Dallas ’63: A Brilliant Synthesis Regarding the November 22, 1963 Coup d’état

Dallas ’63: A Brilliant Synthesis Regarding the November 22, 1963 Coup d’état, by Charles Burris

Once again, the intrepid Peter Dale Scott takes us into that claustrophobic wilderness of mirrors where the criminal underworld meets the establishment upperworld in the sub-rosa labyrinth of the Deep State. Scott is the premier synthesizer unearthing all the various seemingly unconnected strands of hard documentary factual evidence and counterfactual hypothesizing concerning the November 22, 1963, coup d’état.

He begins by addressing head-on the seminal question of “Who was Lee Harvey Oswald?” in a brilliantly sketched portrait we have not seen before. The intelligence services (especially the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton – Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI) suspected a Soviet mole had penetrated the dank bowels of the Deep State and obtained highly secret information concerning the U-2 spy plane. Soon an elaborate multilayered mole hunt began.

Abroad, the CIA/State Department “dangled” Oswald as a US Marine radar operator “defector” to the Soviets, while in the US they compiled a byzantine, contradictory and ever-shifting documentary “legend” of manipulated and altered biographical data concerning Oswald as a trap to snare whom among the various interagency intelligence personnel who accessed his files was the possible mole. Upon his return to the US, Oswald continued his counterintelligence role as agent provocateur, informer, and ultimately as “patsy.”

Mentioned almost in passing was Pyotr Popov, a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer who had been passing secrets to the Americans for seven years. In April 1958, Popov had alerted his Soviet Russia Division (SRD) case officer George Kisevalter that clandestine technical information regarding the CIA U-2 spy plane had reached Soviet intelligence via a Soviet mole. Thus began Angelton’s elaborate efforts to discover and out this treacherous mole. We journey deeper within the Wilderness of Mirrors as a young Marine radar operator, Lee Harvey Oswald, soon attempts defection to the USSR, entering the cloistered labyrinth of decades of lies, disinformation, duplicity, and deception regarding this mysterious individual.

That disturbing aspect of the story is fleshed out in John M. Newman’s Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II, and in Peter Dale Scott’s Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House. Angelton was in the epicenter of events which led to the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and savage murder of President John F. Kennedy.

As he was dying from lung cancer, the Machiavellian CIA head of Counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, provided author Joseph J. Trento (also cited by Morley in his book, The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton) this startling candid and diabolic confession:

“You know how I got to be in charge of counterintelligence? I agreed not to polygraph or require detailed background checks on Allen Dulles and 60 of his closest friends . . . They were afraid that their own business dealings with Hitler’s pals would come out. They were too arrogant to believe that the Russians would discover it all . . .

“Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. These people attracted and promoted each other. Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it . . . Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Carmel Offiie, and Frank Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell. I guess I will see them there soon.”

In my personal library I have several thousand books, hundreds relating to the covert and overt background concerning the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy. From every chapter, from every page of Dallas ’63, leaps long forgotten names and events from these shelved volumes which Scott has masterfully woven into a head-spinning narrative describing the sinister milieu of intriguers from that period.

This concise volume is unlike any previous work on the subject in its magisterial detail of facts and scrupulous documentation of sources. I highly recommend it to the experienced JFK Assassination research community.

Revisiting the “Legend” of Lee Harvey Oswald

[With the onrush of contradictory information/disinformation being put out concerning the alleged attempted assassin of President Donald Trump, Thomas Matthew Crooks, let us briefly take a look at the “patsy” in the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.]

The “Legend” of Lee Harvey Oswald, by Charles Burris

Because so many of my LRC articles/blogs over the years have focused upon the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the insidious coup d’état by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the highest echelons of the National Security State, many readers have inquired again and again what was my assessment of Lee Harvey Oswald, targeted by the Warren Commission as the sole assassin. I have over 100 books in my personal library on these matters. Here briefly are my thoughts and reflections on this controversial subject.

The “Legend” of Lee Harvey Oswald

Our story begins with Petr Popov. Popov was a Soviet military intelligence (GRU) officer who had been passing secrets to the Americans for seven years. In April 1958, Popov had alerted his Soviet Russia Division (SRD) case officer George Kisevalter that clandestine technical information regarding the CIA U-2 spy plane had reached Soviet intelligence via a Soviet mole. The intelligence services (especially the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence James Jesus Angleton – Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence (ADDOCI) suspected a Soviet mole had penetrated the dank bowels of the deep state and obtained highly secret information concerning the U-2 spy plane.

