Bonus reads
EXCLUSIVE: Brooklyn judge says former FBI agent aided in mob hits
Thursday, January 7, 2016, 4:00 AM
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc ... -1.2488378NYC PAPERS OUT. Social media use restricted to low res file max 184 x 128 pixels and 72 dpi Jesse Ward for New York Daily News
Federal Judge Edward Korman slammed ex-FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio in a 2012 case for mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr.
In a stunning burst of candor, a Brooklyn federal judge said he has long believed that a former FBI agent who beat a murder rap was a rogue G-man, the Daily News has learned.
Judge Edward Korman’s damning words were buried in a transcript of a 2012 court case for mob informant Gregory Scarpa Jr.
Scarpa was seeking a reduction of his racketeering sentence as a reward for helping the feds find explosives hidden in the home of Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.
Korman suggested that the government opposed the motion because the FBI might still have a grudge against Scarpa for his willingness to testify against former agent Lindley DeVeccchio
story #2
http://www.mercurynews.com/crime-courts ... criticizedWe brought FBI agent William Turner to speak
at the Univsity of Maine in Farmington Maine
2002
William Turner, Bay Area FBI agent who criticized J. Edgar Hoover, dies at 88
The Marin Independent Journal
Posted: 01/06/2016 11:25:06 AM PST
01/06/2016 11:25:59 AM PST
William Weyand Turner of San Rafael, a former FBI agent who wrote books critical of J. Edgar Hoover, died Dec. 26 after a long struggle with Parkinson s
William Weyand Turner of San Rafael, a former FBI agent who wrote books critical of J. Edgar Hoover, died Dec. 26 after a long struggle with Parkinson s disease. Marin IJ archive photo
William Weyand Turner of San Rafael, a former FBI agent who wrote books critical of J. Edgar Hoover and became a senior editor of the "New Left" literary and political magazine Ramparts, died Dec. 26 after a long struggle with Parkinson's disease. He was 88.
Mr. Turner worked as an FBI special agent for 10 years until Hoover fired him in 1961 for testifying before Congress, calling for an investigation into the bureau's extensive wiretapping.
As an agent, he testified, he made hundreds of wiretaps on telephones and frequently broke into homes and businesses to plant hidden microphones in what were called "black bag" operations.
In his 1970 book "Hoover's FBI," Mr. Turner alleged that the FBI under Hoover had a misplaced focus on the so-called communist menace and was reluctant to prosecute organized crime.
"For nearly four decades, he (Hoover) stuck his head in the sand while the crime syndicates waxed fat," he wrote.
After leaving the FBI, Mr. Turner worked as a freelance journalist, writing investigative pieces on the JFK assassination. That led to him becoming a part of the controversial assassination investigation led by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
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In 1968, while living in Mill Valley, Mr. Turner ran
1.
Raytheon-Websense to Build FBI’s Consolidated Virtual Network
http://www.govconwire.com/2015/12/rayth ... l-network/December 29, 2015
VA, December 29, 2015 — The Justice Department has awarded a Raytheon
(NYSE: RTN) subsidiary a potential $8 million contract to build a
virtual network that consolidates secret and unclassified systems’
access and viewing in one screen, ExecutiveBiz reported Monday.
GCN reported Wednesday it is in accordance with FBI‘s Enclave
Consolidation Initiative to aim for an integrated system that is cost
saving and has augmented security.
According to Ward Ponn, consulting engineer and chief architect at
Raytheon-Websense, the virtual network technology will enable the user
to access both FBI’s Secret network and also the virtual desktop of
their unclassified network in “a single pane of glass, without the use
of the KVM switching device.”
About Executive Mosaic: Founded in 2002, Executive Mosaic is a
leadership organization and media company. It provides its members an
opportunity to learn from peer business executives and government
thought leaders while providing an interactive forum to develop key
business and partnering relationships. Executive Mosaic offers highly
coveted executive events, breaking business news on the Government
Contracting industry, and delivers robust and reliable content through
seven influential websites and four consequential E-newswires.
Executive Mosaic is headquartered in Tysons Corner, VA.
www.executivemosaic.com2.
http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/12/28/why-ci ... ld-part-3/December 28, 2015 | Peter Dale Scott
Why CIA’s Richard Helms Lied About Oswald: Part 3
Not Ancient History -- But Preamble to the Present
Former CIA Director Richard Helms Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy
from CIA Library
Former CIA Director Richard Helms Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy
from CIA Library
This is a rumination on lies — layer upon layer of lies — told by US
intelligence agencies and other officials about what Lee Harvey
Oswald, or someone pretending to be him, was allegedly doing in Mexico
City just weeks before the Kennedy assassination. The original goal,
it seems, was to associate Oswald, in advance of the events of Dealey
Plaza, with the USSR and Cuba.
