Post by John Duncan on Feb 7, 2020 23:00:25 GMT -5
Treason in the Back Channel
by Gil Jesus (2005)
Treason, as defined : An overt act committed with the intent to betray the government; performed in concert with others "for the purpose of executing a treasonable design by force; in effect a forcible opposition...to the execution of public law of the United States; adhering to enemies, giving them aid and comfort. (Corpus Juris Secundum, 87 CJS pp.910-914, 1956 ed.)
For the sake of this narrative, it is not necessary to prove that John and Robert Kennedy intentionally or willfully committed treason against the United States of America, or that they were being blackmailed by the Soviets to do so. It is only necessary to show that their enemies believed that this was true, and in turn, put the wheels in motion to remove the President from office under the codename "The Second Invasion of Cuba". This "Second Invasion of Cuba" was "The Bay of Pigs" that Richard Nixon tried to connect the arrest of the Watergate "Plumbers" with. The main function of the "Plumbers" was to stop."leaks" of information to the press. During the Kennedy administration, these "leaks" were the reason behind JFK's decision to deal with the Russians in what was called "the back channel"---private meetings between representatives of (in this case) himself and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Intent to Betray the Government
Using the back channel, in and of itself, could easily have been considered as border-line treason. It circumvented the use of the government agencies legislated, financed and mandated by Congress to deal with such matters. With JFK and Khrushchev dealing with each other directly, the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congressional leaders and even his own Cabinet and advisors were all cut out of the loop. No one knew what they were talking about. No one knew what deals were being made. Kennedy had been duped by the Russians in the Spring and Summer of 1962 when they assured him that no offensive weapons were going into Cuba, a complete lie. During that crisis, as he had done the previous year, he was dealing with them directly, without the benefit of the experienced advisors he had selected to guide him through dangerous waters. I cannot stress enough the seriousness of this threat to national security called the "back channel". Adhering to enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
All of this, as fantastic as it may seem to the ordinary reader, is not beyond the realm of (as my LN adversaries say) "possibility". If elements of the US government were involved, at least peripherally, in the assassination of the President, they may have allowed it to happen because they felt that he was a threat to the security of the nation and had no other way to stop him. In this vein, it would make sense why the FBI kept to itself its foreknowledge of the assassination. It would make sense why the Secret Service decreased the number of motorcycles and moved them to the rear of the limo the night before Kennedy's arrival in Dallas. It would make sense why their was no supplemental protection from the military. Why the manhole covers weren't welded shut. Why the windows in buildings weren't closed.
Personal Indiscretions: Sex
Sexual compromise and blackmail has always been one of the oldest instruments of espionage.
"He had to be eliminated. He was a Communist.....I mean he was an actual Communist. A covert agent of the Soviet Union. They'd recruited Kennedy in Prague in 1939. His father had sent him off to Europe on a so-called fact-finding tour of Eastern Europe.The NKVD lept at the chance of compromising the son of one of America's most prominent rightists. They set a honey trap......and once he was in the hotel room they drugged him and set up the cameras. An orgy scene, and not just with girls, either. Once he got over his fright, he sort of warmed to the idea. It was a way of getting back at Dad, don't you know. The Sovs let him "sleep" for a long time. They had no idea he would become so prominent so quickly. He may have imagined that with the war and all of the destruction, that they might have forgotten. But when he was safely in the White House, they rang his bell. The Cuban sellout was the first payment. The Reds got a permanent base in the New World and the elimination of a bunch of bases in Turkey. And that was just the beginning."
One's first impression of this story is that it is absolutely ridiculous and is as bizarre as any number of theories that have surfaced since Kennedy's execution. First, JFK was in Czechoslovakia in 1937, not in 1939, for in 1939 the Nazis had the country and I doubt that the Russians would have been operating openly in a country controlled by Nazi Germany.
It was not beyond the Russians to use sexual blackmail to further their goals.
In 1958, the French Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Maurice Dejean, known to be close to DeGaulle, was enticed into an affair with a KGB hooker, then beaten up by a thug posing as her husband. According to the Russian Secret Police, it was Khrushchev himself who wanted Dejean "caught." The Ambassador was visited by a Soviet official who told him that "although it took a lot of doing", the husband had agreed to keep his mouth shut for the sake of French-Soviet relations." What the Soviets wanted from Dejean was to further the old Soviet plan of dislodging France from the Western orbit.
Christine Keeler/Mandy Rice-Davies/Suzy Chang/Maria Novotny
He was also involved with a New York call girl named Suzy Chang who was part of the Christine Keeler - Mandy Rice-Davies sex ring. Keeler herself caused a furor in England in the summer of 1963, when it was revealed that she had been simultaneously shared by both British Defense Minister John Profumo and Soviet military attache' Captain Yevgeny Ivanov. The shockwave resulted in Profumo's resignation and was felt all the way back to the US.
