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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-92678852018-09-17T00:32:12.939-04:00Edward Jay Epstein's Web Log| BioPlexus |  Hollywood Demystified |  Question of Day |  Cyberbooks |  The Big Picture |   |Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-38663230771859720082015-03-10T12:31:00.001-04:002015-03-13T17:15:18.280-04:00The Adventures of the Amazing Bill O'Reilly
Yesterday, I published a story in Newsweek about Bill O'Reilly's amazing ability to be in two places at the same time. Today he replied,albeit indirectly, by having his publisher furnished a truly wild tale, In it, O'Reilly and a freelance cameraman barged into my hotel room to shoe-horn themselves into my exclusive interview with George De Mohrenschildt in Palm Beach.. Supposedly, this barge-in happened on the morning of March 29, 1977 and the intruders somehow made a movie of George De Mohrenschildt on the sofa. Even though such a cinematic coup would, if it existed, include the last pictures of George De Mohrenschildt alive, it was never shown.
 What can I say? My reseacher Nancy Lanoue,does not recall such a barge-in by any reporters-- or anyone-- that day,.Nor do I. More importantly, according to the tape of O'Reilly's phone conversation later that afternoon with Gaeton Fonzi, the investigator for the House Assassination Committee, O'Reilly was not in Palm Beach, On this tape, O'Reilly hearing that De Mohrenschildt is dead, says to Fonzi (who is in Palm Beach), "we gotta get hold of that guy Epstein. He knows what happened." He also only now makes plans to come to Palm Beach. That is also on the tape. "I'm coming down there tomorrow," O'Reilly tells Fonzi. "I'm coming to Florida." He adds, … Now, OK, I'm gonna try to get a night flight out here, if I can." So did a phantom O'Reilly travel back in time on the night flight to to pop into my intervene earlier that day? .
Listen to this tape hereEdward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-29221804479101740782014-12-18T09:33:00.000-05:002014-12-18T09:34:30.080-05:00Truth and Journalism

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 [PREFACE TO MY NEW BOOK]

 The problem of journalism in American proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists and editors are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about a story for themselves, and therefore almost entirely dependent on "sources," who may be self-interested, falsifiers or even fictional characters. It is these "sources" that provide the version of reality that journalists report. Walter Lippmann pointed to the root of the problem a century ago when he made a distinction between "news" and truth. "The function of news is to signalize an event; the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them into relation with each other, and to make a picture of reality on which men can act." Because news reporting and truth seeking ultimately have different purposes, Lippmann concluded that news should be expected to coincide unerringly with truth in only a few limited areas, such as the scores of sports events and the results of elections, where the results are definite and measurable. In more ambiguous areas, where the outcome may be in doubt or dispute, news reports could not be expected to exhaust or perhaps even indicate the truth of the matter. Lippmann held that if the public required a more truthful interpretation of the world it lived in, it would have to look elsewhere.<o:p></o:p>

 Today journalists would have difficulty accepting such a distinction between news and truth. Indeed, newsmen almost invariably depict themselves not merely as gatherers of the fragments of information but of hidden truths. Even though they remain dependent on "leaks" from sources whose motives are murky, their standing, as well as the circulation of their news organization, often requires them to ferret out scoops that depend on secret and otherwise unverifiable sources. The pressure to supply something extra in these stories has led time and again to journalistic invention. <o:p></o:p>

 Consider the invention of an epidemic of child heroin users in Washington D.C. On September 28, 1980, the Washington Post ran a sensational story about an eight-year old addict entitled "Jimmy's World." Janet Cooke, a staff reporter on the Post, described her extended interviews with "Jimmy" whose "thin, brown arms" had tracks of "needle marks" from repeated injections of heroin. Even after a massive police search for "Jimmy" proved unsuccessful, assistant managing editor Bob Woodward of Watergate fame submitted it for the Pulitzer Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize committee, unperturbed by the lack of verification, awarded Cooke the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing on April 13, 1981.<o:p></o:p>

 It turned out that the reason the police could not find "Jimmy," the putative source for the story, was that he was imaginary. Cooke, as she admitted to her editors, invented "Jimmy" in response to pressure to produce an exclusive story for the Post. To his credit, Donald Graham, the publisher of the Post, admitted that the story was fraudulent and returned the award. Even so, Woodward said, "I think that the decision to nominate the story for a Pulitzer is of minimal consequence. I also think that it won is of little consequence. It is a brilliant story—fake and fraud that it is." He added, in what might be termed the Woodward doctrine, "It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes." (Cooke, who resigned from the Post, demonstrated the profitability of invention by selling the film rights to the story of Pulitzer Prize fabrication to Columbia Tri-Star Pictures for $1.6 million, though the film was never made.)<o:p></o:p>

 Woodward also took advantage of this doctrine when he described in vivid detail a scene in which he extracted a death bed confession from William Casey, the former CIA Director, in his hospital room at Georgetown University hospital just before Casey died of a brain tumor in 1987. But, according to Kevin Shipp, who was part of Casey's round-the-clock security detail at the hospital, Woodward was turned away at the door and never entered Casey's room. If so, the interview was pure invention. <o:p></o:p>

 The pressure to accept stories based on unverified sources has only increased in the Internet era. In November 2014, for example, Rolling Stone published a stunning story by Sabrina Erdely entitled "A Rape on Campus," It described in gory detail the ritual gang rape on September 28, 2012 of a student identified only as "Jackie" during a party at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the University of Virginia. It further described the University's response to the incident as inadequate. As it turned out, however, there was no party held at the fraternity on the night of the alleged rape, the description of the fraternity house was incorrect, and prior to the Rolling Stone story there had not been any allegation of sexual assault against any members of the fraternity. The reporter, who viewed her assignment as finding a campus rape story, had not made any effort to speak to any of the alleged perpetrators. Instead, the story relied on a single questionable source. As the discrepancies mounted, Rolling Stone admitted that its trust in the source was "misplaced." Rolling Stone editor Will Dana explained, "We made a judgment -- the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. And in this case, our judgment was wrong." <o:p></o:p>

 I first became interested in the inventions of the media in 1970 when William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, asked me to investigate whether the reported killing of 28 members of the Black Panther party was part of a US government "genocide" program to destroy the Black Panther Party. After investigating each case, I discovered that the list of 28 Black Panther deaths was partly invented, proving that there was no basis for the widely circulated press stories of genocide. After The New Yorkerpublished my article in February 1971, both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times wrote editorials apologies for their stories based on the invention of 28 Black Panther supposed deaths. <o:p></o:p>

 The essays I have included in this book are all variations on a single theme– the vulnerability of journalism to deception. Even after45 years, it is very much a work in progress.<o:p></o:p>

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Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-82493183764704059722014-08-05T20:44:00.002-04:002014-08-05T20:44:25.849-04:00Dr. Susana Duncan on Sushi's DangerDr. Susana Duncan warns about PAIN and too much raw fish
See her blog spot
http://drsusanaduncan.blogspot.com/2010/06/ecstasy-and-agony-of-sushi.htmlEdward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-38202654124131771502013-11-18T14:06:00.000-05:002013-11-18T14:06:39.326-05:00Has Anything changed re: Lee Harvey Oswald

Has anything changed in the last 30 years? Below is my Wall Street Journal essay on November 22, 1983.
Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?
(Wall Street Journal, 11/22/1983)

The endless tangle of questions about bullets, trajectories, wounds, time sequences and inconsistent testimony that has surrounded the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and has obsessively fascinated, if not entirely blinded, a generation of assassination
buffs-probably never will be resolved.

Within this morass of facts. however, there is a central actor, Lee Harvey Oswald. His rifle, which fired the fatal bullet into the president, was found in the sniper's nest, His cartridge cases were also found near the body of a murdered policeman on the route his flight. He was captured resisting arrest with the loaded murder revolver in his hand.

In light of this overwhelming evidence, the issue that ought to have concerned Americans was not Oswald's technical guilt but his dangerous liaisons abroad. Only eight weeks before the assassination he had excited FBI and CIA interest in his activities by renewing his contacts with Cuban and Soviet intelligence officers in Mexico City. Although these foreign connections remained of great concern to the two U S. intellige agencies, they were considered too sensitive to be aired, publicly in the emotional aftermath of the president's slaying.

Oswald was not a "loner- in the conventional sense. Ever since he was handed a pamphlet about the Rosenberg prosecution at the age of 15, he had sought out affiliations with political organizations, front groups and foreign nations that opposed the policies of the U.S. When
he was 16. he wrote the Socialist Party "I am a Marxist and have been studying Socialist Principles for well over five years" and he requested information about joining their "Youth League-." He also attempted to persuade a friend to join the youth auxiliary of the Communist
Party. He subsequently made membership inquiries to such organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, The Gus Hall-Benjamin Davis Defense Committee, the Daily Worker, The Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the Communist Party, USA— correspondence that brought him under surveillance by the FBI,

While still in the early stages of his flirtation with political causes, 0swald joined the Marine Corps . In October 1959, after a two-year stint as a radar operator, Oswald became the first Marine to defect to the Soviet Union, In Moscow, he delivered a letter stating. "I affirm that my allegiance is to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."

Not only did he publically renounce his American citizenship but he told the U.S. consul that he intended to turn over to the Soviet Union military secrets that he had acquired while serving in the Marines, adding that he had data of "Special interest" to the Russians. Since he indeed had exposure to military secrets such as the U-2 spy piane and radar identitification system, and since he may have collected data while on active duty, his defection had serious espionage implications.

