Richard Nagell- A Bad Case of the Blues?

Embarrassing as it is to admit it now, when I first started getting seriously interested in the assassination, back in the early to mid 00s, I was a fierce acolyte of all things Fooish...Almost a militant...eager to wear my Probe breastplate, my pink Zen troofseekers sandals and brandishing the sword Tosh Plumlee sold me for a very reasonable $10000( Did you know Mary Pinchot Meyer was the Lady in the Lake? RFK and Richard Helms gave Tosh Excalibur when they came to Dallas to debrief him about his abort team .. for all you scholars of early Anglo Saxon dialects did you know " Made in Taiwan" was Mercian "for Once and Future King"?) go and wage glorious war against the nefarious alliance of multi headed disinformation spewing hydras, shadowy agent provocateurs and COINTELPRO operatives...

With Cheerleader in Chief Don Jeffries bravely cheering me on....1000 miles away.. As counterintelligence supremo Drago keeps a stuttering beat on his bongos... before continuing his quest for metaphysical certitude from the bottom of his Chardonnay bottle...

Those who have reasonable access to the evidence are either cognitively metaphysical..( hic) shooby dooby doo...no that can't be right.... the entities that live under the acetate of my collaboration with " Monk" Burnham...a smooth acid jazz inflected tone poem based on his Deep Political lament " Santa's Soldier" must be fucking with my mojo.. and my ability to "out" agent provocateurs based on dangling participles...or dangling lifelessly from the cord i'd like to erotically asphyxiate myself from, while listening to a very naughty Texas loyer recite my published essay " in the Blossoms of our Sins"

Full of the certainty of inexperience, and with the neophytes passionate zeal , I pretty much believed everything...

Up to and including Harvey and Lee...

After the Assassinations, the anthology Jim DiE and Lisa Pease edited and Bloody Treason, the first book to really make an impression was Dick Russell's sprawling TMWKTM. Having come from a background in medieval history, deciphering his sometimes ponderous ruminations reminded me of trying to piece together a coherent narrative from amidst the poetical discourses, and religious parables that  were scattered  throughout the extant chronicles...tales of bilocating saints slaying dragons etc and the inevitable interminable geneological meanderings ( all royal houses in North Western Europe, even after conversion to Christianity traced their family trees back to Woden)

Nagell's story blew me away...

The drama and the pathos...it was almost Shakespearean in its scope. The flawed hero battling valiantly against the tyrannical state he had once served so bravely.

Lately I've been re reading a lot of the older threads; both here and over on the 13 Inch Head forum.. that fussy clatch of musty clunged spinsters...swooning at dirty words and the merest whiff of dissent, creasing their learned brows whilst nodding their greying heads in dusty wonderment as some eager young( well youngish) adept presents the fruits of his labours....How to make an extinct equine evacuate its bowels...How best to flay the most shit out your dead horse

Just by chance I stumbled across a thread about Richard Case Nagell's fascinating yarn. The thread included a link to a two part article by Jim DiE over on K and K . 

It reminded me of the first time I really felt the chill of disillusionment run through me, the start of the painful process of having the Conspiracy goggles ( the cognitive equivalent of their beer enhanced cousins perhaps) removed from my eyes. 

First off I want to make it absolutely clear- i'm no intelligence insider. What I learned I learned second hand, albeit through unimpeachable sources with impeccable credentials. If one of the first things we were taught at university when reading charters/ chronicles etc : it is almost as important to understand who was doing the writing and why, as it was to understand what is actually written* Likewise it would be disingenuous of me not to give you the background.

As some of you know my mother was/is one of the leading Russian language experts in Britain. Teaching both the language and the literature. Her main area of expertise is comparative analysis...Soviet/ Russian and Spanish women writers of the 20th century.

The academic community is small; gossipy and almost incestuous. 

Everyone knows everyone else's secrets.

