Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

  • Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 3

    Creating the Oswald Legend – Part 3


    I. Was Oswald a Government Agent?

    In part 3, we will try to answer the most important question regarding Oswald. Was he a secret agent of some U.S. intelligence service and, if so, who was controlling him? We will examine his actions in Dallas and New Orleans and, finally, his alleged trip to Mexico before the tragic events of 11/22/1963. We will show that what happened in Mexico has many similarities with his USSR defection and the U2 incident.

    The Warren Commission had examined the possibility that Oswald was some kind of a “government agent”. J. Lee Rankin, the Commission’s general counsel, during the January 27th, 1964 meeting, was trying to convince the other members that they should counter the “dirty rumor” that Oswald was a “government agent”. Three days earlier, the chair of the Commission, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and Rankin had met secretly with members of the Texas Court of Inquiry to discuss whether or not Oswald was a CIA informant. Henry Wade, the Dallas District Attorney, informed them that somehow he learned that Oswald’s CIA identity number was 110669 and that it was consistent with the CIA’s filing system. Rankin later found out from Oswald’s CIA 201 personality file that Oswald’s CIA number on the file was 289248. Rankin never shared the above information with other members of the Commission and instead told them that there was a rumor out there, saying that Oswald was an FBI informant with identity number S-172 and S-179, which were bogus.[1]

    It was Waggoner Carr, the Texas Attorney General, who had provided the information to Rankin that Oswald had an FBI badge with number 179 and he was being paid $200 a month.[2] If that was true, then there should have been records at FBI HQ and probably in Dallas and in New Orleans. He would not have a badge, but a number that would be consistent with the Dallas field office abbreviation (DL), a four-digit number and the letter S at the end to denote security (e.g. DL1268S).[3]

    As it was concluded in part 2 of this series, Oswald’s Pro-Soviet, Pro-Communist bona fides would have allowed him to infiltrate communist subversive and pro-Castro organizations targeted by both the CIA and FBI. It is doubtful that Oswald would have been directly employed by the CIA or the FBI, but he was most likely employed by a private investigating agency that had connections to both or one of these two agencies, most likely the CIA.

    Peter Scott believed that this particular investigating agency’s field was that of industrial security.[4] To answer if that was the case, we should examine the life of another Marine who, like Oswald, showed sympathy towards revolutionaries, communists, and subversives. His name was Robert C. Ronstadt and in 1946 he started selling subscriptions to the Communist Daily People’s World and in 1947 joined the Communist party. However, he later testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee that he was only pretending to be a Communist. In reality, he was working in the Los Angeles firm Allied Records and he was tasked to smoke out employees with Communist sympathies and affiliations. It was also revealed that his true employer was not Allied Records but the private investigative firm owned  by P. McCarthy and Joseph Dunn that was responsible for providing industrial security to Allied Records. Ronstadt was not an FBI agent, but his employers, McCarthy and Dunn, were reporting their work to the FBI. Later, Ronstadt left the security company and became a paid informant to the FBI.[5]

    During the Cold War, all defense contractors and oil companies were obliged by law to conduct industrial security investigation to make sure that no leftists and subversives were hired by them. It was Lee Pennington Jr., an FBI agent, who joined the private organization the American Legion and started collecting and storing information on subversives in a massive library. The infamous James McCord of the CIA contacted Pennington, when he was looking to expose subversives.[6] Later, Pennington became a CIA consultant and transferred his library files from the American Legion to the newly created American Security Council (ASC ), which was a joint FBI-CIA-military industrial complex organization. Among its benefactors were both right wing anti-communists and Wall Street Eastern Establishment members. Some of them were Bernard Baruch, Nelson Rockefeller, Eugene W. Rostow, Henry and Clare Luce, Senator Thomas Dodd, Averell Harriman, General Lyman Lemnitzer, General Edward Lansdale, General John Singlaub, Patrick Frawley, Ray Cline, and James Jesus Angleton.

    Angleton created the Security and Intelligence Fund (SIF) after his forced retirement. John M. Fischer, one of the ASC’s presidents, was a founding director of SIF. Two other members of the Council, Elbridge Durbrow and General Robert Richardson III, were also SIF’s President and secretary/treasurer respectively. Large defense contractors like U.S. Steel, General Dynamics, Lockheed, Motorola, and McDonnell-Douglas were consulting its industrial security database to check potential personnel who could pose threats to their security.[7] Other notable members of the ASC were Admiral Felix B. Stump, Air America’s board Chairman, Henry O’Melveny Duque, Nixon’s former law partner, and vice presidents from Atlantic-Richfield, Standard Oil of California, General Dynamics, and the National Security of Industrial Association.[8]

    Do we have any evidence that Oswald was doing industrial security to expose subversives?

    When Oswald returned to Dallas from the USSR, he contacted Peter Gregory who was a petroleum engineer in Fort Worth. In August 1962, Gregory invited Oswald to dinner, where he met George Bouhe, leader of the White Russian community. We can recall from part 2 that Oswald was probably receiving leaflet materials from a White Russian organization and not the Cuban Consulate, as it was first believed. Bouhe introduced Oswald to other members of the White Russian community, among them Max Clark and his wife Katya, born as Princess Sherbatov of the Russian Royal family.[9] Max Clark was a retired Air Force Colonel and he used to work at General Dynamics as industrial security officer. Clark had also received covert security clearance from the CIA for “Project Rock” while working for General Dynamics. A CIA document had linked “Project Rock” to Project Oarfish, a code for the manufacturing of the U-2 airplane.[10] Clark later denied that he was working for the CIA, but he probably had some connection to them through that project. Surprisingly, another infamous character, William Harvey of CIA’s staff D, also had security clearance for “Project Rock”. According to a CIA document, they re-evaluated Harvey’s file in respect for approval to get security clearance to the above mentioned project.[11]

    Max Clark was working closely with I.B. Hale, a former FBI agent and later head of General Dynamics industrial security. It was Virginia, wife of I.B. Hale, that had helped Oswald to get a job at Leslie Whiting on July 1962.[12]

    George DeMohrenschildt was encouraged by Max Clark and J. Walton Moore of the CIA to befriend Oswald and become his mentor.[13] It was George DeMohrenschildt who helped Oswald get a new job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall (JCS) after he quit his job at Leslie Welding. JCS was doing contract work for the U.S. Army Map Service and that work was related to U-2 flights over Cuba. Oswald got the job four days before President Kennedy was shown pictures of missiles in Cuban taken by the U-2.[14]

    When Oswald moved to New Orleans, it is possible that his job there was related to industrial security in search for subversives. He was employed by the Reily Coffee Company, but he also worked covertly for Guy Banister. William Monaghan, an ex-FBI agent, was the company’s Vice President and specialized in industrial security. Alfred Claude, the man who hired Oswald, left Reily and went to work in Chrysler’s aerospace division, which was based in NASA’s New Orleans facilities. Emmett Barbee, Oswald’s supervisor, and two other Reily employees, Dante Marachini and John Branyon, went on also to work for NASA[15], more likely in the industrial security division. Oswald was frequenting a New Orleans’s garage and had revealed to its owner, Adrian Alba, that he was going to work for NASA. Bill Nitschke, a Banister associate, confessed that Banister had given an offer to NASA to get a contract for industrial security in NASA’s New Orleans facilities.

    That Banister’s investigating agency was doing industrial security work can be indicated by the testimony of former Banister associate, Joseph Oster. He told L.J. Delsa, an HSCA investigator, that Banister was using two sources to seek out subversives and Communists, FIDELAFAX and the American Security Council.

    One of the people who Oswald met in New Orleans was Ed Butler, the founder of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas. After Kennedy’s assassination, Jim Garrison learned about Oswald’s activities in New Orleans and his contacts with Butler and INCA. Butler got so scared that he packed all the INCA files and parts of Banister’s files and moved to Los Angeles, where he found employment with Patrick J. Frawley, a prominent member of the American Security Council.[16]

    It will not then be a surprise to learn that, in the fall of 1962, Oswald subscribed to the Daily Worker newspaper of the American Communist Party USA, applied for membership in the Socialists Workers Party, and subscribed to that party’s newspaper The Militant.[17] Both parties were a hive of leftists, subversives, and Communists.

    One could conclude that Oswald was not on the direct payroll of the CIA or the FBI, but possibly through Max Clark he was employed by an unknown industrial security private agency with the purpose of reporting on subversives that were of interest to CIA, the FBI, and defence contractors.

    Had this agency been created and controlled by the CIA or the FBI? For Ed Butler was in contact with people like Charles Cabell, Deputy Director of the CIA, and CIA officer Ed Lansdale, a member of the ASC.[18]

    When Oswald was in New Orleans, he was in contact with Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw.  When Oswald was fifteen, he met David Ferrie in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), where Ferrie was a Captain. In 1961, Ferrie and an exiled Cuban, Sergio Arcacha Smith, were part of the CIA’s training and preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion.[19] During the same period, Banister’s office was located in the Balter building in New Orleans. In the same building were located the offices of a Cuban exile organization, the Cuban Revolutionary Council (CRC), and Sergio Arcacha Smith was the New Orleans representative.[20] When Banister moved to 544 Camp Street, Arcacha Smith rented an office for CRC in the same building. It was CIA officer E. Howard Hunt who had helped create this organization.[21] Gordon Novel has said that he met Arcacha Smith in 1961 at Banister’s office upon Ed Butler’s recommendation and, at that meeting, was a person who fit the description of David Phillips.[22]

    In Part 2, we concluded that high-level CIA officer James Angleton had utilized Oswald for a Counter Intelligence operation. John Newman thought that Oswald was an off-the-books agent for Angleton. When Oswald returned from Russia, Angleton probably would not have used him as an official CIA agent, but he may have used his connection with the American Security Council and “hired” Oswald from the back door through an industrial security private firm. Angleton was very close to William Sullivan, the head of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division 5, and they had cooperated in the past against the KGB in search of a mole. Most of Sullivan’s men were in continuous cooperation with Angleton’s Counter Intelligence and his secret CI/SIG mole hunting unit. Don Moore of the FBI’s Soviet Counterintelligence interviewed Soviet defector Anatliy Golitsyn and he was the FBI’s representative to the joint CIA/FBI mole hunt task force that included Sullivan and Sam Papich. Papich was the FBI’s liaison to Angleton’s Counterintelligence staff and, as we shall see later on, he was part of a joint CIA/FBI effort to discredit the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in foreign countries where it had support.[23]

    Angleton and Sullivan also conspired to rehearse questions and answers for the Warren Commission. It can be logically concluded that Oswald’s mission against subversives was a joint CIA/FBI project orchestrated by Angleton.


    II. Oswald as Agent Provocateur

    Lee Harvey Oswald moved to New Orleans in April 1963 and visited his Uncle and Aunt, Dutz and Lillian Murret, where he stayed for a while until he could a find a job and settle down on his own. As it was shown earlier, Oswald got a job at Reily Coffee Company and then secured his own apartment.