Oswald thus had compromised all the secret data he had come in contact with in the Marines. He had also through this act put himself in the hands of his hosts.He was now completely dependent on the Soviets for financial support, legal status and protection.
Before disappearing into the Soviet hinterland for a year, Oswald spelled out his operational creed in a long letter to his brother. From Moscow, he wrote presciently of his willingness to commit murder for a political cause: "I want you to understand what I say now, I do not say lightly, or unknowingly, since I've been in the military .... In the event of war I would kill any American who put a uniform on in defense of the American Government --", and then ominously added for emphasis, " Any American." Although his letter was routinely intercepted by the CIA and microfilmed, no discernable attention was paid to the threat contained in it .
When Oswald returned from the Soviet Union in June 1962 (with a little help from a State Department eager to demonstrate that it could win back a defector from the Soviets), joined by a Russian wife, he retained his militant convictions. In Dallas, where he settled, he purchased a rifle with telescopic sights and a revolver from a mail-order house under a false name. He also lectured his more liberal acquaintances on the need for violent action rather than mere words. General Edwin A. Walker, an extreme conservative, who had been active in Dallas organizing anti-Castro guerrillas became in the Spring of 1963 a particular focus of Oswald's attention. He repeatedly suggested to a German geologist, Volkmar Schmidt, and other friends, that General walker should be treated like a "murderer at large". He did not stop at fierce words. For weeks, he methodically stalked Walker's movements, photographing his residence from several angles.
He then had his wife photograph him, dressed entirely in black, with his revolver strapped on a holster on his hip, his sniper's rifle in his right hand, and two newspapers --~The Worker~ and the~Militant~ -- in his left hand. He made three copies of the photograph-- one of which he inscribed, dated "5--IV-63" and sent to a Dallas acquaintance, George De Mohrenschildt. He then left with his rifle wrapped in a raincoat, telling his wife he was off to "target practice", but his target, General Walker, was out of town that night. Five nights later, Oswald returned to Walker's house, and fired a shot at him that missed his head by inches, demonstrating that he had the capacity as well as the willingness to kill "Any American".
After the failed assassination, Oswald went to New Orleans, where he became the organizer for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Aside from printing leaflets, staging demonstrations, getting arrested and appearing on local radio talk shows in support of Castro that summer, Oswald attempted to personally infiltrate an anti-Castro group that was organizing sabotage raids against Cuba. He explained to friends that he could figure out his "anti-imperialist" policy by "reading between the lines" of the Militant and other such publications. In August, he wrote the central committee of the Communist Party USA asking "Whether in your opinion, I can compete with anti-progressive forces above ground, or whether I should always remain in the background,i.e. underground". During this hot summer, while Oswald spent evenings practicing sighting his rifle in his backyard, the Militant raged on about the Kennedy Administration's "terrorist bandit" attacks on Cuba. And as the semi-secret war against Castro escalated, Oswald expressed increasing interest in reaching Cuba.
Oswald told his wife he planned to hijack an airliner to Havana, suggesting, as the summer progressed, that he might even earn a position in Castro's government. On September 9th, in a report that appeared on the front page of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Castro himself warned that if American leaders continued "aiding plans to eliminate Cuban leaders ... they themselves will not be safe".
The implication of this threat was not lost on Oswald. Telling his wife that they might never meet again, he left New Orleans two weeks later headed for the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City. To convince the Cubans of his bona fides-- and seriousness-- he had prepared a dossier on himself, which included a 10 page resume, outlining his revolutionary activities, newspaper clippings about his defection to the Soviet Union, propaganda material he had printed, documents he had stolen from a printing company engaged in classified map reproduction for the U.S Army, his correspondence with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee executives and photographs linking him to the Walker shooting.
Oswald applied for a visa at the Cuban Embassy on the morning of September 27th 1963. He said that he wanted to stop in Havana en route to the Soviet Union. On the application the consular office who interviewed him, noted: "The applicant states that he is a member of the American Communist Party and Secretary in New Orleans of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Despite such recommendations, Oswald was told that he needed a Soviet visa before the Cuban visa could be issued. He argued over this requisite with the Cuban counsel, Eusebio Azque, in front of witnesses, and reportedly made wild claims about services he might perform for the Cuban cause. During the next five days, he traveled back and forth between the Soviet and Cuban embassies attempting to straighten out the difficulty.
When he telephoned from the Cuban embassy to arrange an appointment at the Soviet Embassy with an officer called Valery Vladimirovich Kostikov, he set off alarm bells at the CIA, which had been surreptitiously monitoring the phone line. Kostikov was a KGB officer who had been under close surveillance in Mexico by the FBI ( and who,in 1971, was identified by a KGB defector in London as the head of sabotage operations in Mexico). By the time the CIA had identified Oswald, and notified the FBI, he had left Mexico.
When he returned to Dallas that October, Oswald assumed a different identity--"O.H.Lee-- and, separating himself from his family, he moved to a rooming house. He also forbade his wife from divulging his whereabouts. He then got a job at the Texas Book Depository, which overlooked the convergence of the three main streets into central Dallas.
On October 18th, Oswald's visa was approved by the Cuban Foreign Ministry (despite the fact that he had not officially received a Soviet visa,as required.) Three weeks later, he wrote another letter to the Soviet Embassy, referring to his meeting with Kostikov in Mexico, and adding cryptically: "Had I been able to reach the Soviet Embassy in Havana as planned, the embassy there would have had time to complete our business."
FBI counterintelligence, which had intercepted this letter in Washington, and evidently was interested in Oswald's "business" in Havana, urgently requested its field agents in Dallas to locate him. An FBI agent, James Hosty, rushed over to the home where Oswald's family was living, and questioned his wife, but he did not find him Oswald until November 22nd, when he had been arrested for the murder of a Dallas policeman and President Kennedy. In the final analysis, the Warren Commission turned out to be right: Oswald was the assassin. He had brought his rifle to work on November 22nd, carefully prepared a concealed sniper's position at a sixth floor window, and, waiting in ambush for almost an hour, shot the President as the motorcade passed below. The possibility that he had assistance-- for example, someone setting off a firecracker as a diversion-- can never be precluded. But the real question is not how but why Oswald assassinated the President.
The most obvious motive was provided by Oswald himself in his letter from Moscow: To kill any American who put on a uniform against his cause. He openly subscribed to the terrorist creed that a man with a rifle could change history; and, as far as Oswald was concerned, President Kennedy and General Walker were both actively working to destroy his avowed hero-- Castro.
Whether Oswald , given his clear disposition towards killing an American leader, was prodded or otherwise induced into committing the assassination was the question that vexed American intelligence after the shooting. Oswald had disappeared in the Soviet Union for more than a year, without yielding a trace of what, if any, training and indoctrination he had undergone. The only record of this missing year was a "diary" he brought out with him, which had in fact been written in two days presumably to provide him with a consistent cover story or legend. His five days with the Cubans in Mexico City were also a blank -- although friendly sources within the Cuban Embassy indicated that he was pressured to prove his loyalty and worth. Although the Cuban government insisted, through both official and intelligence channels, that Oswald was presumed crazy and dismissed as such by the embassy staff, it left unanswered the disturbing question of why a visa was approved for Oswald-- after the report was received from the embassy. Among the eleven questions prepared by the CIA for Mexican interrogators was one that expressed its direct concern: "Was the assassination of of President Kennedy planned by Fidel Castro ... and were the final details worked out inside the Cuban Embassy".
In Dallas, before Mexican investigators could question their sources, Oswald was shot dead, and with his death ended the hope of unraveling his motive.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-40383074965373199832013-10-19T11:04:00.004-04:002013-10-19T11:04:54.284-04:00The Powerline Q&A on the JFK Assassination

The Powerline Q&A with me on the JFK Assassination is here. Questions by Scott Johnson, filming by Ena and Ines Talakich,Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-33365455048269593922013-08-16T10:57:00.002-04:002013-08-18T17:25:17.926-04:00Dr. Susana Duncan Links The New Drug Epidemic To Obamacare

 Dr. Susana Duncan made a truly brilliant connection in the Huffington Post between the epidemic of opiate pain killers and Obamacare. She wrote :This is not the stereotyped drug problem that can be solved by Miami Vice style drug busts of traffickers and periodic round-up of street-addicts and pushers. In this epidemic, the traffickers are our respected pharmaceutical companies acting entirely within the law seeking only to bring legitimate pain relief to sufferers; the addicts are, for the most part, upstanding citizens seeking a medical solution to their pain, and the "pushers" are, with few exceptions, dedicated doctors attempting to alleviate the suffering of their patients. So how can the interaction of decent people, pursuing well intentioned and legitimate ends, result in a truly disastrous narcotics epidemic?

The answer, as counter-intuitive as it may seems, is that in large part the epidemic is an unanticipated consequence of "managed care"; which swept the country in the 1980's to contain rising medical costs.
Almost every week, I have received more calls from new patients searching for a pain specialist willing to take on the prescribing of their drug. In each case the reason given for the need for a new doctor was their previous doctor's retiring or otherwise no longer being available for the task. In each case a brief interview revealed the nature of the injury or physical problem to be either minor or at best partially diagnosed. Further, there is a turn of phrase, an urgency, a worn thin quality to their stories, which informs the practiced listener that driving the call is addiction. The previous prescriber had created a demon and had withdrawn.

As I reflect on why this wave of opiate addiction is so rapidly gaining hold in America, I realize that the answer lies in the new realities of how doctors must practice to earn their livelihood. Listening to Bill Clinton, the only campaign speaker to try to get across the mechanics of Obamacare, I learned for the first time where the funding ($617 billion) for the proposed expansion of medical insurance coverage was to come from: Hospitals, private insurers and doctors.

