Reverse Engineering Disinformation
As some may know, I am currently working on updating my book (under the new title Reopen the Kennedy Cases). What they may not know is why. So here are the reasons:
To add new information to the existing work
To change the layout to the Oxford style
To correct some minor errors of fact (who knew there were two Edwin Ekdahls born around the same time which would cause confusion in assembling his backstory ???)
To complete the story which currently ends in 1959
To purge the book of information obtained from the writings of HP (Hank) Albarelli
The first 4 points are all pretty much self-explanatory.
Let me just say at the outset, I understand Hank has passed away and that by all accounts, he was a loving family man who is and will be missed by those who were close to him. But people are complex critters. He chose, or fell into, making a living creating fables passed off as history to a ready-made audience conditioned to suspend disbelief in return for affirmation of pre-existing ideas and biases.
When I started writing my book and went back in time to include the 1948 assassination of Jorge Gaitain, it became necessary to look into the background of alleged CIA operative, John M Spiritto (note that other spellings of his name include “Spirito” and “Espirito”). Spiritto had joined Castro’s rebel forces, but was eventually imprisoned on counter-revolutionary charges and, under interrogation, admitted to involvement in the Colombian assassination on behalf of the CIA.
About the first thing I found on Spiritto was an article by Hank called William Morgan: Patriot or traitor? Despite a lack of citations within the article, and Hank’s bizarrely paranoid response when I tried to obtain his sources from him via the JFK Education Forum, his reputation was such that I used the material anyway, along with other of his works. He was, after all, a revered and independent investigative journalist!
It was a mistake. I had simply fallen prey to my own acceptance of having biases confirmed – and thereby failed to check Hank’s claims. Better late than never.
So what are some of the claims from that article?
The CIA’s displeasure soon prompted the agency to dispatch another agent to Cuba who could watch over the unpredictable American. That agent, operating under the alias John Maples Spiritto, was a former “special employee” of the Federal Narcotics Bureau. In the early 1950s, Spiritto also had been employed in Manhattan as part of the CIA’s top-secret Artichoke Project.
According to military.com, Morgan had met with a Castro agent in Miami in 1957 and arranged to go over to help train Castro’s men. According to Morgan, his friend and fellow gun-runner, Jack Turner had been captured by Batista’s police, killed and fed to the sharks. Morgan was motivated by revenge.
He was soon thereafter fighting in the Escambray mountains.
1957 was also the year that Spiritto joined the fight.
Even if Spiritto went to Cuba months after Morgan, it would hardly be enough time to determine that they really really needed some one to watch him, choose a suitable agent, infiltrate them into Cuba, and establish contact. Though unsourced, the information used by Albarelli seems to have come from “The Secret War” by Fabian Escalante, published in 1998.
Here is the text from that book:
Morgan was undisciplined and reported little, greatly displeasing the CIA station, which complained about him constantly. Colonel King subsequently sent another of his agents to act as a contact with the volatile and unstable Morgan. He was an Italian American named John Maples Spiritto, recruited in the early 1950s in Mexico, where the CIA station had used him to infiltrate Fidel Castro s forces when they were preparing the liberation expedition would take them back to Cuban soil at the end of 1956.
This is completely at odds however, with the Cuban government’s official position that Spiritto’s confession of being involved in a CIA plot to assassination Gaitan in Colombia in 1948, was factual.
Even the suggestion that the CIA needed to send someone because of Morgan’s volatile behavior and instability, is ludicrous. The CIA fully evaluates each individual they use. They would have been very aware of his troubles in the army, his dealings with the law, and his vagabond lifestyle. Lastly, he was in the mountains until the victory of the revolution. How the blue baby Jesus fuck was he supposed to report to the CIA station from there? Carrier pigeon?
None of Albarelli’s (or Escalante’s) claims around this issue withstand a slightly deeper second thought.
Another claim made here is that Spiritto was a “special employee” of the Federal Narcotics Bureau (FBN). This may be true but I have not yet found any confirmation of it. It is equally possible that in 2002, Albarelli mistook John Spiritto for Francois Spirito, of French Connection fame, who did have a relationship with the OSS and FBN. Having discovered his mistake, Albarelli may have simply doubled down on it, sheeting the information off as coming from Cuban intelligence records in his later books. Yet there is no such information provided about this from Fabian Escalante, the ultimate expert in Cuban intelligence of the period, in any of his books.
There remains however, good circumstantial evidence that Spiritto was with the CIA.
He was from the west coast, yet had a New York driver’s license in Cuba. Fake New York licenses had been given to confirmed CIA agents going to Cuba (most notably, David Christ).
When under house arrest in Cuba, he was not trusted by other prisoners who suspected he was with an intelligence agency.
The confession of his involvement in a CIA plot against Gaitan included that the original plan was to bribe him into exiling in Europe. This is now known to have happened in the case of other Colombian politicians. Additionally, Gaitan’s daughter confirmed being told about such bribes by her father.
