When Oswald was new to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, De Mohrenschildt — who until then had hung out exclusively with country club oil-exec types — took "the working class loner and loser" under his wing. There are good indications De Mohrenschildt was Oswald's CIA "handler," or the guy who kept an eye on a former or current contact or agent. Oswald, based on government records and the facts surrounding his "defetion" to the Soviet Union, was CIA-connected, if not an asset.

There are at least two outstanding books on the subject: Professor John Newman, a retired US Army major and a former instructor at West Point, wrote "Oswald and the CIA." Professor Philip Melanson, who teaches at a Massachusetts state university, wrote "Spy Saga."

Online, an excellent biography from Oliver Stone's JFK web site:

Baron George De Mohrenschildt -- he did not use the title, but claimed it based on his Swedish grandfather's commission from the Queen of Sweden -- was born in Czarist Russia near the Polish border. He spoke at least six languages; was married four times; and is alleged to have performed services for at least three intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the OSS (the CIA's predecessor), and French intelligence. His biography remains one of the great marginal mysteries related, at least by circumstance, to the Kennedy assassination. De Mohrenschildt could at various points of his life count as personal friends such notables as President Lyndon B. Johnson, Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, then-Zapata Oil chief George Herbert Walker Bush, and Janet Auchinchloss, mother of Jacqueline Kennedy. Not to mention Lee Harvey Oswald.

De Mohrenschildt told the Warren Commission that, while living in Texas, he'd heard from friends of a young Russian-speaking American with a Russian-born wife living in Fort Worth, and was intrigued enough to arrange a meeting. He said he'd informally inquired about Oswald with a friend, J. Walton Moore of the CIA's Domestic Contact Service. According to the Baron, Moore informed him that Oswald was "just a harmless lunatic." Moore adamantly denied ever discussing Oswald with De Mohrenschildt, but acknowledged that he had a long-standing relationship with the Baron.

In 1977 De Mohrenschildt was recovering from a nervous breakdown. He tracked down at his daughter's home in Florida by author Edward Jay Epstein, then researching his Oswald biography, Legend. The Baron claimed that he'd deceived the Warren Commission on one significant issue: He hadn't asked J. Walton Moore about Oswald; Moore had first mentioned Oswald to him, as far back as 1961, when the "defector" was still in the USSR. Upon Oswald's return, Moore suggested De Mohrenschildt look into Oswald, as the Domestic Contact Division was anxious to debrief Oswald, and apparently Oswald had refused their overtures. In exchange for some assistance from the Agency in smoothing out bureaucratic details of his planned move to Haiti, De Mohrenschildt befriended Oswald and allegedly passed along information to Moore. (Perhaps correctly, perhaps not, Epstein did not believe him.)(1)

De Mohrenschildt's life took a serious turn for the worse after the assassination of President Kennedy. Called back from Haiti to testify before the Warren Commission, De Mohrenschildt would later claim he'd told the Commission what he believed it wanted to hear, characterizing Oswald as "an unstable individual, mixed-up individual, uneducated individual.&quot 2) "He had nothing. He had a bitchy wife, he had no money, was a miserable failure in everything he did.&quot 3)

CONTINUED...

http://www.jfk-online.com/jfkcameooltmans.html

(Allen Dulles's) ability to press his case (for the establishment of the CIA) improved sharply after the 1946 congressional elections, in which Republicans took control of both houses for the first time in sixteen years. The new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg, named one of Allen's old OSS comrades, Lawrence Houston, to his staff. Houston had directed many covert operations and shared Allen's love of them. Together they drafted a bill that would create a National Security Council to advise the president on foreign policy, and a Central Intelligence Agency authorized to collect information and to act on it. "Wild Bill" Donovan, the widely admired former OSS director, lobbied for the bill in Congress but found some members reluctant. Several wanted State Department, not a secret new agencey, to oversee covert operations, but their case was weakened when Secretary of State Marshall announced that he did not want his department to be involved in such operations. The bill made its way through Congress in a matter of weeks. on July 26, 1947, Truman signed it into law.

[font color="green"]"There were strong objections to having a single agency with the authority both to collect secret intelligence and to process and evaluate it for the President," according to one history. "The objections were overruled, and CIA became a unique organization among Western intelligence services, which uniformly keep their secret operations separate from their overall intelligence activities."

The new National Security Act contained a tantalizing clause worded to allow endlessly elastic interpretation. It authorized the CIA to perform not only duties spelled out by law, but also "such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct." This gave it the legal right to take any action, anywhere in the world, as long as the president approved.[/font color]

"The fear generated by competition with a nation like the USSR, which had elevated control of every aspect of society to a science, encouraged the belief in the United States that it desparately needed military might and counterespionage by agencies that could outdo the Soviet spymasters," the historian Robert Dallek has written. "Dean Acheson (who would succeed Marshall as secretary of state) had the 'gravest forebodings' about the CDIA, and 'warned the President atht neither he nor the National Security Council nor anyone else would be in a poistition to know what it was doing or to control it.' But to resist the agency's creation seemed close to treason."

--Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulls, and Their Secret World War, pp. 88

Kirkus Reviews via Amazon:

A joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who led the United States into an unseen war that decisively shaped today’s world

During the 1950s, when the Cold War was at its peak, two immensely powerful brothers led the United States into a series of foreign adventures whose effects are still shaking the world.

John Foster Dulles was secretary of state while his brother, Allen Dulles, was director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In this book, Stephen Kinzer places their extraordinary lives against the background of American culture and history. He uses the framework of biography to ask: Why does the United States behave as it does in the world?

The Brothers explores hidden forces that shape the national psyche, from religious piety to Western movies—many of which are about a noble gunman who cleans up a lawless town by killing bad guys. This is how the Dulles brothers saw themselves, and how many Americans still see their country’s role in the world.

Propelled by a quintessentially American set of fears and delusions, the Dulles brothers launched violent campaigns against foreign leaders they saw as threats to the United States. These campaigns helped push countries from Guatemala to the Congo into long spirals of violence, led the United States into the Vietnam War, and laid the foundation for decades of hostility between the United States and countries from Cuba to Iran.

The story of the Dulles brothers is the story of America. It illuminates and helps explain the modern history of the United States and the world.

A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013

Larry Summers and the Secret "End-Game" Memo

Greg Palast
Thursday, August 22, 2013

EXCERPT...

The Memo confirmed every conspiracy freak's fantasy: that in the late 1990s, the top US Treasury officials secretly conspired with a small cabal of banker big-shots to rip apart financial regulation across the planet. When you see 26.3% unemployment in Spain, desperation and hunger in Greece, riots in Indonesia and Detroit in bankruptcy, go back to this End Game memo, the genesis of the blood and tears.

SNIP…

The answer conceived by the Big Bank Five: eliminate controls on banks [font color="green"]in every nation on the planet – in one single move.[/font color] It was as brilliant as it was insanely dangerous.

How could they pull off this mad caper? The bankers' and Summers' game was to use the Financial Services Agreement, an abstruse and benign addendum to the international trade agreements policed by the World Trade Organization.

Until the bankers began their play, the WTO agreements dealt simply with trade in goods–that is, my cars for your bananas. The new rules ginned-up by Summers and the banks would force all nations to accept trade in "bads" – toxic assets like financial derivatives.

Until the bankers' re-draft of the FSA, each nation controlled and chartered the banks within their own borders. The new rules of the game would force every nation to open their markets to Citibank, JP Morgan and their derivatives "products."

[font color="green"]And all 156 nations in the WTO would have to smash down their own Glass-Steagall divisions between commercial savings banks and the investment banks that gamble with derivatives.[/font color]

The job of turning the FSA into the bankers' battering ram was given to Geithner, who was named Ambassador to the World Trade Organization.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/larry-summers-and-the-secret-end-game-memo/

Behind the Curtain: Booz Allen Hamilton and its Owner, The Carlyle Group

Written by Bob Adelmann
The New American; June 13, 2013

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn't much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: "[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they've focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience." (Emphasis added.)

For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country's chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.

BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,

[font color="green"]Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. (Emphasis added.)

Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.[/font color]

As noted by Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, “It’s bad enough that the (Bush) administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment.” (Emphasis added.)

CONTINUED w Links n Privatized INTEL...

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15696-behind-the-curtain-booz-allen-hamilton-and-its-owner-the-carlyle-group

Jeb Bush: 'I don't understand' why anyone is upset about the NSA

The Week, February 19, 2015

Likely GOP presidential candidate Gov. Jeb Bush is eager to distinguish between himself and his ex-president father and brother. But comments he made on Wednesday about the creepy spying practices of the NSA suggest he shares their support for a robust surveillance state:

(T)he NSA metadata program... contributes to awareness of potential terrorist cells and interdiction efforts on a global scale. For the life of me, I don't understand [how] the debate has gotten off track, where we're not understanding and protecting — we do protect our civil liberties, but this is a hugely important program to use these technologies to keep us safe. (National Journal)

Despite Bush's confident assessment of the effectiveness of the NSA, reports suggest the mass surveillance program "ha(s) no discernible impact" in preventing terrorism. Bonnie Kristian

SOURCE: http://theweek.com/speedreads/540090/jeb-bush-dont-understand-anyone-upset-about-nsa

Secrecy, Surveillance and Censorship

War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda

by JOHN PILGER
CounterPunch, Dec. 5-7, 2014

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

SNIP...

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News – but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn’t Fox News; it was the New York Times.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/05/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/