A proposed 27% cut in Medicare payments to physicians, already so low as to drive many physicians to refuse to see Medicare patients, is part of the agreed legislation. It is not clear that private medical practice as we know it will survive at all under these cuts. In the past five years physicians have annually fought off a pending far smaller cut, as the austere economics of managed care compels them to compromise and see increasing numbers of patients each hour. This requisite for what government administrators might call "efficiency", cuts deeply into a commodity precious to diagnosis and patient care, especially precious in pain management; adequate time for listening, for which, under managed care, there is no commensurate reimbursement. Pain has its own special, unfortunate place in this new cut-costs at all cost system. Back and neck problems, vague complaints of limb pain can be challenging at the best of times and may take long and repeated visits, interviewing and examining to fathom and correctly treat. It takes not so much diligence as time to apply skill in getting to the bottom of some of these complaints. And time is what is rationed under this new system. In this time-is-at-a-premium climate one understands how for a harried physician, prescribing a pain killer becomes an expedient substitute for a lengthy diagnostic encounter. Indeed, in the last decade, the use of opiates in general practice pain management has become increasingly the norm. The sad truth is that under economic exigency prescribing in all fields, whether it be drugs or expensive laboratory or imaging testing, is dramatically escalating; too often replacing appropriate, in-depth office encounters between physician and patient, such that a precious gem of spoken information, which might provide the key, is never heard. This pattern is only growing: Enough pain killers were prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult around-the-clock for a month.

If one examines the whole story of opiate use more closely, one finds that (here too) there is another hidden and costly outcome: these prescription drugs can readily reach those for whom they were never intended. A bottle of half finished opiates lying somewhere at home can tempt a teenager, and these drugs have the power to addict within three days of use. Further, less well intentioned callers at doctors' offices have learned to mimic pain, to see multiple doctors with the same story, and then sell the prescribed drugs for handsome profits.

Looking ahead one sees that in a system where symptoms are treated, but the source of pain remains, a growing number of patients will become chronic pain sufferers. And as long as managed care continues to manifest as "efficiencies" in medical practices; doctors' remuneration for office visits progressively is whittled down, and opiate-based pills become faster acting and more powerful, the inevitable outcome tragically is even greater opiate addiction in America.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-38356875568763539182013-07-21T09:46:00.000-04:002013-07-21T09:46:23.615-04:00The Snowden Penetration

In March 2013, when Edward Snowden sought a job with Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, he signed the requisite classified-information agreements and would have been made well aware of the law regarding communications intelligence.

Section 798 of the United States Code makes is a very tough law when it come to communications intelligence. It makes it a federal crime if a person "knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States" any classified information concerning communication intelligence. It is indeed so severe that no one working at the NSA has taken misappropriated any classified documents from an NSA facility up until Snowden's penetration.

According to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist through which Snowden released classified documents to The Guardian, Snowden took "literally thousands" of documents that constituted "basically the instruction manual" of the methods that the NSA uses for intercepting communications. Snowden did not accidently stumble on this trove of classified data. He took a position with Booz Allen Hamilton in March 2012 so he could gain access to this super-secret communications intelligence. After working there for about two months, and systematically misappropriating the data, he escaped with it to Hong Kong and told the South China Morning Post , "My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked, that is why I accepted that position." In short, Snowden's penetration was planned to get classified data from the NSA, and his flight to Hong Kong, where he was joined by Greenwald and others, was planned so that he could publish part of these misappropriated documents

My question would be, then: Was he alone in this enterprise to misappropriate communications intelligence?

Before taking the job in Hawaii, Snowden was in contact with three people who would later help arrange the publication of the material he purloined– Greenwald, filmmaker Laura Poitras, and Washington Post Journalist Barton Gellman. Two of these individuals, Greenwald and Poitras, were on the Board of the Freedom of the Press Foundation that, among other things, funds WikiLeaks

In January 2013, according to the Washington Post, Mr. Snowden requested that Poitras get an encryption key for Skype so that they could have a secure channel over which to communicate.

In February, he made a similar request to Greenwald, providing him with a step-by-step video on how to set up encrypted communications.

On May 16th, Snowden made an extraordinary offer to Gellman, According to Gellman, Snowden (using the cryptonynm, Verax) offered to 41 slides of a secret NSA power-point presentation of a covert operation if the Washington Post would also publish on its website a "cryptographic key" so Snowden could prove to an unnamed foreign embassy he was the source of the document leak. Although Gellman turned down this curious demand, it suggests that Snowden either was in contact with, or planned to be, with a foreign embassy in May.

On May 20, three months into his job, Snowden falsely claimed to his employer that he needed treatment for epilepsy. The purpose of the cover story was to conceal his escape to Hong Kong, where the operation to steal U.S. secrets would be brought to fruition.

Greenwald and Poitras also flew to Hong Kong. They were later joined by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks representative who works closely with Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder. Mr. Snowden reportedly brought the misappropriated data to Hong Kong on four laptops and a thumb drive. He gave some of the communications intelligence to Greenwald, who had arranged to publish it in the Guardian, and Snowden arranged to have Poitras make a video of him issuing a statement that would be released on the Guardian's website. At least 3 lawyers were retained In Hong Kong to deal with the authorities.

This orchestration did not occur in a vacuum. Airfares, hotel bills and other expenses over this period had to be paid. A safe house had to be secured in Hong Kong. Lawyers had to be retained, and safe passage to Moscow—a trip on which Snowden was accompanied by WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison—had to be organized.

The world now knows that the misappropriation of U.S. communications intelligence began appearing in the Guardian and other publications on June 5, and Snowden left Hong Kong for the Moscow airport on June 21. A question that remains to be answered: Who, if anyone, aided and abetted this well-planned theft of U.S. secrets?

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-82464880264129869272013-06-03T12:22:00.001-04:002013-06-03T12:22:10.519-04:00The Five Best Books on Unsolved Crime

The Money Changers

By Charles Raw (1992)
1. One of the greatest unsolved crimes of the modern era proceeds from the bizarre hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982 of "God's banker," Roberto Calvi, so called because he invested the Vatican's funds. The Vatican bank later discovered a hole in its accounts that swallowed up a large part of the Vatican's available funds. As the investigation into Calvi's death deepened, it opened a Pandora's box of machinations involving the Banco Ambrosiano, which Calvi headed; a Masonic Lodge in Italy that was allegedly planning a coup d'état; the Mafia and even the CIA. Enter Charles Raw, a star reporter on the (London) Sunday Times. He devoted more than nine years untangling the threads, following a trail that led him to anonymous corporations in Latin America and Europe, and revealed that nearly a quarter of a billion dollars had been siphoned from accounts controlled by the Vatican. Even without solving the crime, Raw provides a fascinating tour of the offshore banking world and a surfeit of individuals with a plausible motive for murder. In doing so, he demonstrates that an unsolved crime can offer an extraordinary education in the dark side of finance.
Blood and Fire
By John Marquis (2005)

2. Murder can be an especially murky business when it involves a member of the royal family. During World War II, Britain sent the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated as king, to the Bahamas, partly out of concern over his connections in Germany. There he was made governor-general and befriended Harry Oakes, a gold miner who was by far the richest man in the Bahamas. When, on the night of July 7, 1943, Oakes was murdered in his bed, the duke moved to stifle the case by imposing press censorship and by bringing in two unsavory police detectives from Miami. The investigators proceeded to frame Oakes's son-in-law, an innocent man who was ultimately acquitted. That left an unsolved crime for local newspaperman John Marquis to write this superb book about. Marquis brilliantly reconstructs the murder, the investigation and the royal coverup. He makes a powerful case that the Duke of Windsor had to close the case quickly to prevent the FBI from uncovering his own involvement in Oakes's illicit money transfers. It would have made a great plot for a James Bond novel, but, in Marquis's skillful hands, it makes an even better nonfiction thriller.

Blood on the Snow
By Jan Bondeson (2005)

3. On Feb. 28, 1986, at 11:21 p.m., Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was fatally shot while walking toward a Stockholm subway station. Other than his wife, who was also wounded, there were no witnesses. The assassin jogged away, and the murder weapon was never found. A somewhat deranged homeless man was convicted of the crime but later acquitted for lack of physical evidence. With the case remaining open, no fewer than 130 people falsely confessed (a phenomenon that turns out to be anything but rare in such cases). Jan Bondeson, a doctor, scientist and investigator of unsolved mysteries, has written an extraordinarily penetrating book on the case, complete with a vivid minute-by-minute account of the crime as well as a detailed description of the failed police investigation and, best of all, a keen analysis of the byzantine political and financial intrigues in which Palme had been involved.

White Mischief
By James Fox (1982)
4. As in the best crime fiction, James Fox masterfully illuminates not only a crime but also the social milieu in which it occurred. On Jan. 24, 1941, the 22nd Earl of Erroll was found shot to death in his Buick on a lonely road in the British colony of Kenya. No weapon was recovered, and no one was found who saw the shooting. The prime suspect, Sir Jock Delves Broughton, was assumed to have a motive because he had been cuckolded by the earl. He was arrested and tried but acquitted for lack of evidence. Fox, schooled in investigative reporting at the (London) Sunday Times, opens "White Mischief" à la Agatha Christie, by noting that "there were many people in Kenya who had a motive for killing Erroll, and many who had the opportunity that night." He then uses the earl's murder as a vehicle for exploring the philandering, debauchery, adultery and other intrigues of the wealthy, titled colonials known as the "Happy Valley set." Though he doesn't solve the Erroll's crime, he brilliantly chronicles the decline and fall of this upper-class society. As in fiction, this story of wife-swapping, drug parties and betrayals can have only one ending—a murder.
Jack the Ripper—CSI: Whitechapel
By Paul Begg and John Bennett (2012)
5. Over 100 books have been written about Jack the Ripper, even though there is not a shred of evidence identifying the man who murdered several London women in 1888. Indeed, much of the lore about him, including his name, is likely fictitious, the products of a circulation war among the British tabloids. (Editors were not above generating scoops by publishing, if not writing, hoax letters about Jack.) Nor was there any physical evidence, since when the attacks occurred, London police were not yet using forensic tools such as fingerprint, blood and hair identification. All that is really known as fact is that six or seven London prostitutes were brutally killed in a similar manner in the Whitechapel area. Paul Begg and John Bennett's book greatly clarifies the mystery with a detailed reconstruction of each murder, featuring both photographs and computer-generated renderings of the historic crime scenes. Begg, a "Ripperologist" for more than 40 years, and Bennett, a researcher in the history of the East End of London, bring new life to what may be the ultimate cold case.

