William Robert Plumlee, "Tosh" or Robert "Tosh" Plumlee - exposes Lee Harvey Oswald as CIA operative turned patsy

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiNckw0Whg4 part 1 STill tokin' podcast

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGj_s3IQWZ0 part 2

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddAb5GHKJ-k Ciphered Past podcast

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87-eO2-W08I

CIA Insider Tosh Plumlee: The "Abort Mission" & The Secret School of Illusionary Warfare

CIA Contract Pilot Attended the School of Illusionary Warfare with Lee Harvey Oswald in ‘58 TrineDay Books releases memoire of Robert "Tosh" Plumlee, Deep Cover, Shallow Graves, a covert contract pilot who claims to have participated in numerous clandestine U.S. intelligence operations beginning in the early 1950s and continuing through the Cold War. The book combines autobiography, political history, and investigative narrative centered on Plumlee’s involvement in covert aviation missions linked to U.S. intelligence agencies, anti-Castro Cuban operations, organized crime figures, and eventually the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. According to former CIA officer and co-author of the book Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti, The School of Illusionary Warfare was considered a top-secret government blacksite. It was located on an old World War II submarine base on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and run by the Office of Naval Intelligence, the oldest intelligence organization in the United States. Marchetti wrote that no one outside of a tight circle of instructors and recruits even knew about its existence. The School of Illusionary Warfare was an offshoot of MK-Ultra and used the techniques developed by director Sidney Gottlieb to create a new type of soldier – a super soldier, if you will, who was mentally strong and psychologically prepared to fight the new brain warfare through a combination of techniques known as psych ops. CIA contact pilot William “Tosh” Plumlee in his new book Deep Cover Shallow Graves describes how he attend the School of Illusionary in the summer of 1958 with fifty-four other students including a young operative named Lee Harvey Oswald. “All of us in my class were young, naive, patriotic and the product of broken homes. In other words, we were impressionable,” he reports. While stationed in Miami and flying weapons for the CIA to supply Fidel Castro and his rebels in the mountains Cuba, Plumlee was approached by CIA official Wild Bill Harvey and told to attend the school. He was later introduced to another CIA officer named George Joannides who was running the psychology warfare program taught at Nags Head – a program designed by the infamous Sidney Gottlieb, director of the MK-Ultra Program under CIA director Allen Dulles. Dulles and Gottlieb both believed there were ways to influence and control the human mind that could lead to an advantage over our Soviet enemies in the Cold War. On April 10, 1953 Allen Dulles described the impetus behind the psychological warfare program in a speech to the alumni of Princeton University. “In the past few years we have become accustomed to hearing much about the battle for men’s minds – the war of ideologies,” he said. “I wonder, however, whether we clearly perceive the magnitude of the problem, whether we realize how sinister the battle for men’s minds has become in Soviet hands. We might call it, in its new form, ‘brain warfare.’” Three weeks later as part of what Dulles referred to as “brain warfare” he approved MK-Ultra, a top-secret CIA program to control the human mind via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. The Nag Head Casino and two bungalows served as classrooms when Plumlee attended the School of Illusionary Warfare. Psychological programming was the main objective at Nags Head. It was performed (or inflicted) on recruits who were taught how to use to it control other people. They learned how to infiltrate a foreign country and capture a radio station to use it to broadcast propaganda. They were taught that if they could control what was communicated to a population, they could control their thinking and their actions. According to Plumlee they also learned that if they lied well enough, people would start to believe them. Some Illusionary War training took place at another secret ONI-CIA base 150 miles northwest of Nags Head known as Point Harvey along the Albemarle Sound. Back then it was the site of hardcore MK-Ultra drug experiments. The base was also used to train assassins and was where the 1stDemotions Section and the 101st Airborne Division – known as the Filthy Thirteen – trained during World War II. The Dirty Thirteen was the inspiration for the hit movie The Dirty Dozen starring Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson and Jim Brown. Students were tested for abilities like remote viewing, the ability to plant an idea in a subject’s mind and predicting future events. Those who showed aptitude in those areas were selected for further training. They were taught techniques to influence a subject’s decision-making. Instructors used sublimation to communicate directly to students’ subconscious minds. According to Plumlee, they were hypnotized regularly. While under hypnosis they were programmed with instructions – like, never compromise a mission; complete your objective; yours is not to reason why, it is simply to do, or die; the mission is more important than your life. As the 55 students progressed with the training, they were separated into specialized groups. Students who went into MK-Ultra were given drugs like LSD to manipulate their mental states, break down their conscious minds and program their unconscious minds to perform specific tasks. Plumlee contends that some of them later became assassins and were dispatched to places like Haight Ashbury in San Francisco and Vietnam. In Lee Harvey Oswald’s case, he was placed in advance Russian studies and was being groomed to defect to the Soviet Union with another eight to ten other recruits, This is from an interview former CIA officer Victor Marchetti did with author Anthony Summers in the late ‘70s: At the time, in 1959, the United States was having real difficulty in acquiring information out of the Soviet Union; the technical systems had, of course, not developed to the point that they are at today, and we were resorting to all sorts of activities. One of these activities was an ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) program which involved three dozen, maybe forty, young men who were made to appear disenchanted, poor, American youths who had become turned off and wanted to see what communism was all about. Some of these people lasted only a few weeks. They were sent into the Soviet Union, or into eastern Europe, with the specific intention the Soviets would pick them up and “double” them if they suspected them of being US agents, or recruit them as KGB