When I was growing up there was a steady stream of first defectors then emigres... having reached  the promised land to make their fortunes. Hoping to turn their sheaf of carefully stashed documents into Yankee Gold or solid unassuming British sterling silver.

With this sudden influx of ex Soviets, mostly from the higher echelons of the nomenklatura,  each having a small tribe of dependents, trailing like a gypsy cloud behind them, there was an urgent demand for top level interpreters/ translators..

I don't want to bore you with my reminiscing but my mum, having done some interpreting work before ( she speaks something like 12 languages..10 of them fluently. ) she was hurriedly dragooned into service... helping to translate manuscripts/ documents etc and acting as an interpreter for several high ranking personages and their families.

I grew up amongst this, and got to know some of the families quite well. Playing with, then later socialising with several of the children. Some of whom i've kept in touch with.

Thus I had an entrée into a small self contained universe. Getting to know some of the emigres( some of whom were high ranking members of the KGB / GRU) well enough to feel able to ask them questions about the Cold War, and the assassination in particular , after I became interested.

Did they tell me the truth? Or what they thought I wanted to hear? Or did they just come up with any old shit to get rid of an annoying little pest?

To be absolutely candid I suppose I can't really say for sure. But what I can say for certain is that all the information that was verifiable seemed to check out. Saying that it would be disingenuous in the extreme to expect you all to accept a relatively naïve and inexperienced teenager would be capable of divining the intentions of highly adroit worldly men and women, many of whom had been highly accomplished professional liars

What has that lengthy preamble got to do with Mr Nagell and his beguiling tales?

Well being in the thrall of chronic conspiracitis and with an unswerving faith in his veracity and his moral rectitude, this was a bona fide hero, right? I enquired about his tale..

Specifically the aspects that related to the KGB...

In all the numerous articles/ studies relating to his story i've never heard this aspect mentioned. Which is actually quite shocking, but all too prevalent...

I'm not joking, after recounting the essence of his story, being hired by the KGB to kill Oswald to halt the assassination I was greeted either by an uncomprehending silence, an uncomfortable pause or on two occasions guffaws of amused indignation...

I can say with almost complete certitude that the part of the story that has KGB agents asking/ ordering Nagell to assassinate Oswald could never have happened. I don't want to sound Cinque like... dealing in absolutes is always problematic, especially in such a murky field as this. Who can really say with any certainty what might or might not have happened?
Unauthorized " vest pocket" operations did happen... but from what I've gathered this was verboten. An infamita...an unbreakable taboo...

Using a foreign national, much less an American to murder another American either in America itself or an unofficial satellite...ju ju no way...

ESPECIALLY an individual with Nagell's problems and proven unreliability...

It went against basic tradecraft.

The KGB( or GRU for that matter) would NEVER have authorised a foreign national ( especially an American) to kill another foreign national in a third country ( or any country for that matter)

Did they assassinate Soviet citizens in foreign countries?, most certainly, but normally only as a last resort..
They WOULD very rarely authorise the murder of a particularly noisesome troublemaker; a dissident or journalist, like Bulgarian Georgi Markov, infamously killed with a poisoned umbrella in London. By this was an extreme case. Anyway it involved someone from a Eastern Block country and the assassin's too were hirelings from one of the satellite agencies...

An American killing an American in Mexico. No way

This was standard operating policy. Pretty easily verifiable stuff.

Even in the darkest days of the Terror, in '36,'37...even during the Spanish Civil War, when the POUM, the anarchists and other militias ,who had incurred the Olympian wrath of Josef Vissarionovich, were liquidated, there was a set protocol. Those earmarked for liquidation were recalled.

Even in the days of Suduplatov... and Ramon Mercarder, who stuck the ice pick into Trotsky's skull in Mexico ( Trotsky was Russian and although Mercarder had been born in Spanish Cuba he was a de facto Soviet citizen)

Anyway by this time, the early 60s , the entire assassination apparatus of the KGB, wildly overexaggarated and fictionalised as it was, was being wound down.

