War Games Almost Go Real

From Thomas Powers - "Intelligence Wars" (p. 351)

Note: General William Odom was former director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) - Army Intelligence.

"It was in this climate of heightened fear and apprehension late in the Carter administration that the American nuclear command and control structure was upset by a series of false alarms - erroneous reports from technical systems that an attack was under way."

"In the most dramatic of these episodes the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), from its bomb-proof post deep beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, informed Colonel (later General) William Odom, military assistant to Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, that the Soviet Union had launched 220 missiles targeted on the United States."

"Odom, at three o'clock in the morning, called Brzezinski, who prepared himself to notify the President in time for the US to retaliate - that is, within three to seven minutes after the Soviet launch. Soon Odom called again to confirm the bad news, adding that the revised, now-correct number of attacking Soviet missiles was 2,200 - the long-dreaded, all out Pearl Harbor-style first strike intended to destroy American missiles in their silos. Brzezinski did not wake his wife; he was convinced everyone would soon be dead. But just before he was about to call President Carter, Odom called a third time to say it was all a mistake - someone at NORAD had loaded the computer-controlled warning system with exercise tapes used for simulating war games. Nothing to worry about! Brzezinski went back to bed."

Thomas Powers on Bob Baer's Assassination Plot

Robert "Bob" Baer, the former CIA operations officer who presented the multi-part TV documentary "JFK Declassified," apparently knows something about political assassinations, having been involved in plotting a coup and attempt on the life of Saddam Hussein. Baer's TV show ran the first two of six episodes on the History Channel before someone pulled the plug on it, though it did run in Canada.

From Thomas Powers' "Intelligence Wars" (p. 386-387)

"The criticisms (of the CIA) come not from think tanks or bureaucratic rivals of the CIA like the FBI but from a vocal group of former intelligence officers - mostly young, mostly field officers from the Directorate of Operations (DO), mostly well-respected and destined for solid careers until they chose to leave - who believe that the CIA is in deep decline."

"The most vocal of these critics is Robert Baer, a twenty-year veteran of numerous assignments in Central Asia and the Middle East whose last major job for the agency was an attempt to organize Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s - shuttling between a desk in Langley and contacts on the ground in Jordan, Turkey, and even northern Iraq."

"This assignment came to an abrupt end in March 1995 when Baer, once seen as a rising star of the DO, suddenly found himself 'the subject of an accusatory process.' An agent of the FBI told him he was under investigation for the crime of plotting the assassination of Saddam Hussein. The investigation was ordered by President Clinton's national security adviser, Anthony Lake, who would be nominated to run the agency two years later. The Baer investigation was only one of the many reasons that the intelligence organizations resisted Lake, forcing him to withdraw his name in 1997, and clearing the way for George Tenet."

"Eventually the case against Baer was dismissed with the help of the Washington lawyer Jeffrey Smith, who served as the agency's general counsel under John Deutch. But for Baer the espisode was decisive. 'When your own outfit is trying to put you in jail,' he told me, 'it's time to go.'"

Thomas Powers, Haviland Smith and General Odom on "The Sting."

Thomas Powers - From "Intelligence Wars," (NYRB 2004, pp. xxxv)

"But old hands in the agent running business would not tell you that the CIA's failure to deliver when it counted - before September 11, - proves it can't be done. How they might go about it was descrbied to me indirectly a few yearrs back at the sixtieth birthday party for a retired intelligence officer named Haviland Smith."

"Among the guests at Smith's party was General William Odum, who held two big intelligence jobs before retiring - first as the Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI), followed by tot tell hree years as director of the National Security Agency (NSA)."

"I asked Odom at the birthday party how he met Smith, who had a very differnt sort of career."

"Smith spent his working life in the CIA's Directorate for Plans, and he spent most of it in the field. He told me once that the work was hard but it had its pleasures - for example, the shere gut thrill of making a successful brush pass on the streets of Moscow while hawk-eyed KGB watchers were on every streets corner trying to make it impossible. What Smith was trying to hand over, or retrieve, he did not tell me, that was classified.But he made no secret of the glow of triumph that came with success.

Smith was a born operator, and Odom met him while seeking advice."

"When I was ACSI I talked to Haviland about Army clan," Odom told me, "It's the endless problem - should the Army be trying to run agents at all?"

