Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Reviews of books treating the assassination of John F. Kennedy, its historical and political context and aftermath, and the investigations conducted.

  • Review of Greg Poulgrain’s JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia

    Review of Greg Poulgrain’s JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia

    “Dulles is a legendary figure, and it’s hard to operate with legendary figures.”

    -President Kennedy

    Let us state the preconditions for the drama that historian Greg Poulgrain is going to compose in his stellar volume, JFK vs Allen Dulles: Battleground Indonesia. Sukarno led Indonesia to independence against both the Dutch and the Japanese. After World War II, he became the first leader of an independent Indonesia. He then became one of the foremost spokesmen for the Non-Aligned Movement, that is, the Third World leaders who did not wish to get involved in American/Russian Cold War struggles but wished to navigate their own foreign policy choices free of those entanglements. Some of his partners in this enterprise were Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. In fact, the first meeting of this group was in Bandung, Indonesia in 1955.

    At the time Sukarno was leading this movement, the two men supervising American foreign policy were the Dulles brothers. John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. To put it mildly, they did not appreciate the attempts at neutralism in the Third World. (Robert Rakove, Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, pp. 10–11) They believed that there was no such thing as neutrality in what they cast as a rigid, dogmatic Cold War world outlook.

    Partly due to this, the CIA tried to overthrow Sukarno in 1958. At that time, this was perhaps the largest Agency operation ever. Ostensibly, it was not successful. And American participation in the attempt was exposed by the shooting down of CIA pilot Allen Pope. To put it gently, Sukarno did not appreciate what the Dulles brothers had tried to do. He also did not like the fact that the United States would not help him in his quest to attain West Irian from the Dutch. Sukarno thought that territory was entitled to Indonesia and should have been turned over at independence.

    Thus, another layer of intrigue is placed over the situation. As Poulgrain notes, Allen Dulles and the Dutch knew something about West Irian that Sukarno did not. In 1936, there had been a joint Dutch/American mountain expedition to the highest point in West Irian, this included Dutch geologist Jean Jaques Dozy. Dozy’s report was discovered in 1960 by Forbes Wilson of Freeport Sulphur. Wilson sponsored a second expedition. Both groups found out that there were immense deposits of gold, silver, and copper in the Carstensz Pyramid, in a place called the Ertsberg. Two miles away, in an alpine meadow, was another huge deposit in an area called the Grasberg. The combined value of the mineral resources in those two places staggered the imagination. To make just one statement about it: This was the largest repository of gold in the world at that time. And it is why the Dutch did not wish to give up the area. Allen Dulles was trying to find a way to let American interests exploit both the Ertsberg and the Grasberg.

    Besides Sukarno and Allen Dulles, the third major character involved in Poulgrain’s epic tragedy is John F. Kennedy, both as a senator and as president. In 1957, Kennedy made a speech on the floor of the Senate which startled the Dulles brothers, President Dwight Eisenhower, and Vice-President Richard Nixon. He made clear his disagreement with the administration over their support for France in its attempt to keep the North African colony of Algeria as part of the French empire. (Allen Nevins, editor, The Strategy of Peace, pp. 66–80) Kennedy opened that speech by saying that people around the world wanted to be independent and that the enemy of independence was imperialism. Kennedy was saying he understood that the era of European colonialism was ending and he was willing to side with the Third World nationalists in Algeria against the longtime American ally in Paris. Sukarno and the Non-Aligned Movement now had a potential ally in Kennedy. In the election of 1960, that potential was realized.

    When Kennedy took office, he arranged a deal. Sukarno would return Pope to the USA and Bobby Kennedy, along with diplomat Ellsworth Bunker, would convince the Dutch to give Sukarno West Irian. This was called the New York Agreement and it was signed at the United Nations in late summer of 1962. The Dutch were out of the picture concerning the Ertsberg, but Dulles still understood what the real situation was. Kennedy and Sukarno did not. With the assassination of Kennedy in 1963 and the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965, Dulles achieved his original goal for his backers, the Rockefellers. How those last two steps were achieved form the backbone of Poulgrain’s work, because they depict the triumph of both Dulles and Freeport Sulphur, which later became the giant mining conglomerate Freeport-McMoran. They also depict one of the most horrible of modern-day atrocities: the attempted extermination of the PKI, the Indonesian communist party, which resulted in the expulsion of Sukarno and the rise of the military dictatorship of General Suharto, who would rule Indonesia for three decades.

    [The above prologue was by James DiEugenio]

    It’s a rare thing when an author achieves a comprehensive and penetrating analysis of a long-forgotten historical episode, while delivering his story with a pace more apropos to a thriller novel than a groundbreaking addition to the historiography of the C.I.A. at mid-century. Dr. Greg Poulgrain’s sweeping and important book is one of the most exciting reads in recent memory—equal parts Indiana Jones, Ian Fleming novel, and geopolitical tour de force—with keen attention paid to the inner personalities of two of the most iconic figures of the 1960s, Allen Dulles and John F. Kennedy. We watch as they played their delicate chess game to determine the future of the Indonesian government; and, by extension, control of the nation’s vast offshore petroleum reserves, along with the largest gold deposit ever discovered in human history.

    Poulgrain’s book stands out for a number of reasons, not least for the flair he possesses as a stylist. Often books on subjects such as this plod through the historical data, citing numerous and turgid anecdotes and stenographic notes from dry briefings that largely put one to sleep. I’ve always found this unfortunate, as the real history of the C.I.A. during the 1960s contains the stuff of the greatest fiction, the greatest cinema. And Poulgrain seems to have noticed. While never shying away from the archives and the documented record, his achievement lies first in his framing of the chance 1936 discovery of the Ertsberg mother lode by a daring prospector working for a Dutch petroleum company as a dramatic hook. He then juxtaposes this earlier timeline against the colorful backdrop of the later power struggle playing out between a freshly elected President Kennedy and his soon to be nemesis, C.I.A. Director Allen Dulles, all the while filling in the relevant gaps to guide the reader through this powerful climactic showdown, which includes a chapter on UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold.

    Moreover, Poulgrain was able to meet with Jean-Jacques Dozy, the prospector who struck gold in 1936, as well as with key political figures relevant to the later political drama in Indonesia during the overthrow of Sukarno in 1965. He conducted a series of interviews from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. And he weaves together his personal notes from these interviews to enrich and enliven the story even further, lending a sort of murder-mystery air to the book in high fashion. How much gold was really in the Ertsberg? Were the explorer and his team complicit in the initial coverup? Who really held the keys to Indonesia’s future? Were internal forces and internecine Indonesian strife responsible for the fated events that unfolded over the next three decades? Or were Dulles and friends in Langley solely to blame for another bloody coup by proxy? Such are the questions the author explores in his fine work.

    A special notice should go to the portrayal of the night of September 30, 1965. That evening may rank with the Night of the Long Knives as to pure treachery and diabolical aim. Many historical commentators have tried to figure out what really happened on that evening, which created such a reversal of Indonesian history. Due to the interviews he did with some of the survivors of that dark episode, Poulgrain gives us the best explication ever written unraveling that mystery. The book is worth reading just for that chapter. (See Chapter 7)

    As most readers of this genre understand by now, Allen Dulles represented an iconic, often sinister, and looming figure in the grand tapestry of mid-century America. From his longstanding ties to the giant law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, to his role in the creation of the Treaty of Versailles, to his vast Rolodex of spies, assassins and international contacts, to his close friendships and admiration for postwar Nazi war criminals like Reinhard Gehlen, he presents an impenetrable and often sociopathic personality, someone who, in his own words, enjoyed the sound of a rat’s neck breaking as the spring trap snapped shut.

    Driven in large part by pure imperialistic greed and deception, and at other times by what appears to be a genuine aversion to anything resembling socialism, collectivism, or non-alignment with U.S. anti-communism, Dulles was the perfect foil to the pro-Third World, pro-decolonization John F. Kennedy. Three years prior to his close victory over Richard Nixon, Kennedy delivered impassioned speeches on the Senate floor, championing the freedom of the Algerian people against the French:

    I am concerned today that we are failing to meet the challenge of imperialism—on both counts—and thus failing in our responsibilities to the free world. (Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy in the Senate, Washington D.C., July 2, 1957, John F. Kennedy Library)

    Yet, in many ways, Sullivan and Cromwell was about imperialism. If one is representing the Rockefellers, as Allen Dulles was, then one is involved with an imperialistic system of beliefs. This ideological impasse between two irreconcilable worldviews serves as the tense thematic backdrop against which the book’s many detours add both color and historical perspective to the dramatic saga of the Indonesian archipelago at the beginning of the decolonization era. As Poulgrain notes, “Kennedy realized during his first year in office that much of the advice on Indonesia from DCI Dulles was premised on the belief that Sukarno’s leadership was Indonesia’s fatal flaw.” (JFK vs. Allen Dulles, p. 46)

    While most scholars seem to place the singular showdown between Dulles and Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs debacle—designed to fail by Dulles and associated C.I.A. cohorts in order to force Kennedy to commit U.S. carrier air support—Battleground Indonesia, the subtitle of Poulgrain’s book, presents a fascinating window into a largely overlooked, but critically important, episode in the Pacific. This episode would represent, along with the Congo Crisis, some of the last gasps of pure unfettered imperialism in its most crystalline form, a quixotic adventure involving obscure shell corporations operating illegally under C.I.A. protection, powerful moneyed interests from the shadow world, familiar names from the later Kennedy assassination plot like George de Mohrenschildt and L. Fletcher Prouty, and corrupt Indonesian officials and splinter groups with their own diverse interests. All of this played out under the wary eye of a sitting U.S. president who intimated that some of his closest intelligence advisors were obfuscating and distorting the situation to suit their own agendas. It is, at once, a tragic and incredible story that has been largely lost in the dizzying array of C.I.A. exploits the world over and, as Poulgrain observes, “into this matrix of intelligence entanglements, Kennedy proceeded unawares.” (JFK vs. Allen Dulles, p. 9)

    The attraction of this work also lies in another achievement that is often forgotten in books of the genre, namely, the personal touch. Frequently, Poulgrain plays the role—commandingly—of amateur psychologist and adds in important depth and essence to the characters involved in this grand undertaking to gain control of the Ertsberg and its associated billions of dollars of ore, to name but one of the numerous story arcs in JFK vs. Allen Dulles. Too often, we forget that human beings, no matter what their titles or powers, are still just that, human beings and, as such, are often fallible, naive, ruthless, proud, furtive, bold, corrupt, cowardly, impetuous, sanguinary, honorable, and countless other adjectives. They are rarely the simple paper cutouts in the annals of history in the extensive catalog of books attempting to detail their exploits.

    This book lives up to its title: JFK vs. Allen Dulles, while tying together a grand panoply of monied interests, international power players, secret agents, and heads of state, ultimately still reads like a battle of two central personalities: President John F. Kennedy, the fresh and enterprising ingenue, filled with a sincere conviction to deliver on his promises to liberate the oppressed people of the developing world—perhaps the last sitting president to legitimately champion the ostensible slogans of the United States overseas and at home—against the Old Guard hardline anti-Communist Director of Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles, Kennedy’s eventual nemesis and the likely architect of his untimely demise in the backseat of a limo in Dealey Plaza. It’s a brilliant dramatic conceit and, when combined with the copious and fresh source material and alluring insights of a first-rate researcher like Dr. Greg Poulgrain, makes for one of the best reads in its genre.

  • Alecia Long Lays an Egg

    Alecia Long Lays an Egg

    The Assassination Records Review Board did some good work in New Orleans. For one, they made available the Clay Shaw trial transcript, which made James Kirkwood’s book, American Grotesque, obsolete. Today, in these post ARRB days, with 2 million pages of declassified documents available, Kirkwood’s wildly biased book—towards the end he actually compared Garrison’s assistants to the guards at the Nazi death camps—is a museum piece. In 2021, any writer on the New Orleans scene has to tell the reader about what the ARRB record reveals about things like AMSPELL (CIA code name for the DRE, Student Revolutionary Directorate), about David Phillips and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), about CIA officer George Joannides, about Oswald’s false friend Kerry Thornley, etc. In fact, kennedysandking.com has led the way on many of these issues. (Click here for the FPCC and click here for Thornley)

    What makes Alecia Long’s book, Cruising for Conspirators, rather shocking is this: 23 years after the closing of the ARRB, she deals with none of these matters. Her book looks backward to Kirkwood—which means 1970. The ARRB uncovered many, many new documents from the FBI and CIA about the Crescent City and there were literally thousands of pages from Jim Garrison’s inquiry that finally entered the public domain. With all this new material now available, why would anyone—except maybe Paul Hoch—want to even pick up Kirkwood? But Long does something even worse. She uses Hugh Aynseworth. And while doing the latter, she does not tell the reader what these declassified documents reveal about the man. Namely that Aynseworth was a secret, and prolific, FBI informant on the JFK case.

    This serves as a good introduction for what is to follow.

    I

    Unlike what Long depicts, photographer Lyle Bonge told Romney Stubbs and myself in the mid-nineties that Shaw was actively involved in pursuing a writer to compose a book on his case. He first tried to get Bonge’s longtime friend, James Leo Herlihy, to do such a volume. Herlihy declined, but he told Shaw that he knew a young up-and-coming writer who would probably be willing to take the assignment. And that is how then novelist Kirkwood wrote his book. It was, for all intents and purposes, commissioned by Shaw. And this is why it has today, an almost ludicrous, impenetrable Maytag dryer spin to it.

    As opposed to what Long implies, Shaw was quite active in smearing Garrison, while portraying his indictment as completely unwarranted. He had previously gotten a friend of his to go to the FBI and spread rumors that somehow Garrison was involved in an approach to a 14-year-old boy. (FBI memo of March 16, 1967) This is most likely a reference to the so-called Bezou incident, which Long writes about. (Long, p. 178, all references to eBook version) Long says that the alleged episode at the New Orleans Athletic Club is shrouded because of grand jury secrecy. Not so. This reviewer talked to Bill Alford in his office back in 1994. Alford was the assistant DA who was running the grand jury at the time. As he related, Shaw’s lawyers had planted a ringer on the grand jury who would repeatedly bring this up. The grand jury chair said, fine, bring in the witness. No one showed. The pattern repeated itself twice more. Again, no one showed up. As Alford said to me, you can repeat this kind of stuff over and over, but if no one shows up what is one to make of it?

    And Shaw was not just on the offensive with the homophobic smear. He was also involved in witness harassment and obstruction of justice. Either Long did not read the following memo from Garrison’s files or she chose to ignore it. Nina Sulzer worked in the Sheriff’s Department and was a friend of Clay Shaw’s. In May of 1967, Sulzer entered the prison to talk to Vernon Bundy. During the preliminary hearing Bundy said that he had seen a man he identified as Shaw approach Oswald with an envelope in hand and leaflets in his pocket at the seawall near Lake Pontchartrain. Sulzer began talking to Bundy, telling him he was on the losing side and pointing out articles in magazines like Newsweek and Saturday Evening Post attacking Garrison. She was there for about twenty minutes working him over. She accused him of taking rewards and asked what they were doing for him. Bundy denied both charges and said, “There is no one doing nothing for me.” He then added, he did not want anyone doing anything for him. Sulzer then went further. She concluded by saying, “You’ll see, somebody will get you out there.” After this, Sulzer was tracked to a residence where Shaw was staying and spent about three hours with him. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 126–27) Because of the above, and much more, many of us are not predisposed to comparing Shaw with a suffering Jesus Christ, which, quite literally, Long does. (Long, p. 76)

    Quoting Shaw’s lawyers, she writes that somehow Garrison bartered for Bundy’s testimony by dropping narcotics charges against him which could have resulted in a five-year sentence. (Long, p. 118) This is contradicted by memos in Garrison’s files. His office contacted local narcotics officers. Bundy was in prison on a voluntary basis, in order to break his drug habit. The most serious crime he committed was breaking into cigarette machines. (Davy, p. 125; also 1995 interview with investigator Gary Raymond by the reviewer) Back then, a pack of cigarettes cost about 30 cents.

    But more importantly, this reviewer interviewed assistant DA John Volz in 1994. Volz was a skeptic on Garrison’s JFK case, but the DA assigned him to interview Bundy. Volz decided to test the witness. He asked him: When you picked up the leaflet that Shaw had dropped, what color was it? Bundy had a rather unusual reply: he said it was yellow. Volz was impressed by this reply, since he had checked some of the flyers distributed in New Orleans and some were yellow. After conducting the interview, this reviewer visited the Royal New Orleans Collection. In a glass case was one of the yellow flyers the authorities had collected. Long lists the Royal New Orleans Collection, today, called the Historic New Orleans Collection, in her bibliography.

    II

    But Long goes off the rails even before she gets to New Orleans. Somehow, she feels she has to pay lip service to the Warren Commission, so she describes Jack Ruby’s shooting of Oswald in about two paragraphs and calls him, “an eccentric local nightclub owner with a history of violent volatility…” (Long, p. 32) Well, I guess that’s one way to dispose of Mr. Ruby. Another way is to buy into his polygraph test for the Commission, which, no surprise, she does, even though the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and author Don Thomas, exposed that test as being so fundamentally flawed as to be worthless. (Long, p. 67 and Don Thomas, Hear No Evil, pp. 537–53)

    And she abides by this Commission standby: Lee Oswald, as a boy in New York, pulled a pocket knife on his stepbrother’s wife and threatened her. (Long, p. 33) Greg Parker did a nice job in casting doubts on this story and showing how it appears to have been created by the FBI with some witness coaching. (Parker, Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, pp. 129–35)

    But the above is just her warm up about Oswald. She mentions his days in the Civil Air Patrol—without bringing up David Ferrie. (Long, p. 34) That is quite a disappearing act, because many people who have written about Oswald consider his friendship with Ferrie to be a key event in his life. For instance, Greg Parker spends about seven pages on the topic. (Parker, pp. 223–29) And he describes the powerful influence that Ferrie had on some of his CAP students. With Oswald, this included an apparent charade: Ferrie masqueraded as a Marine Corps recruiter, in order to convince Oswald’s mother to have her son join the service before he was age eligible. (See Parker, pp. 232–33; Davy, p. 6)

    Long deals with Oswald’s entire military service in five lines. This allows her to skip over crucial issues. For instance, if Oswald was intent on joining the Marines, why was he writing letters to the Socialist Party of America? This was just two weeks before he enlisted. (Parker, p. 249) In that letter, Oswald said he was a Marxist and had been studying Marxist principles for over a year. Does Long know any students at LSU who studied Marxism and joined the Marines? To most objective observers, this double agent masquerade would suggest the influence of Ferrie. She also fails to bring up the military matters of his Russian language test and his association with the U2 spy plane. (Philip Melanson, Spy Saga, pp. 8–12) Was it just a coincidence that, when he left the service, he hightailed it to Russia and offered them radar secrets? (Melanson, p. 13)

    Long then spends all of one sentence on Oswald’s journey to and his stay in the USSR. This radical ellipsis allows her to avoid questions like: How did Oswald know that, in all of Europe, the city of Helsinki granted the fastest visas into Russia? Secondly, how did the impoverished Marine afford to stay in two five-star hotels when he got to Helsinki? (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, pp. 137–39)

    I could go on and on. My point is that Long seems intent on discounting or avoiding all the earmarks that, in the words of Senator Richard Schweiker, branded Oswald with the “fingerprints of intelligence.” (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, p. 192) This includes the fact that the KGB did not believe he was a genuine defector. And this is why they shipped him out of Moscow to Minsk and surrounded him with a ring of human and electronic surveillance. (DiEugenio, pp. 144–49) As John Newman will state in Oliver Stone’s upcoming JFK Revisited, Tennent Bagley, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer, agreed with the KGB on that. Upon Oswald’s return to Texas, the most influential figure for him was George DeMohrenschildt. And before George died, he admitted that he would never have befriended Oswald on his own. He was told to do so by the Dallas CIA station chief, J. Walton Moore. (DiEugenio, pp. 152–53)

    All of this is important information, and not just in understanding Oswald, but because it helps explain a fundamental paradox about Oswald’s life after he returned from the Soviet Union. One that Long does not in any way make explicit. Why, in 1962 and 1963, did the Warren Commission’s Marxist abide amidst two of the most right-wing communities in America? This would be, of course, the White Russians in Dallas/Fort Worth and the Cuban exiles in New Orleans. As many writers have shown—Phil Melanson, Jeff Morley, John Newman—both of these groups were tied in with the CIA and FBI. One example: when the wife of one of the White Russians saw the book Das Kapital at Oswald’s apartment; the couple called the FBI about it. The FBI told them not to worry, “Oswald was alright.” (Harold Weisberg, Whitewash II, p. 46)

    III

    Another character slighted by Long is Guy Banister. And, like many things in the book, this is weird. Why? Because back in May of 1989, in an interview with Dave Mendelsohn of Pacifica Radio, Jim Garrison said that, as far as the New Orleans aspect of the conspiracy went, Banister was the most important personage. The duality of the pinko Marine Oswald, which Long plays down, fits in adroitly with what Banister was doing in the Crescent City—which she also plays down.

    As one of his preoccupations, Banister had taken up the habit of recruiting spies on local college campuses. These would be conservative students who would infiltrate leftist groups. How did Banister find his way into this occupation? After retiring from the FBI in 1955, he came to New Orleans to work for Mayor Shep Morrison. Morrison wanted him to serve as a kind of ombudsman over his problematic police force. The mayor then shifted him over to study communist subversion with the aid of the conservative Senator James Eastland of the Senate Security Sub-Committee. (Davy, p. 12)

    In January of 1958, Banister filed articles of incorporation to open a private detective service. It is notable that the articles were written up by William Wegmann, the brother of Ed Wegmann, Clay Shaw’s attorney. It gets even more interesting, because Banister forwarded for clearance the names of prospective student spies to attorney Guy Johnson, who was a partner to Bill Wegmann. (Letter from Johnson to Wegmann, 1/5/59) Through an informant to Garrison’s office, George Eckert, the DA learned that the former FBI agent never really severed himself from government service, which is why he could charge such low investigative fees. (Davy, p. 14) For instance, one of his spies, Dan Campbell, said “Banister was a bagman for the CIA and was running guns to Alpha 66 in Miami.” (Campbell interview with the reviewer, 9/6/94) Joe Oster, who used to work for Banister, remembered his boss calling Washington and speaking directly to J. Edgar Hoover. (HSCA interview with Oster, 1/27/78) Another former Banister employee saw George Lincoln Rockwell, who ran the American Nazi party, in Banister’s office. (NODA interview with Vernon Gerdes, 10/30/68)

    This is all ignored by Long, as is the following information from Tommy Baumler, an attorney who had worked for Banister as one of his student spies. In 1981, Baumler told researcher Bud Fensterwald that “Clay Shaw, Banister, and Guy Johnson made up the intelligence apparatus of New Orleans.” He also stated that Shaw and Banister were close and that Oswald worked for Banister. (Baumler interview with Fensterwald, 12/30/81) Guy Johnson was with the Office of Naval Intelligence and was Shaw’s first criminal lawyer after Garrison indicted him. As everyone except Long seems to know, Banister was involved with preparations for the Bay of Pigs invasion. (Davy, p. 26) Later, according to HSCA Deputy Counsel Bob Tanenbaum, he was also involved with training for Operation Mongoose. (Probe Magazine, July/August, 1996, p. 24) In fact, at a hearing that David Ferrie called to try and salvage his position with Easten Airlines, Banister said,

    I have had high-ranking Cuban refugees in my office asking me how to go underground and I gave them diagrams for that. I have talked to military and leaders from the various provinces of Cuba that have slipped out and slipped back. (Grievance hearing for Ferrie, 8/5/1963, p. 841)

    Now that we have established the profile of the pinko Marine and the role of Guy Banister in New Orleans subterfuge from the fifties on to 1963, let us turn to Oswald in New Orleans at that time, which, no surprise, Long also wants to discount. She does this by relying on two sources to filter the raw data, namely the FBI and the HSCA. But today, with the declassifications of the ARRB, plus the further work done on this subject since then, it’s not possible to deny the association of Oswald with Banister or his 544 Camp Street address.

    For example, in April of 1968, Garrison’s office interviewed George Higginbotham, who was familiar with Banister and 544 Camp Street in 1962 and 1963. He said he kidded Banister about sharing a building with people passing out leaflets on the street, to which the former FBI man replied: “Cool it, one of them is one of mine.” (NODA memo of interviews, April 12, 16, 17 of 1968) Recently, this writer wrote an article in which I quoted a man named Richard Manuel, who worked in New Orleans in the mid-sixties. He knew two men who worked near Banister’s office and saw him at Mancuso’s coffee shop with Oswald. (ARRB notes of Manuel call of 2/1/96) Dan Campbell, a student spy and Cuban exile trainer for Banister, saw Oswald come into the 544 Camp Street office one day that summer to use the phone. (DiEugenio interviewed Campbell in both New Orleans and Los Angeles in 1994) His brother, Allen Campbell, also worked out of the Camp Street office. He recalls Banister’s secretary, Delphine Roberts, going to see her boss to tell him about Oswald’s leafleting. She got the same reaction that Higginbotham did: Don’t worry, he’s with us. (DiEugenio interview with Allen in New Orleans, 1994) William Gaudet was a CIA asset who had an office in Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. He told the HSCA that he had observed Banister talking to Oswald on a street corner. (HSCA Report, p. 219) Two INS agents were tracking illegal Cubans in New Orleans at the time. They got onto to David Ferrie’s association with them. They followed Ferrie to 544 Camp Street and observed Oswald going in also. (DiEugenio, p. 113) With all the above, and more that I left out, her strategy, borrowed from the HSCA—to insinuate that somehow Jack Martin, who worked for Banister, and his secretary, Delphine Roberts, were insufficient—gets turned upside down. Their testimony is bolstered by these other corroborating witnesses.

    IV

    Harold Weisberg is an author that Long knocks almost as badly as she smears Jim Garrison, but she does not give Harold credit for uncovering some rather interesting information about Oswald in New Orleans. When Marina Oswald was sequestered at the Inn of the Six Flags in Dallas, she was interrogated by the Secret Service. They asked her questions about her husband: about whether he owned a rifle, a handgun, or had been to Mexico City. But they also asked her about a “Mr. Farry.” And also if she knew about a Leonard Reisman at Tulane University, who was part of the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives. (Weisberg, p. 19)

    As a reader later wrote to Harold, what makes these questions so startling is that they seem to have been asked on November 24th, before Garrison brought Ferrie in for questioning. “Farry” is obviously a misspelling for Ferrie. In other words, the FBI was on to Ferrie before the DA even talked to him. But it’s the Reisman query that is perhaps even more crucial, because as John Newman points out in his book on Oswald, this leafleting at Tulane was done while the pinko Marine was in his undercover mode in New Orleans. That is when Banister was secretly trying to smoke out suspected Cuban sympathizers in the Crescent City. (John Newman, Oswald and the CIA, pp. 309, 331–32) This was before Oswald got into an overt and direct conflict with a CIA funded Cuban exile group run by Agency officer and psychological warfare expert George Joannides.

    With that, let us proceed to place another layer over all this New Orleans activity. One that Long completely avoids. That is the CIA’s operations against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) and in support of the DRE, the Student Revolutionary Directorate. Oswald was the only member of the FPCC in New Orleans. He stamped Banister’s office address—544 Camp Street—on one (or more) of the pamphlets he passed out that summer in the Crescent City. Beginning in 1961, that particular pamphlet went through several printings and the CIA ordered copies of the first edition, which is the printing that Oswald had in New Orleans. According to Roberts’ first interview with the HSCA, Banister was very upset about Oswald placing his address on his pamphlets. (Bob Buras interview with Roberts, 7/6/78)

    It is even more provocative than that. And again, Long somehow missed it. The FBI knew about Oswald’s faux pas. After retrieving several of Oswald’s pamphlets, they did two things to conceal the association of Banister with Oswald from the Warren Commission. They either used the alternative address for Banister’s office, which was 531 Lafayette Street or, in their messages to headquarters, they scratched out the fact that Oswald had actually stamped the Camp Street address on his flyers. (Newman, p. 310; Tony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 325) It would appear that J. Edgar Hoover was trying to conceal Oswald’s association with his former agent, because, as John Newman has written, both the FBI and CIA had ongoing operations against the FPCC at this time. (Newman, pp. 241–44)

    The man who began those CIA operations against the FPCC was David Phillips. And according to Howard Hunt’s testimony to the HSCA, it was also his friend Phillips who started up the DRE. (Interview of 11/3/78, p. 77) As we all know AMSPELL—the CIA code name for the DRE—collided with Oswald’s FPCC during a mild ruckus on Canal Street in August. After which, Oswald was arrested, apparently for receiving a punch from local DRE leader Carols Bringuier. After this, Oswald was part of a broadcast debate between Bringuier and Ed Butler, manager of the anti-communist organization Information Council for the Americas. It was these activities, and the photos and films of his leafleting, that got injected into the media very quickly after the assassination. They provided a public image and background for Oswald. And it was this which the Commission and the press used to incriminate him, as well as his alleged journey to Mexico City, which incredibly, Long just leaves out.

