by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
November 4, 2017
OK, the dust has settled on the "release" of the JFK files last week, and here's what we know so far:
As expected, the release is not a full release by any stretch of the imagination, despite Trump's tweets to the contrary. As I pointed out in the most recent edition of New World Next Week, if Trump had done absolutely nothing this week, then the records would have been released as scheduled. But instead, he gave a green light for agencies to withhold documents that they suddenly realized (after 25 years of preparation) need further redaction. As a result, just 2% of the documents that were previously withheld-in-full were released, along with less than 10% of the redacted documents. (Is there really anyone left who doesn't realize that Trump is fighting to save the deep state?)
Also as expected (and as predicted by yours truly months ago), the release contains "revelations" about Oswald's contact with the Russkies that throw a new "How Much Did Those Dastardly Russians REALLY Know?" lifeline to the Oswald lone wolf fairy tale that has long been abandoned by the public. Accordingly, expect much more pontificating about the Mexico City trip and other elements of the Oswald fiction from the MSM talking head class as we approach the assassination anniversary later this month.
In addition, we've seen other distractions and previously-released documents and hoaxes being revived along with the public's renewed interest in the assassination. Someone sent me the McCone-Rowley memo, portraying it as a "new document" from the recent release and not a decade-old long-discredited hoax. The "CIA photograph of Hitler in 1954" that's making the rounds right now has, as my New World Next Week co-host James Evan Pilato points out, been available for months now.
Indeed, JFK assassination research has become such an arcane and specialized field that even the most honest and well-meaning of researchers can get tripped up misinterpreting a key document or falling for an old hoax. That's why I set The Corbett Report community the task of trawling through the JFK Files archives in an open source investigation earlier this week. After all, thousands of heads are better than one.
There's still much more work to be done, but here are five of the most interesting documents that we've uncovered so far.
1 - The Dirty Details of Operation Mongoose
Operation Mongoose, also known as The Cuban Project, was a covert CIA operation to destabilize, undermine and eventually overthrow the Castro government in Cuba. The operation was commissioned under Eisenhower in 1960 and put into operation by JFK in 1961 after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Involving as many as 2500 people and with a budget of $50 million per year, the vast operation remained officially secret until it was revealed during the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s.
A new document released as part of the JFK Files details the minutes of a meeting on Operation Mongoose. It highlights a particularly chilling proposal that was forwarded as part of this covert action plan. The meeting took place on September 6, 1962, and included the operation's leader, US Air Force General Edward Lansdale.
While discussing operations designed to undermine the economy of Cuba, the conversation turned to "agricultural sabotage." General Marshall Carter (the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence) suggested "producing crop failures by the introduction of biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin." The only reservation that was expressed in the meeting about the idea of using "biological agents" to devestate Cuba's agriculture (and, presumably, cause mass starvation), is that any such release would have to be done very carefully to avoid any attribution to the US.
Another document summarizing Operation Mongoose includes a forerunner to the false flag terror plan that became part of the now-infamous Operation Northwoods:
"We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington. The terror campaign could be pointed at Cuban refugees seeking haven in the United States. We could sink a boatload of Cubans enroute to Florida (real or simulated). We could foster attempts on lives of Cuban refugees in the United States even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized. Exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of a Cuban agent and the release of prepared documents subtantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government."
No surprise whatsoever that the same "serious thinkers" in the MSM universe who quickly buried the original Operation Northwoods expose (itself a revelation from the 1990s-era Assassination Records Review Board looking into the JFK files) has quickly downplayed and pooh-poohed these revelations, too, as harmless ideas by those crazy left-field thinkers in America's security establishment. As Jacob Weindling of Paste Magazine writes:
"The idea of our government staging false flag operations is largely confined to conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, but documents like this demonstrate that there is a nugget of truth buried in our most unhinged conspiracies."
You don't say.
2 - McMillan CIA
As Corbett Report member leo.h notes, one of the newly-released documents seems to confirm that Priscilla Johnson McMillan was, in fact, a CIA operative. As leo.h explains: "McMillan is often billed as the only person who knew Oswald and JFK, as well as being Oswald's biographer and a longtime press hack for the North American Newspaper Association and other MSM who has been a long-time defender of the Warren Commission in documentaries and in the press."
The document in question, whose context and origin are not immediately apparent, consist of a single page of handwritten notes, prominently marked "Secret" and "Not for release." Scrawled at the top are the words "Pseudo or crypt may be used instead of true name" followed by an entry on "McMillan" that includes "Wash Evening Star" (a paper McMillan was known to write for) and a DOB of July 19, 1928, which is indeed McMillan's birth date. The final note on the page is on QK OPERA, a covert CIA project to fund the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which itself held conferences and supported writers and magazines that would not have been viable without covert aid. The note reads: "do employ Johnson as news editor-writer."
Definitive evidence of CIA employment? Not exactly. But it has long been known that McMillan did apply for CIA employment in the 1950s (and was supposedly rejected), and rumors that she did, in fact, work for the agency have persisted throughout the decades, so it certainly isn't out of left field.
And I doubt I need to explain the implications of a prominent Warren Commission defender in the press, a go-to figure for the "official story," being a potential CIA employee, do I?
Let's just file this little nugget next to the document confirming that the CIA employed dozens of top level journalists during the period of the assassination, shall we?
3 - Oswald and Ruby Went to Cuba Together?
A particularly puzzling tidbit emerged from one of the documents released in the JFK files, namely a memo from the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) archives written up by HSCA researcher Gaeton Fonzi. It relates the story of George Faraldo (the manager of the Key West International Airport at the time of the assassination), who Fonzi interviewed by telephone and in person and judged "a credible character."