"I asked him, 'what makes a good case officer?"

"Haviland said, 'Did you see that movie with Robert Redford and Paul Newman - The Sting!,' I said yes. He said, 'That's it - The con!'"

Sylvia Odio and Father Machann

From: Oswald Talked – The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination

by Ray and Mary La Fontaine, (Pelican Publishing Co. , Gretna, 1996).

[p.264-265]: “The last time Father Machann was seen in his public role as shepherd of the city’s Catholic exile community was the Tuesday night of October 1, 1963. On that evening, he and other prominent members of the resettlement committee had shared the stage of Highland Park Town Hall with a guest speaker, John Martino, a fifty-two-year-old American and Mafia associate who was on a Bircher-paid tour to talk about his recently published book, ‘I Was Castro’s Prisoner.’ Martino had been imprisoned in Cuba for some thirty-nine months (during which time he befriended Silvia Odio’s father, Amador), and his three-hour book talk dwelled on the barbarism of his confinement by the revolutionary regime – balm to the ars of the gathered refugees and their circle of benefactors on the Town Hall stage…”

“Trudy Castor,…also sat on the stage with Father Machann that last evening,…later said, ‘I have no idea why he [Father Machann] left….After a week or two went by, of course, the Cubans were all talking about, well, ‘Where’s Father Machann?’ After all, this was their spiritual leader and no one seemed to know where he was or what had happened.’”

[p. 268] : “Father Machann’s disappearance was somehow connected to the assassination of the president,….he had heard, perhaps in confession from one of the refugees, perhaps from his mistress Silvia, something about the impending event. This wasn’t an absurd or uncommon opinion, it should be noted. Even Colonel Castorr (who, as Father Machann believed, had some sort of intelligence interest in the Cubans) speculated that he priest had learned something he shouldn’t have. Machann was at his mother’s Dallas home on the day of the assassination, the mother would later reveal, and Colonel Castorr had heard, probably from Mother Machann, that the father, ‘went to pieces in hearing the telecast.’…”

“…investigator Harold Weisberg had also heard that Father Machann entered ‘a home to rest’ following the assassination.”

Page 251: “….A few weeks before the assassination (Fr. Walter M. Machann) had mysteriously dropped out of sight, perhaps from a breakdown, in the city where he had been a lifelong resident. Some weeks later, after the assassination, he quietly left town and has not lived in Dallas since, though returning occasionally to visit his mother. He was last seen in (1993) in Bangkok. (Machann’s mother told Mary in a recent interview that he was visited by the Secret Service or other government investigators as recently as 1992 or 1990.).”

“But in the spring of 1964, Father Machann hadn’t yet made it to Bangkok. That April, apparently at he behest of the Western general counsel J. Lee Rankin, the Secret Service had launched an all-out search for the unusual padre, who was rumored to have bedded a number of women parishioners during his denture as assistant pastor at the Catholic church in east Dallas. After agents failed even to identify the father in Miami (where he had received his training as a Cuban refugee adviser), Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelly managed to locate Machann in New Orleans, interviewing him on Thursday, April 30.”

“The former Dallas priest (he was now on indefinite leave) had been attending classes at LOYOLA UNIVERSITY, and was, as he told Kelly, a frequent visitor of Silvia’s uncle, Dr. Agustin Guitart, a physics professor at the university. Cuitart, it may be recalled, happened also to be a friend of Carlos Bringuier’s, and had attended the New Orleans court hearing of Lee Harvey Oswald following his ‘street scuffle’ with Bringuier and two other members of the local chapter of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) the previous summer.”

“It wasn’t, of course Machann’s vow-breaking proclivities that interested assassination investigators like Kelley, but the role he was said to have played from 1961 through most of 1963 as chaplain of a Dallas group assisting Cuban refugees; for if rumors were flying concerning the priest’s sexual liaisons, they were even more rampant on a more relevant matter, the possible participation of Cubans – whether pro- or antic-Castro one couldn’t say – in the assassination of the president. On the latter matter, Machann had been in a position to be an invaluable informant.”