    In part 2, we reported that Oswald was a frequent visitor to the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles where the people that later founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) were members. We have also concluded that Oswald’s Soviet bona fides were a part of his preparation to later infiltrate this particular organization. In New Orleans, he did so. On May 26, 1963, Oswald wrote to the central offices of the FPCC asking them to accept him as a formal member and informed them that he would open a small office to use as branch of the organization. He asked if the organization could provide him with a charter, leaflets, paperwork, and a photograph of Fidel Castro.[24]

    On May 29, 1963, the director of FPCC, Vincent Lee, informed Oswald that he was accepted as an official member of the organization. But he tried to discourage him from opening a chapter in an area which he knew would attract few members, since they would have to work hard just to put together a rudimentary apparatus. He also warned about a branch office provoking violent reaction of the city’s well known right-wing extremists, so he advised renting a postal box. [25]

    Oswald did rent a P.O. Box in his own name with number 30061, New Orleans, Louisiana. He added his wife’s name, Marina Oswald, and someone by the name of A. J. Hidell to also be able to receive mail. He then made an order to print 1000 leaflets and 500 applications using the name Lee Osborne. [26] On the leaflets, he had his name printed with A. J. Hidell as the chapter President.  He then informed the Worker and Militant of his new P.O. Box.[27]

    In May and June of 1963, Oswald was distributing FPCC leaflets in at least three New Orleans locations: Tulane University, Canal Street, and the port. Two university students had in their possession FPCC leaflets with “Hands off Cuba” and the name A. J. Hidell instead of Lee Harvey Oswald. A military intelligence officer reported to the FBI that he had found one such a leaflet at Tulane with the name A. J. Hidell, P.O. Box 30016. Oswald also distributed leaflets outside the aircraft carrier Wasp.[28] Although the correct P.O. Box address was 30061, for some peculiar reason on the above occasion, it was written 30016.

    On June 24, 1963, Oswald applied for a passport to travel to England, France, Germany, Holland, the Soviet Union, and Poland. He received it the next day with the warning that he was not allowed to travel to Cuba. On July 19, 1963, the Reily Company fired Oswald on the grounds that he was not working efficiently and he was absent from his post quite often. On July 27, 1963, his cousin Eugene Murret asked him to talk about his life in the Soviet Union at the Jesuit College in Mobile, Alabama, where he was a student.[29]

    During his speech, he said the Communist Party USA had betrayed itself. It had become a sidekick of the USSR against the American government, so the Soviet Union could become the absolute ruler of the American continent. This is strange since Oswald first joined the Communist party USA and now was accusing it of betrayal. It is also odd that he accused the Soviet Union while some days ago, he had applied to travel there. On August 1, 1963, Oswald wrote a letter to Vincent Lee informing him that he had opened the P.O. Box and distributed leaflets on the streets. Then he wrote something bizarre, but prophetic, saying to Vincent that some exiled Cubans attacked one of his demonstrations, the police intervened, and because of that he lost any support and was left alone.[30] We don’t know if Oswald possessed clairvoyant powers, but something similar happened four days later. On August 5, 1963, he visited the clothes shop of Carlos Bringuier, an Anti-Castro exiled Cuban and member of the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE), to offer him his skills that he had acquired as U.S. Marine. He appeared to be anti-Castro, but on the 9th of August his true face was revealed when Bringuier and two of his associates witnessed Oswald distributing FPCC “Hands off Cuba” leaflets while seeking support for Castro. This double-faced behavior of Oswald made Bringuier extremely angry and he accused Oswald of  being “a traitor and Communist”. Oswald didn’t seem to be very shaken and replied “OK Carlos, if you want to hit me, hit me”. The police intervened, like Oswald had foreseen, and arrested them all.[31]

    Oswald was locked in jail and he could have been immediately released if he had paid the $25 bail, but he chose not to and stayed in for the weekend. During that time, he was visited and questioned by Police officer Francis Martello and FBI agent John Quigley. What he said to both of them and how this impacted him on 11/22/1963 will be explained later on.

    The focus for the time being will be on the aftermath of his arrest and his subsequent radio interview about the Canal Street event. On the 12th, Oswald testified before the court that he was guilty of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to ten days. However, he paid the bail of $10 and was set free. The Cubans were not sentenced and were released.[32] Oswald continued his leafleting and Bringuier asked the help of Ed Butler of INCA to expose Oswald’s true colors.

    First, Oswald gave an interview to William K. Stuckey’s WDSU-radio program “Latin Listening Post” and talked about his FPCC organization, but he refused to reveal the names of its members. Oswald was questioned if he was a Communist and if Castro’s regime was a Soviet front in the western hemisphere. Oswald did not deny being a Communist, but he said that he was not member of the Communist Party. Stuckey asked Oswald if the FPCC activities promote Communism, which he denied saying that the organization is only concerned with Cuban matters. When asked if he had visited Latin America, he answered that he had been only to Mexico. It should be noted that Oswald never offered the information that he had lived in the Soviet Union. He said the American government and their anti-Cuba policies had forced Castro to seek help from the Soviet Union. Finally, he accused the CIA of mishandling Cuba and called the CIA defunct and Allen Dulles defunct, which might be something an anti-Castro exile would say who thought the Agency did not do a proper job in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.[33]

    At the end of the interview, Stuckey asked Oswald if he could come again for a more detailed interview and he agreed. On August 21, 1963, Oswald appeared on Stuckey’s show “Conversation Carte Blanche” to debate Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler of INCA.[34] Stuckey began the interview by asking Oswald if he had lived in the Soviet Union, a tip provided to him by Bringuier. Oswald was surprised by the question and replied that he had. Bringuier intervened and asked him if he represented the Fair Play for Cuba Committee or Fair Play for Russia Committee. Oswald replied that this was a provocative question that didn’t need answering.

    Stuckey then dropped the bomb and asked Oswald if he’d renounced his American citizenship and had become a Soviet citizen. Oswald replied that this had nothing to do with the topic of Cuban-American relations. But Stuckey insisted that it did, since Oswald had been proclaiming that Cuba is not a Russian puppet and now it was revealed that he had past relationship to Russia and maybe he was a Communist. Oswald did not answer if he was a Communist, but admitted that he was a Marxist.

    Stuckey wondered how he supported himself his three years in Russia and asked if he was given any government subsidy there. Stressed, Oswald almost revealed his true purposes when he said that:

    …I worked in Russia. I was under the protection, I was not under the protection of the American government, but I was at all times considered an American citizen. I did not lose my American citizenship…I am back in the United States. A person who renounces his citizenship becomes legally disqualified for returning to the United States.

    In the first interview, he denied that Cuba was under Russia’s control and insisted the FPCC’s concern was only Cuban independence and opposing intervention in Cuban affairs. In his second interview, he was exposed as a Marxist and possible Communist working for the Soviets and taking his orders from them, perhaps as a Soviet spy himself. Oswald, wittingly or unwittingly, had connected the FPCC to the Soviet Union and had hurt the organization’s reputation and credibility. After this debate, Oswald’s career as member of FPCC and Castro’s supporter had lost its purpose, value, and meaning.

    With his help, his interlocutors made the FPCC look like a Russian Trojan horse in America and a dangerous Communist spying niche. It is more likely that Oswald was acting as such as part of CIA’s anti-FPCC campaign which, as John Newman found out, had been orchestrated by James McCord and David Atlee Philips since 1961.[35] The CIA and FBI suspected that the FPCC back then was trying to infiltrate students that were travelling to Cuba. So Phillips decided to dangle an American student, Court Wood, into the FPCC by pretending to be pro-Castro interesting in starting a new FPCC chapter, something that Oswald tried to emulate two years later.[36]  Although the CIA was not allowed to run domestic operations, the FBI knew they did and turned a blind eye to them as FBI agent in New Orleans Warren DeBrueys told author Jim DiEugenio.[37] It would be very plausible that this CIA anti-FPCC campaign had been passed to CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), formed in 1962. 

    Researcher Peter Vea discovered a list of documents in the National Archives regarding Clay Shaw’s contacts with the Domestic Contact Service (DCS). One of these documents stated Clay Shaw had been granted covert security approval for project QK/ENCHANT.[38] Newly discovered documents revealed that the CIA was examining the prospect of using Banister’s agency as a cover company for project QK/ENCHANT. Based on ARRB investigation, QK/ENCHANT was a cryptonym for “permission to approach” and utilization for cleared contact purposes. These probably indicated the use of individuals and companies as contact cover for CIA proprietary organizations.[39]

    Author Bill Davy showed the above document to former CIA officer Victor Marchetti and, after examining it, he said to Davy, “That’s interesting…he was doing something there.” He added that Shaw would not need a covert security clearance for DCS. Marchetti then said he was likely doing something for Clandestine Services.  When Dave asked which one, Marchetti replied:

    The DOD (Domestic Operations Division). It was one of the most secret divisions within Clandestine Services. This was Tracey Barnes’s old outfit. They were getting into things…uh exactly what I don’t know. But they were getting into risky areas. And this is where E. Howard Hunt was working for at the time.”[40]

    The DOD offices were not located at Langley, but on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington. When Richard Helms was asked about the DOD behind closed doors in 1968, he described the DCS which was not a part of the Directorate of Plans.[41] Donald Freed wrote in his book Death in Washington that the DOD was involved in illegal domestic cover companies and operations against the FPCC.[42]


    III. Setting Up the Patsy

    In this section, we shall look into the events and incidents showing that Oswald was set up to take the fall for Kennedy’s murder. There were many such efforts, but we will concentrate on the most important, since it will be impossible to report in every detail the life of Oswald in this article.

    A. Senator Dodd, Hidell and the Mannlicher – Carcano

    The Warren Commission had a hard time proving that Oswald owned a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the weapon that allegedly was used to kill Kennedy. What is certain, though, is that Oswald was interested in how to purchase weapons by mail. When he was working at the Reily Company, Oswald was spending his time visiting Adrian Alba’s garage and engaging him in conversations about mail order weapons. Oswald would also study some magazines about guns in Alba’s office. He had asked Alba, “How many weapons had I ever ordered, and how long did it take to get them, and where had I ordered the guns from.”[43]

    The Dallas Police said they found an order page from the June 1963 American Rifleman magazine about a Manlicher–Carcano.[44] Oswald, however, had already ordered a Manlicher–Carcano from Klein Sporting Goods on March 12th, 1963, using a coupon from the February issue of the same magazine under the name A. Hidell. He also ordered a Smith & Wesson .38 gun from Seaport Traders of Los Angeles on January 27th, 1963, under the name A. J. Hidell. This was the same gun that Oswald allegedly used to kill Officer Tippit.[45] Was it a coincidence that these two weapons companies were under investigation by the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms agency (ATF)?