    As Jeff Morley has pointed out, immediately after the JFK shooting, Bringuier placed stories about Oswald in the Miami Herald and Washington Post. About 24–48 hours after the assassination, Bringuier and the DRE published a broadsheet clearly suggesting Oswald had killed Kennedy for Castro. In other words, CIA assets were shaping the story at the start. That publication was at the CIA’s expense, as the DRE was being subsidized to the tune of $51,000 per month by the Agency. George Joannides was the case officer. He later lied about this to the HSCA, when he came back to stymie their investigation of Oswald in 1978. (Morley, Miami New Times, 4/12/2001). Needless to say, the other immediate result was the long time CIA goal of the destruction of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

    As many authors have pointed out, what is so notable about the confrontation on Canal Street is that Oswald wrote about it to the New York City branch of the FPCC about a week before it happened. (Click here for Paul Bleau’s fine article) What we did not know prior to Paul’s milestone two-part essay was another fact that is important to understand Oswald’s role in the street theater. The host of the debate was local radio personality Bill Stuckey. Stuckey had written to the FBI in April of 1962 about their knowledge of any FPCC chapter in New Orleans. (FBI Memo of April 6, 1962) Beyond that, Paul also discovered that Oswald had written the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New York, not in 1963, but in 1962.

    To cap it all off, there is evidence Phillips was in Banister’s office in late 1960 planning a TV telethon to benefit the Cuban exiles with Banister and Butler. (Davy, pp. 21–24)

    From all the above, and more, one can understand why CIA officer William Kent, who worked out of the Miami JM/WAVE station, once said that Oswald was a useful idiot. You will learn almost all of this from Paul Bleau’s article. You will learn virtually none of it from Alecia Long. In other words, there is more current and cogent information about Oswald in New Orleans in Paul Bleau’s two-part essay than there is in Long’s entire book. Whether this failing is by design or a matter of poor scholarship is a question only she can answer.

    V

    Then what is Long’s book about? For one, it’s the weirdest interpretation of the Warren Report I have ever read. She writes that the Commission placed the sex lives of Oswald and Ruby under scrutiny for what that could mean as far as motivation went. (Long, p. 65)

    This is balderdash. I am quite familiar with the Warren Report and I do not recall anything like this in those nearly 900 pages. Long later uses the testimony of Dean Andrews about Oswald as her source. Yet Andrews is shuffled on and off stage in that report in the space of one paragraph. (Warren Report, p. 325) The other reference she uses is another throwaway paragraph about the Commission searching for a nexus point between Oswald and Ruby. In going through a list of possibilities, they wrote that there was not any homosexual relationship between the two men. (Warren Report, p. 364) Two paragraphs out of 900 pages is grasping at straws.

    In further desperation, she trots out the whole White Russian rigamarole about Oswald having problems satisfying his wife. Long writes that perhaps this was because Oswald harbored a hidden preference. She then says this was an obvious question. (Long, p. 66) Obvious to who? After several pages of these eccentric and groundless comments, it struck me that Long was grafting her own agenda onto the facts—to such a degree as to be solipsistic. And when I saw her describing the Jack Gremillion complaint to the FBI about a homosexual ring in New Orleans that the DA was using, I understood the idea behind the book. (Long, p. 58) And also why she discounted Banister: he was not gay.

    State Attorney General Gremillion was a notorious racist and rabid McCarthyite. He opposed Garrison and his treatment of the famous James Dombrowski case, because Dombrowski was an active leftist who supported civil rights in the New Orleans area. Garrison took control of the case, in order to guide it to the highest court to invalidate the phony charges grafted onto a Gremillion/Eastland/Banister fabrication: the state’s Communist Control Law. Garrison thought this was unconstitutional. Dombrowski was smeared as a communist, because he was standing up for the civil rights of African Americans. In 1965, the Supreme Court ruled against Gremillion. (Click here for details) It is clear that Gremillion greatly resented what the DA had done and he retaliated with this almost incomprehensible complaint, which he filed with, of all agencies, the FBI. For a scholar to side with riffraff like Gremillion in order to smear Garrison indicates that she has lost her compass.

    When one combines that with the fact that she fails to give the reader a full portrait of Shaw and his association with the CIA, how can one come to any other conclusion? There is no mention of the ARRB declassified documents that reveal Shaw had a covert security clearance. (Davy, p. 195) Or that he was a highly valued and well-paid contract agent for the CIA. (Joan Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54–55) Or that the Agency tried to hide all of this. Going as far as destroying Shaw’s 201 file. (Click here for details) Need I also add that I could not detect any mention of Shaw and Permindex, which after the release of Michele Metta’s important book on the subject, is again, quite a disappearing act.

    Throughout, Long tries to deny that Shaw was Clay Bertrand. In an amazing piece of sleight of hand, she even acknowledges the FBI memo which states such was the case—and further that the Bureau knew Shaw was Bertrand before Garrison arrested him, data they had from two sources. One being Aaron Kohn, a staunch Shaw ally. (FBI memo of March 2, 1967) I could detect nothing in the text concerning the FBI inquiry back in December of 1963, where Cartha DeLoach wrote to Clyde Tolson that Shaw’s name “had come up in our investigation…as a result of several parties furnishing information concerning Shaw.” (DeLoach memo of 3/2/67, italics added) Lawrence Schiller, a prolific FBI informant on the JFK case, sent information to the Bureau that he had several sources in New Orleans and San Francisco saying that Shaw went by other names, including Clay Bertrand. (FBI memo of March 22, 1967) At the Shaw trial, FBI agent Regis Kennedy admitted that he was investigating the Kennedy case prior to his interview with Dean Andrews and that he was searching for Bertrand as part of that investigation. He was then stopped from answering any other questions by Washington. (Trial transcript, 2/17/69)

    The information about Shaw using the Bertrand alias was common knowledge in the French Quarter. But many sources did not want to tell Garrison about it due to their resentment over his prior crusade against B girl drinking, which caused a lot of economic dislocations there. Two such witnesses were Barbara Bennett and Rickey Planche, the latter bought a house Shaw had owned previously. (Jim Garrison: His Life and Times-The Early Years, by Joan Mellen, p. 117) Need I add that she also ignores Andrews’ own secret admission to Weisberg that Shaw was Bertrand. (Mailer’s Tale, Weisberg unpublished manuscript, Chapter 5, p. 11) Only by eliding all this data from one’s text can one write that the identity of Bertrand remained a mystery. (Long, p. 59)

    VI

    Another important aspect of Oswald in New Orleans that Long discounts is Oswald’s leafleting in front of Shaw’s International Trade Mart in mid-August. This also had some interesting telltale points to it. First, Bringuier and his right hand man Carlos Quiroga said that they went to see Oswald in an attempt to infiltrate his FPCC “group” after the ITM incident. The visit occurred before it happened. And Quiroga arrived with a stack of flyers about a half foot thick. In other words, the DRE appears to have been supplying Oswald with his leaflets in preparation for the incident. Secondly, the reason we have films of the event is that Shaw’s first assistant at the ITM, Jesse Core, had summoned the cameras. (Davy, p. 38) Beyond that, it was this leafleting episode that caused George Higginbotham to alert Banister, and his reply was “One of them is one of mine.” (Oswald had hired two helpers from the unemployment office to aid him.) But there was something else to note. In addition to calling the cameras for the ITM incident, Jesse Core picked up a pamphlet from the prior Canal Street episode, the one which got Oswald arrested. He noted that it had Banister’s address on it. He mailed it from the Trade Mart to the FBI with a message attached: “note the inside back cover.” (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 568) This would suggest that both Shaw and Core knew about Oswald’s mistake. How would they know unless they were aware of Banister’s operation? Which recalls the work done for Banister by Bill Wegmann and Guy Johnson. But further, the FBI then knew about Oswald at 544 Camp Street before the assassination.

    In light of all the above, for Long to say that the connection of Banister, Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw was a Garrison innovation which relied on our culture’s suspicions about homosexuals—this is simply fruity. (See p. 90) If one leaves out everything I wrote above about the CIA, then maybe you can sidestep someone with that bunk. But since the first two were not gay, it’s kind of hard to buy. But what makes it harder is all the relevant material she leaves out, like the fact that Ferrie was so desperate to separate himself from Oswald in the wake of the assassination that he committed obstruction of justice and perjury. He went to two sources to see if they recalled Oswald using his library card and he called a former CAP cadet to find any picture he might have depicting him with Oswald. He then lied to the FBI about not recalling Oswald. (See The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, by James DiEugenio, pp. 175–77; Destiny Betrayed, pp. 176–77) Those four instances indicate, as prosecutors term it, consciousness of guilt. I won’t even discuss the illustration of Dealey Plaza that Ferrie had in his desk at work. (Destiny Betrayed, p. 216) And then there were Ferrie’s admissions to investigator Lou Ivon right before he died about his association with both Oswald and Shaw and Shaw’s hatred of JFK. (Davy, p. 66) In the face of this, Long is again ludicrous in saying that Garrison had little evidence against Ferrie. (Long, p. 111)

    We can do the same with Shaw. Since he committed perjury as many as six times on the stand during his trial. Long admits that Shaw lied about his CIA association to the press. She does not admit he did the same under oath at his trial. (Click here for details)

    Let us conclude this silly, utterly superfluous book with this. Long quotes Shaw as saying: Well if I was innocent, why didn’t we just go to trial and get it over with back in 1967? (Long, p. 138) Well Alecia, that might have something to do with another declassified document you missed. It describes 24 folders the CIA titled Black Tape. James Angleton collected them from September of 1967 until March of 1969. He then deemed them classified until 2017. Is it just a coincidence that the beginning date matches the first meeting of the Garrison Group at CIA, which was specifically set up to counter Garrison? At that meeting, Ray Rocca, Angleton’s assistant, said that if things proceed as they are, Shaw would be convicted. (Destiny Betrayed, pp. 269–71) When they set up the Garrison Group and the Black Tape files, the Agency made sure things did not proceed that way, which makes Shaw’s comment likely more revealing than he meant it. (ibid, pp. 271–85)

    But that is the kind of book this is. It’s an almost humorous diversion created for one purpose. It wants us to forget virtually everything we have learned about New Orleans since the creation of the ARRB back in 1994. Sorry Alecia, no sale. It was too difficult to get those files opened in the first place. And when they were opened, we understood why Angleton wanted them closed for fifty years. Consciousness of guilt.

  • Into the Storm, by John Newman

    Into the Storm, by John Newman

    John Newman has finished his third volume on the JFK case. This entry is called Into the Storm. As readers of this site will know, I have already reviewed the first two volumes in the unprecedented series. (Click here for the first review and click here for the second)

    In foreign policy, the third volume focuses on the year 1962, up until the Missile Crisis. These events include the initiation of Operation Mongoose in Florida, the submission of the Northwoods provocation plans to Kennedy, the removal of Lyman Lemnitzer as Joint Chiefs chairman, and the assumption of that position by General Maxwell Taylor. These are all important developments. And one can argue that they may have had an impact of what happened to Kennedy in Dallas, but surprisingly the major part of the writing about them comes near the end of the book. And the weight of that description and analysis is outdone by the subjects the author deals with previously. For me, it made for an uneven and, in some ways, puzzling result.

    Prior to getting to those rather salient points, the author deals with four major topics at length. These are the activist group CORE and their Freedom Ride demonstrations in the south; the KGB/CIA spy wars over men like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, and Yuri Nosenko; the intelligence career of Cuban exile Antonio Veciana; and, finally, the false accusations of Agency officer Sam Halpern implicating the Kennedys in the CIA/Mafia plots against Fidel Castro.

    I

    Newman includes two chapters on the outburst of the race issue under the Kennedy administration. These amount to about 55 pages of text in a 400 page book. The vast majority of those pages deal with two topics: Martin Luther King’s arrest in Atlanta during the 1960 election and the Freedom Rides and the accompanying violence they incurred in 1961. This material has been dealt with many times in the past by several different authors. Newman maintains that they are integral to any story about Kennedy’s demise, since JFK would not have been president if not for the Kennedy brothers’ role in releasing Martin Luther King from a Georgia prison before the election. (p. 15)

    This may or may not be true. There have been several interpretations about how Kennedy won his narrow popular victory in 1960, which was wider in the Electoral College. This includes Robert Caro’s explanation of Lyndon’s Jonson’s campaigning in the south. But even if one were to grant the author his premise, I don’t see how that necessitates including them in a book that is subtitled “The Assassination of President Kennedy.” If, at the end of his series, Newman convincingly shows us how this racial strife somehow impacted Kennedy’s murder, I will be glad to make amends and thank him for his insight.

    In Chapter 2, the author brings up what I think is a more relevant subject, which he does not deal with at the length he does his four main fields of interest. This is the undeclared war of the Wall Street Journal—and all that powerful publication represented—against the introduction of Kennedy’s policy plans, both foreign and domestic. As Newman notes, that newspaper viciously attacked Kennedy right out of the gate, on both his domestic spending plans and level of foreign aid. (p. 39) One reason for this is because Kennedy’s policies posed a juxtaposition with President Eisenhower’s. But secondly, Kennedy had always been concerned about levels of joblessness and the length of unemployment benefits to those who could not find work. He was worried about the cumulative impact of structural unemployment on the economy.

    The author briefly deals with the rather controversial appointment of Douglas Dillon as Secretary of Treasury. (p. 43) Many liberals wondered about this, since Dillon had been a mainstay of Eisenhower and worked at three different positions in his administration. Newman then comments on Kennedy’s counterbalancing of the conservative Dillon with the liberal Keynesian Walter Heller at the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA). There can be little doubt that Heller’s ideas worked. The performance of the American economy was remarkable under JFK: in three years Kennedy doubled economic growth and increased GNP by 20 per cent. (See for example, John F. Kennedy: The Promise Revisited, by Paul Harper and Joann Krieg, pp. 169–224; Irving Bernstein, Promises Kept, pp. 118–217)

    The author also counteracts the accepted CW that Kennedy was unsuccessful at getting his proposals through congress. By late 1961, Kennedy had gotten 35 of his 55 bills passed. (p. 47) He declares that Kennedy had clearly sided with Heller and the CEA and his goals were to keep interest rates and mortgage rates low. (pp. 50–51). None of this success calmed down the attacks by the Wall Street Journal, especially when, recalling Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy began to implement economic programs as a way of dealing with social problems. This meant things like placement services to find jobs for those seeking work and extending unemployment benefits from 26 to 39 weeks.

    In summing up Kennedy’s economic achievement, Newman writes that prices remained stable in a way they had not under Eisenhower, while wholesale industrial prices actually declined. Both happened under a rapidly expanding economy. (p. 59) My one complaint about this section of the book is that there was no mention of the rather important figure of James Saxon, Kennedy’s Comptroller of the Currency. It seems clear to me that Kennedy was relying on both Saxon and Heller to effectively counter the innate conservatism of both the Federal Reserve and Dillon. In my online discussions with British researcher Malcolm Blunt, he seemed to agree with me. (Click here for details)

    II

    One of Newman’s preoccupations, both in this book and in his public appearances, has been his disagreement with the late Cuban exile Antonio Veciana. To anyone who knows anything about the JFK case, I should not have to remind them that Veciana was first interviewed by Church Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi. At that time, Gaeton was working under the Church Committee’s Senator Richard Schweiker. Fonzi was then transferred over to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) by attorney Robert Tanenbaum. Senator Schweiker showed Tanenbaum some of what Fonzi had accomplished under his stewardship and the New York prosecutor was favorably impressed. (Fonzi, p. 431) Gaeton decided to stay on the HSCA even after both Tanenbaum and the first Chief Counsel, Richard Sprague, had left.

    There, partnered with another Tanenbaum hire—New York detective Al Gonzalez—the two pursued various leads out of Miami, Dallas, and New Orleans. These are vividly captured in Fonzi’s fine book on the case, The Last Investigation. In that volume, Gaeton described his first meeting with Veciana and then his following relationship with the man all the way through the closing of the HSCA. Fonzi details the difference in his belief in Veciana and the committee’s disagreement with that belief. This includes Veciana being shot at—four times—after the appearance of the HSCA Final Report. (Fonzi, pp. 392–93)

    In that book, Fonzi meets up with Veciana as he is being released from prison on what the Cuban believed was a trumped-up drug charge. (Fonzi, pp. 123–24) Veciana had a degree in accounting from the University of Havana. He was good at what he did and ended up working closely with Julio Lobo. Lobo was a millionaire known as the Cuban Sugar King prior to the Castro revolution. Since Veciana became one of the most militant of the exile leaders and was associated with Alpha 66, Fonzi asked him who he was tied in with as part of the American government. This turned out to be a man named Maurice Bishop. At one of their meetings, he said that he had seen Lee Oswald with Bishop in Dallas around the beginning of September, 1963. (Fonzi, pp. 125–26). This became the famous Southland Building meeting, where Veciana had arrived a bit early and had seen Bishop chatting with Oswald. When Veciana approached, Bishop disposed of Oswald rather quickly. Fonzi had a police artist sketch a picture of Bishop along the lines of the description that Veciana had given. Veciana and Fonzi spent hours working on the sketch with the illustrator. When this was later shown to Schweiker, he said it looked to him like CIA officer David Phillips. (Fonzi, p. 158) Later, when Gaeton showed the sketch to a brother of David Phillips, he exclaimed “Why, that is amazing! That certainly does look like David!” His office secretary said the same. Then his daughter, David Phillips’ niece, said “What that’s Uncle David!”(Fonzi, p. 315)

    Gaeton then decided to search for sources who had been in the Agency who could confirm that Phillips had used the alias of Bishop on occasion. He ended up finding three such sources. (Fonzi, pp. 308, 364) Former CIA Director John McCone told the HSCA that he did recall a Maurice Bishop who worked for the Agency. (Fonzi, p. 434. The CIA later made McCone walk back the statement.)

    It should be noted: throughout The Last Investigation, Veciana never flatly states that Bishop is Phillips. In fact, there are instances where he denied it. (Fonzi, p. 251) This included a face to face meeting between the two. (Which, as Fonzi notes, Phillips lied about. See p. 276) At the end of the book, Veciana admits that, if it was Phillips, he could not admit it without Phillips’ approving it. (Fonzi, p. 396)

    Gaeton’s widow, Marie Fonzi, wrote to Veciana after her husband’s death in 2012. She was preparing a new version of The Last Investigation. Marie asked permission from Antonio to quote him about Gaeton’s honesty and dedication in pursuit of truth. He agreed to do so. At this time, Veciana was working as an accountant for his son’s marine supply store in Miami.

    The next year, 2013, Marie asked Antonio to identify Bishop. She did not mention Phillips in that request. Veciana’s son typed the letter to her finally saying that Phillips was Bishop. His son asked Veciana if he was sure about what he was doing. Antonio said it was time. Marie alerted journalist Jerry Policoff to this fact and he wrote an online piece, which was picked up by other JFK sites; but got little if any MSM exposure. The following year, Veciana showed up at the 2014 AARC seminar and discussed what he wrote in public. (Email exchange with Marie Fonzi, 9/16/2021)

    There is more I could write about Fonzi’s work on Veciana. For instance about the personal profile he assembled about Bishop (pp. 155–56) and Bishop’s ultimate pay off to Veciana as witnessed by his wife. (p. 150) But I would just suggest that if you have not read The Last Investigation, you should.

    III

    Before beginning any discussion of Newman’s disagreement about the Veciana/Bishop relationship, I think it is important to state what is not in his argument. John never talked to Marie Fonzi or visited her home to look through what she still had left of her husband’s files. Even though Veciana died last year, he had time to talk to Antonio through his daughter who is a professional journalist. As most readers know, this reviewer has shown that Clay Shaw repeatedly lied on the witness stand at his trial. He also lied in public about his relationship with the CIA. This reviewer also believes that Shaw was part of the plot to set up Oswald in the murder of President Kennedy and this is why he called attorney Dean Andrews to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. But in spite of that, I interviewed three of Shaw’s four lawyers. I could not talk to Ed Wegmann, since he had passed on prior to starting the research on my first book.

    There are two main areas that Newman finds fault with in Veciana’s statements to Fonzi and others. The first is that, in his initial utterances, Antonio said that he first met up with Bishop in Cuba in 1960. As the author notes, Veciana later changed this to 1959. The first person to find a problem with this was Fabian Escalante. (Newman, p. 67) At the time of Kennedy’s murder, Escalante was part of Castro’s counterintelligence force. He eventually rose to helm Cuban state security forces. Probably no one on the island knew as much about anti-Castro CIA operations and Phillips as Escalante did. According to his information, Phillips had left Cuba in February of 1960. To his knowledge, he did not come back. (Newman, pp. 67–71)

    Newman’s other main point of contention is that, contrary to what Veciana told Fonzi, he was not primarily associated with the CIA. After leaving Cuba in October, 1961 Veciana was associated with the MRP. In late 1961, he was approved for CIA use in other operations, but did not like working for the Agency. The reason being that he wanted little or no restrictions placed on him. (Newman, p. 293)

    In Puerto Rico, Veciana helped create a group called Alpha 66. And he gained sponsorship from Army intelligence in November of 1962. (Newman, p. 299) The author concludes that, from his timeline, Veciana was working for the Army while he was participating in Alpha 66 activities. And he concludes that when Veciana told the Church Committee that the man behind Alpha 66 strategy was Maurice Bishop, he was being deceitful. (Newman, p. 313)

    John has done some good work with this and I think some of it is valuable. And he probably is not done yet. But let me point out what I see as a bit problematic. The author brings out his information about Veciana, Alpha 66, and Army Intel as if it had been buried underground. Yet it was written about as far back as ten years ago.

    In 2011, Larry Hancock penned a brief but valuable book called Nexus. In Chapter 11 of that work, he writes about how the success of Alpha 66 had drawn the interest of the Army in October of 1962. The CIA and G-2 then shared what information they had collected on the group’s projects. Cyrus Vance of the Army drafted a proposal for very select missions, but Vance’s proposal is marked “Not Used.” Everyone knows that after the Missile Crisis, the actions against Cuba were greatly slowed down and decreased. And, at Kennedy’s insistence, the little that was left was mostly moved off shore. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 70)

    The Missile Crisis concluded as a great success for Kennedy, but the Cuban exiles looked at it differently. The rumor in Miami was that somehow the Russians were lying and Castro was cheating. There were still missiles in Cuba and two defecting Russian officers were there willing to talk. As Hancock mentions both in Nexus and Someone Would Have Talked, the main source for this appears to have been Eddie Bayo of Alpha 66. (Respectively, p. 86, p. 337) If that group was only a G-2 operation at that time, 1963, then why did the reaction to this Alpha 66 rumor turn into a purely CIA project? I am referring of course to Operation Tilt, sometimes called the Bayo/Pawley mission. William Pawley was a zealous sponsor of the excursion into Cuba and presented it to CIA. Dick Billings of Life magazine was involved in this mission on Pawley’s yacht since Life was giving publicity to both the DRE and Alpha 66.

    Newman admits that there was a female contact who worked for Veciana, who communicated messages to him from Phillips. (Newman, p. 83) Delores Cao had been Veciana’s secretary and she recalled messages from a man who used the name Bishop. According to Hancock, in 1963, there was another woman who was used for messaging later. Veciana recalled her name as Prewett. This has to be be Virginia Prewett, who Phillips worked with in propaganda operations. (Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, p. 177) John also admits that some CIA agents stayed on the island after the revolution. And Veciana named one of them who appeared to be an associate of Phillips, but he rules out the possibility that Phillips would have ever returned, because he had no diplomatic immunity since he was not under state department cover.

    IV

     One of the major themes that the author spends many pages on is the controversy surrounding the espionage battles between the KGB and CIA in the fifties and early sixties. This includes figures like Pyotr Popov, Oleg Penkovsky, George Blake, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and Yuri Nosenko, among others. In my discussions with John and in one of the talks I have seen him give, his assessment is going to be contra authors Tom Mangold and David Wise. What he appears to be saying is that there really was a high level mole inside the CIA, Golitsyn was somehow a credible source, and that Nosenko was a false defector.

    In 1992, British journalist Tom Mangold published a long biography of James Angleton and his reign over the CIA’s counterintelligence staff for two decades. That reign ended in 1974, when he was forced to resign by CIA Director Bill Colby, who had replaced Richard Helms. Mangold’s book was really the first full scale biography of Angleton. For too many reasons to mention here, it did not present an attractive portrait. In his review of CIA literature, in house historian Cleveland Cram praised the book as being honest and accurate. (October, 1993, Center for the Study of Intelligence, “Of Moles and Molehunters”)

    Much of Mangold’s valuable work focused on how Allen Dulles and Dick Helms had allowed Angleton to establish what was essentially his own fiefdom within the CIA, including his personal filing system which was not integrated with the Agency’s system. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that those two men allowed the very rightwing Angleton to more or less run roughshod, with little or no oversight. Another major theme of the book was Angleton’s firm belief in virtually anything that Golitsyn told him. Complimentary to that belief were the monetary rewards that Angleton bestowed on the man—no matter how wrong his predictions turned out to be. And many of them were.

    Within a year after Mangold’s book was released, much respected journalist David Wise—who had developed a reputation for dealing with intelligence matters—published his own book dealing with Angleton. This was called Molehunt. Wise traced all the organizational and personal damage to careers that Angleton had wrought in his search for what he thought was the mole in the CIA. This unhinged search was largely based on Golitsyn and the fact that he said the mole’s last name began with a K. To make a long story short, this resulted in the wreckage of CIA officer Peter Karlow’s career; along with Paul Garbler’s and Richard Kovich’s. And by agreeing with Golitsyn’s prophecy—that anyone who followed him would be ersatz—later defectors were either discounted or looked on with suspicion. This went on even beyond Angleton, with a man named Adolf Tolkachev, who later turned out to be a very valuable informant on Russian defense technology. His offer was turned down three times. President Carter later signed a bill called the Mole Relief Act in order to recognize and compensate Angleton’s victims. (Click here for more details)

    Nosenko had first tried to defect in 1962, but he wanted to act as an agent in place, so he stayed in the USSR. But after the assassination, he did defect at Geneva in January of 1964. His message was that while he was in Russia, and as part of the KGB, he was responsible for the Oswald file. The KGB had no interest in the Marine defector and little knowledge of his military background. They were still not interested even after Oswald married a Russian girl. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 316–17)

    Today, Newman is convinced that Nosenko was a false defector, to the point that he once told me that Bruce Solie, the CIA officer who helped rescue Nosenko from three years of torture and imprisonment, might have been the mole. What seems odd about all this to this reviewer is that the author also writes that the KGB had nothing to do with President Kennedy’s murder. (Newman, p. 339) Which means to me that, at worst, the Russians were trying to convince the USA that they had nothing to do with turning Oswald while he was in the USSR, or ultimately Kennedy’s murder.

    A lot of what the author writes in this section of the book is based on the works of Tennent “Pete” Bagley. An important part of what Newman writes about the longtime CIA officer concerns his relationship with esteemed British researcher Malcolm Blunt. This reviewer has material of value to add to their exchange over Oswald’s file that is not in the book under review.

    The Brit Malcolm became friendly with Bagley while the former agent was living in Brussels. By 2012, Malcolm had done some work on the declassified HSCA files of Betsy Wolf. One of her assignments was to investigate the Oswald file at CIA. Betsy was a thorough and conscientious researcher. One of the oddities about Oswald’s file that puzzled her was the fact that no 201 file had been opened on the man after he had defected in 1959. Betsy began to inquire with other CIA officers and to look up certain division charters. She found out that in not opening that file, the Agency was violating its own internal rules.

    The other problem she pondered was that Oswald’s files did not go where they should have gone, which was the Soviet Russia (SR) division. Instead, they went to the Office of Security (OS). The more people she talked to, the weirder this situation got. She came to suspect that somehow, someone had rigged the system so that no 201 file would be opened on Oswald. As she dug deeper, she realized such was the case. For OS did not open 201 files. This is why certain outside agencies were sending multiple copies of files on Oswald to CIA, but they were not getting distributed. After months of research work on this, Betsy interviewed the man who was the then present Chief of Security, Robert Gambino. He told her that the office of Mail Logistics is alerted in advance of where certain files should be headed in the system. She concluded that this is what had happened: someone had instructed that office in advance to misdirect Oswald’s files. (Click here for details, plus a diagram of how Oswald files were routed)

    Malcolm drew for Bagley the diagram of how Oswald’s incoming files were routed in 1959. That is, not going to where they should have been going, namely the SR division, where Pete had worked, but instead being diverted to OS where no 201 file would be opened. After looking at the diagram, Bagley asked Malcolm if Oswald was a witting or unwitting defector. Malcolm did not want to reply, but Bagley pushed him on the question telling him he had to know the answer. Malcolm said, “Okay, unwitting.” Bagley instantly countered with, “Oh no, he had to be witting!” (Newman, p. 339) What makes this even more interesting is that Bagley thought Oswald had killed Kennedy. So you had, for the first time, a veteran CIA counter intelligence officer—who thought Oswald had killed Kennedy—saying that the man was a witting false defector.

