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.

  • Walker, Oswald, and the Dog That Didn’t Bark

    Walker, Oswald, and the Dog That Didn’t Bark

    Part of the official JFK assassination lore is that, on the night of April 10, 1963, accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald took a bus close to the Dallas Turtle Creek neighborhood of General Edwin A. Walker, then a nationally prominent right-wing political activist and armed himself with his Mannlicher-Carano rifle. Oswald then walked to behind the Walker residence, on a service road, a type of back-alley. Walker was seated motionless behind a desk inside his home and facing a large first-floor window. Resting his rifle on a latticed fence about 30 yards away, Oswald took a potshot at his target at 9 pm.

    And missed. Entirely. The shot went over and wide of Walker’s head and into a wall. Walker, on surveying the latticed fence afterwards that evening with a lieutenant from the Dallas Police Department (DPD), remarked that the unknown would-be assassin was a “lousy shot.”

    A police officer reviewing the layout and shooting that night replied, “He couldn’t have missed you.”

    Official Version

    The above official version then posits that Oswald, after shooting and missing Walker, then “buried” his rifle somewhere and rode a bus back home, where he nervously related to his wife Marina details of his expedition.

    Importantly, also entered into the lore was that Oswald would have struck Walker, save for a windowpane that deflected his shot.

    This legend reached something of a zenith in the federally-funded Smithsonian magazine article on 2013. That article not only casually assumed Oswald’s guilt in the assassination of President Kennedy, but then described the shot that missed Walker thusly:

    Drawing a tight bead on Walker’s head, he (Oswald) pulls the trigger. An explosion hurtles through the night, a thunder that echoes to the alley, to the creek, to the church and the surrounding houses. Walker flinches instinctively at the loud blast and the sound of a wicked crack over his scalp—right inside his hair.[1]

    Thus, in the recounted mythology, the shot that missed Walker actually passed through the hair on the general’s head.

    The Dallas Morning News chimed-in in 2013 with a similar story—it was the 50th anniversary year of the JFK murder—that also blithely assumes Oswald’s guilt in both the Kennedy and Walker shootings and adds, “The bullet (fired at Walker) first hit the screen and then the wood frame between the upper and lower windowpanes. Its original path deflected, it passed just above Walker’s scalp.”[2]

    In other words, only a windowpane deflected the Oswald bullet and saved Walker’s life.

    In most regards, the popular-media version of the Walker shooting is actually the opposite of what really happened that night and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, another mythology regarding the JFK murder.

    The Real Story

    There are many reasons not to convict Oswald of either the Kennedy or Walker shootings in 1963. But first, let’s dispose of the dramatic media treatment of that night at General Walker’s and his close brush with death.

    First, Walker, a military veteran who had commanded special forces in combat in World War II, far from feeling a bullet through his scalp, actually initially told investigating officers from the Dallas Police Department that he thought neighborhood kids had tossed a firecracker into to his den through an open window.

    If that! For in a supplementary report filed on April 10, it was written that Walker “stated that when he heard the noise, he thought it was some sort of fireworks.” [3] Fireworks? Hearing fireworks is a far cry from the sensation of a bullet passing through one’s scalp. In truth, only after discovering and examining a bullet hole in the wall behind him, did Walker conclude he actually had been shot at—and so he related to the DPD.

    Secondly, a review of Dallas Police Department documents from the night of April 10 reveals whoever shot at Walker that night would have missed even more widely, save for the deflection downwards of the windowpane.


    Here is a photo of the Walker windowpane and the damage caused by the passing bullet. Obviously, the damage is on the lower edge of the crossbar of the wind plane and likely would have deflected the bullet lower.

    And that is how the Dallas Police Department (DPD) saw it.

    “Officers observed a bullet of unknown caliber, steel jacket, had been shot through the window, piercing the frame of the window and going into the wall above comp’s (Walker’s) head,” according to DPD report filed on April 10 (italics added).

    The report continues, “The bullet struck the window frame near center locking device. From the point where the bullet hit the window frame to the point where it struck the wall is a downward trajectory.”

    It is hard to escape the conclusion that whoever shot at Walker would have missed by even more, except for the deflection. The shooter missed Walker from a distance of about 30 yards, likely armed with a rifle resting on a fence for support.

    In addition, careful readers will also note that that the DPD found a “steel jacket” slug at the scene of the Walker shooting. Assassination researchers know, of course, that Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano used copper-jacketed ammo, from the Western Cartridge Company.

    One thing about police officers is that they tend to know guns and ammo and one might assume that the DPD assigned some of its better detectives to the Walker shooting, given his national prominence in 1963.

    But after the Kennedy murder, the DPD sent the steel-jacketed bullet—stated in police reports to be a 30.06 calibre—to the FBI. The federal agents said the mangled Walker slug was actually a 6.5 projectile from the Western Cartridge Company and copper-jacketed. In other words, a Mannlicher-Carcano bullet.

    In a more-innocent era, one might assume the DPD made a mistake—after all, mistakes happen. And the Walker bullet, in fact, was badly distorted after striking the windowpane and passing through a wall in the Walker residence.

    But since the 1960s, the profoundly dismaying history of CE 399, the “Magic Bullet,” has been revealed: the famed nearly pristine dome-headed slug was almost certainly introduced into the evidentiary record within the FBI facilities in Washington. The curious “pointy head” slug found on the Parkland hospital hallway floor Nov. 22 has disappeared and almost certainly had nothing to do with the JFK murder anyway.[4]

    So, with the true story of the Magic Bullet revealed, one reasonable concern is that the FBI also fabricated evidence in the Walker shooting, replacing a steel-jacketed projectile from Dallas with a copper-jacketed Winchester Cartridge 6.5 slug.

    Unfortunately, the records do not reveal why the DPD detective had concluded the Walker slug was steel-jacketed. If the detective had placed the slug on his desk next to a magnet, perhaps he would have noticed the Walker bullet wiggle. (Worth noting, steel-jacketed bullets can be copper coated, the softer metal copper applied to decrease wear-and-tear on gun barrels). In any event, the Walker projectile was originally logged as a steel-jacketed 30.06 slug.

    There is much more to that evening in April 1963; for example, outside Walker’s home at least two vehicles sped from the scene in the wake of the gunfire, as seen by multiple witnesses.

    Two Cars Leave the Scene

    Though hardly dispositive, an additional curiosity is that two automobiles were seen swiftly leaving the scene of the Walker shooting on April 10, in the immediate aftermath of gunfire.

    Hearing the Walker gunshot, a youth named Kirk Coleman immediately thereafter peered over a fence and “saw a man getting into a 1949 or 1950 Ford, light green or light blue and take off,” according to DPD report filed on April 11.

    “This was in the parking lot of the Church next to General Walker’s home. Also, on further down the parking lot was another car, unknown make or model and a man was in it. He had the dome light on and Kirk could see him bend over the front seat as if he was putting something in the back floorboard,” continued the report.

    General Walker also told the Warren Commission he saw a car suddenly leave the area, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

    Of course, Oswald is thought not to have had driving skills and certainly did not own a car. To be sure, the two cars could have left the Walker shooting scene suddenly as the sound of gunfire is disconcerting. But one might expect ordinary citizens hearing gunfire to report as much to police, yet the men in the vehicles have simply disappeared into that night, and evidently forever. No one has ever come forward and said they were innocent bystanders who drove away quickly on the night of the Walker shooting.

    So, perhaps the departing vehicles held Oswald and compatriots.

    The Dog That Did Not Bark

    A Walker neighbor’s dog, known as an active barker, was conveniently ill and silenced that evening.

    “The neighbor’s dog to the east of the Walker property is a fanatical barker, but on this incidence did not make a sound,” according to an April 12 DPD report.

    Concerning the dog, a neighbor told the DPD that, “Dr. Ruth Jackson, who lives next door to the General, has a dog that barks at everybody and everything. The night that this offense occurred Dr. Jackson’s dog did not bark at suspects. Investigating officers received further information…that Dr. Jackson’s dog was very sick yesterday [the date of shooting] and is also sick today. Reason for this illness is unknown at this time.” (emphasis added)

    Again, the report of conveniently sick dog is hardly dispositive. But if the dog was intentionally poisoned, it suggests an operation involving more than a lone nut who did not own a car.[5]

    The Walker Backyard Photo and Other Evidence

    And of course, one of the curiosities of the JFKA is the backyard black-and-white photo of Walker’s house, purportedly found in Oswald’s possessions after the JFK murder, featuring the infamous two-tone 1957 Chevrolet with its license plate mysteriously cut out.

    If the photo was truly in Oswald’s possession, it is certainly suggestive.

    In addition, Oswald’s wife, Marina, recounted discussions with her husband regarding the Walker shooting, although her testimony in the wake of the JFK assassination was regarded as unreliable, even by Warren Commission staff. In fact, Marina’s statements and testimony on nearly every topic, made under great duress, vacillated wildly on a daily basis.

    Finally, there is also the “Walker letter,” an unsigned page written in pencil and in the Russian language. The undated letter gives instructions to Marina concerning paying bills, a post office box, disposition of Oswald’s personal belongings, and where Oswald could be located in the event of his arrest. The letter is said to have been written shortly before the Walker shooting, though its origins are disputed.

    None of the above evidence is enough to convict Oswald, even if it is “real” and not fabricated. But assuming the evidence in Oswald’s possession is not planted, there is a strong suggestion that Oswald participated in the Walker shooting.

    An Explanation of the Walker Shooting

    The Warren Commission presented the Walker shooting as another version of Oswald as the leftie-loser-loner nut acting out a demented fantasy. Even the House Select Committee on Assassinations did little with the topic.[6]

    But for the purpose of this article, the Warren Commission treatment of Walker shooting is the interesting part.

    In truth, whoever shot at Walker either—

    1. Was a lousy shot, to put it mildly
    2. Intended to miss
    3. Had faulty firearms
    4. Possibly had compatriots

    None of above surfaces in the Warren Commission treatment of the Walker shooting.

    Indeed, the version that the “windowpane deflection likely saved Walker” is allowed to survive unchallenged in the Warren Commission version of events and grew in mass media literature over the years, as seen in the above quotes from the Smithsonian and Dallas Morning News.

    A Better Explanation

    My own interpretation is that Oswald was possibly the gunman who fired in the direction of Walker in April 1963, but that he had accomplices (hence the cars racing from the scene), he did not use a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle (hence the steel-jacketed bullet), and missed intentionally.

    But why such an exercise?

    Based on the research of scholar John Newman and HSCA investigator Dan Hardway, Oswald was an asset of sorts for US intelligence agencies, not exactly rare in the early 1960s, when the CIA literally had thousands of such individuals in the US or nearby as part of expansive anti-Fidel Castro efforts.

    Oswald, contend Hardway and Newman, was being primed for something, possibly for the JFK assassination or another event that could be blamed on Castro or pro-Castro types.

    It is my speculation that the Walker escapade was part of an Oswald biography-building exercise and to practice and test Oswald’s nerve for an intentionally unsuccessful assassination attempt of a prominent figure—such as President Kennedy—an attempt that could then be blamed on Castro.

    If Oswald could be made the patsy in such an event, such as the JFKA, the fallout could justify a major operation against the Cuban leader.

    If the Walker shooting was a test of Oswald, then evidently he passed.

    [1] Shultz, Colin “Before JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald Tried to Kill an Army Major General,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 4, 2013.

    [2] Peppard, Alan, “Before gunning for JFK, Oswald targeted ex-Gen. Edwin A. Walker — and missed,” The Dallas Morning News, November 19, 2018.

    [3] “CE 2001 – Dallas Police Department file on the attempted killing of Gen. Edwin A. Walker,” Warren Commission, Volume XIV, (CD 81.1b).

    [4] Aguilar, Gary and Thompson, Josiah, “The Magic Bullet: Even More Magical Than We Knew?,” History Matters.

    [5] All police reports are found in Warren Commission Exhibit 2001.

    [6] “The Attempt on the Life of Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker,” Warren Report, p. 284.

  • Doug Horne Replies: On Oswald’s Earnings

    Doug Horne Replies: On Oswald’s Earnings

    Here is what I can tell you. Please read most carefully and do not misquote me or even unintentionally misrepresent any of this information. Be most precise, I implore you.

    On September 18, 1997, I reviewed the payment records from both the TSBD and the USMC to Oswald, within the earnings records of the Social Security Administration. Roy Truly was not on the SSA name list of persons paid by the TSBD during the fourth quarter of 1963 (Oct-Dec 63). (I have no idea who was paying Truly; but clearly, on the day of the assassination, he was still acting as LHO’s supervisor, per his encounter of LHO with cop Marion Baker on the TSBD second floor.)

    The Marine Corps did NOT pay Oswald during the third quarter of 1959 (July 1–Sept 11, 1959). The specialist at the SSA told me that while Lee Harvey Oswald was IN the Marine Corps during the third quarter of 1959 (until September 11th, his discharge date), they definitely did not PAY HIM during the third quarter. I reviewed the printed records of the earnings he received from the USMC for that year—which had been stored on microfilm—and it was ZERO for the third quarter, whereas they did pay him for the first and second quarters of 1959. The ARRB’s contact at SSA said there was “no possibility of a mistake” in their records. I printed all of the microfilm records I reviewed on paper and took them back to the ARRB as assassination records.

    Now, as you know, Blakey wrote the draft JFK Act legislation. In it, he exempted both the autopsy materials (“All Deed of Gift” materials donated to the Archives) and “tax information” from the disclosure requirements of the Act. The IRS actually wanted all tax information on Oswald to be subject to the Act and to be released; Congress, erring on the side of privacy (like Blakey), refused to allow this in the Act. That is most unfortunate, because at this juncture, these detailed records that I reviewed can only be released if Section 6103 of the IRS Code is amended to permit their release.

    The Oswald earnings records I reviewed are covered by RIFs 137-10005-10060 through10089, inclusive. They are redacted unless or until Section 6103 of the IRS code is amended by Congress to permit all “tax information” (which definition includes not only tax returns, but also earnings records) to be released.

