The JFK assassination was a carefully planned operation, and the disino smoke screen started before Kennedy was in the ground. Most people have the impression Mark Lane is a teller of truth on this issue, but I know better.
Lane was posted to Army Intelligence during WWII, a theater of operations controlled by Allen Dulles, who went on to construct the CIA and run it—until Kennedy fired him. Lane rushed to Dallas to represent Oswald pro bono and soon found himself representing his widow, certainly a strategic position for any spook, and a position from which Lane dug some rabbit holes and salted them with time bombs.
Rush to Judgment was a confusing mess and even though Lane seemed to know immediately the CIA was behind the event, he never named any major perpetrator, instead focusing singular attention on E. Howard Hunt, a propaganda expert and not an assassin. Lane’s famous lawsuit against Hunt (for which he was paid around $5 million by the Liberty Lobby) proved nothing except Hunt could have been in Dallas that day. Lane could have gone after one of the central figures behind the murder, like Johnny Roselli or Ted Shackley or even James Angleton, and climbed the ladder of power from there, but never tried.
I hope you realize Liberty Lobby is an obvious disinfo op that claims the Rothschilds run the world, a rabbit hole the radical right has been perfecting for centuries. Which isn’t to say that they don’t control enormous resources—obviously they do—but their influence is exaggerated to take attention off the oligarchies of North America and Europe, some of whom don’t even permit Jews in their private clubs.
But there’s one particular rabbit hole with a time bomb I find fascinating, the umbrella man of Dealey Plaza.
Hunt was falsely identified as one of the three tramps, and links from JFK to Watergate exploded. Sprague, who uncovered the tramp photos, immediately started promoting a new concept: the umbrella man was the shooter.
You can see umbrella man in the photo above taken seconds before the assassination. He stands at the entrance of the kill zone and opens his umbrella just as Kennedy arrives and pumps the umbrella to draw attention to it. He became the greatest mystery of the assassination and many researchers assumed he was signaling shooters to commence firing. A darker-skinned man (perhaps Cuban) standing with umbrella man appears to hold a walkie-talkie.
Sprague even made a diagram showing how the umbrella weapon supposedly worked. You’d be surprised how many serious researchers got pulled down into this rabbit hole. Concerns over the umbrella assassin got so intense that when Congress finally opened hearings on the assassinations, they made a public plea for umbrella man to step forward, and he did.
Turns out his name was Louie Steven Witt (three names almost seems essential for players in this drama) and he even brought the actual umbrella with him to the Capitol. He claimed he waved it as a protest symbol connecting England’s appeasement of Hitler with JFK’s appeasement of the Soviets. Witt was asked to open the umbrella so the Committee could be sure it didn’t contain an advanced sort of weaponry. Witt worked at the Rio Grande National Insurance Company, located one block north in the Rio Grande Life Building, 251 N. Field Street, a 19-story structure that included offices for military intelligence and the Secret Service. There’s no evidence to back up his claim an umbrella was ever a symbol of English appeasement of the Nazis. In retrospect, Witt’s story doesn’t pass the smell test, and the diversion into the absurd umbrella-as-weapon story so easily debunked it has all the markings of a counterintelligence misdirection op to confuse people about Witt’s real role.
Today, the umbrella-as-weapon story is trotted out periodically to show how absurd JFK conspiracy theories are. (By the way, Richard E. Sprague, the one who invented this hoax, became attached to every serious investigation, from Garrison to the House Committee and should not to be confused with Richard A. Sprague who resigned as chief counsel for the Congressional investigation early on.)
(Excerpted from Killing Kennedy: The Real Story.)
Well done…