    V

    I would like to close this discussion on a high point, actually two of them.

    Newman’s analysis of how the CIA switched back their plots to kill Castro onto the Kennedy White House is very well done. In fact, it is unmatched in the literature. As the author explicates it, this deception started with Director of Plans Dick Bissell; it was then continued, expanded, and elongated by William Harvey’s assistant Sam Halpern. The author proves that both men knowingly lied about the subject. It is important, because this whole mythology became a way to confuse what had happened in the JFK case. The myth that arose from it was that Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got him. When, in fact, neither clause was true. And neither was the corollary: JFK dug the hole for his own death.

    Bissell was the first person who created the chimera that somehow “the White House” urged him to create an executive action capability. (Newman, p. 182) In fact, Bissell first told this story to William Harvey in 1961. But under examination by the Church Committee, Bissell said six times that he could not recall who the person at the White House was who first asked him to do this. Someone in the administration calls you about such a subject and you cannot recall who it was?

    But on its face, this was not credible. Because the CIA’s Staff D—which included this function—had already been created by then. Plus the CIA/Mafia plots were already in motion. The former began in October of 1960, the latter in August of 1960. And, in fact, it was Bissell’s idea to reach out to the Mafia. (Newman, p. 187) After doing depositions with Bissell, Harvey, and McGeorge Bundy, the Church Committee concluded that Kennedy had filed no such request with CIA and none had been discussed with him. (Newman, p. 191) In fact, the Church Committee was forced to ask Bissell: If the White House tasked you with that, why didn’t you reply that such actions were already proceeding?

    The reason that Bissell wanted to use this fabrication of White House approval was to egg on the Mafia plots in order to salvage the Bay of Pigs operation. This is most likely because he understood from the two designers of that operation—Jake Esterline and Jack Hawkins—that it would not succeed due to the revisions that had been made in their plans. In fact, they wanted to resign, since they sensed a debacle was upcoming. Bissell understood if that happened, he would be left holding the bag, since he was the main supervising officer. (Newman, pp. 191–92).

    Halpern took this fabrication and made it his own, with two alterations. First, he switched the pushing of the plots from JFK to RFK and he used a CIA man he knew, Charles Ford, as RFK’s “accessory.” What was quite revealing about the Church Committee inquiry was that Dick Helms did not seem to know much at all about Halpern’s RFK/Ford schemes. And what he did know was through Halpern. (Newman, pp. 237–39)

    The giveaway about Halpern was his frequent assertion that RFK deliberately left no paper behind about his dealings with Ford. This turned out to be utterly false. And as the author points out, for Seymour Hersh to have accepted this from Halpern for his 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot, tells you all you need to know about Hersh’s piece of rubbish.

    In fact, Charles Ford testified twice before the Church Committee. For whatever reason, we only have his second deposition. But it is clear from the references he makes to the lost first interview that he never did what Halpern said he was doing. That is acting as a liaison for RFK to the Mob for the purpose of killing Castro. Considering Bobby Kennedy’s war on the Mafia, this was preposterous on its face. But as the author points out, we have documents from both sides today—RFK’s and Ford’s—as to what Ford was doing for Bobby. The idea was that he was supposed to check out some American representatives of anti-Castro groups in Cuba and also explore ways to retrieve the prisoners from the failed Bay of Pigs project. (Newman, pp. 260—67). These prove that Halpern was passing gas on two levels.

    But the capper about this is that Halpern knew about it, since he signed off on one of Ford’s memos. In fact, Ford was working with Halpern and Harvey in 1961. And since Ford worked under those two men in 1961, within their domain at CIA, he could not have been working under Bobby Kennedy. The Church Committee examined Ford’s testimony afterwards and found it to be accurate. (Newman, p. 276)

    Perhaps the sickest statement that Halpern made to Hersh was this: “Bobby Kennedy’s primary purpose is dealing with Charles Ford was to do what Bill Harvey was not doing—finding someone to assassinate Fidel Castro.” As Hersh could have found out through declassified documents available at that time, this was an ugly lie. Harvey had found someone he was working with to kill Castro. That was John Roselli. And the CIA had lied to Bobby Kennedy about the existence of this plot. (Newman, p. 279)

    Does it get any worse than that?

    VI

    The book closes with what is a testament to its title. The author notes that Dwight Eisenhower and his National Security Advisor Gordon Gray had thought of using a false flag operation at Guantanamo Bay in the waning days of Ike’s administration. That is, they would employ Cuban exiles to simulate an attack on the base and that would suffice as an excuse to invade Cuba. In fact, Eisenhower had told Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer that he had little problem with that scenario, as long as they could manufacture something “that would be generally acceptable.” (p. 372)

    As the author then writes, it is clear that Lemnitzer recalled Eisenhower’s approval of this concept, since both he and Edward Lansdale, who was running Operation Mongoose, were going to try and push it on President Kennedy. As Newman, and many others have written, once Mongoose—the secret war against Cuba—was up and running in February of 1962, the three men supervising it were not well-suited for each other. That would be Lansdale, William Harvey, and Bobby Kennedy. RFK was there at his brother’s request. Since after the Bay of Pigs, the president did not trust the so-called experts anymore. Lansdale did not like this. He actually asked CIA Director John McCone for complete control over Mongoose. A request that was promptly denied. On top of this, Lansdale and Harvey despised each other and Harvey hated RFK. (Newman, pp. 376–77)

    Lansdale was quite imaginative—and deadly—in his plans to shake up things on the island. He thought up outlandish schemes like Task 33. This was a plan to use biological warfare against Cuban sugar workers, but this was only part of an even more wild menu: to create a pretext to attack Cuba. Lansdale now brought back the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo to provoke an American invasion. There were two other scenarios that Lansdale thought up for this purpose.

    As the reader can see, what Lansdale had in mind actually preceded what the Joint Chiefs were going to propose to President Kennedy, which was the infamous Operation Northwoods. The problem was that President Kennedy not only did not want to provoke American direct intervention, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) But yet, on March 13, 1962 the Joint Chiefs proposed Northwoods to the White House. This was a series of play acted events designed to manufacture chaos in Cuba in order to provoke an attack by American forces. One was a staging of a “Remember the Maine” scenario: blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming it on Castro. Another was to create a communist Cuban terrorism wave on cities like Miami. Kennedy rejected these proposals.

    Newman closes the book with Kennedy’s searing disagreements with Lemnitzer over both Cuba and Vietnam. About the latter, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” In regard to Cuba, Lemnitzer would not let up on the idea of American intervention. This led to his eventual rebuke by Kennedy in mid-March of 1962. (Newman, pp. 391–94) If there was any doubt that Lemnitzer was leaving—and there was not much—this settled it.

    Kennedy did kick him out of the White House, but he sent him to NATO, which, of course, was secretly guiding the Strategy of Tension under Operation Gladio. In other words, the terrorist plan Lemnitzer had been turned down on with Cuba, he was now going to be part of in Europe.

  • Operation Dragon

    Operation Dragon

    Operation Dragon, by former CIA Director James Woolsey and the late Ion Mihai Pacepa, is a revealing book. Not for its ostensible subject, the JFK case. In fact, in that regard, it is qualitatively poor and misleading. It’s revealing, because of what it says about the current state of relations between the USA and Russia; and how badly the CIA wants to fan the embers of the Cold War, in order to set it aflame again.

    Pacepa was an advisor to the deceased President of Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu. At the time of Pacepa’s defection in 1978, he was acting chief of its foreign intelligence service. Once established in the USA, he worked for the CIA in operations against the client states of the former Warsaw Pact. His writings were published on the conservative blog PJ Media and in publications like the Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, The Washington Times, and FrontPage Magazine. He also wrote several books, including Programmed to Kill, which figures heavily in Operation Dragon. I will explain why later.

    I

    On the very first pages of the book, the authors set the overarching theme of what is to come. Consider the following: “America has always stood against tyranny from any ideological source.” (p. 1) One could argue quite cogently that what Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles constructed in South Vietnam was a tyranny. The Nhu brothers were pretty much a dictatorship and, in our blind obeisance to the strictures of the Cold War, not only did we back other dictators, we actually overthrew democratically elected governments. The most prominent examples being Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973. We went further and cooperated in the assassination of a democratically-elected leader, Patrice Lumumba, in Congo in 1961. It’s quite an achievement to somehow wipe those instances from the pages of history; but in no time flat that is what this book does.

    The idea behind the book is to use the same old intel scheme that the CIA has always used. The classic propaganda model is to place white hats on the people the CIA backs and black hats on their perceived enemies, whoever they are. Considering what the authors are going to propose—that somehow Lee Oswald, under orders of the Kremlin killed Kennedy—the idea is to portray the USSR, and today’s Russia, as being the guys with the black hats.

    There is something weird about this whole experiment, because Russia is not a communist state anymore and has not been one for decades. Mikhail Gorbachev began the economic reforms of Perestroika back in the 1980’s. When Boris Yeltsin took power after Gorbachev was kidnapped, he introduced the economic Shock Doctrine to Russia under people like his own advisor Yegor Gaidar and the Americans Jeff Sachs and Larry Summers. It is not an exaggeration to write that, as the late Steve Cohen declared, the result might have been the worst thing to happen to Russia since the Nazi invasion, but Woolsey and Pacepa are only getting warmed up. On page 3, the man who many think was one of the finest prime ministers of England, Clement Attlee, is called an undercover Marxist. Need I add that, somehow, Russia caused the 9/11 attacks? (p. 5)

    The depiction of Russian history in this book might have been written by the late Richard Pipes. (See, for example, p. 15) Pipes was one of the intellectual godfathers of the neocon movement. He criticized any attempt at détente with the USSR, because the neocons ended up being to the right of the CIA. Pipes’ view of Russia fit in with the likes of Paul Nitze, who revived the rightwing, militaristic Committee on the Present Danger (CPD) in 1976.

    That Nitze ended up being wrong on every major point about the threat the USSR posed did not matter. (Article by Fred Kaplan in Slate, 9/7/2004) Accuracy about the military might of the Soviets was not the point, but the revival of the CPD did much to move the Republican Party to the far right—past Nixon and Ford—and set the stage for Ronald Reagan. Therefore, Pipes was on Reagan’s National Security Council in 1981–82. In a very real sense, one can say that the creation of the CPD in 1976, and its almost ludicrous exaggeration of the Soviet threat, marked the complete destruction of whatever was left—and there was not much left—of John Kennedy’s foreign policy.

    Reagan’s depiction of the USSR as the Evil Empire owed its dark coloring to Pipes and Nitze. Thirty-three members of the CPD ended up being part of the Reagan administration. With the rise of Reagan and Pipes, the depiction of the USSR grew more and more extreme—with no end in sight. It was due to this that America failed to recognize who Mikhail Gorbachev really was. He was not a disguised apparatchik; he was a real reformer. But partly because of this intentional demonization, both Reagan and George H. W. Bush missed an historic opportunity. One only has to recall the nuclear deal Reagan turned down at Rejkavik in 1986 and Gorbachev’s later peace plans for Afghanistan and Iraq, both also declined, to realize just how badly the neocons had mischaracterized the man. In this author’s opinion, and Cohen’s, the failure to recognize this moment is what eventually caused the fall of Gorbachev and the rise of the disastrous Boris Yeltsin.

    Cohen and Pipes bitterly argued about their two views of the USSR. Pipes wrote that Russia had somehow always been destined to be the home of a Marxist tyranny under Joseph Stalin and was, therefore, incorrigible. Cohen disagreed with this view. He argued against it cogently and eloquently in his first book, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. Needless to say, the neocons won. Cohen not only lost, but by the end of his life he had been pretty much vanquished from the public scene. (Click here for more on Cohen)

    Today, even though Russia is not a communist country, has let go of virtually all of its former provinces, and NATO has almost advanced to the Russian border, the neocon version of Russia and Vladimir Putin prevails. In other words, the two threats that men like Nitze and Senator Henry Jackson bandied about—communism and territorial expansion—are non-existent. Yet, with very little exaggeration, the continued demonization has not just continued; it has become an industry.

    II

    The above outline is necessary in order to explain the utter fruitiness of a book like Operation Dragon. James Woolsey was an Undersecretary of the Navy, a negotiator in atomic weapons with the USSR, and he then became President Clinton’s CIA Director in 1993. But, by all accounts, Clinton and the CIA Director were not close. After leaving that position, Woolsey became a member of the infamous Project for the New American Century. He was one of the signatories urging Clinton to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 1998. He also became a patron of the Henry Jackson Society. As I tried to explain in my article on the TFX pseudo-scandal, Senator Jackson represented the contrary foreign policy views of John Kennedy within the Democratic Party. And many of the founders and extreme zealots of the neocon movement came from Jackson’s staff (e.g. Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz). (Click here for details) Today, in keeping with that tradition, Woolsey is on many corporate and private interest boards that are focused on national defense and international affairs.

    All of the above helps explain what the book states about Attlee, but there is also the bothersome characterization of Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who played a strong role in the development of the Manhattan Project. After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had second thoughts about what he had participated in. He wanted to control nuclear power in order to halt proliferation and he was against the development of the H-bomb. This led to the loss of his security clearance in 1954. In 1963, President Kennedy awarded him with the Enrico Fermi Award.

    The ordeal Oppenheimer went through was not enough for Woolsey. Neither were any of the biographies of the scientist. With the help of Pacepa, the book does with Oppenheimer what it did with Attlee. Oppenheimer now becomes part of a Soviet apparatus to steal the secrets of the atomic bomb. Since the atomic age is his specialty, I consulted with author/historian Peter Kuznick about this. In an email of August 22nd, he wrote to me:

    There’s no evidence to indicate that Oppenheimer was the source. He was CP until he began the Manhattan Project, but he was careful to distance himself after that. Others close to him were still in the party. The Sherwin-Bird biography is the best source, though they are agnostic on whether he was ever in the party.

    As Peter said to me, the two main sources the Soviets had from the West were Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall. Much has been written about Fuchs, but little about Hall. Yet, he began informing the USSR in late 1944 about both the design of the bomb and who was working on it. His detailed information about the project flowed to Moscow until August of 1945. He was then re-recruited by the KGB in 1948. The National Security Agency (then known as Army Security Agency and, later, as Armed Forces Security Agency) had figured out who Hall was and what he was doing, but the FBI did not prosecute him since it endangered exposure of signals intelligence capabilities. (Kuznick e-mail)

    Significantly, and tellingly, Ted Hall’s name is not in this book. Why is Hall, who surely was an informant on the bomb not in Operation Dragon, but yet Oppenheimer, who in all probability was not, is.

    This odd selectivity is explained by the presence of Pacepa. He was the first of many intel defectors from the East Bloc and former USSR. This wave of defectors increased substantially with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the USSR, and the reign of Yeltsin. Looking back, it’s fairly easy to see why. When most all of Gorbachev’s reforms and his entreaties to the West failed to create any real détente, his reign collapsed in 1991. This showed just how powerful the neocon faction had become domestically. It was fairly clear that, by then, the Jackson/Democratic Party wing was infected by the neocon philosophy also.

    This became rather clear when President Clinton decided to back Yeltsin’s shelling of the Russian White House, the home of the Duma in 1993. (Click here for details) There were hundreds of casualties during that ten-hour siege. Afterwards, Yeltsin ordered arrests and he banned certain political parties and their publications. This did not just reveal what Clinton and the Democratic Party was becoming; it also sent a clear signal to what was left of the Russian apparatus in the intelligence ranks. Yeltsin’s path was what the USA wanted and they would back him in almost any method he used to maintain it. For all intents and purposes, no matter what Yeltsin did, no matter what happened to Russia internally, Yeltsin was Clinton’s boy. (Click here for details)

    Seeing that Russia was now crumbling economically, Gorbachev was persona non grata, and Yeltsin was America’s new horse, former intel operatives decided to head west. People like Vasili Mitokhin and Alexander Vassiliev gave up on a crumbling country and were well rewarded for their literary efforts in England and America. As scholars like Amy Wright have noted, the MSM has been all too accommodating to them. (Click here for details)

    These men, and others, knew what the British and American intelligence community wanted from them. They delivered the goods in the form of “notes” they wrote down before they left. (As Wright asked: Somehow there was no copying machine in the KGB offices?) Two themes that these defectors realized would be welcome, were that first, there really was a large Soviet spy apparatus in America during the fifties and sixties. In other words, Joe McCarthy was correct; and this explains Operation Dragon’s spin on Oppenheimer. Secondly, that somehow and some way, the Soviets were involved in John Kennedy’s assassination: both actively and as contributing large amounts of disinformation into the press to confuse their true role.

    III

    To show how eager to please this trade in intelligence was, there have been some claims by these defectors that have been proven to be simply false. For instance, as with Attlee, British Labor Party leader Michael Foot, allegedly accepted funds from KGB agents. Foot sued for libel. Understandably, publisher Rupert Murdoch did not want to appear in court, so he settled in Foot’s favor. (Click here for details)

    Mitrokhin maintained that Mark Lane was also supplied with funds by the KGB. One donation was for $1500 and one for $500. Lane kept notes on the contributions he received for his JFK work. He said the only contribution he got that was even close to those amounts came from Corliss Lamont, an heir to the giant JP Morgan fortune. Probably not high on the list for KGB recruiting. Further, although Mitrokhin said the transfer occurred in New York in 1966, Lane was not living there at the time. He was living in Britain, finishing up Rush to Judgment. Finally, the next largest contribution Lane got was from Woody Allen for fifty bucks. (Lane, Last Word, pp. 92–93) In other words, the charges by Mitrokhin were manufactured, but they were what Western intel wanted to hear: Liberals were communists and Warren Commission critics were KGB funded.

    Another piece of confection from Mitrokhin, much appreciated by the CIA, dealt with Clay Shaw and the mysterious business entity, Permindex-CMC. Shaw was arrested by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Three days later, the Italian leftist newspaper Paese Sera began publishing a six part series on the activities of Permindex-CMC in Italy. In an article published in the Daily Beast by Max Holland, the Mitrokhin notes say that the USSR started this disinformation program in Paese Sera that was later picked up in New York. (Daily Beast, April 28, 2017)

    Since Shaw’s arrest preceded the publishing of the articles, it is unlikely they had any impact on Garrison’s indictment of Shaw. The late Bill Turner told me that in going over the Italian articles, he told the DA that, since the reportage concentrated on the entity’s business activities in Rome, it would have little relevance to his case against Shaw in the USA. And, in fact, at Shaw’s trial, they were not brought up.

    But the real point of the original series is not indicated by Holland or Daily Beast. I have read the articles in English translation. It was a lengthy six-part series which explored the business activities of the CMC in Italy. An investigative series like this would take a team of reporters weeks to research and then days to write and prepare for printing. But what makes the Mitrokhin story even more strained is this: there was every reason for the newspapers in Italy—and it was not just Paese Sera that printed stories—to be suspicious of Permindex. This business enterprise had previously been kicked out of Switzerland, due to there being a long, drawn out controversy over its sources of funding. In particular, one of the banks was rumored to be involved was Henry Schroder’s, which had been directly associated with CIA Director Allen Dulles. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 96–97) Therefore, the Italian newspapers were wholly justified in investigating Permindex-CMC as a suspicious business entity when it moved to Rome and announced its real estate plans. In fact, with the Swiss example behind it, it would have been irresponsible not to.

    But as it turns out, there was nothing for the KGB to create and hand off in the first place, which is what gives the lie to Mitrokhin and shows what a hack Max Holland was and is. Clay Shaw was on the board of Permindex as it moved to Italy in late 1958. He himself noted this in his Who’s Who in the Southwest entry and it was also announced by Permindex and relayed to Washington in a State Department cable. (Ibid, Davy p. 98)

    Years later, looking through the papers of Montreal lawyer Louis Bloomfield, researcher Maurice Phillips discovered that the attorney was an important figure in the Permindex scheme. Bloomfield coordinated meetings and elicited investments in the enterprise for the titular leader of the organization, Ferenc Nagy. These contributions were requested from some of the wealthiest men in the world at the time, such as Edmund deRothschild and David Rockefeller. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. imfeld, 2/10/60) There can be no doubt of a CIA angle to the operation due to Shaw’s presence; plus Phillips discovered Nagy was a CIA asset who offered the Agency the use of Permindex in any capacity. (CIA memo of March 24, 1967)

    The worst suspicions about Permindex-CMC were pretty much certified in Michele Metta’s book, CMC: the Italian Undercover CIA and Mossad Station. The brother of Shimon Peres, one Gershon Peres, was on the board of Permindex from 1967. (Metta, p. 114) But further, Permindex shared the same office space with Propaganda Due. (ibid, p. 120) P2 was one of the very worst and deadliest secret societies to exist—not just in Italy—but in all of Europe. When it was led by the infamous Licio Gelli, it was implicated in numerous crimes and murders (e.g. the death of banker Roberto Calvi). With all of this evidence in the record today, we can see the Mitrokhin scheme as being nothing but a made to order distraction. Permindex was for real, and it was what Garrison suspected it was.

    IV

    All of the above is a necessary introduction to what is supposed to be the heart of the book. In borrowing from Pacepa’s Programmed to Kill, the authors will now state their main thesis about President Kennedy’s assassination, which is this: Oswald was somehow instructed to kill Kennedy by Nikita Khrushchev. (see pp. 62–78) His control agents on the mission in the West were George DeMohrenschildt in Dallas and Valery Kostikov of the Russian Embassy in Mexico City. Somehow the Russian leader changed his mind, but Oswald proceeded anyway with guidance from Cuban agents.

    To say there are more holes in this “plot” than a Swiss Cheese is an insult to Swiss Cheese. In fact, this Rube Goldberg contraption actually does the impossible: it makes the Warren Report look somewhat credible.

    First of all, to proffer today that Oswald shot Kennedy to any informed person that is simply a non-starter. The overwhelming evidence declassified by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) has all but made that thesis untenable, but Woolsey is so intent on running away from that evidence that he does not even mention it. (see, for example, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today by James DiEugenio, particularly Chapters 5 and 6) One can only conclude that he understands how it would vitiate his “theory.” In fact, one will not find a reference to the ARRB in his index. It is like these declassifications did not occur.

    The other problem with this Woolsey/Pacepa confection is the very real doubts today about Oswald being in Mexico City. People like John Armstrong and David Josephs have made lengthy and detailed studies about his not being there. (Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, pp. 614-702; click here for David’s series) For example, if somehow Oswald was interacting with Kostikov at the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, why is there no picture of him entering or leaving that structure, when in fact, there should be four of them. (DiEugenio, p. 291)

    And beyond that, Oswald’s calls to the Soviet Embassy are, to say the least, puzzling. According to analyst John Newman, they are a mixture of fluent Spanish and broken Russian. (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 356) Yet as the authors of the Lopez Report maintain, the evidence is the contrary: Oswald spoke broken Spanish and fluent Russian. (Lopez Report, pp. 117, 121) There is also a call to the Soviet Embassy on Saturday, September 28, 1963; this is supposed to be a call by the Cuban consulate aide, Sylvia Duran to the Soviet Embassy. Yet, Duran insisted that Oswald did not call her back after Friday, so this could not be her on this Saturday call. (Lopez Report, p. 190) When the Commission asked the FBI for a picture of Oswald in Mexico City, they got a photo of what has come to be called The Mystery Man. This appears to be a husky, six foot male with a crew cut outside the Soviet Embassy. (Click here for details) When Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez figured out how this picture was sent up to the FBI, they deduced that not only did Anne Goodpasture of the CIA know it was not Oswald, she very likely knew who it really was, likely KGB agent Yuri Maskolev under diplomatic cover. (Lopez Report, p. 179)

    Finally, there is another question that the authors of this book do not bring up about Oswald in Mexico City. This addresses the question of what was Oswald doing there in the first place. If one buys the Warren Report, Oswald was there to get an “in transit” visa, which meant that he would go to Russia via Havana. Therefore, Oswald had to visit both embassies, but since he was so ill-prepared with the proper paperwork, he could not get either passport while in Mexico. Again, this is questionable. The State Department had approved his passport to Russia that summer, but had stamped it with a warning that anyone going to Cuba could be prosecuted. If Oswald wanted to return to Russia, he could have just gone the same route he had taken in 1959. But going through Cuba posed a legal problem. (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 615) Neither of our authors address this or any of the other above problems. Yet Mexico City is a central tenet of their theory.

    What about their other chief suspect? As DeMohrenschildt told Edward Epstein, he did not approach Oswald and his wife Marina at the behest of the KGB. He did so at the request of J. Walton Moore of the Dallas CIA office. In fact, Moore had to push George into doing this and Moore did so on three separate occasions. As DeMohrenschildt stated to Edward Epstein, “I would never have contacted Oswald in a million years if Moore had not sanctioned it.” (The Assassination Chronicles, by Edward Epstein, pp. 558–59) I don’t see how one can make it more clear than that. And since Epstein’s work is used profusely in Operation Dragon, it’s hard to buy that Woolsey and Pacepa did not know this.

    The authors place a lot of weight on the letter Oswald allegedly wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington shortly after the first week in November. (Woolsey, p. 65) I strongly recommend to the reader that they read Peter Newbury’s excellent analysis of this document. (Click here for details) It brings up all the obvious questions about this letter and the fact that there were three versions of it. And the Warren Commission asked questions about, not the typed version, but the hand copied version which was done by Ruth Paine. (For an examination of the possible role of Ruth Paine with this letter, click here)

    V

    Woolsey describes the scene in Havana after Kennedy’s assassination with Jean Daniel speaking with Fidel Castro and Fidel getting a call telling him the president was shot. (pp. 141–43) But yet, his description of what was said does not match the one given by Daniel and written about in a famous New Republic article. (The New Republic December 7, 1963) The authors also leave out the entire background of the meeting between Daniel and Castro. Namely, it was the final step of what had begun in January of 1963 with an approach from Castro’s physician to Kennedy administration lawyer James Donovan. Donovan had been negotiating the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners. Rene Vallejo broached the subject with him of normalizing relations between the two countries. Castro had not liked being the centerpiece of an arm-wrestling contest during the Missile Crisis. These negotiations continued through different messengers (i.e. Donovan, Lisa Howard, Bill Attwood and finally Daniel in November of 1963). (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 56–58)

    Castro was surprised at how eloquent, empathic, and forceful Kennedy’s final message through Daniel was. He replied by saying, “Suddenly a president arrives on the scene who tries to support the interest of another class…” Fidel was so elated he spent the next three days with Daniel, saying, among other things, that Kennedy could now become the greatest president since Lincoln. (ibid, pp. 85–89) On the third day, he got the phone call about Kennedy being shot and then the announcement he was dead. Like everything in the paragraph noted above, the authors cut out what Castro said to Daniel after he hung up the phone. Daniel described Castro as looking stunned. Fidel sat down and then repeated over and over: “This is bad news…this is bad news…this is bad news.” When the announcement about Kennedy’s death came on the radio, Castro stood up and said, “Everything is changed. Everything is going to change.” That line is also cut by the authors.

    So, what do the two ultra Cold Warriors substitute instead? If you can believe it, they say that Castro was really play acting about all this. Who is their source for Castro’s Oscar winning performance? You will not at all be surprised when I write the words Brian Latell. Brian, of course, was a longtime CIA analyst and then professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, which means he was teaching up and coming State Department and CIA officers. He became the Agency’s front man for their “Castro killed Kennedy” propaganda effort. His work has been pretty much perforated and his sources deflated by our own Arnaldo Fernandez. (Click here for details)

    But in reality, Operation Dragon falls apart when confronted with a stereo view of Oswald’s defection to Russia, that is, from his arrival in Moscow, and also what happened to his CIA file at Langley.

    From the day he arrived, in October of 1959, the KGB did not buy Oswald as a genuine defector. They always suspected he was an intel operative sent from either the CIA or the Navy. They had good reason to suspect this. Quite simply, the number and frequency of American defectors into the USSR had been increasing since about 1958. From single digits per year, it had grown almost exponentially. They were quite suspicious of Oswald, not just for that reason, but because he told his government tour guide he had classified information about airplanes. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 140) He also said he wanted to become a Soviet citizen. When his plea was turned down, he staged a faked suicide attempt and was sent to the psychiatric ward of Botkinskaya Hospital. Upon his release, Oswald was sent to the Hotel Metropole, which was under KGB electronic surveillance. Clearly, they were debating what to do with Oswald, while watching him interact with American reporters on the scene (e.g. CIA asset Priscilla Johnson).

    In early January of 1960, Oswald was called to the passport office. He was handed 5000 rubles and sent to Minsk, about 400 miles from Moscow. He was given a rent free apartment by the mayor and a generous salary of 700 rubles per month for his work in a radio factory. (ibid, p. 144) The Russians had decided Oswald was a false defector. They wanted him out of Moscow, but they did not want him to leave yet. So they made life easy for him, while turning the tables on the American. The KGB gave the Oswald case a handler. They then encased Oswald with a ring of human surveillance, including Pavel Golovachev, who worked at the radio plant.