I can't overemphasise this point... the KGB would have avoided Nagell like the metaphorical plague...to have them hiring him to kill Oswald , of all things, to prevent an assassination attempt on JFK is fiction of the most lurid kind

The KGB would never have got involved with an unstable, unpredictable loose cannon like Nagell. Absolutely no fucking way. 

This is where a knowledge of the contemporary Soviet system comes in useful.

First of all if the Soviets WERE aware of the plot, a not wholly implausible concept, the last thing they'd have done is to hire some renegade American, who, by all accounts teetering on the very precipice, to do a bit of freelance bushwhacking in the teeming calles of Mexico City, or the sultry back streets of the Big Easy...theyd  have most likely approached a friendly conduit in the press, or gone through a back channel a la the Missile Crisis.

The Central Committee of the Communist Party was the fountainhead of all power. The various intelligence " organs" and the vast Red Army infrastructure, powerful as they were, virtual self contained fiefdoms, were totally subservient to the will of the Party.

Indeed the KGB, despite its relative penury and lack of technology , vastly superior to both the CIA and MI6 ,as an intelligence gathering network, was often seriously hampered by the need to  cater the " product" to fit the capricious whims and increasingly detached paranoid world view of the geriatrics who could barely totter unaided up the few steps to the balcony atop Lenin's Mausoleum...
An elevator was the eventual solution when Chernenko, barely capable of breathing unaided , was appointed GenSec

This nearly culminated in all out nuclear war...the incoming Premier , longtime KGB chief Yuri Andropov ( along with Suslov, an aesthetic fanatic, the de facto rulers during the long precipitous decline during Brezhnev's stagnation. Leonid Ilyich having more pressing concerns than ruling over the creaking Superpower. Along with collecting medals his main interest was somehow reviving his increasingly flaccid libido. This is an true story. During the late 70s he developed a slight speech impediment, due to a mild stroke, or so Pravda assured it's readership. In reality it was the negative reaction to a " revolutionary" impotence treatment, involving monkey glands.... perhaps Trine Day should investigate..." Me and Leonid" ... Dr Juddufki reveals how she helped Brezhnev spank his monkey) insisted the Americans were planning a sneak nuclear attack. 

Andropov was something of a philosopher of totalitarianism...something  of a connoisseur too, evaluating the effectiveness of various repressive apparatuses the way an epicurean compares vintages... Behind the dull plodding exterior there lurked a nimble mind, dedicated to the Soviet Union....he was the driving force behind the smashing of the Hungarian Revolution, the main advocate of Soviet tanks rumbling in to the capitals of satellite states, crushing their aspirations under the clattering treads of the T34s and their successors...

But the paranoia drenched existence ended up corroding his mind....he saw conspiracies everywhere....a vast insidious web of Imperialist duplicity...

A special bulletin board was created in his Kremlin office and all overseas Rezidenturas ( equivalent of CIA stations) were tasked to provide updates....

It was of course a complete delusion...worse even than the Team B fiasco..

Andropov siezed upon a NATO exercise, Able Archer, convinced that this was the real thing...in one of the bizarrest coincidences of all time at the very height of the panic a faulty Soviet satellite ( something to do with solar flares being interpreted as incoming missiles) picked up what appeared to be a volley of intercontinental ballistic missiles, heading for the beating heart of Mother Russia...

It was thanks to an anonymous Soviet colonel in a distant command bunker keeping his head that....well that i'm able to type this and you're able to read it... and John Butler's able to work on his Magnum Opus...

Proving that the entire cast of Tod Browning's 1932 film " Freaks" were doing the hokey cokey round Lee Bowers watchtower on Nov 22nd 1963...

Just imagine the utterly catastrophe for all humanity if, on that distant night, deep down in some gloomy bunker, a Povolnik Butlerski had been staring into the screen, watching the green blips dancing playfully ...