Thus began Angleton’s elaborate efforts to discover and out this treacherous mole. It will ultimately lead to his downfall within the CIA.

We journey deeper within the Wilderness of Mirrors as a young Marine radar operator, Lee Harvey Oswald, soon attempts defection to the USSR, entering the cloistered labyrinth of decades of lies, disinformation, duplicity, and deception regarding this mysterious individual. That disturbing aspect of the story is fleshed out in John M. Newman’s Countdown to Darkness: The Assassination of President Kennedy, Volume II, and in Peter Dale Scott’s Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House.

Angleton was in the epicenter of events which led to the November 22, 1963 coup d’état and savage murder of President John F. Kennedy.

Soon an elaborate multilayered mole hunt began. Abroad, the CIA/State Department “dangled” Oswald as a US Marine radar operator “defector” to the Soviets, while in the US they compiled a byzantine, contradictory and ever-shifting documentary “legend” of manipulated and altered biographical data concerning Oswald as a trap to snare whom among the various inter-agency intelligence personnel who accessed his files was the possible mole.

Upon his return to the US, Oswald continued his counterintelligence role as agent provocateur, informer, and ultimately as “patsy.”

History has recorded Lee Havey Oswald as the “lone nut assassin” of President John Kennedy. But perhaps he is someone substantially different than what “official history” has made of him.

His favorite TV show as a kid was, I Led Three Lives about a double agent for the FBI, Herbert Philbrook, who secretly spies on the Communist Party in the US (I have a signed edition of Philbook’s book by the same name). Oswald was a ninth-grade dropout who joined the Marines in 1956 and became a radar operator with a top security clearance who worked on projects related to the secret U-2 spy planes for the CIA. Oswald was assigned first to Marine Corps Air Station El Toro in July 1957, then to Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan in September as part of Marine Air Control Squadron 1. He learned to speak Russian while a Marine at a secret CIA/ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) training base at Nags Head, North Carolina.

Like all Marines, he was trained and tested in shooting and scored 212 in December 1956, slightly above the requirements for the designation of sharpshooter. In May 1959 he scored 191, which reduced his rating to marksman. He was a poor shot.

Oswald obtained a hardship discharge from the Marines allegedly because of his mother’s poor health, left the United States, and tried to defect to the Soviet Union in 1959. The Soviets were immediately suspicious of his intentions believing he was one of many such agents sent to spy on them. He tried to commit suicide. He was then sent to the city of Minsk to work as a lathe operator at the Gorizont Electronics Factory, which produced radios, televisions, and military and space electronics. He was under constant surveillance by the Soviets. Oswald met a young 19 year old girl, Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, who was the niece of a Soviet intelligence official. Marina thought he was a Russian because he spoke the language like a native Russian. He married Marina and later petitioned the US State Department for permission to return to the United States. It was granted. The State Department loaned them the money to come to the US in 1962. This was quite unusual for the State Department to grant permission to return and loan money to someone who tried to renounce his US citizenship as a “defector.”

Although he was someone who tried to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War, he traveled in right-wing, anti-Communist circles of former Russian émigrés. His new best friend was George de Mohrenschildt, a petroleum geologist with international business connections who was a CIA contract agent and colleague of George Herbert Walker Bush.

Oswald held a series of odd jobs.

He moved to New Orleans and became the sole member of the New Orleans chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Oswald ordered the following items from a local printer: 500 application forms, 300 membership cards, and 1,000 leaflets with the heading, “Hands Off Cuba” establishing a paper trail of his pro-Castro activities. He visited anti-Castro militant Carlos Bringuier at a store he owned in New Orleans offering his services as a former Marine. Bringuier was the New Orleans delegate for the anti-Castro organization Directorio Revolucionario Estudantil (DRE). This was a CIA front group.