Courtney Evans, the FBI liason with the White House, was present for the meeting and said that it."ended most coolly....almost an air of hostility between the Attorney General and the reporters."
Ellen Fimmel Rometsch
Presidential Indiscretions
And yet, when the information put a bad light on the Administration, the Kennedys were quick to suppress that information even to the extent of lying to the American people.
by Gil Jesus (2005)
Treason, as defined : An overt act committed with the intent to betray the government; performed in concert with others "for the purpose of executing a treasonable design by force; in effect a forcible opposition...to the execution of public law of the United States; adhering to enemies, giving them aid and comfort. (Corpus Juris Secundum, 87 CJS pp.910-914, 1956 ed.)
For the sake of this narrative, it is not necessary to prove that John and Robert Kennedy intentionally or willfully committed treason against the United States of America, or that they were being blackmailed by the Soviets to do so. It is only necessary to show that their enemies believed that this was true, and in turn, put the wheels in motion to remove the President from office under the codename "The Second Invasion of Cuba". This "Second Invasion of Cuba" was "The Bay of Pigs" that Richard Nixon tried to connect the arrest of the Watergate "Plumbers" with. The main function of the "Plumbers" was to stop."leaks" of information to the press. During the Kennedy administration, these "leaks" were the reason behind JFK's decision to deal with the Russians in what was called "the back channel"---private meetings between representatives of (in this case) himself and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Intent to Betray the Government
Using the back channel, in and of itself, could easily have been considered as border-line treason. It circumvented the use of the government agencies legislated, financed and mandated by Congress to deal with such matters. With JFK and Khrushchev dealing with each other directly, the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congressional leaders and even his own Cabinet and advisors were all cut out of the loop. No one knew what they were talking about. No one knew what deals were being made. Kennedy had been duped by the Russians in the Spring and Summer of 1962 when they assured him that no offensive weapons were going into Cuba, a complete lie. During that crisis, as he had done the previous year, he was dealing with them directly, without the benefit of the experienced advisors he had selected to guide him through dangerous waters. I cannot stress enough the seriousness of this threat to national security called the "back channel". Adhering to enemies, giving them aid and comfort.
In his book Regicide: The Official Assassination of John F. Kennedy, author Gregory Douglas claims to have in his possession the papers of the late CIA official Robert T. Crowley. According to Crowley's papers, Douglas claims, James Jesus Angleton, the CIA Counter-intelligence Chief, received word through a Soviet spy that the Soviet leadership was receiving high-level information from a source inside the American Government. An investigation ensued and a wire tap of a conversation between Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Soviet KGB agent Georgi Bolshakov revealed that the Kennedys had given the Russians highly-classified information. Although Douglas' book does not reveal what that information was, (It does mention at length a Joint Chiefs of Staff proposal called Operation Northwoods) it does state that the information was given to the Russians prior to the Cuban Missile Crisis (Northwoods was proposed in March, 1962) and implies that it had something to do with Cuba.
Why there were no agents on the back of Kennedy's car. Why his Secret Service bodyguards left him unprotected and partied all night long on the night before he was executed. Why Texas trooper Herchel Jacks kept his distance behind the Secret Service car in the Dallas motorcade. Why military intelligence pointed the Dallas cops in the direction of Oswald.
Why the FBI built a fraudulent case against Oswald, a case where there was no proof that he killed the President. Why Lyndon Johnson shut down the investigation immediately. Why he sought to prevent an investigation by Congress. And since the Dallas Police believed that Oswald had killed one of their own but lacked a motive, they allowed Ruby into the basement to kill him. And on and on and on.
All of a sudden, it all makes sense.
And it also makes sense why the Kennedys were so quick to accept the Warren Commission findings that Oswald and Oswald alone killed the President. Robert Kennedy stated he agreed with the Commission's findings, although he had never read the report. The Kennedys simply had no choice: to challenge the Report's conclusions would have required fighting an enemy that was everywhere and nowhere at the same time without the power of the Presidency. As if dealing with the grief of a lost family member was not enough, it would have required revelations that the Kennedys would have preferred remain private, like their lying prior to the 1960 election about the condition of JFK's health, denying he had Addison's Disease. The Kennedys had nothing to gain and everything to lose by challenging the Commission's findings.
So they never did. In effect, they forfeited justice to preserve JFK's memory. Even to this day, they remain silent.
Before we condemn Douglas' allegation as fraudulent and the work of a con man, there may be substantiation for his allegations from the most unlikely of sources--The House Select Committee on Assassinations.
An HSCA interview of graduate student James Gouchenaur, [RIF#180-10109-10310: 6/1/77 HSCA interview with Gouchenaur] who claimed to have had a long conversation with Secret Service Special Agent Elmer Moore in 1970. Gouchenaur quoted Moore as saying that, "Kennedy was a traitor for giving things away to the Russians; that it was a shame that people had to die, but maybe it was a good thing; that the Secret Service personnel had to go along with the way the assassination was being investigated...."