“Organized in 1961, the Cuban Catholic Committee of Dallas had sought to help Cuban refugees by finding them jobs and planning social and religious functions for their families. In march 1963 the committee had gone a step further, setting up a resettlement office funded through the Catholic Relief Service. Responsibility for conduct of the new office, which offered food and other living assistance for arriving exiles (who were frequently met by committee members as they stepped off a plane at Love Field), had been given to the committee’s capable director, Father Machann. In his capacity as benefactor and spiritual liaison with the Church, the clean-cut father had been a popular figure with the refugees. He knew virtually everyone in the Dallas exile community, and everyone knew him – this despite the fact (as Machann told [s.S.] Inspector Kelly in April 1964) he had made it a policy never to attend ‘any of the political meetings of the Cuban groups that were represented by the Cubans in Dallas, although he was often cajoled and entreated to attend them.’”

“That the father had often been cajoled as well by ladies of the flock wasn’t hard to believe. He was twenty-nine - three years older than Silvia – tall, and movie-star handsome. (However, the Secret Service mistakenly reported Machann’s age at this time as twenty-six.) He had dimples; he was intelligent; he was polite; he was perfect….”

“For all its good works, the Cuban Relief Committee of Dallas had been abruptly disbanded immediately after the president’s murder, by which time the handsome and seemingly competent father, though still in town, was nowhere to be found. He had reportedly taken shelter at his mother’s house, and was there on the Friday of the assassination – when he, like Silvia that day, was said to have suffered a collapse. But whatever the priest’s personal problems may have been at this time – the ones that had driven him underground – the Secret Service and other federal agencies knew nothing of them, except for the whispers of his sexual entanglements. That Silvia [Odio] had been a conquest of Machann’s (or vice versa, perhaps) had already been reported to authorities by her old socialite confidante, Lucille Connell, and tacitly acknowledged by Silvia’s psychiatrist, Dr. Burton Einspruch. The psychiatrist told Warren interviewer Burt W. Griffin that he ‘did not believe the affair with Father Machann was as serious as (the Commission) had been led to believe,’ a rather ambiguous assessment….”

April 1964, having located the missing priest, and armed with the knowledge of his suspected past with Silvia Odio, the Secret Service concocted a devious plan that in efficacy, at least, was miles ahead of the ‘straightforward’ approaches of the FBI and Warren Commission. Instead of grilling Silvia directly on her hallway-Oswald story, Inspector Kelly wanted Father Machann to call Silvia long-distance in Dallas (he would be ‘furnished the necessary funds’) and see if he could get her to tell him ‘the name of the JURE representative who had accompanied Oswald.’ As Kelly may have calculated, she might well confine things to the former lover – her ‘father confessor,’ as she called him in a 1993 documentary – that she wouldn’t say under oath or the glare of a federal inquiry. In this the inspector was probably right, but would Machann be snake enough to go along?”

“It turned out he would. He was, in fact, remarkably docile and cooperative, reportedly stating that ‘it was the duty of every citizen to cooperate to the full extent in the President’s Commission investigation and that he felt he was bound in conscience to give whatever assistance he could.’ It is possible that Machann’s docility was caused (as S.S. head James J. Rowley, Kelley’s superior, wrote on the father’s behalf) by the fact that he ‘did not realize at the time that she [siliva] had not made a full and frank disclosure of the names of the people who brought Oswald to her.’ Toward the end of December 1963, while the priest was still laying low in Dallas, Silvia had spoken to him about the Cubans who had supposedly shown up with ‘Leon Oswald’ in September, but she also told Machann she had already ‘discussed this matter fully’ with the FBI agents. Later, after Father Machann moved to New Orleans, she had written him a letter saying she again ‘discussed her meeting of Oswald with government officials.’ Consequently, Machann told Kelly, he didn’t feel that he would be ‘violating a confidence in giving any information previously given [by Silvia to] the proper authorities.’ Even so, the eagerness of Machann to participate in this game – ‘stating that he could not induce her to tell him who the people were, he could induce her to tell it to the proper authorities’ – sounds a bit edgy somehow, as if fear or nervousness is driving at it, if not the passivity that sometimes accompanies convalescence from a mental breakdown.”

“The deal was struck, and it was agreed Machann would call Silvia that same Thursday evening around 6:30. He requested, and received, privacy for his call. Then, “upon his return to Inspector Kelly’s room at 7:30 pm, he said he had made the call to Mrs. Odio in Dallas and she was very anxious to discuss the entire matter. She advised him [Father Machann] the only information she could provide on the people who visited her was that one of them said he was using the code name Leopoldo, that the second man she could identify as Eugenio Cisneros, and the third man was introduced to her as Leon.’”

