5 Stars “Highest recommendation!”

In ‘The Death of a President’ William Manchester described America in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination as ‘an enormous emergency room with a shocked world waiting outside’. The global impact of the profoundly unsettling news and the dramatic urgency by which it was communicated from person to person in almost every country on earth was unprecedented in human history. So while it was the American Government which took upon itself the task of investigating the event and presenting its conclusions to the American people, it was not exclusively Americans who were affected, and it was not exclusively Americans who met that pronouncement with skepticism. Students and scholars from around the world have debated and discussed, argued over and explored what has rightfully been referred to as “The crime of the century.” And, over time, other nations have produced their own researchers, their own counterpart to the American JFK assassination research community.

Today’s Publication Spotlight features the work of Australian author and researcher Greg R Parker. He is the founder of the invaluable online forum and research resource reopenkennedycase.forumotion.net. He was responsible for organizing Australia’s first JFK Assassination conference in 2016, and is the author of ‘Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War Volumes One and Two‘,published in 2015 as a single edition, subtitled ‘Why the Kennedy Assassination should be reinvestigated.’ In 2017, Parker agreed to participate in a series of interviews for AARC Executive Director Alan Dale’s JFK Conversations for which he created a supplement which expands upon and continues the important work which he had previously published.

LISTEN to Greg Parker’s JFK Conversations with Alan Dale

READ Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War Supplement

VISIT Natural Causes, the website of author Greg R. Parker

VISIT ROKC: ReOpen Kennedy Case

Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War

Volume One takes the reader from the Barrios of Bogotá through the intrigues of Manchuria and war-torn South-East Asia to the slums and skyscrapers of New York City, the latter as seen through the eyes of the truant, Lee Harvey Oswald. Within a year of formation in 1947, the CIA committed what was probably its first major act. It involved an assassination using a designated patsy. Time and place: Bogotá, April 9, 1948 – the victim, the youthful and charismatic presidential front-runner, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. The entire scenario would be replicated 20 years later in Los Angeles with another youthful and charismatic presidential front-runner – right down to a patsy using self-hypnosis and connected to the California cult known as AMORC. And somewhere in between the two slayings was the assassination of JFK and the circuitous path to Dallas taken by patsy-in-the-making, Lee Harvey Oswald – the most intriguingly enigmatic alleged assassin of them all.

Volume Two picks up where Volume One left off. Marguerite and young Lee have left New York City and returned to Lee’s place of birth, New Orleans. Lee seems more like a “normal” kid than ever before. He gets into scrapes at school, joins clubs and keeps a weather eye on the wide world around him. But dig deeper and he is immersed in memorizing the Marines Manual and Das Kapital under the guidance of Captain Dave whom Lee has met in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP). Moreover, he is playing entrapment games with his friends. Has Captain Dave (David Ferrie) recruited Lee into a cadre of teenage anti-subversive agents in a program first floated by the CAP some seven years earlier? Was this program, which included teaching young recruits how to speak Russian, the seeds of what became the False Defector Program? In 1956, Lee is once again uprooted – this time moving to Forth Worth where he gets caught up in the riots brought about by forced integration pursuant to the Brown v Board of Education decision. Meanwhile, the Hungarian Uprising is waiting to explode in Europe. Also in 1956, Ruth Paine’s sister, Sylvia Hoke finished work on a CIA project. The nature of the project is revealed here for the first time. Then in October, on his 17th birthday, Lee joins the Marines. We review his service record and explain some of the anomalies within it. Lastly, we have a look at the very spooky Albert Schweitzer College in Switzerland, which Lee had paid a $25 deposit to attend, but instead had headed to the Soviet Union. The Nazi and doomsday cult connections to the college are exposed, as are US government ties. This edition includes a bonus timeline at Appendix A.

Greg Parker’s Supplement to Volumes I and II:

Get Me to Helsinki in a Hurry

Two questions that always crop up about the journey itself: how did LHO obtain such a quick visa to the Soviet Union (it took one day according to Peter Wronski who runs the Oswald in Russia website) and why did he pay for $300.00 worth of Soviet Intourist vouchers?

The answer to the first part is via the CIA manipulation of the Soviet Consul in Helsinki, Gregory Golub. Some of what I’m about to go through has been covered by Bill Simpich and perhaps others, but it also includes new data.

