Listen Very Carefully to the Nuances in James Jesus Angleton's Discussion

Editor's note: Listen intently (10:37 point in this clip) to the nuances in James Jesus Angleton's interview when he says: "You don't have to be a great, or a large or a wealthy country to have a good intelligence service." Think of Israel then proceed to the republished article.

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Source: The Unz Review

Angleton, Mossad, and the Kennedy Assassinations

BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT | JUNE 5, 2022 | 116 COMMENTS

Edward Curtin wrote four years ago on Counter-Currents:

perhaps no one epitomized the twisted mind games played by intelligence agencies more than James Jesus Angleton, the notorious CIA Counterintelligence Chief for so many years, in whose safe were found gruesome photos of Robert Kennedy's autopsy. Why, one may ask, were those photos there, since Angleton allegedly had no connection to the RFK killing and since Sirhan was said to be the assassin? Was Angleton's work as CIA liaison with Israel in any way connected?

If you ask me, I strongly suspect it was. Angleton had been the Mossad's indispensable ally in John Kennedy's assassination. So he had personal reasons to cooperate with them again in stopping Robert Kennedy from reaching the White House, a position from which, according to multiple testimonies, Robert intended to track his brother’s assassins.[1]

I summarized the case against Ben-Gurion's Israel in the assassinations of both Kennedy brothers in this article, which still turns up regularly among The Unz Review's "Past classics". Here I'll try to show that an inquiry into Angleton's "wilderness of mirrors" makes the case even stronger.

The "World War III" Virus

Angleton's name often comes up in books incriminating the CIA in the 1963 Dallas coup, because he is believed to have engineered the staged visits and telephone calls by an Oswald impersonator to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in late September and early October 1963. Over the phone, this bogus "Oswald" referred to an arrangement with Vladimir Kostikov, who was known to the FBI as the officer in charge of assassinations in the United States. These visits and calls were, of course, monitored by the local CIA cell, and would constitute, after November 22, evidence of a Cuban-Soviet conspiracy.

According to the most natural and common interpretation, the purpose of staging Oswald as a communist conspirator was to blame the Dallas shooting on Cuba and/or the Soviet Union — a classic false flag scenario. Besides getting rid of Kennedy, the theory goes, the motive was to create a pretext for invading Cuba, something that Kennedy had forbidden after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Allen Dulles. That has become the dominant JFK conspiracy theory, best articulated recently by James Douglass. But it has one major flaw: there was no invasion of Cuba following Kennedy’s assassination. How can that be explained?

And why did Johnson, Hoover and the Warren Commission quickly suppress the "rumors" of Oswald's communist profile (already hitting the news on November 23, e.g. the morning front-page of the Washington Post titled, "Pro-Castro Fort Worth Marxist Charged in Kennedy's Assassination"[2]), to replace it with his "lone nut" profile? James Douglass's explanation is that Johnson thwarted the plot hatched by the CIA and Pentagon hawks, thus saving us from World War III. "To Johnson's credit, he refused to let the Soviets take the blame for Kennedy's murder; to his discredit, he decided not to confront the CIA over what it had done in Mexico City. Thus, while the secondary purpose of the assassination plot was stymied, its primary purpose was achieved."[3] The problem with this theory is its internal contradiction, since it also affirms that the reason Kennedy was assassinated was that he refused to start World War III: therefore, starting the war was supposedly the primary — not the secondary — purpose of the whole plot.

The alternative explanation is that Oswald's profile as a Communist assassin was crafted by the conspirators, not for the purpose of starting a war against Cuba and Russia, but for allowing Johnson to bully Federal and State administrations, and even the news community, into closing the investigation quickly, lest the discovery of Cuba and Russia's responsibility force the U.S. into a global nuclear war "that would kill 40 million Americans in an hour," as Johnson kept repeating to everyone from Dallas to Washington. To convince Senator Richard Russell to sit in the Warren Commission, for example, Johnson told him in a taped phone conversation: "we've go to take this out of the arena where they're testifying that Khrushchev and Castro did this and did that and kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour…"[4]

Besides allowing Johnson to shut down Police investigations and secretly task the Warren Commission with the goal of "rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy" (as recommended by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach's November 25 memo[5]), the threat of nuclear war kept the American people satisfied that, if they were being lied to — as many felt they were — it was for their own good. And so the lie about Kennedy's assassination was two-sided: on one side was the Cuban-Soviet conspiracy, and on the other was the lone assassin. Both sides of the lie had to be maintained over the years, the Soviet conspiracy remaining in the background in order to keep the Warren Commission’s conclusion, if not credible, at least justifiable. That is why, in a September 1969 filmed interview (broadcast on CBS on April 24, 1975), Johnson could calmly declare that "there might have been international connections," but that the Warren Commission did a fine job anyway.[6]

Like most JFK researchers, John Newman, a retired U.S. Army major and Political Science professor and the author of Oswald and the CIA, believes that long before Kennedy's trip to Dallas, Oswald was maneuvered and his activities "carefully monitored, controlled, and, if necessary, embellished and choreographed," so that, "on 22 November, Oswald's CIA files would establish his connection to Castro and the Kremlin." However, in an epilogue added in 2008 to his book (which Ron Unz has already referred to here and here), Newman reasons that the real purpose of setting up Oswald as a Communist was not to start World War III, but to create a "World War III virus", used by Johnson as a "national security" pretext to shut all investigations and intimidate the corporate media. "It is now apparent that the World War III pretext for a national security cover-up was built into the fabric of the plot to assassinate President Kennedy."[7]

After reviewing the steps taken to design this plot, Newman concludes: “In my view, there is only one person whose hands fit into these gloves: James Jesus Angleton, Chief of CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff."

No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald's files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president's assassination. Whoever those who were ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy were, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence [Angleton].[8]

As a matter of fact, no one pushed more for incriminating the KGB than Angleton. Michael Collins Piper, who wrote much about Angleton in his groundbreaking Final Judgment, showed that Angleton went to great length to discredit, imprison and torture Russian Soviet defector Yuri Nosenko. who in 1964 claimed insistently that the KGB had decided against trying to use Oswald in any way during his sojourn in Russia, and that the KGB had nothing to do with Kennedy's assassination. Angleton was also the main source for Edward Jay Epstein's book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (published in 1978), which laid the blame on the KGB.[9]

Angleton and Counterintelligence

Angleton was appointed head of the Counterintelligence Staff by CIA Director Allen Dulles in 1954, a position he kept for twenty years. According to Tom Mangold, author of Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton: the CIA's Master Spy Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 1991): "Angleton's longstanding friendships with Dulles and Helms were to become the most important factor in giving him freedom of movement within the CIA. He was extended such trust by his superiors that there was often a significant failure of executive control over his activities."[10]

After Kennedy fired Dulles and his two Deputy Directors Richard Bissel and Charles Cabell in autumn 1961, Angleton was shielded by new Deputy Director Richard Helms, who had survived the purge and would end up as head of the CIA. In 1962, as the CIA moved into its new headquarters in Langley, Angleton's Counterintelligence Staff had nearly two hundred people.[11]

As one colleague and friend said, "Jim's central dominating obsession was communism, something that for him was the essence of absolute and profound evil. For him nothing else really mattered, but he would use anyone and anything to combat it."[12] The most secret component of Angleton's empire was the Special Investigation Group (SIG), tasked with exploring the possibility that the CIA was infiltrated by the KGB. "The SIG was so secret that many members of the Counterintelligence Staff didn’t even know it existed," writes Mangold, "and nearly everyone was denied access to it. . . . Secret units within a secret unit were a hallmark of Angleton, the SIG, and the Counterintelligence Staff."[13]

Please go to The Unz Review to read more.

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