Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

  • Fred’s Flim-Flam

    Fred’s Flim-Flam

    Fred Litwin’s latest book is not really a book. This “book” is mainly just a copy and paste of his blog posts. So he actually didn’t write a book. But nonetheless, fundamentally, Fred Litwin still can’t debunk JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed. So he made up lone nut excuses…he transferred them from his blog to the pages of what he calls a book.

    JOHN STRINGER—“Which is more likely? A different brain, or a lack of memory for minor details after 32 years?” (11/24/21 blog; Chapter 17)

    BRAIN WEIGHT—“Here is an excerpt from Vincent Bugliosi’s book, Reclaiming History…” (11/30/21 blog; Chapter 15)

    BRAIN PHOTOS—“Which is more likely? That the powers that be switched out another brain to fool the pathologists, or that they just used a higher concentration of formaldehyde?” (12/1/21 blog; Chapter 16)

    JAMES GOCHENAUR—“How much he [Elmer Moore] pressured Perry is not exactly known.” (12/5/21 blog; Chapter 8)

    THROAT WOUND—“Dr. Perry…wasn’t performing an autopsy, he was frantically trying to save the life of President Kennedy…No forensic pathologist who has examined the autopsy X-rays and photographs believes the throat wound to be one of entrance.” (12/10/21 blog; Chapter 7)

    BACK WOUND—“Gerald Ford made a reasonable and purely editorial change.” (12/12/21 blog; Chapter 21)

    VALERY GISCARD D’ESTAING—“This all could have [just] been misinterpreted.” (12/15/21 blog; Chapter 34)

    AUTOPSY PHOTOGRAPHS—“JFK Revisited ignores the issue of memory.” (1/14/22 blog; Chapter 18) “One possibility, raised by Vincent Bugliosi…” (1/18/22 blog; Chapter 19)

    HEAD WOUND—“The doctors at Parkland Hospital were frantically trying to save the life of President Kennedy. They were extremely busy and no one had the time to examine his wounds in detail. Dr. Michael Baden explained this to Gerald Posner…” (3/22/22 blog; Chapter 14) “We are dealing with human beings and their imperfect memories.” (3/27/22 blog; Chapter 10)

    MISSING AUTOPSY PHOTOGRAPHS—“Memory is a tricky thing…Here is what Vincent Bugliosi wrote about this issue…” (4/8/22 blog; Chapter 20)

    JFK’S AUTOPSY—“Every single forensic pathologist who has examined JFK’s autopsy x-rays and photographs has come to the same conclusion: that JFK was hit from behind.” (5/12/22 blog; Chapter 22)

    The problem with doing such a thing is simple: a blog is not a book. And the above are just a series of excuses for the powerful evidence presented in Oliver Stone’s films, JFK Revisited and JFK: Destiny Betrayed.

    To show just how weak they are—and also how fundamentally flawed this cut and paste job is as a book—consider the first three. These all concern the forensic case of President Kennedy’s brain. Since the fatal shot was through JFK’s skull, this is quite important forensically. One of the strongest parts of Stone’s film is the case made for the pictures and illustrations of Kennedy’s brain not being genuine. In fact, the evidence dictates that they simply cannot represent Kennedy’s brain. In the film, this case is made on three different planes of evidence.

    1. The sworn testimony of the official autopsy photographer John Stringer made before the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).
    2. The Dutch medical study testing average weights for the human brain.
    3. The pictures and films of Kennedy’s skull exploding and the tissue, brain matter and blood deposited all over the car, into the air, and even on the cyclists riding behind and to his left.

    A fourth plane would be the eyewitness testimony of those who saw Kennedy’s brain after he was pronounced dead. Stringer denied the pictures at the Archives were his due to—among others—two major issues. He did not use the type of film these pictures were taken with, and the technical process that produced the film, a press pack, was not used by him.

    Now look back at what Litwin says about Stringer. Is he really saying what I think he is? That Stringer would have forgotten how he worked as a photographer over a period of decades, and on this the most important case of his life? One of the most compelling interviews the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) did was with Stringer, and it is described in Doug Horne’s book, Inside the ARRB. According to Horne, Stringer was both surprised and excited when he saw the pictures. So much so that he walked over to the holders to examine them closely, he actually held them in his hands. (Horne, p. 807). He then said this was not Ektachrome film and it was from a press pack, neither of which he used in this case. So as far as he knew he did not take the pictures. (ibid, p. 809)

    The second plane of evidence is the famous Dutch study that measured average brain weight—which came out to be about 1350 grams (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p.253) Oddly, Kennedy’s brain was not weighed the night of the autopsy. About a week later, when it was weighed, it came in at 1500 grams. How could that be considering the massive head explosion depicted in the Zapruder film with a jet stream of blood and tissue exiting the top of the skull, with all the blood and tissue all over the back of the car, on Jackie Kennedy’s clothes, brain matter hurled with such force backwards that the cyclists thought they had been hit by a projectile. It was not a projectile; it turned out to be Kennedy’s brain and skull bone. (Josiah Thompson, Last Second in Dallas, pp. 56,57) We will never know how much of Kennedy’s brain was in the back seat of the car because it appears the Secret Service was sponging out the car while Kennedy was in the emergency room; there is a photo to denote this.

    The above matches up with the plentiful witness testimony, all attesting to see a brain that was severely damaged to the point that a large part of it was missing. After all, witness Marilyn Sitzman said, “I saw his head open up and brains coming out.” (David Mantik, JFK Assassination Paradoxes p. 265) In his book, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, Jim DiEugenio collects 12 witnesses from both Parkland and Bethesda who recalled a large part of the brain being lacerated and missing. (p. 161) Which is not at all what one sees in the pictures, or the HSCA illustration drawn by artist Ida Dox.

    Litwin’s argument about using too much formaldehyde shows a shocking ignorance of what happened that night during the autopsy at Bethesda Medical Center. He might ask himself why Kennedy’s brain was not weighed that night at Bethesda. James Curtis Jenkins, a morgue assistant, said the brain was so vitiated it was difficult to induce needles into the blood vessels in order to perfuse the specimen with formalin solution. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 251) Pathologist Thornton Boswell said the brain was so torn up it might not have even shown a bullet track. (ARRB Deposition, p. 193).

    Which leads to the final question: Why was the brain not dissected? As neurologist Mike Chesser said on camera during the filming of Oliver Stone’s documentary, this is necessary in order to determine the bullet path (paths) through the skull. (James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 298) As Cyril Wecht says in the film, the excuse given in the supplementary autopsy report for not doing it was “in the interest of preserving the specimen”. (Warren Report, p. 544) As Wecht declared: preserving the specimen for who and for what? Of course, Boswell’s description might explain why there was no dissection. It also explains why the photos and illustrations cannot be Kennedy’s.

    Taking all of this evidence into consideration, as Doug Horne says in the film, these pictures would not be admitted into court. But further, if a defense lawyer can prove fraud or bad faith—which one could—the attorney can move for a mistrial and also to have the charges dismissed. That is undoubtedly what would have happened here.

    This is Fred Litwin at work. Having demonstrated the (non-existent) quality of his labors in depth and at length, one can guess the value of the rest of those blog posts. And one would be correct; they are something less than zero.

    II

    Slip sliding along, Litwin actually claims that John Connally’s account of the shooting “is all consistent with the single bullet theory.” (11/21/21 blog) Oh really Fred? Connally stated, in the clearest terms, that the first bullet which hit Kennedy did not strike him. (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 4, pp. 135-36) His wife, sitting right next to him in front of JFK, completely agreed. She said that she turned at the sound of that shot and Kennedy “had both hands at his neck….very soon there was the second shot that hit John.” (ibid, p. 147) If one only allows for three shots, as Litwin has to do, then Connally does not agree with the centerpiece of the Commission, the single bullet theory. Because the other two shots consisted of one that missed the car completely, and the bullet that struck Kennedy in the skull. So if Connally is saying that he and JFK were hit by separate shots he contradicts the whole Magic Bullet concept: its four bullets. Moreover, he testified: “There were either two or three people involved or more in this or someone was shooting with an automatic rifle.” (Ibid, p. 133) He later went beyond that in private and said he never believed the findings of the Warren Commission for one second. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p. 418). This is being consistent with the single bullet theory?

    Litwin got offended and hurt about the straight-talk in the film—“I must question whether there was any need for Dr. Cyril Wecht to add that comment in about Gerald Ford. It’s nasty.” (12/12/21 blog; Chapter 21) Wecht says in the film, “As I recall, they said about Gerald Ford that he could not chew gum and walk at the same time.”

    Why does Wecht say this? Because in the next sentence he decries the fact that it was Ford who moved the bullet wound in Kennedy’s back (its true location) up into his neck for the final draft of the Warren Report. So the forensic pathologist asked: on what professional grounds did Ford have the standing to do this? Was he a forensic pathologist? Was he an expert photographer? Was he a criminalist? If he had none of those skills then how did he know how and why to do such a thing?

    What makes Fred look all the worse is this. The man who originally made the unflattering remark about Ford was Lyndon Johnson. He actually said Ford could not fart and chew gum at the same time. And you can find the remark at Brainy Quote. So the real question Litwin will not ask is this: If LBJ thought so little about Ford’s mental acuity, why did he ask him to serve on the Warren Commission?

    Litwin exhibited the same faux outrage when the film “dissed” the Sixth Floor Museum. (3/13/22 blog). No objective person can deny that this institution is dedicated to preserving the myths in the Warren Report. In fact, while offering a prominent position there to a researcher, the management told him he would have to support the Warren Report in public. (See JFK: Inside the Target Car Pt. 3 by James DiEugenio)

    Litwin claimed Nurse Audrey Bell “did not see the wound in Kennedy’s throat despite being there for the tracheotomy.” (3/21/22 blog) This is incorrect! She made clear on NOVA in 1988 that she DID see it: “It looked small and round like an entry wound.”

    I don’t get angry easily, but I did when Litwin actually said Clint Hill “was rather busy trying to help Jackie Kennedy back to her seat, it seems clear that Hill didn’t have time to do a forensic examination.” (3/27/22 blog; Chapter 10) Which is another nonsensical argument. JFK was face down in the car and Hill could see the hole in the back of the head for several minutes until they reached the hospital. It has nothing to do with a “forensic examination”, it’s what the man saw. (See David Mantik, JFK Assassination Paradoxes, p. 281; Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 2 p. 138)

    Litwin cherry-picked certain witness statements to try to put the skull defect solely on the right side of the head. (3/27/22 blog; Chapter 10) He uses John Stringer’s later 1996 words to the ARRB saying the wound was “in the right side of his head above his ear”—but ignored Stringer’s original 1972 account: “In the occipital part, in the back there, up above the neck.” (ARRB MD 84, p. 5) He uses Ed Reed’s later 1997 ARRB testimony saying he saw no wound on the back of the head—but ignored Reed’s original 1978 account: “Very large and located in the right hemisphere in the occipital region.” (ARRB MD 194, p. 2)

    Litwin uses an FBI report to say that Darrel Tomlinson and O. P. Wright seemed to identify the bullet, CE 399, to agent Bardwell Odum. (4/9/22 blog; Chapter 29) But as the film series plainly addressed—and which Litwin ignored—Odum was shown this report by Gary Aguilar, and he adamantly said that he never had or showed any bullet to anyone. In fact, he told Gary Aguilar that, “I didn’t show it to anybody at Parkland. I didn’t have any bullet. I don’t think I ever saw it, ever.” (Mantik, p. 192)

    Litwin next, and rather incredibly, states that Wright “never said or implied that CE 399 was not the bullet [he] found.” Yet again, the film series addressed that very point. Wright adamantly told Josiah Thompson way back in 1966 that the bullet he handled had a pointed tip. And Thompson has a dramatic photo comparison of the two bullets in his Six Seconds in Dallas on page 175. In fact, if one talks to Thompson, or reads Last Second in Dallas, Wright actually followed him out of his office and incredulously asked him this direct question: Was that exhibit the bullet they said I turned over? How could Litwin have missed all this?

    III

    Clearly, Litwin was unnerved by the two speeches that Dr. Henry Lee and Brian Edwards gave in Stone’s documentary about inadmissibility of evidence in court. This is why he brings up these above points about CE 399. No documentary had ever made this issue as strongly as those two men did, with as much backing as this documentary did. So, striking out with Odum and Wright, Litwin tries to extend this issue by saying that the so-called mystery of the 7:30 bullet in Robert Frazier’s notes is actually not that mysterious.

    Let us be clear, Litwin is obfuscatory.. Writer researcher John Hunt notes that there seems to be documents missing from ballistics technician Robert Frazier’s files from that day.

    But still, in two places in his work product, Frazier noted that he was in receipt of the stretcher bullet at 7:30 PM on the day of the assassination. (“The Mystery of the 7:30 Bullet” by John Hunt, at JFK Lancer.com) Which makes for a serious problem in chain of possession. Why? Because the stretcher bullet had not arrived at FBI HQ at 7:30 PM. In fact, the best estimate would be that it would not arrive until probably after 9:20 PM. And the FBI was waiting for this bullet from the Secret Service. (See Figures 6 and 7 in Hunt’s essay.) The FBI memo from Alan Belmont clearly denotes two bullets will be arriving, as he writes “and we are arranging to get both of these.” That memo was signed off on by seven men in the FBI hierarchy, including the number two man, Clyde Tolson.

    What does Litwin now manufacture to get around this information indicating two bullets? He actually writes that Frazier wrote down 7:30 because that was the time that O. P. Wright at Parkland Hospital gave the bullet to Secret Service agent Richard Johnsen! I am not kidding. Can you imagine the spectacle in court on this one? An FBI agent is making chain of possession notes for a private security officer (Wright) and a Secret Service agent (Johnsen)—while they were in Dallas! Which is over 1,300 miles away from where he is. Two men he had no direct contact with and likely did not even know!

    All of this nonsense to disguise the question: How could Frazier be getting the stretcher bullet from Todd when he already had the stretcher bullet?

    IV

    Litwin nonchalantly said the autopsy doctors “identified the entry and the exit wounds in JFK’s head and they saw the beveling that told them which wound was entry and which wound was exit. The evidence was pretty clear.” (5/12/22 blog; Chapter 22) No. As Dr. Boswell explained, a semicircle of one of the late arriving bone fragments kind of looked like an entry wound. And a notch in one of the other bone fragments might have been an exit. Nothing was for sure.

    Litiwn incredibly states about the back wound: “…the autopsy photographs that shows its exact location, which is totally consistent with the single-bullet theory.” (Chapter 21) Simply not true! The HSCA said that in order for it to work, JFK would have to be leaning WAY forward (HSCA Vol. 7, p.100)—which he was not. (Warren Commission Hearings Vol.18, p.26) The bullet also would’ve smashed the first rib had it traversed where the measurements place it.

    In relation to the testimony of the secretaries on the fourth floor i.e. Sandra Styles and Victoria Adams, the author says “Oswald just simply beat Adams and Styles down the stairs.” (Chapter 23) I simply respond to this presupposing statement with, “How do you know there was anyone running down the stairs from the 6th floor in that time frame?” Litwin might say, “The rifle seen in the window and the rifle being found!” To which I will say, “That just means there was a shooter up there. But again, how do you know there was anyone running down the stairs from the 6th floor in that time frame?” Crickets.

    Litwin parrots the lone nut talking point that “of course there was no evidence of the [palm] print being lifted, because the dusting powder on the print is totally lifted off.” (Chapter 27) But that’s impossible, because there was powder found “all over the gun.” (Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 4 , p.81) Litwin says “Oliver Stone would have you believe that there is no evidence the print was even lifted.” (Chapter 27) Hmm…has Litwin not read this sentence from the Warren Report itself? “Nor was there any indication that the lift had been performed.” (WR, p. 123) Litwin also never gets to the real crux of the issue. That is this: the palm print didn’t appear for a week. (Warren Commission Hearings Vol. 4, pp. 24-25). And also, that the only person to see this alleged print said it was an old print. (Gary Savage, First Day Evidence, p. 108)

    Let us mention the Chicago Plot. Litwin says: “Now, of course memories fade over time…Might Bolden have been conflating the Vallee story with [a 1963] rumor?” (7/20/22 blog; Chapter 39) As Edwin Black (Chicago Independent, 11/75) and Jim Douglass (JFK and the Unspeakable, Chapter 5) have proven, at length and in depth, the Chicago plot was no rumor. But I will say this…when basically all you have left is the old shibboleth, “memories are unreliable” excuse—which is Litwin’s and many lone nutters’ constant M.O.—then you have no case.

    V

    As bad as Litwin is on the forensic side, he is just as bad on the historical angle. Which is a major part of JFK: Destiny Betrayed. He refuses to confront the fact that Kennedy was looking for a way to get out of Vietnam in 1961. In the 14 pages he devotes to the Indochina episode the reader will not detect the name of John Kenneth Galbraith. Which, for today, is astonishing. Because right after the White House debates over Vietnam in the fall of 1961, Kennedy sent Galbraith to Saigon.

    Why did he do so? Because, as his son told Oliver Stone, Kennedy did not like the advice he was getting from his rather hawkish advisors in Washington. In fact, as Jamie Galbraith told Stone about his father:

    He admitted many times in the years following, he said Kennedy sent me to Vietnam, because he knew I did not have an open mind. Kennedy knew what he wanted and he knew my father would deliver what he did. (James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 316)

    The second reason this is an inexcusable lacunae is this: Galbraith’s report was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal program. This is another aspect which Litwin actually turns upside down and backwards. If one can comprehend it: Litwin tries to say the withdrawal plan was Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s idea! (p. 365) Which is pretty much impossible. For the simple reason that McNamara was a steady and strong proponent of inserting combat troops throughout 1961. He actually wanted to send anywhere from 6-8 divisions in late 1961. If you do the arithmetic that is about 120,000 men. (Gordon Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, pp. 56-59)

    So how did McNamara get turned around on the issue? Through Kennedy and Galbraith, and in two steps. At the end of the debates of November 1961, Kennedy was extremely frustrated that he had to fight so hard to get his ‘no combat troops’ decree through his advisors. He called a meeting for November 27, 1961. He said words to the effect: Look, when policy is decided, those on the spot carry it out or they get out. He then asked: Now who is going to implement my Vietnam policy? McNamara said he would. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, Second edition, p. 146) That was step one.

    With that established, in April, Galbraith was in town. He and Kennedy discussed a neutralist solution—something Litwin says Kennedy would not do— through the India ambassador’s relations with Nehru. (Newman, pp. 234-36; Litwin p. 367) At this meeting, Kennedy said “he wished us to be prepared to seize upon any favorable moment to reduce our commitment.” Kennedy then sent the ambassador to see McNamara, and according to Galbraith, the defense secretary got the message. This point is double sourced since McNamara’s deputy, Roswell Gilpatric, said that his boss told him ”the withdrawal plan was part of a plan the president asked him to develop in order to unwind this whole thing.” (Virtual JFK, by James Blight, p. 129: p. 371).