After completing the eight-week course, Plumlee ran into Oswald several other times before Oswald was arrested in Dallas and later killed. He saw him in early 1959 while Plumlee was taking a jungle warfare course in Honolulu. His cover was that he was a flight instructor for Hickam Aeroservice. Nights in Honolulu, Plumlee frequented the Shell Bar on Waikiki Boulevard where all the second lieutenant trainees hung out. One night he walked in and saw Oswald sitting there with some other young military-looking guys dressed in civilian clothes. Lee and Plumlee acknowledged one another, and one of the guys in Oswald’s group told him that they were about to take a ship to return to Atsugi Naval Airbase in Japan. There Oswald continued radar training at the U-2 base before defecting to the Soviet Union in October 1959. The hope was, according to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti, that the KGB would try to turn Oswald into an agent, which would give the CIA valuable penetration into the KGB. But things didn’t go as planned. According to KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, instead of recruiting Oswald as an agent, the Russians viewed him with suspicion and sent him to Minsk in Byelorussia to work as a lathe factory making televisions and radios. There in March 1961, he met a pretty nineteen-year-old pharmacy student named Marina Prusakova and they married six weeks later. Tosh Plumlee ran into Oswald again in the spring of 1963 after Oswald had returned to the US and was living in Dallas. Plumlee remembered that he had just finished flying mobsters Johnny Roselli and John Martino from Houston to Galveston. His next trip was Houston to Dallas to coordinate arms shipments for the anti-Castro rebels. He met Oswald sometime in the month of April at a CIA safehouse run Alpha 66 member Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberrio, which stood directly behind an apartment Lee and his family were renting on 214 W. Neely Street in a section of Dallas known as Oak Cliff. According to real estate records, from March 2nd to April 24th, 1963, Oswald lived upstairs with Marina and their baby daughter, June, paying $60 per month, plus utilities. It was there in the backyard eight months before the Kennedy assassination where Oswald allegedly persuaded Marina to snap three photos of him posing proudly with the Italian WWII military surplus Mannlicher-Carcano rifle and scope he had just purchased for $21.45 from a Chicago mail order company. It’s the same rifle that was later found on the Sixth Floor of the Dallas Book Depository Building minutes after the assassination. When Plumlee saw Lee at the safehouse, he assumed Lee had some sort of relationship with the anti-Castro Cubans. The two men recognized each other from Nags Head and talked briefly about where they had been and what they had been involved in. Plumlee reports that they had maybe three conversations over the course of the next two months at various CIA safehouses in the Dallas area, including one on Beckley Avenue, one near Sunset High School and another on Hallendale. There was no doubt in Plumlee’s mind that Oswald was an operative, either for the CIA or military intelligence. As operatives, they knew not to discuss operations, personal information or politics. Plumlee learned later that among the things Lee was doing was serving as a confidential informer for the FBI, which was trying to gain information on the anti-Castro Cuban’s activities. The FBI suspected that the Cubans were involved in stealing weapons from the National Guard Armory at Dallas Love Field. Also involved in the anti-Castro gunrunning operation was a mobster and strip club owner named Jack Ruby. Once, Oswald traced a .30 caliber machine gun that had been stolen from the National Guard Armory to a pawn shop near a CIA safehouse on Sunset Boulevard near Sunset High School run by Alpha 66 member Cecil Hernandez. When Oswald passed this information to the FBI, he was paid $50. Otherwise, Oswald struck Plumlee as something of a loner, meaning that he didn’t hang out with a lot of people. Nor did he frequent bars like the Cubans. Plumlee also sensed that he and Marina had a strained relationship. Some nights he could hear them shouting at one another. The only time Plumlee saw Marina was when she and Lee were having a loud argument on the balcony of the Nealy Street apartment they were renting. He watched then from the safehouse across the alley. The next time Plumlee saw Oswald was that night on TV after he had been arrested as the lone suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Already, the FBI was putting out the story that he was a lone nut who had killed the president in a desperate bid for fame. Plumlee suspected something much more sinister was at foot. He also believed Lee was truthful in his assertion to the press that he was “just a patsy.” Lee was being held in a cell at Dallas Police Department and Dallas Municipal headquarters at 2014 Main Street which is crudely joined to a newer annex that shares the underground parking lot where Oswald would be gunned down by bar owner Jack Ruby two days later. On the fifth floor of the Municipal Building is the location of the jail cell where Oswald and, later, Ruby were confined. On the third-floor are the corridors and detective offices where Oswald underwent twelve hours of interrogation and later took part in an impromptu press conference where he denied any involvement in the president’s assassination. The Municipal Building is also where Oswald requested that the operator place two calls to phone numbers in North Carolina the night before he was killed. Around a quarter to ten Alveeta A. Treon arrived for her shift at the telephone switchboard. Treon was there to relieve her co-worker, Louise Swinney, who had been given orders by their supervisor to assist two men in listening to a call that would come through their switchboard. Treon assumed the men were Secret Service. She suspected that Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin who was being held there, would be making another call. He had already phoned his Russian wife, Marina, and an ACLU lawyer in New York. This call was treated differently. Oswald rang the switchboard at a quarter till 11, Dallas Time. Swinney took the call and scribbled Oswald’s information as the two self-proclaimed Secret Service men listened in. “I was dumbfounded at what happened next,” Treon later told a Senate investigator. “Swinney told (Oswald, ‘I’m sorry, the number doesn’t answer.’ Swinney then unplugged and disconnected Oswald without ever really trying to put the call through.