Golub was initially a CIA target for defector-in-place under the CIA REDCAP operations and it had compiled a substantial personality profile on him as a result.

They gave up on that objective when they realized he was Communist “True Believer.”

Instead, they targeted his perceived weakness and worked to manipulate him into giving US citizens easy and quick entry into the Soviet Union.  His marriage was not a happy one, and his wife spent long periods away for “health” reasons.  So they sent in a young female student who had been recruited under the REDSKIN PROGRAM to befriend him, while his US counterpart also wined and dined him. The interesting thing is that they gave this student nothing. They made no suggestions whatsoever, gave her no information on Golub. Nada. They let her wing it because they feared that Golub was smart enough to detect any such assistance they might provide. I think that is a valuable piece of information to have regarding this case generally. Total control in some situations is not a good thing.

 Two other crucial pieces of information the CIA had about Golub on file.

1. He was to be sent back to the Soviet Union by the end of 1959.

2. He believed non-Soviet bloc communists were “swine” because as he put it “How can we trust a person like that when his own country can’t trust him?”

So, what do we have now? If you needed to get someone into the Soviet Union quickly, legally and without fuss, you had to act quickly before Golub left his Helsinki post because who knows what the replacement will be like and how long it may take to work on him? This then, is the most logical reason for the fraudulent early “out” from the Marines.

The other thing is that you would instruct your guy not to flag his intention to defect to Golub because he would automatically distrust you.

What eventually happened was that Golub notified the US Consul shortly before Oswald’s arrival that he would grant quick visas to Americans if they seemed alright and purchased Intourist vouchers. Indeed, he had just granted two such visas. Despite Golub’s seeming approachability, one thing Oswald did not do was what anyone in his shoes probably would: seek help in defecting from the Soviet Embassy. After all, Finland and the Soviet Union had the Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance in place.  But this non-attempt in Helsinki was even confirmed by Snyder who claimed that this was what Oswald had told him. This failure to seek assistance in defecting in Helsinki in my opinion had to be the result of what was in the Golub file regarding his distrust of foreign Communists. It does at least offer a sane reason for the otherwise frugal Oswald to purchase $300.00 worth of vouchers – something he would not have had to do by defecting right there and then.

After Oswald arrives in Moscow, he meets his Intourist guide and keeps a low profile until Halloween when he attends Snyder’s office.

Next, let’s dispense with Joan Hallett. Joan was hired to fill in for the regular receptionist who was helping at the American Exhibit. That exhibit was over by October 31 and it is obvious from what Joan recalled decades later that she was confusing the person who did defect during that exhibition, with Oswald – that person being of course, Robert Webster. For example, Oswald was there outside of office hours on a Saturday and was not taken upstairs to be interviewed. But that is what happened with Webster who, as shown in the records, was interviewed conference style by consular officers along with executives from his employer, Rand Development Corporation. Joan’s husband Oliver remains of interest though, as he was most assuredly an intelligence officer, intercepting Russian radio transmissions from the submarine he commanded prior to the Soviet gig, and later, at the time of the assassination, manning the Situation Room in the White House.

But there was one person who was present and who is of interest. His name was Ned Keenan (aka Ed aka Edward). In brief, he was a Harvard graduate who had been spotted for the CIA REDSKIN program by none other than Richard Snyder who was being used at the time as a CIA “spotter.”  What Keenan’s role was may have been given to us by Russell Langelle who was working for the CIA under diplomatic cover as the head of security where he acted as Popov’s contact. Langelle was interviewed by the HSCA. He told them that the CIA had X number working in the Embassy and Y number outside which included 3 or 4 students who handled “orientation” projects. Keenan was among the earliest batch of US exchange students to go over. If we apply the ordinary meaning of “orientation” then it implies that those students were advising defectors and travelers about living or staying in the USSR. Keenan would much later claim his reason for being there was a visa problem, but such problems would not require an exchange student to travel from Leningrad on a Saturday. In any event, Keenan was eventually kicked out for “spying” – a claim he would deny in 1967 when that news finally leaked out. He probably could deny that charge on a technicality if he was only obtaining information legally available to him – and that may well have been the case, since it was the alleged aim of the program. But the point is, I believe he was there in that office to assist with any issues that might be foreseen on the Soviet side of this deal going on with Oswald.

Atomic Spies & Purloined Stories 

CONTINUE READING at JFK CONVERSATIONS

About the Author

Related: