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.

Marina’s Sponsor and Oswald’s Fifth Wallet

I am trying to imagine the scene. A divorced housekeeper who cannot hold a job, and whose son is in Russia having made the news for attempting to defect and who married a Russian. The mother asks an ex-boss, who had recently dismissed her, if he can sponsor her son’s Russian bride in order to help them get into to the U.S. The year is 1962, at the height of the Cold War.

On March 15 of that year, this is precisely what Byron Phillips agreed to do, thereby “guaranteeing and assuring anyone concerned that he will personally see that in the event Marina Nikolilava Oswald is permitted to come to the United States that she will not become a ward of any political subdivision of this country, and that he has ample property holdings and assets to provide for her in the event that it should become necessary.”

While I cannot confirm what the obligations were in 1962 for an immigration sponsor, we can assume they were no less strict than they are today: The Form I–864 Affidavit of Support is a legally enforceable contract, meaning that either the government or the sponsored immigrant can take the sponsor to court if the sponsor fails to provide adequate support to the immigrant. In fact, the law places more obligations on the sponsor than on the immigrant—the immigrant could decide to quit a job and sue the sponsor for support.

When the government sues the sponsor, it can collect enough money to reimburse any public agencies that have given public benefits to the immigrant. When the immigrant sues, he or she can collect enough money to bring his or her income up to 125% of the amount listed in the U.S. government’s Poverty Guidelines.

The sponsor’s responsibility lasts until the immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen, has earned 40 work quarters credited toward Social Security (a work quarter is about three months, so this means about ten years of work), dies, or permanently leaves the United States.” (Legal Encyclopedia, Chapter 3)

Who on earth would take such a risk? Would he not try to first get some information from the State Department? For all he knew, Oswald was a traitor and Marina was another “godless commie!” Is there a link between Byron Phillips and the CIA’s David Phillips from Fort Worth, Texas? Was Byron Phillips ever questioned?

While making some interesting headway researching The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which will be the subject of an upcoming article, I got sidetracked by another bizarre event. I decided to put the FPCC research on hold and dig away at this perplexing offshoot.

Marguerite in Vernon

From June 1961 to Aug 1961, Marguerite Oswald was in Crowell, Texas at Macadams Ranch working for Otis Grafford as housekeeper/cook. (Oswald 201 File, Vol 3, CD75, Part 2) Mrs. Grafford affirmed

that she liked Marguerite, but she fought with her mother Mrs. Macadams. She then went to Vernon in August 1961. Vernon is 30 miles east of Crowell, 170 miles outside of Fort Worth. Boyd is a Fort Worth suburb.

A short one-page FBI report dated 12/1/63, states that Byron Phillips was questioned by special agent Jarrell H. Davis on the previous November 25. (Click here and scroll to page 17) Marguerite worked for Byron from August or September 1961 (August 1 according to John Armstrong) to January or February 1962 as a housekeeper and practical nurse for his mother and father who lived close by. She never said anything anti-U.S.; she had told Mr. Phillips about her son going to Russia, marrying a Russian girl, fathering a child; that her employment was terminated because she talked all the time which made his father nervous. He stated that just previous to or shortly after she left his employment, she mentioned that she was having trouble getting someone to sign the sponsoring affidavit to be submitted to Immigration and Naturalization vouching adequate support for the wife and child.

On November 20, 1961, the FBI Dallas office sent one of 5 copies of a memorandum to the FBI director, reporting that Marguerite Oswald had received news from her son Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia. He was confident he would be able to return to the U.S., but expressed doubt about the prospects of such a move for his new Russian bride Marina. Marguerite’s address is listed as 1808 Eagle Street, Apartment 3, Vernon, Texas.

She reached out to the Vernon Red Cross in Jan 1962; they wouldn’t float a $450 loan to him, but they agreed to copy a letter that Marguerite was sending and declare it a true copy (the pre-photocopy era). (CE 2731, WC Hearings, Vol. XXVI, p. 110)

According to Agent Davis’ further inquiries, after ending her employment with Byron Phillips, Marguerite soon found work at the Vernon Convalescent Home and moved in with Mrs. John Bishop to share expenses for three or four weeks in Vernon sometime in February or March. She then found work as a practical nurse and housekeeper for Robert S. Leonard, who also resided in Vernon, before working for Mrs. B. F. Hutchins. at 1810 Eagle Street in Vernon. Mr. Leonard recalled Marguerite saying that her son went to Russia as some sort of government agent.

In a letter to Marguerite dated March 21, 1962, Lee states that he will probably head directly to Vernon upon arrival to the United States. (Commission Document 818) The letter refers to Byron Phillips as a “business friend” of Marguerite and talks about numerous press clippings about Oswald sent to him by Marguerite which increased the odds that Oswald’s turncoat persona was knowable if not known.

Apparently, she went to Crowell, Texas and stayed six weeks with Joe Long in May-June 1962 before leaving to go back to Fort Worth at the end of June 1962 to be near Lee and his family. (Oswald 201 File, Vol 3, CD75, Part 2)

In these and other interviews with people she worked for from mid-1961 to mid-1962, Marguerite Oswald comes across as overly talkative, fussy, bossy, upset by her son being in Russia, penniless, and professionally unstable: A real Mrs. Catastrophe.

Byron Phillips

Byron Phillips signed this very important affidavit on March 15, 1962 (Warren Commission Exhibit 2653) (824) and (197) nearly two months after terminating Marguerite’s employment for being tiresome with his dad and plunging him into a world of uncertainty with a cast of misfit characters intertwined with a Cold War nemesis that he became partially responsible for. Did he ever meet, correspond, keep tabs on these brave souls he so wanted to help…? No! Did he take precautions to alert intelligence during the Missile Crisis in late 1962? It does not seem so. Was he investigated beyond this very cursory inquiry by agent Davis or by the Warren Commission? Not at all. Perhaps there was no need to.

A September 10, 1963 Memo to FBI agent James Hosty directs him to interview Byron Phillips in an effort to locate Oswald.

On November 30, 1963, at the Six Flags Inn of Dallas, with Robert Oswald present, agent Blake of the Secret Service and another unknown agent questioned Marina and asked about a black wallet containing 180 bucks and the identity of Byron Phillips, who had signed the affidavit. She said that neither she nor Lee knew him and that Marguerite was the one who had contacted him when she was living in Vernon. She also stated that the wallet was given to Lee by Marguerite when she came back to Fort Worth and that they always kept that wallet at home.

The following article gives a pretty good profile of Phillips and family:

This rancher was a distinguished gentleman who owned 660 acres of farmland, was a father, and the Deacon at the Fargo Baptist Church. He sat on the local School Board for some ten years, attended business college, was chosen “outstanding Rural Citizen” in 1962, was elected president of the Palomino Club in 1964, and the list goes on. Despite quite the pedigree, this seemingly professional, savvy businessman seems to have been quite imprudent when he put his reputation, and potentially quite a bit of money, on the line when he put his signature on a compromising legal document sponsoring an unknown Soviet bride of a “quasi defector” in order to help a housekeeper he had fired a few weeks earlier. Note that sometime around June 1961, Mrs. Otis Grafford who had hired Marguerite for a couple of months recalled Marguerite telling her of reading about her son’s “defection” to Russia in a Fort Worth newspaper. Where on earth was the due diligence? Unless, of course, Byron had been reassured, or asked for a favor by someone who had an interest in sending Oswald over to Russia and now wanted him back. How could the FBI interview be so weak when it came to understanding motive and Modus Operandi of this mystery sponsor? Not even Byron’s daughter and grandson were made aware of his decision. (This, I believe is to his credit.)

Let me quote about Phillips from a Peter Newbury blog. Here is what he posted in 2012:

The American Embassy suggested he (L.H. Oswald) secure an Affidavit of Support for Marina Oswald.

Again, OSWALD asked his mother for assistance by mail; Marguerite Oswald obtained an Affidavit of Support from her former employer Byron Philips. A CIA Office of Security Memorandum generated by Ethel Mendoza noted that OSWALD’s address book contained the listing “Mr. Phillipes LI 2-22080” then showed deleted traces. [NARA 1993.07.24.10:48:22:340550] This was Byron Phillips, resident of Wilbarger County, Texas. Marguerite Oswald had mailed Byron Phillips’s Affidavit of Support to her son.

Byron Philips commented about these traces in May 1977:

Well, I didn’t know that boy. His mother worked for my mother and daddy for two or three months and that is the only connection I had with him. I never did see him. As far as CIA contact, well, it had to be local over here, I didn’t have any contact with anybody that I didn’t know. There’s a lawyer over here, I’m not sure if he’s FBI-connected or not, he called me and talked to me about him one time. That’s the only one that ever talked to me about him…that’s before it ever happened. A lawyer over here named Curtis Renfro (born April 5, 1905; died September 1984) called me. He just asked me if I knew him…

Curtis Renfro said he knew Byron Philips. As to whether he called Byron Philips in regard to OSWALD before the assassination, he remarked, “I don’t recall a single word about it, I don’t know the fellow, there’s so much going through my office since 1961 and 1962 that I can’t remember it all. I’m 75 years old. I don’t have any records on it.” Curtis Renfro was asked if he had ever had any intelligence community contact: “Not that I know anything about, if I had a call in my life from them I didn’t know it.” In 1963, Curtis Renfro gave the FBI the names of people for whom Marguerite Oswald had worked, in Vernon, Texas. Then he stated that he did not know or remember Marguerite Oswald. [FBI DL-100-10461, DL 89-43 11.29.63 p. 178]

Note how Byron shortens Marguerite’s work stint with him by three months, positions her employer as his parents, and insists on how he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald; which in a way makes his willingness to support Marina seemingly more bizarre—not less. If Curtis Renfro was, in fact, hired by the FBI to find out for whom Marguerite had worked, there is a timing problem according to FBI records, as the FBI had interviewed all of Marguerite’s Vernon/Wilbarger contacts/employers by November 26, 1963, less than 4 days after the assassination. In terms of investigating a lone drifter’s mother, the speed at which the FBI was ready to pounce was stunning, to say the least…unless, of course, they already had files on mom and son. Is it credible that a lawyer would not remember anything about the mother of the most notorious “alleged” assassin of the last century? Another key point is that Renfro inquired about Oswald before the assassination according to Byron.

A Wild Hunch

David Atlee Phillips is the Intel name that has popped up most often in the research I have conducted over the years, sharing some 20 touch points with Lee Harvey Oswald in and around the last 8 months or so of Oswald’s life. He was raised in Fort Worth, Texas, a mere 100 miles from Byron’s place of birth, Gorman Texas. Wilbarger County is 160 miles away. Marguerite had her home in Fort Worth while she worked in Wilbarger County. Why did carless Marguerite work for some 8 months more than 2 hours away from her apartment? Imagine if Byron and David were somehow related. It was this nagging thought that distracted me from the research on the FPCC I was so focused on. A long shot I admit, but still the type worth following up on.

From Gary Hill, Jim DiEugenio, John Armstrong, Larry Hancock, David Josephs, Bill Kelly, Bill Simpich, Jim Hargrove, and Len Osanic, I received interesting insights, links, and documents that helped me build Byron’s profile, but not much that could link him to intelligence. On the one hand, some of these researchers did find Byron’s vouching for Marina suspicious; one researcher, however, noted how poor tradecraft it would be for David to use a relative for such an endeavor.

Through websites such as Ancestry.com, find-a-grave, find a person, etc., I was able to build a fairly complete family tree for both David and Byron and found no common bloodlines going back 4 generations.

Articles from Wilbarger County about community events did not reveal any social ties. Still, the decision by Byron to sponsor Marina, without performing due diligence, to help a dismissed housekeeper without follow-up interest in the midst of the Cold War deserves more scrutiny. The next area of research was to talk to living witnesses, and close ones, if possible.

Jeffrey Cantrell

According to the above newspaper article, Byron’s daughter, Jane Phillips Cantrell, was a teacher in Sherman, Texas. Based on web research, Jane is currently 83, living in Sherman, Texas. Jane has two sons: Jeffrey Don and Jerel Lynn.

With time, I was able to contact Byron’s grandson Jeffrey, who was gracious enough to answer questions for me and to relay some to his mother who also answered. During a phone conversation on June 20, Jeffrey, now in his early fifties, was able to confirm that Byron in fact lived in Fargo, a small town of 100 people, 12 miles north of Vernon where his wife’s family was based and that he was, in fact, an important rancher in Texas. He owned and operated Fargo Gin. Byron and his wife would spend late springs to mid-summers in Colorado. We were able to confirm that there were no links between Byron and David.

Jeffrey candidly admitted the following: He had tried to research the Marguerite Oswald history with the family and his mother simply confirmed the employment and never commented beyond this. Jeffrey’s main source of information on the Kennedy assassination to this point is Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly and he conceded that he did not really know that much about the case. In fact, he was under the impression that Byron had refused to sponsor L.H. Oswald, because he would not want to involve himself with someone he did not know. Only when I spoke with him did he find out that Oswald, while in Russia, married Marina and that it was she and their daughter that Byron sponsored.

Jeffrey also pointed out that he, while working for Freeman’s Exhibits, was given a mandate for the TSBD. He said that he could not see how two of three shots could hit two people.

On the key question, i.e. how could a businessman like Byron agree to sponsor the Russian bride of Oswald for the benefit of a dismissed caretaker at the height of the Cold War, Jeffrey did not have a definitive answer. But he did offer that his grandparents were very trusting people. At the end of this open and cordial call, we agreed that I would send him a series of questions for his mother:

Here are the questions sent to Jeff and answers from his mother:

Jeff Cantrell <jdcantrell>

Thu 6/24/2021 7:20 PM

To: Paul Bleau <pbleau@crcmail.net>;

1) Did she personally meet Marguerite? Yes

What are her recollections about her? She was nice. Got where she was a little domineering. Maybe that is why Byron let her go.

2) Did she know Byron sponsored Marina (Oswald’s Russian bride)? No

3) What were the reactions in her family and the larger community about Marguerite after 1) The 1962 Missile crisis 2) the assassination. It was terrible and weird that they had been associated with someone who had assassinated JFK.

4) Does she have an opinion as to why Byron sponsored Marina, some two months after dismissing Marguerite, during the height of the missile crisis? Doesn’t know about this.

5) Does she know if Byron later regretted his act (if he somehow followed up)? No -really didn’t talk about it anymore.

6) Is it possible that Byron was reassured, or asked to do a favor by someone connected to gvt…in sponsoring Marina? No

7) Whatever else she can share (documents, insights)…would be helpful.

8) Does an LI-2-2080 mean anything to you (this was found in Lee Harvey Oswald’s notebook beside the name Mr. Phillipes). Nothing

Did you hear about Oswald taking Byron’s wallet and having it on him when he got arrested? (Note: this last question is from Jeff to me.)

Jeff Cantrell

(Followed by texting:)

Oswald’s Fifth Wallet

You kind of sense from Jeffrey’s email that Marguerite’s stint in Vernon and area is a bit of a hot potato…short answers, painful memories. The very last line in our email exchange, however, has me totally flummoxed.

There has been so much controversy about Oswald wallets that it is difficult to keep track of all the problems including the likely planting of an Oswald wallet at the Tippit murder scene, another in Oswald’s possession after being arrested at the Texas Theater, two other wallets and/or billfolds linked to Oswald, the “loss” of a wallet by investigators according to John Armstrong, etc.

Well, apologies to researchers. But it is about to get worse:

On November 30, 1963, Marina Oswald was questioned about a black wallet containing 180 dollars (worth $1,584 in today’s dollars) and the identity of Byron Phillips. She answered that Marguerite gave Lee the wallet and that Lee was frugal, thus explaining the quantity kept in the wallet. We shall shortly see that this is Oswald’s fifth wallet!

On December 1, 1963, Marguerite stated that she obtained the wallet from the Waggoner National Bank in Vernon, Texas. (Commission Exhibit 1787)

On June 24 and June 26, 2021, Byron’s grandson (and daughter) stated that the wallet “Oswald took” belonged to Byron.

National archives Photo of Oswald’s brown wallet during arrest and contents: Wallet from Tippit murder scene

According to John Armstrong research before this article was written, there were a total of four wallets belonging to Oswald—not one of them was black—there was attempted obfuscation around three of them! Here is what respected researcher Jim Hargrove sent me from a John Armstrong speech about the wallets:

The last example of evidence alteration I will discuss is the most difficult to follow. It involves the two Oswald wallets found in Oak Cliff and is detailed in Dale Myers’s new book With Malice. A wallet was found at the scene of the Tippit murder by Dallas Police, which contained identification for Lee Harvey Oswald and Alik Hidell. Twenty minutes later, a different wallet was taken from Oswald’s left rear pocket by Detective Paul Bentley. This wallet, the “arrest wallet” also contained identification for Lee Harvey Oswald and Alik Hidell. Both wallets remained in custody of the Dallas Police from November 22^nd until November 26^th. Bentley turned over Oswald’s “arrest wallet” to Lt. Baker. The wallet and contents were kept in this well-worn envelope in the property room until turned over to the FBI. Photographs of the “arrest wallet” and contents were taken by the Dallas Police on November 23^rd and given to the FBI and Secret Service.

The wallet found at the Tippit murder scene turned up in Captain Fritz’s desk drawer, where it remained until November 27^th. On November 25^th, Oswald’s possessions were returned from Washington to be inventoried and photographed. Here we begin to see how the FBI tampered with the wallets.

The FBI inventory listed two wallets—items #114 and #382—yet neither of these inventory sheets showed the wallets coming from the Ruth Paine house, but neither wallet was initialed by Dallas Police. Neither wallet was listed on the Dallas Police handwritten inventory completed at Ruth Paine’s house. Neither wallet was listed on the Dallas Police typed inventory which became Warren Commission exhibits. Neither wallet was photographed among Oswald’s possessions on the floor of the Dallas Police station. Yet two wallets were listed on the FBI inventory—where did they come from? Were they on the Dallas Police evidence film?

To answer that question, I looked at the two rolls of film returned to the Dallas Police by the FBI. (Hold up Dallas Police film) Item #114 was listed as “brown billfold with Marine group photograph.” But negative #114 showed only the Marine group photo. When a photograph is made from this negative, the “brown billfold”—allegedly from Ruth Paine’s house—disappeared (SLIDE 24).

Item #382 (SLIDE 25) was listed on the FBI inventory as “red billfold and one scrap of white paper with Russian script.” But negative #382 (RIGHT 10) showed only the paper with the Russian script. When a photograph is made from this negative, the “red billfold”—allegedly from Ruth Paine’s house—disappeared.

Both negatives were altered between the time the Dallas police turned over their original undeveloped film to the FBI and the FBI returned copies of that film to the police. Why cause the wallets in the original film to disappear? Because the original photos taken by the Dallas Police were probably photographs of the “arrest wallet” and the “Tippit murder scene wallet”—two wallets which contained identification for Oswald and Hidell which would have been unexplainable.

To find out what happened to “Oswald’s arrest wallet” and the “Tippit murder scene wallet,” we must again look at the Dallas Police film. The 2nd roll of film begins in the middle of negative #361 and ends in the middle of negative #451. All of the negative images after #451, with one exception, were ruined. The one exception is the negative image of a wallet. When the negative image is developed into a photograph, you can see that it is “Oswald’s arrest wallet.” This wallet, along with all other items in this film, were sent to Washington on November 26th. Remember when I told you the Dallas Police were blamed for the 255 missing negatives because of “faulty technique?” Does this look like faulty technique? Or does this look like another example of the FBI splicing together and tampering with the original Dallas Police film?

With the “Oswald arrest wallet” in Washington, the “Tippit murder scene wallet” remained in Captain Fritz’s desk drawer. On November 27^th, James Hosty picked up the “Tippit murder scene wallet” from Fritz and gave Fritz a signed receipt. Hosty then took that wallet and other items obtained from Fritz to the Dallas FBI office. According to Hosty, these items were neither photographed nor inventoried. They were placed in a box and flown to Washington by Warren DeBrueys. Two days later, the Dallas Police notified the FBI they had failed to photograph the wallet and contents and wanted photos. The FBI ignored this request and never photographed the “Tippit murder scene wallet.” The only known photos of this wallet are from WFAA newsreel film.

When the FBI finished altering Oswald’s possessions, Hoover sent this March 1964 memo: “The Bureau has re-photographed all of the material in possession of the Bureau and will send a complete set of these photographs to you by separate mail.” Included among the hundreds of new FBI photographs were items #114 and #382. These two wallets were substituted for “Oswald’s arrest wallet” and the “Tippit murder scene wallet.”

As crazy as this already was, now we can add a black wallet with Byron Phillips’s identity and 180 dollars in it to the mix of problematic hidden evidence!

Unanswered Questions

The research into Byron Phillips, someone who, seemingly out of the blue, recklessly sponsored Marina Oswald during the pinnacle of the Cold War, proved frustrating in that it opened the door to more questions than it answered. There does not seem to be any identifiable link between Byron and David. When he vouched, the assassination of JFK was probably not even being discussed by the lead conspirators. He seems to have been a good family man and solid community citizen. This story does stand out as another glaring example of just how underwhelming the FBI/WC investigation was or, perhaps, they already had the information they needed.

What were the real origins of the wallet? Promotional gear from the Vernon bank given to Marguerite? …or one that made its way from Byron to Lee via Marguerite? If the latter… How?

On what basis is Byron’s daughter certain that it belonged to Byron?

Does the Oswald in “Oswald took” refer to Marguerite?

What constituted the “identity of Byron Phillips” inside the black wallet?

Was the identity of Byron Phillips in the wallet placed by Lee to remind Marina of her sponsor she may need? …soon?

Was the cash left on Marina’s dresser by Oswald really the 180 dollars the FBI reported being in the wallet?

Did this 180 bucks belong to Byron?

How on earth does a lone drifter, father of two, minimum wage earner, or often unemployed person for some 18 months since his penniless return from Russia, how does that person save the equivalent of 1600 dollars today? When he squanders some of his own money for his mindless FPCC adventure, travels to Mexico City, buys gifts for Marina, acquires expensive photographic equipment, moves several times, hires lawyers, buys guns and ammunition, pays for communist literature, etc.? White Russians even paid Oswald’s YMCA fees because he was so destitute.

What happened to the black wallet?

Did the FBI deep-six Byron’s wallet? How? When? And why?

Would Marina, not have required the sponsoring support guaranteed by Byron after Oswald’s assassination?

How was D.A. Curtis Renfro involved in all of this and what is his background?

Why was he asking questions about Oswald before the assassination?

Add to these all the mystery around Byron’s secretive sponsoring of Marina with seemingly little oversight for a dismissed housekeeper during the height of the Cold War and we have ourselves another enigma, courtesy of the Warren Commission and friends.

What is not enigmatic for this author is any question of ill intent by Byron. There was none. He sponsored too early in the game for any idea of plot participation to be considered. Based on his very laudable profile, and input from Jeffrey and Jane, he was either acting as a charitable person who was helping the needy, looking for no recognition for himself; or, unbeknownst to his close ones, he was asked to help bring an American patriot home. This part of the mystery has probably reached a dead end for now, one that underscores the complete sham of an investigation that took place back then. When independent researchers and Byron’s grandson do more research about the wallets and Marina’s sponsor than the FBI, the DPD, the CIA, and the Warren Commission combined…in two weeks, you know something is rotten in Denmark.

I do not think Jeffrey can answer many more questions than he already has. Marina, Ruth Paine, the DPD, and the FBI certainly have a lot they can offer about the wallet. And Curtis Renfro was an important figure in his town who should be easy enough to profile. But that will be for another time, perhaps looked into by other researchers.

The area I had been researching before being sidetracked by this new rabbit hole was about perhaps the most incriminating link between David Phillips and Lee Harvey Oswald. One that had them most likely playing on the same side: The FPCC!

Stay tuned.

Addendum: I would like to thank Gary Hill, Bill Simpich, Len Osanic, Jim DiEugenio, David Josephs, John Armstrong, Bill Kelly, and Jim Hargrove for their comments and research support. A special thank you to Jeffrey and Jane Cantrell (two great Texans!) for the help they provided.

July 7, 2021
A Presumption of Innocence: Lee Harvey Oswald, Part 1

In criminal cases, such as the murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the burden of proof is on those who proclaim that Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President Kennedy. The standard required of them is that they prove the case against the defendant “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whilst being a haven for countless unsubstantiated theories, is first and foremost a homicide case. With Oswald’s tragic murder by Jack Ruby, he and the American people were deprived of the right to evaluate his innocence or guilt in a court of law. Oswald was therefore also denied the constitutional rights which should be afforded every American: the right to counsel, the right to a fair trial, and the right to be held as innocent until proven guilty. The Warren Commission, whose report was really a prosecutorial brief, served as judge, jury, and executioner for the defenseless Oswald. Mark Lane petitioned the Commission to serve as Oswald’s legal representation, but was denied his request. (See Commission Exhibit 2033) Nowhere will you read in the Commission’s 26 volumes anyone representing Oswald’s legal interests. That includes during the hearings—the choosing or calling of witnesses or the examination of witnesses.

Nor was counsel on hand to object to leading questions, the authenticity of the prosecution’s evidence, or admit evidence into the proceedings which was exculpatory. As Sylvia Meagher noted, the participation of the head of the ABA, Walter Craig, ended up being utterly meaningless. (Accessories After the Fact, p. xxix)
In these articles, we will try and correct that wild imbalance. We shall examine some of the Commission’s main conclusions side-by-side with an appraisal of the known facts with regards to the evidence pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination. And by doing so, we can begin to see what a real defense of the late Lee Harvey Oswald would consist of.

I. Ownership of the Rifle

Commission Conclusion:

The Mannlicher Carcano 6.5-millimeter Italian rifle from which the shots were fired was owned by and in the possession of Oswald. (Warren Commission Report, p. 19)

The ownership of the Mannlicher being attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald can be seriously challenged at every stage of the mail transaction. Not only is there no credible evidence to substantiate the claim that Oswald owned the rifle in question, there is no credible evidence which would suggest he ever mailed a money order or picked up the rifle in evidence from his post office box in Dallas.

Let us begin to address this issue by asking this key question:
Can Oswald’s ownership of the rifle prior to 11/22/63 be proven beyond a reasonable doubt?

Lee Harvey Oswald had taken up the custodianship of PO Box 2915 in Dallas, on October 9, 1962. Upon such undertaking, Oswald would have been required to complete an application form to rent that box. Oswald’s application form for PO Box 2915 is available to view today, except it is not the complete form. The most important part of the application form, pertaining to the ownership question, is unquestionably Part 3 which asks for:

“Names of persons entitled to receive mail through box.” (Holmes Exhibit No–1A)

This part of the form is missing, presumed destroyed as testified to by Harry Holmes, Postal Inspector and FBI informant.

Mr. HOLMES: Until he relinquishes the box. They pull this out and endorse it so the box has been closed, and the date and they tear off 3 and throw it away. It has no more purpose. That is what happened on box 2915.

Mr. LIEBELER: They have thrown part 3 away?

Mr. HOLMES: Yes; as it so happens, even though they closed the box in New Orleans, they still had part 3 and it showed that the mail for Marina Oswald and A. J. Hidell was good in the box. They hadn’t complied with regulations. They still had it there.

Mr. Liebeler: Now is this regulation that says section three should be torn off and thrown away, is that a general regulation of the Post Office Department?

Mr. Holmes: It is in the Post Office Manual instructions to employees, yes sir. (Testimony of Harry Holmes, VII p. 527)

It is clear that the Commission took the testimony of Holmes as fact with regards to the aforementioned postal regulations which allegedly existed in this case. This flawed approach led the commission to print in its own report:

In accordance with postal regulations, the portion of the application which lists names of persons, other than the applicant, entitled to receive mail was thrown away after the box was closed on May 14, 1963. (WCR, p. 121)

To put it mildly, the Commission was in error on this point. The following postal regulations pertaining to the Hidell/Carcano question were in force in March 1963:

Section 846.53h of the postal manual provides that the third portion of box rental applications, identifying persons other than the applicant authorized to receive mail, must be retained for two years after the box is closed.

Section 355.111b(4) prescribes that the mail addressed to a person at a post office box, who is not authorized to receive mail, shall be endorsed “addressee unknown” and returned to sender where possible. (Stewart Galanor, Cover-Up, Document 37)

So, if a package addressed to an “A Hidell” arrived at the postal box rented in the sole name of Lee Oswald, the package should have been stamped “addressee unknown”; and returned back to Klein’s, of Chicago, the shipper of the firearm.

The Commission asserted that “it is not known whether the application for post office box 2915 listed ‘A Hidell’ as a person entitled to receive mail at this box” (WCR, p. 121) However, information printed in the Commission’s own volumes indicate that the FBI knew that Oswald had not indicated that an “A Hidell” be permitted to receive mail through his box.

Commission Exhibit 2585 is a document from the FBI, dated June 3, 1963. Bullet point 12 states:

Claim:

The post office box in Dallas to which Oswald had the rifle mailed was kept under both his name and that of “A.Hidell.”

Investigation:

Our investigation has revealed that Oswald did not indicate on his application that others, including an “A.Hidell” would receive mail through the box in question, which was Post Office Box 2915 in Dallas. This box was obtained by Oswald on October 9, 1962, and relinquished by him on May 14, 1963” (Commission Exhibit 2585, Volume XXV, pp. 857–862)

In other words, Holmes and Liebeler were prevaricating about two crucial evidentiary points.

Yet even more inconsistencies arise in the form of the length of the rifle allegedly ordered by “A Hidell.” The Carcano allegedly placed into PO Box 2915 was supposedly ordered from the February 1963 issue of American Rifleman. (WCR, p. 119) It was listed as catalogue number C20–T750 and comes in at 36 inches long. The Carcano allegedly linked to Oswald and retrieved after the assassination is 40.2 inches long. There was no explanation offered as to this significant discrepancy of the ordered rifle to the rifle which sits in the National Archives today. The Warren Report does not recognize the difference, let alone explain it. (See WCR, pp. 119–22) The rifle in evidence is of a different length, different weight, and different classification: a short rifle as opposed to a carbine. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 59)

The money order for the Carcano was placed in the mail on March 12, 1963. Through Holmes, we find that this transaction took place early in the morning of March 12, no later than 10:30 am. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 473; CE 773) Where was Lee Oswald at 10:30 a.m. on March 12, 1963? According to evidence in the Commission’s volumes, Lee Harvey Oswald’s time-card shows he was working at the graphic arts company Jaggars–Chiles–Stovall between the hours of 8:00 a.m. and 5:15 p.m. (CE1855)

The question becomes: if Lee Oswald was present at the post office at 10:30 am or earlier on March 12, 1963, to purchase a money order for the rifle, then who completed his assigned tasks during the time he was accounted for at work? Without any credible evidence to the contrary, these time cards are strong exculpatory evidence that gives Lee Oswald an alibi for when the rifle was ordered.

Defenders of the report like to cite the conclusions of the Commission that the writing on the Hidell money order, envelope, and order form matched the handwriting of Lee Harvey Oswald (WCR, p. 569) In reality, the handwriting analysis is the only evidence offered that Oswald ordered the rifle as Hidell. On the surface, this may seem to be compelling evidence against the accused. However, in conjugation with the exculpatory evidence listed in document CE1855, how could Oswald be present at the post office to place the money order, but at the same time be accounted for completing various duties at Jaggers?

When taken into consideration, all the known facts and regulation violations pertaining to the mail transaction itself, a credible explanation for this conundrum is this: Oswald’s handwriting on the money order is a forgery. There are professional forgers who can replicate someone’s handwriting so well that it would prove extremely difficult to differentiate between the subject’s actual handwriting and a replication of it through an external source. In his excellent article on this case entitled “Problems with the Case Against Lee Harvey Oswald,” Mike Griffith touches upon this point quite well with the following:

The famous “Oswald” note to “Mr. Hunt,” signed by Lee Harvey Oswald, is a case in point, according to lone-gunman theorists themselves. WC defenders now claim the note was faked by the KGB. Yet, three renowned handwriting experts examined the note and concluded it was written by Oswald. The HSCA’s handwriting experts could not decide if the handwriting on the note was Oswald’s, but their doubts centered on the signature. They said the text of the note was in handwriting that appeared to be Oswald’s. So, if the “Mr. Hunt” note could have been faked, then the money order, order form, and envelope certainly could have been faked as well.

What makes this explanation even more plausible is the fact that the Warren Report says that Oswald mailed the money order on March 12^th and it was received, processed, and deposited by Klein’s in Chicago in about one day. Chicago is nearly a thousand miles from Dallas/Fort Worth. Once Klein’s Sporting Goods was in receipt of daily deposits, they went through a sorting process to separate in-state checks and money orders from cash deposits and out-of-state checks and money orders. The particular deposit that Commission lawyer David Belin centered on as being Oswald’s with a Klein’s employee on the stand indicated a state check for $21.45. (Armstrong, pp. 474–75) Like the miraculous speed with which this money order arrived in Klein’s bank account, Belin never asked why it was in the wrong category.

Was Oswald’s box being monitored? This is an important question and, whilst there is no absolute proof that box 2915 was under surveillance, when you take into consideration that Oswald was officially recognized as a communist defector, that the FBI knew that he was receiving subversive mail through a subscription to The Worker, as well as the fact that the FBI knew that Oswald had indeed written to Vincent T. Lee of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, it is a valid deduction that his mail and box were being monitored. (Hosty Report CE 829)

We also find, contained in the report of FBI Special Agent James P. Hosty, quoted information which would only be known to any such recipient of Oswald’s letters.

Are we to believe that the FBI knew all about Oswald’s subscription to The Worker and the details of his dealings with the “FPCC,” but knew nothing of a rifle ordered to Oswald’s PO box under the name A. Hidell?

After the assassination, Postal Inspector Harry Holmes could find no one in the postal service who recalled handing a long package over to Oswald or anyone else. Warren Commission defenders would say this was because it was 8 months earlier in the year and mail clerks would handle a lot of mail and customers in that time-period. But the fact is, if one reads the pertinent section in the Warren Report, there is no date given as to when the rifle was given to Oswald. But if we accept the Commission’s scenario, then would not Oswald have had to prove he was Hidell? Could such an exception to the rule have been forgotten?

But further, if the FBI monitored things like Oswald’s subscriptions to leftist magazines, those who were tasked with such surveillance would surely have noticed such a large oblong box and, from experience, related it to a rifle. Yet, no one seems to have blinked an eye when a rifle arrived addressed to Oswald’s PO Box, albeit in someone else’s name.