    There is a third source for McNamara getting Kennedy’s drift. At the May, 1962 SecDef meeting in Saigon, McNamara asked the overall commander, General Harkins, to stay after. McNamara then asked him when he thought the army of South Vietnam would be able to take over the war effort completely. As someone who was there noted, “Harkin’s chin nearly hit the table.” (JFK and the Unspeakable, by James Douglass, p. 120) McNamara said the American effort would be dismantled and Harkins had responsibility to prepare a plan to do so.

    In the light of the above facts, for Litwin to say that the withdrawal plan was McNamara’s idea is utter malarkey.

    Stone’s film then supplies the two major pieces of evidence which show that Kennedy was getting out, without any questions about it. First, the declassified minutes of the May 1963 SecDef meeting in Hawaii where Harkins handed in all the withdrawal schedules for each department. McNamara leafed through them and said the overall plan was too slow, we were getting out faster.(Newman, p. 324-25) The second piece of clinching evidence was McNamara’s exit briefing which John Newman listened to. There, the Secretary said he and Kennedy had decided that America was getting out once the training mission was over. And this was unequivocal; it did not matter if they were winning or losing. (Vietnam: The Early Decisions, edited by Lloyd C. Gardner and Ted Gittinger,p. 166). It does not get any more clear than that. Which is probably why Litwin ignores not just those two instances, but everything else in the above.

    Fred Litwin is not an author. He is an agitprop artist.

    Afterword

    by James DiEugenio

    This will be the last article Kennedysandking will ever publish on Fred Litwin. As the reader can see from the above, Litwin has nothing to contribute to the subject that has any value or insight. On top of that, he has a penchant for the smear. For instance, he heads his chapter on Vietnam by labeling it as “politics”.

    JFK: Destiny Betrayed had the finest array of historians ever assembled in a documentary on the subject: Robert Rakove of Stanford, Philip Muehlenbeck of George Washington, Richard Mahoney of North Carolina State, John Newman of James Madison, Bradley Simpson of Connecticut. There was no better roster to review Kennedy’s policies in the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, and Indochina. This rivaled the luminaries the film had on the forensic side. (For a demonstration of just how unique Kennedy’s foreign policy was, click here)

    Broadly speaking, history is the collection of the best sources with the most relevant information from the most reliable scholars. Politics should have nothing to do with it. And the viewer can read the works of these authors and they will see that they are not at all political in nature; they are factually based.

    Litwin quotes David Talbot from the film saying that there is a thread between 1963 and the horror show of American politics today. (Litwin, p. 363) That is not Talbot saying that about himself. This is what the American public feels. And one can check author Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half-Century to certify it. In the focus groups he conducted, adults of all ages agreed that the assassination “changed America.” An astonishing 61% said Kennedy’s murder “changed the nation “a great deal’. Sabato observed that those alive at the time, testified to the “deep depression that set in across the country. Because the optimism that prevailed since WW2 seemed to evaporate”. (Sabato, p. 416) Kevin Phillips revealed the same in his book Arrogant Capital. In his introductory chapter he depicted a chart which showed the collapse of the public’s belief in the government. The percentage went from over 70% in 1960 to the teens by the nineties. And the collapse began in 1964, the issuance of the Warren Report.

    So this is not, in any way, politics. This is simply social science. If Litwin wishes to deny it then he should speak to Sabato or Phillips. If he does not, then that proves it is Litwin who is being political. It seems to indicate that either psychologically or politically he cannot accept these facts. To be kind, maybe it is because he is Canadian and does not live here?

    The second reason we will now ignore Litwin is the fact that there is a real question of who is the Confidence Man here. Oliver Stone’s life has been laid out by biographers, and by himself in the first volume of an autobiography called Chasing the Light. He makes no bones about who he is.

    But this is not the case with Litwin or his soul brother Steve Roe. In his first book, I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, Litwin states that 1.) He used to be a strong believer in a conspiracy in the JFK case, and 2.) He had been a left winger who turned into a conservative. He has never been able to convincingly prove either one of these claims. Therefore it seems he may have adopted them to mimic his role model David Horowitz. As per Roe, no one has been able to certify a business entity known as “roeconsulting”, which is the rubric he used to post his criticisms of Stone’s film.

    If a writer cannot remove these kinds of fundamental doubts about who they are, why should anyone pay any attention to his work product?

  • A Personal Encounter with the Warren Commission

    A Personal Encounter with the Warren Commission

    The first time I saw the Zapruder Film in its entirety was late 2010. Surfing the net in my flat in Istanbul, site of the 8-mile “Kennedy Avenue” running out to Atatürk Airport, I came across the video on YouTube. Immediately I felt I must have seen excerpts or stills before but never the whole thing, not even the 1975 Geraldo Rivera broadcast. There I was in a foreign land, watching a momentous event as a “newbie” in my mid-forties, gripped with shock-horror at the vision of a dashing US head of state publicly executed on a downtown American street. I stayed up long into the night hunting for assassination material, arriving weary at the law office in the morning.

    Yet the primary emotion I felt on watching the Zapruder Film back then, much greater than shock or horror, was sadness. The vision of the President slammed backward and to his left like flotsam as his distraught wife attempts to retrieve debris from his shattered head is still among the saddest things I’ve ever seen. Of all the dehumanizing visions from history captured on film, somehow the moment of this man’s fatal wounding stands out even among tragedies encompassing many more victims at once. It resonates like a warning to all humanity never to get our hopes up too much.

    *********

    It was in the summer of 1999 that I made the acquaintance of Howard P. Willens, long before I knew who he was. Having recently received the news that I’d passed the bar exam, I needed a job for a couple of months, and as many have long done in Washington, I turned to a legal staffing agency, the name of which I now forget. One of the principals in this small, boutique firm said it would require me to work at the home of a senior, distinguished attorney and his wife, also a lawyer, helping them to finish research on a book they were jointly authoring.

    The interviewer cautioned me diplomatically that, while this client was highly accomplished and respected, he could be “difficult at times,” or words to that effect. The substance of it was that Mr. Willens tended to be overly exacting in his demands, exhibiting impatience that might disconcert some. No problem, I said. I was confident any of this gentleman’s idiosyncrasies would roll off my cocky shoulders with ease. Besides, I reasoned, it was only for a few weeks.

    That the next two months were among the most unpleasant of my professional life was not something I would normally have linked at the time to anything more than over-the-top fussiness on the part of the person I was trying – haplessly – to please. It was not a dull assignment overall, but Mr. Willens’ peculiar habit of becoming red-faced instantaneously, adopting a contemptuous tone of voice without ever raising it, was so effective in sending me into spirals of depression and disconsolation that eventually I couldn’t help but take it personally. No one, I thought, could be this disagreeable unless he had taken a serious, specific dislike to the person he was addressing.

    Since I almost never sensed any satisfaction on his part, I became desperate for days spent alone at the Library of Congress, locating precise content for footnotes and citations. Howard Willens struck me as unambiguously unhappy, and once I discovered who he was, fourteen years later, I would link his unhappiness inextricably to the sadness wrought in my mind by the Zapruder Film.

    I

    The two books that Howard Willens and Deanne Siemer (his wife) produced, and on which I worked in their final stages, are serious-looking academic histories. National Security and Self-Determination: United States Policy in Micronesia (1961-72) (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2000) and An Honorable Accord: The Covenant Between the Northern Mariana Islands and the United States (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002) tell an intricate story of law and diplomacy, how Washington handled Pacific territories that wound up under American control after World War Two.

    Even within the confines of “authorized history,” the authors are not unsuccessful in recounting a tale of twentieth-century American manifest destiny with a “happy ending.” Years of negotiations and interim agreements are related in impressive detail, and, it could be argued, as authoritatively as anyone could. Willens and Siemer were personally instrumental in many of the processes they describe. Mindful that some observers might perceive the formal attachment of the islands to the US as just another form of imperialism – or annexation – their main purpose, as perhaps expected with any authorized history, is to demonstrate that this was never the case.

    The authors cite National Security Action Memorandum 145, issued by President Kennedy in 1962, as encapsulating the guiding American principles for the political future of the Micronesian islands that ended up as a “Trust Territory” of the United Nations, with the US as “trustee.” JFK, sensitive to any colonialism on the part of the United States (or any other country for that matter), reflected that sensitivity in NSAM 145. As the authors note:

    [President Kennedy] identified education as the first priority and directed his cabinet secretaries to create a task force chaired by [the Department of the] Interior, that would develop and implement programs to improve education in the Trust Territory and to address the serious shortcomings in public services and economic development. [An Honorable Accord, p. 10]

    With NSAM 145, JFK transferred responsibility for the Northern Marianas to the Department of the Interior. Prior to 1962, all of the Trust Territory except Rota had been administered by the Department of the Navy, which wanted to maintain strict security controls, limiting outside access to the islands in a typically furtive military atmosphere. Kennedy opened the islands up to outside travel and trade, in his words, to “foster responsible political development, stimulate new economic activity, and enable the people of the Islands to participate fully in the world of today.” [Ibid.]

    Disillusioned with the task force’s slow pace in implementing NSAM 145, JFK appointed an outside expert, Anthony Solomon, to lead a mission investigating prospects for accelerated economic and social development. The mission predictably advised greater US investment but also reported on a lack of political consciousness among the native inhabitants. In the Northern Marianas, they “found no serious opposition to permanent affiliation with the United States” and recommended a plebiscite for 1967 or 1968, offering voters two choices: independence or US sovereignty. [Ibid, p. 11] JFK knew that the islanders had already experienced three colonial regimes – Spanish, German, and Japanese – and he wanted US administration to represent genuine emancipation.

    Balancing the goals of self-determination and non-fragmentation became a serious initial challenge for Washington in determining Micronesia’s destiny. The governments of Guam and the Caroline Islands, for example, initially rejected any arrangement that would make their people US citizens, while the Northern Marianas favored association with the US. The US government thus negotiated separately with the de facto indigenous authorities of the Northern Marianas to achieve a separate status for them. Guam would eventually become a US territory as well, and Guamanians US citizens.

    The authors touch on how, in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, the culture of official secrecy and the national-security state took over the process of establishing the island chain’s political status:

    [T]here no longer was the level of presidential interest that demanded the attention of the National Security Council staff and the secretaries of interior, defense, and state. In December 1963 the National Security Council, at the request of State (without any consultation with Solomon), classified as Secret the first volume of the report dealing with its political findings and recommendations; it remained undisclosed officially for many years. [Ibid. p. 12-13]

    II

    In 1972, the Marianas Political Status Commission (MPSC) retained Willens as counsel, by which point the Pentagon had become more assertive about how much of the islands would be retained for basing and other military purposes. The Nixon administration began planning a vast increase in defense sector involvement, including acquisition of 27,000 acres and the entire island of Tinian. Washington became alarmed when a popular referendum was organized in the Northern Marianas on the issue of relocating a whole village to accommodate a new US military base. The US government informed the Northern Marianas authorities that it would not be bound by the results of such a poll, and it was reassured that the referendum’s results would not be dispositive.

    It took until the mid-1970s, with former Warren Commission member Gerald Ford as US president, for the Northern Marianas to finally formalize the status its representatives said they wanted. This was the “Covenant.” One can argue over how rosy and bucolic the US-administered Northern Marianas became as a result of a process involving the national-security state, but I never had too much trouble believing association with the United States was a more genuinely popular alternative at the time than independence, a scenario that may well have seemed highly daunting. Protection from “Big Brother” America may have been too enticing for a tiny island population to pass up.

    The history of the political status of Micronesia is a unique tale, intriguing for anyone interested in international law. While subject to sanitization in the volumes of Willens and Siemer, there are occasional human touches (in one anecdote, an American lawyer and economist for the MPSC drunkenly assaults a US Air Force colonel who has insulted him in a hotel bar). That said, An Honorable Accord and National Security and Self-Determination are conservative histories.

    A “progressive” analysis of the legacy of covenants between the US and Micronesia might focus on factors such as economic exploitation, corruption, clan-based patrimonialism, and a poor defense of workers’ rights, in addition to the adverse role and influence of the US national-security state in engineering political outcomes desired by Washington (the publisher of the first volume, Praeger, has a long history of CIA-commissioned works). Also, while the Northern Marianas and Guam are part of the United States, their residents have no voting representation in the US Congress, a dubious status shared with compatriots in American Samoa, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the District of Columbia. No official US history is likely to highlight such concerns at great length.

    As recently as 2019, Ms. Magazine published an update to Rebecca Clarren’s 2006 article entitled “Paradise Lost,” highlighting social degradation in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) since the accord with the United States. The purpose of republication was, apparently, to double down on her central points in the face of a Saipan Tribune piece, “Article ignores the great strides we’ve made,” attacking Clarren’s analysis. As Clarren noted:

    [In 1975] the islands’ indigenous population of subsistence farmers and fishermen voted to become a commonwealth of the United States – a legal designation that made them U.S. citizens and subject to most U.S. laws. There were two critical exceptions, however: The U.S. agreed to exempt the islands from the minimum-wage requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act (allowing the islands to set their own lower minimum wage, currently $3.05, compared to $5.15 in the U.S.) and from most provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act. This has allowed garment manufacturers to import thousands of foreign contract guest workers who, ironically, stitch onto the garments they make the labels “Made in Saipan (USA),” “Made in Northern Marianas (USA)” or simply “Made in USA.”

    Former heavyweight DC lobbyist Jack Abramoff, prior to his conviction and imprisonment for fraud, bribery, and tax evasion, served as a lobbyist for the CNMI and blocked bipartisan reforms advanced by Congress to improve labor conditions and immigration abuses. As Clarren pointed out:

    In January 2005, the GATT treaty, which had regulated all global trade in textiles and apparel since 1974, expired, eliminating quotas on textile exports to the U.S. The Northern Marianas had been attractive to garment makers because of its exemption from such quotas and from tariffs on goods shipped to the U.S. marketplace. Without those advantages, manufacturers are increasingly moving to such places as China, Vietnam and Cambodia, where they can pay even lower wages. Since the treaty’s expiration, seven factories have closed in Saipan, reducing the value of garment exports to half its 1999 peak and putting thousands of guest workers out of jobs. Some observers expect almost all factories to close by 2008, when a temporary restriction on Chinese apparel exports to the U.S. ends.

    Given their alternatives, the people of the Northern Marianas could very well have legitimately voted decades ago to become a part of the US, a choice President Kennedy’s NSAM 145 extended to them and – as the authors tell it – the option favored by JFK. One might argue that such grim social developments are ever-present in any process of this kind, that the plunge into social tragedy was inevitable. It’s just that one can’t help but suspect that the Kennedy administration, had it lived, might have put the vulnerable people of Micronesia on a superior social and economic footing.

    III

    Though I never had any contact with Howard Willens or Deanne Siemer again, I hoped they felt I had made a reputable contribution to their authoritative history, that their acknowledgment was more than just politeness. On my last day, I remember sitting next to Willens outside – near the pool behind his attractive, fully detached home in a leafy neighborhood off the Rock Creek Parkway. I seem to recall his small grandchildren were visiting, playing in the background, and it was the first time I felt any sense of relaxation around him. Maybe he was looking forward to me leaving, or maybe he was simply “exhaling” after the laborious, nerve-wracking process of dotting all the i’s and crossing all the t’s in his upcoming tomes. But he was a significantly (if slightly) changed man, and at that point, finally, I no longer took his unfriendliness personally. (As I am duly mentioned in the acknowledgments among seven other research assistants, it occurred to me that others may have quit). He was around family, congenial, talking to me about what I wanted to do.

    As it happened, I was due to travel to the Caucasus region of the ex-USSR in a matter of days. Earlier in the year, my British colleagues and I had monitored an election in Armenia in which the US-sponsored political party – “Unity” – won big. We had found the “Unity” victory deeply flawed, and when the leaders of this new ruling faction were massacred in the parliament chamber in late October by nationalist gunmen claiming they only wanted the “people” to “live well,” US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott squirmed in public while expressing outrage at the slaughter of the Armenian politicians whom he and his Washington superiors had so enthusiastically backed. “Unity” had been amenable to compromise on the disputed, Armenian-controlled territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, something Washington desperately wanted settled to allow oil to flow more smoothly to the west from Azerbaijan, which claimed Nagorno-Karabakh as its own.

    In neighboring Georgia, President Eduard Shevardnadze – long a favorite of the US foreign policy establishment and winner of the “Enron Prize” in 1999 – was facing a stiff challenge from a regional leader in parliamentary elections at the end of October. In the pre-election period, Shevardnadze would bring out US-supplied helicopters to fly low over the capital, Tbilisi, in a deafening alert to his subjects that a “coup attempt” was under way. The putsch, declared Shevardnadze, was being orchestrated by the Russia-friendly head of the Autonomous Republic of Adjara, Aslan Abashidze, whom Western media consistently labeled a “warlord.” The US staunchly backed Shevardnadze in his electoral showdown with Abashidze, whose bloc was polling high.

    Within three years, Washington would turn against Shevardnadze after a poor evaluation of local elections in 2002, and by November 2003 the US would call for his ouster in the “Rose Revolution.” Abashidze would flee to Moscow within six months of the “revolution,” and top US officials like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would celebrate a new generation of Georgian leaders as the US-led war in Iraq ramped up. By 2008, around the time of the five-day war with Russia over the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, Sen. John McCain would dance a “Georgian jig” on camera with US-backed strongman President Mikheil Saakashvili, a Shevardnadze protégé now transformed into the great hope for change in place of the stagnant old ways of the ex-Soviet Politburo member.

    All of this seemed far more exciting to me at the time than the history of Micronesia. Anticipating my impending mission on behalf of democracy and human rights, as I understood them then, I might have been distracted from my assignment. If so, I apologize herewith to the authors. I did try to be precise in my source-checking. In any case, in September 1999, Howard Willens and Deanne Siemer bid me semi-cheerful farewell and good luck as I drove out of their company forever.

    IV

    It was not until the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination that I became aware I had once worked for a former member of the Warren Commission’s legal staff. Howard Willens had just published a book, History Will Prove Us Right (New York: The Overlook Press, 2013), to uphold and defend the Warren Report’s conclusions, and he and other surviving legal counsel appeared in panels to promote and celebrate the Warren Commission’s achievement in securing truth and justice for the people of the United States. By then convinced that the Commission had done nothing of the sort, I found it a dreadful spectacle to watch.

    What I felt most when watching Willens in 2013 was the old, familiar sense of his discontent. In a speech at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, he was animated, occasionally agitated in his broad-shouldered suit, clutching the lectern like a commissar laying down the law. But the stuttering “uhs” and “ahs” sounded symptomatic of over-rehearsal. Explaining the Single Bullet Theory as if it were fact, he looked to me not only despondent but also somewhat worried or under duress.