The big question is: What secret or secrets did Kennedy give the Russians that would have resulted in his execution for treason?
Was this what RFK meant when he said after the assassination, "I've killed my brother"?
Did RFK reveal "Operation Northwoods" to Bolshakov and did that revelation lead to the assassination of JFK?
Perhaps it involved Oleg Penkovsky, the Russian GRU Colonel who as a "spy in place" had given the CIA valuable information on Soviet missiles in Cuba during the Missile Crisis. Penkovsky was a CIA favorite and even met President Kennedy in person.
Penkovsky was arrested in the fall of 1962 (the exact timeframe that Douglas claims the CIA found out about the Soviets receiving classified information) and despite pleas from the US, he was tried in May 1963 as a traitor and immediately executed by the Soviets.
Or could it have been the secret that caused such a panic within the US government in 1962 when the missiles were discovered in Cuba: that the US did not have an early-warning system to its south. The US had the north, east and west covered, but there had never been any perceived threat from the south and as such, any missile attack from the south would have gone undetected until it hit American targets.
This was the "Achilles heel" in the American missile defense system (at that time) and any revelation to the Soviets of this secret, even in passing conversation, put the US at risk of being attacked with a nuclear first strike at any time without warning. Any of the above reasons would most assuredly constitute treasonous activities.
Certainly, the security and welfare of the country is worth the life of any one man, even the President's. And knowing his penchant for telling secrets to his mistresses in bed, it also makes sense why Marilyn Monroe (whose phone was also being tapped) was murdered the night before she was to hold a news conference to "tell everything" that the Kennedys had told her. Her death was a warning to the Kennedys to keep their mouths shut.
In reality, John Kennedy was considered a security risk long before he entered the White House. And he had been known for his personal indiscretions.
Personal Indiscretions: Sex
The President's relationship with women raised an inportant question about his leadership and diplomacy. In the early sixties, if the President had been shown to have slept with a woman not his wife, it would have damaged his Presidency. If however, that woman had been connected in some way to the Soviet bloc, he would have been thrown out of office.
In addition, every one of his policy decisions would have been called into question, from his refusal to allow the American military to support the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, to his support for "no win wars" like the one in Laos, to his refusal to knock down the Berlin Wall, to his refusal to bomb the missile sites in Cuba in 1962, to his seeking a Test Ban Treaty with the Soviets in 1963, to his removal of the troops from Vietnam by the end of 1965.
Every single one of his policies could have been seen as treason: his pulling punches towards the Communists out of fear of being exposed. This exact subject is addressed in Robert K, Tannenbaum's novel “A Corruption of Blood”. Tannenbaum was the Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. On Pages 380-381, one Tannenbaum character tells the story of why JFK was killed to another:
But the point is that JFK's sexual drive placed him in a dangerous spot where he could have been blackmailed or even killed by a female agent of an enemy state. To make matters worse, the Secret Service (not willing to interfere with the President's private life) never checked the women going into the President's hotel rooms to see if they had been carrying any weapons or even poison.
In 1958, the French Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Maurice Dejean, known to be close to DeGaulle, was enticed into an affair with a KGB hooker, then beaten up by a thug posing as her husband. According to the Russian Secret Police, it was Khrushchev himself who wanted Dejean "caught." The Ambassador was visited by a Soviet official who told him that "although it took a lot of doing", the husband had agreed to keep his mouth shut for the sake of French-Soviet relations." What the Soviets wanted from Dejean was to further the old Soviet plan of dislodging France from the Western orbit.
During the same period, the KGB made an effort to bring the Canadian Ambassador to the Soviet Union, John Watkins, a secret homosexual, into camp.
And according to a Czech defector, a KGB seductress was photographed in the early 60's with a Conservative member of the British Parliament. When the Tory refused to work for the Soviets, the pictures were published in a leaflet and sent to the London press. He was defeated for re-election.
For John F. Kennedy, there were plenty of opportunities for sexual compromise leading to blackmail.
"Inga Binga"
When he joined the Navy, JFK's first assignment was a desk job at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.. He was there during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and no doubt saw some of the secret dispatches involving the tragedy. While he was stationed there, he also had an affair with a friend of his sister's named Inga Arvad-Fejos.
Mrs. Arvad-Fejos, or "Inga Binga" as he called her, was a twice-married, gorgeous Danish woman four years his senior, who wrote for the Washington Times-Herald. She had been a former Miss Denmark. In the 1930's she had cozied up to top Nazi leaders (including Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess) and Hitler called her a "perfect example of Nordic beauty".
