Treason For My Daily Bread

Treason for My Daily Bread [1] is a spy thriller written by William Graham Stanton about a man named Mikhail Mikhailovich Lebedev, who became involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Background

The original idea for the book was the brain child of the late Tom Todd, a publisher based in Guernsey, UK. The book was launched on the proposition that Todd had met Lebedev, who was stateless and destitute in Beirut at the end of the 1960s. In this account Lebedev sells Todd a manuscript written in German which is the account of his life, his connections with Martin Bormann in Argentina and his involvement in Kennedy’s assassination. Both this account and the character of Lebedev himself are pure fiction. The only factual part of this account is that Todd approached Stanton to write the book.

Production of the Novel

The book itself was meticulously researched. Todd gathered together anything and everything he could find on the assassination, on Martin Bormann, and on espionage, and passed them onto Stanton who wrote a novel against these facts. The product was a book that passed as a factual account, in much the same way as The Day of The Jackal had. Todd and Stanton had hoped to create some controversy and attract interest from the film industry. By the mid seventies there was little interest in the project, and eventually in 1977 Todd published the book from his own publishing house, Vallancey International. The book sold a limited number of copies on both sides of the Atlantic.

JFK Assassination Conspiracy Theory

At the time they published the book, neither Todd nor Stanton had any notion of the impact, the Internet would have in inflating conspiracies, or that Lebedev’s account of events would become widely quoted as supporting evidence to a number of alternative accounts to the Warren Commission. Although some of the accounts are clearly fanciful, there were occasions when respectable journalists were beguiled by the presentation of the book, viewed it as a historical account, and cited it as evidence[2][3] &.[4] A respected journalist, the late Mae Brussell, believed the book to be a genuine autobiography and used it as a source for a piece suggesting Nazi involvement in the assassination directed by Martin Bormann.[5] This final assertion was fatally compromised in 1998 by the conclusive DNA evidence on a body found in 1972 near Lehrter Bahnhof in Berlin that Bormann did not escape from Berlin in 1945.

References

  1. ↑ Mikhail Lebedev edited by W G Stanton (1977). "Treason For My Daily Bread". Vallancey Press (F.H.Books Limited), Guernsey, British Isles ISBN 0-905589-00-9. Retrieved 2007-10-02.
  2. ↑ Anonymous. "The Reason Why". Retrieved 2011-08-27.
  3. ↑ Unknown. "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination". The Conspiracy Theory Research List. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
  4. ↑ Anastase Vonsiatsky (2003-12-21). "Mae Brussell and Bill Turner ID'd Morris and Willoughby". History KB. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
  5. ↑ Mae Brussell. "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination". Deep Politics Forum. Retrieved 2011-08-27.
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