Monday, 15 August 2011 19:46

JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 5

Written by

The total and utter failure in UFO circles to acknowledge that counter-intelligence is in itself designed to mislead and misrepresent.



(with Larry Hancock)

Part 5: A Very Sad Attempt at Making a Rabbit-Hole

“There's a Starman waiting in the sky. He’d like to come and meet us. But he thinks he'd blow our minds.”

David Bowie, 1972: ‘Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’


A Declaration of Speculation

Try as I might, I feel the final stages of this journey are a bit of a let down. Part of the problem is that I’m now delving into an area a number of people far more knowledgeable and interested than myself have discussed and researched at length. The other part is that even after their excellent work uncovering the scammers involved as seen here at VISUP there is still a lot of speculation floating around. Indeed speculation is the key word herein. The problem I have had with making anything more out of the contacts and higher ups in the infamous Aviary rumour mill is that the ‘Aviary’ represent a nebulous mismatch of half-truths and myths self-fueled by those who were directly involved in it like Robert Collins and or ‘Rick’ Doty (the more well known of the two). The MJ-12 documents were indeed a counter intelligence operation. Counter intelligence operations are specifically designed to sow confusion and create what in intelligence terms is ‘a legend’, a background story; and part of the MJ-12 legend was the Aviary .


Unstable and Unusable?

In light of Timothy Cooper’s antics, I can understand the opposition to what I am about to propose about Bob Collins (or Condor if you go by his Aviary namesake). Don Ecker commented that he found Collins to be more or less ‘unhinged’ in his Paracast interview with Robert Hastings (Don Ecker, Paracast May 24th 2009). Though Ecker never actually said it, the inference could well be “How could such an individual/s be in control or involved in any ongoing operation.” In fact this seems to be a debate many people have about myriad individuals within the UFO sphere, and the arguments seem to be rather black and white. But when dealing in counter intelligence operations, to steal a line from Jim Garrison, “black is white, and white is black” and thus it’s all very much a shade of grey.

In Preamble I we saw that the CIA, well before any official involvement in disinformation campaigns, had clearly made use of the mass media via the manipulation of figures like Adamski and Crisman, and quite likely assets like Arthur Young (and lord knows how many others); plus the willingness of media assets like Ray Palmer and C.D. Jackson to cooperate. Yet it is not well understood that deceptive and boisterous individuals with minimal credibility like Palmer, Crisman, and Adamski make for excellent foils in counter intelligence. As do more gentle individuals like Young.

It’s often forgotten (or not realized) that US intelligence agencies like the CIA backed killers like Osama Bin Laden, and Mobutu Sese Seko. And their allies (namely Britain’s MI5 and Israel’s Mossad) aided the rise of ‘Mr Charisma’ himself Idi Amin to advance the cause of Democracy in their respective Third World enclaves. If this is all recalled, we see that American intelligence uses what we would term ‘unhinged’ individuals as a matter of fact.

But these guys of course were higher functioning individuals of the ‘unhinged’ variety, right? The agents themselves are ‘straight as arrows’. Well, forget about that one as well. If you have read anything by Jon Ronson or watched his documentaries based on his book Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats (not the awful movie), or anything from Adam Curtis, one would see things aren’t all what they are cracked up to be in the world of special agents. If Joseph Trento ever did anything good in his examinations of the Agency, his exposure of the high incidence of burn out, stress, and alcoholism rife in cold war era intelligence work was a valuable contribution. For example: Bill Harvey, James Angleton, Dave Morales, and David Phillips.

The careers of legendary CIA operatives like Bill Harvey, James Angleton, Dave Morales and David Phillips were all blighted with alcohol. These were likely the controllers of slightly unhinged, kooky, yet ultimately patriotic figures like, say Dave Ferrie, Guy Banister, and Clay Shaw, and more loud mouthed individuals like Gerry Hemming, Frank Sturgis and Fred Crisman. This is all apropos of our disucssion of the lineage of Timothy Cooper.


That Crazy Cat Cooper?

Timothy Cooper’s father Harry did photographic work for the USAF, which may have been of a classified (non UFO) nature. And he could well have indirectly brought his son Tim to the attention of Air Force Intelligence (Larry Hancock email 2011). Though this may not be significant, it’s a possible toe hold. Doty himself had rather strong familial connections to intelligence work via his father and his uncle as well.

The real question is this: Did Cooper Jr., like say Kerry Thornley, then don a madman's cap as a sort of cover for himself to fit in with the scenery? Despite what the Woods said in their misguided defence of Cooper, he clearly lied about being involved with other people. In the same way he also lied to Bob Hastings about Friedman and the Woods forcing the documents upon him, not to mention how he received them. In an odd twist, Cooper’s claims against Friedman correspond to a baseless accusation that Friedman himself had cooked up the first batch of documents some months later .