    At the 27:43 mark in the C-SPAN video, Willens can be seen and heard reciting the following:

    “So Single Bullet Theory of course has gone through the ages as a much, uh, uh, maligned, uh… uh, uh, uh, uh, lil’ shorthand for, uh, the Commission’s, uh, conclusion, which of course, it became a conclusion of fact, uh, uh, not… a theory, uh, because after a, a reenactment in-in Dallas in May of 1964, it seemed very evident that the bodies of the President and the Governor were, uh, positioned in the car in such a way… uh, that, that the bullet after it exited from the President… would, would hit the [sic] Connally and cause… the nature of the wounds… in-in his back, his-his-his wrist, and his thigh… that was uh, uh, uh, what he suffered. So it was… and furthermore, what people tend to forget is that the… uh… the… uh, uh, pathologists… and the Commission were not the only people that reached, uh, this view, that this particular conclusion was reviewed in 1968, experts in 1975, experts in 1976, and again in 1978. And out of twenty experts… twenty… let’s be precise… twenty-one… pathologists… experts… in such matters examined the autopsy, uh… photographs and x-rays… they all, they all, all concluded, uh, the course of the bullet… and, uh, twenty out of twenty-one… concluded as did the Commission… that a single bullet… created the back, throat wounds of the President and the wounds suffered by Governor Connally. The dissenting pathologist, who will be in town two weeks from now featured at a conference, when asked what happened to the bullet, when it exited the President’s… throat, he said: ‘I don’t know.’ [Pause, feint audience titters] ‘I didn’t conduct the investigation.’ And unless one has a rational explanation… that, that can rival in terms consistent with the law of physics, and with the physical evidence available… I think there’s not a rational discussion that can be had… on the question of the Single Bullet uck-uck-uck conclusion.”

    The “dissenting pathologist” was, of course, Dr. Cyril H. Wecht, M.D., a member of the House Select Committee on Assassinations forensic panel and a distinguished university professor, who also had a law degree. Having listened to both men speak, I had little doubt which of the two I would prefer to represent me in a jury trial or testify as a witness. Of course, since there was never any genuine trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, the point was moot, but how dispiriting to see a fellow attorney such as Howard Willens – even as he referred to overwhelming majorities of “experts” in the 1960s and 1970s – nonchalantly cast aside the fact that the only “majority” that mattered when determining truth under US criminal law was a majority of jurors.

    In History Will Prove Us Right, Willens fleshes out Dr. Wecht’s “I don’t know” quotation by noting its setting: the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald in London in 1984, with Vincent Bugliosi as mock prosecutor. (Unsurprisingly, Bugliosi’s is the top review on the back of the book’s dustjacket.) But what makes the entire issue of the fate of the “Magic Bullet” so remarkable as a subject of Willens’ ridicule of Wecht is that both Willens and Bugliosi ignored the broken evidentiary chain. The same was true for President Kennedy’s body and limousine. Both were removed from Texas illegally, since the crime scene investigation and autopsy should have taken place in Dallas in accordance with prevailing law, and in a bit of forensic negligence best described as outrageous, Kennedy’s wounds were never even dissected. The presidential car was taken from Andrews Air Force Base to the White House garage, where even FBI investigators were denied access to it until after midnight.

    In short, whisking both corpse and vehicle out of sight of the duly constituted law enforcement authorities destroyed due process. Yet it is Dr. Wecht who is mocked? It is Willens and Bugliosi who should be derided as attorneys. Not only was Wecht speaking the truth, but it was precisely that truth – the “I don’t know” – that made bunk out of all Willens’ and Bugliosi’s so-called “evidence.” It is inconceivable that an attorney of Willens’ stature could accept this state of affairs as evidentiarily sound. It is insulting that he could expect the rest of us to do so.

    Again, Willens’ swagger in 2013 could not negate the deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction I had perceived in him in 1999, and it wasn’t just the stutter. Something still wasn’t right with the world, and as I watched I became aware of a strange “camaraderie” among the ex-Warren Commission lawyers, a “brotherhood” – not so much of joy as “circumstance.” It was as if someone (or something) had dragged these octogenarians out of retirement to go on a tiresome “national tour.” It was like a tedious exercise in going through the motions, but, hey, at least they had each other.

    At the 29:42 mark, Willens can be seen and heard reciting the following:

    Uh, we, we did have the problem, as you know, of dealing with, uh, conspiracy, uh… and the problem that sure you’ll hear about more from my colleagues, but the over… uh… whelming problem from the outset was that it is always impossible, analytically, to prove a negative. And here the task was to prove there was no conspiracy.

    The “task” was to prove there was no conspiracy? Since when did that become the duty of a diligent lawyer or investigator serious about his job? What happened to the truth?

    He continues:

    Now, the Commission was aware then… of all the possible, uh, interests, here in Texas, and nationally and internationally, who might have an interest in assassinating the President. But in order to prove a conspiracy, you have to prove there’s some rel… some relationship between the alleged conspirators and the people who actually… did the deed, whether it’s Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby. And the Commission staff and the members of the Commission conducted… a widespread investigation looking at the associations of both these individuals, intensely and comprehensively, and could not find any evidence that either of them had been aided in any way by one of the alleged, uh, suspects… [unintelligible]. And so, ah, ah, that, of course is a conclusion that one can never be… absolutely certain about, and what the Commission did in its findings was say, was to say, ‘We have found no credible evidence… of a conspiracy.’ They did not say there was no conspiracy. And they fully understood that with the decades to come, there might be additional evidence that would, uh, uh, persuade, uh, uh, impartial, knowledgeable people that there was a conspiracy. It’s been forty-nine years, and that evidence still has not materialized. And if I had had the courage of my convictions, the book would be entitled, ‘History Has Proved Us Right’ rather than ‘History Will… uh, uh, uh… Prove Us Right.’”

    Howard Willens has seen the inside of a courtroom many more times than I, and he no doubt received a much higher grade in evidence to boot. But to point out to your audience that, on the one hand, the Commission used the term “no credible evidence” as a way of qualifying the veracity of its findings, and then, on the other, say that no evidence had materialized in the previous half-century to undermine the Commission’s conclusion beggars belief. It’s akin to arguing with non-lawyer Warrenites online and being bombarded with: “You have no evidence!” You’re left with the option of either cutting the discussion off abruptly or trying to calmly reason with them that, indeed, there is a ton of “evidence.” It’s just a matter of whether one interprets it as “credible” or not.

    At the risk of digression, for example, Helen Markham stated in a sworn affidavit that she arrived at the intersection of East 10th Street and North Patton Avenue in Dallas at 1:06 PM on November 22, 1963, and immediately caught sight of Officer J. D. Tippit’s killer. A sworn affidavit is evidence, as any lawyer worth his or her salt will tell you. In a court of law, you can be certain any diligent defense attorney would not only have entered it into evidence but also held onto it like a pit bull with a fresh bone. Markham’s route to the bus stop was part of her daily routine, making her affidavit more credible than anything else she said. It rendered the accused killer’s arrival at the scene of Tippit’s slaying impossible, and a court of law would have taken due note of that. But the Warren Commission was not a court of law, so it ignored the evidentiary weight of the affidavit. It never proved anything because it didn’t have to. In 2013, Willens blurred the definition of “evidence” as a way of bolstering the hackneyed Warrenite stance.

    The phrase “courage of my convictions” also stands out as curious. If Willens had been brave enough to do the right thing, he would have called his book something else? One has to wonder whether such a statement betrays a sinister truth. Suppose, for instance, that Willens believed the Commission was “right,” as in the book’s title, but not “true.” What if leading Commissioners knew they were perpetrating a massive falsehood for the “right” reasons, because the American public didn’t need to know the truth, or worse (to paraphrase Jack Nicholson’s caricatured Marine colonel in A Few Good Men), couldn’t “handle the truth”? Personally, I suspect certain Commission insiders beyond Allen Dulles (including a few legal staffers) knew some terrible – even unspeakable – secret but set about constructing a fairy-tale narrative to “tranquilize the people.” This is how Senator Richard Schweiker of the Church Committee referred to the Commission. Could Willens have been one of them? Surely not, I hoped as I watched him in 2013.

    History Will Prove Us Right has been ably reviewed on this website, and I don’t feel a need to elaborate on that analysis. But I do think Willens’ Micronesia works qualify as “serious” (if formalistic) academic history, whatever one’s personal perspective on the fate of the Trust Territories. History Will Prove Us Right does not, and no serious scholar would say otherwise. One might speculate Willens was happier writing the Micronesian volumes than he was writing History Will Prove Us Right, but with the benefit of hindsight, I sadly cannot shake the impression that Willens, as he wrote his Micronesia works, was still carrying something abominable around with him decades after serving as a Warren Commission attorney. That is, the unhappiness endured then, as it may still.

    The manner of Howard P. Willens, Esq., struck me as severely unnatural not only in 1999, but forever thereafter in my mind’s eye. Something, I believe now, was desperately bothering him thirty-five years after the publication of the Warren Report, and the unpleasantness of that late summer in Washington was, I still feel, a consequence of that something. The enduring sadness of the assassination was described by John Newman in his seminal work, Oswald and the CIA, as an “unhealed wound.” That was the first place I saw it thus described, and that is still the most eloquent phrase I’ve heard as metaphor for that horrific event. But if the wound remains unhealed for a nation, how must it feel for any single individual still harboring some terrible truth about it?

    Again, as the title of his book indicates, Howard Willens may have convinced himself that posterity would honor the men of the Warren Commission and its staff. He may have rationalized somehow that, in the event this truth became public in their lifetime, the public would understand that he and his colleagues were only trying to be upstanding, to prevent a widespread loss of faith in our institutions of government, with potential resultant chaos and collapse. While this makes some sense, it is at the same time unthinkable to me that anyone could carry something as profoundly awful as that around with them to the end of his life. Yet countless others surely already have.

    The single sentence in History Will Prove Us Right about a phone call that Willens’ former Warren Commission colleague David Slawson received from James Jesus Angleton, ex-chief of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff, in 1975 (Angleton was no longer even a CIA employee) reads as follows:

    When CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton called David Slawson to check his reactions to the Church Committee’s disclosures, Slawson frankly told Angleton how disappointed he was with his agency’s failure to disclose this vital information, but assured him that Slawson would honor his commitment to preserve the confidentiality of other CIA secrets. [p. 317]

    This is a level of sanitization unequaled even in the Micronesian works. One wonders what Slawson himself thought of it. As the incident is recounted by David Talbot in The Devil’s Chessboard,

    In a frank interview with The New York Times in February 1975, Slawson suggested that the CIA had withheld important information from the Warren Commission, and he endorsed the growing campaign to reopen the Kennedy investigation. Slawson was the first Warren Commission attorney to publicly question whether the panel had been misled by the CIA and FBI (he would later be joined by Rankin himself) – and the new story caused a stir in Washington. Several days after the article ran, Slawson – who by then was teaching law at the University of Southern California – got a disturbing phone call from James Angleton. After some initial pleasantries, the spook got around to business. He wanted Slawson to know that he was friendly with the president of USC, and he wanted to make sure that Slawson was going to “remain a friend” of the CIA. [Talbot, 580-81]

    In the 1990s, Slawson infamously refused to answer an Assassination Records Review Board member who asked him whether he had listened to a tape recording supposedly made of Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City (Willens incidentally accompanied him on the trip to Mexico in 1964), remarking defiantly that he was “not at liberty to discuss that.” A federal statute passed unanimously by Congress in 1992 was supposed to afford Slawson just such a “liberty,” of course, but maybe the Ghost of Jim Angleton was still staring at him from somewhere in the room as he spoke.

    President Trump reportedly told Judge Andrew Napolitano over the phone that he had seen something in the remaining JFK files that Napolitano, had he also viewed them, would have understood required continued concealment. If Trump was speaking the truth (not a given), then perhaps there is a small community of Americans prepared to walk around harboring some unspeakably atrocious fact about our government and history, and they are fine with just continuing to carry on that way until the end of their days. I don’t get it, but then I’m not one of them.

    Recent breakthroughs in JFK research, including the watershed work of Jefferson Morley and the Mary Ferrell Foundation in pursuing still-concealed government files related to the assassination, offer hope that an era of great sadness and anguish in American history and life might finally come to an end. Looking back at the period of the Warren Commission and the ensuing several decades, one gains an unmistakable impression of widespread blackmail and intimidation holding sway over public officials, including those staffing official investigative panels. We know for instance, through Hale Boggs’ son Tommy, that J. Edgar Hoover maintained files on the Warren Commissioners. Well-meaning investigators operating in that milieu nearly sixty years ago no doubt experienced acute discomfort.

    The political culture of Angleton and J. Edgar Hoover endured long after their deaths, so that honorable men such as Cyril Wecht found themselves alone in opposing something as grotesquely insulting to human intelligence as the Single Bullet Theory. Unseen pressure and intimidation on those seeking the truth must have been very real, and a recent two-volume set, One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein by Whitney Webb (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2022), while lamentably neglecting to touch on the potential for blackmail in steering the course of investigations into JFK’s murder, has made waves for publicizing what many have long felt but were no doubt afraid to say. The truth is slowly coming into view, whatever those protecting an old secret may still hope to hide. The nation is progressing into light.

    I cannot assume Howard Willens is among those hiding ghastly secrets about the nature of the assassination. It is of course possible that he genuinely believes in the Warren Report’s conclusions. After all, the notion that something was “possible” – however implausible – remains the primary debating stance of Warrenites in defending their bible today. But in the event Willens or any other living American encountered the sort of gangster-like tactics employed by Angleton against Slawson (or by Hoover against innumerable others), they would honor history and nation by unburdening themselves of that cloud of sorrow now. They should let America know of any torment experienced or learned of at the hands of the long dead “wise men” of America’s Cold War intelligence and security agencies. Real US “national security” demands freedom from that miserable past.

  • JFK Medical Betrayal: Where The Evidence Lies by Russell Kent

    JFK Medical Betrayal: Where The Evidence Lies by Russell Kent

    Russell Kent graduated from the University of London with a degree in physiology, which means he studied how anatomy and systems of the body function. He then went to work at a hospital laboratory started publishing. He has now written a book on the medical evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It is called JFK Medical Betrayal. It approaches the subject in an unusual manner, one that ends up garnering some valuable insights into the case.

    I

    Kent begins his book by writing that the Warren Commission essentially discounted the Parkland doctors’ observations in lieu of the pathologists at Bethesda morgue, where Kennedy’s body ended up the night he was killed. There were two serious problems in doing this. First, the pathologists at Bethesda—Jim Humes, Thornton Boswell, and Pierre Finck—were not really qualified to be practicing forensic pathologists. And second, for whatever reason, they did not do a complete autopsy. If the law had not been broken, the autopsy would have been done in Dallas, by a respected medical examiner, Earl Rose. But as a result of these shortcomings—amazingly—no one really knows the specifics of how Kennedy was killed.

    From here, Kent focuses on what happened at Parkland after Kennedy’s body arrived. Dr. Charles Carrico directed the gurney be sent to Trauma Room One. (Kent, p. 19) There, Carrico discovered a very small wound in the anterior neck. He also observed a right posterior wound of the head, down low, “about 50-70 mm in diameter and with the skull sprung outwards.” Carrico saw both cerebrum and cerebellum. (p. 19) Malcolm Perry called for a tracheotomy tube. But by 1:00 PM, Dr. Kemp Clark, the team leader, pronounced Kennedy dead. (p. 20) Nurses Diana Bowron and Margaret Henchliffe undressed Kennedy and washed the body. Clark and Perry went on to write about this large, avulsive wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (p. 21) In addition to Perry, Carrico also believed the anterior neck wound was one of entrance, as did Henchliffe. (p. 22)

    According to the author, since LBJ feared further attacks, the new president ordered everyone back to Washington. (pp. 24-25) This led to some rather poorly qualified doctors performing this very important autopsy. Jim Humes had taken a one week course in forensic pathology 10 years prior. (p. 26) But since 1960, Humes was essentially an administrative desk jockey. And he stayed one until his retirement. (pp. 26-27)

    Another indication of these doctors’ lack of experience is that on the autopsy face sheet, Thornton Boswell did not affix his name, or that of Kennedy as a patient. (pp. 27-28) Boswell described the back wound as measuring 7 x 4mm, but he located it in relation to two movable parts of the anatomy, the mastoid process and the right acromion. The proper manner is to measure down from the top of head and then left or right of the spine. (p. 29)

    Pierre Finck was also an administrative desk jockey who may never have performed a gunshot wound autopsy. He was not certified in forensic pathology until 1961, at which time he was not performing post-mortem examinations. The most logical time for Finck to have done a gunshot wound autopsy was when he was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany. But, at that time, he was not board certified. So its logical that he likely assisted in such exams. (p. 30) Finally, Finck got there well after the autopsy had begun.

    As many have noted, a lot of the facts in the autopsy report are not backed up by written data. Humes burned his notes and the first draft of his report. This happened around the time he heard Oswald had been killed. (p. 31). Further, the pathologists did not consult the photos in preparation of their report. According to the author, Humes did talk to Perry that night and learned of the anterior neck wound. (p. 32). And this was the basis for the idea that the back wound exited the neck wound.

    The author poses a cogent question at this time. Namely, why did Dr. George Burkley—who was Kennedy’s personal physician—not inform the pathologists about all that had happened at Parkland? After all, he was the only physician at both locations. (p. 33)

    II

    From here, Kent delves into the creation of the Single Bullet Theory. The FBI concluded that there were 3 shots, and 3 hits: one to Kennedy’s back, one to his head and one to Governor Connally’s back. They discounted the bullet strike to James Tague on Commerce Street and Kennedy’s anterior neck wound.(p. 39) J. Edgar Hoover never bought the Single Bullet Theory.

    The Warren Commission did not agree. With them, the hole in the front of Kennedy’s neck—which was smaller than the back wound—now became an exit wound. These Commissioners were supported by a team of alleged experts at Edgewood Arsenal testing grounds: including doctors Joseph Dolce, Alfred Olivier, Arthur Dziemian and Frederick Light. The Commission eventually concluded that the back wound, which was 7 x 4mm, was the entrance wound and its exit was the anterior throat wound which was about 3-5 mm wide. In other words, the exit was smaller than the entrance. (p. 45)

    As the author notes, there is no evidence that any tests were done on trajectory analysis of the bullet though the back, i.e. whether or not it would hit bones in the spinal cord. Even worse, Olivier stated that their experiments, “…disclosed that the type of head wounds that the president received could be done by this type of bullet.” (p. 51) As Kent notes, this is not accurate. Because their experiments showed that this type of skull wound would result in a blow out of the right side of the face. That is not what happened to Kennedy. Another point about these experiments: in wrist simulations, the entrance was always smaller than the exit. Yet the reverse was true about Connally’s wound. (p. 53)

    According to Kent, there was disagreement about the Magic Bullet concept. Some of it based on the fact that experimentation showed that such a projectile would not emerge so intact. But it was Arlen Specter who decided to ride out the storm. Beyond that, Light and Dolce thought Connally was hit by two bullets. (p. 55). Dr. Robert Shaw, who worked on Connally at Parkland, testified twice. He could not buy one bullet in Connally, he also was reluctant to accept CE 399, the Magic Bullet.(p. 57) Kent notes that Dolce did not testify before the Commission. One wonders if this was one of Specter’s censoring assignments, like Burkley and his death certificate and the two FBI agents at the autopsy.