“This was amazing, Where did the CISNEROS come from? Silvia hadn’t said a word to the FBI or any other investigative bodyprior to this phone call about one of the two Cubans being Cisneros….”

“…Cisneros himself would immediately jump up and deny the assertion with corroboration of his whereabouts elsewhere in late September of that year…”

“[silvia] Steadfastly refused to admit the obvious, that she had told the priest that one of the men in the hallway had been Rogelio Cisneros. After repeated questioning, the exasperated [Warren Commission attorney Wesley] Liebeler brought out his trump card, the report on the Secret Service-sponsored New Orleans phone call that Kelly’s superior had sent the Commission.”

“MR. LIEBELER. Now, I have a report before me of an interview with Father McKann by a representative of the U.S. Secret Service in which it states that Father McKann told this Secret Service agent that you had told him that one of the men was Eugeneio. But you indicated now that this is not so?”

“MRS. ODIO. No. Perhaps he could have misunderstood me, because he has the same problem with names. Probably I did tell him that the man was not Eugenio….”

[p. 251-256]

“Not many people outside the Catholic circle were talking much about anti-Castro Cubans as possible suspects in the days immediately following the assassination (when the work of the refugee committee was abruptly discontinued by Msgr. Thomas Tschoepe)…” [p. 262]

[Also see: Kennedy Ripples: A True Love Story by Marianne Sullivan (1994, San Clemente, Calf.)]

Robert Howard writes:

…..the Secret Service had a tap on Father Walter M. Machann during one of his conversation's with Silvia Odio, and that in addition he was a 'frequent visitor of Silvia' uncle Dr. Agustin Guitart, a physics professor at Loyola University (where Machann attended classes after leaving Dallas.)

And perhaps more importantly, Guitart it is said also happened to be a friend of Carlos Bringuer!

Incidentally Guitart even pops up at the court hearing for Oswald and Bringuer (Bringuer - jumped? from Alpha-66 to DRE, during that fateful period.)

A point that if correct points to some other machinations is that Odio had mentioned Rogelio Cisneros 'war name' Eugenio in her Warren Commission Testimony, right off the bat (see W.C. XI 380).

From Secret Service memo re: Rogelio Cisneros "Mr. Cisneros said he went to Dallas, TX from Miami, FL in June 1963....specifically for the purpose of contacting Silvia Odio who was to introduce him to a person in Dallas who was interested in selling them small arms. Cisneros said he contacted Sylvia Odio only once,and at that time he was accompanied only be Jorge Rodriquez Alvareda, their [JURE's] Dallas delegate, and no one else. (see W.C. XI 375)

Ostensibly, 'the person of interest' was a Uruguayan gun dealer named Juan (Johnny) Martin, according to Silvia, who also 'owned a washeteria down the street (this is in regards to Odio's residence on Oram, not the Crestwood Apt's on Magellan Circle (this was before the move to there). Regarding Jorge Rodriquez Alvaredo and Antonio Aletando Leon the two were interviewed by the FBI, Rodriguez said that the meeting in Dallas was for the 'purpose of organizing the Dallas Branch of JURE,' However no gun deal was made.

According to the 'discredited?' see 'What the La Fontaines didn't tell you. Lafontaines, pg 253 'Oswald Talked'

Inspector Kelley 'persuaded' Machann to call Silvia long distance in Dallas...and see if he could get her to tell him the name of the JURE Representative who had accompanied Oswald (to the infamous Sept 26th meeting) at Silvia's.

The stage is set and according to the La Fontaines (FWIW, I am only too aware of how controversial this is Robert) She (Silvia) advised him (Fr. Machann) concerning 'the meeting' was that one of them said he was using the code name Leopoldo, that the second man she could identify as Eugene Cisneros and the third man was introduced to her as Leon.

In 'Oswald Talked' the source of the information in the last two paragraphs is cited as 'Chief James J. Rowley (Secret Service) letter to J. Lee Rankin - May 5th, 1964 and Commission Exhibit 2943 (6).