    I published a memo about all this on September 23, 1998, and all tax information and earnings records issues I was aware of are discussed therein. Its title was: “Questions Raised by John Armstrong and Carol Hewitt About Lee Harvey Oswald’s Tax and Earnings Records.” In that memo, all specifics about the microfilm records of LHO’s earnings that I reviewed on September 18, 1997, are REDACTED. The redactions cannot be unredacted unless or until Section 6103 of the IRS Code is amended by Congress to allow release of all “tax information” on LHO, Jack Ruby, and others identified by ARRB RIFs. (We looked at “tax information” for others besides LHO and they are all identified by RIFs, and all the details are redacted).

    Now, listen to this: in a Feb 3, 1964, letter to J. Lee Rankin from HEW, the Warren Commission was told that there were NO EARNINGS REPORTED for Oswald for the third quarter of 1959. This was initially withheld from the public for the standard privacy reasons surrounding “tax information,” but in 1965, the confidentiality classification for this information was removed by the USG. (See enclosure 13 to my long memo) That information passed to the Warren Commission in Feb 1964 is in CD 353 (the cover letter) and 353a (the specifics about when he earned money and from whom).

    Thus, when reviewing Oswald’s earnings records from the Marine Corps in September of 1997, I was simply confirming (by viewing the dollars and cents details) what the Warren Commission had been told by HEW in the Feb 3, 1964, letter, and for which the confidentiality had been removed in 1965. This means that in my oral statements in the documentary, I am simply confirming information that the WC learned about in Feb 1964, and which became open information in 1965 when the USG lifted its confidentiality.

    To obtain the unredacted version of my long research memo, and to get the RIFs about Oswald’s earnings opened up, Section 6103 of the IRS Code would have to be amended. I do not today have the paper copies of the earnings records. Only the Archives has those, as identified above by RIF numbers.

    Now, some of Oswald’s “tax information” is already open information, including his 1959 tax return, which shows his total earnings for 1959 to be $996.31 for that year. This would seem to indicate that SOMEONE paid him during the third quarter (because his earnings for quarters 1 and 2 are not that much money), but whichever entity paid him did not pay him very much, at all. SPECULATION: Perhaps it was what would have been his normal USMC salary, IN CASH???

    The Review Board recommended in its Final Report “…that Congress enact legislation exempting Lee Harvey Oswald’s tax return information, Oswald’s employment information obtained by the Social Security Administration, and other tax or IRS related information in the files of the Warren Commission and HSCA from the protection afforded by the Section 6103 of the Internal Revenue Code, and that such legislation direct that these records be released to the public in the JFK Collection.”

    That is all I am willing, or able, to say about this.

    In summary, I simply confirmed in my interview for your documentary that what the Warren Commission was told in Feb 1964—that Oswald had no reported earnings in the third quarter of 1959—was confirmed by me through careful examination of the microfilmed paper earnings records at SSA. For someone to actually view and review those records identified by RIF number above, the IRS Code would have to be amended.

    That is all I can say.

    Doug Horne

  • Neurology and Jiggle Analysis

    Neurology and Jiggle Analysis

    How long does it take the muscles of the average person to contract in reflexive response to an unexpected loud noise?

    Reasonably precise information on this reaction, known as the “auditory startle reflex,” is presented below. It is vital to “jiggle analyses,” studies of blurred images on the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, based on the assumption that the blurs are caused by the sounds of shots making the photographer jerk.

    Under ideal conditions, jiggle analysis could suggest answers to some questions: When were audible shots fired? Did Zapruder react to all of them equally? If not, which shot elicited the greatest reaction and why? Is the time interval between the apparent impact on the victim and the blur on the film too long—or too short—to work with the official story?

    There are no answers in this report, but I present it in response to the number of researchers who have asked me to find at least some serviceable neurological information.

    I also present the findings of a very original researcher—Gene Case—whose inspired work led to an insight into the nervous system of the camera that is at least as interesting as the nervous system of Zapruder. These findings, published years ago in The Fourth Decade, deserve more attention.[1]

    But first, a few basics. The speed of Zapruder’s camera was 18.3 frames per second—or 54.6 milliseconds from one frame to another. The speed of sound is 1100 feet per second (fps). The muzzle velocity of a Mannlicher-Carcano is close to 2200 fps.  A Carcano bullet from the alleged sniper’s nest would strike Kennedy before the sound of the muzzle blast reached Zapruder. What happens next?

    Auditory Stimulus Response Times in Milliseconds (m/s)

    The following figures come from a study by Brown et al, published in the British journal, Brain.[2] The authors tested the latency period (time it takes to respond) of the auditory startle reflex in 12 healthy volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 80 years. While relaxing in a chair, the subjects were randomly treated about every 20 minutes to a tone burst of 124 decibels, the equivalent BANG! of a car backfire 20 feet away. The average latency period of the relevant muscle groups in milliseconds:

    Neck: 58 m/s (range 40–136 m/s)

    Paraspinal muscles: 60 m/s (range: 48–120 m/s)

    Forearm Flexors: 82 m/s (range: 60–200 m/s)

    Forearm Extensors: 73 m/s (range 62–173 m/s)

    Thumb: 99 m/s (range 75–179 m/s)

    Back of Hand: 99 m/s (range 72–176 m/s)

    The authors concluded:

    The most generalized startle response to the standard sound stimulus employed consisted of eye closure, grimacing, neck flexion, trunk flexion, slight abduction of the arms, flexion of the elbows, and pronation of the forearms.

    There was considerable variation in the degree to which this response was expressed, and in some subjects only eye closure and flexion of the neck were apparent.

    Accelerated Reaction Time

    Aniss et al found that the startle response “is more easily elicited in a state of muscular contraction.”[3] (In rare instances, the opposite occurs, i.e., muscle contraction can inhibit the startle response.) The muscles of Zapruder’s neck, trunk, arms, and hands would all have been in a state of contraction, so one might suppose he was well-primed to jump at the sound of shots—if they were loud enough compared with the ambient noise in Dealey Plaza.

    Jacqueline Kennedy’s Important Observation

    Habituation—the process of becoming so accustomed to a stimulus that it loses its effect—can take place rapidly.[4] The reflex in neck muscle is the last to habituate, according to a 1951 study still being cited.[5] The subjects of the Brown study were hit with tone bursts while relaxing in an otherwise quiet environment—and even they habituated to some extent, within two to six trials.

    Dealey Plaza was already filled with the noise of motorcycles before the shooting began, which could lead to habituation on the part of some witnesses at least. Jacqueline Kennedy makes this clear:

    You know, there is always noise in a motorcade and there are always motorcycles besides us, a lot of them backfiring. I guess there was a noise, but it didn’t seem like any different noise really because there is so much noise, motorcycles and things. But then suddenly Governor Connally was yelling…[6]

    She GUESSED there was a noise? At the time of this shot, the first, she was closer to the alleged source of the noise than Zapruder had been. On the other hand, she was also closer to the motorcycles.

    Two for the Price of One

    While ambient noise can habituate a witness to the sound of shots that are not much louder, there is something that could even prevent one from hearing a shot altogether: the sound of a shot fired immediately before. Muscles supporting the eardrum contract defensively, making one temporarily deaf.

    Thus, two shots can sound like one, creating only one startle reflex, if any, depending on the location of the sniper in relation to the photographer.  

    (Elsewhere, see description of how one shot can sound like two.)

    Impact of Bullet, Impact of Sound

    Luis Alvarez, the Nobel Laureate known mostly for “jet effect” also performed a jiggle analysis.[7] One big concern of his involved the amount of time between the impact of the bullet, and the impact of the sound.

    The expected neuromuscular reaction occurs about one-quarter to one-third of a second later, as shown by the large accelerations near 318. (I’ll adopt five frames as Mr. Zapruder’s experimentally determined reaction time.)[8]

    Alvarez did not quote any authoritative source for this claim about the latency of the “expected” neuromuscular reaction, and his explanation for its length is inappropriate:

    For those readers who are surprised that the neuromuscular response time is so long, let me recall a common ‘parlor trick’: A bets B that if A drops a vertically held dollar bill without any warning, B cannot stop its fall by pinching his fingers together, if his fingers are poised, ready to clamp together, at the bottom edge of the bill. The fact that the bill can almost never be stopped (unless A gives a precursor signal with his fingers) indicates that a nervous system ‘or hair trigger’ takes more than one-sixth of a second (3.1 frames) to respond to an optical stimulus.[9]

    Alvarez was apparently correct about the speed of this particular kind of reaction. Tests performed on baseball hero Babe Ruth showed he took 140 milliseconds to twitch at the sight of a ball on its way—as opposed to the average person’s best, 150 milliseconds.[10]

    But why compare (a) an involuntary response to an auditory stimulus with (b) a voluntary response to an optical stimulus?

    Zapruder’s “reaction time”—assuming he was normal and assuming the sound was loud enough compared with the ambient noise—would be much quicker than Alvarez has claimed, according to neurologists. There is another problem with Alvarez’ analysis, as shown by this statement:

    The human nervous system cannot transmit signals fast enough for the angular acceleration between frames 312 and 313 to have been caused by Mr. Zapruder’s muscles reacting to impulses from a brain that had been startled by the shot that killed the President.[11]

    Gene Case, mentioned earlier, noted that Zapruder’s nervous system, no matter how fast, could hardly be expected to react to a sound that had not yet arrived!

    But why the blur at Z–313? Since it was too soon to have been due to a startle reflex (unless frames are missing between 312 and 313), Alvarez found another explanation, inspired by the observation of another physicist, Enrico Fermi, in a very different context:

    Fermi has almost instantly measured the explosive yield of the first atomic bomb by observing how small pieces of paper which he ‘dribbled’ from his hand were suddenly moved away from ‘ground zero’ by the shock wave.[12]

    Alvarez concluded the blur was “caused directly by shock wave pressure on the camera body.” But, as Case noted, the speed of sound is again relevant since it takes time (1.1 Zapruder frames) for the shock wave to reach Zapruder.

    Case also doubted a shock wave from a bullet could move a three-pound camera at any distance. He bought a Carcano, drove to a quarry with a friend and fired bullets past materials of different weights hanging freely on a stick. His results were conclusive:

    The cardboard, the tinfoil and the strings were unimpressed. The shock wave from a Mannlicher Carcano bullet passing three feet away does not flutter cardboard, tinfoil or string, much less the body of a movie camera (three pounds) 75 feet away.

    “Dr. Luis Alvarez, Nobel laureate, winner of the National Medal of Science, the Medal of Merit and the Einstein Medal, was blowing it out his ass.”[13]

    Bullets Fired Behind Zapruder?

    Case then tried something that lead to a rather exciting discovery. When he fired bullets past a CAMERA—and from NEARBY—he created a blur:

    Alvarez could have been right about the cause—a shock wave—but wrong about the nature of the ‘interaction.’ The ‘interaction’ could be a vibration in the shutter mechanism or elsewhere in the workings of the camera. Firing a rifle past a VHS camcorder, I was able to record the image of the shock wave of a passing bullet. It is an extreme undulation of the picture which lasts three video frames—3/30ths of a second. Of course, an 8mm film movie camera is a very different mechanism. But vibration of the shutter in Zapruder’s camera, or of the film itself, is a plausible explanation for this triple imaging.[14]

    A shock wave [manifest on film] at 313 could only have come from behind Zapruder.[15]

    Another Startle or Shock Wave at Z–318?

    Complicating jiggle analysis is the fact that Zapruder said he heard only two shots: the head shot, and one immediately before it which appeared to cause Kennedy to “lean over.” Zapruder either did not hear, or consciously register, the first shot. As I have previously documented in the newsletter Probe,[16] several witnesses heard only one—or even no shot—before the fatal one, then they heard a flurry.

    Edited excerpt from my Probe article:

    Charles Brehm. Saw head wounded on the “second” shot, heard a third. (22H837)

    Mr. and Mrs. John Connally. Both heard last shot only after lying down in the   seat, with Mrs. Connally’s head next to his. (4H133,147)

    Chief Curry. Heard a shot after Motorcycle Officer Chaney rode up to tell him   what was happening. (4H161) The Nix film shows that Chaney was still behind   the limousine several frames after the headshot.

    Sheriff Decker. Heard first shot when a “spray of water” come Kennedy; heard one more. (9H458)

    James Foster. Saw head wounded on “second” shot; heard a third. (CD897)

    Clint Hill. Heard shot, saw head wounded, while briefly “mounted” on the limousine the first time. Apparently unknown to Hill, the head was already  wounded about 1.5 seconds earlier. (2H144)

    Jean Hill. Said she wrapped up Moorman’s first Polaroid photo and put it in her pocket before she heard any shots. (6H206) At the time, she is still in view, about four seconds after the second shot, the photo is still in her hand.

    Emmett Hudson. Saw head wounded on “second” shot; heard a third while on the ground. (7H560)  (Nix film shows him on the ground after head wounded.)

    Mary Moorman. Heard a shot for the first time as she took a Polaroid photo of Kennedy being hit in the head. She heard two or three more. (19H487)

    Royce Skelton. Heard a shot after seeing Kennedy react to headshot. (19H496)

    Mrs. Philip Willis. She said the head was wounded on the “second” shot; then heard a third. (CD 1245)

    Conclusion

    As Mrs. Kennedy put it, “I guess there was a noise.”

    [1] Case G. Scientific Slumming with Luis Alvarez. The Fourth Decade, 1996; 3(2):32–42.

    [2] Brown P, Rothwell JC, Thompson PD, Britton TC, Day BL, and Marsden CD. New observations on the normal auditory startle reflex in man. Brain 1991; 114:1891–1902.

    [3] Aniss AM, Sachdev PS, and Chee K. Effect of voluntary muscle contraction on the startle response to auditory response. Electromyography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 1998; 38:285–293.

    [4] Valls-Sole J, Valldeoriola, Tolosa E, Nobbe F. Habituation of the auditory startle reaction is reduced during preparation for execution of a motor task in normal human subjects. Brain Research 1997; 751:155–159.

    [5] Jones FP, Kennedy JL. An electromyographic technique for recording the startle pattern. Journal of Psychology, 1951; 32:63–68.