    III

    By 1967, a strong undercurrent had developed opposing the Warren Commission. Several critical books and essays had gained popularity, and DA Jim Garrison had opened an inquiry in New Orleans. Therefore, the Department of Justice decided to begin a counter attack based on the medical evidence. (p. 68). They first gathered Humes, Boswell, autopsy photographer John Stringer, and radiologist John Ebersole in Washington to review the pictures and x-rays. They signed a false statement about the collection being intact, with nothing missing. (p. 69). A second review then took place by the three pathologists. They said the materials agreed with their original report. (p. 69)

    But this was just the beginning of the DOJ maneuver. Deputy Attorney General Carl Eardley now asked Thornton Boswell to write a letter sanctioning an independent panel. Eardley tried to create an illusion that this was Boswell’s idea, but the evidence indicates the letter was written by the DOJ and sent to Boswell to sign. (p. 70). This was the beginning of the creation of the Clark Panel: a panel of four men allegedly independently appointed from academia to review the autopsy at Bethesda. But as with the letter, Kent advances a case that this was not really accurate. That it was really Attorney General Ramsey Clark who appointed this panel.

    The four men chosen, likely by Ramsey Clark, were: Doctors William Carnes (pathologist), Russell Morgan (radiologist), Alan Moritz and, most importantly, Russell Fisher (the last two qualified as forensic pathologists). A high point of the book is Kent’s analysis of the backgrounds of these four men, indicating that Clark did not want an honest review, which is why he chose them. (pp. 72-76) This section seemed to me to be original and well-reasoned. For instance, Moritz taught Fisher at Harvard, Fisher was very reliant on government funding, and Fisher knew both Humes and Boswell. Also, Fisher had written a text book that was used by pathologists around the world. (To cavil on this section, I think it would have been helpful if Kent had mentioned Fisher’s role in the investigation of the alleged suicide of CIA officer John Paisley. Click here for that)

    The Clark Panel met for two days and the second day was not a whole day. (p. 77) Boswell and Humes appeared before the panel. Kent gives us a good summary of the materials they reviewed. He then mentions that the panel raised the rear skull wound upward by four inches and he supplies reasons for why they did so. Kent also adds that their report on damage to JFK’s brain differs from what the original autopsy report depicts. First, the panel reported significant damage on the left side of the brain which the original report did not, and second was that the corpus callosum was widely torn down the midline. (p. 83) As the author notes, were the pictures the Panel looking at not of Kennedy’s brain? In fact, eventually Fisher admitted that Kennedy’s brain was not sectioned, which he characterized was really a crucial step. (p. 84)

    In their description of the now infamous 6.5 mm fragment on the x-rays of the skull, there is no mention that this measurement matches the caliber of the alleged bullet fired at Kennedy. Neither do they say that the dust like particles in the front of Kennedy’s skull are above the posterior entrance wound. This would suggest an entrance wound. Further, the fact that the larger particles are located near the back of the skull would also suggest this origin, as Dr. Vincent DiMaio wrote. (p. 91)

    Another deception was that the report described “a track between two cutaneous wounds”, presumably between JFK’s back and neck. But as Kent notes this was an imputation: there was no proven track. (p. 92) The main reason being that this wound—as well as the skull wound—was not dissected.

    All four doctors signed by April 9, 1968. Yet, it was not released to the public until January 16, 1969. This was just before jury selection began in the trial of Clay Shaw. Kent’s discussion of the Clark Panel is one of the best—if not the best—I have seen in the literature.

    IV

    The next inquiry into the JFK autopsy was in 1975 under the Rockefeller Commission, headed by President Gerald Ford’s Vice-President, Nelson Rockefeller. Incredibly, Warren Commission lawyer David Belin was appointed the chief counsel to this body. He tried to neutralize the issue of bias by having Robert B. Olson run the JFK inquiry. But as Kent writes, Belin showed up during the medical review and took the testimony of two doctors.

    A large amount of evidence was made available to the doctors. It would take weeks to absorb the material. They were left alone with it for one day and then sent out to produce reports which Belin wanted in about 7-10 days. (p. 104) But Belin and Olsen also asked questions about the case that were clearly suggestive. Things like, “How many bullets struck the president?” And “From which direction did each bullet come?” Kent goes through these questions and gives us examples of what the replies were.

    For me the most revealing exchange was to a question that asked, if the sectioning of Kennedy’s brain was necessary to arrive at reliable information concerning the number of shots or angles that hit Kennedy? Anyone familiar with the process would have to reply in the affirmative. How else could one conclude how many bullets hit JFK’s head and what path they followed? Well, consider this answer:

    Although as a routine matter dissection of the brain in gunshot wounds of the head is desirable, it is not an essential element in this case. I do not believe that further examination of the brain would contribute significant additional information relating the angles from which the shots were fired. (p. 111)

    But yet Belin loaded up even more by adding questions about whether the skin tissue slides were necessary as were pictures of the chest. Of course, both were missing in the JFK case. But again, the good doctors tell us that, like the brain, they really were not necessary for additional information. Can one imagine a cross examination of that reply under oath in a courtroom? I certainly can.

    Making it worse was that one of the doctors, Richard Lindenberg, worked with Finck at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. He was also an odd choice in that most of his papers dealt with aviation accidents. Perhaps this was because he was in the medical corps for the Luftwaffe and came to the USA as part of Operation Paperclip. (p. 114) Needless to say, he later wrote a paper with Fisher. Werner Spitz was also on the panel, and he worked with Fisher for a number of years from the late fifties and during the sixties.(p. 123). Another dubious choice on the panel was Alfred G. Olivier, since he worked for the Warren Commission. As the author notes, all the doctors were from the DC/Baltimore area except for Spitz, who moved to Michigan after living in Baltimore for 13 years. (pp. 134-35)

    The Rockefeller Commission continued with the raised rear skull wound, 10 cm about the external occipital protuberance. But as Kent ably points out with photos, although one can make a (weak) case for a wound near that spot in the color photo, that case all but evaporates in the black and white shots. (pp. 120-21)

    Finally, the Rockefeller Commission misrepresented Dr. Cyril Wecht’s testimony. He was asked to testify and he did so for five hours in May of 1975. He was critical of the autopsy and the Magic Bullet. His testimony was reduced to three paragraphs in the report and one would never know how critical he was. Misrepresenting his testimony, it looked like Wecht supported the Rockefeller conclusions. This dispute reached the pages of the New York Times. Wecht asked to see his transcript. He was denied. (p. 135)

    V

    From the Rockefeller Commission, Kent quite naturally leads into the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). As the author notes, during the first phase of the HSCA, Deputy Chief Counsel Robert Tanenbaum only wanted two forensic pathologists: Cyril Wecht of Pittsburgh and Michael Baden of New York City. Attorney Tanenbaum had worked with the latter often since he was in the Manhattan DA’s office and was in charge of the Homicide division for about seven years.

    This approach was drastically altered under the second Chief Counsel, Robert Blakey. Blakey added seven doctors, and this now made for a nine person panel. Baden had just finished a book he co-wrote with Fisher and Charles Petty, who would be on the panel and was the new medical examiner in Dallas. In fact, Baden wanted Fisher on his panel, but he wisely declined the invitation. Petty had trained in Fisher’s facilities and said that Fisher was the best forensic pathologist he knew. (p. 153) Baden also chose Werner Spitz who had been on the Rockefeller Commission Panel and was a friend of Humes, and had been Fisher’s deputy in Baltimore.

    Kent, after describing briefly the other panelists—Davis, Coe, Weston, Loquvam and Rose—concludes that Wecht was the lone independent doctor. He had not published with any of the others and had no personal relationship with Fisher. Plus, he was familiar with other aspects of the JFK case.

    There was an overwhelming amount of material to learn and absorb, and again this could not be done in just the four days the panel met together. But yet, miraculously, at the end of the fourth day, “it became apparent that the members were in substantial agreement with respect to the interpretation of the evidence.” But further, for whatever reason, Wecht was in a sub group and therefore was not allowed to question two of the original autopsy doctors: Boswell and Finck. (pp. 156-57)

    Andy Purdy was the HSCA writer/researcher for the medical panel. He wrote that one of the panel’s functions was to override the idea that the original autopsy doctors’ views should be given greater weight.(p. 163) But Humes would not give in easily to the panel’s desire to raise the rear skull wound upward. In fact, this part of the HSCA discussion provoked Loquvam to say there should have been no recording made of it. The original radiologist, Ebersole, now admitted there were x-rays missing. (p. 165)

    The HSCA panel ended up supporting the Clark Panel on the elevated rear skull wound. Why? The author thinks this was for two reasons. First, in reverence to Fisher. The second was to escape any possibility of extensive damage to the cerebellum, which about seven witnesses saw at Parkland. (pp. 189-90) And Kent comments that the panel largely ignored the Parkland witnesses and their observations.

    In fact, Kent concludes that Baden misrepresented Dr. Robert Shaw’s reasons for doubting the Magic Bullet. Baden said it was because of John Connally’s testimony. But Shaw did not buy it because “he did not think the bullet was tumbling or had struck anything before hitting the governor.” (p. 191) He therefore doubted any bullet could have emerged like CE 399.

    Wecht ended up being the sole dissenter. He criticized the panel for seeming to accept the work of urologist Dr. John Lattimer and ignoring the pioneering work of pathologist Dr. John Nichols, who had testified at the Clay Shaw trial. When Wecht testified before the committee he raised some very cogent and consequential objections to the Single Bullet Theory. These were ignored by the medical panel. The committee then questioned Wecht in a hostile manner.

    The Single Bullet Theory was going to be honored again. But it would not live long as the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) did their own inquiry. Partly at the request of the final chairman of the HSCA, Louis Stokes. As Doug Horne related to this reviewer, Stokes told the ARRB that no one was satisfied with what the HSCA did with the medical evidence.

    In his chapter on the ARRB, Kent focuses on what their outside experts wrote after they were brought in to view the evidence. That is people like forensic radiologist John Fitzpatrick. He was an acquaintance of Executive Director David Marwell. But he specialized in broken bones in children, not bullet wounds. (p. 236). Forensic pathologist Robert Kirschner said the raised entrance in the skull was likely the proper head wound, but he could not match it to the x-rays. He asked to see CE 399 but was skeptical of it. He thought there should have been a large wound track and a gaping exit wound in JFK’s throat. Such was not the case. (p. 241)

    Kent concludes that a completely independent forensic pathology team should have been called in. One that was free of any establishment American influence. (p. 247) In fact he suggests a team from the United Kingdom’s Guy’s Hospital Medical School. He specifically names three men: Francis Camps, Donald Teure, and Keith Simpson. Together, they investigated many unlawful deaths in the London area. For instance, all three were involved in solving the Rillington Place murders. These men could and should have been brought in, for example, to the HSCA panel, but they were not. Whatever they would have concluded they would not have been accused—quite rightfully as was the case—of bias.

    This is an unusual book in its approach. To my knowledge, the medical evidence has never been studied in the new manner that Kent utilizes. It’s almost like a C. Wright Mills approach to the case. For just that he should be appreciated. But beyond that, he studied several medical archives to actually garner the connections between the men who were tasked with examining the forensic facts of Kennedy’s death. With a surfeit of evidence, he proves they were the wrong choices. Which is why their work has not stood the test of time.

  • Eloise Boies interviews Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio

    Eloise Boies interviews Oliver Stone and Jim DiEugenio

  • A Narrative is Debunked

    A Narrative is Debunked

    I was browsing the internet on the subject of Mexico City and the JFK assassination last year, when I stumbled upon an online article on The Conversation webpage. (Incidentally, this article has replicated on other online “news” sites faster than the spread of the Corona Virus, it seems).

    Above the heading JFK Conspiracy Theory is Debunked in Mexico City 57 Years After Kennedy Assassination, were two photos of the infamous Mystery Man: originally purported to be Lee Harvey Oswald visiting the Soviet Embassy. This spurred my curiosity to keep on reading to see if this Mystery Man photo was finally solved. To my chagrin, the article started off with an unfounded general statement that “most conspiracy theories surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination have been disproven”; citing two examples, one absurd and the other of lesser significance, or a case of misidentification if not coincidence. To illustrate my point, it should be noted that six out of seven mock trials on this case resulted in either a hung jury or acquittal for the accused. Meaning that, under scrutiny, the lone assassin scenario is seriously called into question, or that reasonable doubt in favor of Lee Harvey Oswald exists. And let’s not forget about the many scholarly works by serious researchers, particularly from the file releases since the creation of the ARRB in 1994, who have cast even further doubt on that scenario. Finally, it should be noted that most Americans believe in an assassination conspiracy.

    In spite of that unjustified statement, I forged on in the face of this initial tone set by author Gonzalo Soltero, Professor of Narrative Analysis, at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), and author of the book Conspiracy Narratives South of the Border: Bad Hombres Do the Twist. The online article, albeit brief, is based on Chapter 3 of his book titled, “Oswald Does the Twist”. The purpose of this paper is to critique his online article, particularly the main premise: that the late journalist Oscar Contreras Lartigue could not have met Lee Harvey Oswald in Mexico City, as Contreras claimed. If the reader will recall, some witnesses in and around the Cuban consulate said that the man the CIA said was Oswald, was not actually him. As we will see, the man these witnesses saw or met was short, about 5’ 6”, and blonde. Neither of which depicts Oswald. And one of these witnesses was Contreras. (See, for example, James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 293)

    While researching his book on conspiracy narratives in Mexico, the author discovered what he described as “a hole in the story of the very man who started a “tenacious conspiracy theory about Oswald’s Mexico trip”. He goes on further to describe it as a “main conspiracy about Oswald’s undocumented time in Mexico City (that) puts him in contact with dangerous Mexicans on the left side of the Cold War”. This conspiracy theory began well after the Warren Commission: “This story originated in March 1967 when the American Consul in the Mexican coastal city of Tampico, Benjamin Ruyle, was buying drinks for local journalists”. (I can think of bigger conspiracy theories, also mentioned in Soltero’s book, but more on that later). That man is Oscar Contreras Lartigue, who was a law student at the UNAM and budding journalist for El Sol de Tampico newspaper, who wrote for its gossip column, Crisol. Oscar Contreras told Ruyle he met Oswald in 1963 on campus when he belonged to a pro-Castro campus group and that Oswald sought help in getting a Cuban visa. Contreras said Oswald spent two days with these students and met up later with them at the Cuban Embassy. Contreras said he was involved in some nefarious political activities (including blowing up a statue of a former Mexican president) and was afraid to talk much more. He also mentioned that he told his editor too about his encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald. Three months later, Contreras was visited by a CIA official from Mexico City, but he still refused to go into details, except to say that Oswald never mentioned assassination, only a need to get to Cuba. In 1978, the HSCA’s Dan Hardway went to Mexico. According to Soltero, Hardway was unable to interview Contreras despite several attempts, but reported that his account should not be dismissed. (According to Hardway, the CIA prevented the HSCA from interviewing Oscar Contreras. See the article A Cruel and Shocking Misinterpretation by Dan Hardway, 2015).

    Later on, N.Y. Times reporter Phillip Shenon successfully interviewed Contreras for his 2013 book on the assassination and found him to be credible. Contreras was more forthcoming and told him about “far more extensive contacts between Oswald and Cuban agents in Mexico”. Oscar Contreras died in 2016 so Professor Soltero could not interview him, but he remembered a minor detail of Contreras’ account.

    That minor detail was Contreras telling his editor, while a law student, about his encounter with Oswald. Soltero questioned this reference to an editor in Contreras’ story, so he did some investigating. He then found out about Contreras’ job with El Sol de Tampico, and two of his gossip columns, one dated September 22nd and the other on October 6th, 1963. Oswald purportedly arrived in Mexico City by bus Friday morning, Sept. 27, 1963 and left very early on Wednesday, October 2nd. After examining those two gossip columns, Soltero concluded that Oscar Contreras Lartigue could not have been in Mexico City during the time Oswald was there, as he would have been in Tampico, some 300 miles away, covering and writing those stories. He therefore concludes that his account about meeting Oswald was a fabrication and that any conspiracy theory arising therefrom, associating Oswald with pro-Castro Mexicans or Cuban agents, is debunked. But if those gossip columns were dated one week before and after the weekend of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City, how can Soltero make such a conclusion? No specific details from those articles were articulated or given in his article or Chapter 3 of his book. So, I did some digging of my own.

    The gossip columns published in The Conversation article were not clear enough for me to use a translation app, so I needed to consult with a Spanish translator.   Fortunately for me, I met a gentleman who runs a translation service in Mexico, who also has an interest in this historical subject. And what he found was that Contreras does not admit to personally attending, or even imply his attendance, to any events mentioned in those gossip columns, but only describes what those events are: some of which occured in the past and some which will occur in the future. But no events take place on Friday September 27th or during the weekend, or Monday September 30th or Tuesday October 1st, when Oswald was supposedly in Mexico City (Oswald left early Wednesday morning).

    Specific events cited are:

    1. A wedding engagement in Monterrey, N.L between Leticia Lozano & Raul Segovia on the 26th of this month
    2. A reunion at the Club Blanco y Negro in Tampico next Tuesday (the 24th),
    3. A wedding scheduled to take place on October 5th between Lupita Aguilar Adame & Carlos Sanchez Schutz,
    4. A yacht excursion organized by Janet Abisad (on Sept. 16th),
    5. Lupita Rivera Casanova & friends organized a yacht trip (for the 18th).

    So, the absence of a social event in Tampico, during the time that Oswald supposedly visited Mexico City (Sep. 27th to Oct. 2nd, 1963), could not prevent Oscar Contreras from being in Mexico City. Furthermore, even if there was an event during that crucial period, why could not Contreras arrange for a proxy to cover a story? It appears that the basis for Mr. Soltero’s repudiation of Oscar Contreras’ account is unfounded. Not to mention that it’s convenient for Soltero to discredit him, since Contreras is not around to defend himself. However, as specifically pointed out above, the Sol de Tampico archives do not discredit Contreras’ account.

    Professor Soltero also refers to the account of Contreras as a “main conspiracy about Oswald’s undocumented time in Mexico City”. Is it really? If it is a “main conspiracy”, this writer can think of other more important conspiracy theories related to Mexico City, namely: that Oswald met with a Soviet diplomat named Valeriy Kostikov at the Soviet Embassy, who the CIA suspected of being attached to the KGB’s Department 13 in charge of Assassinations, Terrorism & Sabotage. The purported reason being to apply for a visa to get to the Soviet Union via Cuba (the insinuation being to seek asylum after the assassination after conferring with the enemy). Or what about the one saying that Oswald was offered a large sum of money by pro-Castro Cubans at the Cuban Consulate for the assassination? How is this one: that Lee Harvey Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City to attract attention to himself with his public behaviour, in order to incriminate him by his contact with Cubans and Soviets there, ostensibly to use that offensive association during the Cold War, to effect a possible retaliatory response by the U.S. against Cuba or the Soviets? (A related conspiracy to the latter is that someone or persons in U.S. intelligence was/were manipulating Oswald with their knowledge of the CIA’s surveillance of the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy).

