Monday, July 7, 2014

"The Sixties" Makes Ludicrous Presumptions About JFK Assassination

Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman are on a fierce mission to rewrite America's past and turn the CIA's lies into our official history. Hanks and Goetzman are the producers of the abomination called "The Sixties" which is airing on CNN, and, for reasons that are unfathomable to me, they want to turn JFK's assassination into an accidental meeting of killer and president, devoid of any deep political implications and neutered of any CIA, military or secret cabal involvement. [They also produced "Parkland," notable for its historical omissions and inaccuracies.] Hanks is a multimillionaire without a care in the world, and I suppose he feels guilty having gamed a corrupt and top-heavy system. He wants, in his own feeble way, to assure us, or himself, that America is not elitist and evil...and that Kennedy's assassination did not facilitate illegitimate and pseudo-oligarchies in the half-century since. Whatever Hanks' motives, "The Sixties" episode dealing with JFK's assassination is a twisted fairy tale, full of misinformation and outlandish prevarications.

The purported assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is depicted as a miserable misanthrope, unconnected to any intelligence or military agencies, who just happened to get a job in a building overlooking the President's parade route. The fact is, Oswald was a CIA operative whose personal acquaintances and circumstances virtually screamed undercover agent. His best friend in Dallas was George DeMohrenschildt, CIA asset and oil geologist, who was connected to the richest oilmen in Texas and his old pal George W. Bush, head of the CIA in 1976-77 when DeMohrenschildt was murdered. Oswald's landlady in Irving, Texas (where he spent weekends with his wife and children), was Ruth Paine, whose family was associated with the CIA for decades. Paine's mother-in-law was best friends with Mary Bancroft, Allen Dulles's mistress. Who was Allen Dulles? Oh, just the head of the CIA under Kennedy, and the de facto head of the Warren Commission which covered up the assassination. Dulles was fired by Kennedy in 1961, and he despised JFK ever after.

Moreover, Oswald was identified as a CIA agent by his contemporaries in the Agency. Husband and wife CIA assets Jim and Elsie Wilcott exposed Oswald as a CIA double agent. In his book, "JFK And The Unspeakable," James Douglass writes, "In his own HSCA testimony Wilcott said Oswald served as a double agent in the Soviet Union and afterwards came under suspicion by the Agency...Wilcott himself had issued an advance on funds for the CIA's Oswald project under a cryptonym...Wilcott had to confront his own complicity in the CIA's Oswald counterintelligence project that was the background to the president's assassination."

Another CIA employee who spoke the truth about Oswald was Ann Egerter, assistant to CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton. Douglass writes that, "Egerter indicated by her testimony that Oswald was a particular kind of CIA asset, an Agency employee who was suspected of being a security risk. That would have been the reason for opening a 201 file on him specifically in Angleton's Special Investigations Group of Counterintelligence. Egerter said SIG was known in the Agency as the office that spied on spies...[identified as] CIA employees."

Not surprisingly, Douglass did not appear on "The Sixties" as one of the expert JFK historians. However, Warren Commission apologists and Oswald framers Vincent Bugliosi and Max Holland did. It all makes for a pleasant fairy tale, by which Hanks hopes that America will fall asleep and/or chalk up JFK's life and death as a meaningless fable. Maybe Tom should rename it for better ratings--"Asleep in Dallas," or "Forrest Stumped," or "Past Away," or some other Hanks nonsense that makes him obscenely rich and pacifies all our worries.

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3 comments:

Unknown said...

I agree with you, and I'm not a robot.

beobachter said...

From what I've read, Oswald was not so much a CIA agent as CIA prey. I've always had the impression that he was not particularly intelligent or successful, but that could be outdated information, I suppose. In any case, I agree wholeheartedly with you about The Sixties.
I also found it really empty of meaning, on the whole. The episode on music was particularly vacuous - just went nowhere. Probably has to do with the fact that it excluded mention of Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin and several other key figures, ending instead with the Beach Boys. I was born in 1959 and by the end of the sixties I was old enough and sufficiently aware of rock music to know that nobody was focusing on the Beach Boys - except, evidently, Tom Hanks. And I am not a robot.

Tim Fleming said...

Thoughtful post, beobachter. And you are right: Oswald's CIA handlers were setting him up for the fall. To those who are incurious (i.e. Bugliosi believers) he seems an unlikely asset and double agent. To those who scratch the surface of this false veneer, it appears he was a conniving, scheming operative whom his own employer (the CIA) distrusted. Either way, the CIA has plausible denial. But to those who have seriously investigated the matter, Oswald is the patsy who was "manipulated and duped" by several handlers from the time he was first recruited by the CIA until his death. In spycraft, the more the layered the legend is the harder it is to get at the real truth. Oswald WAS more prey than predator...as you aptly state it.