A version of this article appeared June 1, 2013, on page C10 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Edward Jay Epstein.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-44232712998834477432013-04-30T14:19:00.000-04:002013-04-30T14:19:15.157-04:00Is Amanda Knox Innocent?

Amanda Knox, even while appearing on television in America to promote her book "Waiting To Be Heard," is facing yet another murder trial in Italy for a crime --- of which, in 2011, after spending 4 years in prison, she was found innocent by an Italian appeals court. In throwing out the murder case against her, that court declared that the prosecution's charges were "not corroborated by any objective element of evidence." The revival of the baseless charges against Knox, and the tabloid frenzy it will no doubt stoke, proceeds from a five-year-long judicial circus in Italy.

Amanda Knox's ordeal began on November 1, 2007 with the brutal murder of Meredith Kercher, a twenty-one-year-old British exchange student, in a groundfloor flat in a cottage shared by four young women in Perugia, Italy. When police arrived the next morning, they found Kercher's body with several knife wounds, her clothing strewn around, and a broken window. They did not find a murder weapon. It was a holiday weekend; the seven other tenants of the cottage– including four men in the basement flat– all claimed to have been away on the night of the murder, including one other exchange student who was there when the police arrived: Amanda Knox. Knox, an angel-faced twenty-year-old student from Seattle, Washington, told police that she had spent the night at the home of her new boyfriend Raphaele Sollecito. Sollecito, who was standing with her, confirmed her alibi.

While the police investigators had no immediate witnesses to the murder and no murder weapon, they had a blood-stained bedroom in which the coroner determined that the victim was sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. This crime scene was crucial to solving the case since as the great French criminologist Edmond Locard suggested nearly a century ago, even the most careful criminal is likely to leave behind a hair, clothing fiber, a fingerprint or other trace of himself or herself. The crime scene in

Perugia contained more than enough such clues fully to identify the assailant. There were fourteen identifiable fingerprints in the room, a palm print on the blood-stained pillow under the victim's body, a sneaker print in the blood on the floor. DNA of a person other than Sollecito or any other tenant was found inside Kercher's vagina and on her purse. (Kercher's money was missing from that purse.) All those clues were marks of a single individual, though it took over a month to identify him. He was Rudy Guede, a twenty-year-old drifter from the Ivory Coast, who had broken into other homes in the area. Less than a week before the murder, Guede had even been temporarily detained by police in Milan for breaking into a nursery and stealing an eleven-inch kitchen knife.

The crime scene could establish from Guede's fingerprints that he had been inside the victim's room, from his DNA inside Kercher's vagina that he had had sexual contact with her, and from his sneaker impression found on the floor in her blood, his palm print found in her blood on the pillow, and his DNA found on her purse, that he had been in the room after she was stabbed. His description, moreover, fit that of a black man whom two witnesses had seen on the street running away from the cottage that night

Shortly after the murder, Guede had fled to Germany. It took more than a month to capture him. He was then extradited to Italy, tried, and in October of 2008, convicted of both the sexual assault upon Kercher and Kercher's murder.

The belated identification of a local burglar as the intruder and sexual assailant did not, however, end the ordeal of Amanda Knox. In the interim, the chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini had developed a theory that Knox - whom he described as a "she-devil" - had murdered her roommate and staged the evidence of a break-in. Knox had been imprisoned. For Mignini to abandon his "she-devil" theory, even after Guede's arrest, could prove an embarrassment. In an earlier, so-called "Monster of Florence case," he had already advanced a "Satanic theory" -- in which he attributed a string of unsolved murders to a Satanic cult who killed young women to use their body parts in black masses. His efforts in that pursuit of a non-existent cult resulted in him being criminally indicted for prosecutorial misconduct. (He was still under that indictment in 2007.) If his "she-devil" characterization of Knox were to fail as well, the prosecutor mght be further discredited.

The solution Mignini now found was to expand the "She-Devil" theory to include Guede, and to claim that Knox teamed up with Guede and her boyfriend to kill her flat-mate after a sex game.

The initial crime scene investigation had not produced a shred of evidence that Knox had been in the room at the time of the murder. Under interrogation, Knox had, however, lied to police. She had falsely told them that she had witnessed the Congolese-born owner of a nearby bar, Patrick Lumumba, murder Kercher. Knox had worked part-time for that bar. Lumumba denied having ever ben at the cottage. He was, nonetheless, arrested --- as were Knox and her boyfriend Sollecito. Lumumba was fortunate enough to have a solid alibi for the night of the murder. He was released. Knox repudiated her accusation. In her new book, "Waiting To Be Heard," she says the accusation was a pure fabrication, induced by police intimidation.

The false statement makes Knox a liar, but not at all, by implication, a murderer. A recent study of criminal justice in the US by law professor Brandon Garrett shows it is not uncommon for innocent people to lie under police pressure; indeed no fewer than forty people out of 250 who were convicted and later exonerated by DNA evidence, had falsely confessed to crimes they did not commit.

In Knox's case, Italian prosecutors in their subsequent investigation did find two bits of DNA that could support a conspiracy theory. The first was taken from a knife found in Sollecito's kitchen and matched Knox's DNA. The second bit of DNA was taken from Kercher's bra clasp and matched Sollecitto's DNA. As it turned out, both DNA samples were later invalidated by the appeals court because of a serious flaw: the police technician who examined them had failed to change her lab gloves between examining DNA samples, raising the possibility of cross-contamination. That "evidence" was invalidated, leaving none. In the absence of any physical evidence against them, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted by the appellate court.

In Italy, prosecutors have the right to appeal an acquittal. On March 25, 2013, at the request of the prosecutor, a Court of Cassation overturned the acquittal of Knox, ordering her to be tried again for a crime, which an appellate court had found there was absolutely no evidence that she committed. The United States Constitution, under its Double Jeopardy provisions, protects individuals from being retried for crimes of which they have been acquitted. It would be a violation of Knox's constitutional rights as a United States citizen to return her to Italy to be tried again. It would also, of course, be a travesty of justice for an Italian prosecutor to use her case as a means to revive a his reputation, as an advocate of Satanic and She-Devil conspiracy theory.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-82870271551363533472013-04-21T16:36:00.001-04:002013-04-21T16:46:06.502-04:00The Skeleton in the Papal Closet

On June 5th 2012, financial police in Piacenza, Italy searched the home of Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, who was the target of a money laundering investigation. Until just a few weeks earlier, he had headed the Pope's
secretive organization for dealing with the world of Mammon, called not without irony the "Institute for Works Religious," since it operates as an off-shore bank that is beyond the laws and regulations of Italy, the European Union, or any other authority. The raid uncovered a secret dossier that included 47 binders of Vatican documents, some of which exposed the Vatican Bank's loopholes for laundering money, arrangements for discreet accounts, and a note instructing that these documents be delivered to a designated lawyer and the media if anything foul happened to Tedeschi. As it was reported in the Italian press, he had feared for his life because some of the secret accounts serviced individuals in the Mafia and other criminal organizations.

Thirty years earlier, the body of Roberto Calvi, known as "God's Banker" because of his work for the Vatican bank, had been found hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London, a well-organized murder that was never solved. Also missing was a half-billion dollars siphoned through the Vatican bank to anonymous corporations owned by unknown parties.And no one found at that time the documents in Calvi's attaché case, which more than a half decade later were used to blackmail the Pope for $40 million. (Only $2 million was paid to the blackmailers by the Vatican Bank before the police moved in.)

The secret at the heart of these crimes, as it is brilliantly adumbrated in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather Part III , was and remains that the Vatican is desperately short of money, and has been for more than a century. It was so impoverished after the First World War that it borrowed $100,000 from a
bank to pay for the funeral of Pope Benedict XV. It had priceless art and church properties, but it could not sell them, nor did Dioceses abroad provide funds. All it had was the meager revenue from the sale of postage stamps and the annual Peter's Pence collection boxes in churches. In light of its dire financial situation, it had no choice but accept in 1929 a settlement with the government of Benito Mussolini, which provided it with $91.4 million in cash and bonds. That sum at prevailing interest rates did not
yield enough income to pay the Vatican's expenses, so, to get a high return, the Popes used the Vatican's sovereign status to set up a no-holds-barred offshore bank under the guise of the "Institute For Religious Work." As its President Archbishop Paul Marcinkus told me, after he moved to full-fledged money laundering in the Bahamas, "You can't run the church on Hail Marys alone." Unfortunately, in the banking scandal following the death of God's Banker, the Vatican bank lost a large part of its capital.

The new Pope Francis is clearly a well-intentioned man. But all his austerity measures, personnel changes, and efforts at transparency will do little to change its century-old insolvency problem. Now, more than ever, the Vatican needs money.
 Join me for an online video Q&A to discuss the skeletons in the papal closet– , including the murder of God's banker, the blackmailing of the Popes, the money laundering train, and the other Vatican scandals, this Tuesday, 5 PM EST via Shindig. It's free, but you need to register here.