    [6] Kennedy, J. 5 WCH 180.

    [7] Alvarez L. A physicist examines the Kennedy assassination film. American Journal of Physics, 1976; 44(9):813–827.

    [8] Ibid.

    [9] Ibid.

    [10] Fuchs AH. Psychology and the Babe. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1998; 34(2):153–165.

    [11] Alvarez.

    [12] Ibid.

    [13] Case.

    [14] Ibid.

    [15] Ibid.

    [16] Cranor M.  Probe 1999 6(6):6–13.

  • The Unprecedented Debate over JFK Revisited

    The Unprecedented Debate over JFK Revisited

    It is almost three months since Oliver Stone’s documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass was released on the Showtime cable network. The international impact of the film is unprecedented for a documentary on the subject. After its July debut at the Cannes Film Festival, the film made the cover of Paris Match. In Australia, the documentary was featured in three national newspapers as a feature story. The program Today Extra! carried by Channel 9—one of the largest TV networks on that continent—picked up the writer of the documentary, namely me, and drove him to a studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood for an interview. It screened at the Rome Film Festival in both versions, 2 hours and 4 hours—playing within a mile of each other, which again made national news. This screenwriter was also interviewed by Izvestia, one of the largest media groups in Russia. After the Cannes debut, the distribution company Altitude collected the European reviews of the film and the reaction was strongly favorable. Needless to say, Oliver Stone did many media interviews while in Cannes and these got large circulation. One he later did with the RT network’s Michael McCaffrey was widely watched on YouTube, as were the three YouTube trailers made in advance of the film’s American debut. The film is on the long list for the BAFTA award for Best Documentary and will be submitted for the Emmy awards in the same category.

    The amazing thing about this debate and discussion is this: it’s still going on. And this is even before the four-hour version, Destiny Betrayed, has been made available in the USA. Stone enacted a strategy that understood the problem he faced. The MSM in this country has always been predisposed to favor the official story in the JFK case—and the film deals with this topic. So, the celebrated director did an end-run around the MSM. And, with the help of journalist Jeff Morley, it worked. Between Morley and Counterpunch, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan, The People’s Weekly, Russ Baker, Dick Russell and Who What Why, Ed Curtin at Lew Rockwell, Countercurrents, and The Unz Review, Branko Marcetic at Jacobin, and Stone’s personal appearances on shows like Useful Idiots and Breaking Points, the message of the film has reached a potential domestic audience of over twelve million. This is in addition to the foreign exhibition—which is ongoing.

    In fact, two continuing series were caused by the film. Aaron Good’s Destiny Betrayed interview series at Patreon cohosted by Abby Martin (click here) and Russ Baker’s journalistic series at WhoWhatWhy (click here). This successful end-run created enough buzz that it drew author Gerald Posner and leftwing polemicist Noam Chomsky back into the arena. Hardly anyone missed them, but the fact they returned shows that JFK Revisited has had an impact. The MSM attempt to halt that effect has proven unsuccessful. Yet, almost three months later, the attempt is still being made.

    The way the MSM has tried to parry this impact is notable. It’s obvious that writers like Tim Wiener at Rolling Stone do not want to deal with the intellectual architecture of the film. That architecture was formed by the discoveries made possible by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). A fact which Wiener did not even note in his slam at the film. (For my reply, click here)

    Tim never mentions the ARRB, which is quite a feat, because without the Board, JFK Revisited could not have been made. He never mentions points in the evidentiary record that the film delineates as never before in a broadcast format, for example the specious provenance of CE 399 which the FBI lied about; official autopsy photographer John Stringer and his admission that he did not take the pictures of Kennedy’s brain at the National Archives; the long concealed testimony of Dorothy Garner of the Texas School Book Depository where she corroborates Sandy Styles and Victoria Adams in that she never saw Oswald descending from the sixth floor after the assassination. Garner makes this point even more forceful, since she stayed on the fourth floor until supervisor Roy Truly and motorcycle policeman Marron Baker ascended the stairs. All of this is elucidated in the film at length and with precision. How could Tim miss it? Maybe because he had to, since it proves a conspiracy.

    And here lies a curious phenomenon. Tim clearly did not want to do his homework on the subject. Instead, he trotted out, of all people, Max Holland. By now, Holland has been discredited so often that one would think he would be off the table. Gary Aguilar took Holland apart on the very point that Tim borrowed from him to deploy against the film, namely CIA disinformation tales about foreign news stories attacking the Agency (e.g. their role in encouraging the coup plots against President Charles de Gaulle). In fact, in the Holland/Aguilar debate, it became clear Holland was proffering the very dubious testimony of, if you can believe it, Agency official Richard Helms. Helms was actually convicted of perjury on this very topic: that is lying about Agency covert actions. (If the reader thinks I am exaggerating, please click here to see that debate for yourself) Did Weiner not know about this? It was easy enough to locate the debate.

    But in addition to being routed by Aguilar, there was Holland’s pathetic attempt at a documentary on the JFK case. This was 2011’s The Lost Bullet. Here, Holland said that the bullet that struck James Tague on Commerce Street had previously struck a streetlight—and this happened before Abraham Zapruder started filming! In other words, it took place before Kennedy had proceeded down Elm Street into the kill zone, but it’s worse than that. As Pat Speer later revealed, in all probability, the producers of the program knew their nutty thesis about the streetlight was false, since they had had a laboratory do an experiment before the documentary was shown. As Speer noted, “Holland’s theory had thus been shot to pieces, both figuratively and literally, even before the program pushing his theory had aired.” (click here for details)

    In his desperate attempt to critique JFK Revisited, this is the kind of author Tim Wiener utilizes, without telling his readers about it, which brings us to James Kirchik.

    Air Mail is a recently introduced digital magazine. Its chief founder was Graydon Carter. Carter was the longtime editor of Vanity Fair. His 2019 co-founder was Allesandra Stanley, a longtime veteran of Time and The New York Times. They allowed Kirchik to write a review of Stone’s documentary which almost makes one wonder if he saw the film. Kirchik spends most of his time talking about Jim Garrison’s 1969 prosecution of Clay Shaw and Stone’s JFK, the 1991 feature film of Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins. Kirchik does this with all the mildewed and phonily sinister strophes of the likes of James Kirkwood in American Grotesque, a museum piece in the literature on the JFK case.

    When Kirchik does get to what is in the new documentary, who does he use to try and attack it? The Canadian version of Max Holland, namely Fred Litwin. JFK Revisited accurately notes that, with help from the ARRB, 12 witnesses are now revealed to have known that Shaw used the alias of Clay Bertrand. Some of these were turned up by Joan Mellen in her book, A Farewell to Justice. Barbara Bennett was a chanteuse at Pat O’Brien’s. She “had turned on the television and seen Shaw being arrested: ‘There’s Clay Bertrand!’ she shouted out.” Shaw had frequented that nightclub and Bennett was “his sometime party guest.” (p. 121) French Quarter businesswoman Rickey Planche just knew the man as Bertrand. Only when she saw him on TV did she learn his name was Shaw. (ibid) Her testimony would suggest that the knowledge of Shaw as Bertrand was not uncommon.

    It was not. As Garrison notes in his book, a bartender at Cosimo’s said that “Bertrand comes here a lot.” And the man knew that his real name was Clay Shaw. He added, “I think most people know that.” (Garrison, p. 85) Garrison’s investigators then found two more bartenders in the French Quarter who said the same. (ibid) An FBI memorandum of March 2, 1967, states that the Bureau had two sources in February who knew Shaw was Bertrand. Jessie Parker a hostess at the VIP room for Eastern Air Lines, testified that Shaw signed her guest book as Clay Bertrand. Alfred Moran corroborated this instance, but declassified documents show the CIA got to him and talked him out of his story. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, pp. 178–79) In March of 1967, reporter Larry Schiller told the FBI that he had five sources in New Orleans and San Francisco who indicated Shaw used other names including Bertrand. (Davy, p. 193) Ed Guthman, a former Justice Department official, also knew about Shaw’s alias. (ibid) In fact, the Justice Department had told the New York Times that such was the case. (Davy, p. 191) Reporter Richard Billings, who was interviewing Garrison in 1967, noted in his journal that evidence that Shaw was Bertrand was popping up everywhere. (Davy, p. 302) Dr. Jacob Hety knew a gay man named Greg Donnelly. Donnelly had known Shaw for many years and he had referred to him as Clay Bertrand. (Probe, Vol. 7, No. 2, p. 21) When essayist Ed Tatro was in New Orleans for the Shaw trial, he was told words to the effect that, everyone down here knows Shaw is Bertrand. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 387) As the film notes, the icing on the cake as far as this matter goes is that Dean Andrews, who Shaw employed as an attorney, admitted to Harold Weisberg that Shaw was Bertrand. (DiEugenio, p. 388) There are still others I could list, but this makes the point beyond any real question. Clear and simple: Shaw was Bertrand and he lied about it in public and on the witness stand.

    Why did he lie? For the simple matter that he did not want to reply to this question: Why did you call Andrews and ask him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald? By denying the evidence above, Kirchik avoids that point.

    He then recites the discredited line first issued by Dick Helms: Shaw was only a domestic contact source for the CIA, one of thousands of businessmen they interviewed for information from abroad. Then comes this howler: “This was the extent of his involvement with the agency.” JFK Revisited proves this is false and Helms was providing a cover story. Shaw was a highly paid and valued contract agent/source and we produced the document which proves this in the film. It was first unearthed by Mellen in her book Our Man In Haiti. (p. 54) Shaw had a third Agency clearance also. This one was a covert security approval for Project QKENCHANT. (Davy, p. 195). Again, we show this in the film. How could Kirchik have missed it? But the worst one of all is the fact that the ARRB discovered that the CIA had destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. (Click here for the memo)

    And then there is this issue.

    Shaw denied in public and on the stand that he had any association with the Agency. We show a film clip of him saying this in the documentary. Therefore this is more perjury that Kirchik does not wish to admit. From declassified files, we also understand today that Shaw lied about not knowing David Ferrie. (Davy, p. 195). We also know Shaw lied about not knowing Oswald. (See Davy, Chapter 11 and click here) As the late attorney Allard Lowenstein once remarked in relation to the RFK case: In his experience as a lawyer, people with nothing to hide don’t hide things.

    From here, Kirchik pulls a Tim Weiner. He says that the whole idea Garrison had about Shaw and the CIA in the JFK case was part of a Paese Sera story that was printed on March 4, 1967, in that Italian leftist newspaper.

    This is utterly stupid. Garrison was investigating Shaw months before that, in December of 1966. On February 24th, an FBI informant had called Garrison’s office and told them that Shaw was Bertrand. (Davy, p. 120) Shaw was then arrested before the story came out. But beyond that, the FBI itself had been investigating Shaw in December of 1963, since his name had come up in their inquiry into the JFK case due to several parties furnishing them information about him. (Davy, p. 192) Does Kirchik know any of this? What does any of it have to do with Paesa Sera? Zilch.

    The McCarthyite attempt by the CIA to link Kennedy assassination writers and investigators to Communist causes and thereby labeling them dupes of Russian disinformation, that propaganda tactic preceded Max Holland for decades. It first started with Joachim Joesten over his book Oswald: Assassin or Fall Guy back in 1964. Using Gestapo files, they labeled Joesten a member of the German Communist Party. (Click here) This about a man who worked for Newsweek in the forties. As was reported in Time, the Warren Commission—with help from Dick Helms—was out to spike Joesten’s book and one way of doing that was smearing him. (John Kelin, Praise from a Future Generation, pp. 168–71) It is very disappointing to see Kirchik use similar smear tactics today, especially when they are even more groundless now than they were then.

    The article concludes with more meritless attributions Kirchik borrows from Litwin. Jim Garrison never wrote a memo, or said anything in public, about Shaw’s homosexuality. There is not one memo I have ever seen to this effect by him. So what does Kirchik do? He says an August 1968 Confidential magazine article portraying the Kennedy murder as part of a gay plot was written by a Garrison investigator. Kirchik—who does not seem to give a damn about fact checking—has slipped on another banana peel. The author was not a Garrison investigator. He was a friend of Bill Boxley, later exposed as a CIA plant inside the DA’s office. (Davy, pp. 146–47)

    The article ends with another jeremiad against Stone’s 1991 film. In other words, Kirchik has not addressed one evidentiary point in JFK Revisited. His column is a perfect example of what film criticism should not be—bringing one’s own personal prejudices and obsessions to the film; rather than elucidating the film’s structure, themes, and style for the viewer. If one does not know anything or give one iota about the murder of President Kennedy, then one should just admit that and slide by, rather than ensnaring the reader inside the writer’s own pernicious ignorance.

  • The Kirknewton Incident

    The Kirknewton Incident

    Did a US Air Force Security Service Member Intercept a Communication

    Predicting the JFK Assassination?

     

    The time is October 1963. The place is an Air Force Base in Kirknewton (Scotland), located approximately 11 miles west of the capital city, Edinburgh. A US Air Force (USAF) Security Service member is carrying out his regular duties at the base. Although it is in the United Kingdom, the base is currently under the control of the USAF Security Service. His duties include monitoring and reporting intelligence communication traffic to his supervisors. They then relay this information on to the National Security Agency (NSA) Headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. The individual’s name is David Christensen.

    Christensen is listening to communications coming out of Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Suddenly, he eavesdrops on a link between Lisbon and Tangier (Morocco) that mentions a high-ranking figure in organized crime and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Recognizing the importance and gravitas of such an intercept, he immediately informs his supervisors, confident in the knowledge that they will pass the information up the chain of command.

    Christensen had done his duty. He was relieved. He may even have felt that because of the important content of the intercept, it would have been given Critical Intelligence Communications status, otherwise known as CRITIC. Such messages should be alerted to the President and other senior government officials within minutes, if possible.

    A few weeks later, when Christensen heard the news of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963, his heart sank. His life then followed a similarly low trajectory. As he said himself, in a letter he wrote in May 1978, to a fellow officer who served with him at the RAF Kirknewton base, “it really broke me up after Nov. 22, 63 especially when I had it all beforehand.” We will return to this letter shortly.