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ns/Item 005.pdf

5/7/67 -Harold Weisberg

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/C Disk/Castorr L Robert Colonel

Link above to .pdf file of 23 April, 1967 letter to Mrs. Robert L. Castorr from Harold Weisberg.

TAPE #1 (SIDE 2)

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/C Disk/Castorr L Robert Colonel

Response to W. Tracy Parnell

Response to W. Tracy Parnell

In regards to Tracy Parnell's attempt to debunk Antonio Veciana, defame Gaeton Fonzi and announce Jefferson Morley has "flipped to the conspiracy side," I offer the following.

Parnell betrays his own personal bias by referring to "the ramblings" of Veciana, rather than the testimony of an important witness. 

A self-described "guy in pajamas, skeptic and debunker," Parnell refers to his "research," yet he has apparently has not read key works we are talking about - such as Fonzi's Washingtonian article and Phillips autobiography "Nightwatch."

Now that Morley has published Veciana's story in a mainstream media publication like Newsweek, the guy in pajamas has come out of the woodwork in an attempt to debunk Veciana, defame Fonzi and place Morley in the crazy conspiracy camp.

Parnell says that Veciana has "exaggerated his place in history" by simply saying he met his intelligence case officer and the patsy in the assassination of the President in Dallas a few months before the assassination. 

What kind of place in history is that?

It's reminiscent of the counter-logic of Oswald accusers who say he killed the president to make his mark in history, when he denied the deed.

"What evidence is there," Parnell asks, "other than Veciana's own assertions?"

The veracity of a human source (HUMIT) is determined, by CIA standards, by the amount of new, significant and verifiable information he provides.

In that regards Veciana gives us plenty - Pan Am Bank, Berlioz Language school, Moa Bay mining, Army Col. Sam Kail, the bazooka attack that led to the arrest of Odio's parents, Pedro Pan and Plan Centaur, all independently confirmed and verified by other sources. 

I think it's a good approach to understanding the Dealey Plaza Operation by studying related covert ops such as the Bay of Pigs, Mongoose, JMWAVE, Bayo-Pawley, Huma Bunker raid, etc., and Parnell picks two - the Department store arson and Pedro Pan.

That Veciana was associated at all with the bazooka plot to kill Castro puts him in the middle of the JFK assassination story, and Parnell quotes Gonzalez, who got the Odios arrested by fleeing to their farm, saying that Veciana “ran away,” trying to make him look bad. But that’s when the Castro agents penetrated the plot and began to round up suspects, both Gonzalez and Veciana fled, just as “Bishop” told Veciana to do in the course of his training.

Because he first mentions it in his book, Parnell says Veciana is putting himself into the department store arson, when actually Veciana says he feels guilty because an innocent person was killed.

As for Pedro Pan, the evacuation of children from Cuba that was assisted by the Catholic Church, Parnell cites a court case that ostensibly exonerates the CIA.

But in fact the CIA conduit Catherwood Fund financed the Catholic Welfare Society that paid doctors and nurses to set up medical clinics for Cubans in Florida (and possibly New Orleans and Dallas).

The truck used in the Huma Bunker raid was borrowed from Catholic Welfare friend in New Orleans, and the priest assigned to cater to the needs of the Cuban refugees in Dallas, Father Walter MacChann, took the confession of Sylvia Odio when she told him about Oswald’s visit to her apartment with two Cubans. Father McChan was also an associate of John Martino, who was in on the Bayo-Pawley affair and expressed foreknowledge of the assassination.

But Parnell doesn't want to go there. The court says the CIA has nothing to do with the Catholic Church and that’s okay with him, while the Catholic Church is itself an intelligence agency with thousands of years more experience than the CIA. The church invented the word propaganda, for the propagation of the faith.

Parnell accuses Morley of ignoring the "problems" with Veciana's story in regards to contradictions and dates, but Parnell himself ignores two significant lines of Inquiry that confirm the existence of "Bishop" and support the contention he is David Atlee Phillips, and no one else could be. 

Anthony Summers followed up on a lead Veciana provided him, locating and interviewing Veciana's former Havana bank secretary. She confirmed the existence of the "Mr. Bishop," who called Veciana to arrange meetings and she said "Bishop" was associated with a Ms. Prewett. Summers located Virginia Prewett, a NANA reporter who wrote frequently about Alpha 66 activities and she said she knew Veciana, Bishop and Phillips. 

