Years ago, I read a lot of Bill Simpich's magnum opus, "State Secret," at the Mary Ferrell Foundation website.
Has anyone else here read it?
As best I remember, Bill thinks the CIA was behind the JFKA and that the bad guys (James JESUS Angleton in particular?) intentionally mixed up the identities of Lee Harvey Oswald with another defector to the USSR about that time, Robert Webster, in an ostensible mole hunt which the bad guys somehow used to their advantage in killing JFK and/or getting away with it.
I hate to say it, but I do remember finding a few boo-boos in Bill's very long essay.
I'll take another look at "State Secret" when I get some free time and/or I am sufficiently motivated, and I'll report them here.
One in particular sticks in my mind, however -- Bill kinda conflated a 1966-1967 Kremlin-loyal triple agent in the U.S. by the name of Boris Orekhov (J. Edgar Hoover's SHAMROCK) with another Kremlin-loyal dude by the name of Ivan Obyedkov (whose last name was misspelled as "Byetkov" by the transcriber of Angleton's June 19, 1975, Church Committee testimony).
Ivan Obyedkov was the KGB officer / Security Officer at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City with whom Oswald or an Oswald impersonator spoke over a sure-to-be-tapped-by-CIA phone line on Tuesday, October 1st, 1963, and who "volunteered" to him that he (Oswald or "Oswald") had spoken with Department 13-radioactive Valery Kostikov at the Embassy a few days earlier. (Department 13 of the KGB's First Chief Division -- today's SVR -- specialized in assassinations and sabotage.)
Orekhov's claim to fame, on the other hand, was convincing Hoover that the Kremlin had undertaken a very thorough investigation of the assassination right after it happened and that it had concluded that the Military Industrial Intelligence-Community Complex (or some-such thing) had killed JFK.
I'll be posting more on the subject of Simpich's "State Secret" (which you can read for free at the MFF website) a bit later.
Cheers!
PS The CIA's official historian, David Robarge, wrote a few years ago that the Agency never did determine whether or not Kostikov was Department 13.
PPS It's also interesting to note that the only reason the CIA and the FBI believed on 11/23/63 that Kostikov was "Department 13" was because a Kremlin-loyal triple agent by the name of Aleksei Kulak (Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) told the FBI in 1962 that Kostikov's charge at the U.N., Igor Brykin, was a Department 13 agent.
PPPS Angleton told the Church Committee that the CIA mistakenly believed it had successfully recruited Obyedkov.