    I ask the reader: Does this sound like a person the Soviets would recruit to kill Kennedy? A man they suspected from the start was a false defector meant to spy on them, while working for the other side? We know today that, almost beyond a shadow of a doubt, the Russians were correct on this. Through the work of the ARRB analyst and British researcher Malcolm Blunt, we now know that the Oswald file at CIA was rigged in advance of his defection.

    Betsy Wolf was assigned to work on the Oswald file at CIA by the HSCA. One of the things that puzzled her was why Oswald’s 201 file was not opened upon his arrival in Moscow. It took 13 months for that to happen. Wolf could not understand why this was the case. She could also not understand why Oswald’s files went to the Office of Security (OS), instead of where they should have gone: the Soviet Russia Division. According to its own internal rules, Oswald should have had a 201 file opened almost immediately, but Wolf later found out that the OS worked closely with the counter-intelligence division. In other words, knowing that OS would not open a 201 file was likely one of the objectives of counter-intelligence.

    It turned out that Betsy learned the system had been rigged in advance. This was done through a mechanism called CIA Mail Logistics. (Click here for details) Only someone who knew the system, and for whom Oswald was a special project, would have known how to do this and wanted to do so. In Oliver Stone’s upcoming documentary, John Newman points to this rigging of the system as proof that Oswald was a witting false defector. His source is none other than Pete Bagley, a veteran Counter intelligence officer of the CIA for 20 years. In the light of that, this book’s tenet that CIA never had any kind of operative connection with Oswald is ludicrous. (p. 137)

    Operation Dragon is also risible in that the authors say that somehow Oswald proved he could shoot JFK by his attempt upon General Walker. (p. 138) As more than one credible author has shown, and for solid evidentiary reasons, it is highly unlikely that Oswald took a shot at Walker. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pp. 48–59)

    The authors follow with this, “On April 13th just before Oswald traveled to Mexico to show the KGB what a good shot he was.” I do not think this is an error. I think they actually are saying that Oswald took this early journey to Mexico, but they source this to Epstein’s book Legend. I could not find it there. Epstein seems to align with the late September, early October 1963 dates for Oswald’s Mexico journey.

    Finally, the authors blame Joachim Joesten and his publisher Carl Marzani as being responsible for the idea that Oswald was some kind of intelligence undercover agent. And presto, they are now Soviet agents. Naturally this comes from, respectively, Pacepa and Mitrokhin. (pp. 75–76) I don’t have to tell the reader how thoroughly investigated these two men were by both the FBI, State Department, and the CIA or the rather interesting and relevant fact that Oswald was suspected of being an FBI informant as early as January of 1964, and this information was printed in The Nation. In other words, the indications were there for anyone to see. (Click here for details)

    Operation Dragon is a complete, fall-on-its-face failure in what is tries to do. It does not in any way achieve its aim of showing that the JFK murder was a Russian/Cuban operation. It is so riddled with errors, constrained by censorship, and marred by unwarranted assumptions that it simply cannot be taken seriously on any level, except as an outdated, slightly humorous propaganda effort.

  • Kennedy’s Avenger?

    Kennedy’s Avenger?

    Dan Abrams and his writing partner David Fisher have now written their fourth book. The first three were about trials involving Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Adams. All three books dealt with cases that presidents participated in as either advocates or defendants. Kennedy’s Avenger is about the trial of Jack Ruby for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. Since Oswald did not shoot President John Kennedy, I don’t quite get the connection to the previous books. But since Abrams is a dyed in the wool, enthusiastic upholder of the MSM, one comprehends why fairly soon.

    Kennedy’s Avenger is an all-out defense of the Warren Report. And it takes very little time or analysis to come to that conclusion. By page 22, the book says Oswald killed Kennedy in a Warren Report, three-shot scenario. Oswald then shot patrolman J. D. Tippit. The authors follow that up with the following:

    Although no one made the connection at that time, it was later proven that a bullet fired from the same rifle Oswald had used to assassinate Kennedy had ripped into General Walker’s home seven months earlier, barely missing Walker. (p. 23)

    Like the two other cases, the authors present this as a fact they do not have to prove to the reader. The problem is simple: it’s not a fact, because the rifle found in the Texas School Book Depository handled different ammunition than the bullet originally described in the Walker shooting. The original bullet at the Walker scene was described in both police and newspaper reports as 30.06 in caliber. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 100) Further, the original police report described the projectile as being steel jacketed. The ammo for the alleged Oswald rifle was copper jacketed. In the nearly eight months that the Dallas Police investigated the Walker shooting, there was never any hint that Oswald was a suspect. In fact, the police thought that two men were involved. (ibid, pp. 102–03) This was largely based on the testimony of witness Kirk Coleman, who ran out of his nearby house the second he heard a shot being fired. He saw two men driving away in separate cars. According to the Commission, Oswald did not drive. Therefore, just from the above evidence, how could Oswald be involved? But if you don’t tell the reader how the FBI and the Commission made their phony case, then you do not have to explain how it contradicted the actual evidence.

    Considering what we know today, Abram’s coinciding description of Oswald is quite shallow. It lasts about a paragraph. (Abrams, p. 23) The shooting of Oswald takes up about a page. Recall, this is really the main topic of the book, and it gets all of one page! (Abrams, pp. 24–25) Right after this, the book devotes about another page to a cliched description of Ruby, as “one of those likable characters who always had a smile and a scheme.” (Abrams, p. 25) And then, about as fast as they can get it in, the authors recite the holy creed about Ruby’s shooting of Oswald: Ruby felt compelled to kill the assassin due to sympathy for Mrs. Kennedy; “he did not want her to go through the ordeal of returning to Dallas for the trial of Oswald.” (Abrams, p. 26)

    Everyone, except maybe Abrams and Fisher, knows that this was exposed as fraudulent way back in 1967 by Newsweek. (3/27/67 p. 21; HSCA Report, p. 158) The House Select Committee on Assassinations described this pretext as “a fabricated legal ploy.” And we know this from Ruby himself. Ruby passed a note to one of his lawyers, Joe Tonahill, at his murder trial and it exposes the title of this book as unsound. It read:

    Joe, you should know this. Tom Howard told me to say that I shot Oswald so that Caroline and Mrs. Kennedy wouldn’t have to come to Dallas to testify.

    Tom Howard was Ruby’s first lawyer. The night Ruby shot Oswald, Howard was at a meeting that took place at Ruby’s apartment with Ruby’s roommate George Senator and two reporters. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 200–201) But it’s even more interesting than that. Howard entered the basement of the Dallas Police Department a bit after 11:20 AM. After Oswald was brought into the basement, the attorney told a policeman, “That’s all I wanted to see.” Ruby then shot Oswald. (CE 2002, p. 73)

    As the reader can see, it’s what Abrams leaves out that is the real story. But before we expose much more of what is not there, let us deal with what the authors actually write.

    II

    Jack Ruby and his family decided they needed a higher profile attorney than Howard to deal with all the media coverage of the trial. They contacted some of the emerging superstars of the court room from that era (e.g. Percy Foreman and Jake Ehrlich). They finally decided on Melvin Belli. (Abrams, p. 32) Belli was surely one of the most accomplished lawyers of that time. In addition to his achievements in court, he had written 18 books. The silver haired, silver throated, exquisitely dressed Belli cut quite an impressive figure in court. Belli arrived in Dallas on December 10th. His local associates were to be Tonahill and Phil Burleson. The former would try some of the case and advise Belli about Texas law; Burleson was their appeals specialist.

    As the book notes, after Belli’s first meeting with his client, he decided that something was imbalanced with Ruby. (Abrams, p. 38) And it was probably this—plus Belli’s vast background in medical law—that caused him to bypass the defense Howard was going to use. That was murder without malice (i.e. Ruby was “overtaken by the passion of the moment”) and, if successful, this could have amounted to spending no more than five years in prison. (Abrams, p. 29)

    But at the second bail hearing, Belli introduced something that would eventually be the key to his defense. Ruby he said recalled going down the ramp and seeing Oswald, but he did not recall anything else until the officers subdued him. (Abrams, p. 49) Some doctors labeled this as being in a “fugue state.” Belli was going to show that Ruby “suffered from a rare form of epilepsy and had been legally insane when he killed Oswald.” (ibid) The epilepsy Ruby was afflicted with was a newly discovered form. It was called psychomotor epilepsy.

    Going with his high risk, Hail Mary type of defense, Belli understood that he had to get the trial moved out of town. He could never get a neutral enough jury in Dallas to give him a fair shake. And here Abrams and Fisher do a decent job, much better than Mark Shaw, in describing just how unfair Judge Joe Brown was to the defense.

    Brown clearly looked at this trial as being an opportunity for him to become at least a local, if not a state, celebrity. He hired Sam Bloom, probably the most famous PR man in Texas to represent him. (Abrams, p. 38) With that kind of conflict of interest, he was not going to let his golden moment get away from him. Therefore, when Belli moved for a change of venue—based on the prior Billy Sol Estes case—Brown looked askance on the perfectly justified motion. According to the authors, Brown ultimately decided the motion when he learned he could not move with the trial. (Abrams, pp. 55, 85) Even Henry Wade, the local DA, thought that the media frenzy made a fair trial unlikely. (Abrams, p. 61)

    But in his pursuit of a star turn, Brown ignored the obvious. For instance, the chair of the board of directors of the Dallas Crime Bar Association said the only way to vindicate Dallas was to convict Ruby. (Abrams, p. 71) Ruby’s neighbor told the court she knew Ruby could not get a fair trial, because the newspapers had run stories quoting her saying things she did not say. (Abrams, p. 79) When Judge Brown ordered Ruby to Parkland Hospital for psychiatric tests, the hospital refused to run them. Belli thought this was due to Wade and his assistant Bill Alexander. When he posed that direct question, Wade objected and Brown upheld the objection. (Abrams, p. 73) And this was a real problem with the trial. The prosecution made many, many objections, some of which were made before the defense even finished their questions. No matter what, Brown sustained almost all the objections by the DA. (Abrams, p. 78)

    Brown also denied bail for Ruby. (Abrams, p. 66) To try to counteract Brown’s rulings, Ruby’s lawyers and siblings published a two-part article entitled “My Story,” which was released in many newspapers. Ruby specifically denied he was a gangster or racketeer or any kind of underworld character. In reply to any other conspiracy charges, he said that he was not a communist and he did not know Oswald. He also wrote that he had not “been employed by anyone to ‘silence’ Oswald.” (Abrams, p. 67) Of course, if any of these suspicions were true, it would be highly unlikely that Ruby would admit to them. Just as it would not be likely that his lawyers or family would either.

    But Abrams agrees with what was in those columns. Ruby was none of those things. He writes that in order to deal with mushrooming rumors, “President Johnson announced the creation of a fact-finding commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, to investigate the assassination.” (Abrams, p. 68) He then says that Warren took the job because LBJ told him he had to in order to prevent divisions in the country.

    In light of the declassified record, neither of these statements is accurate. It was not Johnson’s idea to create the commission. It was pressed on him by outside forces, namely, Eugene Rostow of Yale and journalist Joseph Alsop. LBJ was quite reluctant to create a federal commission and actually thought it should remain a state matter, which, legally, was the correct procedure. But after Ruby shot Oswald, men like Rostow and Alsop thought things had spun out of control and Washington had to stop what appeared to be a modern version of Tombstone. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 8–15) According to both Warren and LBJ, the clinching arguments the president used to convince a very reluctant Chief Justice to head the commission was that if he did not there would be an atomic war with the Russians that could kill 40 million people. LBJ based this nuclear scenario on reports he was getting from the CIA about what Oswald had allegedly been doing in Mexico City. (Washington Post, 9/23/93, article by Walter Pincus; HSCA Vol. 11 p. 7) By avoiding this kind of underlying data, Abrams saves himself from posing some intriguing questions like: Was Oswald even in Mexico City? And if he was not what was the point of the reports?

    III

    For all intents and purposes, with no change of venue, and Brown’s bias, there was no way the defense was going to get a fair shake. Belli’s all or nothing defense made it even more difficult. But as the authors note, Belli had made a strong case for appeal. (Abrams, p. 85)

    Abrams touches on another problem for the defense before the trial began. In the first jury call up of 500 people, there was not a single Catholic, Jew, or member of a union. (Abrams, p. 59) Considering there were about 700,000 people living in Dallas at the time, this seems improbable.

    This gave the authors a convenient opportunity to review the once hidden record of DA Henry Wade. Yet, in the entire book, there is no mention of Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line. It was that film, plus the Lenell Geter case which first revealed the horrible corruption of the Dallas DA’s office under Wade. (Click here for the former and here for the latter) In the Geter case, Wade convicted the defendant for armed robbery, even though nine witnesses placed him at work, fifty miles away, that day.(Washington Post, 2/3/87, story by James McBride) In the Morris film involving defendant Randall Adams, the appeals court overturned Wade’s conviction due to improper jury selection. Wade then asked the governor to commute Adams’ sentence so a new trial would not be granted. But there was a hearing anyway and the judge ruled that the DA withheld key evidence about witnesses and that the real killer had charges dropped against him in another county after he testified against Adams. The daughter of another witness also got this kind of deal: charges dropped against her for the mother’s testimony against Adams. (D Magazine, April of 1998, article by Sally Giddens)

    Those were by no means isolated incidents. No other county has had as many felony cases reversed on appeal due to DNA evidence than Dallas. (Click here for details) In fact, Dallas had more cases overturned than some states did. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 196)

    But if the authors opened up this door, then the reader would have to question their assumptions about the Kennedy case and the Tippit case, because those two murders were solved by the DA in less than 24 hours. And Wade was pronouncing Oswald’s guilt in the JFK case to the world at that time, which, of course, all went up in smoke when Ruby shot Oswald on NBC TV.

    During the voir dire process, that is when the attorneys interviewed potential jurors to be impaneled, Brown allowed people who had seen Ruby’s shooting of Oswald live to be on the jury. Belli objected since Texas law disallowed a witness to a crime to be on a jury. (Abrams, p. 90) Belli, as he would be continuously, was overruled. The authors do note that Texas law allowed only married men and women who owned property to be on juries at this time. The very few African-Americans who qualified were treated as second class citizens by the prosecution: they were called by their first names. (Abrams, p. 94) Needless to say, Belli ran out of peremptory challenges. When he asked Brown to give him 15 more, Brown granted him three. In other words, after denying a change of venue, Brown failed to begin to even the scales against bias. (Abrams, p. 96) When jury selection was all over, the tally was 8 men, 4 women, all white Protestants, four college graduates, and 11 of them saw the shooting. (Abrams, p. 102)

    With the defense that Belli had chosen, in 1964, the M’Naghten rule applied. This meant that the defendant was acting under such a defect of reason that he did not know what he was doing and could not tell the difference between right and wrong. Therefore, the prosecution had to show that Ruby had acted with intent. The trial opened on March 4, 1964. Belli made several motions that day before the first witness was called. Every one of them was denied. (Abrams, p. 112) There were no opening statements.

    IV

    The prosecution attempted to establish Ruby at the offices of the Dallas Morning News at the time of Kennedy’s assassination. They called three witnesses, yet, through Belli’s skillful cross examination, none of them could place Ruby in their sights at the exact moment of the shooting. (pp. 115–118) This had to be done circumstantially. Wade then tried to trace Ruby’s movements the rest of the day. Two things are interesting about this part of the book, one the authors describe, one they leave out. It turns out that very late that night, reporter Bill Duncan got a call from Jack Ruby. Ruby wanted to know if the reporter wished to talk to Wade, he then put the DA on the line. Belli played this up for all if was worth on cross examination. Less than 48 hours before the defendant killed Oswald, he was in the office of the man now prosecuting him. (Abrams, p. 120) Later, in court, Wade actually said he had never seen Ruby before that night. (Abrams, p. 127)

    Using reporter Wes Wise, the future mayor, the prosecution then placed Ruby outside the county jail on Saturday afternoon. This was about an hour before the first announced transfer to that destination. (Abrams, p. 123) At this point in the trial, the authors write that Belli was doing a bit too well. Therefore, Wade decided to take over the lead in the trial. The book does not reveal that Wade let Alexander go in 1967. This was after Alexander stated that Warren should not be impeached, he should be executed, preferable by hanging. Alexander also once said about JFK’s murder: “And as far as anybody giving a particular rat’s ass about John Kennedy getting his ass wiped in Dallas, who cares?” (DiEugenio, p. 198)

    The prosecution then called parking lot attendant Garnett Claude Hallmark. Ruby had parked his car in his lot on Saturday afternoon. He then made a phone call which Hallmark overheard. He told the person on the other end that Oswald would be transferred soon, but he did not know when; but when he was, he would be there. (Abrams, p. 128) For the Commission, Hallmark clarified this as being Ruby’s phone call with disc jockey at KLIF radio, Ken Dowe. The witness said he was about two feet away from Ruby while he let him use his office phone. Ruby was referring to what he thought would be a transfer on that day, Saturday. (WC Vol. XV, pp. 488–89)

    Doyle Lane then placed Jack Ruby at Western Union on Sunday. Belli tried to explain that, since he was there at 11:17 and could not know when the transfer was going to occur, this eliminated premeditation and therefore malice. (Abrams, p. 130) The prosecution then brought Ray Brantley to the stand and he testified he sold the handgun to Ruby which the accused used to shoot Oswald.

    At this point, the prosecution wanted to insert the testimony of certain police officers as to what Ruby allegedly said after his shooting of Oswald. Belli and Tonahill vigorously objected on the doctrine of self- incrimination. At that time, in Texas, after the point the defendant was arrested, his words could not be used against him. (Abrams, p. 133) Brown overruled the objection and decided it was part of the Res gestae, or part of the felonious act.

    Let me add this point: Wade and Alexander had lined up more than one witness who was willing to state that Ruby made incriminating remarks right after he shot Oswald. And this may have had an influence on the defense that Belli decided to follow. In this instance, Jim Leavelle said that Ruby uttered the words “I hope the sonofabitch dies” after shooting him. But the defense ended up finding ways to either counter or discount this kind of testimony. For instance, Detective L. C. Graves said he never heard Ruby say what Leavelle said he did. And it was Graves who snatched the weapon from Ruby’s hand. (Abrams, pp. 145–46) Officer Don Archer also stated he heard these kinds of incriminating statements from Ruby, yet as Belli examined him, he admitted he did not mention these statements to the FBI. (Abrams, p. 153) Thomas McMillon, Archer’s partner, said that Ruby leaped forward and said, “You rat sonofabitch, you shot the president!” Ruby then shot Oswald. Belli later demonstrated that this was far-fetched, since McMillon was separated from Ruby by three people and was looking the wrong way when Ruby burst forth. (Abrams, p. 159)

    V

    A man who became a very controversial witness also took the stand to testify against Ruby. This was Sgt. Patrick Dean. The book designates that Dean was in charge of security that day for the basement transfer. (Abrams, p. 173) And if the reader can comprehend it, that is all the book says about this crucial subject—which we will discuss a bit later. Dean testified that Ruby told him, “He…had thought about this two nights prior, when he saw Harvey Oswald on the show up stand.” Belli objected wildly and asked for a mistrial on the grounds that Ruby had been arrested at least ten minutes earlier. (Abrams, p. 174) No surprise, Judge Brown allowed it.

    One of the most serious flaws in this book is that it takes place in a time warp. That is, Abrams and Fisher wrote the book as if nothing had happened on this case since. In fact, much had happened. For example, the HSCA concluded that Ruby likely had help getting into the basement and he likely did not come down the Main Street ramp. He came in through an unsecured door off an alley to the rear. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 227–228) If that door was not secured, it was very likely due to Dean’s negligence, or perhaps his cooperation.

    What retroactively sheds light on Dean is this: he failed his department polygraph—even though he wrote his own questions! When the HSCA tried to find Dean’s polygraph test, they could not locate it. For these reasons, the Committee concluded that Dean was very likely a key figure in Oswald’s shooting. In fact, while subduing Ruby, Dean reportedly said, “Man, you got me in one hell of a shape,” to which Ruby apologized at the time. Dean failed to arrange a deposition with the HSCA and would not reply to written questions. (DiEugenio, p. 229)

    But one does not even need to go that far forward in time. Commission counsel Burt Griffin, one of two men on the Ruby case, strongly suspected Dean was lying to his question about whether or not Ruby could have gotten into the basement through that door. Dean said he would have needed a key to get in. When the HSCA investigated this issue, they found three witnesses on the custodial staff who denied such was the case. Griffin finally lost all patience with Dean. He wrote a memo saying that:

    1. Dean was derelict in securing all doors to the basement.
    2. He had reason to think Ruby did not come down the ramp.
    3. He suspected Dean was part of a cover up and advised Ruby to say he came down the Main Street ramp even though he knew he did not. (DiEugenio, pp. 229–230)

    In fact, the authors must know all this. Since they have Seth Kantor’s biography of Ruby in their bibliography. The HSCA found a new witness, Don Flusche, who said he was leaning up against his car outside the Main Street ramp at the time of Oswald’s transfer. He watched the whole thing and he knew Ruby. He said Ruby was nowhere near the ramp, let alone walking down it, before the shooting. (DiEugenio, pp. 227–228). All this leaves the question: did Dean leave that door unsecured for Ruby to enter the building?

    There is one last point which should be made about this key issue. After he got into the basement, Ruby insisted that he was not hiding behind anyone prior to Oswald entering the foyer. This is a lie. (See the film Evidence of Revision, Part 7, nine minute mark) He is seen hiding behind Blackie Harrison and, when this was conveyed to him, Ruby exploded in rage. The day Harrison was scheduled to be polygraphed about Oswald’s murder, he was on tranquilizers to disguise his reactions. His test turned out inconclusive. (DiEugenio, p. 229) To put it mildly, all of this puts a different spin on what Dean said under oath. In fact, it reveals just how bad the DPD was and how dedicated Wade was to cover it all up. But somehow, the authors were not interested in any of it.

    VI

    Because of Belli’s defense, perhaps the most important part of the trial was the duel between each side’s authorities. Belli used Dr. Roy Schafer, Dr. Martin Towler, Dr. Manfred Guttmacher, and Dr. Fredrick Gibbs. The key witness was Gibbs, who was given credit for discovering the sickness and was an expert in reading EEG’s. Wade brought in his own experts, like Dr. Robert Schwab, Dr. Francis Forester, and Dr. Roland MacKay, but one of the problems with Belli’s case is that his star authority, Gibbs, would not say whether or not Ruby knew right from wrong when he shot Oswald. (Abrams, p. 321)

    Brown concluded his poor stewardship of the trial with his charge to the jury. Tonahill called it “a road map to a verdict of guilty of cold-blooded murder.” Burleson wrote up 36 pages of suggested corrections. It took seventeen minutes to read the charge to the jury. Very few of Burleson’s corrections made it. (Abrams, pp. 322–24)

    As the reader can understand by now, although Belli and Tonahill put up a valiant fight, it was pretty much doomed by Judge Brown, but the defense never let up. In his summation, Burleson asked: why were none of these incriminating statements by Ruby in the first day police reports? (Abrams, p. 331) Tonahill said the reason the prosecution was so hotly after Ruby is that they let Oswald be shot on national TV. And he hammered home the message that police witnesses were not trustworthy. He even hinted that perhaps the police were in cahoots with Ruby, to which Wade wildly objected. (Abrams, p. 334)

    The prosecution rebutted Tonahill by saying his was the oldest defense in the book, “If you can’t defend the defendant, prosecute the prosecutor.” (Abrams, p. 336) Belli stressed the learned knowledge of Gibbs and the instability of Ruby. Wade stressed to the jury that they had to put a price on the laws of the state. Ruby had to pay for shooting an unarmed, handcuffed man in the stomach. He then said Ruby did what he did to be in the limelight. He then asked the jury to show Ruby the same mercy Ruby showed Oswald. (Abrams, pp. 342–43)

    Needless to say, after Brown paved the way for them, the jury agreed with the prosecution. They gave Ruby the death penalty. Belli sensed this would occur and counseled Ruby that they had tried the case for an appeal and they would win on appeal. But even at that, Belli exploded when he heard the verdict and his incendiary remarks were squarely aimed at Brown. He told Brown he had blood on his hands.(Abrams, pp. 348–50)

    Burleson prepared a good appeal, which Brown denied. Brown then retired from the case. The Texas appellate court overturned the verdict on appeal in October of 1966. One of the issues they dealt with was the wrongful admittance of Dean’s testimony, which they asked to be struck from the record. A new trial was scheduled for Wichita Falls in February of 1967, but Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital in December of 1966 with cancer. He died on January 3, 1967.

    As per Ruby’s rather fast acting and late detected cancer, although the book says that Ruby’s psychiatrist said he had delusions and was paranoid, there is no mention of who he was. (Abrams, p. 355) His name was Louis Jolyon West. West had worked for and with the CIA in their MK ULTRA program, doing experiments in drug induced hypnoprogramming. (Tom O’Neill, Chaos, pp. 359–65) West even wrote a letter to Earl Warren saying that Ruby had acted in an irrational and unpremeditated manner in order to prove that Jews loved the president and were not cowards. West edited lines from another psychiatrist’s report about Ruby’s running guns into Cuba. (Abrams, p. 386)

    I think we all know why a CIA asset like West would do the last. And why the authors would simply ignore the fact. As Henry Hurt noted in his book Reasonable Doubt, Ruby was involved in these kinds of illegal weapons operations with a man named Thomas Eli Davis. (Hurt, pp. 400–05) In fact, Ruby even told his lawyers about this, since he feared it would surface in the papers. On the day of Kennedy’s assassination, Davis was in Algiers and was using the name ‘Oswald.’

    Let me conclude with two points that, again, although important, are not dealt with by Abrams. In Chapter 18, the book deals with the polygraph test that Ruby insisted on taking. The book agrees with the official verdict about that test revealing no area of deception. What the book does not say is that the HSCA commissioned a study of the records of that test. That three man expert panel concluded Ruby’s test broke about 10 different accepted protocols of polygraph technique. (DiEugenio, pp. 267–70) They deduced that, contrary to what the Commission wrote, Ruby had lied during the test. The report is blistering. It strongly suggests the test was so worthless it was probably rigged.

    If such was the case, the rigging was done through the FBI, which relates to the issue of why Ruby was at the Western Union station, across the street from the Dallas Police Department, right before the Oswald transfer. Belli and Ruby always insisted that Karen Bennett, one of Ruby’s strippers, had asked Ruby for a small advance on the weekend. After examining this issue with the help of Greg Parker, this reviewer came to a different conclusion. Both the FBI and Secret Service worked on Karen and her common law husband Bruce Carlin to massage them into saying that this Sunday morning call was from them to Ruby. This was after Ruby had advanced her five dollars through a third party the night before. The agents were so insistent on making the couple say it was their idea that they literally harassed Bruce at work to the extent he lost a job. The couple would get calls in the middle of the night. Karen had been interviewed seven times before she appeared before the Commission. They were one of the few Commission witnesses who brought a lawyer with them. (DiEugenio, pp. 225–27) The bottom line is this: Karen first stated that it was Ruby’s idea for the Sunday call, and even Leon Hubert, the Commission lawyer on the Ruby case, once agreed with her.

    If Ruby arranged for the call, if he came in through an unsecured door, if he was hiding behind Harrison before springing forward to shoot Oswald, this indicates a much different picture than either the defense, the prosecution, or Abrams presents. And this is what makes Kennedy’s Avenger a superfluous book.

  • Last Second in Dallas, part 2

    Last Second in Dallas, part 2

    Another dispute Thompson had with Vince Salandria was the author’s theory about the small hole in JFK’s throat. On the day of the assassination, Dr. Malcolm Perry said to the public that this appeared to be an entrance wound. Thompson’s idea is that it was a piece of either brain or metal ejected from Kennedy’s skull. And he includes a diagram of this on page 98. The trajectory of this projectile is hard to fathom, especially since it would be traveling through soft tissue. But also, once it went into the throat area, it would be entering into all kinds of small bones and thicker cartilage. So in addition to the trajectory, it found an exit path through that maze?