She had also been the mistress of a Swedish journalist with Nazi connections. What he didn't know, was that the FBI had suspected her of being a German spy and had launched an investigation into her background. They also had her under constant surveillance.
When Kennedy's relationship with Arvad-Fejos became known to Navy officials, it caused a panic. According to ONI section chief Capt. Hunter, Rear-Admiral Wilkinson, the director of Naval Intelligence, "wanted to get Kennedy out as quickly as possible". Capt. Hunter remembered the officer being "really frantic". The assistant director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Captain Kingman, wanted to "cashier" Ensign Kennedy out of the Navy. Hunter claimed Kingman was "very frightened at the time...very upset over the whole situation...It gives an idea of the terror and the mood of the times...The whole naval establishment was in a state of terror from the moment they heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor."
The official eventually calmed down and agreed instead to transfer Kennedy to an ONI outpost in Charleston, South Carolina.
But from a security standpoint, the transfer was useless. Kennedy and Arvad-Fejos continued their relationship in Charleston.
By now, the FBI and Naval Security were trailing the couple. The FBI maintained a wiretap on Arvad-Fejos' Washington apartment and on Kennedy in Charleston. Kennedy was deliberately carrying on an affair with a married woman who was suspected of being an enemy spy. In addition, what worried authorities was that young Kennedy was in a perfect position to be used by an enemy spy. His duties while stationed in Charleston included deciphering and encoding local signals.
By the time Kennedy approached his father about marrying Arvad-Fejos, the Ambassador had had enough. The elder Kennedy went to Secretary of Navy James Forrestal and got his son transferred to the South Pacific. But JFK's indiscretions with women did not end with Arvad-Fejos.
Christine Keeler/Mandy Rice-Davies/Suzy Chang/Maria Novotny
While Kennedy was in Bonn, British Ambassador to the US David Bruce sent Kennedy an "eyes only" cable regarding the Profumo affair, indicating that "thus far, no American government official has, to my knowledge, been involved....nor have I any reason to believe any will become so, unless by innuendo."
The problem was that another of the women, an Anglo-Czech prostitute named Maria Novotny, had had sex with JFK several times in 1960 and was allegedly linked to a Soviet vice ring at the UN, and kept appearing in the Profumo scandal.
Meanwhile, back in the US, Robert Kennedy was meeting with James Horan and Dom Frasca of the New York Journal American, whose front page story claimed that one of the "biggest names in American politics" had been involved with Chang. Kennedy demanded to know who the politician was. The reporters answered, "The President". They played a tape of their telephone interview with one of Chang's acquaintances. Kennedy asked if the allegations had been corroborated by another source. They replied that it had, but refused to reveal it.
The next day RFK asked J. Edgar Hoover to find out what Keeler and Rice-Davies were doing in New York. Amazingly, despite the reporters' taped interview and corroboration by a second source, the FBI found no convincing evidence that Keeler, Rice-Davies, or Chang had been among the women that "drifted" into the President's penthouse at New York's Carlyle Hotel.
Ellen Fimmel Rometsch
Almost immediately after, another sex-and-security scandal involving JFK broke. This one involved a woman named Ellen Fimmel Rometsch, who had been a member of two Communist Party organizations before fleeing to the West in 1953. In April 1961 she and her husband came to Washington, where she got a job as hostess at Bobby Baker's Quorum Club. Her "acquaintanceships" included at least one member of the Soviet Embassy and according to the FBI, the President. Her loud name-dropping and conspicuous spending got the Bureau's attention. When Robert Kennedy found out, he ordered Rometsch and her husband deported to West Germany. He sent one of his aides (LaVern Duffy) with her to "keep her mouth shut". The Des Moines Register reported her expulsion and said that she had been "associating with Congressional leaders and some prominent New Frontiersmen."
Republican Senator John J. Williams of Delaware demanded an inquiry. RFK went to Hoover to ask him to show the bureau's files (which named members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, as "clients") to Senators Dirksen and Mansfield, the Senate leaders of both parties. As a result of Hoover's meeting with the Senate leaders, the President's relationship with Rometsch remaing a national secret.
Presidential Indiscretions
Once in the White House, one of the first examples of John Kennedy's indiscretions with classified information occurred during "Adventures on the New Frontier", an ABC production which took their cameras inside the White House for a "behind the scenes" look at the duties of President. During this production, McGeorge Bundy seemed ill at ease as he tried to brief the President on National Security business. Later, at a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the then Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer was horrified when--with cameras rolling-- the President brought up certain classified matters. In another scene, Kennedy is seen discussing nuclear disarmament with his representative, John McCloy. Although the White House had cleared both for release, the "Advertures" editors themselves decided to eliminate Kennedy's remarks to McCloy and the meeting with the Joint Chiefs from the broadcast. [Victor Lasky, The Man and the Myth, pg. 509]