II. Condition of the Murder Weapon

The operational condition of the Mannlicher Carcano also poses serious problems to the conclusions of the Commission. For, as told to me by weapons enthusiast Peter Antill of Dealey Plaza UK:

As far as the M38 Carcano found on the sixth floor of the TSBD goes, the question is not whether a Carcano could do the shooting, it’s whether that particular Carcano could do the shooting, given the state it was in.

The Carcano in question had a myriad of problems, both operational and mechanical, starting with its defective sight, as testified to by Mr. Simmons of the US Army: “We did adjust the telescopic sight by the addition of two shims, one which tended to adjust the azimuth and one which adjusted an elevation.”

With respect to the operation of the bolt, Simmons testified: “Yes, there were several comments made particularly with respect to the amount of effort required to open the bolt. As a matter of fact, Mr. Staley had difficulty in opening the bolt in his first firing exercise.”

Regarding the trigger pull:

There was also comment made about the trigger pull, which is different as far as these firers are concerned. It is in effect a two-stage operation where the first—in the first stage the trigger is relatively free and it suddenly required a greater pull to actually fire the weapon…In our experiments, the pressure to open the bolt was so great that we tended to move the rifle off the target. (WC, Vol.3, pp. 441–451)

It should also be noted that the Master riflemen, to whom the Commission relied so heavily upon in trying to establish if Oswald held the capacity to work the weapon, did not want to pull the trigger for fear of breaking the firing pin. (DiEugenio, p. 27) An FBI report dated August 20, 1964, from J. Edgar Hoover to chief counsel J. Lee Rankin of the Warren Commission stated that:

In connection, it should be noted that the firing pin of this rifle has been used extensively as shown by wear on the nose or striking portion of the firing pin and, further, the presence of rust on the firing pin and its spring may be an indication that the firing pin had not been recently changed prior to November 22,1963. (CE 2974, WC, Vol. 26, p. 455)

How could the alleged murder weapon be in such poor operational condition? Well, at the time of the assassination, the shipment of rifles which contained C2766 was the subject of a lawsuit. The rifles were claimed to be defective from the receivers Adam Consolidated Industries. CE1977 reads:

Concerning the shipment of those rifles to Adam Consolidated Industries Inc., there is presently a legal proceeding by the Carlo Riva Machine Shop to collect payment for the shipment of the rifles which Adam Consolidated Industries Inc., claims were defective. (CE 1977, WC, Vol. 24, p. 2)

Those rifles may have been defective, as Adam Consolidated Industries Inc claimed, because they were, in fact, cannibalized from other unusable rifles in poor condition. According to William Sucher, who had bought hundreds of thousands of rifles overseas from the Italian government surplus, “many of these rifles were collected from battlefields or places of improper storage.” Mr. Sucher further stated that “these weapons were in very poor condition.” According to his statements contained in Commission Exhibit 2562, “these rifles were bought by the pound rather than units. Upon arrival in Canada, defective parts were removed and salable rifles were sometimes composed of parts of three or more weapons.” (CE 2562, WC, Vol. 25, p. 808)

III. The Ammunition

It would be necessary for any prosecutor to try and establish Oswald’s procurement of the alleged assassination ammunition. Proving Oswald indeed possessed such ammunition would go a long way in proving his ownership of a Mannlicher Carcano prior to 11/22/63. The FBI made an extensive canvass of all the places of business which may have stocked the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano Western Cartridge Company ammunition. (See CE 2694) This search uncovered two stores in the Dallas/Irving area which stocked this specific ammunition. One was owned by John Thomas Masen, owner of Masen’s Gun Shop. The other was John H. Brinegarn, owner of The Gun Shop. The FBI furnished to Mr. Masen a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Mr Masen advised he was “unable to identify this individual as being a person to whom he had previously sold 6.5 ammunition.” Mr. Masen also stated that he bought some ten boxes of the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano Western Cartridge Company ammunition. He advised that if he had “sold more than a box or two to anyone person he would have remembered the sale” (CE2694, WC, Vol. 26, p. 63)

Masen gave a pretty definitive statement, saying he had never seen Oswald. Further, he had no recollection of ever having him enter into his shop or sold ammunition to him. (CE2694, WC, Vol. 26, p. 62)

The FBI also furnished a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald to John H. Brinegarn. According to the Commission volumes, “A Photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald was exhibited to Mr. Brinegarn and he advised he was unable to identify this individual as being a person to whom he had previously sold 6.5 ammunition…Mr. Brinegarn stated he did not know Lee Harvey Oswald, had no recollection of ever seeing him, and did not believe he had sold him any of this type ammunition.” (CE2694, p. 63)

If Oswald had become proficient with this weapon, which was a must according to the testimony of Simmons, then without question he would have exhausted a steady supply of ammunition to achieve such expertise. He would have frequented the premises of Masen and Brinegarn out of necessity to replenish his ammunition stock. This point becomes even more of a puzzler when we take into consideration what transpired after the assassination. Searches were carried out on two properties with alleged links to Oswald. One was located at 1026 North Beckley, Dallas, Oswald’s rooming house. The other was located at 2515 W. 5^th Street, Irving, where his belongings were held in Ruth and Michael Paine’s garage. The Dallas/Irving Police recovered not one single piece of ammunition for either the Mannlicher or the revolver. There was not a single filled or discarded box of ammunition, either Remington Peters or Winchester that was discovered. Another surprising absentee was that there was no oil to service the weapons or cleaning solution to keep the weapons clean and free from dirt, which can impact performance. As Sylvia Meagher postulates in her illustrious book Accessories After the Fact: “The alternative is that this singular assassin squandered more than $20 of his meager earnings for a rifle but—unable or unwilling to spend a small additional sum for ammunition—stole, borrowed, or found on the street five cartridges that just happened to fit the weapon; and that those five cartridges sufficed, from March through November 1963, for dry runs, attempted murder, and successful assassination.” (Meagher, p. 115).

The question of Oswald’s alleged procurement of any ammunition used in the crimes attributed to him, is one of these enduring mysteries that not one single person has ever offered a credible explanation for.

There is also a question of the reliability of the 6.5 Western Cartridge Company ammunition in circulation prior to 11/22/63.

This point was addressed in the Warren Commission’s Report. Under the heading of “Speculations and Rumors” on page 646 of the Warren Report we find the following:

Speculation—Ammunition for the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository had not been manufactured since the end of World War II. The ammunition used by Oswald must, therefore, have been at least 20 years old, making it extremely unreliable.

Commission Finding’s—The ammunition used in the rifle was American ammunition recently made by Western Cartridge Co., which manufactures such ammunition recently. In tests with the same kind of ammunition, experts fired Oswald’s Mannlicher Carcano rifle more than 100 times without any misfires.

This finding by the Commission was in stark contrast to the objections of the critics that the ammunition for the surplus WWII rifle was old and unreliable. In April of 1965, Sylvia Meagher wrote to Western Cartridge Company, the manufacturer of the Carcano ammunition. An official replied back to her query regarding the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano ammunition. The official confirmed to Mrs. Meagher that: “the ammunition had once been produced under a government contract, but was no longer available.” Meagher then sent further correspondence to Western regarding the ammunition. In a letter from Western dated April 20, 1965, “the manufacturer stated quite frankly that the reliability of the ammunition still in circulation today is questionable.” (Meagher, p. 113)

In reply to an independent inquiry regarding the ammunition, dated July 14, 1965, the Assistant Sales Manager for the Winchester-Western Division of Olin Mathieson wrote that concerning your inquiry on the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano cartridge, this is not being produced commercially by our company at this time. Any previous production on this cartridge was made against government contracts which were completed back in 1944.” (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgement, 50^th Anniversary edition, p. 107) In light of this, what did the Commission mean by the phrase “recently made.”

The Commission’s conclusion regarding the reliability of the 6.5mm Mannlicher Carcano Western Cartridge Company ammunition is not substantiated. The ammunition was not recently made by Western Cartridge Company. The ammunition was in fact last made by Western in 1944, meaning the ammunition allegedly used by Oswald would have been 19 years old on 11/22/63. And as pointed out to Mrs. Meagher, “the reliability of the ammunition still in circulation today is questionable.”

IV. The Paper Bag

Commission Conclusion: “Oswald carried this rifle into the Depository Building on the morning of November 22, 1963.” (WCR, p. 19)

Let us first take a look at the physical and scientific evidence pertaining to CE142. That exhibit is alleged to be a homemade paper sack comprised of the same material used in the Texas School Book Depository. The commission charged that Lee Oswald made the paper sack on 11/21/63 to conceal CE139 on his person on the morning of 11/22/63.

Some serious problems arise when talking about the validity of this charge. The most damning, of course, comes in the testimony of FBI Special Agent James Cadigan:

Eisenberg: Mr. Cadigan, did you notice when you looked at the bag whether there were—that is the bag found on the sixth floor, Exhibit 142—whether it had any bulges or unusual creases?

Cadigan: I was also requested at that time to examine the bag to determine if there were any significant markings or scratches or abrasions or anything by which it could be associated with the rifle, Commission Exhibit 139, that is, could I find any markings that I could tie to that rifle?

Eisenberg: Yes.

Cadigan: And I couldn’t find any such markings. (WC Vol. 4, p. 97)

CE142 cannot be scientifically or physically linked to CE139. Of course, this is not the only serious problem with regards to the conclusions about the sack outlined by the commission.

There is no pictorial evidence which depicts CE142 in situ around the south east corner window of the TSBD on 11/22/63. Warren Commission advocates desperately try to salvage the lack of pictorial evidence by asserting that a police officer must have prematurely removed the paper sack before the crime scene photographs were taken.

Question to the apologists: Doesn’t the removal of important key evidence from the scene of a crime—before any such scene is photographed for preservation purposes—constitute evidence tampering?

It gets worse when we find out that no evidence was removed until after “Lieutenant Day and Detective Studebaker came up and took pictures and everything.” (WC Vol. 7, pp. 97–98)

The Commission knew they had a serious problem with regards to the lack of any pictorial evidence depicting the bag in situ on the sixth floor, so out of necessity came CE1302. CE1302 is a manufactured depiction of where the paper sack was allegedly found on 11/22/63. Under the tag line “Approximate location of wrapping paper bag,” Studebaker of the DPD was instructed to draw a dotted line to simulate where the sack allegedly lay on the sixth floor as of 11/22/63.

Warren Commission Exhibit 1302

Mr. BALL: Do you recognize the diagram?

Mr. STUDEBAKER: Yes, sir.

Mr. BALL: Did you draw the diagram?

Mr. STUDEBAKER: I drew a diagram in there for the FBI, somebody from the FBI called me down—I can’t think of his name and he wanted an approximate location of where the paper was found. (WC Vol. 7, p. 144)

Not only does CE1302 hold little or no value as evidence, but the use of such an exhibit is legally and ethically questionable, especially in regard to the citation from Volume 7 quoted above. Namely, that no evidence was moved until after the pictures were taken. It’s inclusion within the exhibits of the report highlights the lengths the Commission went in order to place a “gun sack” on the sixth floor after the assassination.
Various officers who were present on the sixth floor testified to the presence of the paper sack. Below I have highlighted just some of the testimony pertaining to the subject.

Mr. BALL: Did you ever see a paper sack in the items that were taken from the Texas School Book Depository building?

Mr. HICKS: Paper bag?

Mr. BALL: Paper bag.

Mr. HICKS: No, sir; I did not. It seems like there was some chicken bones or maybe a lunch; no, I believe that someone had gathered it up.

Mr. BALL: Well, this was another type of bag made out of brown paper; did you ever see it?

Mr. HICKS: No, sir; I don’t believe I did. I don’t recall it. (Testimony of J.B. Hicks, WC, Vol. 7, pp. 286–289)

Testimony of Roger Craig:

Mr. BELIN: Was there any long sack laying in the floor there that you remember seeing, or not?

Mr. CRAIG: No; I don’t remember seeing any. (WC Vol. 6, p. 268)

Testimony of Gerald Hill:

Mr. HILL: The only specifics we discussed were this. You were asking Officer Hicks if either one recalled seeing a sack, supposedly one that had been made by the suspect, in which he could have possibly carried the weapon into the Depository and I, at that time, told you about the small sack that appeared to be a lunch sack, and that that was the only sack that I saw, and that I left the Book Depository prior to the finding of the gun. (WC, Vol. 7, p. 65)

As for the composition of the bag itself no eye witness ever testified that they saw the accused engage in the construction of the bag. In this regard, Troy West was a very important witness. He was the employee who dispensed paper and under who’s watchful gaze the materials for packing resided: paper, tape, and string. He told the Commission his station was on the first floor and he stayed there all day. (WC, Vol. 6, p. 362) He did not even leave to watch the motorcade on 11/22/63. He said that he knew who Oswald was. He testified that he had never witnessed Oswald attempt to make such a bag. (Ibid, p. 360)

Belin: Did you ever see him around these wrapper rolls or wrapper roll machines or not?

West: No, sir; I never noticed him being around.” (WC. Vol. 6, pp. 356–363)

As a British police investigator, the late Ian Griggs, noted, what makes this testimony rather bothersome are two other factors. First, West noted that it was not possible to take the tape out of the dispenser, since it was linked into a mechanical apparatus that applied water to it as it passed through. Secondly, as we shall see, the FBI claimed that the tape on the sack had the markings of this machine. (Griggs, No Case to Answer, p. 204)

I spoke to witness Buell Frazier regarding Oswald and the ride home to Irving on 11/21/63.

JC: On 11/21/63, prior to, during, or after you gave Lee Oswald a ride back to Irving, did you observe at any time Lee with a brown paper bag? Or materials to construct a brown paper bag?

BWF: No, I did not.

The materials for the paper sack were an exact match for paper materials which was used to construct a replica bag by the Dallas police on 11/22/63. This replica was designated by the tag CE677.

Exchange between staff lawyer Melvin Eisenberg and Commissioner Allen Dulles:

Dulles (to Eisenberg): Could we get—just before you continue there, would you identify what 142 is and 677 is?

Eisenberg: 142 is an apparently homemade paper bag which was found in the southeast corner of the sixth floor of the TSBD following the assassination, and which, for the record, is a bag which may have been used to carry this rifle,139, which was used to commit the assassination. 677 is a sample of paper and tape—and parenthetically, tape was used in the construction of 142. 677 is a sample of paper and tape obtained from the Texas School Book Depository on November 22, 1963, that is, the very day of the assassination.

Please note the fact that CE 677 was taken on 11/22/63. Furthermore, when comparing the paper samples from CE142 and CE677, the FBI’s James Cadigan testified as follows:

Eisenberg: In all these cases, did you make the examination both of the tape and the paper in each of the bag and the sample?

Cadigan: Oh, yes.

Eisenberg: And they were all identical?

Cadigan: Yes. (WC, Vol. 4, p. 93)

Two of Oswald’s prints were found on the paper bag. A partial print of his right palm and a partial print of his left index finger. Now Oswald was supposed to have constructed this bag from scratch. He had been deemed to have placed the Mannlicher inside of it, carried the bag to work, hid the bag, retrieved the bag, and emptied the bag of its contents in order to carry out the assassination. All that alleged handling of CE142 and Oswald only somehow managed to get “part of a right palm print” and “part of a left index print” on it?

If Oswald made and handled CE 142 in the way outlined by the Commission, then undoubtedly his prints would have been all over it. The fact that only “part of a right palm print” and “part of a left index print” are alleged to have been found on the bag, is just not credible to me and is in itself indicative of a frame up.

But don’t take my word for it. Ian Griggs probably has the longest and most thorough analysis of this issue in the literature. It is 35 pages long and he examines the testimony of 17 witnesses. At the end of that essay, the former police inspector makes a series of conclusions about this evidence. Among them are that there is no photograph of the sack in situ since it did not exist at the time. The Commission actually used three exhibit numbers for it in order to confuse the matter: 142, 364, 626. The middle exhibit number was a replica bag to show to witnesses, since the original was damaged too much during testing. As Griggs writes, that excuse “is just too ridiculous to consider seriously.” (Griggs, p. 208)

That comment could be applied to everything discussed so far.

Go to Part 2

June 12, 2021
The Ordeal of Malcolm Perry

On the afternoon of the JFK assassination, within an hour or two after his death, there was a press conference at Parkland Hospital. Three important pronouncements were made. In fact, they were so important that they should have shaped the case in a permanent manner.

First, acting press secretary Malcolm Kilduff talked about how Kennedy had died.

Malcolm Kilduff at Parkland press briefing

When he did so, he pointed to his right temple and said something like: it was a matter of a bullet through the head. Very shortly after, Chet Huntley said the same thing live on NBC television. On the air, he revealed his source to be Dr. George Burkley, President Kennedy’s own personal physician.

Dr. Kemp Clark, chief of neurosurgery—the man who actually pronounced Kennedy dead—said he observed a large gaping hole in the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 80) Dr. Malcolm Perry, who cut a tracheostomy across the bullet wound in Kennedy’s neck, said that the wound was one of entrance. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, p. 367)

Therefore, from these three pieces of evidence, one would have had to conclude that Kennedy was hit from the front. That implication would be almost inescapable. Therefore, some strange things happened with this key press conference. First of all, there is no film available of it today, which is remarkable in and of itself, because, as one can see from pictures and film snippets, there were many reporters in that conference room. It is very hard to comprehend how not one of them called for a film camera to cover the initial public pronouncement of President Kennedy’s death. Second, initially, the Secret Service told the Warren Commission that they did not even have a transcript of this conference. According to former Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) analyst Doug Horne, there are two real problems with the Secret Service saying this. First, according to Horne, the Secret Service went around collecting the films of this press conference. Thus making it disappear. (See Horne at Future of Freedom Foundation conference of May 18^th. This is at the FFF web site.)

But further, the Secret Service lied to the Commission about having the transcript. In responding to Commission counsel Arlen Specter’s request, Chief of the Secret Service James Rowley wrote a letter to chief counsel J. Lee Rankin. He said that he could not locate either the films or the transcript of this press conference. (DiEugenio, p. 367) As the ARRB proved, this was a lie, because they found a transcript of that press conference that was time stamped, “Received US Secret Service 1963 Nov. 26 AM 11:40”. (ibid) Does it get much worse than that? In other words, the Warren Commission’s own investigators were keeping important pieces of evidence from them—and then lying about it.

As most of us know, Perry was pressured to alter his first day story. By the time of his appearance before the Commission, he now said that the edges of the wound were neither ragged nor clean and that the wound could have been an exit or entrance. Gerald Ford got him to say that the reporting from the press conference was inaccurate. Allen Dulles applied the icing on the cake: he said Perry should issue a retraction—which, of course, he just had. (DiEugenio, pp. 166–67)

The reason Ford and Dulles could do this is because, in all probability, the Secret Service had absconded with the films and the transcript. But further, Perry had been worked on. As the Church Committee had discovered, a man named Elmer Moore had taken it upon himself to convert Perry to the Commission’s point of view. Moore was a Secret Service agent who was forwarded to work for the Commission. One of his first assignments was to take up a desk at Parkland Hospital and convince the doctors there that they were wrong and the autopsy report was correct. One of his priority targets was Perry. (DiEugenio, p. 167)

As Pat Speer later discovered, this story about Moore gets even worse. After he performed his assignment in Dallas so effectively, he got a promotion to a longer term one. He became the aide de camp to Commission Chairman Earl Warren. (DiEugenio, p. 168)

But it was not just Moore—and it was not just a couple of weeks later. As Horne stated during that FFF conference, Nurse Audrey Bell testified that Perry told her he was getting calls that evening directing him to alter his testimony.(DiEugenio, p. 169) This is now backed up by a startling piece of evidence surfaced by author Rob Couteau. Martin Steadman was a reporter at the time of the JFK assassination. Couteau discovered a journal entry by Martin that is online. Steadman was stationed in Dallas for several days after the assassination gathering information. Some of it got in print and some of it did not. From all indications, the following did not.

One of the witnesses he spent some time with in Dallas was Malcolm Perry. Steadman was aware of what Perry had said at the press conference about the directionality of the neck wound. Steadman wrote that, about a week after the assassination, he and two other journalists were with Perry in his home. During this informal interview, Perry said he thought it was an entrance wound because the small circular hole was clean. He then added two important details. He said he had treated hundreds of patients with similar wounds and he knew the difference between an exit and entrance wound. Further, hunting was a hobby of his, so he understood from that experience what the difference was. And he could detect it at a glance.

Steadman went on to reveal something rather surprising. Perry said that during that night, he got a series of phone calls to his home from the doctors at Bethesda. They were very upset about his belief that the neck wound was one of entrance. They asked him if the Parkland doctors had turned over the body to see the wounds in Kennedy’s back. Perry replied that they had not. They then said: how could he be sure about the neck wound in light of that? They then told him that he should not continue to say that he cut across an entrance wound, when there was no evidence of a shot from the front. When Perry insisted that he could only say what he thought to be true, something truly bizarre happened. Perry said that one or more of the autopsy doctors told him that he would be brought before a Medical Board if he continued to insist on his story. Perry said they threatened to take away his license.

After Perry finished this rather gripping tale, everyone was silent for a moment. Steadman then asked him if he still thought the throat wound was one of entrance. After a second or so, Perry said: yes, he did.

What is so remarkable about this story is that it blows the cover off of the idea that the autopsy doctors did not know about the anterior neck wound until the next day. Not only did they know about it that night, they were trying to cover it up that night.

But things always get worse in the JFK case. And this issue does also, because, if the reader can comprehend it, that night was not the first time Perry was told to revise his story—or to just plain shut up. Bill Garnet and Jacque Lueth have written, produced, and directed a documentary called The Parkland Doctors. It was shown at the CAPA Houston mock trial a few years back, but only to those in attendance, not to the viewing audience. Robert Tanenbaum is the host of the documentary. He let me see it at his home two years ago. It is a good and valuable film, since it features seven of the surviving doctors at that time, 2018.

Towards the end of the program, Dr. Robert McClelland made a bracing comment about Perry. He said that as Perry was walking out of the afternoon press conference, a man in a suit and tie grabbed him by the arm. After he got his attention, he forcefully said to Malcolm, “Don’t you ever say that again!” I turned to Tanenbaum and said: “This is about ninety minutes after Kennedy was pronounced dead.” Tanenbaum said, “Jim, they knew within the hour.” At the very least, someone knew that there had to be a cover story snapped on.

Malcolm Perry was a victim of a large-scale crime. The evidence above indicates that the cover up was planned with the conspiracy. I would love to know who that well-dressed man who accosted him was.

One last point. When Elmer Moore was asked to appear before the Church Committee, he brought a lawyer with him. (DiEugenio, p. 168)

May 24, 2021
The JFK Records – Will President Biden Obey the Law?
If you are interested in the public release of the JFK assassination records, this is a critical point in time. If you have paid a little attention to this subject, the logical questions are: “Weren’t all the JFK records released in 2017 as required by the JFK Records Collection Act?” And, “Why is this a critical point in time?”

The answer to the first question is that over 15,000 assassination records are still withheld partially or in full by the National Archives. The answer to the second question is that the President, the National Archives, and agencies still withholding these records are facing critical deadlines in 2021.

You may be asking: “Why is the government facing critical deadlines in 2021, when all records were supposed to be released by 2017?” Here is what happened and I will also explain why the American public should be angry and demand action.

As I’ve written about previously, the JFK Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Act”) required the full public disclosure of all assassination records by October 26, 2017. This was not a random deadline. The deadline was precisely twenty-five (25) years following the creation of the JFK Act, which required each assassination record to be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017.

The only way President Trump could sidestep this complete declassification was through written certification stating that:
1. continued postponement was necessary because of an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and
2. the identifiable harm was of such gravity that it outweighed the public interest in full disclosure.
As investigative journalist Jefferson Morley wrote about last month, some 15,834 assassination-related records are still withheld in full or in part by the Executive Branch and agencies who created these records. You can read Mr. Morley’s excellent article on this subject at the following link: Federal Agencies Face April Deadline on Secret JFK Files (justsecurity.org).

So, what actually happened in October of 2017? A week before the October 26, 2017 deadline, President Trump tweeted that he was looking forward to the full release of the JFK assassination records and that all records would be released by the deadline. Well, that did not happen. Even worse, Trump and the Executive Branch blatantly violated the JFK Act. On the eve of the deadline, presumably after meeting with CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump issued an executive “memorandum” giving the federal agencies another six (6) months to comply with their obligations under the JFK Act. There was no mechanism or authority in the JFK Act for President Trump to do this. To justify postponement past October 26, 2017, Trump was required to issue a written certification explaining, for each and every record, why postponement was proper under the clear standards of the JFK Act. I have written in the past in detail about those clear standards. Essentially, Trump was supposed to explain in writing, for each record, why 1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and 2) why such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

Instead, on October 26, 2017, President Trump issued an executive memorandum stating that he had “no choice” but to continue postponement for an additional 180 days because of concerns over “national security, law enforcement and foreign affairs.” Trump, in regards to an assassination that occurred 54 years in the past, asserted that full public disclosure of the JFK Records would allow potentially “irreversible harm” to the Nation’s security. Trump then ordered all agencies to re-review each and every withheld record over that 180-day period and failing a demonstration from the agencies that a record met the standard for proper postponement under the JFK Act, public disclosure would be required for all JFK Records by April 26, 2018.

A six (6) month delay was frustrating, but seemed reasonable given that the Executive Branch and agencies in charge of these records seemingly did nothing since the winding-up of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) in the 1990’s. So, what happened? On April 26, 2018, based on a recommendation from the (National) Archivist, President Trump issued a second executive memorandum giving agencies an additional three (3) years to review withheld records and make recommendations to the Archivist regarding its intent to postpone disclosure past October 26, 2021. Yes, you read that correctly. October of 2021.

In that memorandum of April 26, 2018, Trump claimed that all executive departments and agencies had complied with his prior order to review all information within postponed records and inform the Archivist of the specific reason(s) for continued postponement under section 5(g)(2)(D) of the JFK Act. He cites the “identifiable harm” standard from the JFK Act discussed above and then broadly states that he “agreed with the Archivist’s recommendation” that continued postponement is necessary under the standards of the JFK Act. He then ordered agencies again to “re-review” any redactions (in the records) or decisions on complete withholding over the next 3 years. While Trump’s April 26, 2018, statement contained the key “buzz words” in the JFK Act for decisions on postponement, this action again did not come close to meeting the standards of the JFK Act for postponement. By October 26, 2017, at the very latest, all government agencies were required to provide to the Archivist an unclassified “identification aid” stating the specific facts, based on clear and convincing evidence, warranting a legitimate postponement decision. Those facts must deal with a threat to current military or intelligence operations, a current living person or agent who would be at risk from disclosure of records, or other current sources and methods that required legitimate protection in 2018. President Trump essentially let the executive branch and other agencies skip over this critical identification step in the JFK Act, meaning that continued postponement past October 26, 2021 is almost a certainty due to a lack of accountability. Was skipping this step just lethargy, or is it a continued attempt to withhold assassination history from the public? The only way we will know is seeing the records.

There has been no media attention on the most recent deadline, which was April 26, 2021. In Trump’s April 26, 2018 memorandum, he required each agency (that seeks postponement past October 26, 2021) to identify (to the Archivist) the specific basis for continued postponement under the JFK Act. The Archivist is supposed to make recommendations on continued postponement to President Biden no later than September 26, 2021. Then, President Biden will have 30 days to make final decisions on disclosure by October 26, 2021. This is very interesting because, according to Trump’s memorandum, all agencies had purportedly done their jobs by April 26, 2018, satisfied the Archivist, and then Trump supposedly had agreed with the Archivist’s recommendations on over 15,000 records. If this was the case, why did the agencies get another 3 years to do the same job? And how is the Archivist supposed to do the job by September 26, 2021 without the identification aids from agencies? And how in the world is President Biden supposed to finish the job in 30 days when September 26, 2021 arrives? The simple answer is that the President and the Archivist cannot do their jobs, because the executive branch and other agencies have seemingly ignored the JFK Act and Trump’s executive orders. If they are paying attention to the act and presidential orders, and not ignoring them, the clear reason for inaction is that the agencies don’t want the President, the Archivist, and the American public to know what is in the JFK records.

If the status quo continues, it is easy to see how the President, the Archivist, and various agencies can keep using their “discretion” to continue these unjustified and illegal delays. They will continue postponement by making it appear that they are complying with the JFK Act, but they are really not. The public is entitled to unclassified and specified written reasons for postponement under specific criteria in the JFK Act. If there are legitimate reasons for postponement under the JFK Act, so be it. The law is the law and it is a very good law in terms of public interest and transparency when it comes to the JFK assassination. This article is not aimed at proving a conspiracy in the assassination. It is simply about compliance with the JFK Act and our government offices and agencies following the law.

Fortunately, experienced researchers and attorneys are paying attention. Attorney Larry Schnapf has sent a letter and legal memorandum to Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, calling for oversight hearings and enforcement of the JFK Act. That letter can be viewed here: (jfkfacts.org)). I strongly encourage readers of this article to contact these Congressional committees in support of Mr. Schnapf’s excellent and thorough letter. Congressional oversight committees clearly have authority and a duty under the JFK Act to require action from the Executive Branch and government agencies that are withholding these records from the American public. The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), which advises the President on declassification issues, intends to address the status of JFK Act compliance on May 18, 2021. That is a very good development. Hopefully the PIDB will properly advise President Biden on the clear standards of the JFK Act and the need for compliance.

If Congress and the PIDB do not collectively act on this important issue, there are also legal remedies. I am working with Larry Schnapf and a group of attorneys to develop a plan for private legal action, should that become necessary. Our hope is that there is enough information before Congressional oversight committees and the PIDB, but considering the unjustified and illegal delays we have seen since 2017, there will be a plan in place to get the federal courts involved.

The one thing I do agree with in Trump’s April 26, 2018, memorandum is the following statement:

Any agency that seeks further postponement beyond this certification shall take note of the findings of the Act, which state, among other things, that only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records. The need for continued protection can only grow weaker with the passage of time from this congressional finding.

The President said this in 2018, when Congress had already declared in 1992 that postponement of records should be rare and that clear and convincing evidence was needed to withhold a record from the public.

We have to remember that two government bodies concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy. In 1964, the Warren Commission (WC) concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy on his own and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. The WC also concluded that there was no connection to the murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) also concluded in 1978 that Oswald killed Kennedy, but that there was a probable conspiracy involving two gunmen. The HSCA concluded in its final report that anti-Castro Cuban groups and organized crime, as a group, did not assassinate Kennedy. But the HSCA also concluded that “the available evidence does not preclude” those possibilities. If one or both of these government bodies’ conclusions are correct regarding the JFK assassination, there should have been no legitimate reason for postponing release of records in 1978. In 1992, Congress then declared that protection of JFK Records was legitimate only in the rarest of cases. In 2017 and 2018, it would seem ludicrous for the President and the Archivist to continue to find proper reasons for postponement, especially when you consider the conclusions of the WC and HSCA. Yet, the Executive Branch and agencies got 3 more years to “re-review” the JFK Records. April 26, 2021, has come and gone with no announcement from President Biden or the Archivist confirming that the work has been done by the agencies. Congress has yet to hold any oversight hearings to ensure compliance. Enough is enough, especially after 58 years.
May 13, 2021
Bending the Story on a Bent Bullet
In October of 2017, I posted this story on WhoWhatWhy, “Navy Doctor: Bullet Found in JFK’s Limousine, and Never Reported.”

If you’re familiar with the medical evidence in the matter of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, you may know that, during the president’s autopsy, skull fragments found in the limousine and street were brought to the autopsy table. What you may not know is that something else was allegedly found in the limousine and brought up with the skull fragments—but not reported.

Decades later, Dr. Randy Robertson, a board member of the Assassination Archives and Research Center, came upon obscure documents concerning this important piece of evidence.

According to Navy doctor James Young, a bullet was included in an envelope with the bone fragments and he had a chance to inspect it before passing it on to the pathologists. He wasn’t sure if it was made of copper or brass, but here’s what he said about its shape:

“…it was slightly bent on the end. It was not a straight bullet. In other words, it had hit something and it bent…”

For more details on Young’s account, please scroll down to Appendix A.

Recently, the very existence of that bullet has been challenged. This report is strictly in response to that specific challenge.

It appears in one segment—point 4—of a much longer article, “Summary of Robertson’s Salient Mistakes” by Gary Aguilar, MD, Douglas DeSalles, MD, and Bill Simpich, JD.

In Point 4, the authors focus on discrediting two people: James Young, the Navy doctor who said he saw the bullet, and Randy Robertson, who believed him.

Issue 1

The authors say, “Dr. Young used the term ‘slug’ to describe it and it is on this term that Robertson builds his case that a ‘whole bullet’ was found in the limousine.”

It seems far more likely that Robertson saw the “slug” as a whole bullet simply because of Young’s description of it—which the authors do not include in their paper.

Young used the term “Bullet” with greater frequency than the word “slug.” He said “bullet,” about six times in the Oral History interview and three times in his letter to Gerald Ford.

They reinforce this false premise: “After doing the Oral History interview, Young wrote to President Gerald Ford asking Ford if he knew anything about the ‘brass slug’ Chiefs Mills and Martinelli [sic] had found in the limo. Ford replied, ‘No, he didn’t know anything about it, had not heard anything about it ever.’”

It appears that Aguilar et al. did not read much of the material, not even the short bits. “Bullet” is hard to miss in this correspondence. From Young to Ford:

Two of the corpsmen left and returned sometime later with three varying sized pieces of President Kennedy’s skill bones. In addition, they brought back in an envelope a spent misshapen bullet which they had found on the back floor of the “Queen Mary” where they had found the pieces of skull bones. The bullet and pieces of skull were given to Dr. Jim Humes.

I have never seen anything written about that spent bullet in the Warren Report or elsewhere. Do you recall any testimony or comments which would clarify my concerns?

From Ford to Young:

As a member of the Warren Commission I was very conscientious about my participation in the hearings. However, I have no recollection of “the spent bullet” you refer to.

Young also said that he would ask Arlen Specter to “look into what happened to that bullet.”

The above makes it clear that Young frequently referred to a “bullet,” and much less frequently, called it a “slug.” So, why fault Randy Robertson for assuming Young was talking about a bullet when that is exactly what he called it?