    Besides ATF, there was another ongoing investigation about these two companies, conducted by Senator Thomas Dodd, another member of the powerful American Security Council. Dodd was the Chairman of the Senate Juvenile Delinquency Subcommittee trying to legislate the use of interstate mail orders for weapons.[46] Dodd’s subcommittee started its hearings two days after Hidell ordered the Smith & Wesson gun and the Manlicher–Carcano was also one of the weapons investigated.[47]

    Senator Dodd was also member of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee—headed by the racist, right-wing Senator James Eastland of Mississippi—which was investigating the FPCC. Dodd called the FPCC “the chief public relations instrument of the Castro network in the United States” and believed that both the Socialist party and the Communist Party had infiltrated the committee. It might have been possible that Oswald, as a member of a private investigating firm, was contacted by Dodd’s committee to infiltrate these three organizations.[48]

    The son of one of Senator Dodd’s friends, who had been hired as an investigator to do work for the subcommittee, was involved in a strange incident in Mexico, causing a disturbance in a strip club. He was arrested by Mexican police for having a gun and posing as a police officer. The same man was arrested for carrying three weapons and ammunition in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, on a weekend that President Kennedy was there.[49]

    As others have pointed out, it would have been stupid for Oswald to order a rifle via interstate mail intending to kill JFK, since it would leave a trail that would ensnare him. It would have been easier to buy a rifle from a gun shop in Dallas anonymously. When Oswald was arrested in New Orleans, he was interviewed by Lieutenant Francis Martello of the New Orleans Police Intelligence Division and New Orleans FBI Agent John Lester Quigley. He showed two FPCC cards, one signed by Vincent T. Lee and the other by A. J. Hidell, his alleged New Orleans FPCC officer. As a result, this information was related by Martello to the 112th Army Military Intelligence Group (MIG) at Fort Sam Houston and by Quigley to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Algiers, Louisiana.[50]

    After the assassination, Colonel Robert E. Jones of the 112th MIG informed the FBI that Oswald was carrying a fraudulent Hidell selective service card; therefore this information linked Oswald to Hidell and the weapon used to shoot the President.[51] This would trace back to the FPCC and, perhaps, Castro as a leading force behind the assassination.  One has to wonder why Oswald would order a weapon using an alias and then carry with him an identity card that would link him to the weapon on the day of the assassination.

    B. The Clinton-Jackson Incident

    Jim Garrison was the first official to present witnesses that had seen Oswald in the company of David Ferrie and Clay Shaw in the areas of Clinton and Jackson, ninety miles north of New Orleans.

    One day, during the late summer of 1963, Ed McGehee the owner of a barbershop in Jackson was visited by a stranger who he later identified as Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald asked if he could find a job as an electrician in the area. McGehee told him to ask in the East Louisiana State hospital and informed him that it was a mental hospital, something that Oswald did not know and surprised him. He advised him to contact state representative Reeves Morgan.[52]

    Oswald visited Morgan, but he told him that he could not help him since he could not put him ahead of his own constituents. He advised him to register to vote and that might net him extra points in his search of work. Van Morgan, playing in the front yard, noted the black Cadillac parked outside the house; with a man with a shock of white hair in the driver’s seat.[53]

    The next day, Oswald and his two companions went to the neighboring village of Clinton to register. It happened to be the day when a drive to register black voters—organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—was on. When the Cadillac appeared, most voters thought it might be the FBI, so they noticed the car and its occupants. Several witnesses, from simple voters, to the Registrar, and the local Sheriff, testified that they identified the three people as Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, and Clay Shaw. The Sheriff even approached the car and asked the tall grey haired driver for his license. It turned out to be Clay Shaw of the International Trade Mart of New Orleans. Oswald and another man were the only two white voters trying to register that day.[54] When Registrar Henry Palmer asked him for ID, Oswald showed him some Marine separation papers and offered two references, both doctors, Malcom Pierson and Frank Silva. Oswald said that he was living in the state hospital together with the above mentioned doctors. Then Palmer asked him why he wanted to register and Oswald replied that he was advised this would help him secure a job at the hospital. Palmer replied that this was not so, since he knew many people out of Mississippi that were working in Jackson. Hearing that, Oswald left the office, returned to the car and the trio departed.[55]

    Oswald then resurfaced at the East hospital trying to get a job, but he was making a spectacle of himself. Talking loudly and being obnoxious, he asked the hospital employees what it would take to take Castro down, since he was a Marine and he was involved in getting rid of Castro. Frank Silva, a Cuban doctor that Oswald had used as a reference, heard the conversation and took an immediate dislike to Oswald.[56]

    Maxine Kemp, the hospital secretary, remembered Oswald filling an application and a year later, after the assassination, looked for the file and found it. When Garrison investigators went there looking to find it, the file had disappeared.[57]

    Why did Shaw and Ferrie take Oswald to Jackson to seek a job at the hospital and register as a voter? If we could consider Oswald’s actions against leftists and subversives, it would make sense to try to register with the black voters so to link CORE through himself to FPCC, Castro, and the Soviet Union, something that would comprise the CORE movement for racial equality.  However, the most important aspect of this trip was his visit to a mental hospital acting as a troubled young man talking nonsense and behaving erratically. Garrison believed that if Oswald had secured a job at the hospital it would have been easy for someone to alter his file from employee to a mental patient, something that would fit with his later portrayal as the lone nut assassin.

    C. The Odio Incident

    Sylvia Odio was the daughter of the Cuban truck magnate Amador Odio, who was imprisoned back in Cuba along with his wife for actions against the Castro regime. She was living in a Dallas apartment with her two children and her sister Annie, who was helping Sylvia move to another apartment. In late September, Sylvia was visited by two men who presented themselves as Cuban exiles and an American. The exiles were introduced to Sylvia by their war names: Leopoldo and Angelo. They said they were members of JURE, Manolo Ray’s liberal exile organization of which Amador Odio was a founding member.[58] They had come from New Orleans and asked Sylvia to write them letters in proper English to be used to attract financial support for JURE. Sylvia declined since she did not know or trust these strangers and they then left. But the next day one of the Cubans, Leopoldo, called her and told her that the American accompanying them was named:

    Leon…he was an ex-Marine, an expert marksman…he could do anything, like getting underground in Cuba, like killing Castro. He says we Cubans don’t have any guts; we should have shot President Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs. He says we should a thing like that.[59]

    Sylvia never heard from them again and wrote her father about these strange visitors. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Sylvia and her sister Annie recognized Lee Harvey Oswald as “Leon,” the American that came to her house. Sylvia was certain that they visited her apartment on Thursday, the 26th of September or the next day. This created a huge problem for the Commission: Oswald was supposed to be on a bus to Mexico on the 26th of September. This incident is very similar to Oswald’s bragging to Doctor Silva about getting rid of Kennedy and showing radical, unpredictable, and bizarre behavior.

    JURE was considered by the CIA as a leftist organization that had infiltrated the JMWAVE station. At one point, CIA Officer Henry Hecksher had ordered Manuel Artime, E. Howard Hunt’s protégé, to fire on JURE vessels.[60] Hunt despised Ray and referred to his philosophy as Castroism without Castro.   It is plausible that this incident could have been an effort to connect JURE to Oswald and, subsequently, to Castro and the assassination of Kennedy.

    D. Castro’s Gun Dealer

    Either just before or right after visiting Sylvia Odio, two men visited Robert McKeown, a former gun dealer at his house in Bay Cliff near Houston. One of them introduced himself as Lee Oswald and his companion, a Cuban, as Hernandez. They explained that they wanted to buy a large number of guns to start a revolution in El Salvador. McKeown was skeptical and refused to sell them anything, since he was on probation for smuggling guns to Castro in Cuba on behalf of Prio Socarres. When he refused, Oswald tried to convince him to at least sell them four Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights for $10,000. McKeown again refused and said to Oswald that he could buy these for a few hundred dollars from any Sears Roebuck store in Texas.[61] He thought that the whole deal was fishy and maybe someone wanted to get him in trouble if the guns were really for Castro; especially when he recognized Hernandez as a man he knew in Cuba years ago as a Castro supporter.[62]

    If McKeown had fallen for the trap and one of the rifles was proven to be used in the JFK assassination, then the gun could have been traced back to him and eventually to Castro and Cuba as the instigators of the crime.

    The most important event that took place to incriminate Oswald was the infamous Mexico City incident. Due to its complexity, it will be examined separately, in more detail than the above four.


    IV. Mexico Histrionics

    Oswald’s trip through Mexico and what occurred there is the most convoluted and enigmatic event regarding the assassination, one that could lead to the core of a momentous plot. Analysing it in all its aspects is not within the scope of this essay. One should read John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA or the Lopez Report, to name just two sources, for a detailed and deep analysis. A summary of the incident will be presented here to note if any parallels can be drawn between the episode and the U-2 shoot down in the Soviet Union.

    Oswald visited the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City on a Friday, September 27, 1963, around 11 a.m. and asked Sylvia Duran—the consulate’s secretary—to grant him an in-transit visa to Cuba on his way to the Soviet Union. To make his case, he showed her his work papers from Russia, his marriage certificate, and his membership cards in the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and in the FPCC. Duran found his behaviour odd, since he was a member of CPUSA, which was illegal in Mexico; and he had not gotten a visa from CPUSA which had a special agreement with Cuba’s Communist Party to get instant visas for its members. Duran asked him to get some passport photographs, Oswald left, and then returned with photographs, but Duran advised him that she could not issue him an in-transit visa to Cuba unless he first had obtained a visa to the Soviet Union.[63] So Oswald went to the Soviet Embassy. The Soviets refused him a visa, telling him that that he had to fill in an application form that would be sent to Washington and it could take months for a reply. Oswald returned to the Cuban Consulate and told Duran a bold lie, that the Soviets had issued him a visa. Duran, incredulous, called the Soviet Embassy to find out if they had. KGB operative under diplomatic cover Valery Kasimov told her that the reply from Washington could take months. As John Newman concluded, those who handled Oswald had advised him to lie because they wanted to force Duran to call Kostikov and the conversation would be recorded by CIA’s LI/ENVOY telephone tap secret operation in Mexico City. But neither of the two mentioned Oswald by name and instead referred to him as the American.[64]

    Duran would not issue Oswald a transit visa and told him to leave. Oswald got angry and displayed erratic and aggressive behaviour, making a bad impression on the Cubans. He had to be escorted out of the Consulate.

    The next day, Saturday 28, 1963, he returned to the Soviet Embassy, which was closed on weekends. But he managed to meet with Kostikov for a final desperate attempt to get a visa. According to the Russians, he had a revolver, which he said he needed to protect himself from the FBI. They denied his request and asked him to fill in an application for Washington’s Soviet Consulate. Oswald never filled in the form and gave up, leaving the premises.[65] He never again visited either the Cuban Consulate or the Soviet Embassy.