According to Faraldo, two months before the assassination there were a group of 30 to 40 "hippie-looking" men and women in the waiting area of the airport who remained there most of the day. Upon talking to some members of the group, he learned that "they were going to cut sugar cane in Cuba and they had something to do with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Both Ruby and Oswald were members of the group and both stood out, according to Faraldo, because Ruby "spent most of the time not mingling with the group but standing against the doorway" and Oswald "moved about more and appeared a bit nervous." At one point Oswald approached Ruby and asked: "Have you heard anything from the Big Bird yet?"
Faraldo recalls seeing Oswald board the plane that eventually came to pick up the group, but did not see Ruby getting on specifically.
The rest of Fonzi's memo is spent recounting his mostly-fruitless attempts to corroborate the story. He concludes that there is no hard evidence to confirm the details Faraldo relates, but suggests that Faraldo is still a credible witness and should be taken seriously.
So what are we to make of this story? Without any further details it's almost impossible to do anything with this nugget, but at the very least it would put (another) huge dent in the official story that Oswald and Ruby were complete strangers. Of course, multiple witnesses have testified that Oswald was at Ruby's nightmare prior to the assassination, but the MSM still parrots the official line that they were strangers. In fact, the only outlet to report on this bizarre Ruby/Oswald/Cuba story, The Sun, reported on the very same day as they broke this story that "Neither men knew each other."
So if this story is true, then who or what is "Big Bird?" Sesame Street didn't hit the airwaves till 1969, so it could not have been any kind of reference to the lovable children's TV character. Speculation ranges from the idea that "Big Bird" is LBJ (due to his famously large...uh..."bird"), or that "Big Bird" is LBJ (due to his wife being "Lady Bird"), or that it may be a reference to D.H. Byrd, owner of the book depository where Oswald worked.
4 - The Soviets Assumed It Was A High-level Conspiracy
Here's the real truth about deep state events: That MSM propaganda about how only moonbats and conspira-kooks believe in false-flag terror and inside jobs is the lowest form of propaganda, aimed at the info-serfs stuck at the bottom rung of the information pyramids. The people who move in or around true centers of power know all too well how power really operates, and as a result they're the biggest conspiracy factualists of them all.
There are many examples of this, including all the people in governments and intelligence agencies who have pointed out the blatantly obvious fact that 9/11 was not the work of a bunch of bumbling jihadis with box cutters, but a carefully crafted deep state event.
But here's yet another example of this phenomenon: a document relating the Soviet reaction to the assassination. According to one source ("who has furnished reliable information in the past"), Colonel Boris Ivanov himself, the head of the KGB at the time, believed the assassination to be a high-level conspiracy:
"Ivanov stated that it was his personal feeling that the assassination of President Kennedy had been planned by an organized group rather than being the act of one individual assassin."
And if that wasn't enough, by 1965 that gut-feeling conviction of the KGB chief had not been dispelled by the Warren Commission, but directly reinforced by further evidence. According to the source:
"[T]he KGB was in possession of data purporting to indicate President Johnson was responsible for the assassination of the late President John F. Kennedy."
But what would those crazy tinfoil hatters in the CIA's Russian counterpart know about conspiracies, right, gang?
Well, probably as much as Richard Nixon, who, as ex-CIA Director Richard Helms stated, "used to go around saying that the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem [of Vietnam] and this was just justice." (Bonus points: that quote is from the same document detailing Helms' deposition by the Rockefeller Commission in 1975 that ends abruptly just as he is being asked if there is any evidence "that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent or an agen"--)
5 - Cabell
Another find by Corbett Report member leo.h involves Earle Cabell, the mayor of Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination. It's long been known that Cabell's brother, Charles, was the deputy head of the CIA at the time of the Bay of Pigs and was fired by JFK in the wake of that debacle. But now comes the proof that...
...wait for it...
Mayor Earle Cabell was a CIA operative, too! Among the documents released this year were Cabell's 201 file cover sheet, a document that the CIA uses to assess the personality of agents, informants and operatives.
So, just in case you didn't get that, not only was the Mayor of Dallas on the day that Kennedy was shot the brother of the deputy director of the agency, he himself was an asset of the agency, too! “Nothing to see here, folks, move along!”
Now, to be fair, this document was part of the previous release of JFK files from the National Archives earlier this year, but since it received almost no attention at that time, it feels appropriate to shine a little more light on the story here.
Indeed, if there's anything that this most recent release of documents has taught us (that we didn't already know or strongly suspect, I mean), it's that interest in the JFK assassination has finally reached a point where massive new document dumps are greeted with little more than a collective shrug. This is not surprising. Almost everyone associated with the assassination is in the grave by now (or, in the case of Bush Sr., one foot in the grave). The public has been lied to for so long at this point that they no longer believe it would even be possible to find a "smoking gun" in any dusty old archive.
This cynicism is justified in one sense: There will never be a signed and sealed death warrant for JFK's head with Dulles' signature on it, just as we'll never get a picture of Cheney in the bunker with the plunger on 9/11. That's the cartoon version of politics. But, as noted earlier, the Operation Northwoods documents came to light in the 1990s as part of a JFK file dive, and those documents have formed an important basis for the understanding of many people (myself included) when it comes to false flag terror.
So it's unlikely we're going to get a single bombshell on the Kennedy case from these documents, but there still may be nuggets worth digging up here, new ways of gaining perspective on deep state events that could serve as a spark for a future generation of would-be researchers. To that end, The Corbett Report's own open source investigation into the documents remains open for business. Let me know what you find!