    Was David Christensen destined to become another accidental witness to history, having had prior knowledge of the JFK assassination, alerting the appropriate authorities who then did nothing and failed to protect the President?

    This is his story and how it was eventually brought to the attention of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978.

    David Christensen and RAF Kirknewton

    David Frederick Christensen was born on 26 January 1942 in the midwestern town of Dickinson, North Dakota. He grew up on a ranch near the town of Halliday, which was about 40 miles north east from the town of his birth. Christensen graduated from High School in Halliday in 1960 and married that same year. The young Christensen quickly joined the USAF and in 1961 was sent overseas to the RAF Kirknewton base in Scotland.

    The small town of Kirknewton has a population of just over 2,000. During World War II, a military airfield was built about a mile south of the town by the British Royal Air Force (RAF). Unsurprisingly, it was named RAF Kirknewton.

    The base began life as a grass airfield in late 1940. Its initial purpose was to provide a home for the 289 Squadron in November 1941. The 289 Squadron was an anti-aircraft operation unit who eventually relocated to another base around six months later. RAF Kirknewton was then used for a variety of purposes, including a short stint as a Refresher Flying Training School, which helped to prepare inactive pilots for postings to operational training units.

    In 1943, there was some hope that the RAF Kirknewton base would replace the RAF Findo Gask station, when that base became unserviceable. Findo Gask was situated 50 miles north of Kirknewton. That hope quickly evaporated however when RAF Kirknewton did not obtain the necessary clearance to build runway extensions, probably because of dangerous crosswinds in the area.

    From the 1950s onwards, RAF Kirknewton was no longer used for aviation and in early 1952, the base was handed over to the USAF Security Service––the intelligence branch of the USAF. RAF Kirknewton then began a new life as a strategic US intelligence listening station that was used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and NSA to eavesdrop on military and commercial naval traffic, with priority given to Soviet radar. The Cold War was really heating up at this point. Personnel at the base included radio operators, linguists, and analysts––many with Top Secret and higher security clearance.

    The planning for this phase in the life of RAF Kirknewton actually began in August 1951 at the Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas when the 37th Radio Squadron Mobile (RSM) was activated. This unit was then selected to move to the UK and into the RAF Kirknewton base.

    Ironically, President Kennedy’s last official act as President was at the Brooks Air Force Base on 21 November 1963, when he opened and dedicated the new Aerospace Health Medical Centre there.

    Around May/June 1952, the first personnel arrived in Scotland (via a three month stay in Bremerhaven, Germany for background investigations and security clearances). These first arrivals referred to Scotland as the “land of the heather, the moors, Scotch whiskey and the kilt.”

    The 37th RSM began formal operations at Kirknewton in August 1952 and by the following month the base had grown in size, with around 17 officers and 155 airmen in post. During its first year, RAF Kirknewton was used to evaluate antenna configurations, with the aim of determining the most effective configuration for intercepting Soviet communications and radar signals.

    The formal transfer of RAF Kirknewton from the British air ministry to the USAF had already taken place by 27 March 1953. Two years later, the 37th RSM was re-designated as the 6952nd RSM, but there was no change to the original mission.

    At the peak of its activity, RAF Kirknewton housed 17 officers and 463 airmen. Over 2,000 personnel served during the lifespan of the base. Towards the end of its life as a listening station, the base was even responsible for maintaining security over part of the hotline established in 1963 between Washington and Moscow, as the cable route passed through the area. The base was handed back to Britain in 1967.

    In James Bamford’s book, The Puzzle Palace (Penguin Books, 1983, page 270), we get an insight into the type of work Christensen would have been performing at Kirknewton. An unnamed former employee explained his routine at the base:

    Intercepted telegrams came through on telex machines. I was provided with a list of about 100 words to look out for. All diplomatic traffic from European embassies was in code and was passed at once to a senior officer. A lot of telegrams––birthday congratulations for instance––were put into the burn bag. I had to keep a special watch for commercial traffic, details of commodities, what big companies were selling, like iron and steel and gas. Changes were frequent. One week I was asked to scan all traffic between Berlin and London and another week between Rome and Belgrade. Some weeks the list of words to watch for contained dozens of names of big companies. Some weeks I just had to look for commodities. All traffic was sent back to Fort Meade in Washington.

    As “all traffic was sent back to Fort Meade in Washington” you would have thought that an intercept referring to the assassination of the President would have been given priority treatment and not “put into the burn bag” with birthday messages!

    Christensen’s Letter and Subsequent Investigation

    Earlier, I referred to a letter David Christensen wrote to an ex-colleague in May 1978. The recipient of his letter was Sergeant Nicholas Stevenson, who served two tours of duty at RAF Kirknewton. The second tour was between June 1962 and June 1965, so he was based there at the same time Christensen said he picked up the Lisbon/Tangier intercept. We can see here a typed copy of the letter provided to the HSCA by the NSA in 1978 (click here to see the original handwritten version of Christensen’s letter).

    Unlike his alert to senior officers in October 1963, Christensen’s letter to Stevenson did not fly under the radar. It was quickly brought to the attention of US government agencies and eventually the HSCA, led by Chief Counsel G. Robert Blakey.

    When Christensen wrote the letter, he was in a Veterans Hospital in Sheridan, Wyoming. Stevenson was based at Corry Field, Florida.

    An earlier public release of the letter contained many redactions. This is what two of the pages looked like––clearly there were concerns about the content:

    Once Stevenson had read the letter, he alerted the USAF Security Service, who in turn notified the Office of Special Investigations (OSI). An OSI agent, based at the Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado, was assigned to contact Christensen, and interview him about the letter. This interview took place on or around 1 June 1978.

    A letter dated 2 June 1978 from Paul Fisher (Chief, USAF Security Service) provides an insight into what was discussed between the OSI agent and Christensen. Fisher’s letter was addressed to James Lear, Director of the NSA (click here to see Fisher’s letter). He wrote that the purpose of the interview with Christensen was to determine the names of any other individuals he may have contacted. He went on to state that “Mr. Christensen has a long history of alcoholism, family problems and now wants to see a cleared psychiatrist as he attributes all of his problems from Oct 1963, per the OSI agent. In addition, he has indicated to the OSI that he now fears for his life.”  

    The government agencies at this point clearly seemed to be more concerned about who else Christensen may have talked to about the letter, rather than the actual claim made about the JFK assassination and organized crime. Christensen’s health and personal problems were also highlighted, a common tactic when trying to undermine someone’s credibility.

    This illustrates that if Christensen did intercept a message in October 1963 predicting the JFK assassination, and tried to raise the alarm or alert authorities, then it had a very profound and damaging effect on his life. Something similar happened to Eugene Dinkin, Ralph Leon Yates, and Abraham Bolden to name just a few (click here for more on Eugene Dinkin).

    On 7 September 1978, Daniel Silver (General Counsel, NSA) wrote to the FBI about the letter and provided them with a typed copy. Silver indicated that the FBI may wish to bring the matter to the attention of any Committee of the Congress. The HSCA had already been investigating the JFK assassination for two years by then (click here to see Silver’s letter).

    Interestingly, Silver also corroborated a central claim made in Christensen’s letter about what was going on at the RAF Kirknewton base in October 1963.

    Silver wrote that “the information contained in Mr. Christensen’s letter that the Air Force Security Service was intercepting international commercial communications at Kirknewton, Scotland in 1963 is correct, as is the assertion that the station monitored communications links between Lisbon and other parts of the world.” As we will discuss later, other facts raised by Christensen in his letter can also be corroborated.

    The HSCA were indeed made aware of Christensen’s claim and on 8 November 1978, Chief Counsel Blakey met with a representative of the NSA to discuss further. The memorandum written up from this meeting confirmed that Christensen had been committed to “a mental institution” because of the October 1963 intercept. Blakey posed several questions to the NSA including what their capability was to retrieve communications from Kirknewton from the time period in question, and whether Christensen really was working for the USAF at the time and doing the kind of work consistent with “intercepting commercial communications.”

    Blakey followed this up on 15 November 1978 by writing to Harold Brown who was then Secretary of Defense under President Jimmy Carter. Brown had also worked in the Defense Department under Robert McNamara during JFK’s time in the White House.

    On the same date, a memorandum of understanding was also drawn up and signed by both Blakey and John Kester, who was the Special Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Defense. The purpose of the memorandum was in relation to the Defense Department’s agreement to release Sergeant Stevenson to be interviewed by the HSCA. It included the restrictions placed on them in this regard, such as that it be limited in scope to the allegations made by Christensen, no classified information would be disclosed by the HSCA without the written consent of the Defense Department, and that Stevenson would be accompanied at the interview.

    What is also interesting about the memorandum of understanding was an error in the original typed copy. As we can see, it referred to “the allegations of David F Christensen of involvement by the Government of Cuba in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.” This was then scored out, initialed and corrected to read “of certain individuals.”

    Click here to see the full memorandum of understanding.>

    There is no record that Christensen made any allegation that the Government of Cuba was involved in the JFK assassination. I’m sure this mistake was just an honest clerical error!

    The Interview with Sergeant Stevenson

    The interview with Sergeant Nicholas Stevenson took place on 17 November 1978 in the Senate Intelligence Committee room. Two HSCA staff members conducted the session. They were Gary Cornwell and Kenneth Klein. Stevenson was accompanied by a legislative liaison officer from the USAF. Others in attendance included Eugene Yeates, Chief of Legislative Affairs at the NSA.

    I have been unable to find a verbatim account of what was discussed but a summary of the interview was subsequently written up by Klein that day (click here to see Klein’s report) and by Yeates in a memorandum dated 21 November 1978 (click here to see Yeates’ memorandum).

    At the meeting, Stevenson confirmed that he had known Christensen for a number of years and recognized other names in the letter. He added that he could not rule out that such a message was picked up at RAF Kirknewton but felt it would have been more widely known at the base and be the probable subject of a CRITIC. We have seen previously that this relates to a piece of Critical Intelligence Communications which should be treated with the utmost urgency and importance. Stevenson denied any specific knowledge of the allegation made concerning organized crime and the assassination of the President.

    HSCA investigator Cornwell suggested to Stevenson that he call Christensen to find out the name of the figure in organized crime. Stevenson replied that he was unwilling to do so. In Klein’s report, it is stated that the lawyer representing Stevenson, stated that “such a phone call could only be arranged through the Department of Defense.”

    It has always puzzled me why the HSCA did not pursue more vigorously the name of the organized crime figure mentioned in Christensen’s letter. The memorandum by Eugene Yeates stated that “the staffers remain particularly interested in determining the name of the individual who Mr. Christensen believes relates to the assassination” and ended with the words “If the Committee is able to determine a specific name, the staffers indicated that they would probably initiate a specific inquiry to NSA to again search our materials.”

    There is no available information that I have yet been able to find that the HSCA made any serious further efforts to determine the identity of the individual. Despite what Stevenson’s lawyer said, I would have thought the HSCA would have moved heaven and earth to find out the name of the organized crime figure, particularly as Chief Counsel Blakey was pointing the figure of suspicion for the assassination at organized crime. I also realize at the time (November 1978) that the HSCA and their Congressional investigatory mandate was due to run out at the end of the year. I accept that they may have had higher priorities to pursue at the time, such as the acoustical evidence from the Police Officer’s dicta-belt, that recorded the shots in Dealey Plaza.

    Author, Larry Hancock, did speak to Sergeant Nicholas Stevenson for his excellent book Someone Would Have Talked (JFK Lancer Productions & Publications, 2010 edition, page 367). Stevenson told Hancock that “he was unable to discuss the subject because of two brain operations which had totally eliminated all of his past memories.”

    On 21 November 1978, Eugene Yeates wrote a further letter to confirm that the NSA had “made a thorough search of all records” pertinent to the allegation made by Christensen and that “no communications or information relating to the Committee’s request” had been located. This letter was only released in full in November 2017 under the JFK Records Collections Act 1992 (click here to see the letter).

    Another document only released in full at this time was from Harold Parish of the NSA. His memorandum was dated 2 January 1979. In it, Parish outlines the scope of the search conducted by the NSA to find materials relevant to the Kirknewton incident. He concluded that the NSA had “done all reasonable things to locate the reported intercept with negative results.” Just before concluding this, he also admitted that the search only really consisted of a look through three boxes from 1963 containing unidentified materials. There were nearly 10,000 products on file from January through November 1963 that would take a minimum of four weeks to go through (click here to see the memorandum).

    The reality of the search is underlined by another memorandum dated 13 December 1978, this time by C. Baldwin of the NSA (click here to see the memorandum). Baldwin’s memo confirmed “that a review of the documents in these three unidentified boxes would constitute a reasonable effort to find the alleged record” and that the “latest date in the box was 1962.” We know Christensen’s intercept was made in October 1963.

    Baldwin’s memo goes on to state that Mr. Sapp of the NSA “requested that an additional search be made of materials dated later than 1963” but that after reviewing the listing of such boxes, “nothing on the list merits such a search.”  

    It is clear to me that the NSA’s response, that they had made a “thorough search” to locate information relating to Christensen’s allegation, was disingenuous at best and a complete fabrication at worst. It also makes me wonder why these documents were hidden from public view for nearly 40 years if there was nothing to see. I appreciate that time is precious for government agencies but maybe in the near future, I’ll get the opportunity to make a more “thorough search” of these materials. I look forward to that day.

    The Lisbon and Tangier Link

    The intelligence agencies and HSCA seemed to have closed the book insofar as David Christensen’s allegation was concerned.

    You will recall that he mentioned that the link picked up was between Lisbon and Tangier. We have seen that the NSA confirmed that they were indeed listening to communications between Lisbon and other parts of the world at the time Christensen was based at RAF Kirknewton.

    Lisbon and Tangier are only about 275 miles apart. They are both interesting places to research. Both are port cities with easy access to North Africa, Southern Europe and a gateway to the Atlantic.