    Thompson takes Howard Brennan at his word. (pp. 98-99) Which he also did in his previous JFK book. I am not going to go into the myriad problems with Brennan as a witness. That would be redundant of too many good writers. Let me say this: today, the best one can say about Brennan is that he was looking at the wrong building. The worst one could say is that he was rehearsed and suborned. As Vince Palamara wrote in Honest Answers, Brennan refused to appear before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Beyond that, he would not answer written questions. When they said they would have to subpoena him, he replied he would fight the subpoena. Does this sound like a straightforward, credible witness? (Palamara, pp. 186-89)

    To supplement the dubious Brennan, the author uses the testimony of the three workers underneath the sixth floor. Vincent Bugliosi used one of them in a mock trial of Lee Oswald in England in 1986. I addressed the serious problem with using these men––in Bugliosi’s case it was Harold Norman––in my book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today. (pp. 54-55) To make a long story short, after they were interviewed by the FBI, their stories were altered by the Secret Service. At that mock trial, Norman could have been taken apart and spat out if defense lawyer Gerry Spence had been prepared––which he was not. (For a long version of how and why this happened, see Secret Service Report 491)

    Let me add one key point about this. One of the Secret Service agents involved in this mutation was Elmer Moore, a man who––since the declassifications of the ARRB––has become infamous in the literature. There is little doubt today, in the wake of the declassified files, that Moore was an important part of the coverup. (DiEugenio, pp. 166-69) Therefore, in my view, Thompson missed another pattern––one which could have been indicated to him by Gary Aguilar or Pat Speer, in addition to myself.

    The middle part of the book narrates much of the case history from the early to late seventies. For Thompson, this means the first showings of the Zapruder film by Bob Groden at conferences, then the big national showing on ABC in 1975. This was one of the factors that spurred the creation of the HSCA in 1976. Thompson says that he was invited to the so called HSCA “critics conference.” He says this was where he first heard of the dictabelt tape of a motorcycle recording of the assassination. He takes the opportunity to tell us how the HSCA actually recovered the tape. He also explains how it worked and some of the technology behind it. (pp. 147-51) Keeping with his personal journey aspect, in this part of the book he also tells us how he decided to give up his professorship at Haverford and become a private investigator.

    From 1979 until 2006 the author tells us he was very little involved with the case. (pp. 182-83) This is kind of surprising when one thinks about it. Thompson all but leaves out the yearlong furor that took place over the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Which is odd, since that was the largest period of focused attention the case got since 1975. All he says is that he was called to testify by the Assassination Records Review Board about their purchase of the Zapruder film. And he testified, properly I think, that once the Secret Service knew about the film it should have gone to Abraham Zapruder’s home and taken possession of it right there as a piece of evidence in a homicide case. (pp. 189-90) About any of the rather startling disclosures of the ARRB, I could detect little or nothing.

    He spends several pages on a conference organized by Gary Aguilar in San Francisco which featured Eric Randich and Pat Grant. It was these two men who broke open the whole mythology of Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis, today called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis. I was at that conference and Thompson does a good enough job summing up their scientific findings. (pp. 190-96). As the author notes, this “junk science” had been important to the HSCA in its findings that somehow Oswald alone did the shooting, and the acoustical second shot from the front missed.

    II

    In the second half of the book Thompson more or less forsakes the personal journey motif. He concentrates on what he sees as three important pieces of evidence, which he figures are crucial to the case. I will deal with each of these as candidly and completely as I can.

    Thompson devotes Chapter 16, well over twenty pages, to the medical evidence in the JFK case. He begins this part of his book by declaring that the JFK autopsy was “botched,” in other words, whatever shortcomings there were in that procedure, they were not by design. I was rather surprised by this supposition, for the simple reason that Dr. Pierre Finck said under oath at the trial of Clay Shaw that the reason the back wound was not dissected is because the military brass in the room stopped them from doing so. He also said that James Humes, the chief pathologist, was not running the proceedings. They were being so obstructed that Humes literally had to shout out, “Who’s in charge here?” Finck testified that an Army general replied, “I am.” Finck summed up the situation like this:

    You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people with various ranks, and you have to coordinate the operations according to directions. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 300, italics added)

    The Department of Justice––among other groups––was monitoring the Clay Shaw trial in close to real time. When Carl Eardley, the Justice Department specialist on the JFK case, heard this, he almost had a hernia. He called up another of the pathologists, Thornton Boswell, and sent him to New Orleans, since they now had to discredit Finck for revealing what had happened. Eardley later thought better of this, probably because by any standard measure, Finck had better qualifications as a forensic pathologist then Boswell did. (ibid, p. 304)

    One cannot overrate the importance of this testimony. To give just one indication of its importance: I did a pre-interview with Dr. Henry Lee for Oliver Stone’s new documentary on the JFK case. I asked him this specific question, directly related to Finck’s testimony: Can you figure out a firing trajectory without a tracking of the wound? He said that under those circumstances, it was very difficult to do. Here is a man who has worked about 8000 cases all over the world and is recognized as one of the best criminalists alive.

    The same situation applies to the skull wound, except in this case, the situation is more complex. If one talks to Lee or Cyril Wecht they will tell you there is no evidence of a brain sectioning. But the Review Board did an inquiry into this subject, and Jeremy Gunn and Doug Horne came up with some evidence that such an examination may have been done. Under the scope of this particular review, this is not the place to do an expansive analysis of their evidence. Suffice it to say I found Thompson’s excuse for this lack rather strained: the doctors did not have the time to do so such a thing. (Thompson, p. 259) Yet in the Commission’s volumes there is a brain examination, dated 12/6/63. (CE 391) And there is no mention of sectioning; two weeks was not long enough? Yet without sectioning, how can one determine the bullets’ paths? On this matter, Lee was quite animated. He put his right hand up in front of his face and said words to the effect: You have this bullet coming in at a right to left angle: it then reverses itself and goes left to right? The lack of dissection in this instance is even more perplexing because the head wounding was how Kennedy was killed. And this is why Lee’s hand was piercing the air in bewilderment.

    III

    Thompson wrote something later that stunned me. On page 258 he says that the first time the autopsy doctors learned of a tracheostomy over the anterior neck wound was when they read about it in the next day’s newspapers. That passage is undermined by Nurse Audrey Bell’s 1997 testimony to the Review Board. Bell told them that Dr. Malcolm Perry complained to her the next morning (on Saturday, November 23rd) that he had been virtually sleepless, “because unnamed persons at Bethesda had been pressuring him on the telephone all night long to get him to change his opinion about the nature of the bullet wound in the throat, and to redescribe it as an exit, rather than an entrance.” (See DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 167-68; also this discussion)

    In a very late discovery by writer Rob Couteau, Bell’s testimony was both certified and expanded. In the days following the assassination, many reporters were milling around Dallas, and some found their way to Malcolm Perry’s home, for the reason that he and Dr. Kemp Clark had held a press conference on the day of the assassination where Clark said there was a large, gaping wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull, and Perry said the anterior neck wound appeared to be one of entrance. One of the reporters who migrated to Perry’s home was from the New York Herald Tribune and his name was Martin Steadman. He asked Perry about this issue and Perry was frank. He affirmed that it was an entrance wound. But beyond that he said he was getting calls through the night from Bethesda. They wanted him to change his story. He said that the autopsy doctors questioned his judgment about this and they also threatened to call him before a medical board to take away his license. (See further “The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry”) To put It mildly, I disagree with Thompson’s next day thesis on this point.

    Another surprising aspect of this chapter is that Thompson agrees with the Ramsey Clark Panel. That panel’s findings were released on the eve of the Clay Shaw trial. They upheld the original autopsy’s conclusions about two shots from behind; but they made about four major changes that were rather bracing. One of them was that they raised the entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull 10 mm upward, into the cowlick area. (Thompson, p. 248)

    The way Thompson mentions this in passing was, again, jarring to the reviewer, one reason being that, in all likelihood, it was Six Seconds in Dallas which caused both the Clark Panel to be formed and the rear skull wound to be raised to the cowlick area. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, p. 150). As Russell Fisher, the panel’s chief pathologist later said, Attorney General Ramsey Clark got hold of an advance copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. On page 111 of that book, Thompson shows that Kennedy’s head––as depicted in the Warren Commission to illustrate the fatal wound––is not in the correct posture as shown in Zapruder frame 312. The Commission had the film; therefore, all the indications are that they fibbed about this key point.

    How did the Clark panel elevate that wound into the cowlick area? Since Thompson does not show the anterior/posterior X-ray, the reader is in the dark about this point. The answer is they largely based it on a disk-shaped white object in the rear of the skull that stands out plain as day on the X-ray. The problem with this piece of evidence is that none of the autopsy doctors, or the two FBI agents in attendance, saw it on the X-rays in the morgue the night of the autopsy; and it is not in the 1963 autopsy report. All of which is incredible, for two reasons. First, it is by far the largest fragment visible; and second, its dimensions of 6.5 mm precisely fit the caliber of ammunition Oswald was allegedly firing. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination, pp. 153-54)

    I could go on from there, but I won’t. As the reader can see, I did not find this chapter at all satisfactory.

    IV

    One of the key points Thompson wants to make in this book is something he has been talking about for a rather long time. It is the work of Dave Wimp on what the author calls “the blur illusion.” In fact, Thompson calls Chapter 14, “Breaking the Impasse: The Blur Illusion.” Since I took Thompson at his word about this, several years ago, at a JFK Lancer conference, I mentioned Wimp and his work. I said the forward bob by Kennedy preceding the rearward head snap did not really exist. Almost immediately after I finished my address, first Art Snyder and then John Costella disagreed with me. Snyder disagreed with me on the mathematical analysis Wimp had done. Costella disagreed on whether or not this was really an illusion. In other words: did Kennedy’s head really bob forward before jetting backward? The two disagreements gave me pause. Why? Because both men are physicists.

    Back in the sixties, Thompson first learned of this forward bob between Zapruder frames 312-313 from one of the earliest students of the film, Ray Marcus. (See page 112 of Six Seconds in Dallas, footnote 2) The author and Vince Salandria then studied this in combination with the more dramatic and lengthier rearward slam at the Archives. (Six Seconds, pp. 86-87) The issue is one of the most interesting aspects of Thompson’s first book. He goes through a few explanations of how this could have occurred. He then decides on a term that became rather famous in the critical community––the “double hit” or “double impact.” (pp. 94-95) In other words, two projectiles hit Kennedy’s skull almost instantaneously: one from behind and one from the front. The first moved him forward, the second rocked him backward. He then adds that S. M. Holland had told him the third and fourth shots sounded like they were fired almost simultaneously. He backs this up with other witnesses who heard the same thing. Thus the double impact was credible.

    Why did Thompson change his tune on this point? There seem to be three reasons for this. The first is that he felt his first thesis allowed for too precise a synchronization of the shots. No firing team could be that well trained. The second and third are complementary: Dave Wimp’s work coincided with his gravitation towards the acoustics evidence.

    Since Thompson decided to go with the acoustics, he had to dump the “double hit” he wrote about in his earlier book, because the acoustics evidence allows for only one shot from the front at Zapruder frame 312. The following shot comes from behind at Zapruder frame 328. Dave Wimp aided this new scenario by somehow making the forward bob disappear, being dismissed as an illusion.

    But if such was the case, then why did the two physicists disagree with my statement about the Wimp thesis? Snyder objected to it on mathematical grounds. He did not think that Wimp’s work had absolutely proved his thesis. He told me that there was about a 20% chance Wimp was wrong. Snyder turned out to be correct, because in a reply to Nick Nalli’s review of Last Second in Dallas, Wimp admitted his calculations were not correct. He wrote:

    That I have a blur illusion hypothesis is the result mostly of people failing to distinguish between what people are saying and what people are saying people are saying, which seems to be a pervasive problem. The issue is not about illusions but rather about bad methodology.

    Today, Wimp now seems to admit that Kennedy’s head did go forward by about an inch. Evidently, Thompson oversold this idea to at least one person: me. And since he still insists on it in his book, perhaps others.

    Costella explained why Wimp made an error in a more practical, applicable sense:

    Wimp has always made a valid observation about trying to measure the position of a single (rising or falling) edge, in the presence of blur. That is fraught, especially in the presence of unavoidable nonlinearities. What he never seems to have considered, as far as I can tell, is that if you have two opposite edges (rising then falling, or vice versa) of an object, then it is quite simple to align the center of mass of the object between any two frames, even if the edges are blurred. You can do this even if the two frames are blurred differently––that’s effectively what all stabilized versions of the film do (including his own!). It’s even simpler if you either deblur the blurred 313 to match 312 (like I did back in the day, per my animation on my website), or else blur 312 to match 313 …. What I never did is put an exact number of inches on the forward head movement. I have no idea if his smaller number is accurate or not, because I didn’t quantify. What is certain, just from the visuals, is that the head moves forward in the extant Z film. (Email of 6/15/21)

    How proficient is Costella in his study of the film? After he approached me at JFK Lancer, he took out his cell phone and showed me how he had deblurred Zapruder and the forward head bob was still there. Yes, John is a man who carries his work with him.

    G. Paul Chambers, another physicist, probably has the most sensible explanation for this aspect of the case. He has told Gary Aguilar that what likely happened is that the first shot through Kennedy’s back likely paralyzed him. When the car began to brake, his limp body then went forward. (Phone call with Gary Aguilar, 7/18/21)

    V

    “Jim, there is no motorcycle where the HSCA says there is.”

    The above quotation is taken from a phone conversation in 1994 between this reviewer and the late Dick Sprague. I chose to lead this part of my review with it because, as with the head bob, I once believed in the acoustics evidence. So when the famous photo analyst Dick Sprague said the above to me, I was surprised.

    Let me explain why I had that reaction. When I visited the now deceased HSCA attorney Al Lewis at his office in Lancaster Pennsylvania, he told me about something his former boss had done in the early days of that congressional committee. Chief Counsel Richard A. Sprague had arranged a day-long study of the photographic evidence in the JFK case. There were three presenters on hand: Bob Cutler, Robert Groden, and Dick Sprague. They went in that order. Before Cutler began, the chief counsel turned to those in attendance and said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless I leave, and I don’t plan on leaving.” As Lewis related to me, Cutler’s presentation was about 35 minutes. Groden’s was over 90 minutes, close to two hours. Dick Sprague’s went on for four hours. By the end of Sprague’s demonstration, 12 of the 13 staff lawyers believed Kennedy had been killed by a conspiracy. (James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, The Assassinations, p. 57)

    Such was the photographic mastery of Dick Sprague. At that time, no one had a more expansive collection of films and photos than he did. In that phone call, he told me that Robert Blakey, the second chief counsel, only called him once. It was to ask him if there was a motorcycle where the acoustics experts said there had to be one. Dick spent a lot of time going through his massive collection. He eventually replied that no, there was not. It was Groden who said that there was.

    To this day this issue has not been settled to any adequate degree. And there is simply no papering it over. Because the motorcycle has to be at a precise point near the intersection of Houston and Elm for the acoustics evidence to be genuine. Modern experts on the motorcade, like Mark Tyler, insist that Sprague was correct. And Mark argues that point effectively at the Education Forum. (See his post of June 9th) What I found severely disappointing about Thompson’s book is this: he barely deals with the issue at all. This is what he says about the highly controversial but crucial point: he writes that he and author Don Thomas found the correct motorcycle in the films of Gary Mack. Afterwards, they had a few beers and called it a night. (p. 304)

    I could hardly believe what I was reading. I actually wrote “WTF” in the margin of my notes. Somehow, this trio, not experts on the photo evidence, easily accomplished something that Dick Sprague––who was the leading authority in the field––could not do? The cavalier way Thompson deals with this important point––throwing in the phrase “having a few beers and calling it a night”––underscores just how unconvincing his treatment of it is. If it was this easy to locate and demonstrate, then why is there no picture of the proper motorcycle in proper context to accompany the “few beers and calling it a night”––straight out of Sam and Diane at Cheers––motif? I was so puzzled by this carelessness, leaning toward avoidance, that I went back and read up on the acoustics evidence.

    These sound recordings first entered the legal case during the days of the HSCA. They were offered up by Texas researchers Gary Mack and Mary Ferrell. Thompson does a good job in explaining the rather primitive technology which the Dallas police used in these recordings. There were two channels being recorded that day, simply labeled Channel 1 and Channel 2. The latter used a Gray Audograph powered by a worm gear which drives a needle into a vinyl disk. (Thompson, pp. 304-06). Channel 1 “was done by a Dictaphone that used a stylus inscribing a groove onto a blue plastic belt called a Dictabelt mounted on a rotating cylinder.” (Thompson, p. 148). Channel 1 was used for basic police operations. Channel 2 was for special events, like Kennedy’s motorcade. Back at headquarters, the dispatcher would announce each minute that passed, and each time the dispatcher spoke to a unit he would announce the time. (p. 149)

    The HSCA did two tests of the acoustics. The first was by a company called Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. The main scientist on this was James Barger, who supervised a reconstruction test in Dealey Plaza. After doing this, Barger said that there was about a 50% chance of a shot from the Grassy Knoll. The HSCA then gave those results to another team of acoustic experts: Mark Weiss and Ernest Aschkenasy . After examining this data they decided there was a much higher probability, 95%. The HSCA announced this in their final days.

    Because he is wedded to this evidence for the finale of his book, Thompson has nothing but scorn for what is today called the Ramsey Panel. The Department of Justice asked the National Academy of Sciences to review the work of the HSCA. They set up a committee named after Harvard physicist Norman Ramsey. Alvarez ended up serving on this committee. Alvarez told Barger that no matter what he said he would vote against him. (Thompson, p. 287) The panel was biased from the start and the author does a good job proving that point. For Thompson, this is why they ended up rejecting the HSCA result.

    But I want to note two things about the closing 80 or so pages of Last Second in Dallas and how an author making himself a character in his book is a double-edged sword. Thompson mentions a 2013 debate he did for CNN moderated by Erin Burnett; his opponent was Nick Ragone. (p. 276) If one can comprehend it, Ragone brought up Gerald Posner’s discredited book Case Closed. Thompson says he did not do well since he did not have any new evidence to reply with. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but if I had been there, I would have had a lot of new evidence to throw back. This is how I would have replied:

    Nick, that book came out in 1993. Which was one year before the ARRB was set up. They declassified 2 million pages of documents. Have you read them? I read a lot of them, and here is what they said.

    When asked the old chestnut, “Well why didn’t someone squeal?”, Thompson could have mentioned Larry Hancock’s book Someone Would Have Talked. He then could have said: “Larry shows that two people did talk, Richard Case Nagell and John Martino. If you don’t know about them, that is a failure of the MSM.” As a point of comparison, when Oliver Stone and I did an interview this past June with Fox, I brought about eight of these new ARRB documents with me. Fox filmed me showing them while I described what they said. They then had me send them in email form. Whether or not they will exhibit them on the show, I don’t know. But I had enough rocks in hand to play David with his slingshot.

    VI

    But the reason I think Thompson plays up the CNN experience is that he wants to show that if the acoustics evidence had been reexamined, he could have mentioned that. As noted, Thompson harshly critiques the Ramsey Panel, and much of this is warranted. But he only briefly mentions how the Weiss/Aschkenasy ––hereafter called WA––verdict was rather hastily granted a stamp of approval by the HSCA.

    What makes this kind of odd is that the author mentions Michael O’Dell more than once in the book. But he does not go into O’Dell’s rather bracing criticism of WA. O’Dell is a computer scientist and systems analyst. O’Dell wrote that the WA conclusion was based upon a motorcycle rider having his Channel 1 microphone button stuck open for a continuous five minute period. This was thought to be H. B. McLain, who first said it was and then said it was not him. What O’Dell was trying to do was to replicate what WA had done, except with much more powerful computer tools, not available back then. He wrote a report called “Replication of the HSCA Weiss and Aschkenasy Acoustic Analysis.” In his report, he found that:

    Numerous errors have been found with the data provided in the report, including basic errors involved in the measurement of delay times, waveform peaks and object position. Some of the errors are necessary to the finding of an echo correlation to the suspect Dictabelt pattern. The Weiss and Aschkenasy report does not stand up to even limited scrutiny, and the results it contains cannot be reproduced. (p. 2)

    O’Dell revealed that WA had relied on a millimeter ruler and string to map out their bullet paths on a map of Dealey Plaza. O’Dell used Adobe Photoshop to scan the same map as WA and transferred the measurements into pixels after lining them up in Excel. He found multiple critical errors in WA’s work, including those of distance measurement of buildings from other objects like the stockade fence. (See p. 3) O’Dell wrote that the microphone was positioned in the wrong place by WA. (p. 9) There were errors in the original paperwork independent of a transfer to a virtual model. For the buildings list in Dealey Plaza, items 16 and 20 were described as the same object. (p. 4) He also found out that one of the bullet paths was supposed to rebound off of object 23, yet there were only 22 structures WA had listed. (p. 5). There were objects listed in the WA table that O’Dell could not find on the map. (p. 8) But perhaps the most bracing criticism O’Dell made was that

    … the values presented in Table 4 for the Dictabelt pattern do not appear to be valid measurements of the peaks in the recording. A test that supposedly identifies a gunshot on the Dictabelt recording must, at a minimum, correctly measure the sound being tested on the Dictabelt. (p. 11)

    I could go on. But before anyone comes back at me by saying, “Why would you use something like this after what Dale Myers did with his phony cartoon based on the Zapruder film?” After all, Jim, Myers went on ABC TV and said the single bullet theory was really the single bullet fact. All I can do is reply with the following. I used O’Dell because Thompson used him. In communicating with the man I found out that Thompson had signed him to a non-disclosure agreement about his book. It ended when the work was published.

    Another series of problems with this evidence was written about by Charles Olsen and Lee Ann Maryeski in June of 2014 for Sonalysts, Inc. out of Waterford, Connecticut. They stated that although McLain had claimed he had opened up his cycle to a continuous high speed after the shooting, that is not what they determined by placing the sound on a graph: “What Figure 1 shows is a motorcycle that variously speeds up and slows down and idles during this latter period.” (6/6/2014, Olsen and Maryeski, pp. 3-4)

    Let me add one other comment. As both O’Dell, and especially Dave Mantik have pointed out, one of the virtues attributed to this evidence is the so called “order in the data.” Or as Don Thomas puts it in his book, the best test matches correspond to a topographic order in Dealey Plaza and with the dictabelt. (Hear No Evil, p. 583) But as Mantik informed me, if one looks at Thompson’s own table, if the HSCA had chosen the bullet sound at the 144.90 point in the tape, they would have had two matches to the School Book Depository that very closely matched the one to the knoll area. (Thompson, p. 155) The same thing occurred at 137.70; the TSBD could have been chosen over the knoll. (interview with Mantik, 6/26/21)

    In addition to all the above, Thompson essentially brushes over the issue of heterodyne tones. (p. 296) This is an important point that the Sonalyst report examined. It’s important because it can result in words being scrambled in pronunciation as one listens to them. Meaning that they can sound like one phrase to one person and another phrase to someone else. And this has happened. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 9)

    Even his heralded discovery, that voices saying “Hold everything” and “I’ll check it,” occur around the assassination is odd. First, the object is to show whether or not the bullet echo correlation is real, not the voices. Also, to get a more distinct peak for “I’ll check it,” Richard Mullen, Barger’s protégé, used a narrower sampling PCC (Pattern cross correlation) window of 64. Therefore Thompson concludes this is what should have been used from the start. Yet for “Hold everything,” a wider sampling window of 512 yielded a larger net peak than did a smaller sampling window of 64. Thompson offers no explanation for this seeming paradox. (See Figures 22-6 and 22-7; 6/26/21 interview with Mantik)

    If the “Hold everything secure” phrase is at the time of the assassination, then the acoustics is invalid, since this is spoken after the assassination. “I’ll check it” would be around the time of the shots. So the two phrases are in conflict if both were valid. The first phrase is at the wrong time, the latter one is at the right time. So Thompson argues that the “Hold” phrase has been altered and is really an overdub. (Thompson, pp. 345-47)

    This has also been placed in doubt by O’Dell. (See Dictabelt Hums and the “hold everything secure” Crosstalk) The “Check” phrase, as has been argued by many, is not really crosstalk at all. The same sound does not appear on both channels. (Email communication with O’Dell, 7/25/21). And further, Sonalysts showed that the spectrograms of the phrase differ on Channel 1 and 2. (Olsen and Maryeski, p. 6)

    I could go on. But I think the point has been made. There are simply too many uncertain variables with the acoustics evidence to rely on it as having a 95% probability. Much of this is due to the innate poor quality of the recordings themselves.

    When we were making JFK Revisited, producer Rob Wilson asked me to incorporate a section on the acoustics evidence. I recommended against it. I simply noted that with all the above problems with that evidence we would be making ourselves into a bull’s eye on a target range; a whole gallery of persons would take out their bows and arrows and start unloading their quivers on us.

    As I said in Part 1, there are good things in Last Second in Dallas. And as a responsible critic I have described them. In my opinion, they are important and valuable and have stood the test of time. But it is also my opinion that there are a lot of things which seem to me to be liabilities, including what the author thinks is the culminating arc of his book––and I have described those deficits also. This is why Last Second in Dallas is a decidedly mixed bag.

    Return to Part 1

  • Last Second in Dallas, part 1

    Last Second in Dallas, part 1

    This will be a decidedly mixed review of Josiah Thompson’s new book on the JFK case, Last Second in Dallas. I hope it does not discourage anyone from buying or reading it. There are some good things in the volume. And I will try to be as fair as I can about what I think they are. But I will also not shrink from what I believe to be the book’s shortcomings.

    I

    Thompson has fashioned the book as a kind of one man’s journey into a labyrinth. He begins the book even before the Warren Report was issued. On the day Kennedy was killed, Thompson heard that a doctor performed a tracheostomy over a throat wound on President Kennedy. But yet all the news stories said that the alleged assassin worked at the Texas School Book Depository, which was behind the motorcade. In what is, in retrospect, a monumental piece of unintentional humor, Thompson went to the local FBI office to alert them to this paradox. (Thompson, p. 6)

    When the Warren Report was issued, it was received in the press and broadcast media with almost universal praise, but Thompson noticed that a curious and pesky young Philadelphia lawyer disagreed with the unanimous chorus. That was the late Vincent Salandria. Thompson, who was now a newly made professor of philosophy at Yale, decided to check up on Vince’s work. So, he consulted the Commission’s volumes of evidence and found out that Vince was correct.

    This gave him a bit of a shock. The author now tries to fill in a bit of his conservative Republican background to explain why. This is where I had my first perturbance with the book. The author writes that he thought Alger Hiss was innocent in that case. He then adds that when Allen Weinstein’s MSM endorsed book on Hiss came out, he changed his mind and agreed with Weinstein that Hiss was guilty. (Thompson, p. 9)

    For several reasons, this was puzzling to me. For one, Weinstein was later sued and settled with one of his interviewees. (Click here for details) He also promised to show some of his evidence to other Hiss scholars—he never did. He later became a sexual predator, while supposedly doing his job as chief archivist of the United States. He was protected from legal liability by the George W. Bush administration. (Click here for details) In fact, there are three relatively recent books that pretty much show that Weinstein was really a hired gun and that is how he got the job at the National Archives. One is by Joan Brady, one by Martin Roberts, and one by Lewis Hartshorn. The last shows that Whittaker Chambers, Hiss’s accuser and a man who Weinstein took at his word, was surely a pathological liar. I will return to this political aspect with Thompson later.

    During a Vietnam protest in the Philadelphia area, the author was arrested. The ACLU lawyer sent to bail him out was Salandria. Vince now introduced Thompson to the critical community. They went to NARA to view the Zapruder film and look at 35 mm slides. (Thompson, p. 10). He then visited Dealey Plaza with an Abney level tool and figured out that the angle through John B. Connally was a 27 degree down slope, which he figured most likely came from the Records building. (Thompson, p. 15)

    On the strength of this visit to Dallas, Thompson was signed by the Bernard Geis publishing company. He got a rather small advance, though they agreed to pay his expenses, but Geis knew some people at Life magazine. And they had decided to do a reinvestigation of the JFK case based on the critiques of the Warren Report by Mark Lane and Edward Epstein. (Thompson, pp. 16–17)

    What is next tells the story of Thompson’s field investigation in Dallas. This is where the author encountered witnesses in Dealey Plaza and at Parkland Hospital. Thompson interviewed hospital employees Darrel Tomlinson and O. P. Wright about the discovery of the Magic Bullet, aka CE 399. From here, he pieced together the chain of custody that linked the transport of the bullet to Washington and then the FBI lab. This led to one of the most sensational discoveries in the early days of critical research. Wright insisted that CE 399 was not the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service. The bullet he turned over was sharp nosed, not a round nosed bullet. And since Wright had worked in law enforcement for many years prior to his occupation as a security officer at Parkland Hospital, he knew the difference. (Thompson, p. 25)

    At Parkland, Thompson made another stunning discovery. This one was about the location of CE 399 when it was discovered. In all probability, it was not on Governor John Connally’s stretcher—which is where it had to be located if the Commission’s Single Bullet Theory was to hold any water. In all likelihood, it was found on a child’s stretcher and his name was Ronnie Fuller. (Thompson p. 24. For a more complete explanation, see Six Seconds in Dallas, pp. 156–65)

    From here, the book describes the witnesses in Dealey Plaza. First off are Bill and Gayle Newman who were to the limousine’s right, at the base of the grassy knoll. They were never called by the Commission, but filed affidavits and were interviewed by the FBI. (Thompson, p. 30) They may have been the closest witnesses to Kennedy’s shooting. The couple said the shots came from behind them and Kennedy was hit in the right temple, which would be clear evidence that a rifleman was behind the picket fence. But in addition to the Newmans, Thompson adds Abraham Zapruder and Emmett Hudson, who were in the same area, to this list. He later notes that it appears the FBI altered Hudson’s original statement to the Secret Service. (Thompson, p. 43) Hudson was the first witness Thompson located who indicated that there was another shot after the fatal head shot.