    What happened next is the beginning of the most enigmatic tangled web that surrounded Oswald: a man and a woman impersonating Duran and Oswald, called the Soviet Embassy asking for the visa application that Oswald had not filled in. The name of Oswald is not mentioned. Also, the man spoke poor Russian but good Spanish which was the opposite of Oswald’s case. The imposter told the Russian that he went back to the Cuban consulate to ask for his address in Mexico since they had it.[66] Newman believes that the impersonators wanted it recorded that Oswald had some special relationship with the Cubans. Duran later denied that she made the call as did the Soviets, so it is likely that the Russian recorded answering was also an impersonator.

    Because Oswald’s name was not mentioned, another call occurred on Tuesday, October 1, 1963. The imposter called the Soviet embassy and asked if there were any news on a cable to Washington. Those impersonating Oswald did not know the details of his visits to the Cuban Consulate and Soviet Embassy nor that he had declined to fill in the visa application. If they had known, they would have never asked such a pointless question. Again, the caller spoke poor Russian, which would later pose a problem to them. The imposter asked what was the name of the Soviet official he spoke to and the Russian replied “Kostikov.” Why was it so important to link Oswald to Kostikov? Because Kostikov, according to CIA was, part of KGB’s department 13, responsible for assassinations.

    Newman concluded that the impersonators wanted the names of both Oswald and Kostikov to be mentioned so it would be recorded by LI/ENVOY, planting a virus into the CIA’s records that would be activated on November 22, 1963. That virus would link KGB assassinations and the Soviet Union to the murder of President Kennedy. President Johnson would use the impersonation charade to convince Senator Russell and Chief Justice Warren into preventing a conflict “kicking us into a war that can kill forty million Americans in an hour.”[67] The WWIII virus made sure that the Warren Commission would never investigate what really happened in Mexico.

    It is undeniable that someone impersonated Oswald on these phone calls. But did they impersonate the historical Lee Harvey Oswald or another imposter? There are indications that the real Oswald never travelled to Mexico and there are testimonies by Duran, Cuban Consul Azcue, and a Cuban student that confirm he was not the real Oswald they saw in Mexico.

    Duran testified under interrogation that Oswald was blonde, short, dressed inelegantly, and his face turned red when angry.[68] When the CIA gave Duran’s testimony to the Warren Commission, they eliminated the above description. When Duran testified to the HSCA, she offered the following description: “as approximately five feet six, with sparse blonde hair, weighing about 125 pounds.”[69] Consul Azcue gave a similar description “a white male, between 5’6″ and 5’7″, over 30 years of age, very thin long face, with straight eye brows and a cold look in his eyes.”[70] A Cuban student, Oscar Contreras said that he met an American named Lee Harvey Oswald and he was blonde and short.[71] If these testimonies are true, the impersonator who made the calls had impersonated an already impersonated Oswald: which perplexes things even further.

    Two CIA assets working undercover inside the Cuban consulate told Lopez that the man they saw was not the man accused of assassinating the President.[72] This issue could have been resolved if photographs of Oswald going in and coming out of the embassies existed. The CIA has never been able to present any such photographs and thanks to the Lopez report we know why. Anne Goodpasture was a CIA officer from Staff D posted to the Mexico CIA station. She tried to disguise her role in retrieving photos each day. But Lopez and Hardway found out the man she named in this function only did the legwork for Goodpasture. They finally discovered that Goodpasture was responsible for photographic and electronic surveillance. The translating team said that they did not review all photographs from the Soviet Embassy, only what Goodpasture would allow them to see, and all such photographs were under her control. They also revealed that, although Goodpasture was an assistant to station chief Win Scott, she was a closer assistant to David Phillips, the Chief of Cuban Operations and Covert Action. During that same period, Phillips was also working for the SAS/CI.[73] Phillips was questioned by HSCA Chief Counsel Dick Sprague if he had any photographs of Oswald in Mexico. He replied that the camera was not working those days.[74] Hardway wrote a memo to HSCA Chairman Louis Stokes saying that about ten feet of film was taken from the camera that covered the Cuban Consulate on the 27th and 28th of September. These were developed and sent to CIA HQ, then lost and never seen again.[75]

    The CIA always maintained that the tapes had been erased and there were not any originals for Lopez and Hardway to compare with the existing transcripts. There was a missing conversation of September 30, 1963, that the translator, Mrs. Tarasoff, had transcribed. She remembered that it was a very lengthy call and Oswald had spoken in English and had requested financial aid from the Soviets. She had marked it as urgent and according to her recollection Phillips had also heard it.[76]

    On October 1, 1963, a diplomatic pouch was sent to CIA HQ addressed to a Michael Choaden. This was an alias for Phillips. Phillips had access to all information from Mexico to Washington and vice versa. He had the original tapes that Goodpasture had given him, plus the copies and transcripts at CIA HQ. Simply put: Phillips would have been able to alter the tapes or phony up the transcripts.[77]

    On October 8, 1963, the Mexico station sent a cable to CIA HQ to report an American citizen’s contact with Kostikov. This contact had been known for a week. Phillips tried to explain the delay to Lopez by saying the translators were too slow. But Lopez found out they had finished the translation after 24 hours. Phillips insisted that he was certain about this, since he signed the cable because it concerned Cuban matters. That was another lie, because he had left Mexico the 1st of October and the cable did not say anything about Cuban matters.[78]

    The cable had two separate sections. The first reported that an American male, Lee Oswald, who spoke broken Russian, talked with Soviet consul Kostikov. The second section informed that they had photos of someone entering and leaving the Soviet Embassy that was age 35, athletic build, 6 feet, receding hairline and balding top. The cable did not state that this “mystery man” photographed was the same as Lee Oswald, who was only recorded on the phone.[79]

    It should have been obvious that the mystery man was not Oswald. When Goodpasture was questioned about it, she replied that it was the only photograph of a non-Latin person taken on October 1, 1963. But Lopez and Hardway discovered that the photo was taken on October 2, 1963.[80] All of these falsehoods made Hardway and Lopez suspicious of Goodpasture and Phillips.


    V. A Sinister Mole Hunt Deja Vu

    The Mexico desk at CIA HQ received the Kostikov cable and John Whitten—alias John Scelso—then retrieved Oswald’s 201 file. He found out that it had been dormant for the previous eighteen months. This file had been kept by its custodian Ann Egerter of Angleton’s super secretive CI/SIG. What Whitten could not possibly have known was that the FBI report of Oswald’s debriefing in 1962 was missing. He also could not have known that the FBI reports concerning Oswald’s activities with Cubans and the FPCC in Dallas and New Orleans were not included in his 201 file. Around September 23, 1963, just before Oswald went to Mexico, all this crucial information had been bifurcated to file 100-300-011, entitled “Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”[81] There were no indications that the Cuban affairs office (SAS) read that file, but its Counterintelligence staff SAS/CI did.[82] More importantly, Whitten had no information about Kostikov and did not know that he was suspected of being a KGB officer responsible for assassinations.

    On October 10, 1963, CIA HQ sent a cable to State, FBI, and Navy connecting the mystery man to Oswald and informed them that Lee Oswald contacted the Soviet Embassy and spoke to consul Kostikov. It described Oswald as 35 years old, athletic build, six feet tall with receding hairline. It also reported that this Oswald might be identical to a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and implied that he was still there with his family.[83]

    The same day, they sent another cable to the Mexico City station that included a different description of Oswald as five 5’ 10”, 165 pounds, light brown wavy hair and blue eyes.[84] This cable also identified Oswald with a Lee Henry Oswald that had defected to the Soviet Union and still living there according to latest HQ info dated may 1962; no word about his return to the States and his escapades in Dallas and New Orleans.[85] Most of the Counterintelligence officers in CI/SIG knew that the information included on these cables was not true, but rather deceptive.

    Jane Roman, one the counterintelligence officers who signed both of the cables was interviewed by John Newman and Jefferson Morley in 1994. Roman admitted to them that:

    I am signing off on something I know isn’t true…The only interpretation I could put on this would be that this SAS group would have held all the information on Oswald under their tight control…

    She added “Well, to me, its indicative of a keen interest in Oswald, held very closely on a need-to-know basis.”[86]

    On September 16, 1963, a day before Oswald obtained his tourist visa to Mexico, the CIA sent a memo to FBI for a joint operation to embarrass the FPCC in countries where it had support by planting deceptive information. It would have been a counterintelligence operation inspired by CI/OPS and carried out by SAS/CI.[87] As we have seen in the previous section, Oswald was probably under the control of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division (DOD), but now that he was to be moved outside of U.S. soil, the SAS and David Phillips would have taken the reigns. Could this have been his mission in Mexico to discredit the FPCC, as he had in New Orleans?

    The CIA, and most likely Phillips, had already run an impersonation operation against an American named Eldon Hensen in Mexico. Hensen wanted to help provide useful information to the Cubans and requested a meeting. The CIA station in Mexico City had an agent pretend to be Cuban and meet Hensen. As a result, Hensen walked into a trap.[88]

    However, most clandestine operations have at least two purposes and an operation might be hidden inside another. It is possible that the SAS could have used Oswald or his legend in an operation designed to kill Castro, although no such evidence exists.  Bill Simpich, in his book State Secret, made the case that the disinformation and false data presented in the two cables were designed as a mole hunt to find out who had betrayed a CIA operation in Mexico by impersonating Oswald. I would agree with him up to a point, that there was a mole hunt but it was not benign, as he seems to think, but a sinister one. The name Lee Henry Oswald, the wrong descriptions of Oswald, Marina’s surname pronounced Pusakova instead of Prusakova were marked cards used in a mole hunt.

    This mole hunt had eerie similarities to the one we described in Part 2, which Angleton used as a cover for the U-2 shoot down. Simpich also believes that it was CIA officer from JM/WAVE, David Sanchez Morales, that had used his Cuban intelligence forces, called AMOTs, to impersonate Oswald and Duran. Morales was clever and knowledgeable of counterintelligence operations, but he was not in any way a CIA general. Would Morales be able to bifurcate information into two separate Oswald files? It was this bifurcation that kept his Cuban activities secret and lowered his profile so he would not be included on the Secret Service security index. These two files emerged after November 22, 1963, to complete Oswald’s profile and reveal that an ex defector to the USSR had been involved upon his return to the States in pro-Castro activities and had been in contact with a Soviet KGB assassinations officer in Mexico City. Further, could Morales have foreseen that the FBI would remove the flash warning from Oswald’s file on October 9th, the day before the CIA issued the two faulty memos? That warning had been intact since 1959. This also allowed Oswald’s threat profile to be lowered.  One last point, as we shall see, the probability remains that Oswald was not in Mexico City. Could Morales have known that the double operation was planned with a man who was not going to be there?  Who was a legend?  And would Morales know what specific legend it was? Was Morales really that far up the food chain?