    Lisbon was known as the Capital of Espionage during World War II, largely because Portugal was officially neutral during that bloody conflict. Like its neighbour Spain, Portugal was ruled by a fascist dictator for decades. Antonio de Oliveira Salazar held power from 1932 until 1968. But because of the country’s neutrality during the war, Lisbon became a haven for spies. Intelligence agents from the allies and axis countries all converged on Lisbon.

    After the war, many organizations continued to take advantage of Salazar’s anti-communist dictatorship. These included CIA-NATO sponsored “Gladio” stay behind units, set up allegedly to defend Western Europe from a possible Soviet invasion, but who ended up inflicting murder and terrorist attacks on their own populations to instill fear, and frame political opponents. James Earl Ray also spent around ten days in Lisbon just before his arrest in London in June 1968 for the alleged murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

    Tangier was an important trade centre and international zone from 1924 until it was integrated into Morocco in 1956. It was also a place where spies met and even the setting for part of a James Bond film in the 1980’s! Bond author, Ian Fleming, was a friend of JFK’s. Smuggling was a popular pastime, if we can describe it as that. There were also several alleged sightings of Lee Harvey Oswald in Tangier, but I am sceptical of their authenticity. I could write a separate article about this subject alone! 

    An interesting character who we do know was in Tangier was Thomas Eli Davis III. He was an associate of Jack Ruby and in the gun running business, which included Cuba. In fact, it is reported that Ruby’s first lawyer, Tom Howard, asked his client whilst he was awaiting trial for Oswald’s murder if there was anybody who could harm his defence if it came out at the trial. Ruby mentioned Thomas Eli Davis.

    Davis was arrested in Tangier on 8 December 1963 for trying to sell two pistols to raise money. What concerned the Moroccan police more though was that Davis also had in his possession a cryptic, unsigned letter in his handwriting that mentioned Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. It is likely though that the reference to Oswald was a Victor Oswald, an arms dealer that Davis met in Madrid around November 1963.

    Another, and possibly more interesting bit of information about Davis, is that he was in custody in Algiers, Algeria on the day of the JFK assassination for running guns to the violent Organisation Armée Secrète, commonly known as the OAS. The OAS were opposed to Algerian independence from France (which was won in March 1962) and had tried to assassinate President De Gaulle on numerous occasions because of his stance on Algeria. They also had a station in Madrid.

    According to author Seth Kantor, Davis’s release from custody in Algiers was facilitated by a CIA asset with the cryptonym QJ/WIN (The Ruby Cover-Up, Zebra Books, 1978, page 45). This mysterious individual was part of the ZR/RIFLE Executive Action assassination programme led by William Harvey, who hated Kennedy and Castro. Could Harvey’s programme have diverted its attention towards JFK?

    Anti-Castro Cuban refugees were also known to have left their country of birth and made their way to Tangier because of the Castro revolution.

    The connection between Lisbon and Tangier may not therefore have been as benign as one may originally think. It does not seem unreasonable that communications and intelligence chatter could have been picked up around October 1963 that included talk of the imminent assassination of JFK.

    The Figure in Organized Crime           

    Earlier in the article, we saw the letter that Christensen wrote in 1978. He wrote that “the man’s name most mentioned was number 4 in a certain branch of organized crime at the time. Was number 2 last year.”

    You don’t need to have the detective powers of Sherlock Holmes or Jessica Fletcher to work out that the person mentioned in the intercept therefore had to still be alive in 1977, the year before the letter was written––and was the number 2 man in that branch of organized crime.

    When we talk about organized crime and the JFK assassination, there are three names that generally come top of most people’s lists. They are Carlos Marcello from Louisiana, Sam Giancana from Chicago and Florida kingpin, Santo Trafficante Jr. All are on record as wishing harm on President Kennedy, and his brother Bobby, and all had the means, motive and opportunity to do so.

    Giancana though was brutally murdered himself in June 1975, so this would appear to rule him out as the person in the letter. Other high-profile Mafia figures who have been linked with the JFK assassination over the years include Joseph Civello (Dallas), Jimmy Hoffa (Teamsters Union), Johnny Roselli (CIA/Mafia Castro hits) and Antoine Guerini (Marseille Mafia).

    They were also all dead by 1977 (or in Hoffa’s case had disappeared). Antoine Guerini’s equally notorious brother, Barthélemy, was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 1969 and died in 1982. Suspected grassy knoll shooter, Lucien Sarti, was also dead, killed in a Mexico City shoot out in 1972. So, it is most unlikely that the man’s name mentioned in the letter, and who was number 2 in a certain branch of organized crime in 1977, could have been any of these men.

    It seems credible that the branch of organized crime mentioned in the letter could have been the lucrative heroin drug smuggling trade––going through Marseille and into North America. The so-called French Connection. It was thriving in the early 1960s and therefore under intense scrutiny by some government agencies. Montreal was a key city in this drugs corridor, as they made their way from Europe to the USA. This makes Paul Mondolini a potential suspect. He was alive in 1977.

    This is, of course, all speculation and it is easy to throw names around without any specific corroboration. As well as drug trafficking, there are many other “branches” of organized crime including murder and assassination. The list of potential candidates could therefore be very long. But I do not think it takes us much further forward to throw other names into the mix without evidence.

    What we do know for sure is that there was an opportunity for the HSCA to find out the name of the person in Christensen’s letter, but they either didn’t have time or did not believe it worthy of further investigation. The NSA didn’t help with their poor excuse of a search for relevant records and information. Could they have been worried about where it might lead them?

    An Officer and a Gentleman

    It’s easy to forget that within all this talk of the JFK assassination, organized crime figures, and Cold War paranoia, that the whole Kirknewton incident really revolves around one man––David Frederick Christensen.

    Only he really knows the whole story and may have taken his secrets to the grave. Christensen died on 22 December 2008. He was 66 years old and rests forever at the Halliday Cemetery in North Dakota.

    Some may say that he made the whole story up, perhaps to engineer some medical and financial assistance he may have been looking for from government. What happened between October 1963 and May 1978 (when he wrote the letter to Stevenson) is also a mystery. Who else did he tell about it? Was pressure brought to bear on him to keep quiet? These questions remain unanswered for now and require further investigation.

    What we do know is that it rarely ended well for people who bravely put their heads above the parapet and tried to sound a warning about the possible assassination of JFK.

    For those who doubt Christensen’s story, it’s worth reflecting on some of the other points mentioned in his 1978 letter.

    He included the names of other officers who served at RAF Kirknewton, such as Prater, Harley, and Hendrickson. A review of the alumni at the USAF RAF Kirknewton website confirms the existence of such named individuals who served there. The Berkely Bar in Edinburgh was an established drinking establishment for serving military personnel at the time. He had indeed married a girl call Marlene Burr in 1960 and they were later divorced. He refers to some people as 202s and 203s. A 202 was a Radio Traffic Analyst and a 203 a Language Specialist––work consistent with the RAF Kirknewton base at the time. Could the outfit in Texas have been a reference to the Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio?

    Amongst all these facts, I find it extremely unlikely that Christensen would then have thrown in a wild accusation about an intercept that mentioned the assassination of President Kennedy, unless it really did happen.

    As we all continue to research different aspects of the JFK assassination, maybe more about the Christensen story will be revealed. It’s a pity more of the documents and details about the HSCA investigation were not released until after his death. We may have been able to find found out a lot more if they were released earlier.

    What we should never lose sight of though is that David Christensen was a human being who served his country with distinction and received an honorable discharge. He was trusted with high security clearance and is not just a name to be read in documents.

    He had two sons and six grandchildren––a family man. He enjoyed playing card games and worked in the oil business when he left the Air Force. And his life was profoundly affected following Kirknewton. As he said himself––“it really broke me up after November 22, 1963” and “it cost him a divorce and everything from his wife.”

    Until evidence is presented to the contrary, perhaps we should also start referring to David F Christensen as another forgotten hero as far as the JFK assassination is concerned.

    We must keep searching for the truth.

    As JFK said himself once, “Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.”

  • Gerald Posner vs Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited

    Gerald Posner vs Oliver Stone’s JFK Revisited

    As could have been predicted, JFK Revisited is knocking the deniers sideways, to the point that people like Max Boot, and now Gerald Posner, cannot tell time. On January 8th, Posner tried to counter the smashing success of Oliver Stone’s appearance on Joe Rogan and the ringing endorsement given to him by Glenn Greenwald. Together, Rogan and Greenwald reached an audience of well over 3 million people. This is what Posner posted on his Facebook page:

    Confused by Oliver Stone’s latest ‘documentary’ mishmash on the JFK Assassination? Today only, Open Road Integrated Media, has all digital CASE CLOSED on sale. It was a Pulitzer-finalist for History + a national bestseller. Get a dose of sanity for less than $2.

    Underneath that post, he pictured the poster of JFK Revisited and placed a label on it as “brain fog.” Next to that was a photo of the cover of Case Closed with the label “the cure.”

    On his page, there are posts you can comment on. There was no way to comment on this particular post. He had closed them down., for good reason. It’s an inane, carnival barker type of post. Sort of like Max Boot, Posner has lost his space/time moorings. Recall, Boot had John Kennedy trying to topple Patrice Lumumba in Congo, when, in fact, Lumumba had been killed before JFK took office. Well, Posner published his book in 1993. The Assassinations Records Review Board was appointed and began work in 1994. They stayed at work until 1998. They declassified 60,000 documents, making up a repository of 2 million pages. JFK Revisited is largely based on their work product. So how the heck could Posner’s book be used to counter the discoveries in the film based on the work of the ARRB? If anyone has “brain fog”, it’s Posner.

    Let us use some examples of Posner’s brain fog:

    • In perusing the index to his book, Posner does not mention Dorothy Garner. How could he? Her interview with Justice Department lawyer Martha Stroud was discovered in 1999 by author Barry Ernest. It corroborates the alibi evidence supplied by Vicki Adams and Sandy Styles, who worked at the Texas School Book Depository. That document destroyed the Warren Report’s false presentation of the Adams and Styles time frame for being on the stairs after the assassination, one which Posner dutifully recites on page 263 of his book. Barry clearly demonstrates this in the film. (See also The Girl on the Stairs, pp. 214–18). What makes it worse is that Barry proves that the Chief Counsel of the Warren Commission knew of the Garner interview in the summer of 1964.

    • Posner mentions the name of John Stringer in his book. Quoting chief pathologist Jim Humes, he says that Stringer’s autopsy photos were never touched and, therefore, Posner writes, “they provide proof positive of the President’s wounds…” (Posner pp. 300–01) He then says that Stringer verified the autopsy photo inventory in 1966. What he cannot write is that Stringer denied that the 1966 photographic inventory was intact before the ARRB, as Humes did before both the HSCA and the ARRB. Stringer said that he knew the 1966 inventory was not intact, but he was told to sign it. So, he did. (Stringer ARRB Interview, 7/16/96 pp. 136–37; Humes’ ARRB interview of 2/13/96 pp. 96–97)

      Because of the ARRB, this record now gets worse. Doug Horne was in the room when the ARRB’s Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn conducted his landmark deposition with Stringer. As Doug describes in JFK Revisited, under Gunn’s questioning, official photographer Stringer ended up denying that he photographed the extant pictures of President Kennedy’s brain and he did this on no less than five evidentiary grounds. Two of them were that he did not use the film utilized in the present National Archives pictures and he also did not use the photographic technique used to take these extant photos. (Horne, Inside the ARRB, pp. 803–10) Therefore, once this is established, the film asks the logical questions: Who did take them, and why? How could one ask those questions before the Gunn/Stringer deposition?

    • In discussing the so-called Magic Bullet, that is Commission Exhibit 399, Posner used Vincent Guinn’s Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis test to argue for both its authenticity and its trajectory through both Kennedy and Governor John Connally—who was in front of the president. In Case Closed, Posner rhapsodized about Guinn’s work. He called it “indisputable evidence” that CE 399 had not been planted and “it had traveled through Connally’s body…” (pp. 340–42) This has turned out to be pure bunk. The entire scientific underpinning of that test has been shown to be utterly false, so much so that the FBI will not use it in court again for fear of its agents being indicted for perjury. This was done by the team of metallurgist Ric Randich and statistician Pat Grant. (Federal Lawyer, Nov/Dec, 2007, pp. 66–68)

      But beyond that, in Posner’s discussion of CE 399, I could not locate the names of Bardwell Odum or Elmer Lee Todd. These two men are crucial in exposing the fraud of CE 399 and the fact that the FBI misrepresented the provenance of this bullet. As JFK Revisited demonstrates with new evidence, the FBI lied when it said that agent Bardwell Odum had shown CE 399 to the two men who first encountered it at Parkland Hospital: Darrell Tomlinson and O. P. Wright. Odum told Gary Aguilar and Josiah Thompson that he did no such thing. And, in fact, Wright previously denied to author Thompson that CE 399 was the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 282–84) JFK Revisited also proves, through the work of the late John Hunt, that unlike what the FBI states in the Commission volumes, agent Elmer Lee Todd’s initials are not on the bullet. And since he was the agent who delivered it to the FBI lab on the night of the assassination this is inexplicable. What is even more inexplicable is the fact that the lab already had the “stretcher Bullet” an hour and twenty minutes before it was allegedly delivered by the Secret Service to Todd. As Dave Mantik asks in the film: How is that possible? (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 248–50) If all these discoveries by Hunt, Aguilar, and Thompson came after 1993, then how does Posner’s book counter this new evidence? With people like Odum, Todd, and O. P. Wright not even in the index of his book?

      JFK Revisited demonstrates all the above about CE 399 through Gary Aguilar, who interviewed Odum, and with documents that people like Aguilar, Thompson and Hunt produced. In other words, it is all done with primary sources. So, the questions then become: Why did the FBI lie about the identification of the bullet? Why did the FBI lie about Todd’s initials being on CE 399? How could CE 399 be delivered to the FBI lab after they already had it? And the ultimate question: who planted the bullet? And likely on the wrong stretcher. (Don Thomas, Hear No Evil, pp. 392–99) And make no mistake, CE 399 is utterly crucial to the Warren Report.