" Comrade Lieutenant General beg to report the Imperialist pigdogs have launched a flock of flying celery stalks with HARVEY facemasks.... permission to nuke the Eastern seaboard in retaliation Comrade Lieutenant General Bagginsov?"

To get back to Soviet contemporary mindset, they harboured no illusions regarding American superiority. It was overwhelming..

Make no mistake; the Soviet achievements of the late 40s ( their acquisition of the Atomic bomb was a lasting testament to their highly efficient espionage network) through the 50s; Sputnik, Yuri Gagarin etc, were incredible, especially taking into consideration the trauma and devastation of the Great Patriotic War, even in the 50s vast swathes of the industrial heartlands and the most fertlle black soil regions lay in ruins...

But by the end of the 50s entropy was beginning to creep in...a listless apathy, senses dulled by the ever present shadows of the Terror..

The hardliners , unrepentant Stalinists were all for keeping the Cold War just hot enough... stirring up trouble for the Americans and their allies wherever they could, attempting to co opt, then hopefully communise the wars of national liberation/ anti colonial struggles, especially in Africa and Asia...

Utilising Fidel, and especially the glamorous photogenic corpse of Guevara as propaganda tools... revolutionary chic...after all a coven of crudescent geriatrics bordering on senility, barely able to muster a wave atop the mausoleum are hardly the images of vibrant underground rebellion...Fidel proved to be a more than adequate geopolitical pawn... sending Cuban troops and tanks into the jungles of Angola and Mozambique, not to mention the veldts of the then Rhodesia...

I suspect that a handful, not the faceless caricatures of near godlike " sponsors" I hasten to add, at the very top were fully aware the Cold War was a sham. A refinement on the age old mechanism of control. Indeed in many respects they had more in common with their counterparts in maze like burrows of the Pentagon than some of their own colleagues in the Presidium, and indeed in the Politburo.

Kruschchev, with his allies, including the wily Furtseva and the even wilier Mikoyan ( who sacrificed his teenage sons to appease the wrath of Stalin) I firmly believe were trying to reach some sort of detente.

Despite being elbow deep in blood of 1937, serving as Stalin's faithful hatchet man, even at times exceeding his quotas , when dispatched to purge the Ukraine...

Having previously been involved in the grain " requisitions" during the Holdomor famine of 32/33...millions dying of starvation, living corpses curled up outside the " official blackmarket" Breadshops, parents, maddened by hunger, devouring their children ( there's a photo of a pair of anthropagi, a man and woman, middle aged, hollow faces and dead black eyes, standing above a tablet filled with the contents of their cannibal's larder...) " Closed villages", after the so called ten ear law, following the decree that lowered the age for capital punishment to 12, this law, a soul deadening melange of stentorian fatuity and totalitarian bureaucratic pedantry, mandated 25 year sentences for stealing ten ears worth of grain ( Hence the ( unofficial) name), elderly babas in colourful headscarves being marched off to certain death in the flourishing GULAg empire, for giving a starving grandchild a handful of grain...

Despite having served a truly homicidal apprenticeship, under the tutelage of one of history's most effective mass murderers, by the time he became Premier, Kruschchev had undergone some sort of epiphany... 

His letter to JFK, written at his dacha on the Black Sea is incredibly revealing.

But returning to Nagell, I have a great deal of time for Larry Hancock, imho he is one of the very few researchers who deals in reality. What is proven and what is proveable.

He understands the mechanics of covert operations. Most of all the paramount importance of compartmentalization.

However on this occasion I have to disagree with him.

From what I've learned I've come to understand that " tradecraft" was pretty much universal. The same basic protocols were followed on both sides of the curtain.

I can't see what could possibly make Nagell seem like a viable recruit. Undoubtedly he had served, with distinction in Korea, and in the FOI, an incredibly secretive outfit.

But post army? With his medical, family and psychiatric history..

It makes absolutely no sense.