More important, whatever shape the bullet was in, it was an important piece of evidence that went unreported.

Issue 2

The authors assert that Young confused the little fragment (CE 569) shown below with a whole bullet:

No ‘non-fragmented bullet with a bent tip’ ever existed. Robertson made up its existence out of an ambiguity in Young’s use of the term ‘slug.’ No ‘complete bullet’ was ever found in the limousine. Dr. Young was referring to Q3, later designated C3, and even later designated CE 569.

How could Young have been referring to that little fragment—the base of a bullet, not the tip—when he never even saw it? He did not go down to the garage with the petty officers. Nor did those officers bring it back to the autopsy. Those fragments were turned over immediately to the FBI. And that fragment (CE 569) does not remotely resemble what Young described.

Dr. Aguilar’s argument has all the credibility of what a man told the judge when he was being tried for shooting his mink-encased mother-in-law in the family garage. He said, “Your honor, I thought it was a raccoon!”

Issue 3

Aguilar et al. present a “foundational document” on the fragments discovered in the car, a document that does not mention a whole bullet—so we are to believe the bullet never existed:

This is all Robertson says about Dr. Young and the ‘bent brass slug’ that Chief Mills or Marinelli [sic] found on the floor of the Presidential limousine. This is odd since one of the most foundational documents in the case—Commission Document 80, a 15-page document including photos and another SS Report—tells in granular detail how the various fragments were discovered on the evening of November 22^nd.

We in the research community have seen many documents that are false, misleading, incomplete, or otherwise not reliable.

A passage in this “foundational” document contains intriguing information that may explain how the bullet, or whatever Young was talking about, could have been picked up by Martinell and carried—but unseen—because it was submerged in brain. (And this might explain why FBI firearms expert Robert A. Frazier never saw it.) (See Appendix B for a longer quote from the “foundational” document, CD 80.)

They then recovered a three-inch triangular section of skull. Martinell also recovered what was apparently a quantity of brain tissue from the back seat of the car.

Question 1: Could that “quantity of brain tissue” have embedded the bullet, or whatever Young called a bullet, so that it was—at the time—out of sight?

Question 2: Whether it contained any metal or not, why didn’t Humes report that “quantity of brain tissue” when he reported the bone fragments? After all, it’s evidence. There should be a description of it, and whether it was searched for bullet fragments. (Humes reported plenty of trivia, so why not this?) Could that brain tissue have been cerebellum?

But then Humes was quite deceitful when it came to reporting things directly related to the wounds. For instance, incredibly, he never even mentioned the gross condition of the cerebellum in the autopsy report or his testimony. Not one word on how much of it was left. We only have Parkland Hospital’s descriptions of the organ (very damaged, half of it missing…) This was one of the most talked about pieces of gore in all the literature on the head wound. I seem to be the only one concerned with this omission. (Click here for details)

A related mystery: Clint Hill and others have said that hair was attached to the large bone fragment. That hair should have been documented, combed for bullet fragments—and used to help identify where the bone fragment came from. His hair was longish on top, but considerably shorter in back. What happened to it?

Question 3: Why didn’t Aguilar et al. mention this “quantity of brain” picked up by the petty officer along with the skull fragments—and not reported? It is clearly relevant.

And here’s a discrepancy that may have a mundane explanation, but should be noted:

Aguilar et al. said, “This ‘whole bullet’ is never mentioned in the notes FBI Agent Robert Frazier kept during his forensic examination of the limousine at the Secret Service garage between 2:00 AM and 4:30 AM on the morning of November 23rd.”

But, according to the “foundational document,” the petty officers who picked up the bone fragments and Secret Service agents arrived much earlier—at 10:00 PM.

[Re the question about why the bullet was not mentioned by Frazier, the above may explain it. Or not.]

Issue 4

The authors try to close the case and snuff out Dr. Young’s contribution:

Now with the whole story of what happened in the White House garage fully described in various reports, whatever Dr. Young thought he was seeing is rendered irrelevant. We know what happened. It was not just Martinelli [sic] and Mills who searched the limousine…

“Rendered irrelevant?” Not so fast.

“We know what happened.” Aguilar doesn’t seem aware of the simplest, most basic, most relevant facts upon which to base his theory—that Young confused the little fragment found in the front of the car with the less damaged bullet Young says was found in the back of the car and brought to the autopsy table along with the skull fragments.

The Basic facts need repeating:
- Young never even saw that little fragment. He stayed in the autopsy room and never went down to the garage where the limousine was, and where the front seat fragments were found. Petty officers were sent.
- The front seat fragments were turned over to the FBI and whisked away. (Commission Exhibits 567 and 569)
- The front seat fragments were NOT brought back to the autopsy table.
- So how could James Young have confused a spent bullet (or any form of a bullet) with CE 569 which is the hollow base of a bullet—with no tip, bent or otherwise?
When it comes to this case, it’s hard to know what to believe. But sometimes we know what not to believe. Considering all the deception we have seen, all the lies by major players about major issues, the planting of evidence, the destruction of evidence—why is it so hard to believe James Young?

Aguilar et al. seem to believe official stories:

The other bullet fragment found in the front seat area is shown in figure 31. The simplest explanation is clearly that CE 567 dropped down into the front seat area after striking the windshield at 328/329. CE 569 likewise dropped into the front seat area at 328/329 after striking the rear-facing chrome strip shown in Figure 30.

As the authors know very well, the “stretcher bullet” was planted. Yet they trust the government version on the front seat fragments. While I have no reason to doubt that claim—I have no reason to believe it either.

And I keep remembering something Roy Kellerman said. He’s the Secret Service agent who sat in the front passenger seat of JFK’s limousine, the place where the fragments were found. From his interview with the HSCA:

Kellerman recalled that when he was in the car just moments after the shots he observed “a splattering of metal around me.” And he said there had to be “four or five metal fragments in the car.”

Four or five? Had to be? But only two were reported. (I’m assuming he was not referring to tiny lead particles. Those were probably too numerous to count.) This could have an innocent explanation, but not necessarily.

And then there’s the odd story of the undertaker who said a federal agent had shown him a glass vial filled with fragments taken from Kennedy’s head – 10 fragments. Yet, the lead pathologist said he only removed two fragments. (ARRB MD 180, p.3) (Someone else made a similar claim, but I can’t remember who.)

In most of these cases of gross discrepancies, it’s impossible to find hard proof of who is right. But there is one thing you can prove: when a person makes a false claim about what is, or is not, in a particular document. Whether the false claim is a lie, or a mistake, is a matter of judgment.

Personal Note

I know all three of the authors (Aguilar, DeSalles, and Simpich) quoted above and suspect the ideas expressed in Point (4) of the larger paper are mostly those of Dr. Aguilar, whose work was trusted by the other two, but that’s just my theory. And I believe they dashed out that article too quickly, in defense of a comrade, Josiah Thompson, whose book Randy Robertson has harshly criticized. I can sympathize with this impulse. The problem is—they did it at the expense of James Young, who seems to have done nothing to deserve such disrespect. And if they succeed in snuffing out all references to this unprovable, but still interesting bit of evidence, then they also did it at the expense of future research.

Addendum

One theory about what happened to the bullet James Young said he saw:
A family member of the late George Burkley, Kennedy’s personal physician, reportedly told researcher John Titus that “something relating to the assassination—something very important—was stolen from Dr. Burkley as he traveled between airports on his way to Denver.”

Click here to read Titus’s story about what happened when he reported this to former Warren Commissioner David Slawson. And click here for more.

Appendix A

James Young, MD, one of Kennedy’s personal physicians who attended the autopsy, believes he witnessed something strange that was never reported anywhere, apparently.

Soon after the autopsy, he wrote a memoir about what he saw for his children. He revisited that memoir in 2001 during an interview with the US Navy Medical Department Oral History Program.

The lead pathologist, James Humes, MD, said bones were missing from JFK’s head, and asked two petty officers (Chiefs Thomas Mills and William Martinell) to retrieve any bone fragments left in the president’s car. (p. 53)

They came back with an envelope that contained three pieces of skull as well as a “brass slug about half a centimeter in diameter and distorted.” Later in the interview he said:

I came across this issue of the bullet [while looking at the memoir]…

They picked up the bullet off of the floor in the back of the car. Well, I decided that this is something, you know, the third bullet has never been decided about ever, apparently…I went through the entire Warren Commission book…I went through the whole thing and there was nothing in it.

Now, at that particular time nobody said anything about this. And I know what we did. We brought that in, I mean Chief Martinell and Chief Mills went…got the stuff off of the floor in the back seat, brought it back out to us and we gave that to Commander Humes at the time…

[…]

So, the bullet, again, was a copper jacketed bullet like a military bullet?

No, it was a brass jacket…I don’t know, maybe it was copper, I couldn’t tell. But it was that color or brass and it was slightly bent on the end. It was not a straight bullet. In other words, it had hit something and it bent…and so I called Tom Mills and I said, “Tom do you recall this situation?’ He said, ‘Yes I do’ and he said, ‘You’re exactly right.’ He said, ‘We did bring that slug out from the back…’

The last time Young tried to talk to Mills, Mills said he didn’t want to talk about it. He’s not the only one.

Appendix B

From Aguilar et al.’s paper: On the Mary Ferrell site it is described as “Commission Document 80 – Secret Service Report of 06 Jan. 1964 re: Presidential car.” Below is a photocopy of a paragraph from page 2 of the Report:
April 23, 2021
Inside Clay Shaw’s Defense Team: The Wegmann Files

From the May-June, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 4) of Probe

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

April 18, 2021
Bill and Ed’s Washington Adventure

From the July-August, 1997 issue (Vol. 4 No. 5) of Probe

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

April 18, 2021
Tom Bethell: A Study in Duplicity

Tom Bethell passed away last month at the age of 84. He capped his career as a longtime conservative critic of science. This included his disagreements with HIV being the cause of AIDS, manmade global warming, and Darwin’s theory of evolution. In 2005, he wrote a book called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, which aired all these points. As Rational Wiki notes, the theme of that book,

is Bethell’s conspiratorial perspective in which the scientific establishment is constantly sidelining “politically incorrect” dissent in order for scientists to prop up liberal ideology and make off with mountains of grant money.

Bethell published books through houses like Regnery and The Discovery Institute. Quite properly, he ended his career as being a senior editor at American Spectator and, for 25 years, was a media fellow for the Hoover Institute at Stanford.

The way Bethell spent the last 45 years of his life makes his earlier work on the John Kennedy assassination seem a bit odd. I am not saying that conservatives cannot have an interest in the JFK case. That is disproven by the works of John Newman and Craig Roberts. But those two men are not at all the type of conservative that Bethell became. Tom Bethell ended up making his living off of the massive rightwing establishment that came to fruition in the seventies and eighties. In other words, unlike Newman and Roberts, he lived off and prospered from that conservative gravy train—as so many other authors like him did. To that particular kingdom, one does not gain entry by exposing all the problems with the Warren Commission Report. A prime example of this would be Bill O’Reilly and his conversion by the Fox impresario, the late Roger Ailes. (Click here for background)

In understanding Bethell, it’s important to go back to the beginning. Bethell was born in London. He was educated at Downside School and then Trinity College at Oxford. He reportedly spent time in England as a school teacher. (New Orleans Times Picayune, July 2, 1967) The story of how he ended up going from England to New Orleans was that he developed an interest in jazz. If this was so, then it’s strange that he did not publish a book on the subject until 1977, over ten years after he arrived in America.

But somehow, he also developed an interest in the John Kennedy assassination. In putting together a rough itinerary for Bethell, it seems he first arrived in the USA in Virginia. He then moved to New Orleans. But then, in a notable twist, he went to Texas. Gayle Nix Jackson and Andrea Skolnik have uncovered an article by the late Penn Jones written in The Continuing Inquiry in October of 1976 that details how this happened.

Penn had purchased a letter written by Jack Ruby which had been smuggled out of the Dallas County Jail. Jones purchased the letter for $950 from document collector/examiner Charles Hamilton in New York. Black Star, a photographic publishing company, heard about the sale. They sent Matt Herron, a free-lance photographer living in New Orleans, to visit Penn in Midlothian, Texas. Herron introduced Penn to a former Englishman who had moved to the Crescent City to study jazz, but was also interested in the JFK case. This, of course, was Bethell. According to Penn, Bethell ended up staying with him for a long time, actually months. It appears the stay was from the end of 1966 to the beginning of 1967. Why he needed to stay that long was never explained by either Jones or Bethell. But it’s worth noting that it was really Jones and his friend Mary Ferrell who were the locus of the early Texas research community. As we shall see, Ferrell will later figure into the unusual journey of Mr. Jazz and JFK.

After this strange interlude, Bethell returned to New Orleans and went to work for DA Jim Garrison on his assassination inquiry. It is not easy to figure out how this happened. But in one rendition of the story, it occurred through the intervention of Sylvia Meagher. This had to have happened before she turned on Garrison and she likely heard of Bethell through Jones, who she shared a correspondence with. (Click here for info on that split)

Bethell went to work as a researcher and then also became Garrison’s archivist. The one positive achievement in two years that I can detect from Bethell is a trip he took to the National Archives in June of 1967. Because of his work there, Bethell reported that it was apparent “that the CIA knew a great deal about Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination.” (Op. Cit, New Orleans Times Picayune) For that newspaper report, Bethell also said that many Commission Documents originating from the CIA about Oswald were still classified and there was evidence that some CIA documents concerning the alleged assassin never got to the Commission at all.

With that in mind, it’s important to read an interesting piece by Jackson. (Click here for details) She includes some segments from Bethell’s diary, which state that he and reporter Dick Billings did not think there was a conspiracy on the part of the government, the Commission, or the FBI to cover up the truth in the JFK case. But yet, how does one reconcile this with the CIA concealment of those documents about Oswald? And make no mistake about it, based on the work of Jefferson Morley, and the newly declassified work of Betsy Wolf—via Malcolm Blunt—the CIA had a lot to hide about their relationship with Oswald. It was not, in any way, a benign type of avoidance. It extended back to before Oswald’s defection. Yet Bethell was oh so willing to take that benign alternative path.

Jackson continues with Bethell extracts. The Englishman also agrees with Billings on the issue of Life magazine—where Billings worked—not really suppressing the Zapruder film. After all, people could see it at the National Archives. This is utterly ridiculous. The impact of the film on the public was demonstrated in 1975, when it was shown on ABC television. It created a nationwide sensation and this caused the creation of a new JFK investigation by congress. The idea that suppression was really not the magazine’s intent is undermined by the fact that, after the firestorm was created, Life gave the film back to the Zapruder family.

There are two concluding aspects that should be noted about Jackson’s article. First, Billings and Bethell were both cognizant of the aborted New York Times reinvestigation of the Kennedy case. Bethell says that in November of 1966 during one of Penn Jones’ memorials for Kennedy in Dallas, he met up with New York Times reporter Martin Waldron. At that time, Waldron had a 4–5 page questionnaire of problems they were looking into as part of the renewed inquiry. Most of these questions were about New Orleans, specifically about David Ferrie. And as Bethell concludes: this was independent of Garrison, and possibly even pre-Garrison. This information dovetails with a recently declassified CIA document from January of 1967. That document states that in December of 1966, Times reporter Peter Khiss had told an informant that he was working on a full-scale expose of the Warren Report. It would find that the Report’s conclusions “were not as reliable as first believed.” (CIA Memorandum of January 23, 1967)

But yet, in spite of this, Bethell writes that he agrees with Billings: somehow Clay Shaw is completely innocent. Recall, at this time, Bethell is the archivist for Garrison’s files. Jim Garrison had several witnesses who informed him that Clay Shaw was Clay/Clem Bertrand. (Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 121–27; Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp. 85–87). He also had several witnesses that placed Shaw with Oswald and David Ferrie in the Clinton/Jackson area in the summer of 1963. (Garrison, pp. 105–17; Mellen pp. 211–22) The first group of witnesses indicated that Shaw had called Dean Andrews and asked him to fly to Dallas and defend Oswald. The second placed Shaw and Ferrie in a highly compromised place and position with the alleged assassin. So the idea that somehow Shaw was Mr. Clean does not jibe with this information in Garrison’s files, which Bethell had to know about.

Which leads us to a rather interesting hypothetical question. As most people who follow the Kennedy case understand, one of the big problems that Jim Garrison had was files either disappearing or copies ending up in the hands of his opponents. By the last, I mean journalists like Hugh Aynesworth or Shaw’s attorneys. In John Barbour’s fine documentary, The Garrison Tapes, Garrison says that Bill Boxley, a CIA infiltrator, actually took files from the office. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 278–85) To give another example, Aynesworth ended up with Sheriff John Manchester’s affidavit, in which he stated that Clay Shaw showed him his driver’s license in Jackson. (Mellen, p. 235). Would it not be possible that Bethell could have been the source for these leaked documents? He was in the perfect position to do so.

