A new piece on Slate, written by Cold War reporter and espionage expert Ron Rosenbaum, takes a look at two recent books that seem to shed new light on the JFK assassination plot. Did Castro orchestrate the assassination of JFK, after learning of a CIA plot to assassinate Castro? New evidence in support of that theory comes to light in these books. On Slate, Rosenbaum says:
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But in the course of one week this winter I came upon two recent books that made me think the two cases deserve further thought…
The Oswald-related book, Castro’s Secrets: The CIA and Cuba’s Intelligence Machine, is by Brian Latell, a former top-level CIA agent charged with the debriefing of a high-ranking defector from Fidel Castro’s highly secretive intelligence agency, the DGI. The defector who came in from the cold in Vienna in 1987, a guy named Florentino Aspillaga, offered some remarkable inside DGI information about Oswald, the DGI, and Fidel that, if true, argues for a paradigm shift in Kennedy assassination theories. He also discloses substantiating material from a previous defector—information that was new to me.
The Philby book—Young Philby—is a unique (and strangely overlooked) historically-based spy novel by well-respected espionage writer Robert Littell (The Company and The Once and Future Spy among others, many of which suggest contacts within the intelligence community). It seeks to substantiate the possibility that [Kim] Philby was more than a KGB mole, that in fact he may have served as a knowing or unknowing channel of information (and disinformation) for MI6 and the CIA—a theory I wrote about (and called “unlikely”) in my investigation, but which Littell—no naif in these matters—clearly seems to believe. And he says he has a smoking gun to prove it…
…what makes Littell’s book more a than just another twisty spy fantasy is the nonfiction epilogue, in which Littell tells of a fascinating encounter he had with Teddy Kollek, a figure most well-known as longtime mayor of Jerusalem, but who knew Kim [Philby] as a young communist sympathizer in Vienna in 1934. And here’s where we meet our mysterious third figure: in a 1983 Harper’s piece I wrote about the way there were some who believed U.S. counterintelligence guru James Angleton had not been fooled by Philby, because Angleton had been tipped off by Kollek and—here’s yet another way of looking at the case—had deliberately fed Philby disinformation. Philby was then the dupe of Angleton, not the other way around. An unwitting triple agent…
In his nonfiction epilogue to Young Philby Littell focuses on a story Teddy Kollek told him about Philby and Angleton shortly before he died in 2007. A significantly more detailed story of a Kollek tip-off than has been seen before, a story about how before the “Third Man” accusation in 1951 Kollek visited Angleton at CIA headquarters in Washington.
Philby was then serving as MI6’s liaison to the CIA, downloading all its secrets to the KGB via an unknowing Angleton, a regular lunch companion of Kim. Or was he? Here’s the money quote from Kollek, according to Littell:
“I was walking towards Angleton’s office … when suddenly I spotted a familiar face at the other end of the hallway … I burst into Angleton’s office and said ‘Jim, you’ll never guess who I saw in the hallway. It was Kim Philby!’ And I told him about Vienna … and the suspicion that Philby may been recruited … as a Soviet agent. … And I said ‘Once a Communist, always a Communist.’ ”
Littell says he asked Kollek how Angleton reacted. “No, Jim never reacted to anything. The subject was dropped and never raised again.”
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Interested readers may also want to check out Rosenbaum’s book: How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III. From Amazon:
The president loses control of fifty nukes for nearly an hour. Russian nuclear bombers almost bump wingtips with American fighter jets over the Pacific coast. North Korea detonates nuclear weapons underground. Iran’s nuclear shroud is penetrated by a computer worm. Al-Qaeda goes on the hunt for Pakistan’s bomb, and Israelis debate the merit of a preemptive nuclear strike. Treaties are signed, but thousands of nuclear weapons are still on hair-trigger alert.
This is how the end begins.
In this startling new book, bestselling author Ron Rosenbaum gives us a wake-up call about this new age of peril and delivers a provocative analysis of how close—and how often—the world has come to nuclear annihilation and why we are once again on the brink.
Rosenbaum tracks down key characters in our new nuclear drama and probes deeply into their war game strategies, fears, and moral agonies. He travels to Omaha’s underground nuclear command center, goes deep into the missile silo complexes beneath the Great Plains, and holds in his hands a set of nuclear launch keys.
Along the way, Rosenbaum confronts the missile men as well as the general at the very top of our nation’s nuclear command system with tough questions about the terrifying assumptions underlying it. He reveals disturbing flaws in our nuclear launch control system, suggests remedies for them, shows how the old Cold War system of bipolar deterrence has become dangerously unstable, and examines the new movement for nuclear abolition.
Having explored the depths of Hitler’s evil and the intense emotion of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Rosenbaum now has produced a powerful, urgently needed work that challenges us: Can we undream our nightmare?