    By excluding Oswald’s Cuban escapades from the two cables, only the Soviet Counterintelligence staff would be responsible for drafting and signing them, while the SAS was kept in the dark. Tennent Bagley, the Chief of Soviet Russia/CI, had nothing to say about Kostikov’s role as KGB assassination officer. Yet on November 23, 1963, submitted a memo describing Kostikov as “an identified KGB officer…in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th department responsible of assassinations.”[89] It is worth mentioning that Bagley was transferred in 1963 from the Bern station in Switzerland to Langley and promoted as Chief of SR/CI, just in time for the suppression of Kostikov’s KGB role. Could Morales have been able to transfer Bagley, an Angleton ally, back to CIA HQ and place him in the right place to ensure that everything would go as he planned and loose ends would be unexposed? Could Morales have anticipated with precision each of Angleton’s moves, all the way to the point that the FBI would remove Oswald from the security index, ensuring he would not  be picked up and removed from the motorcade route in advance?

    Putting it all together, we can try to synthesize the puzzle of what happened in Mexico City. Angleton, who John Neman believes was privy to the conspiracy to assassinate the President, had to design a foolproof plot. The idea was to make it appear that the Cubans and Soviets manipulated Oswald in Mexico City in such a way to use him in the assassination of Kennedy. Angleton knew that the exposure of this plot would plant a WWIII virus in Oswald’s files that would halt any real investigation in order to prevent a possible nuclear war. To achieve that, Oswald’s profile had to be lowered for the six weeks before the assassination. Angleton had to come up with a cover story so no one would ever question his role in the plot. As Newman revealed, he was the only person with access to all the Oswald files and information and he managed to manipulate and restrict his FPCC activities in Dallas and New Orleans. He knew the allegedly explosive information about Kostikov’s involvement in wet affairs and he was in a position to instigate a SAS counterintelligence operation against the FPCC in Mexico.

    Would Oswald have been asked to go to Mexico if only his legend was to be used? Or was he too important for the assassination plot’s success to place him in suspicious and dangerous situations in the Cuban and Soviet embassies, especially with someone as lethal as Kostikov in direct proximity? More importantly, if anyone had taken a photo of him and somehow his legend was exposed, it would have been extremely difficult to lower his profile. He would have been marked a potential threat and would have not have been allowed on the motorcade route. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that a short, blonde man was sent to Mexico to impersonate the real Oswald as part of an SAS counterintelligence operation.

    But we don’t really know how the impersonation was justified for this legitimate CIA operation. The plan was for Oswald to fail to get a transit visa to Cuba, thereby provoking Duran to call Kostikov and plant the WWIII virus. Even if Duran had mentioned Oswald by name to Kostikov, I believe that the telephone call impersonations on 9/28 and 10/1 would have still occurred. This necessitated the bifurcation and also the removal of the flash warning.

    Angleton used the impersonations as an excuse to start a mole hunt in a similar way he did back in 1960 when a mole had betrayed the U-2 secrets that led to its shoot down. Angleton did not find any mole. But he used the mole hunt as an alibi to cover his role in the U-2 incident, which resulted in the Paris Peace Summit cancellation.

    The mole had returned to action and now he had betrayed the CIA operations against Cuba in Mexico, even contacting the head of KGB assassinations before he himself tried to get to Cuba. Angleton had the excuse to manipulate information and to lower Oswald’s profile in a way that it would not raise suspicion until after November 22. Again Angleton would fail to catch a mole, but he had used the mole hunt to cover his true role that resulted in the murder of a U.S. President.

    Below a table would present the parallels between the two mole hunts, in the Soviet Union and in Mexico.

    Oswald in Soviet Union

    Oswald in Mexico

    Oswald defected to USSR

    Oswald claimed to return to USSR via Cuba

    Visited Embassy on a Saturday so he could not defect

    Visited Soviet Embassy in person and phone calls to the embassy on Saturday when closed

    Never returned to sign defection papers

    Never returned to complete visa application

    Impersonated to look like he was replaced by a Soviet Illegal

    Impersonated to look like a Cuban or Latin person had replaced him

    Angleton believed that the U2 was compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIA

    SAS operation to embarrass FPCC
    A possible SAS operation to assassinate Castro and the CIA surveillance operations were all compromised possibly by a Soviet mole inside CIA

    Purpose to cancel Paris peace summit

    Purpose to show that the Cubans and the Soviets controlled Oswald in a plot to kill Kennedy to revenge CIA’s plan to kill Castro

    Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find out the Soviet mole that betrayed the U2 secrets

    Oswald legend was used as part of staged mole hunt to find the Soviet mole that betrayed the SAS operation

    Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose

    Mole hunt was used as a cover to hide Angleton’s true purpose

    FACT: A mole was never uncovered but the Peace Summit was cancelled

    FACT: A mole was never uncovered and JFK was killed instead

    Angleton was the man pulling the strings from the CIA HQ and David Phillips and Anne Goodpasture were his foot soldiers covertly pulling strings down in Mexico City. It is more likely that Morales would have also taken orders from Angleton and not the other way around. This author remains incredulous to the theory that Morales was such a diabolical puppet master that he could organize such an evil plot from Miami, forcing CIA’s Counterintelligence and Angleton’s CI/SIG to unwittingly dance to his music resulting in the President’s assassination. And then get away with it.

    Go to Part 1

    Go to Part 2

    Go to Part 4

    Go to Part 5

    Go to Part 6

    Go to Conclusion

    Go to Appendix


    NOTES

    [1] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 332.

    [2] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 129.

    [3] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 131.

    [4] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 243-244.

    [5] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 244.

    [6] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 244-245.

    [7] The American Security Council.

    [8] Scott, Peter Dale, The War Conspiracy, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2008, p. 235.

    [9] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.152.

    [10] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 15, p. 39.

    [11] CIA RIF#104-10106-10582, 17/9/1959.

    [12] Simpich Bill, The Twelve who built the Oswald legend, part 6.

    [13] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.153.

    [14] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.154.

    [15] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.157.

    [16] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    [17] Summers Antony, Not in your Lifetime, Open Road Integrated Media, 2013, p. 187.

    [18] Ed Butler: Expert in Propaganda and Psychological Warfare

    [19] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.86.

    [20] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.

    [21] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.395.

    [22] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.105.

    [23] Scott, Peter Dale, Dallas ‘63, Open Road Media, 2015, kindle version.

    [24] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 3.

    [25] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 18, p. 4.

    [26] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 30.

    [27] NARA, JFK Files, RIF 124-10011-10133.

    [28] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 310-311.

    [29] SAC Mobile, November 30, 1963, FBI 105-82555-383 1st NR.

    [30] Warren Commission Report, Vol. XX, pp. 524-525.

    [31] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 315.

    [32] Kaiser David, The Road to Dallas, Belknap Press 2008, p. 219.

    [33] Weberman J.A., Coup d’etat in America, Nodule 19, pp. 60-74.

    [34] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, University Press of Kansas, 2005, p. 321.

    [35] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 236.

    [36] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 165.

    [37] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.158.

    [38] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.

    [39] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.

    [40] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.385.

    [41] Marchetti-Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Coronet Books, 1974, p. 257.

    [42] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 427.

    [43] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.

    [44] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 248.

    [45] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.

    [46] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 249.

    [47] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.

    [48] Evica, George Michael, And We Are All Mortal, Hartford University, 1978, p. 253.

    [49] Evica, George Michael, A Rifle Symposium, The Assassination Chronicles 1976.

    [50] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, p. 258.

    [51] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics, University of California Press 1993, pp. 259-260.

    [52] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.157.

    [53] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.89.

    [54] DiEugenio James, Reclaiming Parkland, Skyhorse Publishing, 2013, p.158.

    [55] DiEugenio James, Destiny Betrayed, Skyhorse Publishing, 2012, p.92.

    [56] Mellen Joan, Farewell to Justice, Potomac Books, 2005, pp. 220-221.

    [57] DiEugenio James, The Assassinations, Feral House, 2003, p. 208.

    [58] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 20.

    [59] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, p. 21.

    [60] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 156.

    [61] Hancock Larry, Someone Would Have Talked, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 2006, pp. 26-27.

    [62] Russell Dick, The Man Who Knew too Much, Carroll & Graf, p. 280.

    [63] Lopez Report, p. 192.

    [64] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 616.

    [65] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.

    [66] Hancock Larry, Nexus, JFK Lancer Productions and Publications Inc. 20011, p. 145.

    [67] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 616-617.

    [68] Lopez Report, p. 186.

    [69] Lopez Report, p. 194.

    [70] Lopez Report, p. 205.

    [71] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 289-290.

    [72] Fonzi Gaeton, The Last Investigation, Marry Ferrell Press, 1993, 2008, pp. 293-294.

    [73] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [74] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [75] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [76] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [77] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [78] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [79] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 398.

    [80] DiEugenio James, ch. 6, Chicago and Mexico, excised from Reclaiming Parkland pdf.

    [81] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 619.

    [82] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 394.

    [83] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 398-399.

    [84] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 399.

    [85] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, pp. 400-401.

    [86] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.

    [87] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 623.

    [88] Newman John, Oswald and the CIA, Skyhorse Publishing Inc. 1995, p. 362.

    [89] Scott, Peter Dale, Deep Politics II, Mary Ferrell Foundation Press 2003, pp. 31-32.

  • The 3 Faces of Dr. Humes

    The 3 Faces of Dr. Humes


    Warren Commission

    The autopsy on President John F. Kennedy is certainly one of the most controversial aspects—if not THE most controversial aspect—of the assassination. It has spawned the most bizarre theories, some of which are beyond ridiculous, others are outright obscene, yet some researchers’ conclusions are probably closer to reality than the actual autopsy protocol. What I propose to do is to take a look at the record of Commander Dr. James Joseph Humes, the lead autopsy doctor on the evening of November 22, 1963. We will cover his testimony before the Warren Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations, and the Assassination Records and Review Board.

    Dr. Humes testified before the Warren Commission in 1964, the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, and the Assassination Records Review Board in 1996. These three different interrogations deserve examination. Many questions have loomed—and still remain—as to what really happened during the evening of November 22, 1963. Humes was the head autopsy doctor that night. To quote Al Smith, “Let’s take a look at the record.” Our decisions about believing him will rest largely on his testimony, correlated with other data we have assimilated over the years.

