As Jeff Morley points out - there are some former CIA officials who suspect the assassination of President Kennedy was conducted by rogue CIA officers - out of the Miami JMWAVE station - including Jake Esterline as a primary suspect.
Rolf
Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, told a
conference of intelligence professionals that his study of JFK’s assassination
indicated that the president was killed by enemies in the CIA’s Miami station
According to an
account on Medium by veteran Washington reporter Nina Burgleigh,
“Mowatt-Larssen, using his access to classified CIA files, went looking for
officers who would have had a motive, and access to information about Oswald.
“It takes an agent to find a mole,” he said. “Who
would betray his country? We were looking for a team of rogues.”
Mowatt-Larssen’s prime suspect is a senior officer
in agency’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion. His alleged motive: JFK’s Cuba policy.
“The rogues must be expert, and they need a motive,”
Mowatt-Larssen explained. “To me, JFK is the motive. He pulled the plug on the
Bay of Pigs. And he was reckless. He almost got us into a thermonuclear war
with the Soviets.”
Mowatt-Larssen’s conclusions are hardly definitive
but his reasoning is logical. Given his expertise, his work deserves to be
checked. He is asking the right questions….
Mr. Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is the Director of the
Intelligence Project at the Belfer Center.
Prior to assuming the Director position, Rolf
served as a senior fellow at the Center and served over three years as the
Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of
Energy. Prior to this, he served for 23 years as a CIA intelligence officer in
various domestic and international posts, to include Chief of the Europe
Division in the Directorate of Operations, Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction
Department, Counterterrorist Center, and Deputy Associate Director of Central
Intelligence for Military Support. Prior to his career in intelligence, Mr.
Mowatt-Larssen served as an officer in the U.S. Army. He is a graduate of the
United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. He is married to Roswitha and
has three children. He is a recipient of the CIA Director's Award, the George
W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism, the Secretary of Energy's
Exceptional Service Medal, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal,
Secretary of Defense Civilian Distinguished Service Medal, and the National
Intelligence Superior Performance Medal, among others.
Spy vs. Spy
Ex-CIA spooks talk Trump-Russia, JFK, and more at
Valerie Plame’s inaugural espionage conference
It was just a week after my return from Spies, Lies & Nukes,
a weekend espionage seminar hosted by former CIA agent Valerie Plame in
November at a hotel in downtown Santa Fe, when one of the conference attendees — let’s
call him Snow Goose — buzzed my cell with some urgent news.
He wanted me to know that, based on his professional
judgment, honed over decades in covert intelligence, one of our fellow guests
at the conference was now playing for Moscow. His evidence was far from
conclusive: Now officially retired, the other spy — call him Copernicus — had
simply stated the opinion, to anyone who would listen, that presumed Russian
meddling in the 2016 election on behalf of the Trump campaign was overblown.
He’d pushed the same line in a private conversation with me.
To Snow Goose, Copernicus’ arguments hewed
suspiciously close to Kremlin spin.
“I know what it looks like because I used to to do
it myself, for our side, ” he told me on the phone. He said he planned to
alert the FBI, just to be prudent, and warned me not to be surprised if I got a
call from the bureau asking about my one-on-one chats with Copernicus.
I thanked him for the warning.
The conference had drawn an audience of 175
academics, historians, and espionage groupies, each of whom had paid up to
$500, not including hotel rooms, for a series of presentations and panels
bearing titles like “Terrorism, Intelligence, and the Paradigms of Perception”
and “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Secret Intelligence Perspective.”
One of the final panels, featuring a group of ex-spies,
examined the question: “Was There Russian Interference in U.S. Elections?”
Nearly all of the participants answered in the affirmative, but they disagreed,
sometimes vehemently, on the effects. (This predated a report last month that the FBI had, in fact,
investigated whether Trump was working for the Kremlin.)
“The Russians did what they always do and what we
frankly do, too,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who served for 23 years as a CIA
intelligence officer in various domestic and international posts, including
Russia station chief, told attendees. “They went to active measures. They
wanted to hurt Hillary and help Trump. There is no question they tried to
influence voters.”
“If any of us did not try to remove this man [Trump]
from office, we would be derelict. It is absolutely clear that Russian
intelligence manipulated him.”
While Mary Beth Long, a former CIA agent and
assistant secretary of defense, defended the president as the duly elected
commander-in-chief and slammed former intelligence chiefs John Brennan and
James Clapper for publicly criticizing Trump, she also admitted he might well
have been compromised. “I would be shocked if it was not the case that, while
Trump was a businessman, he was approached by Russians,” she said, “and I have
no doubt he was sexually entrapped and he had arrangements, for business
purposes. But that doesn’t make him a traitor.”