It appears that if Timmy has his eyes on the prize for such rubbish then he’s not the wayward Paul Benewitz type duped by others (like Bill Moore), an image he played up to at the end. The fact that Cooper has dropped out of all circulation nowadays is also an indication that he had enough sense to get the ‘hell out of Dodge’. His phony pronouncements and profligate lying certainly make him worthy of being co-opted or exploited for any counter intelligence disinformation operation going - whichever way one looks at it.


Captain Condor and his Chain of Command

Now what cannot be doubted in all of this is that Robert Collins was involved in a US intelligence disinformation operation hawking false documents pertaining to relate to
MJ-12 in the eighties. What’s never been sufficiently asked till now is what role Collins played in the JFK-MJ-12 palava, because I think there’s a very good chance that he was the hidden hand on the ground floor behind it. It also appears that he’s been higher up the chain of command than he has let on. Also, far too many people seem to ignore the subject of rank and the formal command structure when dealing with Collins and Doty.

In Gregory Bishop’s Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, National Security, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth Collins is briefly described as an employee in the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency). Now that makes quite an impression doesn’t it? (Bishop, p. 212) However, Larry Hancock pointed out to me in the blurb to his book Exempt from Disclosure that Collins is merely described as:

Robert M. Collins, Author, Writer, Consultant and Editor: A former Air Force Intelligence Officer (Chief Analyst in theoretical Physics) at the Foreign Technology Division (FTD, Air Force Achievement Award)

Now I’m more than inclined to go along with a reliable source like Bishop than Collins. But in saying that, there are some complications worth mentioning that may trip people up. Collins’ close pal Doty, spent some time in Europe and during his time there, according to Gus Russo, was known to no lesser than ‘two’ former Directors of the CIA before their ascensions. Now while Russo never actually says Doty was or is involved with the CIA, it’s odd that he never bothered to ask if his good pal Collins had links to the agency as well. But as we’ll see in my next part, this type of selective investigation is standard for Russo.

I really can’t be bothered in entering into any debate about how high up Collins went. That’s just adding fuel to the fire he himself has lit. But let’s clarify the point that Doty was, and has always been, Collins’ underling (a fact a number of people struggle greatly with). Doty has never been regarded as anything more than a ‘Sergeant’ in the AFOSI (Airforce Office of Special Investigations); more commonly referred to as OSI. MUFON themselves investigated the group and named ‘Doty’ as Collins middleman . The insinuation here seems to be that Collins could have been the Colonel to whom Doty deferred. Now that’s a step up from Captain - if indeed it is Collins, because whatever rank Collins truly held, be it Captain, or a Colonel in the DIA or OSI or whether these were covers for some contract CIA roles, if we put this into the era of the JFK-MJ-12 documents, we can see that Collins is Alpha, Doty is Beta, Cooper is Gamma.


JFK-MJ-12 Connections between Collins, Cooper and Doty

What the following is largely based upon is the work of Robert Hastings. Hastings had Collins and his pals in his crosshairs a long time before anybody else did. Thus I advise anybody interested in Hastings and Don Ecker’s comments on Collins to listen to this interview.

After trying to foist more fake MJ-12 documents on the terminally trusting ‘JFK expert’ Linda Moulton Howe, circa 1987, Collins remarked that he had been in touch with a certain Bill Moore for years. Now if one checks in on any history of MJ-12, be it Coppens, or more advanced treatises like Bishop’s or Pilkington’s, you will see how important a role Moore played in the original MJ-12 setups. Clearly, Collins was likely more involved in a ‘behind the scenes capacity’ with the first batch of MJ-12 documents than has been reported.

But I’m going to stop right there with Collins and the first batch. As I have said, this whole Aviary thing is a mess no matter how you view it, and I don’t want to add any more to the gibberish Collins and Co. have spouted. If Collins was deeply involved at this stage (and in all probability he was) he was still answerable to some other feathered friends higher up in the DIA (and possibly CIA), food chain. The problem is, of course, that there are a number of different conclusions out there and it’s a very real mess. And not just for researchers. It’s actually very hard to discern who is in control of much of the modern day disinformation concerning UFO’s and MJ-12. As Leon Davidson pointed out long before any rifts became apparent there was, and remains, very real tension between the CIA and the DIA, with organisations like the USAF and their intelligence network caught up in the middle of it all. (This point will be discussed briefly at the end of the next section.)

What is of interest to the ‘right here and now’ however is that according to Hastings, Collins was at Kirtland AFB by 1987 working in the Sandia National Laboratory. Doty by all accounts was there also. Collins left what seems his cover job in 1988, the very same year Doty also left the Air Force. If you recall from Parts 2 and 3, Doty and Collins left at the very same time that Cooper’s interest in the Kennedy assassination bloomed with his supposed FOIA requests.