    What makes all of the above even worse is the fact that Posner is a lawyer! Therefore, he has to know what the rules of evidence are. He was educated at a California law school, so he knows what a 402 hearing is. This is a pre-trial procedure where the defense has the opportunity to challenge the evidence the prosecution is going to present. There is simply no chain of custody for CE 399. And if in fact it would be presented at trial, it would be destroyed upon cross-examination.

    Posner also has to know that if a photo or illustration is to be presented at trial, the person who took it would have to testify that this is the picture he took. Well, Stringer’s testimony would show that the pictures of the brain in evidence were not taken by him, which would open the door to a line of questioning that would likely get the prosecution’s case thrown out of court. For if someone else took the pictures, then that would lead to the questions of who did so and why? To use one example, which is described in JFK Revisited, ARRB witness Sandy Spencer did see other autopsy pictures which were different than the ones in evidence today. (William Matson Law, In the Eye of History, pp. 429–33) As Jeremy Gunn told Doug Horne, he thought Spencer was the best witness the ARRB had. Again, Spencer’s name is not in the index to Posner’s book. How could she be?

    Finally, as any lawyer will tell you, when one has an independent alibi witness like Garner, it makes it hard to disprove time and place. The Commission knew this, which is why their Chief Counsel, J. Lee Rankin, buried the evidence of Garner’s interview with Stroud. Does it get much worse than that? See if that bit of information is in Posner’s book.

    For Posner to either ignore or completely discount the above is simply preposterous and it reduces his book to rubble. But it’s even worse than that. As an attorney, he has to know its value in court. In all probability, this much fraud would have gotten the case against Oswald thrown out. On that basis, let me extend a challenge to Gerald. I will agree to debate him at a public venue in either Los Angeles or San Francisco and he can bring former Commission attorneys Howard Willens, Burt Griffin, and David Slawson with him. I would only ask that I be allowed to choose one other person. In other words, it would be 4–2 in their favor.

    Gerald can contact me through Oliver Stone’s office or the Kennedysandking.com website. I eagerly await his communication. In my view, the interest is this would be so high it would be broadcast on radio and TV.

    I predict that call will never come, because if they did show up they would be shown to be, at best, clowns, at worst, charlatans. And their books, Case Closed and the Warren Report should be in the fiction section of any library.

    Appendix (from Jim Lesar):

    (Click here if your browser is having trouble loading the above.)

  • The Post and the 30th Anniversary of JFK

    The Post and the 30th Anniversary of JFK

    On Sunday, May 19, 1991, the Washington Post published a feature story by George Lardner in its Outlook section. It was titled “On the Set: Dallas in Wonderland.” Lardner had visited the set of Oliver Stone’s film JFK while it was shooting in Dallas. His lengthy article pretty much gave a blast off to the long, sustained MSM preemptive strike against a film that the public would not see for seven months. This phenomenon was unprecedented in the history of cinema, before or since. And Lardner’s attack was total. He even wrote the following (shocking) sentence about the film’s major thesis: “There was no abrupt change in Vietnam policy after J.F. K.’s death.” (Click here for details)

    On December 22, 2021, Ann Hornaday published a feature story in the Sunday Arts section of the Washington Post. It was titled, “JFK at 30.” The extended subtitle was “Oliver Stone and the lasting impact of America’s most dangerous movie.” Her article was softer in tone than Lardner’s superheated polemic. But as far as the film went, and the state of the JFK case today, there is not much difference in effect.

    Perhaps the worst aspect is when Hornaday makes an attempt to somehow link the film to what happened at the January 6th insurrection. She says that JFK “did not invent alternative facts, deepfakes, or Deep State paranoia. But its form and content surely anticipated them and helped usher in an era when audiences would increasingly accept them as reality.”

    Only someone wishing to ignore rightwing conspiracy movements could write such a statement. In 1991, when JFK was released, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show had been nationally syndicated for three years. A year later, in 1992, Limbaugh would launch a TV version of his show. Recognizing Limbaugh’s success, approximately four years after that, Roger Ailes convinced Rupert Murdoch to launch Fox News Channel. Limbaugh and Fox were used to attack scientific concepts like global warming, to defend Donald Trump after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and to spread 2020 election fraud allegations. It is this kind of propaganda—furthered by Fox imitators OAN and Newsmax—that led to the insurrection, which was planned and exacerbated—even while it was happening—by the Mercer family backed Parler online service. (Click here for details)

    This false attribution angle is complemented by her comments about Stone’s portrait of President Kennedy, which she says, “has been called the mother of all counterfactuals.” Why? Because Stone thinks that Kennedy would have stopped the war in Vietnam, aggressively pursued civil rights, and curtailed the Cold War. If Kennedy pulling out of Vietnam is “counterfactual” one has to wonder why the following illustrious scholars also support that thesis: Gordon Goldstein, Howard Jones, David Kaiser, James Blight, and David Welch. And why did a man she uses to denigrate Stone, Tim Weiner, write this headline in the New York Times on December 23, 1997: “Kennedy had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam.” The reason Tim wrote that article was because the Assassination Records Review Board had just declassified scores of pages of documents from the May 1963 SecDef meeting in Hawaii. At that meeting, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was collecting Vietnam withdrawal schedules from the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department. Schedules he had requested months earlier.

    As per Kennedy and civil rights, again, this is not at all counterfactual. President Kennedy did more for civil rights in three years than Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower did in three decades. This is simply a matter of historical record. It is also historical record that, after the tearing down of Jim Crow in the south, President Johnson altered Kennedy’s plans for the second stage of his program—with deleterious effect. (Click here for details)

    Finally, Kennedy was trying for a détente with the USSR and a rapprochement with Fidel Castro at the time of his death. For the latter, Hornaday could have made reference to the people involved, like William Attwood and Jean Daniel. (Peter Kornbluh, Cigar Aficionado, September/October 1999) As per the USSR, she could have consulted another negative critic she uses, namely Tim Naftali. In Naftali’s book, One Hell of Gamble, he revealed a secret communication that was sent to the Kremlin through Kennedy family friend William Walton. That letter originated a week after the assassination with Robert Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy. It said that they did not buy the MSM story about Oswald alone killing JFK. They suspected a large rightwing domestic plot, but they knew that the new president, LBJ, was too close to big business to continue the détente that JFK and Nikita Khrushchev had begun. Therefore, Bobby would resign as Attorney General, gain electoral office, and then run for the presidency and that he would then continue it, which is what RFK did—and Jackie did not want him to do. (Naftali and Aleksandr Fursenko, pp. 345, 402; David Talbot, Brothers, pp. 30–34) She ended up being correct in her prognostication. If this happened as previously outlined, how is it counterfactual?

    About the original release of Stones’ film, she says that Warner Brothers launched a “Free the Files” campaign which shrewdly detracted from a negative press. That campaign began the day the film was first shown. For at the end of the picture, a crawl was attached which said that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA)—the last official inquiry into JFK’s murder—were classified until the year 2029. The public reaction to that information was electric. Capitol Hill was deluged with phone calls, faxes, and telegrams outraged that this secrecy could still be going on. To give just one example: when the chairman of the HSCA, Congressman Louis Stokes, saw the film with his daughter, she asked him: “Why did you do that Daddy?” Stokes ended up being one of the prime backers for the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The Board’s function was to do just that—attempt to declassify all of those still secret documents. According to ARRB employee Doug Horne, Stokes met privately with the five person panel and urged them to reinvestigate the medical evidence in the case. Since, according to Stokes, no one on his committee was satisfied with what they had done in that regard.

    This leads us to the subject of the ARRB. Using Naftali as a source, Hornaday says that Donald Trump delayed the ultimate release of the still withheld ARRB files for three years. What happened was this. By law, everything was supposed to be released in October of 2017. President Trump had tweeted about how he was looking forward to doing just that. He was the only person who could delay that release. On the day it was supposed to occur, he did just that—he delayed it for a period of 6 months. When that interval was over, he then added another three years to the extension. One would think 3 1/2 years would be enough to sort through the files. Apparently, it was not, because, in October of 2021, President Biden delayed it for two more months. In December, he only released about 10% of what was still being withheld. The rest was postponed until October of next year. In other words, if all is finally released then, we will have waited almost five years beyond the legislated release date to see what was in these files. And what is the guarantee that Biden will not delay it further at that time?

    Concerning what was in some of the previously released files, she says that Clay Shaw—who Jim Garrison prosecuted for conspiracy in the JFK case—had once worked with the CIA. The implication being that at the time of the assassination or afterwards, he had not. One of the ARRB declassified files revealed that Shaw had a covert security clearance—and it was valid in 1967. (William Davy, Let Justice de Done, p. 195). Through its CIA specialist, the ARRB also learned that the Agency had destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. (ARRB memorandum of November 14, 1996 by Manuel Legaspi) Since the Shaw case figures rather expansively in the 1991 film, and the defendant denied he had worked for the CIA, one would think that this would be relevant information for her article.

    Quoting Tim Weiner, the former New York Times reporter says the thesis of the film is a lie, but yet many people believe it. Hornaday then mentions the whole Weiner/Max Holland mythology about Garrison’s case being initiated by a KGB planted story in an Italian newspaper. Since Garrison arrested Shaw before that story was printed, and was investigating Shaw for about three months prior to its publication—and there was no contact between the two entities prior to publication—the reader should find the logic of all this rather puzzling. (For a detailed explanation of how Holland duped The Daily Beast, click here) And as I have previously noted, for anyone to take Holland seriously after he produced one of the worst documentaries ever on the JFK case is simple MSM fruitiness. Holland’s program was so bad that even Warren Commission zealots decried it. (Click here for details)

    Writing about Stone’s dark 1991 portrait of Lyndon Johnson, and consistent with an emerging pattern, Hornaday now goes to Mark Updegrove. Mark was the Director of the Lyndon Johnson Library and Museum for eight years and is president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation in Austin. Predictably, he says that Stone’s film was,

    …seminal insofar as it legitimized wide-eyed conspiracy theory and set a great precedent in how far we could push film to depict history, or purport to depict history. And that was a dangerous and irresponsible precedent.

    Everything in Stone’s JFK about the Vietnam War, and Johnson’s actions involving it, has proven to be accurate. For example, the scene where Johnson tells the Joint Chiefs, “You just get me elected and I’ll give you your damned war” was taken from the 1983 edition of Stanley Karnow’s book Vietnam: A History (p. 326)

    The most recent scholarly work in the field is even more convincing in this regard. In 1962, Johnson was getting the true data on how poorly the war was proceeding, not the false numbers that showed it was going well. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, 2017 edition, p. 223) But in 1961, the vice president had visited Saigon and, in conjunction with the Pentagon, had suggested to President Diem that he request American combat troops to help fight the war. (Newman, pp. 73, 77) This is something Kennedy had not authorized and would never authorize. In Virtual JFK, the authors’ quote a 1964 tape in which Johnson literally says that he disagreed with Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam, especially his decision to withdraw in a losing situation. (Blight, pp. 305–10) A month after this, in March, LBJ authorized the drafting of NSAM 288. This planned a great militarization of the war, including a full scale air war against Hanoi. It meant that “the administration has rejected all thought of a graceful withdrawal.” (Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War, p. 129) What was left to enact NSAM 288 was a declaration of war. The Johnson administration was drafting just that—three months before congress passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution in August. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 26–27) As noted above by Blight, not only did Johnson know he was breaking with Kennedy’s policy, but he also took pains to conceal it. Again, Stone’s portrait of Johnson in relation to Vietnam was accurate. And has been both proven and bolstered by later document releases and research.

    She also says that somehow the conspiratorial framework of the film, that is a plot between the CIA and Joint Chiefs, has been debunked. She does not say where or by who, but to name some prominent people in the critical community who subscribe to, or had subscribed to, this general concept: attorney Stanley Marks, attorney Vincent Salandria, author Doug Horne, author Jacob Hornberger, Professor John Newman, and myself. In the long version of JFK Revisited: Destiny Betrayed, Stone backs this up with more evidence. She also says that JFK Revisited does not prove that Allen Dulles was a part of the plot. One of the featured speakers in the film, David Talbot, does make that case in his book The Devil’s Chessboard. All she had to do was call him as she did Tim Wiener or Mark Updegrove. Evidently, she didn’t.

    She never called the screenwriter of JFK Revisited either, even though I left her an email and asked her to do just that. If she had done so she could not have written that the documentary includes what Stone “insists” is new evidence. Since I was involved in researching the script, arranging the interviews and posing the questions, I could have told her just what was new, how it was new, and what it meant to the calculus of the case (e.g. in dealing with CE 399, the testimony of Commission witness Victoria Adams, and the ARRB sworn deposition of autopsy photographer John Stringer). Respectively, it means that there is no chain of custody for the magic bullet and the FBI lied about it; that Dorothy Garner, Adams’ supervisor, supported her testimony, which gave Lee Oswald a formidable alibi for the time of the shooting; and that Stringer did not take the photos of Kennedy’s brain in the National Archives. Which begs the questions: Who did and why? There is no ”insisting” about this. It is all new—made possible by the ARRB.

    In 1991, George Lardner gave Oliver Stone a slap across the face with his open hand. In 2021, Ann Hornady gave him a backhand wrapped in a velvet glove. After Max Boot and this, it’s pretty clear that, thirty years after Stone’s film, The Washington Post cannot accept the facts—old or new—about what happened to President Kennedy.

  • Max Boot vs JFK Revisited

    Max Boot vs JFK Revisited

    On December 21st, the Washington Post decided to publish an opinion piece by columnist Max Boot about Oliver Stone and his new documentary JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass. Like Alecia Long before him, and Tim Weiner in Rolling Stone, there was little pretense of Boot writing any genuine criticism. (Click here for a reply to Weiner and here for one to Long) After all, the title of the column accused the director of telling lies about JFK’s assassination. Boot then called Stone a demagogue and compared his work to that of Leni Riefenstahl. When a writer stoops to this kind of name calling by the first line of his second paragraph, one knows what lies ahead is going to be a non-analytical smear.

    In the second paragraph, Boot calls Stone’s 1991 film JFK “the most deceitful film ever produced by a major Hollywood studio.” This for a film that won two Oscars and was nominated for eight. And, as far as Max is concerned, that disposes of that.