The essay focuses on tales told by Richard Helms, a top official of
the CIA in 1963 who later became its director — and is based on a
talk given by Peter Dale Scott.
Scott is the popularizer of the expression, “Deep Politics,” and a
virtuoso when it comes to what sometimes seems like grabbing smoke —
capturing proof, however elusive, of motives and objectives that could
explain the machinations of US intelligence agencies — and then
analyzing the residue.
Not all of the chicanery Scott describes is subtle. For example, in an
apparent attempt to bring the Russians into the picture, someone
delivered to the FBI’s Dallas office a purported audiotape of Oswald
calling the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. That failed, though, when
FBI agents decided that the voice did not seem to be Oswald’s.
Then, two days later, the FBI joined the subterfuge by falsely
reporting that “no tapes were taken to Dallas.” Because of this lie,
an investigation more than a decade later by the House Select
Committee on Assassinations would erroneously declare that there was
no “basis for concluding that there had been an Oswald imposter.” (The
existence of an Oswald impersonator in the months before the
president’s murder would in and of itself have been prima facie
evidence of a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death.)
And then there was the attempt to set up a Soviet agent…
You will probably not be able to keep up with each tall tale, nor does
it matter. They have a cumulative effect, one that explains why it is
impossible to study these documents without coming away believing in
conspiracy.
There is dark humor here — reminiscent of the television sit-com of
the 1960’s, “Get Smart” —
about a secret agent who was always telling one lie after another,
blissfully unaware that each new lie not only undermined the last one,
but any new one that came after:
Smart: I happen to know that at this very minute seven Coast
Guard cutters are converging on this boat. Would you believe it?
Seven.
Mr.Big: I find that pretty hard to believe.
Smart: Would you believe six?
Mr.Big: I don’t think so.
Smart: Would you believe two cops in a rowboat?
Would you believe that the US intelligence community has been telling
us the truth all of these years?
Essay based on talk given by Peter Dale Scott at Third Annual JFK
Assassination Conference in Dallas, 2015. (Produced by TrineDay Books,
Conscious Community Events, and the JFK Historical Group.)
—WhoWhatWhy Introduction by Milicent Cranor
(This is Part 3 of a three-part series. For Part 1, please go here,
and for Part 2, go here.)
The CIA’s Obstruction of Justice in 2015
Now let us compare the CIA’s lying performance in 1964 with its lying
performance in 2015. In the wake of the Kennedy assassination, members
of many U.S. agencies, including also the FBI, the Office of Naval
Intelligence, the U.S. Air Force, and the Secret Service, withheld
relevant information from those investigating the murder.[1] But to my
knowledge there is in 2015 only one U.S. agency that is still actively
maintaining the cover-up – and that is the CIA.
I am referring to the CIA’s declassification and release of a
previously classified CIA study by CIA historian David Robarge, “DCI
John McCone and the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”[2]
The essay is worth reading, and it contains interesting information on
such matters as McCone’s relationship with Robert Kennedy. It is also
significantly selective: it does not mention for example that McCone
only learned late on the night of November 22 that “the CIA had known
beforehand of [the alleged] Oswald’s trip to the Soviet Embassy in
Mexico City,” nor that as a result McCone “was enraged, ripping into
his aides, furious at the way the agency was run.”[3]
Buried within Robarge’s discussion of John McCone and the Commission –
a pertinent but hardly central topic – are a more important thesis
statement and conclusion about the CIA itself. In the light of what I
have just said about Helms, I would charge that both of these
statements are false – so false indeed as arguably to constitute, once
again, obstruction of justice.
The thesis statement on page 8 is that “Under McCone’s and Helms’s
direction, CIA supported the Warren Commission in a way that may best
be described as passive, reactive, and selective.” This claims that
the CIA’s deception of the Warren Commission was a sin of omission.
But no, the CIA was not just passive. Helms perjured himself, just as
he lied again in the 1970s.
Worse, the article focuses on the failure of the CIA to tell the
Warren Commission about its plots to assassinate Castro, which may
very well have been relevant; but in so doing it deflects attention
away from the CIA’s suppression of its own LCIMPROVE operation in
October involving “Lee Oswald” (or “Lee Henry Oswald”), which
unquestionably was of very great relevance.
Worst of all is the article’s conclusion:
Max Holland, one of the most fair-minded scholars of these events, has
concluded that “if the word ‘conspiracy’ must be uttered in the same
breath as ‘Kennedy assassination,’ the only one that existed was the
conspiracy to kill Castro and then keep that effort secret after
November 22nd.”
Fidel Castro Photo credit: Library of Congress / Wikimedia
Fidel Castro Photo credit: Library of Congress / Wikimedia
Of the many things wrong with this sentence, the worst service to
truth in my mind is the skillful effort to divert attention away from
the Angleton operation involving Oswald, and to focus instead on plots
to kill Castro. This is an old ploy dating back to 1965, following in
the footsteps of old CIA veterans and friends like Brian Latell and
Gus Russo. It allows a writer like Philip Shenon to quote from the
Robarge study the old red herring question “Did Castro kill the
president because the president had tried to kill Castro?”[4]
Public Attacks in 1963-64 on the CIA’s Operational Capacity
Some people have deduced, from the fact that CIA officials lied, that
the CIA killed Kennedy. I myself believe only that some CIA
individuals were involved, along with others in other agencies. As I
indicated earlier, my working hypothesis is not that the killing was a
CIA operation, but that the plot was piggy-backed on an authorized CIA
covert operation that was not under secure control and may in part
have been outsourced.[5] Some CIA actions before the assassination,
notably the protection of Oswald by suppressing the reported
allegation that he had been in contact with Kostikov, suggest to me
that some members of the CIA CI staff, and in particular CI Chief
James Angleton, may have participated to some degree in the
piggy-backed plot.
At a minimum, we can say that the CIA, through its Oswald operation,
was sufficiently involved in the facts of the assassination to have
been embarrassed into a cover-up. We have to recall that in late 1963
the CIA’s covert operations were coming under increasing criticism and
attack, initially because of the 1961 Bay of Pigs Operation against
Cuba, a total fiasco, but now also because of the developing chaos in
Vietnam, particularly after the assassination on November 1, 1963, of
Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother.
We do not know just how aware the CIA was of Kennedy’s expressed vow
to friends, first revealed a decade later, “to splinter the C.I.A. in
a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.”[6] But objections to
the CIA’s covert operations were beginning, to an unprecedented
degree, to be voiced in the U.S. media.
On November 20, 1963, the New York Times published a letter, dated
November 7, that argued, as did some Congressmen of the period, that
“One of the very first steps … should be to strip the CIA immediately
of all operational and policy-making powers and confine it to its
original function – namely the gathering of information.”[7]
One month earlier, on October 2, Washington News correspondent Richard
Starnes had published a blistering attack on the CIA from Saigon
(possibly inspired by U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who was
already preparing to be a Republican candidate for president in 1964):
SAIGON, Oct.2 – The story of the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in
South Viet Nam is a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance,
obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power….
Other American agencies here are incredibly bitter about the CIA. “If
the United States ever experiences a ‘Seven Days in May’ it will come
from the CIA, and not from the Pentagon,” one U.S. official commented
caustically. [“Seven Days in May” is a fictional account of an
attempted military coup to take over the U.S. Government.][8]
These complaints swelled to a crescendo after November 22. Exactly one
month later, President Truman himself wrote in the Washington Post,
“I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose
and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency…. For some time, I
have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original
assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making
arm of Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our
difficulties in several explosive areas. I never had any thought that
when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak
and dagger operations.”[9]
As David Talbot notes in The Devil’s Chessboard,
“Truman’s explosive piece in The Washington Post, which instantly
caught fire and inspired similar anti-CIA editorials in newspapers
from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Sacramento, California. Syndicated
columnist Richard Starnes, a bête noire of the spy agency, used the
Truman op-ed to launch a broadside against the CIA, calling it ‘a
cloudy organism of uncertain purpose and appalling power.’ Meanwhile,
Senator Eugene McCarthy, another agency critic, weighed in with an
essay for The Saturday Evening Post… bluntly titled, ‘The CIA Is
Getting Out of Hand.’”[10]
And by the time of Helms’s testimony even McCone, the outside CIA
Director appointed by Kennedy, “kept saying that he wanted to get out
of the cloak-and-dagger business.”[11]
In other words, Helms’s motives for perjury in 1964, involved far more
than the technicality that he had sworn an oath to protect the
agency’s secrets. At risk in these crucial months was the preservation
of the agency itself, or at a minimum the preservation of its
operational capacity. The choice confronting him was not between two
conflicting oaths. It was a choice between the survival of the CIA as
he knew it, or the survival of America’s justice system and the rule
of law as we then knew them.