    On March 16, 1964, Dr. Humes appeared before the Warren Commission with Arlen Specter, the Commission’s designated medical attorney, handling most of the inquiry. Commander Humes stated that “the body [of President Kennedy] was received at 25 minutes before 8 and the autopsy began at approximately 8:00 p.m. on that evening” (2H 349). Early in the questioning, Dr. Humes mentions that all of the autopsy photos were not taken at the same time, but “were made as the need became apparent to make such” (2H 349).[1] This point will come up again during his ARRB deposition. The photos made before the proceedings began were, as Humes stated, “the face of the President, the massive head wound and the large defect associated with it. He mentions 15-20 being made before these proceedings finished. This number seems low, especially when there was litigation in 1993 to have 257 photos and x-rays released.[2] The point is that Humes indicated the autopsy photos were not all taken at once, but throughout the procedure as the need arose. Specter asked Dr. Humes to dilate on the neck wound, which really means the back wound, which was five and three-eighths inches down from the top of the shirt and coat collars.[3] There never was or will be a neck wound in the back. This needs to be settled once and for all. Whether you agree with Admiral Burkley’s assertion on the death certificate, or just look at the autopsy pictures, President Kennedy was shot in the back, not the neck. This is important for the sake of accuracy: the Gerald Ford revelation about changing the language in the Warren Report from “back” to “back of neck,” which he confessed to doing “for the sake of clarity,” was, in fact, a key element in salvaging the Single Bullet Theory, which is the foundational point for the government’s case against Oswald, and also for there being only one shooter firing that fateful day. Specter then asked if it would have helped to have the photos and x-rays, to which Humes responded that it might be helpful. Specter follows this up with a rather memorable observation: “Is taking photos and x-rays routine or something out of the ordinary?” (2H 350). Having Harold Rydberg execute medical illustrations for the Commission volumes because the autopsy photographs weren’t available, this was both unnecessary and absurd. Humes both relied on deceitful drawings in testifying before the Commission and he and fellow pathologist Thornton Boswell described those drawings for Rydberg, instead of using the actual photographs, which he did not see until November 1, 1966. That is two and a half years after the fact. Recall: the third pathologist, Pierre Finck, did not appear until the brain had been removed, late in the game.

    Simply compare the Rydberg drawings with the actual stills of the Zapruder film and you might conclude they are from two different crimes. JFK’s head is not in the slightest bit in the same position as Zapruder frame 312, when compared to the Rydberg drawings. Keep in mind, early in the history of this case, the only way you could compare frame 312 with the Rydberg drawings was to actually own a set of the 26 volumes of hearings and exhibits (and the frames only went up to 334 in the volumes).

    This is the death of the President of the United States![4] Humes went on to describe the posterior wounds. The back wound was 7 x 4 mm; it had a long axis roughly parallel to the long axis of the vertical column. The back-of-the-head wound was 2.5 cm to the right of midline and slightly above the external occipital protuberance. There was also a wound of exit, which created a huge defect over the right side of the skull, leaving fractures and fragments. Its greatest diameter was 13 cm. Humes stated that, after they reflected the scalp, they found a corresponding defect on both tables of the skull. After Humes described the head wound, Specter asked him if he was referring to the wound on the lower part of the neck! Specter, throughout his interrogation of the doctors, is always trying to divert, deflect, or ask them hypotheticals that are irrelevant to the evidence at hand. Does he have an agenda? Yes. If you doubt that assertion, then I ask you to please go back and read his questioning of any of the medical personnel.

    Humes went on to say that portions of JFK’s skull came apart when they reflected the scalp. This has led some to believe that the President’s head cracked like an eggshell, when it exploded due to the force of the missile entry. Humes said they received three portions of skull late in the evening or early morning hours of the 23rd.[5] They were roughly put together to account for the portion of the defect that Humes thought was the exit wound. It still left one-fourth of the defect unaccounted for. Again, fragments of scalp fell to the table as it was reflected.

    Humes then mentioned their attempt to locate non-movable points of reference. He mentions the mastoid process and the acromion process. Basically, the measurements are movable if the torso can swivel. When Humes measured the “back” wound at 14 cm below the mastoid process, he is measuring the back in terms of the ear. Was the body straight? Arched back? Arched forward? These factors would make a significant difference in determining the actual distance. The head wound, however, is 2.5 cm to the right of midline and slightly above the external occipital protuberance, which is fixed and not movable. An attempt to “take probes and have them satisfactorily fall through and definite path” proved unsuccessful. (2H 361) Robert Knudsen, White House photographer (HSCA Agency File Number 014028), when interviewed by Andrew Purdy, stated he saw at least two probes going through the body of President Kennedy; there may have been as many as three. This will come up again during Humes’ ARRB encounter. Another possibility, if they didn’t use probes, is that the back wound was not penetrable, because the doctors never bothered to rotate the musculature of JFK which could have loosened things up enough for them to correctly probe the wound.[6]

    Dr. Humes said he didn’t talk with Dr. Perry at Parkland until the next day, November 23rd. I find it hard to believe that anyone, including Dr. George Burkley—who was the only medical person to have been at both Parkland and Bethesda—wouldn’t have said something to the pathologists, especially if he saw the throat wound before the tracheotomy was performed, an assumption many have claimed, but have not proven. There has been a lot of controversy whether Dr. Humes made the customary Y-incision or some alternative, perhaps a U-incision. Humes stated to the Warren Commission, as well as putting it in the autopsy report, that he made the customary Y-incision, perhaps because someone did not want JFK’s adrenal glands examined. This will also come up during his ARRB discussion, where he repeats his claim that he made the Y-incision. Humes said he saw JFK’s clothing for the first time the day before his WC testimony. This implies many things; the most obvious being negligence on Humes’ part, assisted by the Secret Service. He addressed this issue again during his ARRB questioning.

    Humes stated that the missile traversed JFK’s neck from interior to exterior, due to an analysis of the fibers on the front side of the shirt. This also correlates with the left anterior tie defect. This depends on what is the cause of the cut shirt and tie nick. Some argue this is due to a scalpel cut when his clothing was removed. (Harold Weisberg argued this in a letter to the Washington Post of January 11, 1992) Humes went on to say that the wound in the anterior portion of the neck was physically lower than the posterior wound in the back. This has to be the party line for the Single Bullet Theory to survive. A mere look at the autopsy photo showing the back wound (Fox-3) warrants this as dubious. At the COPA conference of 1995, investigator Andy Purdy and both Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Michael Baden agreed to this, the back wound entered at a slightly upward angle, 11 degrees, based on the abrasion collar around the entry wound. What the Forensic Pathology Panel did—in conjunction with the work of astrophysicist Thomas Canning—was have JFK leaning sufficiently forward so that a level of upward track through the body itself became a downward path. (HSCA Vol. VII, pp. 87, 100) Therefore JFK was leaning sharply forward, while behind the Stemmons Freeway sign. And he does this for precisely .9 seconds. But since JFK was sitting nearly upright while in the car, the photographic panel for the HSCA concluded that the back wound was even with or lower than the throat wound. But in a very odd reference the photographic panel said it would leave the final figures up to Tom Canning. (See footnote in Vol. VI, p. 33)

    Humes stated that he didn’t feel the X-rays would assist the Commission materially in specifying the nature of the wounds. This may make more sense when we get to his testimony before the ARRB. It seems an odd sort of reasoning for a medical doctor to say the x-rays wouldn’t help or assist the Commission in determining the nature of JFK’s wounds. A point of controversy in recent years was in respect to what Dr. Humes actually burned in his fireplace the weekend of the assassination. He stated before the Warren Commission that the draft of the autopsy report was “burned in the fireplace of my recreation room” (2H 373). There was a question as to whether he burned an autopsy draft or his autopsy notes—a significant difference. This will get cleared up when we get to his ARRB testimony. Dr. Humes concluded his testimony by declaring that CE-399 could not have inflicted the wound to Governor Connally’s wrist or left thigh, due to the fragments that were discarded while the jacket of the bullet remained intact. He implied that one bullet could have caused both wrist and thigh wounds, but not CE-399. He also suggested that one bullet could have penetrated President Kennedy and also Governor Connally, but not have caused any further damage. This is a key point that is very much underplayed.

    House Select Committee on Assassinations

    On September 7, 1978, Commander Humes, appearing before the HSCA, was asked a scant 44 questions by Gary Cornwell. This should not pose much of a surprise, since the Warren Commission asked all three autopsy doctors a total of only 304 questions (Humes was asked 215; Boswell and Finck essentially nodded their heads to what Humes had already replied to Specter). With little exaggeration, it could be stated that the testimony of Commander Humes could be the entire autopsy statement. To say, “Humes, Boswell, and Finck,” only means they were all in the same room together at the same time, which Specter allowed them to be while testifying, though you would think the opposite should have been done to avoid collusion. Specter asked Boswell if he agreed with Humes, which turned him into a bobblehead of agreement. Specter questioned Finck more than he did Boswell. This was odd, because a lot of cutting had been done before Finck entered the morgue. What is disturbing is that at least 92 other witnesses were asked more questions than the three pathologists combined. Thoroughness was not the aim of the Commission. But for the HSCA, the third question that Mr. Cornwell asked already makes you think Dr. Humes is being excused for his incompetence. Cornwell asked, “You had received special education and training in the field of pathology; is that correct?” Humes: “That is correct, yes, sir” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 324).

    Humes then states the autopsy began “about 7:30 pm in the evening and after some preliminary examinations, about 8 or 8:15” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 324). He said they noticed almost immediately the two wounds, one in the head and one in the back of the neck. Humes is rather liberal, as was Specter before him, with the use of “back of the neck,” since the photos, drawings, and clothing all show the wound in the upper back. Humes, responding to a question by Mr. Cornwell, said the autopsy ended around midnight, even though he said 11 pm to the Warren Commission.

    The questioning then turned to the subject of Dr. Humes being interviewed by the Forensic Pathology Panel in the Archives. When Mr. Cornwell said the panel disagreed with Dr. Humes about the location of the head wound, Humes—on the PBS videotaping of the proceedings—was visibly shaken. He attempted to jot down some notes, while at the same time steadying his hand to do so. He told the panel that the small droplet—which looks like a piece of tissue paper one applies to a cut after shaving—in the lower portion of Fox-3 (F-48 according to the HSCA exhibits) was a “wound of entry and that that was the only wound of entry” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 325). Cornwell then proceeded to an observation by Dr. Petty about the supposed defect in the cowlick area (in looking closely at this, the supposed wound appears to be somewhat below JFK’s cowlick area, which was higher on his head). Yet, the alleged defect is much more apparent in the Ida Dox drawings than in the Fox-3 autopsy photograph. This is because Dox was given pictures of gunshot wounds, which she then superimposed in that area of the skull, highly exaggerating what was really there. Documents revealing this kind of alteration by Dox, urged on by Baden, were declassified years later, making it even more offensive. In fact, with Baden in his presence, Dr. Randy Robertson presented these at Cyril Wecht’s Duquesne Conference in 2003.