    Professor Soltero does mention in his article, an argument between Oswald and the Cuban consul, Eusebio Azcue, when he visited the Cuban Embassy seeking a visa to the Soviet Union. However, the HSCA shed more light on that incident with Azcue. On page 250 of their Findings, they state that “Eusebio Azcue testified that the man who applied for an in-transit visa to the Soviet Union was not (emphasis added) the one who was identified as Lee Harvey Oswald, the (alleged) assassin of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963”. Both Azcue and Silvia Duran described the man in question as dark blond or blond hair and short. (The Lee Harvey Oswald Files, Flip De Mey, p. 292). Interestingly enough, Oscar Contreras even described a person who introduced himself as Oswald, as blond and short (Flip De Mey, p. 419, note 838)! Anthony Summers spoke to Oscar Contreras, who said he met a blond American calling himself Oswald in Mexico City in the fall of 1963 (Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 447, Skyhorse. Kindle Edition). “Contreras told Summers that he now doubts that the man really was Oswald. He, too, said the man he met was over thirty, light-haired and fairly short. Contreras, not very tall himself, remembers looking down on ‘Oswald The Rabbit’” (Fonzi, The Last Investigation, p. 448). [Note: The reference to “Rabbit” was from a Mexican cartoon about rabbits that included two characters named Harvey & Oswald, that Contreras and fellow students joked about when they met Oswald at a university cafeteria, which is why it stuck in his mind (See Anthony Summers, Not In Your Lifetime, p. 323, Kindle Edition)]

    With respect to that alleged meeting with Valeriy Kostikov, a CIA cable on October 9, 1963 sent by its Mexico City Station to CIA headquarters, described an October 1st phone call to the Soviet consulate which it wiretapped, about an American male who spoke broken Russian and who “said his name Lee Oswald”, and that he had been at the Soviet Embassy on September 28th when he spoke with a consul believed to be Valeriy Kostikov. One problem with that call is that the real Oswald was fluent in Russian. Furthermore, the cable’s description of the man entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy from surveillance photos (35, athletic build, 6 feet, receding hairline and balding top) did not match Lee Harvey Oswald’s description, since he was shorter and slimmer. “What one is confronted with in the October 9th cable is an apparently damning connection between Oswald and a KGB assassination expert, but a connection made by a man impersonating Oswald”. [Jim Douglass, JFK and The Unspeakable, p. 76].

    The Soviet Embassy and Cuban Consulate in Mexico City were thoroughly monitored by the CIA, which possessed tape recordings, photographs, and transcripts supposedly of Oswald, as he went in and out of those buildings, and from his telephone calls to them. The CIA station sent this information to the FBI in Dallas on the morning of November 23, 1963. Astonishingly, the FBI Agents in Dallas discovered that neither the voice on the recording nor the man in the photographs matched Lee Harvey Oswald, the man in custody. J. Edgar Hoover gave this news to LBJ that morning of the mismatch (a “second person”), and then later to head of the Secret Service about an impostor (“individual was not Lee Harvey Oswald”). The implications of an imposter are quite significant since it could mean a conspirator, not Oswald, was attempting to lay blame to the Cubans and/or Soviets to incite a retaliatory, military response; if not to consciously induce a cover-up of an assassination conspiracy with a lone assassin scenario, by planting a false trail to the KGB (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp. 38-41, by Peter Scott). We now know that this succeeded with LBJ, who intimidated Chief Justice Warren to participate in the Warren Commission, and the infamous Katzenbach memo urging that “The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial” (Flip De Mey, pp. 294).

    The CIA and FBI belatedly tried to explain away the photos and tapes, but other sources and rationalizations refute such back-pedalling (As an example, how does one confuse a tape-recording or listening to one, for a transcript? Several other reasons are enumerated in the book, The Lee Harvey Oswald Files, by Flip De Mey, pp. 289 – 291). Moreover, neither LBJ nor Hoover repudiated their initial, recorded communications about an impostor. In fact, Hoover seven weeks after the assassination, scribbled at the bottom of an FBI memo “O.K., but I hope you are not being taken in. I can’t forget the CIA withholding the French espionage activities in the USA nor the false story re Oswald’s trip to Mexico, only to mention two instances of their double-dealing.” (Douglass, p. 81).

    To reinforce the aforementioned cases of double Oswalds, there were other instances of possible Oswald impostors around Dallas, in particular, the encounter by Silvia Odio on September 25th if not the 26th, which is suspicious since Oswald cashed a check in New Orleans on the day that he supposedly was in Dallas and/or was on his way to Mexico City through Houston then Laredo. And in another case, much earlier in Russia, from a 1960 memo by J. Edgar Hoover to the State Department, warning “there is a possibility that an impostor is using Oswald’s birth certificate.” [Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 209, Basic Books,Kindle Edition]. But it doesn’t end there, as there was a December 2nd, 1963 report by SSA Floyd Boring that a credible witness encountered an Oswald look-a-like in Washington, D.C. on September 27th, 1963, when the Warren Commission was adamant that “Oswald” was in Mexico City on that date! (Honest Answers by Vince Palamara, pp. 201- 202, Kindle Edition)

    The other main conspiracy theory in Mexico City involves a young, Nicaraguan named Gilberto Alvarado Ugarte, who was revealed to be a “penetration agent of the right-wing Somoza government of Nicaragua” (Oswald, Mexico & Deep Politics, Peter Scott, p. 36, Kindle Edition) and a CIA informant (Our Man In Mexico: Winston Scott & the Hidden History of the CIA, Jefferson Morley, Location 4512, Kindle Edition). The basic story is that Alvarado says that on September 18, 1963, he witnessed a Cuban give Oswald a total of $6,500, presumably to hire him to kill the President. He claims to have heard Oswald say to the Cuban (a red-haired black man) “You’re not man enough – I can do it”. The problem with that story was that Oswald was not in Mexico on that date and Alvarado later failed a polygraph test. Yet in its early stages, it was promoted by the CIA Mexico City Station via Win Scott and David Phillips and Ambassador Thomas Mann.

    Alvarado’s claim was flashed to Washington for the attention of the FBI and the State Department—and the White House, where it became one of the first pieces of “evidence” to sow the idea of a Castro conspiracy in the new President’s mind. Twenty-four hours later, the CIA reported information “from a sensitive and reliable source” that tended to confirm Alvarado’s story.” (Anthony Summers, Not in Your Lifetime p. 388 Open Road Media. Kindle Edition).

    Yet, “In spite of the holes in Alvarado’s claim about Oswald, his allegation was brought to President Johnson’s attention on at least three occasions and for some time remained a live issue.” (Summers, ibid, p. 391).

    The historical significance of the latter conspiracy theory (together with the Kostikov story) clearly outweighs the one promoted by Professor Soltero involving Oscar Contreras. Because on the basis of the foregoing story, LBJ persuaded Chief Justice Earl Warren that 39 million American lives were at stake if war broke out with the Soviets via Cuba, something that was not going to happen under the Johnson administration, along with any mention of any international Communist conspiracy. Thus, the lone assassin scenario was adopted with the creation of the Warren Commission on November 30th, 1963, which pre-empted any independent Congressional investigation.

    Professor Gonzalo Soltero began his online article with a blanket statement that ‘most conspiracy theories surrounding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination have been disproven’, using two outlandish theories as examples, while ignoring all the additional file releases by the ARRB and cumulative work of researchers since the 1990s that point to a conspiracy. This establishes the bias for the ensuing narrative, despite acknowledging the existence of conspiracies in his book Conspiracy Narratives: South of the Border which contains some statements at odds with the rather blanket denial: “conspiracies are planned and executed, and evil squadrons do exist” (p. 19), “the DFS were bad hombres”, “DFS agents were the local muscle for the CIA”, and “the agency (CIA) ran assassination and sabotage missions against other countries” (p. 93 –Kindle Edition).

    He claims that the account of Oscar Contreras, a pro-Castro law student and gossip column journalist, who says he met someone that identified himself as Lee Harvey Oswald asking for assistance to procure a travel visa to Cuba, was a fabrication. Why? Because he could not be in Mexico City while covering social events in Tampico, and therefore that a “main conspiracy theory” about Oswald being “in contact with dangerous Mexicans on the left side of the Cold War” is debunked. Yet the basis for his claim is actually not substantiated by the dates and details of newspaper columns during the time that Oswald visited Mexico City in late September/early October 1963. (And it seems superfluous to add, other witnesses also encountered the short, blonde Oswald.)

    The relevance of this is that it leaves open the possibility that Contreras met Lee Harvey Oswald, or more importantly, an impostor based on his description and the descriptions by others; not to mention other reported cases of someone impersonating Oswald in Mexico City and beyond. This also resuscitates the belief by Phillip Shenon and Dan Hardway that Oscar Contreras was a credible witness. However, unlike Shenon, Hardway thinks the evidence of Cuban assistance to Oswald is very weak at best, which is also contrary to Soltero’s statement that Hardway “reiterated in 2015 that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been part of a wider Cuban intelligence web”. In fact, Contreras was warned by Cuban Consular staff and an intelligence officer to avoid Oswald as they suspected he was trying to infiltrate pro Castro groups (Hardway, 2015). This parallels the time that Oswald was used to identify and contact pro-Castro students at Tulane University in New Orleans (Ibid). Soltero does not mention the issue of an Oswald impersonator in his online article, but does allude to it in his book. But he dismisses the issue of impersonators in Mexico City as “an espionage operation (counterintelligence impersonation – CIA assets pretending to be Oswald and Silvia Duran) getting caught in another espionage operation (telephone and photographic surveillance). And then the CIA had to cover its tracks to protect their own sources and operations, some of which were covert and perhaps illegal.” (Gonzalo, p.99, Kindle Edition).

    How can this be an innocent explanation without considering the possibility that Oswald was being used in an intelligence operation as an “intelligence dangle” or “an attempt to discredit the FPCC, or both?” (Hardway, 2015) Moreover, Hardway says this suggests that Oswald’s trip to Mexico was either designed in advance, or spun in the aftermath, to give the appearance of Cuban and Soviet collusion in the Kennedy Assassination” (Ibid). And, let’s not forget: the conditions ripe to set up a scapegoat, the patsy in Dallas. A patsy who was an opponent of Castro to Silvia Odio in Dallas, but pro-Castro in Mexico City.

    This is an inconsistency that should raise red flags, but not to Soltero, who concludes that Oswald was a “disorganized loner who couldn’t handle travel logistics.” Notwithstanding that Oswald successfully managed a trip to the Soviet Union, purportedly as a defector during the Cold War, and returned to the U.S. with hardly a hassle.   Professor Soltero concludes that the JFK Assassination is a cold case and that only exhausted leads remain in Mexico. I agree with the former but not the latter: especially since the CIA resisted the HSCA’s inquiry into that area of their investigation (Ibid). Not to mention the delay on the release of classified files relating to the JFK assassination, which continues to this very day.

    And lastly, critics of the Warren Commission or researchers involved in this case, are not concerned with narrativity, or telling a good story, but to ascertain the facts and follow them to reach definitive, evidentiary-based conclusions, if not just to establish reasonable doubt. This is not paranoia, but a quest for justice and the truth.

    [Note: This author thanks Robert Rafael Esquivel Diaz for his translation service and insight.]

  • Gus Russo: There is Nothing in those Damn Files!

    Gus Russo: There is Nothing in those Damn Files!

    Last year and this year, Gus Russo did columns on the John Kennedy assassination for Spy Talk. I would hope these two nothingburger pieces would get him eliminated for the 60th anniversary next year. But, realistically, they look like auditions to the MSM for that target date. The overall theme of his 2021 piece was that there was nothing in–not just the newly declassified documents President Biden had released–but really, there was nothing in any of the JFK material ever released. Not just by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Even though Russo admitted he only had time to scan the declassified pages Biden released in 2021, he assured us that there was nothing in them of any merit or value. Therefore, the media was making Much Ado about Nothing.

    Gus then leaned back in his chair and looked up at his bookshelf. He now added his punch line. Look you dummies, back in 1964, the Warren Commission issued 26 volumes of evidence and testimony, added to their 888 page report. In 1966 President Johnson released thousands of pages of material from the National Archives. In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations issued 12 volumes of testimony, interviews and evidence. In 1998 Gus says the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified 5 million pages. His (unsubtle) implication was that the whole expanse of those documents contains simply more of “Oswald did it”.

    The last statement about the ARRB is in error. The Board declassified 2 million pages, and they did not do it all at once. They did it over four years. It is this material that Russo has avoided when serving as reporter for the late Mike Sullivan at PBS in 1993, for the late Peter Jennings at ABC in 2003, and for Tom Brokaw at NBC in 2013. If anyone can show me where Russo interviewed anyone on the ARRB for any of those programs, please do. I (painfully) watched all three of them; I do not recall him doing such an interview, or even mentioning the Board. In fact, the first two programs were so loaded up with compromised sources that the roster guaranteed nothing from the Board could be mentioned, let alone discussed. Consider some of the following talking heads:

    • Carlos Bringuier
    • Ed Butler
    • Edward Epstein
    • Richard Helms
    • Priscilla Johnson
    • Ruth Paine
    • Gerald Posner
    • David Slawson
    • Larry Sturdivan
    • Sal Panzeca
    • Nicholas Katzenbach
    • Hugh Aynseworth
    • Jack Valenti
    • Robert Oswald
    • Michael Paine
    • Sam Halpern
    • Milton Brener
    • Rosemary James
    • John Lattimer
    • Robert Dallek

    I would argue that some of the more interesting disclosures of the Board concern some of these very persons e.g. Bringuier, Butler, Johnson, Halpern, to name just four. So how could Russo go that route? He would be impeaching his own program.

    Nothing in those ARRB files: really Gus? Let us turn back the clock to the time frame of 1994-98, plus some years beyond, since the Board placed a timed release stamp on some of their documents. Now let us list some of the things that the ARRB managed to both declassify and discover through both their inquiries and through the acquisition of files from both federal sources, and other personages, like J. Lee Rankin Jr. and Jim Garrison.

    • In Volume 7 p. 37, the HSCA wrote that witnesses at Bethesda morgue disagreed with those at Parkland Hospital since they did not see a baseball sized hole in the rear of JFK’s skull. False, The ARRB proved they did see it. (James DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, pp. 127-28)
    • Warren Commissioner Gerry Ford altered the draft of the Warren Report by moving Kennedy’s back wound into his neck, thereby making the Single Bullet Theory more palatable. (NY Times, 7/3/1997)
    • John Stringer, the official autopsy photographer, told the ARRB that he did not use the kind of film or photographic process used in the photos of Kennedy’s brain, so he could not say under oath he took them. (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, pp. 806-07)
    • White House photographer Robert Knudsen told the HSCA that he also took autopsy photos, and his pictures—including one with a cavity in the rear of the skull– had now disappeared. (Horne, pp.266-67)
    • Sandy Spencer was a photo technician who also saw autopsy photos of JFK that weekend which differed from the extant ones. His body was cleaned up but there was a neat hole in the back of his skull. Again, that hole is not present in the extant photos.(Horne, pp. 314-15)
    • Due to work by Doug Horne of the ARRB, one can now make the case—through three lines of evidence– that the brain photos at NARA can’t be Kennedy’s. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 160-65; Oliver Stone’s film JFK: Destiny Betrayed)
    • FBI agents at the autopsy both said the wound to JFK was in his back, not his neck, and it did not perforate the body. They swore that Commission lawyer Arlen Specter lied about their testimony.(Horne, pp. 699-705)
    • ARRB declassified documents of 1997 prove that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his death. (Records of the May 1963 Sec Def Conference; DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 78)
    • The ARRB declassified the CIA’s IG Report in which they themselves say they never had any presidential approval for the plots to kill Castro. (DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, p. 75)
    • In 1962, Kennedy turned down a Joint Chiefs plan to create a false flag operation, called Northwoods, in order to invade Cuba. (DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, pp. 180-81)
    • HSCA researcher Betsy Wolf discovered that the CIA had rigged entry and distribution of Lee Oswald’s file in 1959; when CIA officer Peter Bagley saw this altered routing system, he said Oswald was a witting defector. (See “Creating the Oswald Legend Pt.4” by Vasilios Vazakas)
    • The FBI had several sources who informed them that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. And they were given his name as part of their JFK inquiry back in 1963. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 192-93)
    • Under oath for the HSCA in 1978, Sheriff John Manchester identified Clay Shaw as the driver of a car in the Clinton/Jackson area in late summer of 1963. His passengers were Oswald and David Ferrie. (Davy, pp. 105-6)
    • Hugh Aynseworth offered a bribe to Manchester to leave the state so he could not testify for Jim Garrison. Manchester replied with this comment: “I advise you to leave the area. Otherwise Ill cut you a new asshole.” (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, p. 235)
    • In September 1967. the CIA assembled a Garrison Group to obstruct the DA’s inquiry. They thought if they didn’t Shaw would be convicted. This activity went on before, during and after Shaw’s trial. (DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, 2nd edition pp. 270-71)
    • CIA lied to HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey about George Joannides, who had funded and supervised the Cuban exiles Oswald interacted with in the summer of 1963. With that hidden, Joannides served as a liaison to the HSCA.. (DiEugenio, JFK Revisited, pp. 233-35)
    • Priscilla Johnson, had tried to join the CIA in 1949 and was later classified as a witting collaborator. She then tied up Marina Oswald with a book contract for over a decade. That book was issued during the HSCA. (See Max Good’s film The Assassination and Mrs. Paine.)
    • If Oswald had spoken with KGB agent Valery Kostikov in Mexico City, why did it take seven days for that cable to get to CIA headquarters? This was so suspicious that David Phillips lied about it. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 290)
    • The FBI had a flash warning on the Oswald file since 1959. Why did they remove it on October 9, 1963 right after Oswald allegedly got back from Mexico City. That removal enabled Oswald to be on the motorcade route on 11/22/63. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 301)
    • In 1963, Earle Cabell was mayor of Dallas. He was the brother of Deputy Director of CIA Charles Cabell, fired by Kennedy over the Bay of Pigs. It turns out Earle was a CIA asset. (Click here)

    I could easily add another 20 items of either equal or similar importance. But the point about Russo’s implication is made. Because these disclosures, in and of themselves, alter the contours of the JFK case. And, as one can see, they do so on different planes: in forensic evidence, with Kennedy’s foreign policy, with Oswald’s associations, and his connections to the intelligence community. In that regard the information by Betsy Wolf and Pete Bagley is of the greatest interest. Unless, of course, you are part of the MSM.

    Gus Russo had three opportunities to disclose at least some of this material. As far as I can see, he never did. But someone will say, in 1993, during the making of the PBS program, the ARRB was not appointed yet. My reply is that there were still files being disclosed, at least in part, at the time. Some of them en toto. I know since I had two friends who were there looking through them.

    Bur Russo was not just implying nothing important existed, he was finding ways around their import.

    A good example of this avoidance is that, although the 1993 PBS program dealt with Mexico City, the authors of the legendary Lopez Report, Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, were absent. What did the show give us instead? For starters, how about Robert Blakey and Dick Helms. After mentioning that there was no picture available of Oswald entering either the Russian or Cuban consulate, Blakey assured us that Oswald was in Mexico City since he was photographed for and filled out a visa application.

