Saturday, December 22, 2018

Newman's Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) and Sam Halpern on RFK

John Newman writes: In Volume III (“Into the Storm”), I employ a technique called the “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield” to help readers understand Sam Halpern’s decades-long campaign claiming RFK had a secret assassination plot to use the Mafia to assassinate Castro. 

I want to thank Peter Dale Scott for his endorsement of the result:

PDS: Using analytic techniques from his days in Army Intelligence, Newman collates and overlays disparate covert narratives to provide an unmatched overview of his explosive topic: how deception and intrigues have obscured the Kennedy presidency and his assassination. Future serious historians will have to deal with this masterful book.

—Peter Dale Scott, author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Dallas ’63, and Poetry and Terror.

Newman: 

This is relevant extract from Chapter Nine:

Examining Halpern’s RFK Narrative — A Methodological Approach:


Given the historical significance of Halpern’s RFK story and the present popularity of the Castro-killed-Kennedy paradigm, nothing less than a rigorous examination is called for. The methodology I will employ is analogous to what most people have experienced when watching time-lapsed photography. The slow movement of objects through time are observable through the horizontal merging (“splicing”) of frames separated by longer units of time.

A similar effect can be achieved with information arranged through vertically merging transparent overlays of the data. By selecting information for the overlays from different sources, a more complete picture of the subject becomes visible. 

In U.S. Army Intelligence we use this approach to obtain an accurate picture of the battlefield. One overlay would be information about the disposition of friendly forces; another overlay would be information about the disposition of enemy forces; and other overlays would be information about geography, weather, illumination, and other factors that can affect the outcome of a conflict. We call this the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB).

To examine Halpern’s theories about Robert Kennedy’s activities in 1962, I will employ a methodology similar to the IPB. Three transparent overlays of information will be superimposed together. In this chapter, I will discuss the first overlay. The information in it will present a chronological illustration of Halpern’s RFK-Mafia façade. The complicated nature of Halpern’s fabrications will require careful analysis and explanation. 

The audit trail of every piece of oral evidence must be carefully tracked from the moment of creation to its resting place in Halpern’s epic RFK-Mafia story. 

In Chapter Ten, I will add the second overlay. Mercifully, it is more straightforward than the first. The second overlay is a thorough arrangement of information from contemporary CIA cables and internal memoranda from 1962 describing Bobby Kennedy’s routine requests for CIA assistance. When this layer of evidence is superimposed over Halpern’s RFK history, the results are startling.

Finally, in Chapter Thirteen I will add a third revealing overlay and superimpose it over the first two. That overlay sets forth the true CIA-Mafia plot to assassinate Castro and the secret transfer of that plot in 1962 from the CIA Security Office to Halpern’s boss, William Harvey. 

The superimposition of this third overlay reveals how the CIA kept RFK in the dark about the transfer of the plot to Harvey and how Sam Halpern conflated Bobby’s routine requests described in the second overlay (Chapter Ten) into the threads of his mercurial epic.


BK NOTES: When Thomas Powers trashed Jefferson Morley's book on James Jesus Angleton, I responded with this essay, that also mentions the Sam Halpern - RFK Nexus. 





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