You can also register here for my future online Q&As about DSK, Amanda Knox,Alexander Litvinenko, and the Lindbergh Kidnapping.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-42721239027171452112013-04-14T21:04:00.000-04:002013-04-14T21:04:04.429-04:00The Decapitation Plot

Today is the 148th anniversary of the death of Abraham Lincoln. As all the world knows by now, he was assassinated by the actor John Wilkes Booth, who was shot to death by federal troops Since then Booth has in the popular mind become the template for the crazed lone assassin. In fact, Booth was not the only assassin at work that night. Only a few minutes after Lincoln was shot at Ford's theater, Lewis Powell, and David Herold, arrived at the home of Secretary of State William Seward, who was in line after the Vice President to succeed Lincoln. Powell stabbed Seward (although he survived the assassination attempt.) Meanwhile, another would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, stalked Vice President Andrew Johnson with a loaded pistol, but failed to carry out the attack. These was a connection between these men: they had all been co-conspirators with Booth in a previous plot to waylay and abduct President Lincoln,

When Johnson succeeded Lincoln on April 15th as president, he had information that these assassins were part of a plot to decapitate the U.S. government, saying that there was "evidence in the Bureau of Military Justice that the atrocious murder of the late President, and the attempted assassination of the Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, were incited, concerted and procured," by Confederate leaders. To investigate the extent of the alleged conspiracy, he set up a Military Commission (similar to the Commissions President Obama plans to use to try the 911 conspirators.)

The Military Commission found that there was a conspiracy involving Booth, Powell, Herold, Atzerodt, and the latter three were executed, and warrants were issued for top officials of the Confederacy who had fled the country.

So Booth, though a lone gunman, was not a lone conspirator. How high up did the decapitation conspiracy go? In 1864, the Confederate Congress allocated five million dollars to finance covert actions by its secret service based in Canada. These operations included a plan to blow up the White House and one, which involved Booth, Powell, Herold, and Atzerodt to kidnap Lincoln. Further, the Military Commission found is a ciphered letter sent to Booth on October 13, 1864, asking whether Booth's "friends would be set to work as directed," but, it did not identify the task. So we do not know if Booth was authorized to upgrade the kidnap plot to an assassination plot, or if he recast on his own volition.

Historic research over the decades has provided intriguing clues, such as cash withdrawals from a Montreal bank account just prior to the assassination, but not conclusive proof of the involvement of Confederate intelligence officers. What is clear is that the assassination of Lincoln and attempts to assassinate Seward and Johnson, were part of a decapitation plot aimed at creating chaos in Washington D.C.

Please tune in to my video chat on the Booth conspiracy at 5 PM, Tuesday. April 16. You can participate in the Q&A via the incredible Shindig platform Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-17560208526412955822013-04-12T10:10:00.002-04:002013-04-12T10:10:52.137-04:00The Vulnerability of Loner Theories

Lets not assume that all high-profile crimes are solved, even if authorities say they are. Nor should we assume that "loners" are necessarily alone. See the televised conversation I had on April 7th in the Newseum in Washington D.C. with Shelby Coffee.Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-47902848917765621442013-03-26T15:07:00.000-04:002013-03-26T16:49:55.852-04:00The Bizarre Pursuit of Amanda Knox: Injustice Italian Style

 Yesterday the Court of Cassation, Italy's of highest court of appeal, overturned the acquittal of Amanda Knox. The comely Knox was a 20 year old American exchange student in Perugia when her British flat-mate Meredith Kercher was murdered in 2007. Initially, she was convicted on the basis of demonstrably flawed DNA evidence but then acquitted after the appeal court found that the charges against her were "not corroborated by any objective element of evidence." As I show in The Annals of Unsolved Crime, there was not a scintilla of evidence that placed her at the murder scene. Nor was there a witness. The case proceeded from a wild theory of prosecutor Giuliano Mignini that she was a "she devil". The same prosecutor had previously made a fool of himself in the s-called "Monster of Florence" case by blaming a non-existent satanic cult for the suicide of a Perugian doctor,and was now trying to redeem himself by spinning another Satanic cult crime.

To be sure. Amanda Knox, under unrelenting interrogation without a lawyer, had given a false statement, which she later fully repudiated. Making a false statement is not a rare phenomenon. Especially when the accused are denied lawyers. Brandon Garrett, a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia Law School, examined 250 cases of people convicted of crimes that DNA later proved they did not commit. No fewer than forty of these exonerated individuals had given a false confession to crimes they did not commit. The lesson Italy needs to learn is that interrogation without Miranda rights and adequate legal representation leads to false admissions. The absurdity in the Amanda Knox case is that the Italian prosecutors are now getting another chance to perpetuate their original miscarriage of justice. Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-51862414714700037882013-03-24T11:18:00.002-04:002013-03-24T11:21:46.502-04:00The Death of Boris Berezovsky

On March 23, 2013, Boris Berezovsky, the once powerful Russian oligarch who helped bring Vladimir Put to power, was found dead in home in Ascot, England, an as yet "unexplained death," according to British authorities.
 Some seven years earlier, on January 23, 2006, Berezovsky had been the toast of London, or Londongrad as he called it, holding his 60th black-tie birthday party at Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace. In the center of the room was an ice sculpture representing St. Basil's Cathedral on Red Square, coated with mounds of belugi caviar. At one table was Alexander Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, and Akhmed Zakayev. They all had been born in the former Soviet Union and they had all been in prison, and, under Berezovsky's aegis, they would engage in covert intelligence operations in Russia. Britain, and Spain. Berezovsky's stated goal was to overthrow the Putin regime, explaining in a 2007 interview with The Guardian,"It isn't possible to change this [Putin] regime through democratic means. There can be no change without force, pressure." Asked by the reporter if he was effectively fomenting a revolution, he said: "You are absolutely correct." Ten months later, these men, and Berezovsky's most private office, would be exposed to the rare radioactive isotope, Polonium-210, that had been smuggled into London. Despite a surfeit of speculation, there is no satisfactory explanation how the Polonium 210, which can be used as a trigger in an early stage nuclear weapon, got to London. For my take on this mystery, based on my extensive interviews in Moscow and London, see "The Case of The Radioactive Corpse" in my book The Annals of Unsolved Crimes.Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-13098764834563566772013-03-14T11:14:00.001-04:002013-03-14T11:16:32.173-04:00The Perils of Confirmation Bias

In writing my new book The Annals of Unsolved Crime, I learned that even the most well-intentioned investigations are vulnerable to what social scientists call "confirmation bias." This phenomenon helps explains why criminal investigators tend more readily to accept evidence that confirms their initial working hypothesis and hold in abeyance evidence that undermines it. While nowadays neuroscientists are actually able to observe such cognitive dissonance at work inside the brain with MRI scans, it has been long understood by philosophers. Francis Bacon summed it up eloquently four centuries ago when he wrote in Novum Organum that "The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside or rejects." Such confirmation bias limits even the most exhaustive investigations backed by all the resources of a powerful government, as I found in my re-examinations of inquiries into the Anthrax attack on America, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the JFK assassination. It also accounts for why in my view some of history's most intriguing mysteries remain unsolved.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-12914469497527035902013-01-15T11:27:00.000-05:002013-01-15T11:27:57.457-05:00The Brilliant Invention of the Golden Globes If the Golden Globes infomercial did not exist, NBC might have had to invent it to compete with ABC's Oscar Awards. Fortunately, for NBC, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), an otherwise obscure group, had invented this award-ceremony in 1944 during a free lunch for its members in the 20th Century Fox commissary. Although its dozen or so "members" were mainly war refugees in LA. The German occupation of their homelands had made most of them correspondents without a country, but they loved movies. , Twentieth-Century Fox's ingenious studio head Darryl F. Zanuck instantly saw that this ragtag group offered another highly-valued product for Hollywood: awards for studio movies. Since the Academy of Arts & Sciences had passed over his studio's "Song Of Bernadette" for the Oscar in 1943, why not accept the "Best Picture" award-- as well as Best Director" and Best Actress-- from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association? So, with a little largesse from the studios, another annual Award ceremony-- and opportunity for placement of the ultimate product, movie stars-- was born.

In short order,the Hollywood Foreign Press Association came up with a slew of other awards that appealed to studio chiefs, such as "Best Film for Promoting International Good Will," "Best Film Promoting International Understanding," "Best Non-Professional Acting," "Hollywood Citizen Award," "Ambassador of Good Will," and a special award for "Furthering the Influence of the Screen" (which went to the Hindustani version of Disney's Bambi.) With them, it managed to promote free dinners for its members at celebrity hangouts including Ciro's, the Coconut Grove and the polo lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

For a while, it was run by Swedish twin brothers; Gustav and Bertil Unger, who were tap dancers. Gustave wore his monocle in his right eye, Bertil in his left, and one consideration in picking winners was who they could get to show up.

But despite the fun, the enterprising group only began to make real money when Ted Turner elected to televise the Golden Globe in the 1980s. Since few stars could resist the ego gratification that came with an award, they provided free talent. The show was taken over by NBC in 1996, which paid the HFPA roughly $3 million a year for the broadcast rights.

Nowadays it is of no matter that the 82 members who vote the awards are mostly free-lance writers and photographers with day jobs or that they have little, if any, connection with the Hollywood community. As the Hollywood Reporter observed "The studios couldn't care less whether the awards are decided by isolated Benedictine monks in the Himalayas or angels on high, at least not since the Globes have evolved into a tremendous marketing tool." As such, it offer scripted speeches by stars, promotional clips from movies, and nostalgic eulogies to some 20 million viewers. And by this time the value of public self-congratulation has become so inculcated in the Hollywood culture that one producer complained to me, "These ceremonies have taken over our social life. Almost every week we get into our formal gear, push through a gauntlet of paparazzi to get to some ballroom, give ourselves awards for everything from movies to lifetime achievements, and then applaud ourselves." Nevertheless, Hollywood's star troopers suited up last night for yet another black-tie award ceremonies, NBC got its high ratings, the media could report, as if it was a news event that Social Network, won best movie, and Hollywood got yet another infomercial

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-29164952670955306092012-11-24T09:34:00.001-05:002012-11-25T09:14:27.040-05:00The CIA's Great Gatsby: Edwin P. Wilson

Edwin P. Wilson was anything but inconspicuous in the nineteen-seventies. To many, he was Washington's answer to the Great Gatsby. His 2500-acre farm, bordering on the estate of Sen. John Warner and Elizabeth Taylor in the hunting country of Virginia, was the site of weekend barbecues that attracted senators, congressmen, admirals, generals, CIA officers and other high government officials. Wilson's three private planes were usually available to ferry VIPs wherever they wanted to go. He also had properties scattered around the world, an apartment in Geneva, a hunting lodge in England. a seaside villa in Libya and real estate in North Carolina, Lebanon and Mexico.