    PBS and Mike Sullivan left out something about that application and the picture. And it’s important. The FBI did a door to door search for any photographic studio in the area Oswald was abiding at. There were none. When they searched for such studios around the Cuban and Soviet embassies the results were that no one had any evidence that Oswald had his picture taken there. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 638). And although Blakey said the signature was Oswald’s, David Josephs found the two copies. Not only do the documents not match, the signatures don’t either. (Click here) This might have been the reason that, as Josephs wrote, the Commission did not show receptionist Silvia Duran the application.

    The PBS show also relied on two Australian girls allegedly on the bus with Oswald headed down to Mexico City: Patricia Winston and Pamela Mumford. But as has been delineated by John Armstrong and Josephs, the two girls don’t appear to have been on the same bus line as Oswald. And further “they said the Russian passport he showed them was stamped; but Oswald had applied for a new one in 1963 and it was not stamped.” (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 282)

    Throughout the appearance of Cuban consulate receptionist Silvia Duran, there is no mention of her discrepancy in identifying Oswald or her arrest and alleged torture at the hands of the Mexican authorities. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 59; Armstrong pp. 673-74) But the following is key. She told Anthony Summers that she originally identified Oswald by reading his name in the papers and assuming he was the same person she met. But when Summers sent her a film of Oswald from New Orleans leafleting, she said she now doubted it was him. And in her notes she wrote down that the man she saw in Mexico was short, no more than 5’6”, and blonde. Oswald was neither. (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 350-51) She then repeated this identification to the HSCA, as did diplomat Eusebio Azcue. In 1967, student Oscar Contreras related a similar description about a man named Oswald to an American diplomat. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 293) You will not see any of this in the Sullivan/Russo PBS Frontline Special. So the whole assumption made in Frontline, that Oswald was really there is only possible by neutralizing such key facts.

    The PBS show also says that there actually might have been pictures of Oswald entering the Cuban consulate. In the declassified files, we now have the inventory report from the photography station, which reads negative for Oswald. We also have CIA reports from the Agency plants in the Cuban consulate. They were interviewed twice, and both times, they said Oswald was not there. (DiEugenio, ibid, p. 294)

    The PBS program relied heavily on three KGB agents under diplomatic cover at the Russian consulate. PBS did so without ever asking them some key questions. Like, why is there no picture of the guy you say Is Oswald either entering or leaving your building? There should be four of those shots. (DiEugenio, ibid, pp. 287-88) They also never posed the question of why did the man the CIA said was Oswald spoke terrible Russian on calls to that consulate. (DiEugenio, p. 288) When in fact, four witnesses who conversed with Oswald said he spoke Russian proficiently: Marina Oswald, George DeMohrenschildt, Ernst Titovets and Rosaleen Quinn.

    I could go on about this, but the reader can see my point: PBS and Sullivan constructed a slick edifice that seemed to explore the mysteries of Mexico City, but really did not.

    And yet, this was not the worst part of what Sullivan and Russo did. In retrospect the worst part was the game they played with the “Rusty Livingston prints”. I will not go into all this at length since it kind of nauseates me. But specifically, what PBS did with FBI fingerprint expert Sebastian Latona was inexcusable. PBS was determined to have the viewer think that what they produced for them was a new set of fingerprints which incriminated Oswald. For instance, in their 2003 rerun, the PBS narrator said, “The FBI says it never looked at the Dallas police photograph of the fingerprints…”

    Yet, in his Warren Commission testimony, Latona said the contrary. He stated that he did examine photos of the trigger guard area sent by the DPD. (WCH, Vol. IV, p. 21) And it was this print that PBS concentrated on as being some kind of revolutionary discovery. But not only was it not new, it is dubious that this was a separate set. For as Pat Speer has written, when one separates the blow ups from the originals it is likely that the number of Livingston photos was really two. And according to Speer, PBS was wrong not only about Latona, but these prints had been examined by both the FBI and HSCA. In each case they were categorized as lacking forensic value. I really do not want to go any further with this because of what it says about two men who have passed on, Sullivan and his print “analyst” Vincent Scalice. I will just advise the reader to click here and scroll down to “The Prints that Got Away” and please read it all the way through.

    In his most recent Spy Talk essay, Russo has come out in full-fledged support of Paul Gregory’s new book The Oswalds. But before getting to that, Russo takes a blast at the CAPA Conference in Dallas this last November. What is so odd about this is that he describes it as if he was there. For instance, he states that panels denounced all of the government’s evidence as fake news. He then writes, with pugilistic vehemence, that there was a reverence for New Orleans DA Jim Garrison.

    I would like to inform Mr. Russo that there was only one panel during this conference. It did not analyze any evidence. It discussed how the JFK case was treated in schools and colleges. Jim Garrison was not the focus of any panel. Former investigator Steve Jaffe discussed what he did as part of that inquiry for the DA, and he did that via Zoom. In other words, of the 18 speakers, only one talked about Garrison. Which leads one to ask: Was Russo even at the conference? According to the secretary of CAPA he did not register, and if he was there as a walk in, I did not see him. I consulted with two other attendees and they did not see him either. As for his other complaint, again, according to the secretary, Mr. Paul Gregory did not ask to address the conference about his book, The Oswalds.

    Russo has fulsome praise for Gregory’s book, The Oswalds. Why does Russo think this rather incomplete book is so worthy? Well, let us take a look at his Spy Talk discussion, in which he previews the book with the following:

    1. Oswald fired a shot at General Edwin Walker
    2. Oswald was going to do away with Vice President Nixon
    3. Oswald killed patrolman J. D. Tippit
    4. Oswald tried to kill Officer McDonald in the Texas Theater

    When a writer goes beyond what the Warren Commission accused Oswald of, that should be a huge warning sign. For not even the Commission bought Marina Oswald’s story about having to lock Oswald in the bathroom to stop him from killing Nixon. According to them, the bath locked from the inside, and Nixon was nowhere near Dallas or even announced to be there in the near future. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, 1st edition, p. 272; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, pp. 240-41).

    As Sylvia Meagher noted, this should have shed doubt on Marina’s other claim: about Oswald shooting at Walker. Because the bullet found at the Walker home was not the type of projectile fired from Oswald’s alleged rifle. It was different in caliber and hue. (DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 101) Further, the best witness, Kirk Coleman, said he saw two men leaving the scene, and neither was Oswald. And they drove separate cars; Oswald supposedly did not have a car, and had no driver’s license. Oswald was never considered a suspect in the Walker shooting while the DPD was inspecting the case. Only when the FBI took over and Robert Frazier now said the projectile fired was a 6.5 mm copper jacketed bullet, only now, seven months later, did Oswald become the chief suspect. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 49)

    As per officer Nick McDonald’s story about Oswald attempting to kill him, I could do no better than refer the reader to Hasan Yusuf’s article, which I believe to be the best exposure of Nick and that issue.

    As per the Tippit case, that was dubious since 1967, when writers like Mark Lane and Sylvia Meagher began to poke holes in it. In 2013, Joe McBride published a book length study, Into the Nightmare, that redefined the outlines of that case–I believe forever. Far from Oswald accosting TIppit, the Dallas Police were looking for Oswald. (Please refer especially to Chapters 11-13)

    As the reader can see, Russo’s attempts to turn Oswald into something like a cold blooded serial killer–thus establishing his guilt in the Kennedy case—betrays an almost rabid, convict at any cost mentality. And it does not matter to Gus, that he leads with his chin. It is this bombastic bias that allows him to embrace Gregory’s book with both arms, all the while patting Paul on the head.

    Gregory does not write about any battering of Marina Oswald by Lee that he himself witnessed. The author relies on reports from the White Russian community. As both James Norwood and Robert Charles Dunne have shown, these are dubious since many of these witnesses were reciting hearsay evidence.(Click here and also here for Dunne’s excellent work)

    One thing that Russo does not mention that is relevant to the case perhaps more than anything else is this: Oswald liked Kennedy. (HSCA Vol. 2, pp. 209-10, p. 217. P. 279) In fact, when and if David Lifton’s Oswald biography is posthumously published, we will learn that Oswald actually had a picture of JFK in his Dallas apartment. Everything else Russo writes in order to demean Oswald would be strongly challenged in court if Oswald would have had an attorney. This point would not have.

    For reasons explained above, Gus Russo lost his way back in 1993 over seeing something that Sebastian Latona did not. I leave it to the reader to decide who was correct on that score.

    Coda:

    To see just how bad Russo has become, we need to make a reference to the book he co-wrote with Harry Moses for the Tom Brokaw special in 2013. In his interview with journalist Richard Reeves, Reeves said that it was Kennedy who got the US into Vietnam, not Johnson, and not Nixon. (Where Were You? American Remembers the JFK Assassination, E book version, p. 174)

    This is patent nonsense. On the day Kennedy was inaugurated there was not one combat troop in theater. On the day he was killed there still was not one combat troop in theater. That all changed under President Johnson. Within a year of Johnson’s election there were 170,000 combat troops in Vietnam. And the figure went up from there. Peaking under Nixon at 540,000 troops. And Nixon dropped more bomb tonnage in Indochina that Johnson. As many historians have uncovered, for example David Kaiser, Kennedy was getting out at the time of his death, and LBJ reversed that process. (See Kaiser’s book American Tragedy, Chapters 10-14)

    Gene Kelly alerted me to an article Gus wrote for the MobMusem.com blog in November of 2021. In this piece of nonsense, Russo goes whole hog for the Cuban/Russian angle manipulating both Lee Oswald in Mexico City and also the critical community e.g. Mark Lane.

    He then goes after Oliver Stone, saying that he initially consulted for Stone’s film JFK, but withdrew after he read the script. This clashes with what he told me in Dallas in 1992. In a conversation with witness Al Maddox, Russo said he was a consultant on the film. And Jane Rusconi told me that Russo also helped with the Book of the Film. (Click here)

    Let us leave Russo with the following sentence he wrote: Oswald was “a serial murderer wannabe and a violent sociopath….that’s what he was.” A serial murderer about whom Bob Tanenbaum, a proficient trial prosecutor, said in JFK Revisited that no jury in the country could convict. I would like to ask Gus: How many homicide cases have you tried to verdict? But I know the answer: Zero.

    UPDATE:

    One of the listeners to Black Op Radio surfaced a video copy of the 2013 NBC special hosted by Tom Brokaw called Where were You? The Day JFK Died.

    It was very difficult to locate as I could not find a copy in any library in America, or for sale on Amazon or Ebay. It is almost like NBC wanted it to disappear.

    The reason I wanted to see it again was simple. I had a distinct memory about one of the interview subjects, the late journalist Richard Reeves. Reeves wrote a book about John Kennedy called President Kennedy: Profile of Power. The book had a major publisher, Simon and Schuster, and it was published in 1993. I could not finish the book since, as Donald Gibson said to me, “It is a piece of junk.” And there is no doubt it was and is. With what Reeves left out, one could have written another, and much better, book.

    Now, why did Brokaw and his reporter Gus Russo want to interview Reeves, and not say, Arthur Schlesinger or Ted Sorenson or Pierre Salinger. These men all knew Kennedy and wrote much better books about the man. This is the likely reason. John Newman’s milestone book, JFK and Vietnam had been integrated into Oliver Stone’s film JFK. And this aspect, Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Indochina, had a huge impact on a national scale. The message being: If Kennedy had not been killed, there would have been no Vietnam War.

    Well, Reeves was there to say the opposite. As the reader can see in the main article above Reeves said that Kennedy got America into Vietnam. How he kept a straight face saying this is remarkable. But on the show he added something to this. Apparently wishing to counteract the import of the October 1963 NSAM 263, in which Kennedy ordered the withdrawal of a thousand troops, Reeves said something that is truly shocking. He said that this order only referred to support staff like cooks etc. This is why I wanted to see the program again. Because I needed to know if I recalled correctly. I did. The quote is utterly false on its face.

    For example when Kennedy first instructed Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to brief the press on the order, he told him to tell them it would include helicopter pilots also. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, p. 415) If that is not enough, here is a link to NSAM 263. Does military personnel mean cooks to anyone? Finally, one can read the entire McNamara-Taylor report and not find anything close to what Reeves said on the program.

    This was really one of the all-time lows ever for the MSM and the JFK case. Which is saying something. But what does one expect from a combination of Russo and Reeves and Brokaw. John Barbour tried to talk to Brokaw when he heard he was producing the program. He told Tom that he had hours of interviews with the late Jim Garrison to show him. Brokaw simply replied, “No Garrison John.”

    No Garrison. Instead cooks being withdrawn with NSAM 263 right Tom?

  • David Lifton Has Passed On 2

    David Lifton Has Passed On 2

    David Lifton passed away in Las Vegas at a hospice center on December 6, 2022. There was no official notice until a sister of his penned an obituary for the New York Times. He was 83.

    Lifton was born in New York and attended college at Cornell. At the time of JFK’s death, he was in a graduate program at UCLA. His major was engineering physics. He is known in the John Kennedy critical community for a long early essay on the JFK assassination, two books on the subject, and his belief that the Zapruder film had been altered.

    The long essay was printed in Ramparts magazine in June of 1966 and was called “The Case for Three Assassins”. Co-authored with David Welsh, it was a lengthy—22 pages of text—and profusely annotated essay on the medical and ballistics evidence in the assassination that indicated a hit team had taken Kennedy’s life in Dealey Plaza. (Ramparts article)

    The first book, published in 1968, was Document Addendum to the Warren Report. That volume is a compendium of important documents that were not printed by the Warren Commission. It contains the famous Liebeler Memorandum. This was named after Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler and it contains his Devil’s Advocate criticisms of an early draft of the Warren Report. This volume was limited in audience appeal since it was aimed at the critical community, but it was a valuable work.

    The above two contributions were made when Lifton was—more or less-considered as one of the first generation critics of the Kennedy case. In his book Best Evidence he owes his initial interest in the assassination to a trio of first generation critics, namely Mark Lane , Vince Salandria and Ray Marcus. (pp. 3-11).

    One can say the same about his approach during his confrontation with former CIA Director Allen Dulles. This meeting occurred in late 1965 on the UCLA campus. Dulles had been retired by President Kennedy from the Agency and was now taking a guest lecture spot at the college. LIfton termed it as being a Regents Scholar. As he explained, “He was paid a princely sum for giving a few speeches and meeting students, informally, in a coffee-klatch atmosphere.” (Best Evidence, p. 33) As Lifton noted, Dulles’ appointment to the Warren Commission by Lyndon Johnson was his first return to any kind of public service.

    Lifton first asked for a personal audience with the veteran spymaster. Dulles turned this request down but said he would be glad to answer his questions in front of a small audience. So Lifton joined a gathering of about 50 people in the Sierra Lounge of Hedrick Hall, a UCLA dormitory. LIfton brought a couple of volumes of the Warren Commission with him. This debate is described in Best Evidence on pages 34-37. But since John Kelin sent the author a copy of Lifton’s memorandum on the meeting, we will use that as a reference for this rather memorable confrontation.

    Lifton started off by challenging Dulles on the direction of the shots, with still frames he had enlarged from the Commission volumes of the Zapruder film. Dulles imply denied this evidence. When Lifton said there was smoke atop the Grassy Knoll, Dules said, “Now what are you saying, that someone was smoking up there?” Lifton then quoted Harold Feldman who listed many witnesses hearing shots from two directions. When Dulles asked about Feldman LIfton said he wrote for The Nation. Dulles had a huge belly laugh and said, “The Nation, The Nation.” Dulles also shrugged off the testimony of Governor John Connally, by saying, ”Its utterly ridiculous! A man can’t tell in a situation like that which bullet hit him.” Dulles then said there was not an iota of evidence of a frontal shot. Lifton then argued that eye and ear witness testimony coupled with the Zapruder film indicated there was. Dulles insisted he could not see a thing in the blow up presentation. After Dulles left, many students huddled around Lifton to look at the pictures. This went on for two hours. The graduate student felt he had won the debate.

    But about this time, 1965-67, Lifton began to change his approach to the JFK case. In Best Evidence, he denotes the cause of this as being a phrase in the FBI report on the autopsy; a report made by agents Jim Sibert and Frank ONeill:. The phrase went like this: “…it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed as well as surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull.” (Best Evidence, p. 172)

    In his book LIfton describes this phrase as being a defining moment in his research on the case. He says, “I was exhilarated, terrified. I wanted to vomit.” He then described himself as follows, “I arose on Sunday morning convinced I had discovered the darkest secret of the crime of the century.” (Best Evidence, p. 181) It was this feeling that now moved him out of the camp of Commission critics and into what he would later call a radical reconstruction of the Kennedy case. He came to call this “pre-autopsy surgery” He phrased it like this in Best Evidence,

    If someone had altered the head, the configuration of the wounds at Dallas was not the same as at Bethesda. The head was thrust backward by the impact of a bullet from the front, yet the autopsy performed at Bethesda showed an impact from behind. Someone had altered the head! (ibid, p. 172)

    He then concluded that, “Somewhere between Dallas and Bethesda the President’s body had been altered.” Lifton also used this to explain why there were no bullets in the body. (Best Evidence, p. 175) In his arguments with Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler—a professor at UCLA at the time—he would ask Lifton: if there were other assassins, where are the other bullets? This would portend to be a reply to that query.

    From here, Lifton went on to assemble his whole complex theorem of the crime, based upon an alteration of Kennedy’s body somewhere between Dallas and the Bethesda morgue. And he now used this to explain in his view, “…how many different officials and investigative agencies…could be foiled.” In his concept,

    The secret removal of bullets before the body reached the autopsy room would have severed the ballistic connection between the shooting and the gun of other assassins—before the investigation began. The entire investigative apparatus of the U. S. government could have been misled. (ibid)

    As noted above, Best Evidence was backed by a large publishing house and was guided by a front rank agent, Peter Shepherd. It became a Book of the Month Club selection, and a national best seller. But it also created a rather large controversy both in the MSM—Dan Rather obviously did not buy it—but people like Sylvia Meagher and Harold Weisberg also disapproved. This is not the place to outline this rather rigorous debate, but just to note it.

    The book was quite long, and it went through more than one reprint by different publishers. Lifton also issued a video production based on his research for that book–Best Evidence: The Research Video–and that also sold well. (“Click here for that presentation.

     

    In his research for Best Evidence, Lifton stumbled across another nebulous and controversial area. This was the provenance and possible alteration of the Zapruder film. On page 555 of the Carroll and Graf version of Best Evidence, Lifton begins a very long on-page footnote in which he describes how he became interested in the subject. That note goes on for three pages. In brief he states that when he saw a very good copy of the film, he noted that he did not see a posterior skull cavity as was described by the Dallas doctors in the Parkland ER. He also discovered evidence that the film had been in the custody of the CIA. Finally, he notes that the doctors in Dallas did not see an exit wound in the upper right side of JFK’s head above and to the right of his ear. Yet, this was supposed to be the exit for the rear shot as depicted in the film.

    At the time of his death, Lifton had been working for a very long time—decades actually– on a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. That book was entitled Final Charade. This was to be part of a trilogy of Best EvIdence, Final Charade and a volume on the Zapruder film. In the anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, Lifton submitted an essay called “Pig on a Leash” about his theories of Z film alteration.