    Except it doesn’t. When one compares the director’s cut of that film with the declassified record, one will see that compared to other true story films (e.g. The Untouchables), Stone’s film does not use an excess of dramatic license. The hyperbole used in that regard is so exaggerated as to be dismissed as an outburst of collective journalistic hysteria. The truth is that the people making these charges knew next to nothing about the JFK case or what happened in New Orleans with Oswald in the summer of 1963.

    I know this since I am aware of those matters and did a comparative analysis of the first 16 scenes of the film with the new records made available by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). There are some things which appear later in the film that I would have advised Stone not to use, but there are also things that are clearly labeled as speculation or presented as theorizing. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 190–94) To point out one major strand of JFK which was vehemently attacked at the time: all the material pertaining to the Vietnam angle is accurate. And further work in this field has made Stone’s thesis even stronger. (Click here for details)

    Therefore, at the start, Boot shows what he is writing is bombast, playing to the crowd. In referring to the declassification process, he cannot even spell out the term Assassination Records Review Board. Or inform the reader that the Board declassified 60,000 documents and two million pages of material. Yet today there are still approximately 14,300 pages being withheld from public view: 58 years after Kennedy’s assassination.

    Max then writes this whopper:

    What has come out so far has done nothing to shake the conclusion reached by all credible investigators that Oswald was the lone gunman.

    How does he know? Has he read the two million pages? It’s this kind of arrogance that has made a large part of the public so sick of the MSM that they have turned to alternative forms of media for information.

    The other part of Max’s charade is this: He does not tell the reader anything that is in the film based on this new information. If he did, he’d expose his charade, because the ARRB did not just declassify 2 million pages of either redacted or completely classified documents. They were also able to conduct inquiries into ambiguities in the evidence. Therefore, they did an investigation into the autopsy of President Kennedy. Two of the witnesses they deposed under oath were FBI agents Jim Sibert and Frank O’Neill, who were present at the Bethesda morgue that night. Both men stated that they observed a large defect in the right rear of Kennedy’s skull. In their declassified interviews with the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), both men said the bullet in Kennedy’s back did not exit his body. (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, pp. 681, 685)

    The agents had nothing but scorn for Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission. They were angry because neither testified before that body. They both felt this was due to Specter, since he knew what they would say would contradict his pre-ordained conclusion. They also both learned that Specter had, to put it gently, misrepresented their testimony to the rest of the Commission in order to keep them from testifying. (Horne, pp.702–05)

    When the reader is presented with their evidence, one can see why Specter did not want them deposed. First, there is no autopsy picture of the skull wound they describe; a wound which would indicate a shot from the front. Secondly, their testimony vitiates the Single Bullet Theory that Specter needed to construct. If the bullet in the back did not transit Kennedy then Specter’s theory is simply untenable: another bullet hit Governor John Connally and there was a second assassin. JFK Revisited refers to this testimony. But Max Boot doesn’t reveal it to the reader, probably because it would “shake the conclusion reached by all credible investigators that Oswald was the lone gunman.” Or, in plain English, it would show that Max is a poseur.

    Another episode in the film that would “shake the conclusion reached by all credible investigators” is the fact that there were two plots to kill Kennedy prior to Dallas. They both occurred in November of 1963. One was in Chicago and one was in Tampa. As essayist Paul Bleau demonstrates in the film, both of these failed attempts had remarkable similarities to what finally succeeded in Dallas. For example, in Chicago the profile of the fall guy—Thomas Vallee—resembled Oswald.

    And the FBI informant who helped thwart the Chicago plot was codenamed ‘Lee’. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 204–07)

    In Tampa, the suspected patsy was Gilberto Lopez. As Oswald was the organizer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) branch in New Orleans, and its only member, Lopez was a pro-Castro Cuban who attended meetings of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. He had been hospitalized that year for an epileptic condition. He was in Tampa on the day of Kennedy’s long motorcade route which went past the 23 floor Floridian Hotel. According to Secret Service expert Vince Palamara, the authorities had men on every floor of that hotel due to information about a threat on Kennedy’s life. Afterwards, Lopez went to Texas, and on the night of the assassination, he crossed the border at Nuevo Laredo into Mexico. With money loaned him by the FPCC, he was the only passenger on a Cubana airlines flight from Mexico City to Havana on November 27th. The Mexican authorities later wrote he was acting suspiciously and they had an informant who said he was involved in the Kennedy case. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, pp. 256–58; see also Daily Mail, September 3, 2019, article by Daniel Bates) On December 3rd, the CIA was alerted to run “urgent traces” on Lopez. Both the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations found that, while the Warren Commission was in its most active stage, reports were “circulating that Lopez had been involved in the assassination.” (HSCA Final Report, pp. 118–21)

    JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, is the first broadcast documentary to include these prior attempts. For whatever reason, both were covered up at the time. If that had not been the case, it is quite possible that the successful attempt in Dallas would not have occurred. The reason being that the similarities to the prior instances were obvious enough that Oswald would have been removed from the motorcade route. Somehow, Max Boot does not think this information merits public attention.

    The film proves matters that Boot labels “lies.” It proves that CE 399, the Magic Bullet, was not fired in Dealey Plaza that day and would not have been accepted into a court of law. It does the latter through an instructor in criminal justice and also the illustrious criminalist Dr. Henry Lee. The film proves that James Humes, the lead autopsist, destroyed both the first draft of his report and, even worse, his autopsy notes. It also shows that Pierre Finck, another Kennedy pathologist, had his notes pilfered. The film illustrates, with blown up photos, points of evidentiary discrepancies not officially explored in the so-called backyard photographs of Oswald. In the forthcoming 4-hour version, the documentary will present the late CIA officer Tennent Bagley’s analysis of the routing of the CIA file on Oswald and his conclusion that he was a false defector.

    For Max Boot to write that the information in the film was debunked by Gerald Posner in his book Case Closed is the height of MSM clownishness on the JFK case. That was not possible, since Posner’s book was published before the ARRB went to work. For Max to use the late Vincent Bugliosi to pose the question of why there were no extra bullets discovered is about as silly. In the long version of the film, to be released in America in February, we will show that there is evidence that an extra bullet was recovered that evening that made it into the morgue. (Click here for details)

    Boot goes off the edge when he writes that the film uses an absence of evidence “as proof of a monumental coverup.” The film clearly demonstrates parts of the cover up that were concealed, but have been revealed by the ARRB. Another example being the hidden statement of Dorothy Garner, the supervisor to Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles at the Texas School Book Depository. As author Barry Ernest states in the film, she backed up what Adams and Styles officially stated: that they were on the stairs of that building about 15–30 seconds after the shots were fired. Therefore, in all probability, they would have seen or heard Oswald coming down those rickety wooden steps, if he had been on the sixth floor. They didn’t. The presentation of this evidence by Mr. Ernest is a major segment of the film. How Max missed it, or deemed it unimportant, is inexplicable.

    Boot ends his column by saying that the film theorizes that Kennedy was a “peacenik” who was trying to end the Cold War. This is not a theory. The film shows with new evidence that JFK was planning to withdraw from Vietnam; his policy to keep the Congo free from imperialism after independence; and his attempts at rapprochement with both the USSR and Cuba in 1963. The film uses excerpts from Kennedy’s famous Peace Speech at American University in June of 1963, where he clearly called for outreach to Moscow. After his death, the last two policies were abandoned and the first two were dramatically reversed—with disastrous results. The upcoming 4-hour version of the film goes into this issue in more areas and at greater length. Boot tries to neutralize all this by using the speech Kennedy made it Fort Worth the morning of his assassination. I hate to tell Max, but if a president goes to a city that relies on defense spending for jobs, he makes a speech about defense spending, especially if his election is coming up the next year. Max ignores Kennedy’s planned speech in Dallas for that afternoon, where JFK was to speak against the John Birch Society, about leadership and learning, about the importance of foreign aid to developing nations, the pursuit of peace, and how military might is secondary to maintaining a just and righteous society.

    It is predictable that Boot would cherry pick the speeches, since he was and is a neocon. He was a former member of the calamitous Project for the New American Century, which advocated for American intervention in Iraq as far back as the Clinton administration. He was also part of the mythologizing about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for that debacle. Boot championed intervention in Afghanistan and opposed withdrawal. He had no problem with Hillary Clinton’s unmitigated disaster in Libya. He also agreed with her advocacy of direct American intervention in Syria. As several have said, there has scarcely been a war that Max Boot did not like—no matter how bad the results were. And they do not get much worse than Iraq or Libya.

    This helps show why Boot cannot be trusted with anything dealing with Kennedy. In 2018, in his hagiography of Ed Lansdale, he wrote that JFK had tried to topple Patrice Lumumba in Congo. (The Road not Taken, p. xxvii). As with Posner debunking the ARRB, this was not possible. How could it be? Lumumba was assassinated before President Kennedy took office. One of the reasons the CIA took part in his murder was because they feared that Kennedy would back Lumumba once he was inaugurated. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23)

    As the reader can see Max Boot is in no position to accuse anyone of telling lies about JFK.

    (Click here for Max Boot’s twitter feed)

  • Why Tim Weiner Never Called Me

    Why Tim Weiner Never Called Me

    On November 22, 2021, Tim Weiner wrote an article about Oliver Stone’s new documentary dealing with the JFK assassination for Rolling Stone. It’s really a hit piece, the literary equivalent of a drive by shooting. And, as we shall see, it’s not about what Weiner says it’s about.

    Weiner begins by saying that JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is “rooted in a big lie.” What is that lie? According to Weiner, the lie is that Kennedy was murdered by the Deep State (i.e. the CIA backed by the military-industrial complex). From here, one would think that Weiner would now confront the evidence in the film and, point by point, counter it and thus reduce Oliver Stone to, in his words, “a tinfoil-hatted fabricator.”

    He does not do that. Not even close. Like a cardsharp, Weiner skips that step and jumps to this accusation: if anyone thinks the CIA killed Kennedy, you are being deluded by a Soviet era disinformation campaign. Unfortunately, I’m not kidding. But before Weiner begins playing his Russian aria, he first does a prelude. He says this about JFK’s assassination:

    Either Lee Harvey Oswald, trained by the United States Marines as a sharpshooter before he defected to the Soviet Union, got off a million-to-one shot in Dallas. He acted alone. Or he was an instrument of a conspiracy so immense that it staggers the mind.

    Right out of the gate Weiner sets up a game of false alternatives, because JFK Revisited shows Oswald’s “million-to-one shot” did not happen. The film takes pains to demonstrate that the Warren Commission’s Magic Bullet, labeled CE 399, was not fired in Dealey Plaza that day. JFK Revisited proves this on more than one basis. The film also proves that the FBI and the Warren Commission lied about the provenance of CE 399. It does this with evidence made possible by the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), but Weiner does not want the reader to know this since it knocks out one of his false alternatives. If he admitted this evidence, then one would be left with, well, a conspiracy.

    This phony prelude leads to Weiner’s main theme. It’s not an easy job to soften and make acceptable the life and career of CIA Director Allen Dulles. One would think that, after all we know about Dulles today, no one would try, but Weiner has to, in order to sketch in his other false alternative. Namely that Stone says that Dulles was the “presiding genius of the plot against the president.” (The film doesn’t really say that, but accuracy is not what Weiner is after.)

    So now Tim pulls out his make-up kit for Dulles. He writes that the CIA Director did not back the plots to overthrow Charles de Gaulle of France, which is a startling statement. For many interested observers, one of the best books on the career of Allen Dulles is The Devil’s Chessboard. Author David Talbot uses a variety of sources to show that Weiner is wrong. For example, the newspaper Paris-Jour centered on Dulles as the main culprit in the attempted overthrow of April 1961. Later, bestselling French author Vincent Jauvert traced the sources of these stories in the French press to de Gaulle’s own foreign ministry. (Talbot, p. 414) In fact, De Gaulle had come to this conclusion himself. (London Observer, May 2, 1961) Author Andrew Tully also noted columns in Le Monde and l’Express which he wrote were owed to high French officials. (CIA: The Inside Story, pp. 48–49)

    In the USA, The Nation reported that high level French government employees thought the CIA had encouraged the attempted overthrow. And using l’Express, they wrote that one of the dissident French generals had several meetings with CIA agents who advised him that getting rid of de Gaulle would do the free world a great service. (The Nation, May 20, 1961) These stories also appeared in American mainstream newspapers like The Washington Post. (April 30, 1961) Most fatally for Weiner, his former employer The New York Times also printed the story. Scotty Reston wrote that the CIA was indeed “involved in an embarrassing liaison with the anti-Gaullist officers.” (New York Times, April 29, 1961) But further, Talbot goes into the reasons behind the conflict between Dulles and de Gaulle. It was the desire of the French leader to get rid of NATO’s Operation Gladio elements in France and also his intent to set free the French colony of Algeria in North Africa. (Talbot, pp. 416–17) One would think that all this would be enough to satisfy most objective observers.

    In a neat bit of cherry picking, Weiner never mentions any of these sources. He borrows a trick from Max Holland and says that the idea that the CIA backed the attempts by dissident French officers to overthrow de Gaulle was all part of a Russian disinformation campaign that began in Italy. To most informed observers the idea that Scotty Reston would rely on the Italian newspaper Paese Sera is ridiculous on its face.

    But further, for Weiner to use Holland as a source for the John F. Kennedy assassination is inexcusable. Ten years ago, Holland made one of the worst documentaries ever produced on the Kennedy assassination. In fact, as Pat Speer has noted, there were indications that Holland knew his thesis was faulty before the documentary even aired. How bad was it? Even Commission zealots Dale Myers and Todd Vaughan attacked the show. The Lost Bullet was so indefensible that one would think no one would ever treat Holland with any degree of respect again. (Click here for details)

    But this is the JFK case, so normal rules of credit and reference do not apply. Therefore, Weiner trots out Holland once more. And he then doubles down on the man. He says that New Orleans DA Jim Garrison arrested Clay Shaw because of a story that ran in Paesa Sera three days after. (Hmm) He then adds that Garrison bandied this story about as a basis for his prosecution of Shaw and also that it became a central basis for his whole case against the Central Intelligence Agency.