In 1963 the group was financed by the CIA with $25,000 per month, under a CIA program named AMSPELL run by George Joannides, the chief of the psychological warfare branch in Miami’s JM/WAVE station. The money went to Luis Fernandez Rocha, the DRE’s leader in Miami, and supported the DRE’s activities in a variety of cities, including New Orleans. Joannides also provided non-financial support, including reviewing military plans and briefing them on how to handle the press. Joannides worked with the group from December 1962 to April 1964; CIA monthly reports on the group from 1960 to 1966 have been declassified, except for this period. It was this group which first spread to the media after the assassination disinformation concerning Oswald’s Cuban connections.

In 1978 the CIA summoned Joannides out of retirement to serve as the Agency’s liaison to the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, in specific regard to the death of President Kennedy. Former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley writes “the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It wasn’t until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy’s death, that Joannides’ support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light.”

Bringuier would later tell the Warren Commission that he believed Oswald’s visits were an attempt to infiltrate his group, when they were actually used to establish his “legend” or cover as a Marxist supporter of Cuba.

On August 9, Oswald turned up in downtown New Orleans handing out pro-Castro leaflets. His Fair Play for Cuba leaflets had the address “544 Camp Street” hand-stamped on it. This was actually the address where the anti-Castro, anti-Communist groups were headquartered. Bringuier confronted him claiming he was tipped off about his leafleting by a friend. A well-publicized scuffle ensued and Bringuier, Oswald, and two of Bringuier’s friends were arrested for disturbing the peace. Before leaving the police station, Oswald asked to speak with an FBI agent. Agent John Quigley arrived and spent over an hour talking to him.

Oswald later appeared on New Orleans TV and radio interviews claiming to be a Marxist supporter of Castro and the Cuban regime, further establishing his “legend” or cover identity persona, just as Herbert Philbrick did as a double agent for the FBI in his favorite TV show as a child.

In 1961-62, the New Orleans chapter of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a CIA front group, occupied an office in the Newman Building at 544 Camp Street. This was the building where anti-Castro activist and accused JFK Assassination conspirator Guy Banister had his office. Banister also had worked in Naval Intelligence and continued his intelligence connections. This was also the address Oswald had stamped on his pro-Castro flyers.

Banister’s office was within walking distance of the New Orleans offices of the FBI, CIA, Office of Naval Intelligence and the Reily Coffee Company where Oswald worked. Reily was Oswald’s employer and a supporter of anti-Castro Cubans. During this period, Banister associate Sergio Arcacha Smith was the “official delegate” for the New Orleans chapter of the CRC.

Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, told author Anthony Summers that Oswald “…seemed to be on familiar terms with Banister and with [Banister’s] office.” Roberts said, “As I understood it, he had the use of an office on the second floor, above the main office where we worked…. Then, several times, Mr. Banister brought me upstairs, and in the office above I saw various writings stuck up on the wall pertaining to Cuba. There were various leaflets up there pertaining to Fair Play for Cuba.”

Later Oswald is going to be accused of shooting at right-wing former Major General Edwin Walker in his home, although both Walker and the Dallas police stated he was shot at with a 30.06 rifle, a firearm Oswald never owned. The Dallas police claimed that the bullet was a 30.06 caliber; the bullet shells from the Texas School Book Depository were 6.5mm. The Walker bullet was too severely deformed to allow a conclusive analysis of its pattern of grooves. A spectrographic examination by Henry Heilberger of the FBI laboratory found that the lead alloy in the bullet was different from that of bullet fragments found in President Kennedy’s car.

Oswald’s wife Marina was the Warren Commission’s chief witness to the alleged shooting at both General Walker and President Kennedy. She later fully renounced her testimony stating it was achieved under duress and threats of sending her back to the Soviet Union to face reprisals.

Although Oswald never spoke of any hostility or dislike towards President John Kennedy he is going to be accused of shooting the most protected man in America.

Oswald is going to be accused of ordering a cheap mail order rifle so there is a paper trail, instead of simply going to a local gun shop in Texas to purchase the rifle incognito. In Texas no identification was needed, and no incriminating paper trail would exist. An incriminating paper trail was created when purchasing a weapon from a different state by mail order. The 6.5×52mm Mannlicher-Carcano ordered from Chicago allegedly by Oswald using the name of “A. Hidel.” The rifle portrayed in the ad and which Oswald allegedly received were not the same.

He is going to be accused of taking pictures of himself with the rifle he is going to use. Then he is going to be accused of shooting the president from the place where he works, the Texas School Book Depository.