Helms’s choice was unambiguous, as it was again in 1973, when he
“falsely testified [to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] that
the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile”.[12]
He lied, at the expense of justice, to ensure that the CIA would
survive. In this he would assuredly have had the support of Angleton.
Angleton later testified to the Senate Church Committee that “it is
inconceivable that a secret intelligence arm of the government has to
comply with all the overt orders of the government.”[13]
The 1960s and 1970s Conflict: Public State versus Deep State
In Dallas ’63 I argue that these two decades, the sixties and
seventies, were a crucial period in American history, two decades in
which the American constitutional state and its structural deep state
(including the CIA) were opposing each other and struggling to see
which power would prevail over the other.[14]
It is noteworthy that in 1973, when Helms perjured himself again, not
only the agency’s but his own personal career were again at risk.[15]
In December 1972, after the Watergate break-in, Nixon believed Helms
“was out to get him;” and accordingly he banished Helms to be
Ambassador in Iran. He then he gave orders to Helms’s replacement,
James Schlesinger, “to turn the place inside out.”[16]
In The American Deep State, I argue that, by banishing Helms to Iran,
Nixon had heightened a conflict between the two forms of power (the
state and the deep state), a conflict in which he, and not Helms,
would become the victim. I believe that Tehran became a new center for
Helms’s machinations, in conjunction with the intelligence agencies of
Iran, France, and Saudi Arabia.
In 1976, after it became evident the new president Carter would resume
the efforts to trim the agency, Helms became part of an organized
offshore network (the so-called “Safari Club”) of these foreign
intelligence agencies, which resumed the covert operations (notably in
Angola) that were being curtailed by the combined efforts of the
president and Congress.[17] Then, in 1980 (in the so-called Republican
October Surprise), CIA veterans combined with leaders of the Safari
Club to defeat Carter’s bid for re-election, and elect instead Ronald
Reagan,[18]
Given this evolution of events, I conclude that Helms’s perjuries
significantly affected the history of this country. They were a vital
part of an on-going process whereby, after the Reagan Revolution of
1980, the constitutional deep state was now subordinated to the needs
and priorities of the structural deep state (including, but not
limited to, the CIA). One of these needs, ever since 1963, has been to
preserve the threadbare fiction that Lee Harvey Oswald by himself
killed the president, and no one in the CIA was involved in any way.
How can we make the American people more aware that elements of the
CIA lied about the assassination in 1964, and are still lying today?
How are we to deal with the widespread climate of denial in our media
and academies?
To pursue the truth about these matters is to position oneself outside
the mainstream-supported structure of ideas. And we have learned from
experience that there are severe limits to the amount of assistance we
can expect in that pursuit from either Congress or the courts.
The truth, however, can be a powerful political weapon. So can
justice. So I hope we will all continue to dedicate ourselves to this
very slow, but undying and rewarding effort, to make truth and justice
prevail.
.
[1] See Scott, Dallas ’63.
[2] David Robarge, “DCI John McCone and the Assassination of President
John F. Kennedy,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol .57 No. 3 (September
2013),
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4 ... bb_026.PDF.
[3] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 224; cf. 239: “McCone kept saying that he
wanted to get out of the cloak-and-dagger business.” The response of
Thomas Karamessines, Helms’s Assistant Deputy Director of Plans, was
to order that no more messages “to DCI [McCone]… too confusing”
(Handwritten CIA record, “Document Concerning Name Trace Requests and
Results,” NARA #104-10015-10013
[4] Philip Shenon, “Yes, the CIA Director Was Part of the JFK
Assassination Cover-Up,” Politico, October 6, 2015,
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... cia-213197.
I have described this suggestion that the assassination was a plot
that “backfired” as a “Phase Three” story, following (but not in time)
the Phase One Story that Castro (or the KGB) did it, and gthe Phase
Two Story that “Oswald acted alone.” See Peter Dale Scott, “William
Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate: TILT and the “Phase
Three” Story of Clare Boothe Luce,” GlobalReseearch.ca, November 28,
2012,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/william-pa ... ce/5313486.
[5] For my similar hypothesis that the 9/11 plot was piggy-backed on
an authorized operation, see Scott, The American Deep State (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 133.
[6] Tom Wicker et al., “C.I.A.: Maker of Policy, or Tool?” New York
Times, April 25, 1966; quoted in James Douglass, JFK and the
Unspeakable (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2014), 15; cf. Jack Anderson,
San Francisco Chronicle, March 3, 1967.