Afterward, Swinney tore the sheet from her notepad and threw it into the trash. When her shift ended, she left. Treon retrieved the wadded piece of paper from the trash and copied the information onto a standard long-distance telephone call slip to save as a souvenir. The slip reveals that Oswald had given Treon two phone numbers and a name associated with one of them – “John Hurt” and “Raleigh N.C.”  A decade later independent researcher Michael Canfield secured a copy of the slip, while conducting research for his book Coup d’Etat in America. When Canfield called and spoke to John Hurt of Raleigh, NC, Hurt said he didn’t know Oswald, but revealed, “I was in the counterintelligence corps in the Army during World War II.” In an interview with JFK researcher and university dean Walter Proctor, Victor Marchetti – the 14-year CIA veteran who had served as executive assistant to Deputy Director Richard Helms – revealed that in calling Hurt, Oswald was clearly following standard procedure for a CIA asset under duress. “[Oswald] was probably calling his cut-out. He was calling somebody who could put him in touch with his case officer,” Marchetti told Proctor. “He couldn’t go beyond that person. There’s no way he could. He just had to depend on this person to say, ‘OK, I’ll deliver the message.’ Now, if the cut-out has already been alerted to cut him off and ignore him, then …”  “Marchetti was absolutely correct,” Plumlee reports.  “As an operative that’s exactly the same procedure I would have followed.”  But Marchetti, Proctor, Canfield and others all seemed to have forgotten the second number Oswald was trying to reach that night. It belonged to CIA operative Edward Gibbons Moore II, who was the manager of the Nags Head Casino. The casino in the ‘50s and ‘60s was operating as a CIA cut-out base. Says Plumlee, “All of us operatives who were trained at the School of Illusionary Warfare had that number and knew to call Moore if we drank too much and got arrested or had another kind of run-in with law enforcement. We’d call Ed Moore and he would arrange to have the problem taken care of.” Oswald was trying to enlist Moore’s help the night before he died, but the call was never placed. The two men posing as Secret Service agents made sure of that.  The Nags Head casino was later used to house Cuban survivors of the Bay of Pigs. In the ‘70s when Moore was called to testify before the Church Committee and started to spill the beans about Nags Head and his activities, the government accused and found him guilty of trying sell documents to the Soviet Union. (I refer you to the May 5, 1977 article by Robert Meyers in the Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1977/05/06/moore-guilty-of-trying-to-sell-ciafiles/e7987987-a9f0-434f-b8ce-55601f215fa9/) It was their way of discrediting Moore.  Plumlee says, “I have no doubt that Lee was innocent. He never tried to kill President Kennedy. He was a young patriot like me from a broken family who was recruited and trained to complete clandestine missions for the government.”  He continues, “Like one of our instructors at Nags Head told me in the summer of ’58, ‘You’re not intelligent enough to be agents, or you wouldn’t be in this unit. You’re nothing but cannon fodder.’”

Deep Cover, Shallow Graves by Robert "Tosh" Plumlee with Ralph Pezzullo Available for pre-order, out April 14, 2026 at: https://trineday.com/collections/upcoming-releases/products/deep-cover-shallow-graves