James Jesus Angleton, CIA Counterintelligence Chief was the master of sowing disinformation and confusion.
His plots were ridiculously complex—if you had a chart of the deceptions it would look like a bowl of spaghetti.
While they were mostly used to confuse foreign adversaries they were also employed in the JFK assassination and related events.
Tools in the toolkit included:
—Fake people—sometimes not even good lookalikes. The most famous one was the laughable “Oswald in Mexico”.
—Fake witnesses just making up lies
—Controlled journalists or writers cranking out more lies
—Diversion and distraction. The facts could be correct but designed to draw attention away from data that needed to be hidden.
—Name calling—weaponized the “conspiracy theory” term. It had been around for a long time but exploded in the mass media after the JFK assassination.
—Patsy creation, training, monitoring and control. (Training = teaching a few Marines Russian as one example.)
—Fake evidence—guns, ammunition, fingerprints, and of course document forgeries.
—Fake politics—have patsy hand out leaflets, order literature, write letters to leave a “trail” that looked they had certain political views.