[7] New York Times, November 20, 1963, letter from Harold W. Thatcher,
of Forty Fort, Pa,; cf.
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2012 ... cover.html[8] Richard Starnes, Washington News, October 2, 1963. As James
Douglass points out, the Starnes story was discussed at a National
Security Council meeting the same day: “The President then asked what
we should say about the news story attacking CIA which appeared in
today’s Washington Daily News. He read a draft paragraph for inclusion
in the public statement but rejected it as being too fluffy. He felt
no one would believe a statement saying that there were no differences
of view among the various U.S. agencies represented in Saigon. He
thought that we should say that now we had a positive policy endorsed
by the National Security Council and that such policy would be carried
out by all concerned.”
[9] Harry S. Truman, “Limit CIA Role To Intelligence,” Washington
Post, December 22, 1963,
http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman’s%20CIA%20article.html.
[10] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard (New York: Harper, 2015),
569.
[11] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes, 239.
[12] Melvin Allan Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and
Fall of the CIA (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 286.
[13] Mangold, Cold Warrior, 351.
[14] Scott, Dallas ’63, 170-78. Cf. Scott, The American Deep State,
101-08.
[15] President Nixon had long mistrusted both Helms and the CIA, and
was looking for ways to be less dependent on them. Meanwhile Helms was
very close to former CIA officer Howard Hunt, now working for Nixon;
and Hunt may well have been informed Helms of Hunt’s trip to Miami in
April 1971, to recruit Cuban exiles for a new operational group,
outside the CIA, that would be backed by the Nixon White House. See
Stanley Kutler, The Wars of Watergate (New York: Knopf, 1990), 113,
200-03 (“close to Hunt); E. Howard Hunt, Undercover: A Memoir of an
American Secret Agent (New York: Berkley, 1974), 144; cited in Lamar
Waldron, Watergate, the Hidden History (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012),
472 (“operational group”).
[16] Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: 374; Scott, Dallas ’63, 174.
[17] Scott, American Deep State, 26-27.
[18] Scott, American Deep State, 27-29, 103-06.
3.
People interested in creating standards of performance for law
enforcement
and a volunteer civilian review police board with subpoena powers
can post their ideas here.
If they want to talk with people who have taken a leadwership role
in these areas contact Andrea Pritchett at Berkeley Copwatch
Dan Handelman at Portland Copwatch and Mary Powers at Citizens Alert
The Huffington Post today was critical of the FBI lack of standards
in reporting police shootings/killing of civilians
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fbi ... a68881239eThe Big Problem With The FBI's Tracking Of Fatal Shootings By Police
A Washington Post senior editor says the agency did "a very poor job."
12/29/2015 11:26 am ET
According to a comprehensive report from The Washington Post, nearly
1,000 Americans were shot and killed by police in 2015. That startling
number aside, another surprising finding from the data is just how
little the FBI truly understood the breadth of police shootings in
pervious years.
Washington Post senior editor Marc Fisher discussed the report with
HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski on Monday, explaining that because
most American law enforcement is decentralized and locally-powered,
national numbers about killings at the hands of police were lacking --
until now.
"The FBI does make at least a partial effort to get this information,"
Fisher said. "They ask police departments across the country to
voluntarily report fatal shootings by their officers, but only a small
number of those departments bother to do that, so the FBI's reports
are extremely incomplete, which is what we found this year when our
tally came up with three times as many fatal shootings as the FBI had
in each of the preceding nine years."
That doesn't mean there was a huge increase in fatal shootings by
police this year, Fisher said. Instead, the numbers show the FBI's
deficiency in investigating the data.
"What's going on is the FBI was really doing a very poor job of
collecting this information, which they'
4.
Pittsburgh Mayor Hires FBI Agent As Public Safety Director
December 30, 2015 11:51 AM
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2015/12/ ... -director/ Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto has hired a former city paramedic and
25-year FBI veteran as the city’s public safety director.
Fifty-three-year-old Wendell Hissrich will begin the job Jan. 11.
He replaces Stephen Bucar, another FBI veteran, who left in September
for a job as deputy commissioner with the Pennsylvania State Police.
Hissrich was a paramedic for five years before joining the FBI in
1990.
Most recently, Hissrich was Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction
Operations Response Unit at FBI headquarters. In that job, Hissrich
supervised 56 FBI field offices as they focused on WMDs and related
investigations.
City Council must approve the hiring to the post which pays $112,500
annually