He claimed he had originally been sent to Bogota to infiltrate university student groups as an Italian student named Georgio Ricco, and that on arrival he had to report to a Dr. Dávila at the university. In writing my book, I found a psychiatrist based out of the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, who had ties to a CIA affiliated mental health foundation, and who also had professional ties to Colombia. His name was Dr. Guillermo Dávila. Dávila certainly looks like a good candidate for the role of Spiritto’s contact.
Another quote from Albarelli’s article:
A confidential FBI memorandum dated May 5, 1959, states that Morgan was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army in 1950, and that “he reportedly is [a] veteran of the Korean War and is described as a judo expert.” Oddly, none of Morgan’s surviving family remember his being in Korea. His brother-in-law, Edric Costain, said, “I don’t know where that came from. He was an Army veteran, not one that anyone is very proud of, who had been in Japan, not Korea.”
Morgan’s (dishonorable) army discharge was dated April 11, 1950. The Korean War started on June 25, 1950. The FBI would not give any oxygen to a claim that he was a Korean War vet. If such a document exists, it is probably fake. The only other alternative is that it existed solely in the imagination of Albarelli to spice up his article.
About this time, Morgan reportedly developed a keen sense of righteous indignation and a longing for social justice. He is said to have despised the oppressive regime of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Baptista, as well as the peculiar cabal that kept the dictator in power.
This is absolute hogwash. He went to Cuba to fight Batista in revenge for Batista killing his friend and gun-running buddy Jack Turner. He seems to have developed a social conscience only through living and fighting with Castro’s revolutionaries and through the respect with which he was treated by the Cuban people.
He repeatedly denied being a communist and that Castro was a communist. He said he did work with some communists in the fight against Batista, and would continue to do so, but only on the proviso that they kept their politics out of it.
He was simply a man who had found his calling and who got the respect he had failed to receive in his previous life.
Albarelli continues:
In the 1950s, Havana served as a hedonistic playground for the world’s elite, producing huge gambling, prostitution and drug profits for American Mafiosos, corrupt law-enforcement officials and their politically elected cronies. Drugs, be it marijuana or cocaine, were so plentiful at the time that one American magazine, in a 1950 article, proclaimed: “Narcotics are hardly more difficult to obtain in Cuba than a shot of rum. And only slightly more expensive.”
I was so intrigued by the quote used here that I tried to track down the original source. No luck. What I did find was the same quote used all over the web in stories about those days in Cuba. Where it was cited, it was only to Albarelli. No one, not Albarelli or any of the “citizen journalists” who followed the lead, bothered to put a name to the magazine, let alone the author of the article it allegedly came from. I do know that I could find no earlier reference to it than Albarelli’s 2002 article. Presumably Albarelli wanted us to believe that he saw and read the 1950 story with his own eyes. So why did he fail to name the magazine or the author?
It begs the question regarding the true origin of the quote. I can’t prove Hank made it up, though that is how it looks. I do know that in publishing the quote, he started the ball rolling for a perfect field experiment in how information is repeated over the internet without question- and as a result is eventually accepted as true.
It did set the pattern for Albarelli’s later books when it came to citations. His citation motto may well have been Lateat Vero – Let it be hidden…. a feat he achieved through vague allusions to the works of others, never actually admitting they were sources, and by using the journalistic code of protecting sources – a two-edged sword that while allowing whistleblowers to be heard, can also be used as a shield, allowing authors to make up witnesses and sources out of whole cloth. In Albarelli’s case, he claimed to have several sources inside the intelligence community who had to remain anonymous.
And then came the Pierre Lafitte datebook. The pinnacle of a life’s work bet on selling the bona fides of a datebook that is protected from examination for authenticity by a phalanx of promises, copyrights, and non-disclosure agreements! Yet publication of a book based on the datebook went ahead, despite the death of the lead author and despite a lack of authentication of the main source material.
The datebook was allegedly kept by a two-bit chef, petty criminal and lowlife informant who, in the Albarelliverse is elevated to the status of Assassination Overseer/Project Manager – his datebook purportedly recording the day-to-day activities and machinations of the parties involved.
Left to sell this monstrosity are Albarelli’s two co-authors, though the heavy lifting has been left to Linda O’Hara under her pen-name Leslie Sharp. As previously shown. Ms. O’Hara is no virgin when it comes to exposure to fraud. Her hapless husband has twice been left unpaid by two scam-artists he worked for.
I trust bad luck does not run in threes for the O’Haras and that they get their rightful cut from this particular scam.
The datebook itself has a touch of Nostradamus about it in that it is full of cryptic comments. Those comments are slowly being interpreted and attached to various pieces of research in the same way that the Nostradamus’s quatrains are interpreted to match with historical events. In fact, Ms. O’Hara is on record as stating that unless a piece of research can be verified by an entry in the datebook, that particular piece of research can be discarded.
Such is the sad state we are in.
Especially since this is not an isolated example of fraud upon the public in this field. It is unfortunately, just the latest.
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