    Both the back of the head photograph and the Dox drawing are easily obtainable on the internet. Compare and prepare to be bedazzled! Humes replied to Petty:

    I don’t know what that is. No. 1, I can assure you that as we reflected the scalp to get to this point, there was no defect corresponding to this in the skull at any point. I don’t know what that is. It could be to me clotted blood. I don’t, I just don’t know what it is, but it certainly (my emphasis) was not any wound of entrance. (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 326)

    Humes then stated to Cornwell that he only had short notice to prepare and hoped they could straighten things out. Humes saw the wound on the night of the autopsy. He knew the HSCA location of the wound was too high. There are certainly valid reservations that the image in the cowlick area is even a wound at all. Maybe if we had both the back of the head photos, as inventoried in HSCA, Vol. VII (medical and firearms evidence), in stereo viewing it would help with the orientation. Cornwell continued verbal probing about the head wound: “If…you have a more well-considered or a different opinion or whether your opinion is still the same, as to where the point of entry is?” Humes then made a rather weird characterization as to his appearance before the pathology panel: “Yes, I think I do have a different opinion. No. 1, it was a casual kind of discussion that we were having with the panel members, as I recall it” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 327). Humes then digressed about the photographs, saying that he first saw them on November 1, 1966, and again on January 27, 1967, when the three (he indicated Finck wasn’t there when talking to the ARRB) autopsy doctors went to the Archives to categorize and summarize their findings.[7]

    Humes then stunned everyone when he said that the alleged cowlick area wound would fit as being above and to the right of the external occipital protuberance, and:

    …is clearly in the location of where we said approximately where it was…therefore, I believe that is the wound of entry…By the same token, the object in the lower portion, which I apparently and I believe now erroneously previously identified…is far below the external occipital protuberance and would not fit with the original autopsy findings” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 327).

    Dr. Humes seemed unaware of Baden’s hidden agenda. Michael Baden was determined to have the HSCA panel agree with the Ramsey Clark Panel of 1968. In that brief 48-hour medical affair, Dr. Russell Fisher and his three cohorts made five alterations to the original autopsy. (see more here)

    What is amazing about that feat of medical alchemy is that Fisher did it all without exhuming the body or consulting with the original pathologists, which is probably why Humes appeared surprised before the HSCA. One of the things Fisher did was to raise the rear skull wound 4 inches upward. Yet Cornwell probed no further! Is there any wonder that some critics have suggested the photos may have been tampered with, if the doctor who performed the autopsy can’t remember where the wound of entrance is located on the head of the President of the United States while looking directly at them? This will be even more evident during his ARRB testimony in regard to the X-rays. Mr. Cornwell then asked Humes to step to the easel to locate the wound of entrance on the lateral x-ray of the skull. It is obvious when you watch his testimony on video that Dr. Humes was very reluctant to address the easel. Humes agreed with Dr. Baden on the location of the wound to the skull at the point of a fracture line that juts out a bit. He concludes this tête-à-tête by saying they were presently engaged in semantics about the location of the wound of entrance to the head. After all that has preceded, with Humes admitting he was wrong about the head wound entrance, changing from slightly above the external occipital protuberance to the area of the cowlick, he then revealed something that is equally shocking. Cornwell: “The testimony today indicated that the panel places that (head wound entrance) at approximately 10 centimeters [c. 4 inches] above the external occipital protuberance. Would that discrepancy be explainable?” Humes: “Well, I have a little trouble with that; 10 centimeters is a significant—4 inches” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 329). Cornwell again did not ask Humes to expand on the dilemma. The question is: What does Dr. James J. Humes believe about the wound of entrance to the head? He seemed to agree with the forensic panel and then turns right around and states that 4 inches is significant and that he has a little trouble with that. So, do a lot of other people. This issue was revisited during his ARRB testimony.

    When Humes and Boswell were behind closed doors talking with the medical panel, they were both quite vociferous that the entrance wound in the back of the head was below the external occipital protuberance. When the cowlick wound was then pointed out to him he says, “No, no. That is no wound.”

    Humes stated that he stayed with the morticians to help prepare the President’s body until about 5:00 a.m. He began to write the autopsy report about 11:00 pm the next evening. He finished about 3 or 4 o’clock the following morning, Sunday the 24th. Cornwell asked Humes: “was the distance between the wound and the external occipital protuberance noted on those notes?” Humes replied: “…not…in any greater detail than appears in the final report” (HSCA, Vol. I, p. 330). He thought the photographs and x-rays would suffice to accurately locate this wound. He will share that same notion with the ARRB. Is it Humes’ contention that this would be better than the body itself, which he had? How does this explain the ruler in the Fox-3 autopsy photograph? Was someone not measuring? This seems to have been the most opportune time to measure the exact location of the wound. He then continued about the autopsy notes, saying the original notes had the President’s blood on them and he didn’t want them to fall into potentially untrustworthy hands after the fact. He will give a more detailed account before the ARRB. Didn’t military procedure bind him to turn the notes over to his commanding officer, after he adapted the information from them into his report? He wouldn’t have been allowed to take them out of the building. What he took out and what his affidavit specifies are “draft notes.” In other words, a rough outline of notes for an autopsy report. He then wrote a more coherent draft the next day and burned the “draft notes” in his home fireplace. Given the circumstances under which they were written, they may have gotten blood on them, perhaps from the original notes, or from Humes’ gloves or clothing, that is if he wrote draft notes before changing out of his autopsy garb. Or it was the original notes that he burned and he did not want to admit that.

    Humes closed his testimony by restating he had no reason to change his opinion that only one bullet struck President Kennedy in the back of the head, without ever being asked. He doesn’t seem as sure, however, as to where that bullet struck. Cornwell closed the questioning and no one else raised one question to Dr. Humes. Odd, that the one man who may have the most vital information about the condition of the late President’s body isn’t probed more aggressively? You get the feeling the Committee is somewhat embarrassed for Dr. Humes, given his somewhat waffling testimony. They shouldn’t have been.

    Assassination Records Review Board

    On February 13, 1996, the Assassination Records Review Board questioned Dr. Humes for almost 7 hours. The examination was conducted by Jeremy Gunn, General Counsel of the ARRB. Early in the questioning, Gunn asked Humes about JFK’s adrenal glands. Humes seems irritated—as he does throughout the deposition—and said about his conversation with Dr. Burkley, “…the nature of that conversation I don’t think I should discuss with you people” (ARRB p. 29). I have never understood why Humes was so annoyed about JFK’s adrenal glands being discussed. The Parkland doctors spoke without hesitation of what they often called his “adrenal insufficiency.” Why he would feel so bound to what was by then a non-secret befuddles me. The Kennedys no doubt didn’t want JFK’s Addison’s Disease exposed, but today, as in 1996, it’s foolish to try and avoid it as some kind of taboo subject.

    Humes repeated that he called Dr. Perry the next morning about 8 or 9 o’clock—which gives us a time frame—and only then learned about the wound in JFK’s throat. Before the Warren Commission, he claimed that he “had to take one of my children to a religious function that morning, but then I returned and made some phone calls and got hold of the people in Dallas, which was unavailable to us during the course of the examination.” Is he serious? He tried, but couldn’t get in touch with any of the Parkland doctors, specifically Dr. Perry. So, let’s see if I get this right: the FBI could compile a complete dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald within hours of the assassination, but no one could seem to find the most important doctor in the world on that night, the one who had obliterated that anterior neck wound with his tracheotomy. Humes admitted to not knowing about standard autopsy protocol for gunshot wounds and autopsy of the neck. He stated early in this testimony that he had experience with gunshot wounds at Tripler Hospital in Hawaii and possibly in San Diego. In this part of his testimony, Dr. Humes still refers to the back wound as the back of the neck, which is amazing after the Clark Panel and the HSCA. He repeats there were some superficial attempts at probing, but the effort was aborted. He doesn’t deny probing—perhaps because of what Robert Knudsen told the HSCA—but only says it wasn’t effective. He also mentions he should have requested JFK’s clothing. He also remembers giving Dr. Burkley JFK’s brain in a pail after his interment. He said that Robert Kennedy, being the spokesperson for the family, wanted to inter it with the body. He stated he gave it to Dr. Burkley about ten days after the autopsy, after JFK had been interred. So, what was the point?

    Another oddity is that Dr. Humes claimed to have never even seen the autopsy manual produced by the Departments of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, dated July 1960. If this seems like topic hopping, it is because the ARRB did this periodically. Humes admitted the possibility of phone calls during the autopsy, but that he was not directly involved. There are witnesses who report calls between Parkland and Bethesda the evening of the autopsy. Humes said one of the biggest problems that night was the people in the autopsy room. He says he should have thrown them all out. He approximates 15-20 people were in the room that night.[8] He appeared frustrated, however, as to who was actually in the autopsy room.

    One of the reasons Humes had no idea who assistants like Jerrol Custer, John Stringer, and Paul O’Connor were is that he didn’t do autopsies. At this stage of his career, he was really an administrator. He initially said that Admiral Calvin Galloway wasn’t there, but then says he may have been, but played no role whatsoever. Yet Galloway was the commander at Bethesda Medical Center. He can’t recall Admiral Edward Kenney being there either, though he may have stuck his head in the door at some point. Kenney was the Surgeon General of the United States Navy, the highest medical officer in the corps. He says if General Philip Wehle was in there, he was unaware of it. This certainly doesn’t seem to line up with the Sibert-O’Neill report, which stated the presence of both Galloway and Wehle. When asked why he didn’t weigh the brain, thymus, or thyroid, Humes repeated, “I don’t know.” He went on to say that he didn’t understand why Dr. Burkley verified and signed the autopsy report. He didn’t recall him doing this.

    Dr. Humes stated that all of the photos, excluding Fox-8, were all taken before the head was cleaned. Fox-8 was taken, obviously, after the brain was removed, near the end of the autopsy. As a sidebar, he thought most of the x-rays were taken before the photographs. He also remarked they had all of the x-rays developed during the autopsy. As he stated to the Warren Commission, the skull fell apart when he reflected the scalp. When discussing the removal of the brain, he never mentions Paul O’Connor, though he is listed in the Sibert-O’Neill report. Humes stated that Dr. Boswell may have helped him remove the brain; he wasn’t sure. He felt the brain was disrupted by the “force of the blow rather than by the particular passage of any missile…” (ARRB, p. 103). He said the lacerations were in the mid-brain posteriorly. Keep in mind, when Humes testified before the Warren Commission, he said, “at the time of the post-mortem examination, we noted that clearly visible in the large skull defect and exuding from it was lacerated brain tissue which, on close inspection, proved to represent the major portion of the right cerebral hemisphere.” In other words, one of the two hemispheres was almost completely missing. Oddly, that same brain, when weighed at the supplementary examination, was assessed to weigh more than a normal human brain.

    On page 111 of his ARRB deposition, Dr. Humes said he spent 30-45 minutes examining the cranium after the brain was removed. How could you not remember exactly where the point of entry was in the rear of the head?

    He said they didn’t actually record the autopsy, because that procedure was relatively new and they had just begun doing that. But it had started recently and you would think that especially with the autopsy of the President of the United States you would want to record the proceedings for posterity—unless there were external forces that felt otherwise. Humes said: “I don’t think any real thought was given to it, to tell the truth” (ARRB p. 118). Apparently a lot of things weren’t given much thought that night.