    Again, this derives from Max Holland. Holland has been selling this line for a very long time. He was pretty much eviscerated on it by Gary Aguilar back in 2004. This was during a debate that was broadcast by CSPAN and is still available on the web; therefore Weiner could have easily located it. (Click here for the debate) Aguilar proved that, unlike what Holland and Weiner imply, Garrison did not make the Paesa Sera story a part of his case against Shaw—either in public or at Shaw’s trial. For example, in his 26 page Playboy interview—the longest ever run by the magazine at that time—the DA never brought it up.

    But then Weiner does something that is probably even worse. And it shows his utter disdain for the work of the Assassination Records Review Board. He says that Shaw was not a longtime operative of the CIA. Because of the work of the Board, we now have documentation that proves that the defendant lied about this at his trial. Shaw had three CIA clearances, one of them being a covert security clearance. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 196) As Joan Mellen discovered, Shaw was also a valuable and well-compensated contract agent. (Mellen, Our Man in Haiti, p. 54) Adding the documentation up, Shaw’s CIA career extended over a period of 23 years. Unlike Tim, most people would think that qualifies as being longtime. In fact, the Board’s CIA specialist also discovered that the CIA had destroyed Shaw’s 201 file. Why? (Click here for details)

    Virtually everything in the above paragraph is displayed in the film. Somehow Weiner either missed it or chose to ignore it, but in JFK Revisited we also feature authors Jefferson Morley and John Newman. Those two discuss what Garrison based his own investigation on at its inception: Oswald’s activities in New Orleans. Specifically, how he interacted with the CIA run anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) and the fact he stamped his pro-Castro flyers with the address of the extremely rightwing Guy Banister. We then detail how:

    1.) The FBI covered up Oswald’s association with Banister, (Newman, Oswald and the CIA, p. 310); and

    2.) The CIA lied about their liaison to the House Select Committee on Assassinations having no association with the Oswald case in 1963. The truth was that George Joannides was the CIA handler of the DRE in 1963. (Miami New Times, April 12, 2001, “Revelation 1963”)

    Most people, as Garrison did, would think that this information about Oswald in New Orleans would tell us something about him, probably that he was not really a Marxist. The latest discoveries on this issue were made possible by the ARRB and are in the film.

    In fact, one of the most shocking things about Weiner’s article is this: He cannot bring himself to mention by name the Assassination Records Review Board. Or the fact that JFK Revisited uses their work to an unprecedented degree. This is quite a bit of alchemy since the film interviews three men who worked for that body, and it mentions the Board throughout. In addition, it displays declassified documents which back up many of the declarations in the film. Weiner does not refer to any of these documents or witness statements.

    Toward the end of his screed, Tim writes that he cannot tell us that there wasn’t a conspiracy. He then says that maybe there is a bombshell in the still classified archives. That utterly inane statement demonstrates why Weiner’s article is not criticism; it’s a hatchet job. As demonstrated, Tim does not want to tell the reader what is in the film. The fact that, under oath, the official JFK autopsy photographer told the Board that he did not shoot the pictures of Kennedy’s brain that are in the archives today. John Stringer gave five reasons for his denial. Two of them being that he did not use the type of film with which the extant photographs were taken, and he did not utilize the photographic process evident in those pictures. JFK Revisited has Doug Horne, an ARRB employee who was in the room with Stringer during his sworn testimony, narrate this passage. (Horne, Inside the ARRB, p. 810)

    Just like he does not want to tell his readers about the above, Tim also won’t reveal that the FBI lied about CE 399, the Magic Bullet. They did so in three ways. The film proves that the Bureau lied about its identification by the first two people who handled it. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 282–84) It also proves that the Bureau lied about an FBI agent’s initials being on the exhibit. They are not. Third, by their own records, the FBI lab had the Magic Bullet before it was transferred to the agent who delivered it there. This delivery, of course, was by the agent whose initials are not on the bullet. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 345)

    Like the issue of the autopsy photos, the information about CE 399 is proved out in the film. It would be of great interest to anyone watching, since it goes to the heart of the Warren Commission’s case against Oswald. Like everything else above, Weiner does not mention it. In fact, before writing his piece and attributing sources of information in the script to Paese Sera, he never called this writer, which would seem to be a significant trespass of journalistic ethics since I wrote the script. I could have informed him of the actual sources we used for things like the attempted overthrow of de Gaulle or Clay Shaw and the CIA. Those sources had nothing to do with what Weiner attributes them to. When the annotated scripts are published next year, this will be made plain to anyone who reads them.

    So, the question then becomes: Why didn’t Tim Weiner pick up the phone to call Jim DiEugenio? Or shoot an email to Jim to find out what my actual sources were in writing the script? It would have been simple to do either. All he had to do was call Oliver Stone’s office or find me on the web through the Kennedys and King web site.

    Since Weiner neither poses nor replies to that question in his column, it leaves the answer open for speculation. He closes his hatchet job by saying something about “a moral obligation to call bullshit when we see it.” Tim is so wrapped up in his own agenda that he does not recognize his own paroxysm of hypocrisy. When a writer does not present any of the documented material that he calls “bullshit” then yes, one can declare it as such. But that is not journalism; its classic propaganda that does nothing to inform the public. When a film can document what it says with sworn testimony and documents written at the time, that is not “bullshit.” These are unpleasant facts that were kept hidden from the public for decades. And it was only through Oliver Stone’s making of his film JFK in 1991 that they finally began to emerge.

    One last point about Tim’s concluding issue about disbelief in government. One can see through the graph in Kevin Phillip’s book Arrogant Capitol that, unlike what Weiner wants you to think, that erosion of belief is not a recent phenomenon. That graph extends from 1960 to the mid-nineties. The year of the single biggest drop in trust was 1964, when the Warren Report was published.

    Another factor that led to overall cynicism was ten years of war in Vietnam—the most divisive conflict since the Civil War. As JFK Revisited shows, if Kennedy had lived, this would not have happened. The film also shows that President Johnson consciously reversed Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in order to escalate that war. There is no mention of this by Wiener in his article. By that excision, Wiener’s hypocrisy is in full view.  For on December 23, 1997, there was an article in the New York Times about the ARRB declassifying documents from the May 1963 SecDef meeting in Hawaii where Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was collecting Vietnam withdrawal schedules from the Pentagon. The title of the story was “Kennedy Had a Plan for Early Exit in Vietnam.”

    The reporter was Tim Weiner.  What a convenient lapse of memory. Tim Weiner is an object lesson in why the public has lost faith in the MSM.

    Click here for what appears to be Tim’s current Twitter account.

  • Alecia Long Lays An Egg: Part 2

    Alecia Long Lays An Egg: Part 2

    Since Priscilla Johnson has passed on, for the 58th anniversary of the murder of President Kennedy The Washington Post trotted out Alecia Long. As readers of this site know, Long has been in rehearsal for becoming a public spokesperson defending the mendacity of the Warren Report for quite a while. (Click here for her early practice session) More recently, she published a truly nonsensical book about the JFK case, one which I was at pains to show, had no saving graces to it. (Click here for details) Evidently, these prior run throughs were enough for the Post to give her the podium.

    Why? Apparently, Long was needed to counter the broadcast by the Showtime cable network of Oliver Stone’s new documentary on the JFK case, JFK Revisited. Long says that the two-hour presentation “is entirely predictable” to anyone was saw Stone’s 1991 feature film JFK. Since I wrote the documentary, I can inform Ms. Long that I never even looked at the 1991 film as I worked on the screenplay. What I wrote was focused upon presenting new evidence that had surfaced since 1991. Much of that material was derived from the Assassination Records Review Board, which operated from 1994–98 three years after JFK was released.

    One of the things we deal with in the film is Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. Long states early in her piece that the idea that Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam “is counterfactual.” And that no one can know,

    …with certainty whether he would have started an active ground war, as Johnson did. Such thinking fuels conspiracy theories with an entirely unprovable assertion about what might have been.

    One thing our documentary is not is counterfactual. It can only be deemed that by not telling the reader the facts in the film. The documentary presents three new pieces of evidence, never shown in broadcast format before, that makes the Kennedy withdrawal thesis both credible and provable. They are:

    1. The records of the SecDef conference in Hawaii held in May of 1963, with representatives from Saigon. There, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was reviewing the withdrawal schedules he had previously requested from the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department. Once he looked them over, he told those in attendance the schedules were too slow and had to be speeded up.
    2. The taped conversation in 1964 between Johnson and McNamara, where LBJ clearly admits he knew Kennedy and McNamara were withdrawing from Vietnam and always thought it was a bad idea. But he sat there in silence, since he was not in charge.
    3. Interview subject John Newman listened to McNamara’s Pentagon debriefs after he was removed from office by Johnson. In those sessions, McNamara clearly states that he and Kennedy had decided they could send equipment, trainers, and advisors to Saigon. But that was it. American could not fight the war for South Vietnam. When the training period was over, America was leaving and it did not matter if Saigon was winning or losing.

    None of this new evidence was in the 1991 film, but it would convince most objective people that Kennedy was simply not sending American combat troops into Vietnam. But Johnson was quite willing to do so. LBJ thought McNamara and Kennedy were wrong and he browbeat McNamara into changing policies. The evidence on this topic is overwhelming today and has been presented by several authors in different ways: Howard Jones, Gordon Goldstein, James Blight, David Kaiser, and, most prominently, by Newman in the 2017 version of his book JFK and Vietnam. It speaks very poorly of Long as a history professor that she is not familiar with this work. Or if she is familiar with it, to simply deny it.

    She follows this up with a bizarre statement that is confounding no matter how many times one reads it. She says that assassination related research continues to focus on a narrow set of questions, “including whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted as a lone assassin or if a conspiracy lay behind the president’s murder.” Alecia, that is not a narrow question. Most people would think it’s the ball game. If Oswald acted alone, the Warren Report is correct. If it was a conspiracy, the 900-page Warren Report was wrong and some secret body overthrew our government, with calamitous results.

    She then writes something that, even for her, is astounding. She says that JFK Revisited blurs the lines between fact, fiction, and pure speculation in presenting the work of the ARRB. The film presents three people who worked for that body: Chairman John Tunheim, his deputy, Tom Samoluk, and Military Records analyst Doug Horne. JFK Revisited shows documents that were declassified due to their work. Every statement made in the film is backed up by evidence and we show many documents and exhibits in the film. For example, the testimony by the official autopsy photographer that he did not take the pictures of Kennedy’s brain that are today in the National Archives. Which leads to the questions: then who did take them, and why?

    But, as with Vietnam, Long does not want to reveal that bit of new information, since it would prove the contrary of what she is preaching.

    She then admits that the CIA and FBI delayed the release of many documents. And sometimes they were actually deceptive to the two main federal investigations of Kennedy’s murder: the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations. But she then adds that “no documents have been released that indicate intelligence agency participation in the assassination.”

    Oh really? In the film, John Newman states that the FBI removed the FLASH warning from the Oswald file just a few days after Oswald’s return from his alleged Mexico City visit. This allowed him to escape being placed on the Secret Service security index in advance of Kennedy’s Texas trip. If the FLASH had not been taken off, Oswald would likely have been removed from the motorcade route due to his active and open communist activities in New Orleans and his alleged visits to the Cuban and Russian embassies in Mexico City. As Newman also states, this same type of maneuver inexplicably occurred at the CIA. In other words, something was going on with the Oswald file at both the FBI and CIA in advance of the assassination. When one throws in the fact that the legendary, ARRB-declassified Lopez Report about Mexico City indicates Oswald was not there—but the CIA insisted he was—then excuse me, but does someone have to hit Alecia Long over the head with a 2 x 4? This whole issue of Oswald’s relationship with the CIA, and counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, will be gone into at length in the four-hour version of the film.

    Long closes her column with her usual hatchet job on Jim Garrison. Through Jefferson Morley, the film shows that the alleged pro-Castro communist Oswald was associating with anti-Castro groups like the CIA sponsored DRE. In addition to that, Oswald associated with three known rightwing, CIA associated figures in New Orleans: Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. And all three men lied about their association with Oswald after Kennedy was killed. The FBI covered these relationships up, another point Newman talks about in the film. (Click here for proof) This would seem to raise some questions about who Oswald really was and what he was doing in New Orleans in that fateful summer before Kennedy’s assassination.

    But to Long, this is not important. She ends her nonsensical column by saying, and I am not kidding, we should forget about bullets and ballistics. Forget about bullets and ballistics in a homicide case? Instead, we should consult the newly declassified record in order to learn “how events that fertilized citizen cynicism about the government more than a half-century ago can help us document our contentious past…” and also “explain the troubling conspiracy theories of today.”

    The reason cynicism sprung up way back then was precisely because the Warren Report did not follow regular procedures in evaluating bullets and ballistics. And we prove that in our film with new evidence exposing the fallacies the Commission foisted on the public, but somehow that is not important to Long or The Washington Post.

    In other words: Who the heck cares who killed Kennedy? We should worry about how all that stuff caused QAnon. Alecia, the question of who killed Kennedy is quite important, due to the fact that whether you know it or not, or like it or not, something happened to this country—both domestically and in foreign policy—due to his assassination. And if you do not trust me just look at Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century. There he explains, through polling and focus groups, how about 90% of the public feels America lost its way due to JFK’s assassination. (see p. 416)

    As far as QAnon goes, JFK Revisited relies on data, not faith or mysticism—or as some suspect what QAnon really is, a psy-op. The documented screenplays for both versions of the film will be published in April. As Long will then see, and as Stone said at Cannes, JFK Revisited turns conspiracy theory into conspiracy fact. It explains how, just one year after getting elected, Johnson had 170,00 combat troops in Vietnam. On the day he was killed, Kennedy had none. That is a fact. And the film does this throughout with documents and testimony that she either does not know about, or does not want to convey to the public.

    The murder of John F. Kennedy was a homicide case. That is the way it should be treated. What Long writes is a diversion from the new calculus of that case. President Kennedy deserves better than that. Much better.

    Go to Part 1