mata Hari had a double way back in WWI, Castro used twins for espionage work, and the Soviets used the identity of a Canadian who died as an infant on a ship to Finland to create a spy who worked in both the US and Britain.
Read it.
Btw, whatever happened to Lisa Pease? She used to post here frequently, and is an expert in this area. I miss her voice.
Lisa posts on Facebook. She co-edited THE ASSASSINATIONS, a great collection of essays on the political assassinations of the sixties. I believe Arthur Gilroy got the link to the John Armstrong book corrected; he’s got an essay in the book. It’ll give you a glimpse into the kind of research that Armstrong does.