The cash seemed to flow as freely as the hospitality in Wilson's world. Paul Cyr, for example, who then worked for the Pentagon, came to the Wilson farm for turkey shoots and wound up accepting cash bribes for, among other things. allowing Wilson to plant bugs in the Army Materiel Command. (In 1982, Cyr pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from Wilson and agreed to cooperate with the federal prosecutors.) Another Wilson associate said he had seen cash distributed to a long list of congressmen and government officials, and that "whatever else you call it, blackmail was the name of the game." The same man maintained that Wilson had installed tape recorders in his Washington, D.C., office. in his limousines and at the farm, and added. "I assumed that almost everything said was recorded."

During these festive weekends. no one asked where or how Wilson got the money to play the Great Gatsby. But it certainly was not family money. Wilson came from an impoverished farm in Idaho and had to work as an attendant in a laundry room to put himself through college in Oregon. In 1952. he enlisted in the Marines, and in 1955, he joined the CIA as a S70-a-week security guard. For the next 16 years, he worked as an undercover agent. When he finally left the CIA in 1971, he was earning only $20,800 a year. From then until 1976, he went to work for a secret naval intelligence operation. called Task Force 157, for an equally modest salary. In an interview, Wilson explained that he had worked for the Navy for "patriotic reasons... not money." Yet, despite his meager salaries, Wilson amassed a fortune. Then, in 1980 he was indicted in a murky case involving international arms transfers.

Wilson's problems intensified in 1983 when three witnesses in the investigation died. Rafael Villaverde. a Cuban refugee. disappeared at sea after his speedboat exploded off the coast of Florida; Kevin Mulcahy. an electronics expert. was found dead in an isolated motel in the Shenandoah Valley-apparently a victim of exposure; and Waldo Dubberstein, an archaeologist and expert on the Middle East, died of a shotgun blast to his head– a presumed suicide.

All three of the deceased had worked for the CIA and, in the mid 1970s. became involved in operations involving Wilson.

Villaverde, who had served the CIA as a saboteur in Cuba, was recruited by Wilson as a hired gun and promised a million dollars for an assassination in Egypt. Mulcahy, a CIA specialist in secret communications technology. was hired to supervise the smuggling of electronic and military equipment. Dubberstein, an ex-CIA man whose subsequent work for the Pentagon included compiling the daily military intelligence summary for the Secretary of

Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff— a position that gave him access to the ultra secret

Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the precise order of battle for nuclear war— was paid by Wilson to sell his country's secrets.

Assassin, smuggler and spy: Why had these men accepted such nefarious assignments?

The answer each gave was that he had been recruited by Wilson after he left the CIA in 1971 under the pretense that he was still a CIA executive,. In the espionage world. misrepresenting one's side or organization in order to get an opponent to cooperate is called a "false flag- recruitment. When the recruit realizes he has been duped, he was too far compromised to easily withdraw his cooperation.

According to IRS data released in July 1983, Wilson made at least $21.8 million from servicing Libya alone, Libya funneled this huge sum of money into Wilson's account in return for special equipment and personnel that could be used to implicate the CIA in Qaddafi's assassination plots and other conspiracies.

As it then turned out, Wilson artfully used the false flag trick for to penetrate deep inside the U.S. intelligence establishment. In addition to Villaverde, Mulcahy and Dubberstein, Wilson attracted to his false flag no fewer than three dozen intelligence and weapons specialists. including CIA officers on active duty. senior military officers and civilian weapons designers with top-secret clearances. Through these connections, he obtained secret CIA cables from the Far East, NSA computer procedures for detecting submarines and missile, assassination devices from CIA suppliers and exotic secret weapons from the Navy and CIA testing base at China Lake in California. Wilson also clandestinely exported to Libya all the components (including technicians and specially developed exploding plastics from the CIA) for manufacturing terrorist bombs disguised as ashtrays and other innocent looking objects. Even worse, the explosive in the ashtrays had distinctive characteristics and a 'signature' that could he traced back to, the CIA.

The damage Wilson has done to U.S. intelligence cannot be assessed merely in terms of stolen secrets and weapons technology. All its vaunted techniques of "quality control," including polygraph tests, failed to detect Wilson's recruitment of CIA personnel. At least two CIA officers on active duty moonlighted for Wilson (one of them used his CIA credentials to recruit an entire team of Green Berets for then Libyan dictator, Muammar Qaddafi). In addition. Wilson hired four part-time CIA contract employees and a dozen former CIA officers, many of whom still had CIA clearance and consulting status. Moreover, even after being fired from the CIA, Wilson maintained a close association with two of the agency's top executives-Thomas G. Clines, the director of training for the clandestine services, and Theodore G. Shackley, who held the No. 2 position in the espionage branch. Both of these men sat in on meetings that Wilson held with his operatives and weapon suppliers and, by doing so, helped further the illusion that his activities had the sanction of the CIA— an illusion crucial to keeping his false flag attractive.

Clines not only met with Wilson informally, but Wilson used his legal and office facilities to set up corporations for Clines' personal use, Clines had also been the control officer for one of the Cuban exiles whom Wilson recruited as an assassin. In reviewing the evidence in 1977, Adm. Stansfield Turner. then the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, concluded that Clines had been working "in collaboration" with Wilson, and permitted him to resign quietly from the agency. Subsequently, Wilson secretly funneled $500,000 from a bank in Geneva into one of the shell corporations, money which Clines used to finance deals to ship US arms to Egypt. (Clines repaid money after Wilson's indictment in 1980.)

Shackley had known Wilson and Clines since the early 1960s, when they had all worked on preparations for the invasion of Cuba. He explained during an internal investigation by the CIA that he had not wanted to be a captive of the CIA system, that Wilson had served as an outside contact. Yet, according to federal prosecutors who examined the CIA's files on Wilson, Shackley had not filed reports of his contacts with Wilson and his associates, nor had he recommended that they be debriefed by the CIA's domestic contacts office— the usual channel for such intelligence. Further, Shackley had intervened on Wilson's behalf within the intelligence community on at least two occasions and ridiculed Kevin Mulcahy as an "irrational, paranoid, alcoholic and unreliable informant," after Mulcahy reported some of Wilson's illicit deals to the FBI and CIA in 1976. The CIA's investigation failed to overcome the defenses of this Old Boy network: Indeed, even after Mulcahy informed on Wilson, CIA officers continued working for Wilson. So much for the idea of quality control.

In his defense, Wilson's attorneys argued that Wilson had in fact been working all along for the CIA. The U.S. Attorney E. Lawrence Barcella. however, refuted this defense claim by showing that Wilson was unable to provide any details of his relations with the agency, not even the obligatory cryptonym of his operation or the name of his case officer.

A federal court in Virginia convicted Wilson of exporting firearms to Libya without permission and sentence him to 10 years in 1983. He was then convicted in Texas of exporting explosives to Libya and sentenced to 17 years and, in New York, he was convicted him of attempted murder, criminal solicitation, obstruction of justice, tampering with witnesses, and retaliating against witnesses, and sentenced him to 25 years, to run consecutively with his Virginia and Texas sentence.

He spent the next 20 years in prison. Then, on October 29, 2003, Judge Lynn N. Hughes of Federal District Court in Texas threw out the 1983 conviction after finding that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony to undermine his defense. Judge Hughes found that the CIA claim that Wilson had not worked for the organization since his dismissal in 1971 had been undermined by a CIA memorandum indicating high officials in the CIA may have known of his recruitment activities. So how high did Wilson's liaisons penetrate the CIA? We will never know. Wilson, who died on September 10, 2012, took this secret to the grave, Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-9411737654569405492012-11-14T11:31:00.001-05:002012-11-14T17:37:58.125-05:00Ten Missing Dates in the Petraeus Penetration Scandal

Before we can walk the cat back, and establish a chronology of a possible penetration, we need to answer the following ten questions?

1. When and where did the sexual liaison between Paula Broadwell begin? Was it before, during, or after the FBI conducted its mandatory background check on General Petraeus in 2011?

2. When did General Petraeus, who was authorized to access top secret documents, and Paula Broadwell, collaborate to set up anonymous gmail accounts and exchange passwords to them? For what period, were these "drop boxes" to evade a US intelligence surveillance of internet providers through the device of storing drafts of unsent emails?

3. It is reported that Paula Broadwell, a former military intelligence officer, under pseudonym "KelleyPatrol" sent an email to General John Allen, the former deputy to General Petraeus in Tampa, warning him that Gilberte Khawam Kelley was a "seductress." If so, what date was this warning to General Allen sent?

4. It is further reported General Allen, who exchanged 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails with Kelley, told Kelley of the anonymous warning. If so, what date did this occur?

5. It is reported Kelley consulted a friend in the Tampa FBI field office in May 2012, What was exact date? Was it after she received news of the warning from General Allen?

6. When did the FBI determine "drop boxes" were being used by Paula Broadwell?

7. The FBI reportedly obtained a warrant by showing show probable cause of a crime to search the anonymous accounts. If this was a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant, what crime did the FBI allege it was investigating? What date did it obtained this warrant?