While this is all rather neat and tidy, there is a problem with creating any kind of linkage between Collins and Cooper prior to or shortly after JFK. Simply put folks, there is no evidence of contact until around 1999-2000, when Collins was openly promoting Cooper’s musings about Monroe’s DOD ID card. By this stage Cooper certainly knew Collins and indeed seemed very familiar with him. Collins critical analysis of Marrs conversation with the dubious Bill Holden about UFO’s also indicates an interest in Kennedy on his own behalf, not to mention the links to JFK assassination stuff on one of his webpages. Indeed, it also seems that Cooper was very familiar with the legend of the ‘Aviary’.

For instance, Cooper has written elsewhere:

When I learned about Bill Moore and his “aviary” sources who were really OSI agents. Unlike yourself and others Moore was taken in by EBE’s.

Now Extra Biological Entities’ aside, if someone knows about Moore, and the Aviary then the likelihood of them not hearing the names of Collins and Doty being associated with it by, say 2000, are next to impossible. Or are we to believe that the ‘OSI agents’ in truck with Moore were not Collins and Doty and that Cooper boldly investigated this as well? While one could say that Cooper or someone else could have picked up on this information via the internet. It’s also very safe to say that Cooper surely knew whom he was dealing with at this stage. Because within months of S-1’s warning about Moore he was busy ‘horsing around’ with Collins with the aforementioned Monroe DOD ID. Which is ironic, because it’s right back with dear Norma Jean, where we find them all.


Doty and Dolan do Hollywood

The addition of JFK to the entire quagmire is totally tangential, based on the political agendas (and hugely paranoid world views) of some of those initially promoting it (Ride a Pale Horse) and separately on JFK's market value - when you throw JFK into the mix of anything you reach out to a brand new audience. Take a look at the genesis of the TV series Dark Skies to appreciate that (total garbage but really fun TV).
(Larry Hancock 2001)

The key link to Cooper and Collins is, of course, their misunderstood pal Dick Doty’s sauntering around Hollywood. If Doty knew of or was promoting the second batch of papers as early as, say, 1992 or 1993, then there’s a fair chance that it was he, rather than the more reclusive Cooper (who seemed to have emerged in public much later) who helped sell the Monroe-JFK-MJ-12 line to people like Milo Speriglio. But most importantly people like Chris Carter of the X Files who he apparently was a consultant for between 1994-1996 (Greg Bishop, Project Beta, page 83), and Richard Dolan’s buddy Bryce Zabel of Dark Skies, whom I believe was also in contact with Doty at the time.

If so, just how much of a conspirahypocrite is Dolan? Well check this out for size - in Michael R. Schuyler’s article Richard Dolan's Tinfoil Hat; a General Systems Theory of Conspiracy Dolan already has a curious history with Doty:

He tells the story of Doty recruiting William Moore into intelligence work against Paul Bennewitz, and comes to the conclusion that Doty was the likely origin of the MJ-12 documents sent to Moore and Jaime Shandera. In other words, he exposes Doty as a disinformation agent……….Yet a few pages later Dolan uses Doty as a source for a story about a briefing to Bush 1 relating to plans for UFO disclosure. (p. 565) He has a nice little disclaimer at the beginning of the story, but then tells it with the same relish as every other story. You’re left scratching your head saying, “Wait, I thought Doty was one of the Bad Guys!

Fret not Mike. There’s solid evidence that Doty was indeed good pals with Dolan’s buddy Bryce Zabel. According to Phil Coppens, dear old Richard Doty was an advisor on the show he produced Taken in 2002. Yes, Dolan and Zabel, like the Woods, are all connected up in the same foul smelling stench. This means, of course, there’s an extremely high chance that Doty would have been in contact with his old pal Collins ‘by proxy’ at this point, and considering Doty’s previous history with Moore and Benewitz, he didn’t just stumble over Cooper’s new documents, he was, to use an English phrase, ‘likely, well in on it’.

For the record I emailed both Dolan and Zabel asking about their relationship with Mr Doty and also challenging them to an organised debate between myself and Jim DiEugenio on Black Op Radio. Unsurprisingly these brave heroes of the truth never replied. Nor do Jim and I anticipate they ever will. The conveniant excuse will likely be that they are now too busy. Both are involved with a film called ‘Majic Men’ set for 2012. It will be fascinating too see whom the consultants for the show will be and whether they’ll be crass enough and try and once again tie the Kennedy assassination into this movie about Stanton Friedman and the race between himself and a rival to bust the story of Roswell. Needless too say I do hope concerned readers send them emails asking were and why they are hiding (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1719048/).