    We should all hope that the manuscript of Final Charade will eventually be published. LIfton spent so many years on it, so much money, and so much effort, that it needs to be printed. Only then can it be judged as part of the LIfton canon.

     

  • David Lifton Has Passed On

    David Lifton Has Passed On

    David Lifton passed away in Las Vegas at a hospice center on December 6, 2022. There was no official notice until a sister of his penned an obituary for the New York Times. He was 83.

    Lifton was born in New York and attended college at Cornell. At the time of JFK’s death, he was in a graduate program at UCLA. His major was engineering physics. He is known in the John Kennedy critical community for a long early essay on the JFK assassination, two books on the subject, and his belief that the Zapruder film had been altered.

    The long essay was printed in Ramparts magazine in June of 1966 and was called “The Case for Three Assassins”. Co-authored with David Welsh, it was a lengthy—22 pages of text—and profusely annotated essay on the medical and ballistics evidence in the assassination that indicated a hit team had taken Kennedy’s life in Dealey Plaza.

    The first book, published in 1968, was Document Addendum to the Warren Report. That volume is a compendium of important documents that were not printed by the Warren Commission. It contains the famous Liebeler Memorandum. This was named after Warren Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler and it contains his Devil’s Advocate criticisms of an early draft of the Warren Report. This volume was limited in audience appeal since it was aimed at the critical community, but it was a valuable work.

    The above two contributions were made when Lifton was—more or less-considered as one of the first generation critics of the Kennedy case. In his book Best Evidence he owes his initial interest in the assassination to a trio of first generation critics, namely Mark Lane , Vince Salandria and Ray Marcus. (pp. 3-11).

    One can say the same about his approach during his confrontation with former CIA Director Allen Dulles. This meeting occurred in late 1965 on the UCLA campus. Dulles had been retired by President Kennedy from the Agency and was now taking a guest lecture spot at the college. Lifton termed it as being a Regents Scholar. As he explained, “He was paid a princely sum for giving a few speeches and meeting students, informally, in a coffee-klatch atmosphere.” (Best Evidence, p. 33) As Lifton noted, Dulles’ appointment to the Warren Commission by Lyndon Johnson was his first return to any kind of public service.

    Lifton first asked for a personal audience with the veteran spymaster. Dulles turned this request down but said he would be glad to answer his questions in front of a small audience. So Lifton joined a gathering of about 50 people in the Sierra Lounge of Hedrick Hall, a UCLA dormitory. Lifton brought a couple of volumes of the Warren Commission with him. This debate is described in Best Evidence on pages 34-37. But since John Kelin sent the author a copy of Lifton’s memorandum on the meeting, we will use that as a reference for this rather memorable confrontation.

    Lifton started off by challenging Dulles on the direction of the shots, with still frames he had enlarged from the Commission volumes of the Zapruder film. Dulles simply denied this evidence. When Lifton said there was smoke atop the Grassy Knoll, Dulles said, “Now what are you saying, that someone was smoking up there?” Lifton then quoted Harold Feldman who listed many witnesses hearing shots from two directions. When Dulles asked about Feldman Lifton said he wrote for The Nation. Dulles had a huge belly laugh and said, “The Nation, The Nation.” Dulles also shrugged off the testimony of Governor John Connally, by saying, ”Its utterly ridiculous! A man can’t tell in a situation like that which bullet hit him.” Dulles then said there was not an iota of evidence of a frontal shot. Lifton then argued that eye and ear witness testimony coupled with the Zapruder film indicated there was. Dulles insisted he could not see a thing in the blow up presentation. After Dulles left, many students huddled around Lifton to look at the pictures. This went on for two hours. The graduate student felt he had won the debate.

    But about this time, 1965-67, Lifton began to change his approach to the JFK case. In Best Evidence, he denotes the cause of this as being a phrase in the FBI report on the autopsy; a report made by agents Jim Sibert and Frank ONeill:. The phrase went like this: “…it was also apparent that a tracheotomy had been performed as well as surgery of the head area, namely in the top of the skull.” (Best Evidence, p. 172)

    In his book Lifton describes this phrase as being a defining moment in his research on the case. He says, “I was exhilarated, terrified. I wanted to vomit.” He then described himself as follows, “I arose on Sunday morning convinced I had discovered the darkest secret of the crime of the century.” (Best Evidence, p. 181) It was this feeling that now moved him out of the camp of Commission critics and into what he would later call a radical reconstruction of the Kennedy case. He came to call this “pre-autopsy surgery” He phrased it like this in Best Evidence:

    If someone had altered the head, the configuration of the wounds at Dallas was not the same as at Bethesda. The head was thrust backward by the impact of a bullet from the front, yet the autopsy performed at Bethesda showed an impact from behind. Someone had altered the head! (ibid, p. 172)

    He then concluded that, “Somewhere between Dallas and Bethesda the President’s body had been altered.” Lifton also used this to explain why there were no bullets in the body. (Best Evidence, p. 175) In his arguments with Commission lawyer Wesley Liebeler—a professor at UCLA at the time—he would ask Lifton: if there were other assassins, where are the other bullets? This would portend to be a reply to that query.

    From here, Lifton went on to assemble his whole complex theorem of the crime, based upon an alteration of Kennedy’s body somewhere between Dallas and the Bethesda morgue. And he now used this to explain in his view, “…how many different officials and investigative agencies…could be foiled.” In his concept,

    The secret removal of bullets before the body reached the autopsy room would have severed the ballistic connection between the shooting and the gun of other assassins—before the investigation began. The entire investigative apparatus of the U. S. government could have been misled. (ibid)

    As noted above, Best Evidence was backed by a large publishing house and was guided by a front rank agent, Peter Shepherd. It became a Book of the Month Club selection, and a national best seller. But it also created a rather large controversy both in the MSM—Dan Rather obviously did not buy it—but people like Sylvia Meagher and Harold Weisberg also disapproved. This is not the place to outline this rather rigorous debate, but just to note it.

    The book was quite long, and it went through more than one reprint by different publishers. Lifton also issued a video production based on his research for that book–Best Evidence: The Research Video–and that also sold well.

    In his research for Best Evidence, Lifton stumbled across another nebulous and controversial area. This was the provenance and possible alteration of the Zapruder film. On page 555 of the Carroll and Graf version of Best Evidence, Lifton begins a very long on-page footnote in which he describes how he became interested in the subject. That note goes on for three pages. In brief he states that when he saw a very good copy of the film, he noted that he did not see a posterior skull cavity as was described by the Dallas doctors in the Parkland ER. He also discovered evidence that the film had been in the custody of the CIA. Finally, he notes that the doctors in Dallas did not see an exit wound in the upper right side of JFK’s head above and to the right of his ear. Yet, this was supposed to be the exit for the rear shot as depicted in the film.

    At the time of his death, Lifton had been working for a very long time—decades actually– on a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald. That book was entitled Final Charade. This was to be part of a trilogy of Best Evidence, Final Charade and a volume on the Zapruder film. In the anthology The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, Lifton submitted an essay called “Pig on a Leash” about his theories of Z film alteration.

    We should all hope that the manuscript of Final Charade will eventually be published. Lifton spent so many years on it, so much money, and so much effort, that it needs to be printed. Only then can it be judged as part of the Lifton canon.

  • Tucker Carlson and JFK

    Tucker Carlson and JFK

  • Book Review: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee

    Book Review: The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee

    The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York: Diversion Books, 2022), 286 pp.

    The lives of Paul Gregory, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his late father Pete, a Russian émigré from Siberia, intersected with those of Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina in 1962-63. In the summer of 1962, Marina gave lessons in the Russian language to the son Paul. Pete, the father, wrote a letter of recommendation for Lee. And, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Pete translated the words of Marina for the Secret Service in a hideaway motel. As both the son and the father conversed extensively in Russian with the Oswalds, and the father was a distinguished linguist, Paul Gregory’s new book may shed light on one of the most important questions about Lee Harvey Oswald: How did a high school dropout become so proficient in the Russian language?

    Gregory’s book is written in the form of memoir. However, his experiences with the Oswalds in the summer of 1962 were not sufficient for a book-length manuscript. Consequently, the author rounded out his coverage of Oswald with a more expansive biography. For his sources, Gregory relied primarily on the Warren Report. This is revealing; it is clear that he has not probed deeply into the work of independent researchers of Oswald and the JFK assassination. The author refers to the latter body of literature as “forensics,” stating that “I cannot consider the hundreds of theories that reject Lee Harvey Oswald as the sole gunman.”[i]; “I am not going to engage in forensic analysis of an extra bullet and shots fired, directives to kill from Castro or Khrushchev, right-wing-fanatics, or deep-state cabals.”[ii] Gregory is convinced that his first-hand experience of Oswald validates the findings of the Warren Commission and is sufficient to demonstrate the lone gunman theory.

    And yet when it comes to the matter of Oswald’s Russian language skills, Gregory cites my article “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language,”[iii] wherein I explore the evidence indicating that Oswald was already fluent in Russian prior to his departure for the Soviet Union in 1959. My contention was that Oswald was an asset of the United States government sent to the Soviet Union due to his ability to understand Russian, which he carefully concealed during his nearly three-year sojourn in Minsk. Gregory acknowledges that Russian is a difficult language to learn, yet he appears to dismiss my findings as conspiratorial thinking: “Some conspiracy theorists contend that Oswald’s Russian fluency constitutes proof of a conspiracy. They claim that he could not have picked up the language so quickly.”[iv] But Gregory does not explore how, when, and where Oswald did pick up the language so quickly. He only indicates that Oswald’s Russian language skills were “self-taught.”[v] But where did the self-instruction occur? It certainly was not at Arlington Heights High School in Fort Worth in which Oswald dropped out after completing the ninth grade. It was not at the Monterey Institute of Languages, as Oswald never resided in Northern California. There is a suggestion he was there, but no real proof. It did not occur during his stint in the Marines, where Oswald was observed by multiple eyewitnesses as already fully capable of reading Russian-language materials in print.

    As for his spoken Russian, prior to his departure to the Soviet Union, Oswald was commended by Rosaleen Quinn, the aunt of one of Oswald’s Marine buddies, who experienced first-hand Oswald’s Russian language abilities. Quinn had been learning the language for over a year from Berlitz for a future position in the State Department. She later said to author Edward Epstein that Oswald spoke better Russian then she did. Gregory chooses to ignore the evidence that Oswald was already fluent in Russian when he left the Marines. The author simply assumes that Oswald achieved a mastery of Russian while he was in Minsk.[vi] But, during his nearly three-year stay, Oswald was not working diligently with his tutors or practicing on his own; instead, he was remembered by his friends in Minsk as constantly struggling with Russian and primarily speaking to them in English! In an interview that Gregory did with Patrick Bet David on November 22nd of this year, Gregory said that Oswald spoke Russian, but his grammar was very bad. This is not what Quinn said. She told Epstein that Oswald could string entire sentences together without much hesitation.

    When Oswald returned from the Soviet Union, he and Marina received correspondence from their acquaintances in Minsk. Ernst Titovets wrote a letter in Russian addressed to both Lee and Marina, but he included a separate portion to Lee written in English.[vii] The same was true with Aleksandr (Alejandro) Zieger in a joint letter written to Marina and Lee. The undated letter was composed sometime after the Oswalds left Minsk in 1962. Mr. Zieger writes most of the letter in Russian, offering general news of the Zieger family. But at the end, he includes a personal message to “Alek” (Oswald’s nickname in Minsk) that is written in English: “Alek—my best wishes and a ton of good luck.”[viii] These letters demonstrate that his friends in the Soviet Union were under the impression that Oswald could not read Russian. Yet the correspondence was received by the Oswalds at a time when Lee visited the office of Pete Gregory in order to obtain a letter of recommendation that verified his Russian language competency. Pete gave him a test after pulling out Russian volumes from his bookshelves and asking Oswald to translate. Surprised by Oswald’s proficiency, Pete then wrote the brief letter that vouched for Oswald, whose aptitude in Russian was so good that Pete believed him “capable of being an interpreter and perhaps a translator.”[ix]

    In what is revealing information contained in Gregory’s book, the linguist father Pete concluded that, based on his spoken Russian, Oswald was “from a Baltic republic or even Poland with Russian as a second language.”[x] He also speculated that “Oswald’s Russian fluency was explained by immersion in daily life rather than attendance at some sinister Russian language school for spies.”[xi] Pete’s son Paul attested that “having spent hours with Lee speaking Russian, I can confirm that his command of the everyday language was excellent. He could express anything he wanted to say.”[xii] The lapses in grammar and mistakes in gender may be partially explained by the father’s contention that Oswald originally learned Russian as a second language, “possibly from a Baltic republic or even Poland.” This description would explain how Oswald had already become proficient in Russian at the time he departed for the Soviet Union in 1959. It also must give us pause as to what was the true background of this young, bilingual man. The real Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans and raised exclusively in the United States. But Pete Gregory was referring to a young man who was likely born in Eastern Europe and was speaking both Russian and English as second languages.

    Working under tremendous pressure, Pete Gregory translated the words of Marina in response to questions from the Secret Service shortly after the assassination. His translations were subsequently checked by other experts and judged “faultless without deviation.”[xiii] Previously, he had been selected to accompany President Eisenhower to Moscow to serve as translator during the summit that was eventually cancelled due to the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident. In describing his father as “one of the nation’s best Russian interpreters,”[xiv] Paul may not have been engaging in hyperbole. As a world-class linguist, Pete Gregory is an authority worth listening to as an eyewitness to Oswald’s Russian language skills. As it turns out, Pete’s characterization of Oswald having learned Russian as a second language somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly “from a Baltic republic or even Poland,” merits some consideration.

    How may this lend a clue to our understanding of Oswald? The answer lies in the massive work Harvey and Lee by John Armstrong, along with his articles on the harveyandlee.com website, and his digital archive documenting his research, which is accessible online from Baylor University. Because of the evidence of two Oswald boys using the same name, growing up in different households, attending different schools, and training separately in the Marines, Pete Gregory’s revelation about Oswald’s Russian language abilities could be corroborative evidence of Armstrong’s “The Oswald Project”, which sought to place a Russian speaking American in the Soviet Union as an asset.

    The long-term project of planting a Russian-speaking spy in the Soviet Union must be examined in the context of the aftermath of World War II and the start of the Cold War. Immediately after the war, there was the forced relocation of enormous populations as the map was being redrawn in Eastern Europe. Thousands of “displaced persons” were interred in camps. The so-called Displaced Persons Commission made available to the CIA the names of potential assets. As a result, Eastern European refugees were brought to the United States under a program headed by Frank Wisner, the CIA’s director of clandestine operations. Wisner had become the State Department’s and the CIA’s expert on Eastern European war refugees during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Under Wisner’s program, the refugees were granted asylum in return for their cooperation in secret operations against the Soviets.

    Wisner gained approval from the National Security Council for the “systematic” use of the refugees as set forth in a top-secret intelligence directive, NSCID No. 14 (March 3, 1950). Both the FBI and the CIA were authorized to jointly exploit the knowledge, experience, and talents of over 200,000 Eastern European refugees who had resettled in the United States.[xv] Under Wisner, the CIA was running hundreds of covert projects for the purpose of what the NSCID directive called the “exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information.”[xvi] The surviving evidence suggests one of those projects merged the identities of a Russian-speaking immigrant boy, who likely came from Eastern Europe, with an American-born boy named Lee Harvey Oswald.[xvii] 

    Many of the Eastern European children grew up bilingual with Russian as a second language. As observed by journalist Anne Applebaum in her book Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, Eastern European children would, as a matter of course, be sent to live with another family at an early age in order to learn a second language. The idea behind this CIA project was to groom the Russian-speaking boy as a spy who, when he reached adulthood, would “defect” to the Soviet Union. Because he had assumed the name and identity of an American, the Soviets would not suspect that he spoke fluent Russian. The result was that nearly a decade later, as an undercover agent who secretly understood Russian, the Eastern European immigrant posing as a disgruntled United States Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald defected and spent nearly three years in the Soviet Union. While there, he married a Soviet woman and returned to the United States with his wife and child.

    Upon his return to the United States, Oswald wrote a lengthy account of his experience working at the Minsk Radio and TV Factory, where he drew upon “his fairly wide circle of friends and acquaintances to gather the figures and descriptions of the inner workings of the Soviet system.”[xviii] In wondering how Oswald “was able to put together such an insightful picture of the Soviet enterprise,”[xix] Gregory notes that Oswald was “a surprisingly keen observer of Soviet reality.”[xx] But there should be no surprise if it had been Oswald’s principal purpose as a false defector to observe and to report on the realities of Soviet life during his stay. Dennis Offstein was a co-worker of Oswald at the graphic arts company of Jaggars, Chiles, Stovall in Dallas shortly after Oswald’s return in 1962. In his testimony to the Warren Commission, Offstein recalled that Oswald gave him a detailed account of Soviet military maneuvers during his residency. Specifically, Offstein remembered Oswald’s description of:

    …the disbursement of the [Soviet] military units, saying that they didn’t intermingle their armored divisions and infantry divisions and various units the way we do in the United States, that they would have all of their aircraft in one geographical location and their tanks in another geographical location, and their infantry in another, and he mentioned that in Minsk he never saw a vapor trail, indicating the lack of aircraft in the area.[xxi]

    This perceptive account of the Soviet military activities that includes being on the lookout for “vapor trails” squares with other detailed observations that Oswald brought back and recorded in detail. In the testimony of Offstein alone, there was enough cause to warrant an investigation of Oswald’s ties to intelligence and the possibility that he was sent to the Soviet Union in 1959 in the capacity of what Offstein called “an agent of the United States.”[xxii] But with the presence of Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission, Oswald’s records in the CIA were effectively pre-screened from the committee. 

    It was Allen Dulles who insisted that the Warren Commission publish a detailed biography of Oswald. As a result, Chapter VII (“Lee Harvey Oswald: Background and Possible Motives”) is a fifty-page narrative replete with inaccurate details and chronological errors. That “biography” may be a mélange of the lives of two young men, and it has misled researchers for nearly sixty years, the latest of which is Paul Gregory. The major premise that undergirds Gregory’s book is that Oswald was a genuine defector. Working closely to the Warren Report, Gregory believes that Oswald was a committed Marxist, that his distribution of pro-Castro leaflets in New Orleans was genuine, that his opening of a branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in New Orleans was genuine (despite him being the only member), and his visits to the Russian and Cuban embassies in Mexico City were genuine (despite the absence of concrete evidence that Oswald himself paid those visits). In paraphrasing the Warren Report, Gregory identifies Oswald’s principal motivation for the assassination not out of animosity for John F. Kennedy, but his belief, shaped by his study of Marxism, that “he was destined for a place in history.”[xxiii]

    But if Oswald was not a genuine defector and was working for the United States government, the entire edifice of the Warren Report collapses like a house of cards. If Oswald really had delusions of grandeur, he had the perfect opportunity to proclaim his great deed to history as he was paraded through the halls of the Dallas police headquarters and was allowed to address the press. But instead, he protested his arrest and insisted on his innocence with the words, “I’m just a patsy!” In this crystalline moment, he may have realized that he was a mere pawn in the greater design of the Cold War.