There are several reasons I postulate this. One is that Bethell was an inveterate liar about his stance on Garrison and the blow up that got him fired and charged. In his book The Electric Windmill, he muses back on his days working with the DA and says that in retrospect Garrison’s was a dubious case. (Bethell, pp. 60–71). That book was written and published in 1988, before his diaries became public and published in newspapers in New Orleans. As the reader can see by the Jackson piece, the “in retrospect” qualification does not really apply. Further, many years ago, when I interviewed the late Vince Salandria, he also told me the contrary. He would have arguments with Bethell in 1967 about not just the efficacy of Garrison’s case but also the findings of the Warren Commission. (February 23, 1992 interview with Salandria)

On the eve of the Clay Shaw trial, Bethell turned over the prosecution’s entire witness list with a summary of what each witness would testify to. (Mellen, p. 293) One must delineate a key point here. Back at the time of the Shaw trial, in Louisiana, the doctrine of pre-trial discovery was not operative. In other words, the prosecution was allowed to keep its witness list and summaries from the defense. Bethell was breaking a rule of law at that time.

Bethell lied about this issue. In 1991, he wrote an article timed for the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. (National Review, December 16, 1991) In that piece, he said that he voluntarily told Garrison about his duplicity. This was false. What really happened was this: In January of 1969, on the eve of the trial, Garrison understood that there was something going on with Shaw’s defense and their knowledge of his case. His first assistant, Lou Ivon, conducted an internal investigation. Ivon confronted Bethell with the case against him and the Englishman broke down and started weeping. (Interview with Ivon, February 19, 1992) What I find so fascinating about this is that, evidently, Bethell wanted to stay on Garrison’s staff during the trial. Perhaps to more clearly inform Shaw’s lawyers on a daily basis during that proceeding?

Bethell so feared what would happen to him, that he actually fled New Orleans for awhile. Back in the late nineties, I ran into the estranged son of the late Mary Ferrell. He told me that when Bethell split the Crescent City, he took refuge in Texas at Mary’s home. As Jerry Shinley discovered, Bethell was charged by Garrison and he had to hire a lawyer. Garrison was recused and a special prosecutor took the case. The problem was that Shaw’s lawyers refused to take the stand, and the judge allowed this on grounds of attorney/client confidentiality. (See Jerry P. Shinley Archive, post of 10/22/03)

After the judge dismissed the case and the higher court refused to hear it, Bethell migrated to Washington DC. He briefly worked for publications like Harper’s and the Washington Monthly, before finding his home in the conservative constellation at American Spectator and then the Hoover Institute. From about the mid-seventies onward, he spent the rest of his life ridiculing both liberals and critics of the Warren Commission. For instance, he once wrote that liberals were somehow anti-American. Why? Because they relished America’s defeat in Vietnam. This is just hate-spinning. The reason so many people did not understand the Vietnam War was they could not figure out why we were there and what we were fighting for. (Click here for details) No one I knew was rejoicing over that last image of the American helicopter lifting off the embassy with VIetnamese hanging on to it. That picture was both sad and pathetic. It symbolized the waste of so much blood and treasure for both Vietnam and the USA. But that was something Bethell did not want to address. And although it was true, neither did he want to talk about this fact: Garrison had said many years prior that President Kennedy was not going to commit combat troops into Vietnam. And there were none there on the day he was killed.

Not only was Bethell Sean Hannity before Hannity, he was also Vince Bugliosi before Reclaiming History. By 1975, after Watergate and during the inquiries of the Church Committee, he sensed there might be a new JFK investigation on the way. In reminiscing about his days as Garrison’s archivist, he said the real reason he betrayed Garrison was that the DA was going to put the infamous Charles Spiesel on the stand, the witness who said he fingerprinted his own daughter when she returned from college. (DiEugenio, pp. 296–97) Tom implied that Garrison understood who Spiesel really was, but he needed him.

Which is another Bethell whopper. Not only did Garrison not know about Spiesel’s liabilities, neither did the man who decided to call him to the stand: Assistant DA Jim Alcock. When this reviewer interviewed Alcock, he said that it was he who talked to the witness in New York and, at that time, he seemed OK to him. (Interview with Alcock, November 23, 1991)

The man who was going to be the key witness for the prosecution was Clyde Johnson, not Spiesel. And what happened to Johnson was a frightful tale that Bethell does not want to write about. Garrison understood his importance and so he hid him out at a college campus outside the city. Somehow, this was discovered and Johnson was beaten to a pulp and hospitalized to the point he could not testify at Shaw’s trial. (DiEugenio, p. 294)

But the deception described above was not enough. In the same Washington Monthly article, Tom said that there was really no mystery about the Kennedy assassination. And he wrote this incredible sentence:

In the case of the assassination of President Kennedy, there is practically no evidence whatsoever of a conspiracy and by far the most plausible hypothesis is that a single unaided assassin—Lee Harvey Oswald—shot the President.

But in his new incarnation, even that was not enough for Bethell. He actually tried to say that a recent article in Harper’s, portraying the Bobby Kennedy case as a probable conspiracy, was “remarkably foolish.” He can do so, since he doesn’t bother to explain how Sirhan Sirhan could have killed the senator from the front, when all the shots entering RFK’s body came from behind.

This was the real Tom Bethell. I leave it up to the reader to decide if Bethell ever really gave a damn about how or why President Kennedy was assassinated. Or if he was the secret supplier of Garrison’s files to people like Boxley and Aynesworth.

March 27, 2021
Barry Ernest Replies to John Armstrong, RE: Victoria Adams

In a recent website article titled “Oswald DID NOT Run Down the Stairs” (his emphasis), researcher/author John Armstrong dissects the story of Victoria Adams. He wholeheartedly upholds her account that she descended the back stairs of the Texas School Book Depository immediately after the assassination. But he takes strong exception to statements she made to me that she did not (my emphasis) see employees William Shelley and Billy Lovelady when she arrived on the first floor.

Vicki is quoted in her Warren Commission testimony as saying Shelley and Lovelady were there. Yet those two men claimed they remained outside the Depository for some 10 minutes after the assassination. This apparent contradiction between Miss Adams’ prompt descent while claiming she saw two men still outside is what the Commission used to discredit her.

Armstrong thinks her statement before the Commission—that she saw Shelley and Lovelady—is gospel. He contends her comments of not seeing those men made some 40 years after the fact should be viewed with skepticism and doubt.

No one agrees more than I.

That doubt is precisely what pushed me to search for the original transcript of her testimony. Did she really say she saw Shelley and Lovelady, or was her testimony doctored as she herself believes? I was looking for the first generation, virtually unalterable, accordion-style paper tape coded by the court stenographer. What I discovered was that this critical tape was missing from the National Archives. A later document revealed it had been destroyed by the Commission, previously on record as promising to preserve such tapes for future inspection.

So, we don’t really know what Vicki said. Or didn’t say. Nevertheless, Armstrong maintains she was word-perfect about seeing those two men, and chastises her for telling me otherwise. He ends up calling her a “hoax.” Knowing about Vicki and her highly principled background, she is the last person who would fabricate a story.

So why is this guy so harsh with her?

In order to answer that, we need to understand John Armstrong.

In 2003, he wrote a book titled “Harvey and Lee.” In it, he claims Lee Harvey Oswald was actually two people: one the publicly recognized assassin “Lee,” the other a mysterious look-alike named “Harvey.” The book was praised for its meticulous detail. But it was also criticized by some on the grounds Armstrong interpreted evidence in a way that reinforced his hypothesis.

Part of Armstrong’s recent foray contends that both Harvey and Lee were cohorts in a plot to kill JFK. And each was present in the Depository on November 22^nd. Abettors were there as well, one to help one of the pair of Oswalds escape from the sixth floor, the other to lead the other away from the crime scene.

Enter Shelley and Lovelady…and, by extension, Victoria Adams.

Armstrong’s scenario has Lovelady turning off electrical power in the building from a circuit box on the first floor. This allowed the sniper’s-nest shooter to pry up loose floor boards, safely crawl into the passenger elevator shaft below, then make his way into the elevator compartment and ride to freedom once Lovelady reset the power a couple minutes later. Shelley’s task was less complicated, merely escorting the other confederate out a rear door.

Shelley and Lovelady thus had to be present on the first floor…in a New York minute. Their quick appearance at the back of the building, Armstrong surmises, “is a clear indication that either one or both of these men may have been co-conspirators.” That’s why he favors Vicki’s up-tempo descent and her supposed sighting of both men. But that’s also why he’s so critical of her when she says she really didn’t see those two after all. This is why he has to call Adams’s story a “hoax”.

Since Vicki’s original testimony no longer exists (prompting suspicion by itself), is there other corroboration?

The best comes from a co-worker, Sandra Styles, who accompanied Vicki to the first floor. She was a perfect witness to not only verify the timing, but also to say who was there when the girls arrived. She was never questioned by the Warren Commission. Funny thing too is that Sandra Styles knew Shelley and Lovelady. In fact, she knew them well. When I tracked her down in 2002, she told me that Shelley and Lovelady definitely were not on the first floor. She repeated that in subsequent interviews, often emphatically. So how does Armstrong handle this?

Adams’ co-worker, Sandra Styles, followed her from their office on the 4^th floor, down the wooden stairs, and onto the 1^st floor. As the two women were rushing out of the building, Styles momentarily focused her [eyes] on a policeman hurrying toward the stairs and elevator. Styles’ memory of seeing police (Officer Baker) on the first floor agreed with Adams’ statement of the time that she arrived on the first floor, which was within one minute after the shooting. Styles did not see Shelley or Lovelady, but her vivid memory of the police may explain why she paid little or no attention to other people in the area. Her focus of attention was on the policeman.

That elucidation is unsourced. I think I know why. Sandra Styles never saw a policeman on the first floor.

After sending Sandra that paragraph for a response, she replied that she absolutely did not see a policeman, let alone police, on the first floor that day. She had no clue about where Armstrong got his information. Her only sighting of a cop, she said, was the one sitting on a motorcycle outside the building.

Armstrong gives excessive weight to the day-of affidavits by Shelley and Lovelady in which each imply a rapid re-entry into the Depository. But their later interviews to the FBI and Warren Commission detailing their longer stay outside are considered bogus, having been “changed” in order to avoid culpability.

He elevates Dallas Police Officer Marrion Baker’s observation of seeing two unidentified white men on the first floor as he and building manager Roy Truly rushed toward the back staircase:

One of these two “white men” was Bill Shelley, who stated in an affidavit to the Dallas Police that he was told “to watch the elevators and not let anyone off.” The only time that Roy Truly could have told Shelley to watch the elevators was moments before he and Officer Baker ran up the stairs—1 and 1/2 minutes after the shooting (his emphasis).

From the first floor, Baker and Truly sped up the back stairs to the roof where the policeman felt shots may have originated. According to Truly, that round trip took about 10 minutes. It’s conceivable Truly’s request that Shelley oversee the elevators may just as likely have taken place after Truly and Baker returned to the first floor.

Oddly, Armstrong completely ignores the one man all three individuals—Miss Adams, Miss Styles, and Officer Baker—independently told me they noticed near those elevators: a large black man. That is the only person Vicki said she saw and spoke to, not Shelley or Lovelady. That is the only person Miss Styles observed. And that is the same man Baker told me he was about to confront, a la Oswald seconds later, until Truly told him the black man was an employee.

Shelley, Lovelady, and Miss Adams were questioned by Warren Commission staff in April 1964. Vicki went first, followed by Lovelady, then Shelley. Armstrong writes:

The simple fact is that if Adams had not told the WC, in 1964, that she saw Shelley and Lovelady on the first floor, then the WC would have no reason to question these men about Adams.

As Armstrong knows, for he already cited this document, the Commission had in hand a February 17, 1964, interview submitted by Dallas Police Detective James Leavelle, in which Miss Adams, for the first and only time since the assassination, is quoted as saying she saw Shelley and Lovelady. Those interested should read that section of my book which discusses the strange circumstances surrounding this unnerving interview. Particularly the detective’s explanation that Vicki had to be re-interviewed because a fire at police headquarters had destroyed her earlier file. (See The Girl on the Stairs, pp. 246–47)

Armstrong writes that during Lovelady’s testimony, he “volunteered [his emphasis] that he saw ‘Vickie’ when he returned to the building.” That is not accurate. Here’s what Lovelady said: “I saw a girl, but I wouldn’t swear to it it’s Vickie [sic].” Armstrong’s mistake is a bad as the Commission’s conclusion: “On entering, Lovelady saw a girl on the first floor who he believes was Victoria Adams.” Shelley, by the way, said he didn’t see Vicki on the first floor, a detail Armstrong overlooks.

In a September 1964 internal memo, Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler wrote this about Vicki:

Victoria Adams testified that she came down the stairway within about 1 minute after the shots, from the fourth floor to the first floor where she encountered two Depository employees—Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady. If Miss Adams was on the stairway at that time, the question is raised as to why she did not see Oswald…

But notice how Armstrong inserts additional words into Liebeler’s comment when he quotes the attorney as saying this instead:

Victoria Adams testified that she came down the stairway, within about 1 minute after the shots, from the fourth floor to the first floor where she encountered two Depository employees—Bill Shelley and Billy Lovelady. If Adams saw these two men on the 1^st floor, near the freight elevators and stairway, only one minute after the shooting, then how could Oswald have [run] down the stairs from the 6^th to the 2^nd floor at the same time?

If you follow his argument, then this explains the excess verbiage.

And although he is quick to condemn Vicki for her 40-year-old assertion, he uses as further support for his thesis a comment Buell Wesley Frazier made, which Frazier made for the first time at the 50^th anniversary of JFK’s death. He said he saw Oswald emerge from the rear of the Depository shortly after the assassination. It’s only natural to suspect he does this to support his construct.

February 27, 2021
Litwin and the Warren Report
It is not possible to understand Fred Litwin’s second book on the JFK case, dealing with Jim Garrison, without addressing his first book, which tried to uphold the Warren Commission. David Mantik did an excellent job in critiquing that first work. (Click here for details) But I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak is such a shabby book that no one person could expose the scope and depth of its tawdriness.

One of the most startling remarks Litwin makes in the first book—and one which shows how politically slanted his work is—appears relatively early. (Since this review is based on the e-book version, the pages I quote may differ slightly for the reader.) On page 51, Litwin writes: “The authors of the Warren Report were honorable men who conducted an honest investigation and reached the right answer.”

In this day and age, for anyone to infer that Allen Dulles and John McCloy were honorable men indicates either:
1. Staggering ignorance
2. The writer lives in an alternative moral universe, one outside the bounds of a normal ethical system, or
3. The writer does not care what he writes since he has an agenda a mile long.
In reality, there were very few prominent Americans of the 20^th Century who were more utterly dishonorable than Dulles and McCloy.

While working in the War Department during World War II, John McCloy was one of the strongest advocates for the Japanese internment. This removal and detainment of mostly American citizens was so ethically indefensible that even J. Edgar Hoover opposed it. When his opponents argued that if American citizens were deprived of property and rights, they deserved due process, McCloy replied with one of the most shocking remarks an attorney could make:

If it is a question of the safety of the country or the Constitution of the United States, why the constitution is just a scrap of paper to me. (Jacob Heilbrunn, The New Republic, “The Real McCloy”, May 11, 1992)

Attorney McCloy was so determined to discard the Constitution that he used unethical means to keep the victims in detention. He deleted important evidence from the record in the appeals of the case. (Ibid) To any objective person, such behavior would be relevant to his performance on the Commission. Yet one will not read about it in Litwin’s book. And, make no mistake about this affair, the “honorable” John McCloy was also a racist. In a letter to a friend, he talked about how the internment was an opportunity to “study the Japanese in these camps.” The last part of this passage is a doozy in delineating McCloy:

I am aware that such a suggestion may provoke a charge that we have no right to treat these people as guinea pigs. But I would rather treat them as guinea pigs and learn something useful, than merely to treat them…as they have been in the past with such unsuccessful results. (Kai Bird, The Chairman, pp. 165–66)

Whatever McCloy meant by that last statement, I don’t think anyone could describe it, in Litwin’s phrase, as honorable and honest. I should add, McCloy never admitted he could have been wrong about this shameful exercise. In the seventies, with over twenty years to think about it, he objected to any monetary compensation to those who had their rights trampled, property confiscated, and lives detoured. He called even the consideration of compensation, “utterly unconscionable.” (Op. cit, Heilbrunn)

McCloy’s bizarre sense of justice is further exemplified by his involvement in the other theater of World War II, in Europe. McCloy objected to the bombing of the Nazi concentration camps. He replied to this proposal with another of his jarring leaps of logic. He said that even if it were possible—which it was—it could lead the Germans to do something even more vindictive. (Heilbrunn, p. 42) As many have commented about that reply: What could be worse than the Holocaust?

This lack of mercy for the Jews of Eastern Europe made an interesting contrast with McCloy’s sympathy for the Nazis responsible for slaughtering them. McCloy was involved with the escape of Klaus Barbie out of Germany to Bolivia after the war. There, the former Gestapo chief became a drug lord. (Bird, p. 346). Even for a Nazi, Barbie was sadistic. He liked torturing his victims before killing them. A favorite method was hanging them upside down by hooks. In the deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz, Barbie decided there should be no age barrier to an early exposure to poison gas. He emptied a French orphanage of 41 children ages three to thirteen and sent them to the gas chambers.