Another link which gives us a hint as to Collins hand in all of this is that from 1992 onwards James Angleton featured heavily in Cooper’s fantastical documentation. Word had it that Collins had actually edited Cooper’s bizarre Nexus Magazine article about Angleton. However this had been conveniently erased from all other internet postings of the article. Thus I despaired of finding it. That was until I happened upon the aptly named ‘Chemtrail Central’ forum (you can get the tone of the conversation). An individual called ‘nsasucks’ has put the entire article in a post dated the 2nd of May 2001 (http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000389-4.html). Near the top we can clearly see that underneath the embarrassing ‘majestictim’ email address is Collins editing credit. Indeed, thanks to Bob Hastings relentless pursuit of Cooper I can also go further with confirmations. In Cooper’s apochryphal letter to him in 2009 he mentions that in Collins woeful ‘Exempt from Disclosure’ that Collins had edited his Angleton, Nexus article used in the book.

My only inclusion in the book amounted to Collins taking a speculative piece I wrote for the internet back in 1999 about James Jesus Angleton, which he unilaterally edited into the book and was not a co-author of in any real sense.

But as we have seen previously, with Cooper’s goofy idea that a ‘Hebrew Bible’ was recovered from a crash site at White Sands, Angleton was clearly not the only ‘angle’ Cooper covered in Collins’ book. Furthermore, Hastings had not even asked Cooper if Collins was a co-author in any real sense. So why did a liar like Cooper even bring it up? When there is ample and overwhelming evidence that Collins had been involved with the article and Cooper prior to 2005 when his book was published. The inference is that Collins and Cooper did indeed co-author that particular Nexus article and likely the asinine Dulles one. Both the Angleton and Dulles articles were highly sympathetic to the two men. Indeed, Cooper and Collins seem to have gone so far as to make Angleton out to be a patsy of MJ-12:

On a final note, the legend of James Jesus Angleton and his "wilderness of mirrors", as he often referred to his daunting task of protecting vital state secrets, faded into obscurity on May 11, 1987. But the secret that went with him re-emerged almost precisely the day he died. Perhaps Jim was not the real bad guy in the counterintelligence game. Maybe he was its victim?

At the time of reading this, I naively thought the article was quite possibly the most bizarre Angleton disinformation I had ever read. That was until I came across a fantastic article on the ‘Reality Uncovered’ site describing how the Collins, Doty and Cooper fell in with an individual claiming to be the Grandson/Nephew (depending on the version you hear from them) of Jesus Angleton himself. In Collins’ book there is also a small tract explaining how the Miami Angleton’s father had worked for Jesus. The clincher is that this was the exact same job that Cooper’s father had also worked in. Their job was apparently attempting to teleport rats! This was apparently with Great Grand Daddy Angleton’s full knowledge.


Are they ‘Schill’ Working for US Intelligence?

As far as Collins involvement in officially sanctioned UFO-JFK disinfo today, though it goes against my better judgement, I’ll say ‘I agree’ with a number of commentators that’s probably not the case now. Collins was probably cut loose to do his own thing, quite likely at the same time that Cooper bailed on him and Doty, or even well before. Playing it even safer, Cooper continuing work with Doty, in the form of his book, was less part of an operation than a cashing in on the havoc they themselves had wreaked for the better part of thirty odd years together.

I want to reiterate the fact that I know perfectly well that Collins is ‘not the be all and end all’ of disinformation in the UFO nexus, and quite clearly in the first batch of MJ-12 documents in the eighties he had higher ups he was answerable to. Likely so in his foray into the Kennedy field. But let’s not assume that the same people behind his work in the eighties were actually involved in his second stint. If he were contracted out (and yes this does happen in intelligence circles) it’s likely he would have had a very different set of masters. But once again, this is where I’ll tread carefully. Without definitive proof of this at the present time one could just say ‘Collins and his cronies innocently collaborated together to cash in on the JFK buzz and conned a number of people’. But a critical link to Collins and his crew’s involvement in a broader agenda is the lack of investigation into the JFK-MJ-12 documents in the JFK zone itself, not to mention the lack of interest shown in discrediting them by old pals Gus Russo, John McAdams and Dave Perry.

Last modified on Sunday, 23 October 2016 17:59
Seamus Coogan

Seamus Coogan is one of a number of JFK assassination researchers hailing from New Zealand and Australia.  He has devoted considerable effort to ferreting out and exposing unfounded and sensationalistic or far-fetched conspiratorial hypotheses.  His most notable contributions include those on John Hankey's JFK II, on Alex Jones, and on the Majestic Papers.  He  has also reviewed numerous books for this site.

Find Us On ...

Sitemap

Please publish modules in offcanvas position.