8. When was General Petraeus told by FBI it was investigating anonymous gmail accounts? Was it done through the FBI liaison with the CIA?

9. When did FBI determine Paula Broadwell was in possession of classified date on her commuter?

10. It is reported that General Petraeus told Paula Broadwell to stop sending anonymous letters, If so, was it after he learned of the FBI investigation? In any case, when did General Petraeus and Paula Broadwell last communicate?

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-17011493814598636912012-10-13T11:40:00.002-04:002012-10-13T11:40:56.073-04:00The Assassination Rhumba

A half-century ago, the Cuban missile crises began. On October 16, 1962, President John F. Kennedy learned that the Soviet Union was secretly installing missiles in Castro's cuba. He responded by putting American forces on their highest state of alert and giving the Soviet Union an ultimatum: Remove the missiles or face nuclear war. Thirteen days later, the Soviet Union acquisced. The missiles were removed but Fidel Castro remained in power. JFK then decided to remove Castro by other means, a decision that resulted in 1963 in a deadly dance of assassination between the CIA and Castro's intelligence service. It ended on November 22, 1963. How did it play out– and back fire? See my book The Assassination RhumbaEdward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-37909120422509650362012-06-30T08:28:00.000-04:002012-06-30T08:29:21.979-04:00What Did Castro Know-- and When Did He Know It

In 1976 Thomas Mann, who had been the U.S. ambassador to Mexico in 1963, told me that he believed that there was "an indictable case" that Castro had been involved in the Kennedy assassination, but when he continued reporting this view in cables to the State Department, he was fired. Now there is a new book by Brian Latell, the CIA's former national intelligence officer for Latin America, that again raises the question: What did Castro know — and when did he know it — about the Kennedy assassination?

Prior to this book, here is what has been established. On November 22, 1963, there were actually two jackals on the prowl: one in Dallas, Texas, the other in Paris, France.
In Dallas that day, Lee Harvey Oswald, who previously had attempted to assassinate General Edwin Walker, was working under a false name at the Texas Book Depository, which overlooked the route that President John F. Kennedy would take that day. Oswald had arrived at work that morning with a package that, as the FBI lab would later establish, contained his rifle.
Less than two months earlier, Oswald, under his real identity, had gone to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City and met with Cuban officials. Even though the Cuban government did not then grant visas to individual American citizens who were not sponsored by government organizations, on October 15 his application was processed in Havana. On October 18, the Cuban foreign ministry notified the embassy in Mexico that it could issue Oswald a visa if he also obtained a Russian entry visa, so an exception was made in his case.

The jackal in Paris was Major Rolando Rubella who, as a close associate of Fidel Castro, was allowed to travel abroad for the Cuban government. What Castro supposedly did not know was that Cubela had been recruited by the CIA and given the code name AMLASH. His CIA mission would be to assassinate Castro. During the Collegiate Games in Porto Alegre, Brazil, that took place from September 5-8, 1963, he met with CIA case officer Nestor Sanchez and tentatively agreed to this mission. Although he had asked to meet with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the best the CIA could do was arrange a meeting in a safe house in Paris on October 29, 1963, with Desmond Fitzgerald, a high-ranking CIA officer, who identified himself as the personal representative of Robert Kennedy.

At this point, the jackal asked Fitzgerald to supply him with a high-powered rifle with telescopic sights that could be used to kill Castro from a distance and to insert an agreed-upon phrase in a speech President Kennedy would give in Miami. The phrase was inserted, thus confirming that the CIA had the backing of the President.
The next meeting took place in Paris on November 22 at the time that JFK's motorcade was moving past the Texas Book Depository. Instead of the requested rifle, the CIA offered Cubela a poison pen with a concealed syringe. In the midst of the meeting, the news arrived that Kennedy had been shot. Cubela returned to Cuba but never carried out the assassination assignment.

The burning issue for the CIA was whether Castro learned about this plot. It knew that Castro had intentionally revealed he knew about CIA support for an operation to eliminate him on September 7, 1963. It also knew that was the very day that the CIA was meeting with its jackal in Brazil.
Even more ominously, Castro chose a diplomatic reception at the Brazilian Embassy, which was Brazilian territory. At the reception, he went directly over to the US correspondent for the Associate Press, Daniel Harker, and told him, in an on-the-record interview, that "United States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe."

The timing and Brazilian connection were enough to convince James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's legendary counterintelligence chief, that the Cubela operation was "insecure." He warned Cubela's handlers that the fact that Cubela had refused the CIA request to take a lie detector examination made him suspect and recommended, without success, that the operation be ended.
The question of whether Cubela was a double agent persisted for three decades and was only answered when Miguel Mir, who served in Castro's security office from 1986 to 1992, defected. He told the CIA that he had personally reviewed Cubela's file, and it showed that Cubela was working as a double agent under the control of Cuban intelligence from the time when he allowed himself to be recruited in Brazil.
His real mission was to ascertain whether President Kennedy was behind the CIA plots — hence his request to meet with his brother and have words scripted by Cuban intelligence put in JFK's Miami speech. If so, Castro knew 1) CIA officers in Brazil were recruiting an assassin to kill him 2) the CIA was prepared to deliver an exotic assassination weapon, and 3) the CIA was supported by President Kennedy.

What Castro knew about Lee Harvey Oswald is less clear. During his stay in Mexico City between September 27 and October 2, 1963, Oswald made at least two visits to the Cuban Embassy. To convince the Cubans of his bona fides — and seriousness — he had prepared a 10-page dossier on himself, according to the testimony of his wife, Marina. This resume included photographs he had taken of General Walker's home just prior to Oswald's attempt to assassinate him with a high-powered rifle. So the Cubans could have known that Oswald was a potential assassin with a high-powered rifle.
When the Cuban Consul argued with him over the requisites he would need for a Cuban visa, Oswald reportedly made claims about services he might perform for the Cuban cause. According to the 2009 book Brothers in Arms: The Kennedys, the Castros, and the Politics of Murder, by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton, Oswald then met with at least one Cuban intelligence officer outside the embassy. Whatever was said in or outside the embassy, Oswald's file, presumably containing this information, was sent to Havana in support of his application, which was conditionally granted.
Five months after the assassination, Castro told Jack Childs, a courier for the Communist Party USA, that Oswald had shouted in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico that he was going to kill Kennedy. Unknown to Castro, Childs was working as an informant for the FBI and duly reported his conversation with Castro to US intelligence.

While Castro's statement coincided with what other witnesses in the embassy claimed to have overheard, it was not evidence Castro had prior knowledge. He could have been briefed on Oswald's file after the assassination. But if this threat was in Oswald's file, why was Oswald's visa approved?

Brian Latell now addresses this question in Castro's Secrets: The CIA and Cuba's Intelligence Machine. He reveals that Florentino Aspillaga, who defected from Cuban intelligence in 1987, and whom he interviewed, told the CIA that just hours before Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, he had received an extraordinary order from the high command of Cuban intelligence when he was in charge of the communications unit located near Castro's compound.
Up until then, his unit had focused its antennae on Miami to monitor clandestine radio transmissions from anti-Castro groups. But now he was instructed to redirect all his antennae to Texas and report immediately any transmissions of interest. He assumed from his conversations with his superiors that they had been desperately seeking a transmission from Texas. Latell deduces from this shift that Cuban intelligence had prior knowledge of the Kennedy assassination.
Such a conclusion, however, requires a leap about the purpose of the shift. It is possible that it was not related to Oswald or the Kennedy assassination. Cuban intelligence may merely have been awaiting a burst transmission from an asset in Texas who had no connection with Oswald. Until we have further information about the activities of Cuban intelligence on November 22, 1963, the antennae shift, along with the visa approval, will remain a central part of the mystery

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-57195683403417485602012-05-17T11:27:00.004-04:002012-05-17T11:33:02.806-04:00How Crazy Is Wall Street

The New York Times published an article on May 14, 2012 concerning the question of whether the rich, from a moral standpoint, are good or bad. The story reported that"A recent study found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are "clinical psychopaths" and that they exhibit an "unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation." The vivid term "clinical psychopath" brings to mind the berserk buzz-saw wielding investment banker played by Christian Bale in the film "American Psycho." Since some 3.9 million people work in the financial services industry, a clinically-diagnosed horde of lunatics numbering almost 400,000 people would certainly be a matter of public concern, though it might only confirm some journalist's view of American capitalism.

It is fair to ask what is the provenance of this incredible"study." The New York Times cites its source as a March 12, 2011 story in THIS WEEK, which attributes the psychopath data to an estimate made by free-lance writer Sherree DeCovny in CFA Magazine, in an article entitled "The Financial Psychopath Next Door." She wrote that "studies conducted by Canadian forensic psychologist Robert Hare indicate that about 1 percent of the general population can be categorized as psychopathic, but the prevalence rate in the financial services industry is 10 percent." The problem here is that Hare never conducted a clinical study of the financial service industry, and never did a research that 10 percent of its members were psychopaths. John Grohol, the editor of World of Psychology, after the publication of DeCovny's article, asked Hare about the putative study. Hare told him, "I don't know who threw out the 10% but it certainly did not come from me or my colleagues." The closest he came to such a claim was in a research paper he co-authored that analyzed the responses submitted by 203 corporate professionals from seven companies, none of which were on Wall Street. Nor were these 203 people randomly selected . He found that the answers of only eight people– approximately 4 percent of the sample– indicated psychopathic tendencies on a scale he had devised. Even though this was not a clinical study, the responses of these eight people, who might have not even worked in financial services, were transformed via the blogospshere into a supposedly scientific finding noted in one of our most respected newspapers that one-tenth of those working on Wall Street are clinical psychopaths. As Ryan Holiday, author of "Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator," explained to me, "Headline-grabbing trend

manufacturing such as this now dominates the pseudo-news cycle on the Web." Welcome to the Internet, which is not known for its source-checking. Unfortunately It is then only a short leap to the so-called newspaper of record, which is happy to serve up to the public this non-existing study, which like much else that demonizes financiers as a scientific finding. As a result, we now have mad men of Wall Street running amok in the public imagination.
[This is now included in my ebook "Myths of The Media" http://amzn.to/KifIfM

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-46896686379569473692012-05-14T08:57:00.001-04:002012-05-14T08:57:31.911-04:00The DSK Affair: One Year Later

When Dominique Strauss-Kahn stepped out of the shower in his $3,000 a night suite at the Sofitel Hotel in New York one year ago May 14, he was fully on track to become the next President of France. As head of the International Monetary Fund he was now on his way meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel with a secret plan to avert the Greek default. He was nearly 20 points ahead of his rival President Nicolas Sarkozy in the public opinion polls. He had planned to announce his candidacy on June 15th, he told me when I interviewed him last month. He was confident, perhaps overconfident, he could not be stopped, expecting to be nominated by his Socialist Party, and then defeat Sarkozy.