    A fatal shortcoming of Gregory’s methodology is that he has not kept up with new evidentiary discoveries in the JFK assassination, particularly the findings of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The military historian John Newman has observed that “in the history of the KGB and the CIA, their wars are not actually shooting each other so much as trying to penetrate each other.”[xxiv] Oswald may be best understood in the context of a myriad number of CIA projects with the goal of “penetrating” the enemy, including the critical area of identifying moles from within. Newman recounts the time when one of the legendary CIA mole hunters and “probably our most celebrated and capable counterintelligence officer in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency,”[xxv] Tennent “Pete” Bagley, sat down with researcher Malcolm Blunt. Bagley and Blunt reviewed the collection of documents on Oswald from the CIA, the State Department, and Naval intelligence. As they assessed the evidence, the stunning revelation came to Bagley that Oswald “had to be witting” in his defection.[xxvi] In other words, this senior CIA officer recognized that the evidence demonstrated that “Lee Harvey Oswald was a witting false defector when he went to Moscow.”[xxvii] This revelation was made possible through the efforts of the tenacious researcher Elizabeth “Betsy” Wolf, who had prepared detailed notes during her time spent on the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in the late 1970s. The implications of her notes were so explosive that they were hidden until their declassification on a time-delayed release following the termination of the ARRB in 1998. Salvaging the notes was made possible by Oliver Stone’s film JFK, which led to the JFK Records Act and the establishment of the ARRB. In turn, the indefatigable researcher Malcolm Blunt carefully assembled Wolf’s notes and assessed their implications with Bagley.

    Betsy Wolf had been troubled by the fact that a “201 file” had not been prepared on Oswald by the CIA at the time of his defection in 1959. This point was not addressed by the Warren Commission which paid little, if any, real attention to Oswald’s connections to the intelligence network. According to CIA protocol, 201 files were routinely opened for persons “of active operational interest.”[xxviii] But, inexplicably, after Oswald’s so-called defection, a 201 file was not opened until over a year later on December 8, 1960.[xxix] Wolf’s breakthrough discovery was that early CIA reports on Oswald were pigeonholed in the CIA’s Office of Security (OS), rather than to the SR (Soviet Russia) division. The OS would not refer a 201 file, while SR would. As recounted by researcher Vasilios Vazakas, “in the case of Oswald, his files bypassed the General Filing System and went straight into the Office of Security and its SRS [Security Research Service] component.”[xxx] One possible explanation entertained by Vazakas was that “Oswald was a special project for [James Jesus] Angleton, one he wanted no one else to know about.”[xxxi] In a crucial interview described in Wolf’s handwritten notes and discovered by Blunt, on July, 26, 1978, Wolf spoke with Robert Gambino, at that time, the current chief of the OS. Gambino informed her that a request for the special handling of Oswald’s documents had occurred prior to Oswald’s defection. In other words, CIA documentation on Lee Harvey Oswald predated his defection. With an understanding of that chronology—and the testimony of both Bagley and Gambino– it is clear that the CIA was fully aware of the phony defection in advance of the time it occurred in late October, 1959.[xxxii]

    Even Oswald’s Marine roommate in Santa Ana, California, James Botelho, recognized that Oswald was not a genuine defector when he told attorney Mark Lane that “Oswald was not a Communist or a Marxist. If he was I would have taken violent action against him and so would many of the other Marines in the unit.”[xxxiii] After Oswald’s defection was made public, Botelho told how an investigation at the Santa Ana Marine base was conducted purely for show:

    It was the most casual of investigations. It was a cover-investigation so that it could be said there had been an investigation….Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. That was a major event. When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the “defection,” I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.[xxxiv]

    Through a nearly miraculous chain of events starting with Oliver Stone’s film and leading to the ARRB’s preservation of the notes of Betsy Wolf, we have today documentary evidence supporting Botelho’s claims that Oswald was a false defector.

    Instead of following through on the implications of Oswald’s language proficiency in Russian and exploring whether or not he was a genuine defector, Gregory pivots to spend a large portion of his book recounting the stormy relationship of Lee and Marina. Gregory returns to his default mode of the Warren Report to cite the Commission’s alleged motivation for the killing of the President: “The relations between Lee and Marina Oswald are of great importance in any attempt to understand Oswald’s possible motivation.”[xxxv] The fact that the Warren Commission had to look to the marital relationship of the suspected assassin for motivation for the murder of the President demonstrates how flimsy the case was against Oswald. Gregory spends countless pages describing the abuse Lee heaped upon Marina, mainly relying on secondhand information from members of the small Russian émigré community in Dallas. Gregory’s narrative resembles the plot outline of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, wherein Lee is the tyrannical overlord of Marina just as Petruchio seeks to keep Katharina on a short leash.

    In what he calls his own “amateur psychoanalysis,”[xxxvi] Gregory repeats on multiple occasions the tiresome refrain of Warren Commission apologists that Oswald was seeking to impress his wife by carving out his place in history. During his time spent with Oswald in the summer of 1962, Gregory “detected none of the trademarks of a future assassin.”[xxxvii] Yet in the back-reading of his own experience through the lens of the Warren Report, Gregory concludes that he had “witnessed firsthand this small man’s attempt to prove to the world and to his young wife that he was indeed exceptional.”[xxxviii] Through a tortured logic, Gregory posits the following in response to Marina’s belittling of her husband’s politics and his substandard performance in the bedroom: “What better way for Oswald to kill two birds with one stone than by the ‘manly’ act of killing the most powerful man on earth?”[xxxix] This psychoanalytical approach completely misses the point that the killing of President Kennedy was a politically driven act at the height of the Cold War, the effect of which was a compete reversal of America’s foreign policy in the 1960s. Many of which were detailed in Oliver Stone’s four-hour film JFK: Destiny Betrayed.

    In an interview given by Gregory shortly before the release of his book, the author indicated that he was motivated to write the memoir because his family was embarrassed at having an association with the alleged assassin of an American president. In Gregory’s words, it was “a black spot on the family.”[xl] The resulting book is not the impartial work of a scholar at the Hoover Institution. Rather, it is the biased opinion of an eyewitness with a personal agenda. Gregory considered Marina Oswald as a friend, as she helped him to prepare a paper on an obscure Russian play during the summer of 1962. But one looks in vain in the book for Marina’s corroboration of what Gregory has written about her and her first husband. The author sent Marina a draft of the manuscript, as well as a cordial letter. But she never replied. The last time Gregory saw Marina was on Thanksgiving Day in 1962. In a 1993 NBC interview, the feisty Marina went toe-to-toe with newscaster Tom Brokaw, as she took issue with the claims of Gerald Posner in his book Case Closed and said of her husband that “he definitely did not fire the shots.”[xli] In 1996, Marina told Oprah Winfrey that she came to the conclusion that her husband was innocent by studying the Warren Report’s supplementary volumes, which puts a damper on the entire hypothesis of Paul Gregory’s book: “And then comes the 26 volumes of the testimony, of the evidence, which does not support their conclusion.”[xlii] Drawing so heavily as he does on the Warren Report, Gregory has written a book that should take its place alongside Priscilla Johnson McMillan’s Marina and Lee, Robert Oswald’s Lee, and Jean Davison’s Oswald’s Game, all of which serve as posthumous daggers in the heart of Lee Harvey Oswald.

     

     

    Appendix

    The Media’s Response to The Oswalds and Reflections on the Cold War

    Following the release of Paul Gregory’s book, the media’s response has fixated on the lurid elements of alleged domestic abuse and the troubled marriage of the Oswalds. Writing in the Daily Mail on November 25, 2022, Daniel Bates offers the eye-popping title of “‘He feared he would be exposed as a loser.’ Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated JFK because he was ‘humiliated’ by wife Marina who mocked him as sexually inadequate and cheated with a businessman.”[1]

    Bates’s formal review then begins with the observation that “Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated John F. Kennedy because he feared being branded a ‘loser’ by his wife who ridiculed his pretensions of being a Marxist intellectual.”[2]

    Here the journalist is invoking guilt by association in an argument that goes as follows: If Oswald was belittled and shamed by his wife, it follows that he killed the President in retaliation. A Kirkus review succinctly summarized the book as “an informative view of a killer’s marriage and lethal motivations.”[3] Writing in the New York Post, Heather Robinson concludes her review by speculating that “it’s even possible that Oswald killed JFK because the young president was seen as the ultimate symbol of American masculinity and power — and because Marina liked him.”[4]  Some of this “writing” resembles postmodern literary criticism.

    In the alternative media, Gus Russo on Spy Talk introduces a litany of titillating incidents not even mentioned in Gregory’s book. At the same time, he completely ignores how Oswald attained a superior level of Russian language proficiency, as well as Peter Gregory’s analysis that Oswald spoke like an Eastern European who had learned Russian from daily exposure, as opposed to formal training in the classroom. As Paul’s father, Pete, testified to the Warren Commission, “I would say it would be rather unusual, rather unusual for a person who lived in the Soviet Union for 17 months that he would speak so well that a native Russian would not be sure whether he was born in that country or not.”[5] This linguist was attempting to reconcile what he had heard as the inflections of an Eastern European speaking Russian that conflicted with what he was told by Oswald about how he had learned to speak the language. Russo also makes no mention of Oswald’s “defection” in 1959 and Gregory’s blind acceptance of the Warren Commission’s profile of Oswald as a genuine Marxist.

    In their rush to paint Oswald as a domestic abuser of the most despicable variety, the reviewers fail to mention a very important evidentiary point: Paul Gregory relies extensively on secondhand reporting that he heard from members of the Dallas Russian émigré community. The reviewers give readers the impression that Gregory is offering startling, new revelations. But these individuals were called before the Warren Commission and were questioned about the alleged abuse. Robert Charles-Dunne has provided a valuable collation of their testimony in “Was Oswald a Serial Wife Batterer?” that would serve as an indispensable resource alongside Gregory’s book.

    In following the words of the witnesses, it is apparent that they were not really witnesses. That they too were invariably relying on second- and third- hand reporting of Oswald’s treatment of his wife. The testimony of nineteen witnesses reveals that no police report was ever filed and rarely was there an actual witness to verify Oswald’s displays of temper. Gregory himself never observed Oswald physically striking Marina during any of his forty-eight tutorial sessions. And yet, his allegations are the bedrock foundation for the motivation that Oswald killed President Kennedy.

    Any instance of spousal abuse is reprehensible, and Marina Oswald has acknowledged that she was an abused wife. Yet over time, she was able to separate the abuse from the question of whether or not her husband shot the President. By the 1990s, while continuing to acknowledge Oswald’s shabby treatment of her, she still concluded that Lee had been framed…primarily from her study of the supplementary volumes of the Warren Report!  Scholars who tackle this topic should have the same degree of objectivity as a victim like Marina.

    In investing so much time in writing about the connection between Oswald’s treatment of his wife and the murder of President Kennedy, Gregory has given short shrift to the climate of the Cold War that impacted the lives of everyone described in his book, including his own and especially his father’s. Pete Gregory entered the pressure cooker to translate for Marina in response to questions from the Secret Service over the stressful assassination weekend. His dedication movingly comes across in the memoir. This was an instance of a law-abiding citizen being sucked into the maelstrom of a national crisis. But what was not known until recently was that Pete Gregory was later a likely employee of the CIA. As uncovered by researcher Malcolm Blunt, a set of documents indicates that, in 1965, Pete applied for work in the CIA in the JPRS (Joint Publications Research Service).[6]  

    The recipient of his application was the Chief Officer of the Foreign Documents Division of the CIA. It is possible that Pete may have been applying for a position of translator of sensitive multi-lingual texts at the height of the Cold War. In addition to Pete’s completed application, another document verifies his CIA security clearance through a strict process of vetting that included the administration of a polygraph. By profession, Pete was an engineer working in the petroleum industry of Texas. More work lies ahead in understanding precisely what role Pete was playing in the CIA in a Cold War connection that is never mentioned in his son’s memoir.

    Indeed, discourse on the Cold War in general is conspicuously absent from Gregory’s book. Mark Kramer, who is Director of Cold War Studies at Harvard University, wrote a commendatory blurb that appears at the start of The Oswalds: “Gregory’s book offers a definitive personality sketch of Oswald and a great deal of evidence that should put an end, once and for all, to the notion that shadowy forces intent on murdering the president would have enlisted such an unreliable and tempestuous loser.” This astonishing perspective written by a scholar of the Cold War speaks volumes about what little time the so-called experts have invested in studying the JFK assassination. Historians, journalists, and bloggers should be following trails of reliable evidence and placing a historical event carefully in context. They should not be relying on hearsay, gossip, and psychoanalytical speculation. A seminal moment of the Cold War was the assassination of President Kennedy that shifted the nation’s foreign policy over the course of a weekend. The preponderance of evidence suggests that the scapegoat Lee Harvey Oswald was a creature of the Cold War and that President Kennedy’s death was the result of forces at work against his vision of peace in the period following the Cuban Missile Crisis. Both men were pawns on a chessboard that we can finally understand today if we only take the time to examine the evidence. Until that happens, our knowledge of the Cold War will remain incomplete.

    [i] Paul R. Gregory, The Oswalds: An Untold Account of Marina and Lee (New York: Diversion Books, 2022), 36.

    [ii] Gregory, 230.

    [iii] James Norwood, “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language,” http://harveyandlee.net/Russian.html.

    [iv] Gregory, 100.

    [v] Gregory, 245.

    [vi] Gregory, 88.

    [vii] Gregory, 124. Gregory describes Titovets’s letter as “jocular.” But if Oswald had achieved “mastery” of Russian while in Minsk, as Gregory suggests, then why would Titovets feel compelled to write a special portion of the letter addressed expressly to Oswald in English?

    [viii] Mr. Zieger’s letter was published in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. XVI, 156 (Exhibit 33).

    [ix] John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee (Quasar, Ltd., 2003), 399.

    [x] Gregory, 100.

    [xi] Gregory, 100.

    [xii] Gregory, 100.

    [xiii] Gregory, 202.

    [xiv] Gregory, 207.

    [xv] The first article of the directive reads as follows: “Exploitation of aliens within the U.S. for internal security purposes shall be the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Exploitation of aliens as sources of foreign intelligence information or for other foreign intelligence purposes shall be the responsibility of the Central Intelligence Agency. This allocation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and to the Central Intelligence Agency of separate areas of alien exploitation responsibility does not preclude joint exploitation, which must be encouraged whenever feasible.”
    NSCID No. 14: https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf

    [xvi] NSCID No. 14, article 1: https://cryptome.org/nscids-50-55.pdf

    [xvii] See my article “Lee Harvey Oswald: The Legend and the Truth,” which begins with discussion of the HSCA testimony of Jim Wilcott: http://harveyandlee.net/J_Norwood/Legend.html

    [xviii] Gregory, 59.

    [xix] Gregory, 59.

    [xx] Gregory, 49.

    [xxi] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 202.

    [xxii] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. 10, 200.

    [xxiii] Gregory, 36.

    [xxiv] James DiEugenio and Oliver Stone, JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (New York: Skyhorse Publishing 2022), 193.

    [xxv] DiEugenio and Stone, 193.

    [xxvi] DiEugenio and Stone, 194.

    [xxvii] DiEugenio and Stone, 194.

    [xxviii] John Newman, Oswald and the CIA: The Documented Truth About the Unknown Relationship Between the U.S. Government and the Alleged Killer of JFK (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), 47.

    [xxix] For researcher Vasilios Vazakas, Betsy Wolf was puzzled because “there were two reasons to open the 201 file on Oswald over a year prior to when it happened. Neither one triggered the opening. Further, when Wolf looked at the 201 file, it only contained copies and the two Naval dispatches were gone…. What could be a more compelling reason for the counter-intelligence office opening a file on Oswald than his threatening to give secrets of the U-2 to the Soviets?” Vasilios Vazakas, “Creating the Oswald Legend—Part 4.” kennedysandking.com. August 15, 2020.

    [xxx] Vazakas.

    [xxxi] Vazakas.

    [xxxii] Historian James DiEugenio summarizes the remarkable discovery of Betsy Wolfe as follows: “Only toward the end of her search did Betsy find out what had happened. Betsy’s notes include an interview with the former OS chief Robert Gambino. According to Malcolm, her handwritten notes are the only place anyone can find anything about this particular interview. (Wolf notes of 7/26/78) Gambino told her that CIA Mail Logistics was in charge of disseminating incoming documents. In other words, someone made this request about the weird routing of Oswald’s files from OS’s Security Research Service. (p. 324) And this was done prior to Oswald’s defection. Malcolm concludes that with what Betsy unearthed, there should now be no question that the CIA knew Oswald was going to defect before it happened.” Book review by James DiEugenio, “The Devil Is in the Details: By Malcolm Blunt with Alan Dale. kennedysandking.com. March 20, 2021: https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-reviews/the-devil-is-in-the-details-by-malcolm-blunt-with-alan-dale

    [xxxiii] James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable—Why He Died and Why It Matters (Ossining, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2008), 40.

    [xxxiv] Douglass, 40.

    [xxxv] Gregory, 230.

    [xxxvi] Gregory, 229.

    [xxxvii] Gregory, 16.

    [xxxviii] Gregory, 240.

    [xxxix] Gregory, 243.

    [xl] The LBJ Library, “With the Bark Off: A Conversation with Paul Gregory About Lee Harvey Oswald” (October 27, 2022): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ595whXpdE

    [xli] Marina Porter interview, August 1993 (NBC): https://www.pinterest.com/pin/28640147609703189/

    [xlii] A complete transcript of Marina’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, which includes an appearance by Oliver Stone, may be read in the following transcription made by R.J. DellaRosa: https://www.tumblr.com/novemberdays1963/37177099041/marina-oswald-porter-on-oprah-1996

    [1] Daniel Bates, The Daily Mail (November 25, 2022): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11458759/Lee-Harvey-Oswald-assassinated-President-JFK-humiliated-wife-Marina.html

    [2] Bates.

    [3] https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/paul-r-gregory/the-oswalds/

    [4] Heather Robinson, “Pal Reveals Lee Harvey Oswald’s Weird, Paranoid Life One Year Before Killing JFK” New York Post (November 29, 2022): https://nypost.com/2022/11/19/pal-reveals-lee-harvey-oswalds-weird-paranoid-life-pre-jfk-killing/

    [5] Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. II, 347.

    [6] According to the Harvard University Library, “The United States Joint Publications Research Service is a government agency which translates foreign language books, newspapers, journals, unclassified foreign documents and research reports.  Approximately 80% of the documents translated are serial publications.  JPRS is the largest single producer of English language translations in the world.  More than 80,000 reports have been issued since 1957, and currently JPRS produces over 300,000 pages of translations per year.” https://guides.library.harvard.edu/jprs

     ________

    James Norwood taught for twenty-six years in the humanities and the performing arts at the University of Minnesota. The curriculum that he offered included a semester course on the JFK assassination. He is the author of “Lee Harvey Oswald: The Legend and the Truth” and “Oswald’s Proficiency in the Russian Language” published at harveyandlee.com. His article “Edmund Gullion, JFK, and the Shaping of a Foreign Policy in Vietnam” was published at kennedysandking.com.