But aiding Barbie wasn’t enough for the man who did not want to attack and liberate Auschwitz. After the war, McCloy became High Commissioner for Germany. He decided that many of the former Nazis who had been given prison sentences deserved to be set free early. In just six weeks, McCloy reviewed 93 cases. (Bird, p. 336) In 77 of those cases, McCloy’s board recommended reductions in sentencing. In some instances, this meant commutations of death sentences. That group included 20 former SS officers who served in the Einsatzgruppen. (Heilbrunn, p. 44) The Einsatzgruppen was Hitler’s first method of Jewish extermination. In this phase of the Holocaust, the SS troops, and, at times, the regular army, would round up the victims and herd them onto a bus. They would then drive them to a rural wooded area and, in this concealed area, they would machine gun them. Somehow, some way, McCloy thought the Allies had been too hard on these killers. After viewing this record, instead of calling McCloy honest and honorable, journalist Jacob Heilbrunn had a different opinion of the man. He called him a thoroughly despicable character. (Heilbrunn, p. 41)

Again, none of the above is in Litwin’s book, which is doubly strange. Because, as we shall see, Litwin likes playing the anti-Semite card against Commission critics. But somehow, the Jewish Litwin is able to, not just stomach all of the above, he eliminates it from the record. Only in Fred Litwin’s moral universe does endorsing the Single Bullet Theory erase crimes of the magnitude of John McCloy’s.

What I have done with McCloy, I could also do with Dulles and Commissioner Jerry Ford. And, in fact, I have done so. (James DiEugenio, The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, pp. 325–41). But further, by necessity, Litwin’s term “honest and honorable” extends to the man who provided the overwhelming majority of investigative materials to the Commission. Or else how could they have come up with the “right answer”? That would be the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. (DiEugenio, pp. 237–40) But wisely, Litwin does not directly describe Hoover as honest and honorable. Probably because, with all that is now known today about the man, if he did, the reader would start laughing and throw the book into the trash can. But the key point to understand here is that Litwin is willing to censor or curtail important information, in order to disguise who the perpetrators of the cover up actually were—some of the worst Americans of that era. If you conceal that record, then you can hide from the reader the things they would be willing to do.

II

In any study of the Commission, the above information is crucial, because along with Dulles and Ford, McCloy dominated that body’s inner workings—from the beginning to the end. It is also important to know that McCloy and Dulles had a personal relationship that went back over thirty years. (Bird, pp. 76–77) As opposed to Commissioners Richard Russell, John Sherman Cooper, and Hale Boggs, the Dulles/Ford/McCloy trio attended the most meetings and asked, by far, the most questions. (Walt Brown, The Warren Omission, pp. 83–87)

This might not have mattered if, as he was presumed to be, Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren had been the real chairman and arbiter of the Commission. But that was not the case. Warren never wanted the position. He only accepted it when President Lyndon Johnson told him that if he did not accept, thermonuclear annihilation threatened the world. Warren left the White house in tears after that meeting. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 83; Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, pp. 41–42) The atomic war threat was effective. When Commission attorney Wesley Liebeler interviewed witness Sylvia Odio in Dallas, he told her that Warren had given the lawyers instructions to avoid evidence indicating a conspiracy. (Church Committee interview, 1/16/76)

In this regard, McCloy made two comments that recall his past cover up duties with the Nazis and the Japanese internment. He once said that the Commission had been “set up to lay the dust…not only in the United States but all over the world.” He then said he thought it was important to “show the world that America is not a banana republic, where a government can be changed by conspiracy.” (Bird, p. 549) Make no mistake, as with the internment, McCloy was firm in this belief for years afterward. In 1967, he secretly intervened in the production of the CBS four-night special on the Warren Report. His daughter was the secretary to network president Dick Salant. When it looked like producer Les Midgley might explore some sensitive areas of the case, and do so in a fair manner, McCloy stepped in to stop it. He wrote a long memorandum disputing Midgley’s approach. His view prevailed. Ellen McCloy became the back-channel through which her father was a secret consultant to the program. Like the veteran prevaricator and cover up artist he was, the “honorable and honest” McCloy lied about this clandestine and unethical journalistic role for the rest of his life. (Click here for details)

As noted above, Earl Warren had been effectively neutered when Johnson conjured up images of millions of charred bodies amid a tableau of atomic annihilation. But that was not enough for Hoover and the three managing Commissioners. Once Ford and Hoover heard of Warren’s first choice for Chief Counsel, Warren Olney, they made it clear he was not acceptable. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, pp. 41–43) After a rump meeting including Dulles, McCloy, and Ford, McCloy came up with a list and their first choice was J. Lee Rankin. One of the initial things Rankin did was to deprive the accused, but deceased, Lee Oswald of any representation before the Commission. This was in January of 1964. (See Commission Exhibit 2033)

Richard Russell wrote a letter of resignation in February, which he did not mail to Lyndon Johnson. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 291) Why did he want to resign? As the reader can see from the above, Commissioners Russell, Cooper, and Boggs—who I have called elsewhere the Southern Wing—had been more or less marginalized. Very soon, Russell had lost faith in what the controlling faction was doing. He even accused the Commission of scheduling meetings behind his back. Like every other Commission zealot, Litwin conceals this split in the Commission ranks, which allows him to write about that body as if it were a monolith. This was not the case. And one only has to read the transcript of the September 6, 1964, examination of Marina Oswald to understand that.

In a number of ways, this was an extraordinary session. It was held at a Naval Station in Dallas. (See WC Vol. V, p. 588) Very telling is this fact: Dulles, McCloy, and Ford were not there. But beyond that, Warren was not there. It was presided over by Russell, with Boggs, Cooper, and Rankin in attendance. It is important to note that Marina Oswald was a key witness for the Commission. She had been groomed and prepared by the FBI and Secret Service before she appeared as the first witness. She then appeared twice more, once in June and once in July. Many would call Marina—along with Ruth Paine, Kerry Thornley, Carlos Bringuier, and George DeMohrenschildt—a keystone witness for the prosecution. What is remarkable about this particular session is that it is pretty clear from the start that these three Commissioners do not buy Marina. Marina’s past statements figured strongly in the dialogue and the question of perjury hung in the air. Incredibly, Marina was even asked if she knew Clay Bertrand or Sylvia Odio. As Walt Brown notes, this hearing had all the earmarks of a hostile interrogation. (Brown, p. 238) In this reviewer’s opinion, this is where a real investigation should have begun, not ended. When one reads this record, one can understand why the others were not in attendance. As Warren told the staff, it would make little sense to impugn the testimony of their chief witness to the character of Oswald, which is what Russell was doing. (Edward Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, p. 315)

In practical terms, this might not have been the wisest step for Russell to take. Rankin clearly told the others—the people he was really working for—about what had happened. The final executive session of the Commission was held less than two weeks later. Rankin and Company had laid a trap for Russell. By this point, Russell simply did not buy the Single Bullet Theory, which was the ballistic underpinning of the Commission’s case against Oswald. This is the idea that one bullet hit both Kennedy and Governor Connally, created seven wounds in the two men and had emerged in almost pristine condition on someone’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital. (It was, in all probability, not Connally’s gurney: see Donald Byron Thomas’, Hear No Evil, pp. 392–99) But it became the working thesis of the Commission for a simple reason: if the two men were hit by separate bullets, it would be synonymous with saying there were two assassins. (Edward Epstein, Inquest, p. 46)

The serious split in the Commission ranks is not a new revelation. It was first described by Edward Epstein back in 1966. It is quite clear from his rather skimpy rendition of what happened at the final meeting that Russell, Boggs, and Cooper were aligned against the four other Commissioners. But there is a key issue involved that Epstein did not write about. Russell thought that his objections, and the ensuing debate, were being recorded by a stenographer. He recalled there was a woman there and he thought she was taking notes. (McKnight, p. 295) But there is no stenographic record of this meeting on hand today. A six-page summary is what constitutes the record of this hours long meeting. (Click here for details)

It is obvious to anyone what really happened. Rankin and his allies did not wish to record this debate over the Magic Bullet. They wanted to create the illusion that the Warren Report was a unanimous document which no one had any objections to. Therefore, the public should accept it without qualifications. To do this, they deceived three members of their own committee. Since, from their World War II experience, Dulles and McCloy were familiar with how an intelligence deception worked, they probably thought up the masquerade. Rankin and Warren went along with it.

It later turned out that Russell, Cooper, and Boggs were the first Commissioners to openly denounce the Warren Report. (DiEugenio, p. 319) We also know today that Jerry Ford secretly agreed with their verdict. (Click here for details) In reality, the Warren Report was a minority report. And who knows what would have happened if LBJ had not scared the living daylights out of Warren?

Is any of the above honorable and honest? Outside of Litwin’s world, it would appear to be purely Machiavellian. If you don’t tell the reader about it, then you can present it as otherwise. But that is just conducting a charade. As the Commission did at their final meeting.

III

The very title of Litwin’s book, I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak, strikes this reviewer as being deliberately provocative, but at least a bit ersatz. The implication of that title would be that, at one time, the author really believed that a conspiracy killed President Kennedy. Litwin says this was so, yet somehow, he does not produce any evidence to demonstrate it was in his entire book. He notes articles and talks he gave which support the Warren Commission and ridicule the critics. (Litwin, p. 143)

For instance, Litwin attended a talk given by Commission critic Rusty Rhodes in Montreal in 1975. He then wrote a piece for the student newspaper at Concordia University criticizing Rhodes as a sensationalist. (Litwin, p. 107) In 1976, he actually argued in a piece he did for People and the Pursuit of Truth that the bullet channel from Kennedy’s back out of his neck was genuine. (Litwin, p. 143) Another example in the nineties, he met with the Dallas ’63 group in UK. He again argued against conspiracy. (Litwin, p. 148) In August of 1994, he gave a talk for this group. He again argued for the Oswald did it side. (Litwin, p. 154) He then turned that talk into a paper called, “A Conspiracy too Big? Intellectual Dishonesty in the JFK Assassination.” This paper was not about anything the Warren Commission did that was dishonest—which I have outlined in detail above. It was about the critics of the Commission, who he says “have constructed a conspiracy so massive that it ultimately falls of its own weight.” Here, Litwin sounds indistinguishable to me from say, Dan Rather on a bad day. On this evidence, if there is anything freakish about Litwin, it is his refusal to accept any evidence that the Commission was wrong—at any time in his life.

Early in 1994, Fred Litwin indirectly met his American soul brother, Paul Hoch. Someone brought Fred past issues of Hoch’s newsletter, Echoes of Conspiracy. Litwin describes Hoch as a man who wanted to follow the facts, no matter where they led. (Litwin, p. 147) Litwin then quotes Hoch as saying that pieces of physical evidence for a conspiracy in Dealey Plaza have gotten weaker over the years. That is not a misprint. Hoch then says that the House Select Committee did tests for the Magic Bullet which critics expected to negate the Single Bullet Theory—the NAA, trajectory analysis—but they did not. He then quotes Hoch as writing that, after the HSCA, the Magic Bullet was really not a joke anymore. It had to be taken seriously.

As I was reading this, I had a hard time figuring out what was the worst part of this passage, that Hoch would write this stuff originally; or that Litwin would quote it; or that anyone could take it seriously. First of all, the very idea that Litwin would use Paul Hoch as a kind of model for the critical community is absurd in and of itself. If anyone can show me something that Hoch has written in the last thirty years that is a valuable contribution to any kind of criticism of the Commission, I would like to see it. Hoch finding evidence that a document about Jack Ruby’s alleged employment for the HUAC being a forgery is now rendered dubious. For the basis of his judgment, the premature use of zip codes, has turned out to be erroneous. (Click here for details) Frankly, I consider his journal Echoes of Conspiracy not worth reading today; but it was pretty much not worth reading when it was written. Hoch is a commentator who took Tony Summers’ book Goddess pretty much at face value. Hoch actually accepted Tim Leary’s nuttiness about Kennedy taking LSD tabs in the White House. Like the Ruby zip codes, these have both been discredited beyond repair today. (Click here and here for details) So how does any of this portray Hoch as a man possessed? As someone who was so incontinent in his search for truth that he would follow the facts wherever they led?

Then, there is the following. In the early nineties at a Coalition on Political Assassinations conference, Lisa Pease met up with Hoch. He tried to recommend that she read Carlos Bringuier’s book, Red Friday. (Phone communication with Pease, 12/2/2020) With this, Hoch was vouching for a man who, within 24 hours of the assassination, helped put together a broadsheet, saying Oswald killed Kennedy for Castro. Bringuier’s group, the DRE, was being paid tens of thousands per month by the CIA. (Jeff Morley, Ghost, p. 145)

This reviewer attended a JFK conference in Chicago in 1993, at which Hoch spoke. Also in attendance at this meeting were former Warren Commission counsel Burt Griffin and former Deputy Chief Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Robert Tanenbaum. Griffin, of course, defended the Commission and its conclusions. Tanenbaum attacked the Commission. After both men spoke, Hoch approached me and said he thought that Griffin’s speech was better, which would mean, by deduction, that he bought the Single Bullet Theory.

Back in 1979, Harvey Yazijian and the late Carl Oglesby published a journal for the Assassination Information Bureau. Clandestine America was interested in chronicling the work of the HSCA. At the close of that committee in 1979, they surveyed a number of interested parties to get their opinion of what the HSCA had accomplished. Hoch was one of the very few, perhaps the only one, who preferred the work of the HSCA under Chief Counsel Robert Blakey than under Blakey’s predecessor Richard Sprague, which again would place Hoch in the Magic Bullet camp. This was in 1979.

Just like he does not produce evidence of himself being a Commission critic, Litwin does not reveal any of this about Hoch. With that in mind, as referred above, just what HSCA tests are Hoch and Litwin referring to that actually endorsed the Single Bullet Theory and saved it from ridicule? The two tests were Vincent Guinn’s Neutron Activation Analysis, today called Comparative Bullet Lead Analysis (CBLA), and Tom Canning’s work on the trajectory of Commission Exhibit 399, the Magic Bullet. CBLA was used by the HSCA to say that only two bullets hit the limousine; that the fragments’ trace elements all showed that these specimens came from Western Cartridge Company—which made the ammo for the Mannlicher Carcano rifle allegedly used by Oswald—and fragments from Connally’s wrist matched the magic Bullet, CE 399, thereby showing the Single Bullet Theory was valid.

The problem with what Hoch said then, and with Litwin quoting him today, is rather simple: Both “tests” have been demolished. A statistician/ metallurgist team, Pat Grant and Eric Randich, took Guinn’s claims apart and rendered them into rubbish in a milestone article for a peer reviewed publication. (Journal of Forensic Sciences, July 2006, pp. 717–28) For a less complicated explanation of how this test was destructed by Grant and Randich, read Gary Aguilar’s discussion of it (Click here for details) The demolition was so complete that the FBI will never use CBLA in court again. At a conference held by Aguilar in San Francisco, Randich said the judge in a case he testified in told the Bureau if they tried to do so, he would entertain charges of perjury from the defense. Does it get any worse than that? So just what is Litwin talking about?

As per Canning, his work was a non-starter from the beginning. The HSCA had secured the autopsy photos and they had an artist do illustrations of them for the volumes. It is clear from these drawings that the posterior bullet wound that first hit Kennedy struck in his back. In Tom Canning’s drawings, that wound is moved upward where the Warren Commission had placed it—in the neck. (HSCA Volume 2, p. 170) In other words, the Commission had lied about this and Canning had repeated it for trajectory purposes. Secondly, the forensic panel of the HSCA said that the magic bullet went through Kennedy at a slight upward angle. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 79) Again, if one looks at Canning’s work, he flattened that angle to pure horizontal. (HSCA, op. cit.) This is important, because Canning admitted that if his calculations were off by just one inch, he would miss the firing point by 30–40 feet, which would mean that Canning missed the alleged sniper’s nest window by anywhere from three to four floors in the Texas School Book Depository. (HSCA Vol. 2, p. 196)

But it’s worse than that, because in his calibrations for the fatal head shot, Canning used the revised position for that rear skull entry wound. (HSCA Vol. 2, p. 167) In other words, he raised it from the original autopsy, where it was in the lower skull, up into the cowlick area, a distance of about four inches. But here is the issue: if the doctors who actually saw and handled the body at the Bethesda morgue on the evening of 11/22/63 are correct, then Canning’s calculations are off by as much as 160 feet, which would likely place the assassin who killed Kennedy across the street in the Dal-Tex Building. And this is just the beginning of the problems with Canning. In his book, Hear No Evil, Don Thomas spends over 20 pages undoing Canning and his tests. (pp. 422–448). After reading that, if anyone needs any more proof that the HSCA trajectory analysis was pure bunk, please read what Pat Speer wrote about it. (Click here for details) The reader will see that Canning’s measurements, and his positioning of entrance and exit wounds, all changed over time. But what makes it all the worse is this: his illustrations—from side to front—do not match up with each other! Therefore, if one is thinking logically, with all the declassified information on the table, Hoch’s conclusion is ass backwards. The HSCA tried every piece of junk science available and they still could not make the Single Bullet Theory work.

IV

Let me add a rather important point to the above relationship between Hoch and Litwin. Although Randich and Grant applied the final kibosh to Vincent Guinn’s charade, Wallace Milam actually began to protest Guinn’s technique about a decade prior to that. The late Jerry Policoff pointed out the basic problem with Canning—that his underlying information was dubious—right after the HSCA closed shop. Milam was a high school teacher. Policoff was a journalist and TV/Radio advertising salesman. Paul Hoch has a PhD in physics. Neither Speer nor Thomas has such a degree. Further, Hoch had been studying this case since the sixties, much longer than either one of them. Yet, to my knowledge, physicist Hoch never raised a complaint about the scientific methods used in the above fraudulent tests, which, in light of what Litwin is up to, makes it natural for Fred to use him as some kind of authority. When, in fact—if one does not censor the material at hand—the question Litwin should have asked him is this: Paul, what has a physicist like you been doing for four decades?