While Parnell suspects Veciana embellished his story after reading Phillips' 1977 autobio - Nightwarch, that he apparently hasn't read himself, Veciana began telling his story in March 1976, to both Fonzi and Dick Russell, before Phillips' book was published.

http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2017/07/dick-russell-on-veciana-summer-1976.html

Parnell also points to a CIA agent named Bishop, who did know Veciana, according to the CIA files, but this agent was primarily assigned to the Far East, while "Maurice Bishop" was a Western Hemisphere Division guy. The entire career of David Phillips fits like a glove over the background of "Maurice Bishop," as Veciana described him before "Nightwatch" was published in 1977. And Plan Centaur is the clincher.

Among Veciana's 1976 "ramblings" was Plan Centaur - an unauthorized part of the plot to assassinate Castro in Chile, an event that seriously affected Phillips, Bishop and Veciana and led to the dissolution of their relationship. 

Anyone who wants to disassociate David Atlee Phillips from being "Bishop" and Veciana must give an explanation for how Plan Centaur so dramatically affected all three people, other than it is the clincher that certifies David Atlee Phillips as spymaster "Maurice Bishop." 

Joe Smith on Paul Linebarger and David Maurer

From Joseph B. Smith’s “Portrait of a Cold Warrior,” (Ballantine Books, NY, 1976)

Chapter 6, At the Foot of the Master

….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 (Korean) 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 the Defense Department in the same capacity, giving advice on U.S. psychwar operations in Korea, and he was 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.

The seminars were held for eight weeks, every Friday night at his home. Going to Paul Linebarger’s house on Friday evenings was not only an educational experience for those who attended the seminar, it was also an exercise in clandestinity. Learning covert operational conduct was considered part of the course.

Each seminar was limited to no more than eight students. They were told to pose as students from the School for Advanced International Studies, to go to Paul’s via different routes, and to say they were attending a seminar in Asian politics….

The School for Advanced International Studies had its campus in Washington, but over in Baltimore at the main campus of John Hopkins University, Owen Lattimore, the expert on Asian geography, held sway….

It could just be possible some communist surveillant might follow one of the students up Rock Creek Park to 29th Street. They might even be operating from the Shoreham hotel, a few blocks away…..It would be difficult to say whether it was the political atmosphere in general, the office routine of the day just closed, or the drawn drapes in Linebarger’s living room, but students at the seminar met in an appropriately conspiratorial mood that raised the level of their appreciation of their subject.

The mood was fitting if not essential to an understanding of the material. The first point that Linebarger made was that the purpose of all psychological warfare is the manipulation of people so that they are not able to detect they are being manipulated. Wartime psychwar had been a matter of undermining the enemy civilian and military will to continue to fight. The audience, in brief, was very clearly defined. Determining just who it was they wanted to manipulate and for what ends was also pretty clear to the OPC personnel. Their targets were the Communists and their allies. Having this firmly in mind, any methods of manipulation could be used, especially “black propaganda.” 

Black propaganda operations, by definition, are operations in which the source of the propaganda is disguised or misrepresented in one way or another so as not to be attributable to the people who really put it out. This distinguishes black from white propaganda, such as news bulletins and similar statements issued by one side in a conflict extolling its successes, of course, or other material just as clearly designed to serve the purposes of its identifiable authors….

Paul Linebarger’s was a seminar in black propaganda only. One reason for this was that the United States already had an overt propaganda agency as part of the cold war apparatus. In those days it was run directly by the State Department, but in 1953 it would become formalized into the United States Information Agency and become the independent government agency responsible for worldwide Untied States propaganda operations….

Paul Linebarger loved black propaganda operations probably because they involved the wit-sharpening he liked to talk about. Also, he was so good at them that his was one of the inventive minds that refined the entire black operations field into shades of blackness. Linebarger and his disciples decided that propaganda that was merely not attributed to the United States was not really black, only gray. To be called black it had to be something more. Furthermore, they divided gray propaganda into shades of gray. So-called light gray was defined as propaganda that was not attributed to the United States government, but instead, for example, to a group that was known to be friendly to the United States….Dark gray was the term for propaganda attributed to a source usually hostile to the United States. This left the term black propaganda for a very special kind of propaganda activity. Black propaganda operations were operations done to look like, and carefully labeled to be, acts of the Communist enemy….