    II

    The author transitions over to witnesses who were further away from the limousine or not in as good a position to see or hear what had happened to JFK, but whose testimony is still important. In the cases of the motorcycle escorts, he notes that it was Bobby Hargis and B. J. Martin who were struck with blood and tissue from the fusillade. The significance of this is that they were riding to the left of Kennedy. Hargis told a reporter he was splattered with blood and the impact was so hard he thought he himself might have been hit. Later, while walking to the Sheriff’s Department, a colleague told him he had something on his lip: it was a piece of Kennedy’s brain and skull bone. (Thompson, pp. 55, 56) Martin’s cycle was also splattered with blood and flesh and he said that the left side of his helmet was also hit. In this profusely illustrated book, one can see that Martin was looking toward the president right before the firing sequence began. (Thompson, pp. 50, 58) Some have said this kind of evidence is eyewitness testimony. I disagree. It qualifies as physical evidence which indicates directionality.

    Officer Joe Smith smelled gunpowder near the underpass, but this testimony was then altered by the FBI. Smith also said he met up with a Secret Service agent, which was not possible as they were all at the hospital. (Thompson, pp. 58, 59)

    The author then proceeds to two men who have become famous to both the public and in the JFK case: Lee Bowers and S. M. Holland. Although Thompson says that Holland was more important, I believe they are of equal importance.

    Bowers was made famous by Oliver Stone’s film JFK. Memorably played by actor Pruitt Taylor Vince, in a riveting sequence he described how three cars came into the area behind the picket fence, circled around and then left by about 12:25. One of the men seemed to have some kind of electronic communication in the car. Bowers said that at the time of the shooting, something out of the ordinary, some commotion, occurred in the area behind the picket fence—where Elm Street dips down at the underpass. To be mild, Joseph Ball of the Commission did not do a good job in pursuing this line of inquiry, so Mark Lane took it up later for his film, Rush to Judgment. Bowers said he saw a flash of light or smoke “which caused me to feel like something out of the ordinary had occurred there.” (Thompson, p. 66)

    Bowers died in August of 1966. It was later discovered, through Debra Conway of JFK Lancer, that there was more to Bower’s story. Bowers had actually seen someone holding the trunk of a car open, placing something in it, and driving off. This was told to her by Olan DeGaugh, a supervisor a couple of levels above Bowers. Barney Mozley was a colleague of Bowers who replaced him on the later shift. Mozley said that Bowers was very fearful of telling all he knew: to the point of having to place a lock on his tower door so no one could interview him. But he told Mozley something which coincided with what he told DeGaugh: at the time of the shooting Bowers saw someone coming around the wooded area in a trench coat and what looked like a rifle underneath. Clearly Bowers was petrified of telling anyone about everything he witnessed.

    Holland was standing on the overpass at the time of the shooting. In his original affidavit, Holland said he heard four, perhaps five gunshot sounds. (Thompson, p. 68) Two of the shots were extremely close together. The sound came from the grassy knoll area and as he turned in that direction he saw smoke rising, so he and three companions ran there. Holland was looking for shells. What they found were a series of footprints at one end of a car. These were accompanied by muddy spots on the bumper and cigarette butts on the ground. In other words, it was as if someone was behind the fence and waiting for the motorcade. (Thompson, pp. 70–72) An obvious question was: Why would someone view the motorcade from behind the fence? (Thompson, p. 79)

    Thompson and his partner, Ed Kern, were impressed by Holland. The witness drew them a diagram of what he saw when he got to the scene. (Thompson, p.77) The episode is capped by Thompson’s photo comparison of Holland standing at the position he was that day, behind the fence, with an anomalous shape in the famous Mary Moorman photo taken from across the street looking toward the knoll. They appear to match. (Thompson, p. 80) Since the author found out that there were no trunks searched, he concludes the chapter with a postulation as to what happened: the rifleman (men) could have just opened the trunk, thrown the rifle in, milled around for a few minutes and later just walked away. This scenario would correspond with what Bowers saw.

    The next step in the Life inquiry was an interview with Dr. Charles Gregory, one of the two doctors who performed surgery on Governor John Connally; who was sitting in front of President Kennedy in the limousine. Gregory, along with his colleague Dr. Robert Shaw, both concluded that the bullet that hit Connally did not strike anything previously. They deduced this from the clean edges, and also since no cloth fibers were carried into the governor’s back wound; yet “his wrist wound was fouled with numerous fibers from his wool suit.” (Thompson, p. 85) The other key development was that Gregory thought the shot that did hit Connally came in approximately at Zapruder frames 237–240. Which again, separate it from the shot that hit Kennedy, since the timing was too late. Gregory was very accomplished. He was a field physician in the Korean War and had spent much time studying gunshot wounds.

    Thompson was disappointed by the essay eventually printed in Life. It was called “A Matter of Reasonable Doubt” and was published as the cover story on November 25, 1966. Featuring frames from the Zapruder film, which Time-Life owned, the piece was largely based upon John Connally’s estimation of when he was hit versus when JFK was. In other words, all the material reviewed, thus far, was eliminated (e.g. Bowers, Holland, the Newmans, Gregory, the splatter pattern, etc.). Beyond that, there was space given to Arlen Specter to respond and the ending included a roundup of Kennedy assassination books described with snide and smug remarks. The only book that was recommended was Edward Epstein’s Inquest, which, as most of us know, was not at all a comprehensive critique of the Commission’s evidence. What is striking about this article is that, although it stated at the end the case should be reopened, it did not include the evidence the magazine had that likely would have reopened it: the backward head snap of JFK which begins at Zapruder frame 313. As Thompson points out, it also mistakenly said that the bullet angle through Kennedy’s body matched up to Connally’s, which was not remotely true. (Thompson, p. 90).

    From here, Thompson relates his retirement by Life and his determination to create a book out of his materials. Life made it difficult by suing him over artist renditions of the Zapruder film in what became Six Seconds in Dallas. But the judge upheld his right to do so.

    III

    In this reviewer’s opinion, the approximately first hundred pages of Last Second In Dallas represent the best part of the book. Its combination of witness testimony, professional observation, and physical evidence is compelling. And this presentation is combined with another virtue. Thompson is an accomplished writer. He has a simple, supple style that is quite easy to read. He also knows how to carve out “scenes” in prose. As noted, like Six Seconds in Dallas, the book uses illustrations adroitly. For example, in addition to the one with Holland, the picture comparing the condition of CE 399 to two bullets fired into tubes of cotton is quite effective. (Thompson, p. 22)

    After giving the author his due, I must add that I did have some reservations with this part of the book. Some of it emerges from Thompson’s point of view, which is pretty much a first-person journey. Therefore, he cannot help but describe the shutting down of Life magazine’s inquiry into the JFK case. He only mentions in passing that the New York Times had fielded an inquiry and also shut it down. (Thompson, p. 92)

    There was an interesting crossover between the two inquiries. His name was Tom Bethell. Bethell ended up being a pal of Dick Billings. Billings was the member of the Life team who told Thompson the inquiry was being closed down. (Thompson, p. 91) Bethell was the Englishman who ended up working for Jim Garrison, but not before he journeyed to Texas to live and hang out with Penn Jones. Billings had been part of the infamous Bayo/Pawley raid into Cuba, an event which the author does not mention. The two B’s agreed that there was not a covert effort by the government, the Commission, or the FBI to conceal the truth in the JFK case. They also agreed that Life did not really suppress the Zapruder film, since interested parties could see it at the National Archives. This seems a bit ridiculous in light of what happened when the film was nationally viewed in 1975.

    Both Billings and Bethell were cognizant of the New York Times inquiry. Bethell said that in November of 1966 he had met up with Times reporter Martin Waldron in Dallas. Waldron had a 4–5 page questionnaire of items they were looking into as problems with the Commission. Many of these questions were about New Orleans and they focused on David Ferrie. This was independent of Jim Garrison. (Click here for details)

    This is important in two ways. Apparently, Thompson was unaware that around the time he was retired, early February of 1967, Billings was also in New Orleans. He had been tipped off by Life stringer David Chandler that Jim Garrison was investigating the JFK case. Garrison had agreed to share information with Billings in return for some photographic services. This links directly to the following quote:

    What Patsy [Swank] and I did understand was that there was a level of the Life investigation beyond our participation or understanding. I never knew what [Holland] McCombs was supposed to be doing, and it was apparent that I was not supposed to know. (Thompson, pp. 26–27)

    With the help of British researcher Malcolm Blunt, we now can shed some light on what McCombs was doing. As noted above, it seems that when the Times started delving into New Orleans, they decided to drop the case. That parallels what happened with Life. McCombs retired Ed Kern and Thompson, but Billings and Swank stayed. In fact, Swank was writing reports to McCombs on the case well into 1968. (Swank to McCombs 7/16/68) With Kern and Thompson gone, McCombs now began to turn his guns on Garrison. Why? Because as Blunt has shown, he was best of friends with Clay Shaw. (See letters of 3/9/68, 3/22/68, 6/20/68, 7/31/68 and beyond) McCombs now began to work with and encourage the likes of hatchet men like Chandler and Hugh Aynesworth. (See letter of 5/13/67 to Duffey McFadden)

    What makes this even more interesting is that, in February—around the time Thompson and Kern were cashiered—Billings had received a telegram marked confidential. It said Ferrie had been seen by two witnesses at White Rock Airport in Dallas in October and November of 1963. They also discovered a pilot in Dallas who knew Ferrie and flew to New Orleans to meet with him in 1964. (message of 2/26/67) Therefore, like the Times, Life now had interesting information about Shaw’s friend Ferrie. And make no mistake, Chandler knew of this relationship. His son emailed this reviewer in the early part of the millennium and said that his father knew that Shaw and Ferrie were friends. By May, McCombs was referring to Life’s reopening as a joke. (McFadden letter)

    In June, it got worse. McCombs was in direct contact with Ed Wegmann, Shaw’s lead lawyer. (See letters of 6/14 and 7/25/67) By 1968, Shaw was congratulating McCombs on making speeches against the critics of the Warren Report. About reading their works, Shaw wrote: “It is almost unbelievable how much nonsense I have had to absorb.” (Letter to McCombs, 6/20/68)

    The evidence adduced by Blunt would indicate that McCombs was there to ensure that what he labeled Life’s “so called reinvestigation” did not stray too far from the homestead, which was Rockefeller Center in New York City. In addition to these two inquiries, which were clearly neutered, there is a third parallel with what happened at CBS. Through the late Roger Feinman, we know those circumstances in detail, since Roger worked there. In that case, the middle level employees like Dan Schorr wanted to do a real investigation into what happened to President Kennedy. They were turned back by upper level management like Dick Salant, Bill Paley, and Frank Stanton. And then, as in the case of McCombs, John McCloy was employed as a secret consultant for the program. I know Thompson has this article since I sent it to him. (Click here for that essay)

    I bring this up for two reasons. In this book, Thompson says he and Kern were retired because Time-Life did not want to pay for a continuing inquiry plus the time to educate its reporters on the case (Thompson, p. 92) With what we know today, this is rather underplaying it, especially with Swank and Billings staying in place. I think I understand why Thompson underplays what I believe was a significant pattern. At a conference in Chicago back in 1993, we were both on a panel focusing on the media. As I recall it, he was the only person arguing that there was no broad pattern of editorial coercion on the JFK case. At that time, he chalked it up to the fact that there were too many editorial levels in the chain. When one has people like McCombs as a circuit breaker, one does not need such an institutional hierarchy.

    IV

    As Thompson transitions out of Life magazine and into the production of Six Seconds in Dallas at Bernard Geis, another rather awkward note is struck. That is this: somehow the critical community has gone off on a wild tangent and he has become isolated. Predictably, Jim Garrison gets the back of his hand. (Thompson, p. 112) He then writes the following about Vince Salandria:

    Vince Salandria, my mentor and guide to all this, was behaving like a wigged-out conspiracy theorist, rethinking raw facts to make them mean what he wanted them to mean. (Ibid)

    Since both Garrison and Salandria have passed on, I would like to say a few words in their defense. Back in late 1967, when Thompson was on his book tour, he did an interview with Pacifica radio. He said that he had just heard Garrison saying that Kennedy’s murder was really a coup d’état. Thompson then said that a coup was a shift in power and that there was precious little evidence to back that up. He then added that a good reporter could make Garrison look foolish on this point. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, 2nd edition, p. 381)

    What makes this odd is that Thompson refers a few times in this book to his attendance at Vietnam protests, yet he does not make any connection between the sudden escalation of the war and JFK’s murder. Jim Garrison was the first critic to do this. In the view of several intelligent and documented studies, and the declassified record, he was correct: there was a shift between JFK and LBJ on Indochina. (For example, see books by David Kaiser, James Blight, John Newman, Howard Jones, and Gordon Goldstein.) Further work by scholars like Richard Mahoney, Greg Poulgrain, Robert Rakove and Philip Muehlenbeck have furthered Garrison’s thesis into areas like the Middle East and Indonesia. I have little problem referring to Kennedy’s murder as Garrison did today. (Click here as to why)

    As per Salandria, Vince was one of the very, very few people who predicted that if Robert Kennedy won the California primary he would be assassinated. I don’t think that portrays him as being “wigged out.” And I can pinpoint when he began to disagree with Thompson. The first or second time I met Vince at his home in Philadelphia, he escorted me into his study and pulled down a copy of Six Seconds in Dallas. He immediately turned to page 246 and pointed out lines he had blocked off in brackets. After a space break in the text, Thompson says that what he had written in the book did not prove a conspiracy and it did not prove Oswald was innocent. After Vince pulled the book away, he said: “Jim, that is just what he spent almost 250 pages doing! And now, in the last sentences of the text, he denies what he just did?”

    I had to admit: Vince had a point, one which got buried in all the photos and illustrations and sketches which made Six Seconds in Dallas unique. To further elucidate where Vince was coming from, by the end of the Clay Shaw trial, he had seen enough of what the likes of Holland McCombs, Dick Salant, and Punch Sulzberger were up to. And he now differed in his approach from other critics. Vince had started the whole field of micro studies in the JFK case. His early articles for Liberation and The Minority of One, were milestones in the field. (For an example, click here)

    By 1969, he did not see any further point in doing that kind of thing. Salandria had supervised the Dealey Plaza portion of Shaw’s trial where, among other things, Pierre Finck had imploded and spilled the beans on what happened at Bethesda the night of Kennedy’s autopsy. In his opinion, that part of the case was now obvious. The questions for Vince were: Why was Kennedy killed, and why in such an execution style at high noon manner, with hundreds of spectators in attendance? To Vince, it was to show that, no matter how many explications one made exposing the official story, it did not matter. Democracy had ended. The CIA and the Pentagon were now running things. To him, the escalation in Indochina and the following murders of Malcolm, King and RFK proved that, especially since the RFK case was even more obviously a conspiracy than the JFK case. Agree or disagree, I understood the position. I did not think it was “wigged out.” There was nothing wrong in trying to configure the Big Picture.

    V

    The narrative picks up with the infamous 1967 four-part CBS special and Luis Alvarez. Again, Thompson introduces this in a rather puzzling way. He writes that, “The whole CBS program was so unconvincing that I just let it slide.” (Thompson, p. 117) Which makes me wonder: Did Thompson or his editors look at Six Seconds in Dallas? That book has an appendix entitled “A Critique of the CBS News Documentary, ‘The Warren Report’”. It is written in small print, but in normal size lettering it would probably be about 5–6 pages long. This is letting CBS slide?

    But it is through this program that Thompson brings into the story the figure of scientist Luis Alvarez. There can be very little doubt that the author does a nice job in portraying him as a quite pernicious character in the JFK case. And it was not just with CBS. Alvarez’ participation in the case extended past the years of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, into the eighties. Through this long portrait, we understand a theme that Gary Aguilar and Don Thomas have written about. Namely, that for several scientists, the JFK case was not really science. Politics trumped the science they were supposed to be applying, e. g. Vincent Guinn, Tom Canning, Michael Baden. The Alvarez case is extraordinary, because of the blatancy of the falsehoods he told and because he entered into areas that he knew little or nothing about. It did not matter to Alvarez, it was all about saving the Warren Commission verdict.

    Therefore, to explain away the very fast backward movement of Kennedy’s body in the Zapruder film, Alvarez dreamed up the so-called “jet effect” theory. Thompson shows that Alvarez, to put it mildly, cooked his research on this and then lied about it. (Thompson, pp. 124–29) This was the infamous shooting of the melons experiment. It was meant to show that Kennedy’s head rocketed backward because of the explosion of blood and tissue toward the front. Alvarez announced that he did not use the Edison method in this experiment. That is, he did not try and try and try over and over until he got the desired result. But then, years later, it was revealed that this is what he did.

    At another time, to limit the shooting sequence in Dealey Plaza to just three shots, he created something called the jiggle effect. This meant that there were just three places in the Zapruder film where Abraham Zapruder “jiggled” his camera. Therefore, there were only three shots fired in Dealey Plaza. There was a big problem with this: it was false. There were six places. And Alvarez must have known it. (Thompson, p. 121) He clearly had an innate bias, since he once wrote to the author that “the critics are a bunch of nuts and that the Warren Report is essentially correct.” (Thompson, p. 119)

    But even here, I beg to disagree with some of the nuances which he uses to portray Alvarez. He writes that “no single individual ever played a more central role in preserving a mistaken view of the shooting.” (Thompson, p. 115) He says that this is not an understatement and he does not qualify it by confining it to the field of science. What are we to make then of the roles in this case of Arlen Specter, Dan Rather, Larry Sturdivan and David Belin? Rather worked on several CBS specials that were all rigged to back up the Warren Report and all appeared at certain crucial times: e. g. anniversaries, during the Church Committee inquiry, right after Oliver Stone’s JFK appeared.

    Later he writes that, “Powerful forces did not contact Alvarez and ask him to come up with his theory.” (Thompson, p 121) This seems contradicted by the work of Roger Feinman. Feinman, working from pilfered files out of CBS headquarters, showed that what happened is that the secret executive committee running CBS—the CNEC—rejected the idea of a fair and objective look at the Kennedy case. CBS President Richard Salant then sent two high level CBS employees, Les Midgley and Gordon Manning, to the San Francisco area. They met with two powerful attorneys, Bayless Manning and Edwin Huddleson. It was these two lawyers who suggested the program concept be switched around to an attack on the critics. And it was Huddleson who suggested they use Alvarez to do so. (Click here for that essay)

    It was not Alvarez who created that awful series. He was an appendage to a larger Establishment enterprise. Is it just a coincidence that, in 1971, Bayless Manning left Stanford to became the first president of the Council on Foreign Relations?

    Go to Part 2

  • Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War

    Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War

    Greg Parker’s Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War is quite appropriately titled. There have been many biographies of Oswald, some of them good, some adequate, and some downright poor. The dividing line, both temporally and in content, was Philip Melanson’s Spy Saga. Released in 1990, Spy Saga was the first work to make a book length case that Oswald was intimately tied up with the world of American intelligence—and most likely not in a casual way. Phil also did important work on the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy cases. Unfortunately, he passed away in 2006. But when he appeared before the Assassination Records Review Board, he made a rather pithy and self-deprecating comment. He said he hoped when their mission was complete, the new database on Oswald would make Spy Saga look like a Cliff Notes pamphlet.

    There is no doubt that Melanson’s prognostication came true. For example, the declassified notes of HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf create an epiphany concerning the relationship between the CIA and Oswald before his defection to Russia. (Click here and go to Section 2) In his book, Parker has not gotten to that point yet. (This review is of the compilation Volumes 1 and 2.)

    Several books on Oswald track his character through the progress of the Cold War. But, quite naturally, the Soviet/American conflict is always in the background. The unusual thing about Parker’s book is that there really is no background. His volume blends so much of the Cold War into the story that background and foreground are almost indistinguishable. That is why I stated that the title is all too appropriate.

    To underline this point: the volume opens in a most unusual manner. Many books on the case, and some biographies of Oswald, discuss the overthrows of Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and the killing of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, not to mention the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. This book begins with an assassination in Bogota, Colombia. It discusses the murder of Jorge Elicier Gaitan, who, quite frankly, I had never heard of before. (Parker, pp. 4ff) I sure as heck will not forget him now.

    Gaitan was a mayor of Bogota, a member of congress, Minister of Education, and Minister of Labor, Health, and Social Welfare. He was a lawyer who gradually shifted over to politics, especially after seeing the influence of the United Fruit company in his country, particularly after what is called the Cienega, or Santa Marta, massacre. (Parker, pp. 5–8) This event was more or less covered up for decades until Gabriel Garcia Marquez made it famous in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude. What enraged Gaitan about the event was that the American press and State Department tried to paint the massive machine gunning as a natural reaction to a communist plot. It was no such thing. United Fruit demanded the government intervene to halt a strike, since their policy was no negotiations. In fact, United Fruit’s influence may have extended up to having Frank Kellogg, the American Secretary of State, threaten to invade if United Fruit was not protected.

    Gaitan used this event to vault himself into the political arena. He was so effective as a speaker and organizer that he created a kind of rump group to the Liberal Party called the National Leftist Revolutionary Union, or UNIR. Gaitan was a combination Socialist and Populist. Land reform was very important to him. In 1946, he ran for president and lost, mainly because the Liberals ran two candidates, himself and Gabriel Turbay. As Parker makes clear, its odd how Turbay died a year later. (Parker, p. 26) And Gaitan was assassinated a year after that—on the verge of taking over the Liberal Party.

    Before reviewing Gaitan’s murder, the author discusses just how influential the American government was in Latin America. United Fruit’s law firm was the formidable Sullivan and Cromwell, which employed a young John Foster Dulles. Foster Dulles was a kind of roving ambassador for the company in that area. (Parker, p. 9) America was very powerful in Colombia due to the scheme used by Phillipe Bunau Varilla, William Nelson Cromwell, and Teddy Roosevelt to pretty much create the new country to the north in order to finish the Panama Canal. (Parker, pp. 10–13)

    Before the creation of the CIA, the FBI had domain in Latin America through its Special Intelligence Service or SIS. But by 1946, the SIS was on the way out due to the creation of the CIG, the Central Intelligence Group, and the CIA in the following year. Birch O’Neal was an SIS agent who joined the new group. He soon became one of James Angleton’s chief—and most secretive—assistants. (Parker, p. 20) Preceding both the SIS and CIA was the Office of Naval Intelligence. Founded in 1882, by 1929 it had widened its scope from just spying on the advancements of the navies of other nations. (Parker, p. 3)

    On April 9, 1948, Gaitan emerged from his office at about 1 PM. He was shot at four times with one bullet missing. The man apprehended for the crime was Juan Ros Sierra. He was immediately taken to a pharmacy by two policemen. But when they called for reinforcements, no one answered the phone at the station. When asked who put him up to the assassination the defendant only said, “Powerful things that I can’t tell you! Oh Virgin of Carmen! Save Me!” (Parker, p. 29)

    In a startling coincidence, both Gabriel Marquez and Fidel Castro were in direct proximity to the scene of the crime. Marquez later said that he saw a tall, well-dressed man urging the mob to break the police line and extract revenge by killing the suspect. Once this was successful, that man drove away in a new car. (ibid) What happened after must have clearly influenced Castro in his revolutionary career. It came to be called El Bogotazo: ten hours of violence, mayhem, and chaos that left four thousand dead and a large section of the city in ruins. (Parker, p. 30) In turn, that ignited La Violencia, a ten-year civil war that took the lives of about 200,000 people. This reveals not just how much Gaitan was a symbol of hope to the masses, but also how they collectively felt that the—now dead—accused was not working alone. (Parker, p. 30)

    They were correct. A man named John Espirito later made a confession to this effect. He said that the murder was timed for the meeting of the Latin American leftist group which Castro was there to attend. Although Espirito clearly implied that Roa performed the shooting, Parker disagrees. Roa was in the habit of performing mind control exercises that would place him in a trance state in front of a mirror. He then imagined someone emerging from the mirror. The author writes that it actually was a man and he was part of the set up. He corresponds to someone at the scene who had a trench coat draped over his arm. Parker writes that this was the main assassin and that Roa only fired the last shot, the one that missed. (Parker, p. 54)

    The chapter ends with a postulation: was this the CIA’s first assassination plot? If so, it certainly resembles the RFK scenario, not just in its intricacies, but because it stopped a liberal leader from taking power and produced years of chaos. In the American case, it prolonged the Vietnam War.

    II

    The Gaitan murder happened closely after the official opening of the Cold War, which is usually timed with George Kennan’s long telegram from Moscow. The author then jumps forward a few years to Korea. He focuses on two types of specialized warfare that emerged during the conflict. The first was what had been apparently used with Roa: mind control. The second was germ warfare. The United States coveted Japan’s so called “Devil Doctor,” Ishii Shiro and his infamous Unit 731. He was perhaps the most advanced microbiologist of his day and performed thousands of experiments on human guinea pigs, including American POW’s. Douglas MacArthur made sure he was not prosecuted and so he ended up at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (Parker, pp. 78–80) In other words, what happened with Operation Paper Clip in Europe also occurred in Asia, except in this instance it was not rocketry, but biological science. It was left to the Russians to expose Ishii for what he was and how he had experimented on American prisoners. This is how America developed the science for bacteria weapons in Korea and then, according to Parker, lied about its usage. (Parker, pp. 83–86) One way they did so was by saying the Chinese had brainwashed the men who said they did it.

    All of this clearly amped up domestic Cold War tensions. Ruth Paine started to attend Quaker meetings in 1947, but did not actually join the church until 1951. The author describes a kind of factionalism within the Quaker movement that gained traction over the forties and fifties. The Hicksites, a very pure and spiritual sect inside the church who had been strongly anti-slavery, now gave way to a more conservative evangelical strain. (Parker, pp. 94–95). This struggle was exemplified by a meeting of the Friends at Earlham College which Ruth attended. Earlham was a hotbed of this early kind of conservative evangelical movement. A future graduate of Earlham was Von Edwin Peacock. By the time of the FBI inquiry into Oswald’s alleged visit to Mexico City, Peacock was acting Director of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The AFSC ran the Casa de los Amigos in Mexico City. A local Quaker said he saw Kennedy’s alleged assassin at that place while he was in Mexico City in 1963. (Parker, p. 96)

    What makes this interesting is that the latest work on this aspect indicates that Oswald was not in Mexico City. But yet, one of the things that Ruth Paine did complemented what the AFSC group did for the Warren Commission. She supplied articles that were allegedly returned to Dallas by Oswald from Mexico City. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 203)

    In an interesting piece of discovery, the book states that Marguerite Oswald once worked at a naval base in Algiers, Louisiana as a switchboard operator. (Parker, p. 104) This was during World War II, when Oswald was perhaps 2 years old. Parker believes this job involved some kind of research project through Pittsburgh Paint and Glass at that base. It was at this time, late 1941 or early 1942, that she met Edwin Ekdahl, an electrical engineer. Ekdahl would become her third husband and the step father to Lee since the child’s real father had died before he was born in October, 1939. Parker believes that Marguerite met Ekdahl while at the base and that the company he worked for, Ebasco, a division of GE, was also involved in that research project. (Parker, p. 106) You will not find this information in the Warren Commission report or that by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

    The two eventually married in 1945 and moved to Fort Worth, where Ekdahl was now working. The couple stayed together until 1948. Parker notes more oddities about Lee’s enrollment in 2 elementary schools: Ekdahl is listed as his father, but in the blank for mother, no one is listed. (Parker, pp. 117–18). Although the wife thought the husband was having an affair, it was the husband who filed for divorce first. The attorney he hired was Fred Korth, who had an office in close proximity to his own. (Parker, pp. 110, 118) Korth was a lawyer and a banker. He would eventually become Secretary of the Navy in 1962, succeeding John Connally. Both men served at Vice President Johnson’s request. Parker points out something about Korth here that may be more than just passing interest. Though Korth handled Ekdahl’s end of the divorce, the Warren Commission could not find any evidence that Ekdahl had legally divorced his first wife, Rasmina. What makes that even more odd is that Rasmina and Edwin ended up being buried together. (p. 119)

    III

    The scene now moves to New York City. As many have noted, it has never been entirely clear as to why Marguerite decided to move to the Big Apple. The ostensible reason is that her first son, John Pic, and his wife lived there. With Robert Oswald, Lee’s older brother, in the service, Marguerite said she did not want Lee to be alone while she was at work. (Warren Report, p. 675) But, as the author points out, Ekdahl was now living in New York and may have helped get Lee into Trinity Evangelical Lutheran School. (Parker, p. 128) And third, there is the mysterious issue of Lee’s “mental tests” that were likely done at Yeshiva University. This was discovered through an FBI interview with a house cleaner for Marguerite, Mrs. Louise Robertson.