These well-laid plans, as the whole world knows now, went astray moments after he stepped out of the bathroom naked and encountered a statuesque maid. The liaison that followed in the next seven minutes is currently the subject of a civil suite filed by that maid, Nafissatou Diallo, who claims he forced her to twice have oral sex; DSK claims that the sex was offered and consensual.

Four hours later he was arrested at JFK airport(after calling the Sofitel and reporting his location so it could return a missing cell phone.) In their rush to judgment, and after receiving information from an unidentified official in Paris, the prosecutors moved to deny DSK bail before they had gathered critical evidence, including key swipe and cell phone records. As a result, he was paraded before the cameras in a humiliating "perp walk," imprisoned in the Rikers Island jail for four days, placed on suicide watch, and then put under house arrest for more than a month. By this time, his presidential ambitions had been effectively destroyed.

Only one month after this spectacle, in late June, after the prosecutors got the key swipe records , did it become clear to them that Diallo, the only witness against DSK, had given false testimony under oath to the Grand Jury about the case itself. So the Grand Jury had indicted him on testimony from a single witness that was untrue. The prosecutors found her "credibility cannot stand the most basic evaluation" and that "the nature and number of [Diallo's] falsehoods leave us unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt." They further concluded that the medical evidence not only did not "prove or corroborate that their encounter was forcible or non-consensual," but it fails to corroborate certain aspects of [Diallo's] account." In an almost unprecedented move in a high profile case, the district attorney dropped all the charges.

When, I met with DSK in Paris this April, he could not easily accept that the destruction of his political career was merely the result of false testimony. By now he had considerable reason to believe that he had been under surveillance by his political opponents. This suspicion is consistent with the conclusion of investigative journalists Didier Hassoux, Christophe Labbé, and Olivia Recasens, who interviewed member of the French intelligence services DCRI for their 2012 book, The President's Spy. They reports that the DCRI not only had made DSK a target but also set up a "special group" that liased directly with Sarkozy's Élysée Palace. If so, DSK was likely being watched on his US trip that May. It would then be possible for these operatives, and their superiors in Paris to use whatever happened at the Sofitel to ruin his presidential ambitions.

There certainly were curious happening in that hotel suite, including reported interceptions of his emails, a missing Blackberry phone, and at least one unidentified person using someone else's key cart to enter his room just prior to his arrival. The suite had also been used for sexual liaisons before he checked in. The police lab analysis of the DNA evidence found precisely where Diallo said the attack occurred, revealing other stains there with DNA from at least seven other "unknown individuals. One stain visible in the carpeting contained a mixture of saliva and semen from three different people. Since no complaint was filed, these were presumable consensual liaisons.

Even if all the mysteries of the presidential suite have not been solved, it is now abundantly clear that if the district attorney's office had gathered more evidence before they arrested and imprisoned DSK, the outcome of the French election might well have had a different victor. But DSK's enemy Sarkozy has not emerged triumph. The ending here is more like a Shakespearean revenge tragedy in which, as the plot unfolds, everyone involved is ruined.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-62259585158317267592012-05-02T17:02:00.000-04:002012-05-03T18:17:55.136-04:00What I (Still) Don't Know About DSK

I have spent the last 10 months investigating the incident involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the Sofitel Hotel in New York-- an investigation which has resulted in my book Three Days In May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK. I have had considerable success obtaining CCTV surveillance tapes from around the hotel, the key swipe records for both the Presidential suite (2806) in which the incident took place and the room across the hall (2820), cell phone records, and police reports. But despite all my digging, I have been unable to answer 10 key questions about the downfall of DSK– nor was DSK able to shed light on them during my interview with him this April

1. Who put DSK under surveillance during his US trip in May 2011, and why? I am convinced that DSK was under surveillance both on his trip to Washington DC and New York. But I do not know who ordered the surveillance.. He had reportedly become the target of the DCRI, France's domestic intelligence service that March. That agency, according to my sources in US intelligence, certainly had the capability to track DSK in the US, but it also may have been handled by a free-lancer.

2. Why were not the hotel's key card records for room 2820 not provided to the New York prosecutors immediately? The records– which can be found here are the best evidence of what happened on the 28th floor, which is not covered by CCTV cameras. If they had been handed over immediately, the flaws in the maid, Nafissatou Diallo's story would have become instantly apparent to the prosecutors. They would have seen then, as they later reported in their motion for dismissal, her "credibility could not withstand the most basic evaluation." But who was responsible for this long delay?

3. Why did the maid enter DSK's suite twice without her cleaning equipment? The key card records indicate that the maid entered, left, and re-entered the president suite at 12:06 pm just before the sexual encounter took place. The maid told prosecutors her gear was inside room 2820, the room across the hall. DSK told me he was certain that she had no cleaning equipment. The hotel managers I interviewed all agreed a maid cannot clean a room without her equipment. Her first entry might have been to see if room was available for cleaning, but, why would she then leave and -re-enter without the gear she needed to clean the suite?

4. Who was in room 2820, across the hall from DSK's presidential suite? The Sofitel has
consistently refused to identify the mystery guest in room 2820, even though he could be an
important witness to the events on 14 May 2011. Hotel records show the unidentified man in room 2820 checked out at 11:37 am that morning, but I have been unable to get the CCTV footage showing the man checking out at 11:37 am.

5. Why did two hotel employees carry out a "victory dance"? The pair, who included the head engineer and a hotel security guard, displayed joy when the police were finally called. As CCTV video in loading dock shows, both men spoke for a moment, then high-fived each other, clapping their hands and briefly dancing. Other hotel managers I interviewed said calling the police would be viewed as a disaster in terms of the hotel's image. So what were these men celebrating?

6. Was DSK's IMF BlackBerry bugged? This was the device that he used it to send and receive both personal and work texts and emails. According to DSK, he received an alarming text message on this device on the morning of the encounter with the maid. A friend from Paris warned him that at least one private email he had recently sent from the IMF BlackBerry to his wife Anne Sinclair had been read by his political foes. He decided then to have the BlackBerry examined by an expert to see if it was bugged.

7. Why did that same IMF BlackBerry go missing? Later that day, after the sexual encounter with
Diallo and after his subsequent lunch with his daughter, as he was in a taxi headed for JFK airport, DSK realized the IMF BlackBerry was missing. What DSK did not know was that his phone had remained at the Sofitel after he left the hotel. BlackBerry records show that the device's GPS signal was still emanating from the Sofitel 23 minutes after DSK left, at 12.51pm. But at that moment it abruptly stopped sending out a signal, indicating either that the battery had run out or that the GPS had been intentionally disabled. As the phone was not found in the police search that afternoon, someone took it. But who–and why?

8. What restrained the hotel from calling 911 immediately after the incident? There was a gap of
about one hour before Sofitel security guards contacted police. The videos of the security area show repeated re-enactments. Had the maid been unwilling up until that time to go to the police, as a lawyer for the hotel group suggested. If so, who or what had persuaded Diallo to go to the authorities?

9. Who intervened from Paris with the New York district attorney's office on 15 May? The prosecutor Cyrus Vance was reportedly contacted by one or more French officials who provided information that appears to have been significant in persuading New York courts to refuse him bail and keep him in prison, further damaging his public reputation. Who were these officials, and why did they intervene in a way that hastened DSK's downfall.

10. Who else had sexual liaisons in that same suite? No one doubts DSK had a sexual liaison with the maid. DNA testing showed his semen mixed with her saliva. But they were not the only ones having them. When the police lab examined the carpet in the section of corridor near the bathroom, precisely where she said she had spat, it found semen stains from other individuals, including one stain containing a mixture of one person's saliva mixed with the semen from three other people. In all, the identified semen or saliva mixed with semen from seven unknown individuals, all the engagements taking place in this same small area. (Other areas in the suite were not examined) Since this evidence would not be washed away by multiple room cleanings, the conclusion of forensic experts was that they had occurred only a short time before the suite was rented to DSK. But the key card records I obtained for the suite, unlike those of 2820, do not extend before the day DSK arrived. I was therefore unable to ascertain how, when, or why these 7 unknown individuals got access to the suite.

Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-40591413386654469722012-04-18T16:15:00.000-04:002012-04-19T16:23:39.249-04:00Three Days In May

My book will be published April 29.Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-9267885.post-47031424212081148942011-11-01T17:13:00.001-04:002013-02-19T18:11:44.672-05:00Jobs vs. Milken

Despite the current hagiography of Steve Jobs and the demonization of Mike Milken, Milken's revolution of corporate finance is far more important for the US economy than Job's cool designs for Apple. See my Milken excerpt <http: pmm0lk="" scr.bi="">(From my Money Demons.)</http:>Edward Jay Epsteinhttp://email@example.com