Linebarger was always careful to point out that to have any chance of success, these black operations must be based on good solid information about how the Communist Party we proposed to imitate actually conducted its business….

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

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

DAVID MAURER'S THE BIG CON

“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 and the confidence man’s are almost 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 avidly reading The Big Con. The tales it told did, indeed, contain a lot of hints on how to do our job. 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." 

“He had two leading operational heroes whose activities formed the basis for lessons he wished us to learn and whose examples he thought we should follow. One was Lt. Col. Edward G. Lansdale, the OPC station chief in Manila, and the other was E. Howard Hunt, the OPC station chief in Mexico City. Both of them had what he called “black minds,” and the daring to defy bureaucratic restraints in thinking up and executing operations. He had a number of stories to tell about the exploits of both. 

He was particularly fond of Lansdale….He had a favorite Lansdale story and a favorite Hunt story to illustrate what he admired in each and to demonstrate two widely different kinds of black operations. Lansdale’s was somewhat complex and required the support of a number of people and pieces of equipment. Hunt’s was disarmingly simple….

A note of caution that Linebarger added to these discussions of black operations sounds like a bell down the years. He would explain, after someone had come up with an especially clever plan for getting the Communists completely incriminated in an exceedingly offensive act, 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 get 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.”

The CIA and "The Sting"

The CIA and the "The Sting"

In his book "Intelligence Wars," Thomas Powers recalls a party for a retiring veteran CIA operations officer where he met former NSA (National Security Agency) and ACSI  (Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence 1981-1985) General William Odum.

[  William Eldridge Odom - Wikipedia / William E. Odom, 75; Military Adviser to 2 Administrations  /  William Odom, 75, National Security Director, Dies - The New York Times ] 

Over cocktails, Thomas asked Odum, an agency chief, how he came to meet the retiring CIA covert operator. 

Odum replied that he had asked the covert operator two questions - should the Army be running agents at all? 

The second question was what makes a good covert operational case officer?

While Thomas doesn't tell us the answer to the first question, we can see the value of Army Intelligence running undercover agents because the CIA is prohibited from doing so domestically by their charter, and the value of the Army intelligence during the civil rights and Vietnam protest era is readily apparent.

As for what makes a good covert operational case officer, the surprising answer was, just like the movie "The Sting." 

From that answer, it was apparanent that the retiring CIA covert operator had taken Paul Linebarger's class at the Center for Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins in Baltimore, as described by Joseph Smith in his book "Portrait of a Cold Warriror."

Besides his own text book "Psychological Warfare," Linebarger had his students read David Maurer's "The Big Con," the book that formed the basis for the movie "The Sting." 

Maurer, a linguistics professor at a Kentucky University, began to study the street slang of gangs, theves and criminals, compiling a unique dictionary of slang, in the course of which they told him about the Big Con artists who didn't rob people but instead convinced them to give them large amounts of money under the impression they would get more, verifing the idea "you can't cheat an honest man." 

When he met some Big Con artists and took them out to lunch, he gained their confidence, so they told Maurer the secrets of the Big Con, how it is conducted, and how everyone in the operation except the Mark is an actor playing out their assigned roles. Like a magician who gives away  the secrets of their tricks, Maurer got the details of the Big Con. They also told Maurer about some of the more legendary Big Con artists like Charlie Gondorf, an Atlantic City bartender portrayed in the movie by Paul Newman. 

When I read an early edition of "The American Confidence Man," a trade paperback aimed at academics and students, I immediatly recognized it as the basis for the movie "The Sting." 

A later mass market paperback edition "The Big Con,"  Linebarger assigned his covert operational students to read that was apparently picked up by Hollywood screenwriters who produced "The Sting," but failed to acknowledge Maurer's contributions. "The Sting" movie itself was a sting. 

When Maurer inquired, the Hollywood screenwriters denied ever reading Maurer's book, but when Maurer took them to court they settled when they couldn't come up with another published source for the name "Gondorf." 

While  the movie "The Sting" is an example of how covert operations are coonducted, Maurer's book gives covert operational case officers the crafts and techniques needed to carry out such operations, as Paul Linebarger taught his psychological warfare students at John Hopkins' Center for Advsnced International Studies.