    The living arrangement did not last long. Parker does a nice job in exposing the Warren Commission version of how it ended. In their attempt to show that somehow the 13 year old Oswald was already a sociopath, they wrote that Oswald threatened Pic’s wife with a knife and smacked his mother while this was going on. (Warren Report, p. 676) By going through the original sources, the author shows how the Commission completely distorted the whole affair. He shows that when first interviewed about it with the FBI, Pic said no one had ever informed him any such threatening incident. But by the time he testified before the Commission, his memory had been completely refreshed. Except for one telling point—he had to take out his notes to keep the details straight. (Parker, pp. 131–33) What likely happened is that Pic’s wife did not care for her mother-in-law and her son. And she completely exaggerated what had happened in order to get them out. The FBI and the Commission then did what they usually did. With Oswald having no attorney, they were allowed to turn the incident into something it wasn’t—as long as it was exaggerated to Oswald’s detriment.

    Parker does an equally adroit analysis with the famous Youth House report by Renatus Hartogs. Oswald was truant from his schooling and was referred to a kind of halfway house for three weeks in the spring of 1953. There he was examined by Dr. Hartogs. To this day, if one views the Wikipedia entry on Oswald, one will read about Oswald threatening Pic’s wife with a knife—which most likely did not occur. But also, various newspapers in 1963, like the New York Times and Charleston News and Courier, had written stories based on alleged reports Hartogs had made about Oswald back in 1953. According to those reports Hartogs had written that Oswald had “schizophrenic tendencies” and that Oswald was “potentially dangerous” and should be committed. (Parker, pp. 170, 179)

    Evidently, from reading the newspapers, Hartogs came to think that this was what he had written. And he never bothered to cross check this with his original reports. But Wesley Liebeler had the reports when he examined the doctor on April 16, 1964. It turned out that Hartogs made no such comment about having Oswald committed. He thought Oswald should be placed on probation. He also never wrote that he thought Oswald was capable of a possible violent outburst. As Liebeler also pointed out, there was no reference to Oswald as “incipient schizophrenic” or “potentially dangerous” in his report. Finally, there was no evidence that Oswald was suffering from either delusions or hallucinations. (Parker, pp. 174–78)

    Incredibly, in 1968, Hartogs was still claiming he had predicted Oswald was potentially dangerous. A few years later, he was successfully sued by one of his patients for sexual molestation. (Click here for details)  Some witness.

    IV

    Marguerite moved back to New Orleans in 1954. Although the HSCA tried to say that Uncle Dutz Murret served as a kind of surrogate father for Lee, that is in contradiction to what the man said to the Commission. He told them he did not take much interest in or pay much attention to the lad. (Parker, pp. 194–95) The author concludes that the only real father figure Oswald had was Ekdahl and he passed away in 1953.

    Another myth proposed by the HSCA regarding Oswald was that somehow Beauregard Junior High School had the reputation of being a spawning ground for future criminals. Yet again, this was contradicted by someone who should know, namely Marguerite’s sister, Lillian Murret, who lived in New Orleans her entire life. The reason that Marguerite used Lillian’s address was in order to register Lee for Beauregard, since “it had a good reputation as a good school.” Family friend Myrtle Evans said the same, that it was a good school and Marguerite had used Lillian’s address to get him in for that specific reason. (Parker, pp. 200–01)

    In 1955, Lee completed a personal history in class which said his career choices were the military and undecided. Two weeks later, his brother Robert Oswald returned from active duty. Two weeks after that, Oswald joined the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) with his friend Ed Voebel. As his mother tried to tell the Commission: Was it not odd that at the same time Lee was reading the Marine Corp Manual, he was also studying Karl Marx? (Parker, p. 216)

    In its original design, the CAP was designed to be, among other things, a kind of Loyalty Police. The author sources this to a NY Daily News story from 1948. To support this belief, he writes that the story was quickly withdrawn and then denied. But that story got a reaction from other papers who said that the CAP was “Fascism wrapped in the American flag.” (Parker, p. 221)

    From here, we shift to oil tycoon Harold Byrd and how he figured in both the creation of the CAP and the purchase of what would become the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). Byrd was one of the founders of the group back in 1941. He then became commander of the Texas wing and then a Colonel in the patrol before he went off to the Department of War in 1943. He eventually ended up as Vice Chair and then Chair of the national organization in 1959. (Parker, p. 222) Byrd bought the building which became the TSBD in 1939 for a fire sale figure of $35,000. He go it since he had been a part of the original loan, which had been defaulted on for about ten times that price.

    Appropriately, the author now goes into the relationship between CAP leader David Ferrie and Oswald. For all his faults, which are well known, the author writes that Ferrie had the reputation of being a good trainer in the Cleveland CAP, which is where he was born. (Parker, p. 224) He describes how Ferrie was booted out of the CAP in New Orleans and then started his own renegade group. He focuses on the secret group that Ferrie had created inside his unit. Sometimes this was called the Omnipotents, at times it was given the longer rubric: Internal Mobile Security Unit. The members of this inner group were given special training and special assignments: like getting a passport so one could emigrate to Cuba through South America. (Parker, p. 227) This indicates the degree of control that Ferrie had over his cadets.

    In the fall of 1955, someone forged a letter in Marguerite’s name which stated that Oswald was leaving school for San Diego. Oswald attempted to drop out. But Marguerite fouled it up by enclosing his real birth certificate in a duffel bag. (Parker, p. 233) In fact, as is mentioned in passing, someone dressed and posing as a Marine recruiter showed up at the Oswald home to try and convince her to let him join, even though he was underage. In Bill Davy’s discussion of this episode, he suggested this may have been Ferrie. (Let Justice be Done, p. 6) As Parker notes once more, the Commission gravely distorted this episode by writing that Oswald was able to convince his mother to make a false statement about his age.

    V

    One of the highlights of the book is the discussion of Oswald’s employment at Gerald F. Tujague, Inc. The author brings in an aspect about this brief employment that I was not aware of. The founder of the company was A. E. Hegewisch and it was his name that was used in its original title. It was a freight forwarding business and it began in 1923. As a vociferous anti-communist, Hegewisch was plugged into the New Orleans higher circles. In fact, he was the second president of International House. (Parker, p. 236) It’s pretty easy to figure out why. He knew the CIA approved Dr. Alton Ochsner, CIA agent Clay Shaw, and CIA asset William Gaudet. He was also an early president of an Agency front, the Cordell Hull Foundation. That foundation originated in Nashville—Hull was born in Tennessee—but it moved to New Orleans in 1954 and was housed inside the International House. Ochsner took over the presidency in 1956.

    In 1953, Hegewisch turned over the company to five of his employees. This included Mr. Tujague, who became president, thus the name change. (Parker, p. 237) It appears that, as with Hegewisch, the Agency stayed in the background of the picture, because, later, Tujague was one of the founders of Friends of Democratic Cuba, which we know was associated with Ochsner and Shaw’s colleague, Guy Banister and also with the CIA associated Sergio Arcacha Smith. The author’s hypothesis is that Oswald was employed there in 1955, most likely through his acquaintance with Ferrie. His performance as a runner was a test of “Lee’s ability to deliver ‘goods’ and messages around the ports to the various networks of agents, informants and assets.” (Parker, p. 237) As Jim Garrison once noted, this is why New Orleans was so important to the CIA and FBI, because of its centrality as a portal to and from Latin America.

    After a bit over two months, Oswald went to JR Michels, Inc., which was located in the same building. His job there was “running Export Declaration forms to the Customs Office for authentication.” (Parker, p. 238) It required that a file with picture be kept of Lee at the Customs office. It was reportedly destroyed around 1958. As Joan Mellen later observed, that destruction was not solitary. Her research assistant Peter Vea later discovered that Oswald had meetings at Customs in 1963, yet those files were never recovered by the ARRB. (Mellen at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference of 2003)

    The author postulates that these temporary positions were more of less a dress rehearsal for Oswald’s ultimate enlistment, this time at a legal age. And he mentions programs like REDSOX, and REDCAP, and an ONI program which were supposedly designed for infiltration and false defectors. (Parker, pp. 230, 257) Parker notes that when Oswald wrote a letter to the Young Socialist League it was before he signed the Loyalty Certificate for Personnel of the Armed Forces. And that organization was listed on the certificate as being subversive. In the letter, he was asking to not just join, but perhaps start his own branch. There was no ambiguity about that. (Parker, p. 263) Yet this violation triggered no action against Oswald, even though an FBI check was done. Was this perhaps because, according to Ferrie’s friend Van Burns, Ferrie would meet with Oswald before his defection in 1959? Therefore, was everything cleared in advance?

    As we all know, in the Marines, Oswald was sent to Atsugi air base in Japan, one of the homes of the U2. An utterly fascinating revelation in the book is about Ruth Paine, more specifically about her sister Sylvia Hoke. It turns out that she was part of the FICON project, the precursor to the U2. In other words, Hoke was working under the guise of a civilian for the Air Force when, in fact, she was really employed by the CIA. She worked on that project through the auspices of George Washington University. (Parker, pp. 266–267). Is this why Ruth denied any knowledge of her sister’s employment when Jim Garrison questioned her before the New Orleans grand jury?

    Another provocative issue the author brings up is Oswald’s meeting with Rosaleen Quinn while in the service. Quinn worked for Pan Am Airlines, but she was taking a Berlitz class in Russian because she wanted to join the State Department. What is new here is that Pan Am had a close association with the CIA, “more specifically between the CIA and members of the flight crews.” (Parker, p. 276) But not just the CIA. Employees were participating with “State Department operations involved behind the scene mission in dangerous locations.” Parker is clearly postulating that the so called “Quinn date” was really another test, this time for Oswald’s ultimate mission to Moscow. If so, he passed, since Quinn said he spoke Russian better than she did. To amplify that opinion, the author notes that Quinn met with Oswald’s radar commander afterwards, John Donovan.

    Parker closes his book with the Albert Schweitzer College episode. Stephen Frichtman was the famous minister at the Unitarian church in Los Angeles. This was in easy driving distance to Santa Ana, where Oswald was stationed. Frichtman’s name was found in Oswald’s undercover cohort Richard Case Nagell’s notebook. (Parker, p. 287) The point being that Albert Schweitzer did very little advertising. And a person who was familiar with the college told the late George Michael Evica that recruitment was usually done through personal contact. The highest entry class was about 30 people and sometimes the place was near empty. As Evica found out, Hans Casparis and his wife—who were running the place—were both academic frauds. So in preparation for travel abroad, why and how did Oswald list this place on his passport itinerary and how did he find the application form? Parker seems to imply it was with the help of Frichtman and/or Kerry Thornley, his supposed friend at the base.

    Parker has written an unusual, provocative, and insightful work. I have some disagreements, but considering the overall quality, they are really too mild to bring up. He and Seamus Coogan and Frankie Vegas (real name) are all significant contributors to the case from down under (i.e. Australia and New Zealand). Parker has had some serious health problems of late. Let us wish him well. I would really like to see the concluding volumes of this intriguing series.

  • Morley v. CIA

    Morley v. CIA

    Jefferson Morley’s e-book Morley v. CIA is a brief tome, but if one is attuned to the scenario and the political times, it’s a work that is powerful in its overtones. On the surface, it tells the story of a journalist at the Washington Post who got interested in the JFK case. He decided to pursue a certain angle about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans with a certain Cuban exile group. He then filed a Freedom of Information Act request. The end result of that application had two long term results that were both negative for Morley and for the cause of open government and disclosure. They are really the heart of this story. But before we get to them, let us lay in some background.

    Morley was one of the very few MSM reporters who showed a real interest in the John Kennedy assassination. From his outpost at the Washington Post, he became acquainted with John Newman. He and Newman cooperated on what was one of the most fascinating and important discoveries in the early days of the Assassination Records Review Board. This was the interview those men did with CIA official Jane Roman in the fall of 1994. Morley had discovered that Roman had handled cables and communications about Oswald in the weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Yet she had signed a communication to Mexico City saying that the latest information CIA had on Oswald was a State Department report from May of 1962. This was a key discovery in trying to comprehend what was going on in Mexico City, which the Warren Commission never came close to understanding. (For a fuller version of that incident click here)

    Morley actually got the Post to publish a few stories on the JFK case which were not cheerleading boilerplate for the Commission or slams against the critical community. This was a significant achievement. He has talked about the rather difficult process he had to go through to get the stories published. At times, it was almost a Catch 22 situation. His editors would ask him what theory he was trying to push. He would reply that he was not pushing any theory. They would then ask: “Well why do you want to run the story then?” Consider: Morley was a veteran reporter who had been with The New Republic and The Nation for a number of years prior to the Post. The fact he had to run this gauntlet shows how radioactive this issue was thirty years after Kennedy’s assassination.

    As he began to go through some of the declassified CIA documents, the reporter noted that, contrary to what the Agency had maintained for decades, they had a keen and continuing interest in Oswald. (Morley, p. 9). He was particularly struck by the fact that the Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil—the DRE—had participated in a broadcast debate with Oswald. Afterwards, they had called for an inquiry into his group: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. This was three months before the assassination. He was surprised when he discovered that not only did the CIA have a file on the DRE, they had three boxes of materials on that group. After going through the material, he concluded that the DRE was in reality a CIA front. (Morley, p. 10) They were getting a princely sum of $51,000/month to operate both domestically and abroad—the equivalent of nearly a half million today. (Morley, p. 11)

    He then went about tracking down some of the surviving DRE members. They all referred to a man named “Howard” as their contact with the CIA in 1963. In the boxes, there were lengthy monthly reports out of the Miami station on the DRE, yet these did not appear to exist in 1963. (Morley, p. 10) In 1998, the Review Board released a document which stated the case officer for the DRE in 1963 was not Howard Hunt, but George Joannides. (p. 14) The plot thickened when Morley learned that, in 1978, while he was recovering from a heart operation, Joannides was recruited by Scott Breckinridge. Breckinridge was the chief liaison for the CIA with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). Unfortunately, when Morley unearthed all of this, he also found out that Joannides had passed on in March of 1991. The Post obituary had described him as a Defense Department attorney. (Morley, p. 15)

    Once he had this information in hand, the reporter contacted Robert Blakey, the Chief Counsel for the HSCA during its last two years of operation. He asked him if he knew what Joannides was doing in 1963. Blakey said he was not doing anything. He had a deal with the Agency that no one operative in 1963 would be working with the committee. In other words, the Chief Counsel had been snookered. (Morley, p. 15)

    Morley thought, quite naturally, that this all added up to an interesting story that the Post should run. Bob Woodward agreed. But the investigative reporting chief ended up vetoing the story. The author’s summary of this episode is notable:

    They just didn’t want to deal with a JFK assassination story, which amounted to prudent careerism manifested by a difference in news judgment. Nobody had ever gotten ahead in Washington by challenging the CIA’s account of JFK’s assassination…The truth was, I had a good story that didn’t serve the newsroom’s collective agenda. (Morley, p. 18)

    It then got worse. The Post, in the person of managing editor Steve Coll, denied his suggestion to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get more documents on Joannides. Therefore, Morley had to publish the story with the Miami New Times, an alternative weekly.

    Though he switched over to the online version of the Post, he did not lose interest in Joannides. Morley ended up joining forces with the very experienced Washington FOIA attorney Jim Lesar. Lesar agreed to take the case, because the precedent in the field was that if the CIA lost, the Agency would have to pay his fees. (Morley, p. 19)

    Prior to working with Breckinridge, since he spoke fluent Greek and French, Joannides had worked as an undercover agent at the Athens station. The author makes clear that Joannides was an operations man, not a desk jockey. (Morley, p. 21) But in 1962, he was sent to the Miami station. At around this time, Deputy Director Richard Helms decided to redo the Agency contract with the DRE. Whoever became their case officer would have full access to Helms. (p. 22) In some documents the CIA gave up, Morley discovered that Joannides took out a second home in New Orleans in 1964, while the Commission was holding hearings there. This may have been important, because Helms never disclosed that the DRE had a CIA code name, AMPSELL, to the Warren Commission. This was the case even though Helms was the key officer controlling CIA relations with that body.

    Lesar filed for the missing monthly reports and the reasons why Joannides was chosen as the HSCA liaison. (p. 26) Dan Hardway became co-counsel. Hardway had worked for the HSCA and had direct contact with Joannides. Recall, when Fletcher Prouty first went to the HSCA for a pre-interview, he saw Joannides there. He immediately realized what had happened. So, he chose to cooperate in only a perfunctory manner.

    In interviews this reviewer did with Hardway, and based on a speech Hardway’s partner Eddie Lopez gave in Chicago in 1993, Prouty was absolutely correct. Up until Joannides coming in, Danny and Ed worked out of the CIA offices in Langley. It was a relatively cooperative and informal arrangement. And the two made good progress on their studies of the CIA and Oswald, and the Oswald in Mexico City mystery. This changed under Joannides. As Lopez said in Chicago, now they were shifted out of Langley to offices at the HSCA headquarters. A huge safe was moved into the office. Ed and Dan had to file formal written requests that were now courier-delivered to a secretary. They then had to sign in and out and also for each batch of documents. They also had to hand in their notes. But further, according to Hardway, they now did not get completely unredacted documents or all the documents under request. This violated the agreement that the HSCA had made with CIA. In other words, Joannides acted as a hatchet man.

    Judge Richard Leon oversaw Morley’s case at the district level. To put it mildly, he did not look upon it with sympathetic eyes. And here, in addition to the struggle at the Post, comes a second sub theme to the book. That is, how the GOP has stacked the judiciary through The Federalist Society. Leon was appointed to the court by George W. Bush and, according to the late Robert Parry, that may have been an appreciative familial gesture. (Click here for details)

    Leon consistently ruled against Morley and Lesar, but, on appeal, Lesar got about 300 pages of newly declassified material. It should be revealed here that, in his interview with Oliver Stone for the director’s upcoming JFK documentary, ARRB chair John Tunheim stated that he was also deceived by the CIA about Joannides. The Agency told the Board that all they had on the former operator was his personnel file. That turned out to be, at the very least, an exaggeration. Tunheim felt that he also had been snookered. For example, Joannides told Blakey that the CIA cut off contact with the DRE in April of 1963. Not accurate. The CIA funding of the DRE went on all the way until late 1966. (Morley, p. 41)

    After the 300 pages—which declassified an award that included his domestic actions, which Morley thinks may have been his work with the DRE—Leon attempted to end the case. This was with about 100 documents still outstanding. (Morley, pp. 43–45). This time, the appeals court—with Brett Kavanaugh on it—agreed with Leon.

    This led to the second part of the suit, which was an attempt to have the CIA compensate Lesar for the work he had done on the filings, hearings, and other parts of the case. Here, Brett Kavanaugh proved crucial. Prior to the Morley case, there had been a four-part test over the issue of compensation. (Morley, p. 47) If the plaintiff prevailed, those four parts came into play. Clearly, Morley had prevailed, since he got hundreds of pages out which had been secret. These benefited the public, since he wrote many articles about it. Further, the JFK case was and is an issue of substantial interest.

    In the end, Kavanaugh reversed his initial vote on the fees. In 2013, he agreed with Lesar. In 2018, he did not. The main issue that changed was that he was now on the verge of attaining his life’s ambition as a member of the Federalist Society. (Morley, p. 55) As the author writes, Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was sealed with a “decision that can only be described as arbitrary, self-serving, and detrimental to the spirt of the Freedom of Information Act.” (Ibid)

    And that statement is not hyperbole and it is not sour grapes either. The author includes Kavanaugh’s decision along with Karen Henderson’s in his appendix to the book. Henderson dissented and her opinion pretty much takes apart Kavanaugh’s in every way. And make no mistake, this is an important issue, for the simple reason that it is difficult for a private individual to take on the FBI or CIA on his own. And the people who file these cases are usually not those of extreme wealth (e.g. the late Harold Weisberg). This is what keeps the scales a bit more even and what helps secure an open government. But once one gets a judge like Leon, who defers to the judgment of the CIA, and one like Kavanaugh, who saw his future beckoning, past precedents were forgotten. Henderson’s dissent is very much worth reading.

    Morley has written an unusual book. I don’t recall one like it dealing with the JFK case. It seems to me more than just a profile of a FOIA lawsuit. It tells us about problems with not just the JFK case, but through that with the press and our court system. Both of which weighed in on the side of secrecy.

    Joannides must be smiling.

  • John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, 2017 version

    John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, 2017 version

    Working in the field of historical revisionism, I understand how difficult it is to challenge an established paradigm. The meme could be that Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise attack or that the Germans bear the blame for the outbreak of World War I. Whatever it is, once an alleged authoritative determination has been made in the historical field, it is very difficult to alter it in any significant manner.

    That is what made John Newman’s 1992 publication of JFK and Vietnam so startling. The author had set himself to work at, not just altering, but reversing a historical paradigm, one that had been set in stone for decades. That paradigm said this: After President Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon Johnson continued what Kennedy was doing in Vietnam. If one looks back at college textbooks or virtually any history of the Indochina conflict, that is what one will read (e. g. David Halberstam’s massive bestseller The Best and the Brightest or Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History). The mass indoctrination of the American public into this mindset was pretty much complete. Any dissenting voices were essentially marginalized. And there were some, like State Department official Roger Hilsman, former White House advisors Ted Sorenson and Arthur Schlesinger, and authors Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers in their book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. There were also essayists specializing in hidden history, like Peter Scott and Fletcher Prouty. But as per their combined effect, as the old saying goes, they might as well have been pissing in the wind. The entire media/political/academic establishment had bought into the “continuity” between Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam: the history of Indochina would have been no different if Kennedy had lived. Altogether—between Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos—about six million people would have died no matter what.

    Which shows just how ignorant, and also pliant, these Establishment forces were. Because, if one was really looking, the journalist could have found sources that would have indicated that Kennedy differed from Johnson in his dealings with the Third World in general, and Vietnam in particular. In addition to the above, as far back as 1980, in the first volume of his biography of Kennedy, The Struggles of Young Jack, Herbert Parmet spent about 12 pages describing Kennedy’s opposition in the fifties to the Republican administration’s maneuverings in the Third World; and, specifically, Dwight Eisenhower’s policy in support of French empire in Vietnam and Algeria. In 1989, one could read about these differences at greater length and depth in Richard Mahoney’s milestone book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. Both of those books review Kennedy’s watershed senate speech on Algeria in the summer of 1957. That remarkable oration had been available in book form since 1960. (The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allen Nevins, pp. 66–80) No one with any objectivity can read that declaration and not see that Kennedy was throwing down the gauntlet on the issue to both Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He was trying to find a new path in America’s approach to the Third World.

    I note all this in order to preface the battle that broke out over the issue when Oliver Stone’s film JFK debuted in late 1991. Stone’s staff had become aware of Newman’s dissertation on the subject. Stone had already worked the Vietnam angle into the script through military advisor Fletcher Prouty. The director decided to augment that work by making Newman a consultant on the film. Newman had direct input into the script and also has a bit part in the picture.

    No one who was around at that time can forget the unprecedented, almost collectively pathological attempt to discredit JFK several months before it opened in December of 1991. These included attacks on the film’s thesis about Vietnam: namely that Kennedy was withdrawing from Indochina at the time of his assassination and Johnson changed that policy within a matter of weeks, if not days. In fact, in one of the earliest assaults on the film—in May of 1991—Washington Post reporter George Lardner wrote that Johnson carried out a thousand man troop withdrawal as JFK had wished and, “There was no abrupt change in Vietnam policy after JFK’s death.” (JFK: The Book of the Film, by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar, p. 197) Newman quite effectively shot back at this in The Boston Globe. He accused Lardner of creating historical fiction and playing politics with the issue. He also questioned Lardner’s traditional sources who had swallowed the Kennedy/Johnson continuity line: Karnow and William Gibbons. Newman used several solid primary sources to counter this mythology, including General James Gavin and senators Mike Mansfield and Wayne Morse. (ibid, pp. 401–03)

    II

    In 2017, Newman issued a new version of JFK and Vietnam. It turns out that the original publisher of the hardcover edition essentially sandbagged the book. Even though the thesis was red hot at the time of first publication—early 1992—John got no book tour to promote his work, in spite of the fact that Arthur Schlesinger had written a positive critique for the New York Times Book Review. (March 29, 1992) Further, Warner Books pulled the volume from bookstores and refused to take the author’s calls about it. (Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 2017 version, p. 479) After the intervention of the family of John Kenneth Galbraith, the author got the rights back to his work. (Ibid, pp. 489–90) He set about refashioning it.

    I did not realize just how much this version of the book differed from the 1992 edition. But while working on Oliver Stone’s upcoming documentary, I had the opportunity to read certain sections. I concluded that it was a substantial rewrite. Because of that, plus the fact that I never critiqued the early version, I decided that this 2017 edition deserves to be, however belatedly, reviewed.

    Right at the start, in his prologue, the author makes two additions to the book. The first deals with how he struck upon the idea of using such a hypothesis as the subject for his dissertation. It was due to a challenge from his former boss, Lt. General William Odom. (Newman, p. xiii) Then, by serendipity, Newman was stationed in Arizona with a man who was instrumental in working on what ended up being part of the main framework of his book: Col. Don Blascak. When John told him the subject of his dissertation—Kennedy and Vietnam—Blascak said, “Well, that’s when the big lie started.” (ibid, p. xiv) Blascak then gave him a list of people involved in MACV—Military Assistance Command, Vietnam—in 1962.

    From these men, and a visit to the army’s Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, Newman developed the evidence for one of the main tenets of his book, namely that General Paul Harkins and Colonel Joseph Winterbottom had devised an intelligence deception about how the war was going in 1961–62, because they knew that, in fact, it was not going well. (ibid, p. xvi)

    When the dissertation was completed in late 1991, Newman sent a chapter dealing with that issue to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. McNamara declined to see him, but he did write back that he did not think he was lied to. After the book was published, McNamara did agree to a visit. Over a series of meetings, the author provoked the former secretary to write his memoir about the war, entitled In Retrospect. Published in 1995, McNamara stated for the first time in public that President Kennedy would not have escalated the war as Johnson did. In fact, he wrote that JFK would have pulled out of the war. (McNamara, p. 96) Newman, as we shall see, was quite influential in McNamara denying the academic/MSM verdict on this subject: History would have been different had Kennedy lived.

    The powerful impact of the publicity surrounding McNamara’s book caused McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s National Security Advisor, to write his own study of his part in the Indochina debacle. (See Lessons in Disaster, p. 22) Unfortunately, Bundy passed away before his book was completed. But a capable scholar, Gordon Goldstein—who Bundy had chosen as his writing partner—finished the volume after his death. Bundy had the same message: Kennedy would not have escalated in Vietnam. (Click here for details)

    It should be noted that those two books are not purely memoirs drawn from random reminisces. The co-authors, Goldstein and Brian Van DeMark, did copious research. They recovered hundreds of pages of documents to replenish both men’s memories. Both works are supported by documentation.

    As the reader can see, Newman’s work had a direct impact on major players involved in creating the history of the Indochina conflict. Today, with so much of the documented record finally declassified, my only question is: Why did the reevaluation take so long to occur? We will address that question later.

    III

    The textual opening of the 2017 version of JFK and Vietnam is also different. Following a brief section about General Edward Lansdale and Deputy National Security Advisor Walt Rostow directing Kennedy’s attention toward Vietnam after his inauguration, the author adds a new chapter on Laos. When President Eisenhower met with Kennedy during the transition, he told the president-elect that Laos was a key area in the struggle for Southeast Asia. (Newman, p. 9) To Ike, it was so important that he would not consider a neutralist solution. If needed, he wanted SEATO—Southeast Asia Treaty Organization—to enter the country, yet France and England did not think Laos was really worth such an investment.

    Largely agreeing with Mike Swanson, Newman argues that what American intervention did under Eisenhower was to essentially prevent any neutralist solution from occurring. (Click here for a review of Swanson’s book) The CIA then funded the pro American, anti-communist forces led by Phoumi Nosavan. They augmented this by recruiting a group of tribal hillsmen—the Hmong under Vang Pao—to fight for them and against the leftist Pathet Lao. (Newman, p. 12) Assigned a CIA case officer, Phoumi became the leader of the American backed forces. This was resisted by a neutralist leader, Kong Le. When his resistance failed, he joined the Pathet Lao. The Soviets began a large airlift to the leftist forces. (Newman, p. 18) This allowed the Pathet Lao to inflict some defeats upon Phoumi.

    In reaction, the Pentagon wanted to insert troops in South Vietnam and send them to Laos; and to also consider an atomic option if necessary. (p. 19) When the Pathet Lao began a new offensive in late March of 1961, the Joint Chiefs now pushed for a 60,000 man insertion, with air cover and atomic weapons in reserve. (p. 22) The idea behind the last was simple: the military wanted no more Koreas.