The answer to that question, as posed by the anecdotal evidence I listed above, would suggest some kind of innate bias, a bias that overrides the scientific skills and training Hoch acquired at university. The last thing in the world Litwin wants to do is to pose—or have the reader pose—this question: How could these unskilled and untrained people figure out the forensic hoaxes that physicist Hoch could not? To avoid that obvious question, Litwin does not go within a country mile of the area, because that, in turn, would pose this question: Why would Litwin use him as an expert?

But, as David Mantik pointed out in his 44 questions for Litwin, this is all irrelevant anyway. The phony debate over CE 399, its trajectories, and chemical composition were always an example of a dog chasing its tail. We know today that CE 399 was worse than a joke: it was a smoke and mirrors illusion. The work of the ARRB—which Litwin avoids like CV-19—has made it superfluous. It was through that work that Gary Agular and Josiah Thompson proved that the FBI lied in its alleged identification process of CE 399. Bardwell Odum—the FBI agent who the Bureau said showed the bullet to witnesses for purposes of confirmation—admitted to both men that he never did any such thing. Yet, the fraudulent document saying he did—CE 2011—is in the Commission volumes. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 284) The chain of custody for the Magic Bullet was therefore not confirmed by the witnesses who handled it. In other words, J. Edgar Hoover—implied by Litwin to be an honest and honorable man—played the Commission, also honest and honorable men, for suckers, which considering who McCloy and Dulles really were, was probably kind of easy.

How bad is bad? The late John Hunt proved the worst about CE 399. To further certify the (phony) chain of custody, the FBI wrote that agent Elmer Lee Todd’s initials are on that bullet. As Hunt discovered at the National Archives, this is another lie. They are not. (Click here for details) But beyond that, there is another equally serious problem with the chain of custody. Todd was supposed to have delivered CE 399 to technician Robert Frazier at the FBI lab that night. Frazier’s notes say he was in receipt of the bullet at 7:30 PM. This presents a huge problem for the evidentiary record, because Todd did not obtain the bullet until 8:50 PM. How could he have given Frazier a bullet he did not have? (Click here for details)

The fact that Todd’s initials are not on the bullet poses the gravest questions, but by avoiding all the evidence above, Litwin can say that it’s kind of ridiculous to insinuate that there was another bullet. (Litwin, p. 216) But if one analyzes the record above, that is what the evidence trail clearly suggests. Frazier already had a bullet at 7:30 PM. Todd was in receipt of another bullet at 8:50 PM. Therefore, one could likely have been switched out for the other. Recall, CE 399 is the only whole bullet in evidence. The bullet that missed the street entirely was not officially recovered. The bullet that struck Kennedy in the head was in fragments. Since there were only three shells discovered on the sixth floor, another bullet would indicate a second shooter.

Further complicating this issue is the fact that when author Josiah Thompson first interviewed the head of security at Parkland, O. P. Wright, Wright denied that CE 399 was the bullet he turned over to the Secret Service on 11/22/63. He said the bullet he turned over was a sharp pointed bullet, not a round one like the Commission said it was. (DiEugenio and Pease, p. 283) Is that the bullet that was made to disappear? This is what the declassified records suggest, but J. Edgar Hoover was not going to confront such skullduggery, which is why he lied about this issue. He understood early that something was seriously wrong with the evidence. When asked if Oswald was the actual killer, he replied with, “If I told you what I really know, it would be very dangerous to this country. Our whole political system could be disrupted.” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 246) Therefore, Hoover did what Jerry Ford did, he covered up the facts and then lied to the public, which was natural for Jerry, since he was Hoover’s stoolie on the Commission. (DiEugenio, p. 336)

In Litwin’s world, none of the above matters. (p. 216) In fact, he quotes John McAdams saying that even if CE 399 would not be admitted at trial, it would still be “absolutely dispositive where historical judgments are concerned.” Litwin is so monomaniacal, so freight train locomotive obsessed, that he does not understand how he has just undermined his own argument by having McAdams admit it would not be admitted at trial. That is the equivalent of saying there was no chain of custody.

The chain of custody legal standard is designed to prevent the prosecution from either altering or exchanging an exhibit. Each step in the chain, from the crime scene, to the police HQ, to the lab, back to the evidence room, and into court must be accounted for. And the identification of the exhibit cannot change. With CE 399, any chain of custody pre-trial hearing would turn into a comedy show. (Click here for details) In fact, a defense lawyer would probably not call for a hearing. He would want to have it admitted at trial and watch the jury giggle as the evidence is presented. Can one imagine showing Todd the document saying he initialed the bullet and then asking him to find his initials on it? And that would just be for starters.

In his attempt to revive the rather downtrodden HSCA, there is another story which Litwin has to bury. That is the sea change that overtook that committee once Richard Sprague was removed. That element of the story is integral to any honest evaluation of that committee. The first chief counsel, Sprague, was a career prosecutor in Philadelphia with an impeccable legal reputation and an excellent record in court. He had every intention of treating the Kennedy assassination as a homicide case and he hired attorneys and investigators who had this kind of criminal experience. For instance, Sprague’s choice for Deputy Counsel over the Kennedy case was Bob Tanenbaum. Tanenbaum was chief of homicide in New York. He had never lost a felony case. Sprague did not last long, because it became clear he was not going to accept any of the Warren Commission’s conclusions without testing them first. He was going to do a complete reinvestigation of the JFK case, from the bottom up. (DiEugenio and Pease, pp. 56–57) He was not going to use the FBI or Secret Service as his agents. He was going to hire a whole new independent team to do a fresh inquiry. With that kind of approach, it would be inevitable that, sooner or later, he would have uncovered what Hunt, Agular, and Thompson did years later. All one needs to know about what happened to the HSCA is that it took the ARRB to show us the depth of the fraud the Magic Bullet was mired in.

With his homicide approach, I think Sprague also would have questioned the weapon in evidence. David Mantik did a fine job posing all the questions in the record that arise by the Commission’s acceptance of the Mannlicher Carcano, serial number C2766, as the rifle used in the assassination, but I would like to add one more evidentiary problem with the acceptance of that rifle. The Commission says that Oswald mailed a coupon and money order to Klein’s Sporting Goods in Chicago from a post office in Dallas. It was supposed to have been mailed on March 12, 1963. The Commission says it arrived in Chicago a day later. But not just that. It was also sorted at Klein’s and then walked over to their bank and deposited. All in about 24 hours. (Warren Report, p. 119)

Needless to say, Litwin does not bat an eyelash at this transaction. But I think it’s important to add, this was in the days before zip codes. It is also in the days before computers and sensors. From Dallas to Chicago is nearly 1000 miles. This reviewer mails letters inside the city of Los Angeles that take more than one day to arrive at their destination. For his upcoming documentary, JFK: Destiny Betrayed, Oliver Stone decided to conduct an experiment. He had Debra Conway of JFK Lancer mail a letter from the same post office that Oswald allegedly mailed his payment for the rifle. She mailed it to Michael LeFlem, an author for this web site, who lives a mile from where Klein’s used to be located. The letter took five days to arrive.

V

Towards the end of his book, Litwin mentions this reviewer specifically. (Litwin, p. 216) He writes that in my book The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today, that I believe I have found “discrepancies” in the chain of possession of CE 399. Discrepancies? Can the man be real? Bardwell Odum denying he ever showed the bullet to O. P. Wright, or anyone else, is not a “discrepancy.” Frazier getting the bullet before Todd gave it to him is not a “discrepancy.” The FBI lying about Todd’s initials being on the bullet is not a “discrepancy.” His initials are not there. All of this constitutes fraud and evidence alteration.

In this same passage, he then makes a leap—actually more like a Sergey Bubka pole vault. He says that I have written that all the evidence in the case is planted. (p. 216) In his references, he does not supply a footnote as a basis for that imputation to me. (See p. 270) I do not recall ever saying such a thing. For instance, I do not believe the David Lifton/Doug Horne body alteration concept. I am an agnostic on the Zapruder film being faked. I disagreed with just about everything in each of Nigel Turner’s The Men Who Killed Kennedy installments after the initial series was broadcast in America in 1991, e. g. the theories of the late Tom Wilson. I even disagreed with some of the original broadcast. I also have severe problems with writers like Robert Morningstar and Jim Fetzer and I consider most of their ideas to be outlandish. I have written about many of these disagreements and Litwin could have found them if he wanted to.

What I do in The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today is simply review the core evidence in the case in light of the revelations of the ARRB and the revisions in the record made after the Warren Report. The revelations and revisions in that record were both plentiful and disturbing. After distorting what I wrote, Litwin then applies another smear: he says I have no paperwork, witnesses, not anything to back up such a sensational claim. As noted above, I don’t recall making the claim he says I made. But each claim I do make is backed up with credible evidence. In that book, concerning the subject of evidence manipulation, I only go as far as the record establishes. And that record is not something I created or embellished. It’s there in the record for all to see. The JFK Assassination: The Evidence Today has over 1800 footnotes in it, many more than the book under review. Litwin does not want the reader to know that, so he air-brushes it out.

But let me use one example to show just how untrustworthy Litwin is. On the subterfuges around CE 399, here is the evidence I outline.

Witnesses:
- O. P. Wright, security chief at Parkland Hospital who gave the bullet to the Secret Service
- Bardwell Odum, FBI agent who allegedly showed the bullet in question to witnesses at Parkland Hospital
- Josiah Thompson, who interviewed witnesses at the hospital in November of 1966
- Gary Aguilar, who interviewed Odum in November, 2001
- John Hunt, who examined Robert Frazier’s 11/22/63 work product
Paperwork:
- Interview of Wright in Six Seconds in Dallas
- Interview of Odum in The Assassinations
- Complete absence of FBI 302 reports on Odum’s alleged interviews about the bullet
- Frazier’s work product as shown in Hunt’s essays
- Receipt for transfer of Magic Bullet from Secret Service to FBI on 11/22/63
- Blow up pictures of the Magic Bullet at the National Archives
This is having no witnesses or paperwork? Most people would say it is a surfeit of witnesses and paperwork. I could do the same with other examples from my book. But an important point to understand is this: Litwin does make reference to my book, which means he had it in some form. I am not an attorney, but I do know the laws of libel in California. I will be making consultations about the issue. After that, I will do a cost-benefit analysis and then decide whether or not to file an action.

VI

Throughout his book, Litwin makes recurring references to the sanctity and the probative value of the medical evidence in the JFK case. (See p. 177) How does he do this? As David Mantik mentioned, Litwin does not specifically describe what the 1968 Ramsey Clark Panel did to the original autopsy. Yet, anyone can read that report. (Click here for details) Before we get to the radical revisions of that panel, we must mention two points. First, that panel did not exhume Kennedy’s body. Second, they did not call in the original autopsy team—the three pathologists, the official photographer, or the radiologist—to testify. Their review was largely based on the autopsy report in the Warren Report and the photographs and x rays. The following is what the Clark Panel concluded:
1. They raised the entrance wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull four inches upward, i.e. almost the entire height of the skull, into the cowlick area.
2. The above conclusion was largely based on something that none of the original autopsy doctors saw on the x rays: a large 6.5 mm object in the rear of Kennedy’s skull.
3. They denied any particle trail rising from low in the skull and connecting to a higher trail above.
4. They saw particles in the neck area.
Each one of these differed with the original autopsy report from 1963, although point 4 ended up being incorrect. (As Gary Aguilar and Milicent Cranor have pointed out, later inquiries concluded these were artifacts.) The Clark Panel smudged another point of difference with the Warren Report, but the HSCA did make this clear: the wound on the president’s body was definitively lowered from the neck to the back.

Let us refer to my book for one of the original pathologist’s reaction to one of the differences in the record, specifically point 3. The following dialogue is between ARRB chief counsel Jeremy Gunn and James Humes. It was done with an x ray in front of the witness:

Q: Do you recall having seen an X-ray previously that had fragments corresponding to a small occipital wound?

A: Well, I reported that I did, so I must have. But I don’t see them. (DiEugenio, p. 152)

In other words, the present X-ray differs from his autopsy report. Let us now go to point 2, the appearance of the 6.5 mm object in the rear of the skull. When Gunn asked Humes about it, he said, “The ones we retrieved I didn’t think were the same size as this….” He then added that they were:

Smaller, considerably smaller…I don’t remember retrieving anything of this size. Truthfully, I don’t remember anything that size when I looked at these films. (DiEugenio, p. 153)

When Gunn asked another pathologist, Thornton Boswell about this issue, he replied “No. We did not find one that large. I’m sure of that.” (DiEugenio, p. 153) Why is this so important? Anyone can figure that out. In addition to its size in relation to the other fragments, the 6.5 mm dimensions of the object precisely fit the caliber ammunition that Oswald allegedly fired at Kennedy. Under those circumstances, are we really to believe that three pathologists, two FBI agents, the photographer, and the radiologist did not see it the night of the autopsy? When, in fact, this is what they were looking for: evidence of bullet remnants in the body.

One might ask: Why does Litwin not precisely deal with the Clark Panel’s modifications of the autopsy? Specifically, their raising of the rear skull wound and the appearance of the 6.5 mm object? Perhaps because, as the leader of that panel, Maryland Medical Examiner Russell Fisher, later said: the panel was formed to counter what the critics had pointed out about the Commission’s version of the autopsy. (Maryland State Medical Journal, March 1977) One way the 1968 panel did this was to raise the rear skull wound, so it would not misalign so much with both Kennedy’s positioning in the Zapruder film at frame 313 and also with where the exit wound on JFK was supposed to be: above and to the right of his right ear. Josiah Thompson had shown that the Commission had misrepresented these matters in illustrations in the volumes. (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 111)

What the Clark Panel did was help solve the problem of how the bullet came in: at a low point on the rear skull, on a downward angle; but exited at a higher point and, by necessity, at a rising angle. But, as David Mantik later pointed out, the Clark Panel’s “solution” left another huge problem. The base and nose of the skull bullet were found in the front of the car. (See Clark Panel Report p. 6; WR, pp. 557–58) This meant the 6.5 mm object, still in the rear of the skull, had to come from somewhere in the middle of the bullet. How could such a thing happen? Should we call it the Second Magic Bullet? Litwin does not tell the reader about this problem, so he does not have to explain it.

In spite of all the problems in the official record, which he sidesteps, there is still another HSCA shibboleth that—in his apparent allegiance to Paul Hoch—Litwin trots out to uphold the findings of that committee, namely that the autopsy photographs were authenticated. As with so many aspects of the HSCA, the ARRB declassification process has made this issue problematic. The HSCA wrote that, even though they had not found either the camera or lens used during the autopsy, the pictures were authenticated due to features on the photos that showed internal consistency. (HSCA Vol. 6, p. 226, reference 1) In itself, this seems questionable, since there was no comparison with the original apparatus utilized at Bethesda Medical Center on 11/22/63. But, as the ARRB found out, it’s worse than that. The Pentagon had found the only camera in use at Bethesda in 1963. But when the HSCA tested it, they found that the test results disagreed with its analysis. As Gary Aguilar notes, perhaps there was a different lens and shutter attached to the camera afterwards. But when the ARRB tried to search for the actual tests performed by the HSCA on the camera, the Board could not find them. Whatever the case, the statement made by the HSCA on this matter does not align with the declassified record. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp. 279–80)

Let us go to another huge problem with the medical record, one I wrote about in The JFK Assassination. ARRB Chief Counsel Jeremy Gunn examined the official autopsy photographer, John Stringer. When he showed him photos of Kennedy’s brain, the witness was visibly puzzled. The pictures Gunn showed him were shot with a different film than what Stringer used and were performed with a different technique. The latter was betrayed by a series of numbers on the film. Stringer also said that, on the brain photos he originally saw, the cerebellum was both damaged and cut. Here it was presented as intact. When asked directly by Gunn if he would say these were the photos he took of Kennedy’s brain, Stringer replied “No, I couldn’t say that they were President Kennedy’s.” (Doug Horne, Inside the ARRB, Vol. 3, pp. 806–10) Again, can one imagine the impact of such testimony during a legal proceeding? How could the HSCA not discover this very important revelation? This new ARRB evidence leads to these questions:
1. Who really took those photos?
2. Why was a second set needed?
As I demonstrated above, every single modification of the evidence I have mentioned in this review, or in my book, exists in the official records of this case. They are all there for the interested party to see. There is nothing fanciful about it. Litwin’s postulation that I had no witnesses or paperwork to support what I wrote in that regard has been shown above to be utterly false. It can only exist in his cherry-picked world. The problem with his doing that is that he leaves out proof which alters the contours of the evidence and changes the forensic conclusions in the JFK case.

Post Script: In looking through my notes, I see that I left one point out which I think Litwin is correct about. The author dedicates the book to John McAdams and Paul Hoch. Today, for reasons stated above and throughout, I would have to agree that such a pairing is appropriate. I will deal more with this later in the series.

Click here for Fred Litwin, On the Trail of Delusion – Part One.
February 13, 2021