And if a key component of his story, or one of them at least ( although I would argue his supposed mission from his putative Soviet handlers was the fulcrum upon which his entire narrative hinged) can be definitively disproven, then what does that say about the remainder?

Has anyone actually heard the mysterious tape for example? Of  the enigmatic " Q" ( allegedly Quiroga) and Arcacha discussing the assassination?
Or what about the stash of Oswald memorabilia that was supposedly discovered in the trunk of his car when he was arrested in September 63?

Has its existence been verified independently?

At first glance it seems so convincing... beguiling even.

But as is so often the case when you start examining the individual pieces, utilising what should be rudimentary protocols...( for example I'm genuinely stunned that no one thought of checking out the Soviet angle...or maybe they did and I just forgot...) the whole thing just implodes...

I can hear the gnashing of teeth and the titters of outrage at the sheer audacity of some foul mouthed troll punk minion daring to question the validity of one of the Sacred Cows of Conspracism...

I'd be fascinated to hear what your opinion is regarding the elusive Mr Nagell and his caseful of blues...or in his case wasn't it a purple footlocker that supposedly contained his evidence that disappeared?

Like the fezless Fezzo when the local COINTELPRO goons showed up to Miss Topless Emoji of the year...

Does his story contain a grain of truth? Did he run into Oswald? What about " Leon"?

I read through as much of the documentation that was available at the time ( Lancer probably) and he sounded like a genuinely troubled man. A plaintive story shot through with tragedy and dark gallows humour

* The most outrageous example is Blind Harry's " Wallace" a long narrative poem, written in the mid 1480s in early modern Scots.
Much of what is known about William Wallace can be traced back to this poem, and the slightly later Scalachronica..

Although, incredibly for someone who died over 700 years ago, new information can be unearthed.
In the past couple of decades ( maybe earlier) in a relatively obscure German archive, a letter baring Wallace's seal was discovered. " Willemus filus Alani Wallace" William, son of Alan Wallace, challenging the long held belief that Wallace's father was one Sir Malcolm Wallace of Elderslie.
Interestingly a Sir Alan Wallace WAS recorded in the Ragman Rolls, dating to the 1290s.
Wallace's seal bore a longbow, perhaps indicating previous military service.
As a second son, unlikely to inherit, his only realistic career choices would have been the church or entering the military household of one of the great magnates.
Many historians believe the young Wallace may well have served as a mercenary in King Edward Is Welsh campaigns. 
Anyway in a later interpolation of the Wallace, dating from the early 17th century, written by an unknown poet at the behest of a Scottish noble family, the Douglas's or Buchan's perhaps, the wholly fictional character of Wallace's " wife" Marion Braidfute was created, so the family could claim kinship from her...
In reality no one knows if Wallace was married. His first recorded appearance in history, the Action at Lanark, when the English appointed sheriff William deHeslinrigg was killed was long thought to have involved his wife.

Although in the sheriff's accounts, an invaluable insight into medieval life it was recorded that Wallace ( and an English soldier) had been involved in the theft of a barrel of beer, some believe this relatively minor altecraalte could have served as a trigger ..

Suck on this.

Thanks to Malcolm Blunt.

I agree, Alex. I agree Nagell is not credible. Sort of like Fletcher Prouty.

Vinny wrote:I agree, Alex. I agree Nagell is not credible. Sort of like Fletcher Prouty.

Speaking of credibility,
Sort of like most of the cherry-picked witnesses called for the Warren Commission. Like most of the eyewitnesses used by the Dallas Police. Like most of the Oswald did it lot. Those types?

Mick_Purdy wrote:

Vinny wrote:I agree, Alex. I agree Nagell is not credible. Sort of like Fletcher Prouty.

Speaking of credibility,
Sort of like most of the cherry-picked witnesses called for the Warren Commission. Like most of the eyewitnesses used by the Dallas Police. Like most of the Oswald did it lot. Those types?

 Yes. Also the Harvey and Lee types.