The Texas School Book Depository (TSBD) building was owned by D. H. Byrd, co-founder of the Civil Air Patrol (in which Oswald served in as a youngster in New Orleans) and was a strong financial supporter of Lyndon Johnson. After World War II Byrd helped incorporate CAP and have it designated as an Auxiliary of the Air Force, helped initiate the International Air Cadet Exchange, and established or supported cadet scholarships. For his work with the CAP Byrd was awarded the US Air Force’s Air Force Scroll of Appreciation on 24 May 1963. Byrd and fellow Dallas right-wing billionaire H. L. Hunt were personal friends of Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis Lemay, a rabid Kennedy hater who later flew hundreds of miles to be in the operation room gallery at JFK’s autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital on the day he was murdered

D. H. Byrd also employed LBJ’s personal hitman Malcolm Wallace at his defense company LTV. LTV got a big defense contract in January, 1964. Wallace’s fingerprint was found in the sniper’s nest on the Sixth Floor of the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). Byrd had the so-called “sniper’s window” removed from the TSBD which he kept as a souvenir. Byrd was a big game hunter and had the trophy heads of all sorts of animals in his house. Some persons suspect the TSBD sniper’s window was right next to those mementos.

Oswald was not in that window at the time of the assassination but was downstairs eating lunch. In that window just prior to the assassination was TSBD employee Bonnie Raye Williams eating a chicken bone sandwich.

Oswald is going to be accused of taking off from the TSBD and shooting a cop, Officer J. D. Tippit, and leaving his wallet on the scene so he could be found.

On November 24, 1963, Oswald is going to be shot by Dallas night club owner Jack Ruby in the garage of the Dallas Police headquarters in full view of television cameras broadcasting live to millions and die at Parkland Hospital. Ruby had stalked Oswald at police headquarters all weekend since his arrest.

Jack Ruby had long standing connections to organized crime figures, all the way back when he was a numbers runner for Al Capone’s mob in Chicago while a youth. He later worked for Congressman Richard M. Nixon, at the urging and recommendation of Lyndon Johnson. In the weeks prior to the assassination, Ruby had been in contact with major crime figures from around the country.

While watching Jack Ruby shooting Oswald on Sunday morning on TV, Richard Nixon voiced his recognition of Ruby as the man who once worked for him.

This Oswald/Dallas assassination “plot” is one of several other uncovered such plots.

There were two uncovered in Chicago, one involving a group of Cuban men with high-powered rifles and scopes, and one involving a former Marine Thomas Arthur Vallee who, like Oswald, had served at the Naval Air Facility Atsugi in Japan.

Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent, claimed that in October, 1963, the Chicago Secret Service office received a teletype from the Federal Bureau of Investigation warning that an attempt would be made to kill President John F. Kennedy by a four-man Cuban hit squad when he visited the city on the 2nd of November. Armed with high-powered rifles, the men were from “a dissident Cuban group”. According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, the Secret Service arrested two suspects, however, they were eventually released.

Bolden later discovered that this information was being kept from the Warren Commission. When he complained about this he was warned “to keep his mouth shut”. Bolden decided to travel to Washington where he telephoned Warren Commission Counsel J. Lee Rankin. Bolden was arrested and taken back to Chicago where he was charged with discussing a bribe with two known counterfeiters. He was eventually found guilty of accepting a bribe and spent six years in prison. When he tried to draw attention to his case, he was placed in solitary confinement. Mr. Bolden has steadfastly maintained his innocence, arguing that he was targeted for prosecution in retaliation for exposing unprofessional and racist behavior within the U.S. Secret Service.

Mr. Bolden chronicles his experiences in his book The Echo from Dealy Plaza. He has been recognized through numerous platforms for his ongoing work to speak out against the racism he faced in the Secret Service in the 1960s, and his courage in challenging injustice. In 2022 Bolden received a full pardon from President Joe Biden,

Another plot involved an assassin in Tampa, Florida who was to be situated in a high-rise building while the presidential motorcade passed. The Tampa gunman would have fired from a window of the Floridan Hotel, then the tallest building in the city. (In Dallas, Lee Harvey Oswald was accused of shooting from a window on the sixth floor of a book depository.)

2:15 pm on April 24, 2025

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