    Kennedy decided against this. Instead, he sent a naval task force into the area, accompanied by a speech saying he favored a neutralist solution. On April 24, 1961, Moscow signaled they would be agreeable to such terms. (p. 27) Up until the very end, Admiral Arleigh Burke was pushing for direct American intervention, posing the question: Where do we fight in Southeast Asia? Agreeing with Swanson, Newman ends this chapter by saying that once Laos was settled, the Joint Chiefs began to aim at Vietnam as their target. (p. 29)

    At this point, the author sketches in the background of the conflict, describing central characters like Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem. (Although he writes the Bao Dai was a puppet installed by Japan, he was actually installed decades earlier by France. See p. 31) Bao Dai was asked to appoint Diem as his prime minister and Diem eventually shoved Bao Dai aside with help from the USA. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles initially approved of Diem and sent him to Saigon in July of 1954. Veteran black operator Ed Lansdale became the chief protector and benefactor for Diem. In a secret operation, Lansdale used psy war techniques to encourage Catholics from the north to migrate south. This was done to boost Diem’s popularity, since he was a Catholic, not a Buddhist. Backed by Lansdale and American funds, Diem set about building an army. Diem concentrated power by defeating the drug traffickers, the Binh Xuyen, and thus mollified the Cao Dai religious sect. (Newman, pp. 31–32)

    As many authors have pointed out, the problem with Diem is that his whole regime was built around him and his family. Lansdale rigged elections as Diem concentrated more and more power in his own hands—while stamping out freedom of debate and dissent. This went to the point of closing down newspapers and prosecuting, imprisoning, and doing away with political opponents. (p. 33) It was quite clear to any objective reporter that, contrary to what Dwight Eisenhower was saying, America was not backing democracy and Diem was not a Miracle Man. This led to serious inroads by the Viet Cong and also to plotting against Diem within his own government apparatus. To no avail, Ambassador Eldridge Durbrow tried to advise Diem to change his ways. (p. 33)

    Lansdale decided to visit Saigon in December of 1960. He was quite critical of Durbrow and his attitude toward Diem. By this time, the ambassador had essentially given up on America’s mandarin. There were two coup attempts in about seven months between the end of 1960 and the beginning of 1961. Durbrow now said he would rather see Vietnam fall than continue with Diem. (p. 34)

    As advised by Rostow, Kennedy read Lansdale’s report about his visit. Lansdale recommended that Durbrow be removed, which Kennedy agreed to do. Lansdale was not so subtly angling for the position, but Secretary of State Dean Rusk made sure he was not appointed. State Department veteran Frederick Nolting became the new ambassador.

    IV

    Kennedy was very disappointed by the advice he got on the Bay of Pigs invasion and the use of atomic weapons against Laos. Naval Chief Arleigh Burke retired in August of 1961. Shortly after, Kennedy let it be known that the Army’s Lyman Lemnitzer would not retain his position as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. One reason for this is that Lemnitzer made it clear in the summer of 1961 that he thought America should directly intervene in Vietnam. Chief of the Vietnam MACV, Lt. General Lionel McGarr, also thought intervention would be the smart choice. (p. 67) At around this time, JFK decided he needed to talk to General Maxwell Taylor for the purposes of first, being his personal military advisor, and later, to replace Lemnitzer.

    In May of 1961, Kennedy decided to send Lyndon Johnson to Saigon on a goodwill tour. He made it clear that he wanted no one to suggest to Diem that American ground troops could or should enter the theater. (pp. 67–68) By this time, Kennedy must have understood that many of his advisors were leaning this way and, therefore, he wanted to head it off at the pass.

    Prior to Johnson’s arrival, the Joint Chiefs sent a message to McGarr saying that Diem should be encouraged to request troops from LBJ. (p. 73) And Johnson did suggest this to Diem. At this point, Diem politely declined. Instead, he asked for funding to increase the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN.

    Kennedy agreed to the increased funding for the ARVN. He refused the military request for 16,000 combat troops. (pp. 89–90) Yet in October, Diem did request American combat troops. (p. 126) Right after this, Deputy Defense Secretary U. Alexis Johnson also suggested the insertion of combat troops. Kennedy was so upset by these requests that he planted a story in the New York Times saying the Pentagon was not advising him to send in combat troops. (p. 131) Clearly, Kennedy did not like this ascending crescendo towards direct intervention. Yet that October—after Kennedy sent Taylor, Rostow, and Lansdale to Vietnam—they returned with a recommendation to insert several thousand troops under the guise of flood control. Kennedy was shocked by this request, so much so that he recalled each copy of the report. He did not want it to get into the press. (p. 138)

    At this point, I wish Newman had brought the role of John Kenneth Galbraith into finer focus. As many have pointed out, the above pushing and pulling was all headed towards a showdown debate. This happened in November, 1961. (See, for example, Chapter 3 of James Blight’s, Virtual JFK). Due to the work of Harvard professor Richard Parker, we can now detect the direct and substantial influence of Galbraith in these crucial November decisions.

    Stationed as Ambassador to India, and as part of the State Department, Galbraith had a close view of the Indochina conflict. He was strongly opposed to any further American intervention. Before the showdown meeting on Vietnam, Galbraith had flown into Washington with the ruler of India, Nehru. He arranged a meeting between the two leaders outside the Beltway area. The idea was that India could help arrange a neutralist solution to the Indochina conflict. Hearing about the Taylor/Rostow report, Galbraith later visited Rostow’s office. As a call came in, he pilfered a copy of the report which recommended inserting American combat troops. When he read it in his hotel room, he was horrified. He spent two days writing up a point by point broadside against it. When Kennedy got Galbraith’s memo, he compared it to the official report. He decided to postpone the climactic meeting. In the meantime, certain senior White House officials—perhaps Robert Kennedy—began leaking to the press that the president was opposed to sending combat troops into Vietnam. At the long-delayed meeting, it was RFK who would parry all attempts to adapt that part of the report. (Click here for details)

    Kennedy rejected combat troops, allowed for no mutual defense treaty, and did not provide any commitment to save Saigon from communism. He did allow for more American intelligence advisors, military trainers, and equipment. But as both Newman and Galbraith’s son Jamie have noted, the written result of this meeting, NSAM 111, marked a dividing line, one which Kennedy never crossed: Americans could not fight the war for Saigon. (Newman, p. 140)

    V

    It also triggered the beginning of Kennedy’s plan to begin to get out of Indochina. When Galbraith left Washington, Kennedy told him to visit Vietnam and to write a report on the situation. As Galbraith’s son Jamie told this reviewer, Kennedy knew how his father felt about American involvement there and it was his way to keep the hawks at bay. (Phone interview of July 2019)

    While this was happening, Kennedy had a meeting with some higher-ups in the national security hierarchy. This occurred on November 27, 1961, and included Rusk, Taylor, Lemnitzer, Lansdale, and McNamara among several others. Kennedy was frustrated about the repeated calls for American troops in Vietnam. To him, this showed a lack of support for his policy in the area. He went as far as to say, “When policy is decided on, people on the spot must support it or get out.” (Newman, p. 146) He said there should be whole-hearted backing for his decisions and he then asked who at the Defense Department would carry out his Vietnam policy. McNamara replied that he and Lemnitzer would. As Newman notes, this was a kindness by McNamara, since he understood that Lemnitzer would be replaced by Taylor, which is why Taylor was there. McGeorge Bundy later agreed that this had happened: Kennedy had told the Defense Secretary that there should be no talk from him about escalation or combat troops from here on out. (Blight, p. 130)

    To illustrate his function, McNamara called for and attended the first of what would be called “SecDef” meetings in Hawaii on December 16, 1961. One reason for this was to oversee how the new support Kennedy was supplying was working out. What is remarkable about all this is that, even after Kennedy issued his warning about his policy, there were still requests to escalate. Air Force Chief Curtis LeMay complained about the Farm Gate program—air attacks with an American and Vietnamese in the cockpit. LeMay said atomic weapons were needed. (Newman, p. 165) The military put together something called the Joint Strategic Survey Council, which recommended direct American intervention. (ibid) Another such recommendation followed in January of 1962 by the Joint Chiefs. This one said if America did not go to war in Vietnam, the dominos could fall all the way to Australia and new Zealand. (ibid, pp. 166–67)

    With the hawks swirling around him, Kennedy decided to use Galbraith and his report to counter them. By early in 1962, Galbraith had filed not one, but three back-channel cables to Kennedy. All of them frowning derisively on further American involvement in Indochina. (The Nation, 3/14/2005) Galbraith had pointedly written Kennedy that if the USA increased its support for Diem, “…there is consequent danger we shall replace the French as the colonial force in the area and bleed as the French did.” (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 118) In early April, Galbraith met with Kennedy at his retreat in Glen Ora, Virginia. Kennedy had him write still another memorandum discouraging American involvement:

    We have a growing military commitment. This could expand step-by-step into a major, long-drawn out indecisive military involvement. We should resist all steps which commit American troops to combat action and impress upon all concerned the importance of keeping American forces out of actual combat commitment. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 236)

    As Newman and others have noted in discussing Galbraith’s proposal, Kennedy made a significant comment about it. He said that he wanted the State Department to be prepared to ”seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment, recognizing that the moment might yet be some time away.” (Newman, p. 235; Goldstein, p. 236) That comment was recorded in a memorandum of April 6, 1962. He then had Galbraith make a personal visit to McNamara. The ambassador later reported to Kennedy that he had a long discussion with the Defense Secretary and said that they ended up being in basic agreement on most matters. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 129, p. 370) We know that McNamara got the message, because his deputy Roswell Gilpatric said, “McNamara indicated to me that this was part of a plan the President asked him to develop to unwind the whole thing.” (Goldstein, p. 238) And, as we shall see, McNamara conveyed that request to Gen. Paul Harkins at the SecDef conference of May 1962.

    There is an important key that Newman now sketches in. It’s important, because it fulfilled the request Kennedy made to “seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment.” As the author learned from Don Blascak, in Saigon there was a deception being perpetrated. Max Taylor appointed Harkins to lead the entire Vietnam military operation, this included intelligence gathering. Harkins made Air Force Col. James Winterbottom his chief of intelligence for MACV. This allowed Winterbottom to control the intelligence coming into CINPAC—the entire Pacific command—since that was led by another Air Force officer, General Patterson. From CINPAC it went to the Joint Chiefs and McNamara. (Newman, pp. 181–86)

    Harkins and Winterbottom did not know about the April 1962 Galbraith/McNamara meeting. Nor did they know what Kennedy had told representatives of the State Department about seizing on a moment to reduce our commitment. So, in February of 1962, at the third SecDef conference, Harkins said that things were improving in Vietnam, based upon new equipment supplied by the Pentagon. He could say this since Winterbottom was rigging the figures. (Newman p. 188, p. 195) In fact, at times, Winterbottom would actually make up numbers of Viet Cong being killed. (Newman, p. 222) The author makes clear that this deception was deliberately aimed at McNamara, since Harkins and Winterbottom thought that the illusion of progress would keep the American commitment going. (Newman, pp. 242–43)

    But there was one agency in Vietnam that actually was telling the truth about how badly the war was proceeding. This was the US Army Pacific Command or USAR-PAC. Somehow, Lyndon Johnson’s military aide, Howard Burris, had access to these reports and he passed them on to LBJ. (Newman, p. 225; 246–51) As we shall see later, this is important in relation to Johnson’s reversal of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan.

    In May, 1962, at the Fifth SecDef meeting, McNamara was presented with another rosy picture conjured up with phony figures. By now, Winterbottom was counting civilians as dead Viet Cong. Meanwhile, the communists were finding it easier to recruit, because of Diem’s increasingly corrupt and despotic rule. (Newman, p. 303)

    After the presentation was over, McNamara met with Harkins and a couple of his assistants behind closed doors. He now passed on Kennedy’s orders about beginning to reduce the American commitment, because the Pentagon could not actually fight the war for Diem. (Newman, pp. 263–65) Harkins was blindsided at being hoisted on his own petard. He replied that he would need time to begin a withdrawal schedule. McNamara said he would like the schedules at the next conference. The secretary repeated his request to Harkins in July. McNamara was now telling the press how America was winning the war.

    Newman writes that this was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan, but it might have begun earlier with Galbraith’s visit to McNamara. As mentioned above, the Defense Secretary understood he was to be Kennedy’s stalking horse on the issue. (Blight, p. 129)

    VI

    To show how set Kennedy was on getting out, and how unawares Harkins was he was aiding him, Newman devotes another chapter to Laos. Under the cover of the June 1962 cease fire and the July settlement, the Pathet Lao and Hanoi got what they wanted: infiltration routes into Vietnam. American advisors gradually left, but Hanoi’s did not. Harkins attempted to keep the enemy advantage a secret by recalling a report on it. (Newman, pp. 276–78) But the information did get to Roger Hilsman of the State Department. Kennedy was aware of the situation and how this increased the number of Viet Cong, but he still had diplomat Averill Harriman proceed with the neutralist agreement. (Newman, pp. 280–82)

    At the July 23, 1962, SecDef meeting, Harkins continued his faux good news. He told McNamara that the training of and transfer to the ARVN, and the phase out of the major US operational support activities were, per the secretary’s request, on schedule. At this meeting, McNamara announced a three-year deadline for withdrawal of all American forces, which matches the 1965 termination date that Kennedy would endorse the next year. (Newman, p. 293)

    The real situation in Vietnam was getting worse, not better. One reason being that Diem did not want his major forces to meet the enemy in large scale battles. He wanted them preserved in order to protect Saigon. Joseph Mendenhall, a State Department advisor on Vietnam and Laos, admitted that, in reality, Saigon was losing the war. (Newman, p. 298) He blamed it on Diem and his brother Nhu. He said the status of the war would not improve unless there was a change in leadership. There were people in the State Department who shared this (accurate) view. They will loom large in 1963.

    As other commentators have noted, the full exposure of the inability of Diem and Nhu to field a functioning army came in January of 1963 at the battle of Ap Bac. With almost every advantage—more men, helicopter support, better weaponry—the ARVN were still routed. The Pentagon tried to cover up this humiliating defeat, which exposed the cover story put together by Harkins and Winterbottom. But Roger Hilsman was in country at the time and he understood what had happened. (Newman, pp. 311–13) Hilsman and his colleague Mike Forrestal wrote a memo to Kennedy about their trip, which included a questionable view of both the progress of the war and the Viet Cong casualty count. (Newman, p. 319) Ap Bac and this memo are strong indications that Kennedy knew something was wrong with the MACV information. The author also uses a 1971 NBC documentary on the killing of Diem which said that Kennedy realized the intelligence he was getting was not sound. (Newman, p. 329) The author concludes that, by March of 1963, Kennedy understood an intelligence charade was being enacted.

    One of the most important ARRB disclosures—if not the most important one—was the full record of the 8th SecDef Conference. This was held in Hawaii on May 6, 1963. Harkins was still insisting Saigon was winning. McNamara now requested the withdrawal schedules he had asked for many months prior. He looked at them and said they were too slow and asked they be speeded up. The secretary also said that he would ask for a thousand man withdrawal by the end of the year. (Newman, pp. 324–25) The declassified minutes include that it was understood this would be a part of a complete withdrawal by 1965. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3, p. 20) McNamara had achieved what Kennedy had asked him to do the previous year. Everything was now in place for Kennedy to execute his withdrawal plan around his re-election, which is why McNamara specified it as being completed in 1965.

    The author references a famous quote from the book Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye. In that volume, Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers describe the aftermath of a meeting that Kennedy had with Senator Mike Mansfield on Vietnam:

    After Mansfield left the office, the president said to me, “In 1965, I’ll become one of the most unpopular presidents in history. I’ll be damned everywhere as a communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.” (O’Donnell and Powers, p. 16)

    This is a revelatory comment. As Newman, Jim Douglass, and Gordon Goldstein have noted, Kennedy told several friends and acquaintances he was getting out of Vietnam. But this particular quote is important, because it delineates his conscious effort to design that withdrawal around the 1964 campaign, which is why the end date was 1965. This is a key point we will return to later.

    VII

    In 1963, few could fail to see that things were not as Harkins and Winterbottom said they were. The strategic hamlet program, which was actually requested and started by Diem and McGarr, was not working. (Newman, pp. 179, 196) The Viet Cong were strong in the countryside, but the infamous Buddhist uprisings, which began in Hue in April and May of 1963, now spread the revolt against Diem and Nhu into the cities. The Buddhists were a clear majority in numbers, yet they felt they were being discriminated against by the regime—which they were. The archbishop of Hue was Diem’s brother. In April, he held a celebration on the anniversary of his ordination. Papal flags were flying everywhere. But several days later, before the celebration of Buddha’s birthday, Buddhist flags were banned. This ban was created by another brother of Diem. (Newman, p. 340)

    The regime could hardly have made a worse blunder. But they then aggrandized it by not admitting it and then trying to enforce it with arms. The deputy province chief ordered gunfire against the protesting crowds. This resulted in 7 dead, 15 wounded, and 2 children crushed under an armored vehicle. Diem ratcheted up the tensions even higher by lying about the casualties. He said they were caused by a Viet Cong grenade. A localized demonstration now expanded into a full blown political crisis. (Newman, p. 341) This featured hunger strikes and mass demonstrations in other cities like Quang Tri in June. Diem and his brother Nhu resorted to tear gas and even mustard gas. Embassy spokesman Bill Trueheart told Diem’s representative that American support “could not be maintained in the face of bloody repressive action at Hue.” (Newman, p. 342)

    Making it all worse was the presence of Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu. She blamed the demonstrations on the communists. This set the stage for the now famous televised immolation of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc on June 11th. Madame Nhu responded to this shocking event by calling it a “barbecue.” She then said if any more monks wished to do the same, she would supply the gasoline. (Newman, p. 343) The White House was shocked by all this. Dean Rusk now cabled Trueheart. He wrote that he should tell Diem he must modify his relationship with the Buddhists or the USA would be forced to re-examine its relationship with Saigon. The modification did not occur. Seven more monks and one nun burned themselves in public. Diem then ordered martial law throughout the country. His brother used the declaration to raid the pagodas, arresting 1,400 Buddhist practitioners. Nhu then ordered the phone lines in the American embassy cut. (Newman, pp. 349–50)

    Blindsided, Kennedy decided to switch ambassadors. Although the author says it was Kennedy’s decision to replace Nolting with Henry Cabot Lodge, this is not the whole story. As Jim Douglass has pointed out, Kennedy wanted to appoint his longtime friend Edmund Gullion as ambassador. Rusk objected to this and they then agreed on Henry Cabot Lodge. (JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 151) As Douglass points out, this was a mistake.

    If one reads Newman’s fine chapter entitled “Cops and Robbers,” and follows that with Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable on the role of Lodge in the downfall of Diem—pp. 190–210—those combined 33 pages give the reader perhaps the finest brief summary of the nine-week period that led to the assassination of the Nhu brothers. What I believe occurred was that Lodge and CIA officer Lucien Conein, acted in league with a cabal in the State Department—Mike Forrestal, Averill Harriman, and Roger Hilsman—in order to enable an overthrow, stop Kennedy from neutralizing it, and then the two Americans in Saigon made sure the coup plotters polished off the Nhu brothers. I should add, I also believe that Lodge and Conein moved to get rid of the CIA station chief in Saigon, John Richardson, in order to make their scheming easier to accomplish. (Douglass, p. 186) All of this is why the president had recalled Lodge to Washington at the time of his death, in order to terminate him. (ibid, p. 374)

    While all this intrigue was going on behind the scenes, Kennedy had sent Taylor and McNamara to Saigon, not to write a report, but to present him with his report. In his book, Death of a Generation, Howard Jones writes that the Taylor/McNamara report was actually written before the plane ride over to Saigon. (Jones, p. 370) Newman says it was written while the mission was in progress. The chief author was Prouty’s boss General Victor Krulak who, although he is listed as a trip passenger, was really back in Washington. It was through this back channel that Kennedy meant to make the report his fulcrum for withdrawal. This is why an early sentence reads as follows: “The military campaign has made great progress and continues to progress.” What then follows is that training of the ARVN should be completed by the end of 1965 and it “should be possible to withdraw the bulk of US personnel by that time.” (Newman, 409)

    VIII

    The author shows that even at this late date, the fall of 1963, there was resistance to Kennedy’s plan. William Sullivan of the State Department insisted that the ’65 withdrawal date was too optimistic, so that part was taken out. Kennedy was alerted to this upon the return from Saigon. At a private meeting with Taylor and McNamara, he ordered it put back in. (Newman, p. 411) Others, like the Bundy brothers and Chester Cooper of the CIA, also objected. Kennedy overrode them. There was one more tactic the opponents of withdrawal used: they began to rewrite intelligence reports from the battlefield. They now admitted Saigon was losing. Kennedy still proceeded. (Newman, p. 432)

    In the face of all this evidence of Kennedy’s determination, it surprises me that in his latest book Vince Palamara argues that this was all a mirage: Kennedy was not really withdrawing. He bases this on the advice of someone named Deb Galentine who, quite frankly, I never heard of. (Honest Answers, pp. 142–49). Vince quotes her as saying that Kennedy was a hard-core Cold Warrior and the domino theory was alive and well in the Kennedy White House.

    My eyebrows jumped up a couple of feet when I read this for the simple reason that it is pure and provable bunk. (Click here for details) She then says that Kennedy had no real intention of withdrawing from Vietnam at all. Really? Then are all these people wrong?

    • Senator Wayne Morse
    • Senator Mike Mansfield
    • General James Gavin
    • Marine Corps Commander David Shoup
    • Journalist Charles Bartlett
    • Prime Minister of Canada, Lester Pearson
    • National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy
    • Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
    • Chair of the JCS Max Taylor
    • Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff
    • State Department assistant Mike Forrestal
    • Congressman Tip O’Neill
    • Assistant Secretary of State Roger HIlsman
    • Assistant Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric
    • Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith
    • Journalist Larry Newman
    • White House assistants Ken O’Donnell and Dave Powers
    • Commanding General of North Vietnam, Vo Nguyen Giap

    Many of these are taken from either JFK and the Unspeakable, the volume under discussion, or JFK: The Book of the Film. Another source would be Virtual JFK by James Blight, or Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. The last listed source is from Mani Kang who interviewed Giap’s son. (Click here for the details) So all of them are wrong and Deb G is right? Kennedy faked all these people out? She makes no attempt at all to explain Kennedy’s 12 refusals—as explicated by Goldstein and Newman—to send in combat troops during 1961–62.

    The worst part of this is that she bases her argument on an issue that was first brought up by the late Post reporter George Lardner back in 1991. It was then replied to by Newman in his aforementioned column and also the first edition of his book. Lardner said all this “posturing” by Kennedy was done to threaten Diem so he would reform; and that is borne out by Kennedy’s reluctance to make NSAM 263—his withdrawal order of 1,000 troops by December of 1963—public at first, and to embody the Taylor/McNamara Report (i.e. the eventual withdrawal of all advisors by 1965).

    The idea that Kennedy was still trying to manipulate Diem into reforms is undermined by a rather simple fact: Kennedy had all but given up on Diem by this time. How anyone can know about the Torby MacDonald mission and not understand this is bizarre. (Douglass, p. 167) When you are using a secret channel to tell the President of South Vietnam to exile his brother and his wife and take refuge in the American Embassy, I think you are at the end of your rope. The late attempts to try and get Diem to reform were sponsored by Taylor not Kennedy. (Newman, p. 399) Finally, it would appear that by October, 1963, Kennedy decided he could not stop the forces pushing for an overthrow. If Kennedy did not order the overthrow, he ended up acquiescing to it—which is why he sent MacDonald to try and save Diem. (Newman, p. 421) So what would be the point of trying to manipulate Diem? In fact, Kennedy explicitly told Taylor and McNamara not to raise the withdrawal issue with him. (Newman, p. 416)

    Finally, the reason that Kennedy was reluctant to make NSAM 263 public—and to include the Taylor/McNamara Report as part of it—had nothing to do with his exit strategy. It had everything to do with the 1964 election. As noted, Kennedy was all too aware of how weak Diem’s administration had become. This is why he had ordered an evacuation plan in November. The problem for JFK was the political impact of a Hanoi takeover before the election—in the middle of a withdrawal. Kennedy was clear about this in conversations with Mansfield, Bartlett and O’Neill. He explicitly said to Bartlett that he could not give up South Vietnam and then expect the public to reelect him. (Douglass, p. 181) Therefore, he wanted to be able to adjust the withdrawal schedule in order to prevent such a political calamity from occurring. (Newman, p. 414, p. 419)

    The evidence is overwhelming. The only way to reverse a withdrawal from Vietnam was by doing so over Kennedy’s dead body.

    IX

    It was Max Taylor who decided on the OPLAN 34 operations against North Vietnam. He approved a design for these naval provocations in September, without showing it to McNamara. So Kennedy never saw it. It was not shown to McNamara until the November 20th Honolulu meeting. Taylor had only cleared it with the Pentagon and these were not hit-and-run operations. They clearly needed much American support. (Newman, p. 385, p. 444) Also, at this meeting, the intelligence reports had been rewritten and the true war conditions were apparent. Therefore, Taylor also tried to reduce the withdrawal plan by having it made up of individuals instead of the whole units that JFK wanted. (Newman, p. 442)

    When McGeorge Bundy returned from this meeting, Johnson was in the White House. His NSAM 273, written for Kennedy, was altered by the new president. Johnson’s revised version allowed expanded operations into Laos and Cambodia. The withdrawal plan was more or less neutralized and it granted the vision of OPLAN 34 that Taylor wanted: using American assets, not just Saigon’s. Therefore, coastal raids were allowed with American speedboats and some personnel, accompanied by American destroyers fitted with high tech radar and communications gear. The American aspect is what Johnson altered in these coastline operations, as the South Vietnam navy could not have performed these any time soon. (Newman, pp. 443, 456–7) These essentially American patrols/provocations led to the Tonkin Gulf incident in August, which—misrepresented by the White House—was used for a declaration of war by the USA.

    The author ends his book here before NSAM 288 of March 1964, which mapped out a large—over 90 target air campaign—against Hanoi. (Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129) Something Kennedy would not countenance in three years, Johnson had done in three months. LBJ used 288 as a retaliation list for what he considered an attack on Americans on the high seas at Tonkin Gulf. As Newman noted, since LBJ was getting the genuine intel reports, he understood that our side was losing. And this is what he used to confront McNamara and turn him around on the issue. These conversations occurred in February and March of 1964. In the first one, the president said he always thought it was

    …foolish for you to make any statements about withdrawing. I thought it was bad psychologically. But you and the president thought otherwise, and I just sat silent.

    He then added that he could not understand how America could withdraw from a war it was losing. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, p. 310) In the March conversation, LBJ now wanted McNamara to revise his announcement of withdrawal to say that Americans were not coming home, even though the training of the ARVN was completed. (ibid)

    What Johnson was doing was the first swipe at creating the myth that he was not breaking with Kennedy—even though he knew he was. In a later call with McNamara in 1965, Johnson reveals that what is left of the Kennedy war cabinet understands what he is up to, which is “to put the Vietnam War on Kennedy’s tomb.” (ibid, p. 306) LBJ’s fabrication—that there was no breakage—was then picked up by NY Times reporters David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan and utilized in their best-selling books The Best and the Brightest and A Bright Shining Lie. (For Halberstam, click here and for Sheehan click here) The combination of those three men helped create the pernicious national mythology of Kennedy/Johnson continuity, which left McNamara holding the bag.

    Halberstam went the last nine yards in making Vietnam out to be McNamara’s War. And there lies both an epic and personal tragedy, because it was not his war. By 1967, it was clear that McNamara was going through a severe mental crisis. (Tom Wells, The War Within, p. 198) Johnson thought he was going to have a nervous breakdown. According to his secretary, he would break out into rages about the uselessness of the bombing; and then he would end up crying into the curtains on his office window. Johnson retired him in late November of 1967.

    Newman’s relationship with McNamara eventually revealed the reasons for the secretary’s tears and, also, the motive behind his order to begin a classified study of the war called The Pentagon Papers—which he kept secret from Johnson. When he left office, McNamara went through a debrief session. Newman learned of this and asked the former Defense Secretary if he could hear it. McNamara agreed and the author drove out to the Pentagon. They clearly did not want him to listen, so he had to call McNamara and get him on the phone with the archivist. It became clear why they were reluctant to let John listen in. (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger, pp. 165–67)

    In those debriefs, McNamara said he and Kennedy had agreed that America could train the ARVN, advise them, and give them equipment. And that was it. When the training mission was completed, America would leave, even if the South Vietnamese forces were in a losing situation:

    I believed we had done all the training we could and whether the South Vietnamese were qualified or not to turn back the North Vietnamese, I was certain that if they weren’t it wasn’t for lack of our training. More training wouldn’t strengthen them; therefore we should get out. The President agreed. (ibid)

    This was the secret and tragedy of Robert McNamara. He knew what had really happened and couldn’t say it until it was too late. I don’t think one can get a more graphic illustration of the adage that the man sitting in the Oval office makes a difference.

    John Newman did a true service to the truth and to his country. And the new version of his book is even better than the first one.