Then again, it certainly might, insisted Glenn
Carle, who worked for the Agency for more than two decades on four continents
before retiring in 2007. “This is the greatest threat to our country since
1861,” he said. “Not even Watergate, not World War II — there was never any
real danger Hitler would walk down Constitution Avenue. But I think there is
substantive, overwhelming evidence, and that if any of us did not try to remove
this man [Trump] from office, we would be derelict. It is absolutely clear that
Russian intelligence manipulated him.”
“I strongly disagree,” countered Larry Johnson,
former staffer at the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism and ex-CIA
agent, who now runs his own private investigation and security consulting firm.
“Is there gambling at the casino?” he asked. “Yes, Russians have been
intervening here for years. I harbor no illusions about that. But we do it,
too.”
Johnson added that the “level of Russian hysteria”
directed at the Trump election “is jeopardizing our ability to actually work
with Russia, in places like the International Space Station.” “If they’re so
damn bad,” he wondered, “why are we trusting our astronauts to them?”
Santa Fe is one of those places — like the South of
France and the city of San Miguel de Allende in Central Mexico — where American
spies often go to retire. Today, the city, with its art galleries and turquoise
jewelry, is best known as a moneyed playground for gentleman ranchers,
heiresses, and horsey trophy wives. But that reputation belies a far more
controversial backstory: the city’s vital place in the history of Cold War
espionage. According to ex-CIA officer Bruce Held, author of A Spy’s Guide
to Santa Fe and Albuquerque, the nearby Los Alamos laboratories, where
scientists developed the atom bomb, attracted the KGB’s attention early on. For
decades, Americans working in the service of the Soviet Union showed up in the
area, using code names like Star and Bumblebee, looking for technical
information on the nuclear weapons program and delivering it to their Russian
handlers. KGB agents dead-dropped papers and notes in invisible ink all over
town, exchanged intel at clandestine meetings at the Paseo de Peralta bridge,
and executed expert brush-passes at the Greyhound station.
Plame and her husband, former diplomat Joseph
Wilson, settled here after Plame’s cover as a CIA agent was blown — not by
Moscow or another foreign adversary but by senior members of the Bush
administration. A week before her outing in 2003, Wilson had publicly disputed
one of the Bush team’s main rationales for the invasion of Iraq. Outing Plame
was an attempt to retaliate and discredit him. The so-called Plame affair led
to the conviction of Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, for several
felonies (he was recently pardoned by Donald Trump) and became the subject of
the movie, Fair Game.
Now the author of a memoir and a few novels, and a
regular on the lecture circuit, Plame launched the conference, Spies, Lies
& Nukes, last year, inviting eight retired CIA agents to reminisce about
their adventures in Russia, Chad, Libya, Switzerland, and other countries they
said they were forbidden from naming. At least one, Mowatt-Larssen, bore the
honor of having been PNG’ed at Moscow; as spies put it — caught out, declared
“persona non grata,” and sent packing.
Having been obligated to keep their work secret for
years, it turns out that retired spies like to talk. Working in intelligence
can be lonely and thankless. The best operatives are invisible, so bland and
colorless that they are capable of hiding in plain sight. It is not a job for
someone with a narcissistic bent or a need for public validation.
The CIA “wanted me to exploit, manipulate, persuade,
and bribe people. And I found out that not only was I good at it, but I
enjoyed it.”
As spy-turned-novelist John Le Carre knew, the life
can be psychologically and emotionally challenging. “What the hell do you think
spies are?” the jaded British spy Leamas snarls to his naive girlfriend in the
1963 adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. “They’re just a
bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me: little drunkards, queers, henpecked
husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten
little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right
against wrong?”
The spies who came in from the cold for Plame’s warm
Southwestern spy-hang were not seedy or squalid. They didn’t swagger or drink
heavily. They wore business suits or the fleece vests preferred by west of the
Rockies elites, and reminisced placidly about hiding their identities, bribing
foreigners with suitcases full of cash, and sometimes, risking their lives.
Even so, in his talk “Soul Catcher — How the CIA
Recruits Assets,” James C. Lawler, retired member of the CIA’s Senior
Intelligence Service who spent much of his career tracking and fighting WMD
proliferation, described the sort of old-fashioned tradecraft Leamas would have
recognized.
An elfin man with a white goatee, Lawler said he
decided to join CIA in 1980 without giving the idea much thought. “I had no
idea what they wanted me to do,” he said. “Then, I learned they wanted me to
exploit, manipulate, persuade, and bribe people. And then, I found out that not
only was I good at it, but I enjoyed it.”
He added: “There’s sociopathy involved.”
The first rule of recruiting an asset, he said, is
identifying the target’s vulnerabilities. “You study the cracks. What are your
stress points?” he explained. “And then, you let them know, ‘I can relieve your
stress.’”
Revenge was one motivation to commit treason. Money was another.
People going through a divorce were “prime bait” — child support, health care,
the cost of education. And then there were those with what he called, “a Walter
Mitty fascination” — people who would betray their country because it fed their
sense of self-importance.
Lawler recounted his first attempt to persuade one
embassy deputy in an unnamed country to share information with the CIA. The
deputy, who had until then thought of Lawler as just an American acquaintance,
turned him down. After worrying that the target would turn him in to local
authorities (and knowing the CIA would cut him loose if it happened), he
decided to call a week later to see if they were still on good terms. To his
surprise, the deputy not only affirmed the friendship, but asked if the offer
was still on. His wife had announced she was divorcing him, and he needed money.
Lawler signed him up.
“Recruitment is metaphysical,” he concluded. “It’s
as if you have a mental link to the target.”
In the end, he justified such manipulation by
convincing himself he was improving his targets’ lives. “Maybe that’s my coping
mechanism,” he told the audience.
The invitees broke for lunch, queuing at stainless
steel chafing dishes piled with green chile enchiladas, guacamole, three kinds
of local salsa ranging from really hot to make-you-gasp, and posole. I spent a
lot of time talking to a shy farmer and homemaker named Rita Jo Flynn, a
self-described lifetime spy-wannabe with 17 grandchildren, who traveled to
Santa Fe from her home in Harper, Iowa. After watching the movie Fair Game on
Netflix, she googled Valerie Plame, found out about the conference, and
immediately bought a ticket.
“My husband and five kids kind of laughed, but they knew
I always wanted to be a spy,” she said. So far, the trip had been worth it. “I
usually get shingles when I travel,” she said. “But not this time.”
After lunch, Glenn Carle, the only CIA official to
publicly refuse to participate in torture during the war on terror and author
of the book The Interrogator,gave a talk entitled, “Terrorism,
Intelligence, and Paradigms of Perception.” The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
he declared, have been a waste of money, having cost $5 trillion, so far. In
the years since 9/11, he pointed out, the same number of Americans (fewer than
200) have died at the hands of Islamist terrorists as have been killed by
right-wing extremists.
Later, Mary Beth Long, the former assistant SecDef,
gave a PowerPoint on the long and dastardly history of U.S. covert activities
in foreign lands, from the Bay of Pigs and other Cuban adventures to Oliver
North and Iran-Contra. She said she was aware of at least 20 other
“extraordinary” Cold War operations ordered by various presidents, “most of
which won’t ever make the public eye.” One recently declassified example, she
said, involved the CIA’s manipulation of Lech Walesa and the Polish labor
unions in the years before the Berlin Wall came down.
Long added that she and her colleagues had come to
the conference partly because it offered an unusual chance to reconnect with
former colleagues and to speak in public. “I don’t remember ever having had an
opportunity to be in a room with my colleagues, especially this caliber of case
officers,” she said. “We all are wired with a passion for public service, and
after you leave the CIA you have to find a way to satisfy that. A lot of us
struggle with that. We don’t usually engage people on questions regarding our
work. So this is a very important opportunity, psychologically.”
Later that night, the group crowded into a ballroom
for a screening of Active Measures, a 2018 documentary that examines the
evidence that Donald Trump, whether wittingly or otherwise, is a tool of
Vladimir Putin (full disclosure: the author of this article makes a brief
appearance). The filmmakers were on hand to discuss the movie — but halfway
through the screening, a fire alarm went off. By the time the hotel staff
declared it a false alarm, the audience had scattered into the night, and the
screening was cut short. Curiously, the alarm was only activated in the part of
the hotel where the film was screening.
“Maybe it’s the Russians,” one of the filmmakers
joked.
On the conference’s closing day, the white-haired
Mowatt-Larssen walked us through his theory on who killed JFK. He started out
with a key idea — that if the CIA killed Kennedy, the plot would have
necessarily involved three people: a mastermind and two others — one to handle
Lee Harvey Oswald and one to deal with Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner
who shot and killed Oswald before he could be interrogated.
Then Mowatt-Larssen, using his access to classified
CIA files, went looking for officers who would have had a motive, and access.
“It takes an agent to find a mole,” he said. “Who would betray his country? We
were looking for a team of rogues.”
After going through the names of ranking officers
during the years before the assassination, and then cross-referencing them, he
settled on Jacob Esterline, the CIA’s project director on the failed Bay of
Pigs assault on Cuba, as the likely mastermind, the man with the best motive,
and the probable ringleader. In his role as the CIA’s director of Western
Hemisphere, he would have had access to Oswald, as well.
“The rogues must be expert, and they need a motive,”
Mowatt-Larssen explained. “To me, JFK is the motive. He pulled the plug on the
Bay of Pigs. And he was reckless. He almost got us into a thermonuclear war
with the Soviets.”
Esterline went on to serve as chief of the CIA’s
Miami office, and as deputy director of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division.
He died in 1999. Of course, there is no shortage of conspiracy theories about
the death of JFK, but Mowatt-Larssen currently serves as director of the Belfer
Center’s Intelligence Project — at Harvard’s Kennedy School, no less — so his
speculation carries some weight.
After operative Bruce Held regaled the audience with
his adventures in Chad, including the story of being personally targeted for
death by Moammar Gadhafi in the 1990s, the gang gathered in the dining room to
say their goodbyes over coffee. Larry Johnson was elaborating on his opinion
that it is impossible to rig American elections because they’re too
decentralized. He said cyber experts call CrowdStrike, one of the security
companies that has claimed to find evidence linking Russia to 2016 hacks into
the Democratic National Committee, “ClownStrike.”
Across the room, Snow Goose was still fulminating
about the lack of consensus on Trump as a Russian traitor. “The panel depressed
me,” he said. “The facts are so overwhelmingly clear. There is no ambiguity.
There is no debate on this.”
Students from the University of New Mexico’s
political science department, who had volunteered their service for the weekend
in exchange for the awesome chance to meet real spies, packed the various
speakers’ unsold books into boxes and took down the tables. Mary Beth Long and
Glenn Carle debated the wisdom of flying out of Santa Fe that afternoon, which
had no direct flights back to Boston and Washington, D.C.
Valerie Plame hugged them all goodbye and extracted
promises that they would return. She was so pleased with the turnout and the
conversation that she vowed to start planning another Spycon for next year,
perhaps with a major university or other institution involved.
Weeks have passed now since my alarming call from
Snow Goose, and so far no G-men have appeared on my doorstep. But the
conversation did leave me unsettled. What would I say if I got such a call?
Journalists enjoy a measure of protection from government scrutiny — at least
in theory. But that didn’t prevent a colleague of mine, Matt Cooper, from
nearly landing in jail for refusing to name his source in connection with the
Plame affair.
Copernicus didn’t strike me as a Russian asset, but
in the “wilderness of mirrors,” as longtime counterespionage chief James
Angleton put it, doubt and even paranoia go with the territory. I know that
spies everywhere regard journalists as useful tools — trained information
gatherers who can sometimes go where American officials cannot, and potential
conduits for propaganda. Way back in 1977, Carl Bernstein published a lengthy investigation into
links between U.S. intelligence services and mainstream journalists, and
there’s every reason to believe such manipulation is still practiced.
Maybe Copernicus’ skepticism was part of a
disinformation campaign. Or maybe Snow Goose was playing me. Or maybe Rita Jo’s
fangirl-Iowa-housewife routine was just an elaborate cover…
In a post-truth world, you never know for sure,
which many intelligence officials believe is exactly what our enemies want.
During one presentation, spycatcher James C. Lawler compared the current
American situation to a famous Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters
on Maple Street,” in which suburban residents, during a power blackout, start
squabbling and killing each other.
Mary Beth Long agreed. Sure, our adversaries would
like to undermine our political culture however they can, she pointed out. But
we’re the ones that make it possible. “The cracks are ours,” she said, “at
the end of the day, it’s us.”
Writer, explorer, national politics at Newsweek, 5
books, NYC
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And now FWIW Valerie Plame is a U.S. Senate candidate. Connections? Public Service? Self Enrichment? Boredom? The Pueblos have been there much longer than the Beautiful People.
ReplyDeleteEsterline makes a lousy candidate. For one thing he publicly dismissed the idea that JFK was to blame for the failure at the Bay of Pigs.
ReplyDelete