    When the burning of his notes came up for discussion, he gave rationale as to why he did it. He remembered going to Greenfield Village, home of the Henry Ford museum, and seeing the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot. He said the tour guide pointed out a drop of Lincoln’s blood on the back of the chair. He thought that was macabre and didn’t want anyone to ever get these documents, hence the burning of the notes. What follows is some quibbling as to whether he burned his autopsy notes or a draft of the report, Humes replied, “It was handwritten notes and the first draft that was burned” (ARRB, p. 134). Later, Humes goes further: “Everything that I personally prepared until I got to the status of the handwritten document that later was transcribed was destroyed” (ARRB, p. 134). He only wanted to hand Dr. Burkley a completed version…everything else was burned. He added that he may have burned a draft of the report due to spelling errors. “I don’t know. I can’t recall. I absolutely can’t recall” (ARRB, p. 138). So much for a good memory—an absolute pre-requisite for an individual whose work might well include courtroom testimony. When questioned about non-movable points for measurement, Humes got annoyed, he asked if he did anything wrong, and said that he didn’t want to get into a debate. When asked about Burkley placing the back wound at about the level of the third thoracic vertebra, Humes said he didn’t know if that was correct, since he didn’t measure from which vertebra it was. He went on to say, “I think that’s much lower than it actually was” (ARRB, pp. 141-142).

    Mr. Gunn then proceeded to have Dr. Humes comment on the Fox autopsy photographs. He begins with Fox-4, which is the left profile. The only comments by Humes are in regard to any incisions being made before the photo was taken. Humes denied this, with the exception of having to make a coronal incision to remove the brain.

    [Note: James Jenkins’ book, At the Cold Shoulder of History, has suggestions that this was NOT the Bethesda morgue, because of the phone placement, the tiles, and the metal head rest used, as Bethesda simply used a wood block.]

    The second photo was the right superior profile, sometimes referred to as G-1 (Groden-1). When asked about the triangular shaped object above the right ear—what the late Harry Livingstone referred to as the “devil ear”—Humes replied, “That’s a flap of skin turned back” (ARRB, p. 158). What Livingstone referred to as “bat wing configuration sutures,” Humes dismissed as a “piece of skull” (ARRB p. 159). The other sharp line that creates another V, Humes again said it’s another piece of skull. On the top of JFK’s head, there is matter that is extruding; Humes notes “that’s scalp reflected that way” (ARRB p. 160).

    The next photos were Fox-6 and Fox-7. The matter on the top of the head Humes says is simply scalp folded back. In reference to the object over where the right ear would be, Humes says it is a piece of bone.

    The fourth photos Humes looked at was Fox-5, which is the back-wound photo. Humes stated there may have been some slight cleaning in this photograph. When asked about the ruler, he said they may have been trying to record visually the size of the wound. Gunn then asked about the two marks, one at approximately the second-centimeter line and the other at the six-centimeter line. Humes said the one lower in the back may represent a drop of blood, when questioned directly about it, Humes then said, “I have no idea” (ARRB, p. 167). He did not think there were two wounds of entry in the picture. Gunn then digressed about the head wound and missing bone and Humes responded, “It was just a hole. Not a significant missing bone” (ibid, p. 171). During this same exchange, Humes says something that is significant. When Gunn asked him if there was any missing bone in the rear of the skull, Humes said, “There basically wasn’t any…not a significant missing bone.”

    The reader should understand a key issue at this point. According to the record, the Harper fragment was discovered the day after the assassination. It was given over to some medical experts in Dallas, photos were made, and then it transferred to the FBI. The Bureau flew it to Washington where it was given to Admiral Burkley. After that, it disappeared. Which means that Humes never saw it. It is certainly an important piece of evidence that represents a rather significant area of space—according to David Mantik—on the rear of Kennedy’s skull. (See the photos presented by Mantik in Murder In Dealey Plaza, pp. 226-27) Could Humes really not have been aware of any of this? And if so, why did Jeremy Gunn not bring it up in the questioning at this point?

    The discussion then went to Fox-1 and Fox-2, usually referred to as the “stare of death picture” in the photographic record. This showed Kennedy from the front, thus including the tracheotomy. Humes suggested there might be an exit wound in the inferior portion of the wound that was obliterated by that tracheotomy. (ibid, p. 175)

    Humes then proceeded on to Fox-3, the back-of-the-head photograph. When Dr. Humes was in closed session with the HSCA forensic panel, he picked the lower point, the little white droplet, as the entrance wound. And this is what the three autopsy doctors said was the entry point of the rear skull wound. Then before the HSCA in public session, he chose the higher point, near the cowlick area, as the point of entrance. Now, before the ARRB, he can’t pick either, while looking at the photograph. (See pp. 180-83) He was simply unable to identify the entrance wound in the back of the head. He then went on to say he isn’t aware of where the HSCA forensic panel placed the wound. He commented that it is possible the scalp is being pulled forward in Fox-3. He added that he cannot place the entry wound in the high mark, close to the cowlick area. He also doesn’t have the “foggiest idea” of what the marking is toward the bottom (white droplet), near the hairline (ARRB, p. 180). He says he has problems identifying the entry wound in the photos, but didn’t on the night of the autopsy. He also says he can’t see ANY wound in the upper area in the black and white copy of Fox-3. The flap above the ear was possibly dura, according to Humes. Despite what any of us might think, and for whatever it is worth, no matter what anyone thinks of the photos, the doctors at Parkland Hospital, the morticians, Mrs. Kennedy, and Clint Hill and almost all of the medical personnel place a wound in the back of the head. And although Humes was befuddled by the photos as presented to him by Gunn, the lead pathologist did revert back to his original work for the lower location of the skull wound in his 1992 interviews in the for the Journal of the American Medical Association. And with Gunn, as we shall see, Humes seemed to defer to that earlier opinion.

    Humes waffled once again, when asked about a reflected scalp photo of the posterior portion of the head. He now said he cannot recall it specifically. He can’t seem to identify Fox-8—the mystery autopsy photo—as either posterior, frontal, or parietal. He says the scalp is reflected downward in Fox-8. Humes seemed to imply that the large gaping hole is an exit wound, though you get the impression he thought he was looking at the temporal-parietal area of the head, not the occipital region. Humes also seemed troubled about not seeing a photo of the interior of the thorax. He regretted not having a photo of the posterior cranial fossa, where the defect was. On page 203 of the deposition, Humes stated that the right side of the brain, the cerebrum, appears to be intact. He says, “That’s not right, because it was not” (ARRB p. 203). He then realizes he was looking at the photo of the brain backwards! In his confusion, he suggested the left cerebrum was disrupted due to the explosion of the bullet striking the skull and the brain bouncing off the interior of the head. The discussion turned to the X-rays, with the anterior-posterior X-ray discussed initially. He said the large gap in the top right quadrant was the result of being removed by the path of the missile. The second x-ray, lateral, was then probed for any details Dr. Humes might be able to add to the record. He noticed fracture lines in the top of the parietal bone as well as into the occipital bone. He thought there were fragments towards the vertex in this picture. He also said he had previously seen fragments corresponding to a small occipital wound in the x-ray, but now doesn’t see it (ARRB p. 222).

    Again, this is a key evidentiary point that Gunn seemed to understand and was prepared for. In the autopsy report in the Warren Report, Humes described a line of particles in Kennedy’s skull that went from the low wound in the posterior up to a line of particles up higher. Gunn expressed it like this:

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

    Humes: Well I reported that I did, so I must have. But I don’t see them now. (ibid)

    In other words, the way this lower wound connected to the particle lines in the upper skull was now gone. Did someone make them disappear? In other words was the X ray altered? Or as some people think: Did that lower to upper trail simply never exist? If it did not, then did the trail of fragments in the upper skull forensically reveal a shot from the front? At any trial of Oswald—like the Harper fragment—this would have been a significant issue for the defense. And it would pose a serious problem for the prosecution.

    Humes also said he didn’t understand the big, non-opaque area that takes up half the skull. He didn’t remember seeing this the night of the autopsy. He was then asked, rather awkwardly, about the existence of a photo or X-ray of a probe inserted into the posterior thorax. Humes responded, “No, absolutely not” (ARRB, p. 224). Yet, in his Warren Commission testimony, he talked about superficially attempting to insert a probe. He also mentioned taking X-rays of extremities in case a missile might have lodged there, but no serious pieces of metal were ever found.

    The interview concluded with Humes stating how confused he has been and how even more confused he was before the HSCA. The final page of the deposition, in a letter from Dr. Humes to Mr. Jeremy Gunn said:

    I experienced great difficulty in interpreting the location of the wound of entrance in the posterior scalp from the photograph. This may be because of the angle from which it was taken, or the position of the head, etc. It is obvious that the location of the external occipital protuberance cannot be ascertained from the photograph. I most firmly believe that the location of the wound was exactly where I measured it to be in relation to the external occipital protuberance and so recorded it in the autopsy report. After all that was my direct observation in the morgue and I believe it to be far more reliable than attempting to interpret what I believe to be a photograph which is subject to various interpretations. (ARRB, p. 248).

    Did Humes suffer from intellectual agnosia? He didn’t seem to remember the location of the alleged entrance wound into the back of the head of the President of the United States. From his different testimonies over the years, he couldn’t seem to recall a number of things. Dr. Humes seemed to want all of this to just go away, but as long as doubts, inconsistencies and subterfuge exist, hopefully there will be enough interest around to keep pouring over the record, trying to figure out what really happened. Dr. Humes passed away in May of 1999. I think we can agree that at a trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, the defense would have looked forward to cross examining Humes. That questioning would not have resembled the examination given to Humes by Arlen Specter for the Warren Commission.

    Addendum, from James Jenkins’ book: Earlier, it was noted that Humes was uncertain about Galloway and others; more to the point, he had no idea who James Jenkins or Paul O’Connor were. Jenkins stated for the record that he had never assisted in an autopsy performed by Humes, whom he characterized as “…more of an administrator.” So the autopsy of the murdered president was conducted by a man who knew none of the corpsmen involved. The second pathologist, Boswell, was a moonlighting lab pathologist, and the final addition to the lineup was supposed to be the guy to keep them informed by reviewing their work, an Army Lt. Colonel. The radiologist was not a pathology radiologist but a radiation oncologist. When Humes asked for an outside forensic pathologist to join them, the request was denied. Dr. Milton Halpern, the medical examiner in New York City, expected to be called in to oversee the autopsy. He was surprised when he was not called.


    [1] It goes without saying that it would be challenging if not impossible to take pictures of the body at the same time you take photos of the interior of the skull cavity, even though the latter group of exposures have vanished without a trace.

    [2] Part of that bizarre numerical inconsistency is due in part to the fact that some of the so-called “Fox” poses involved four exposures, multiplying Humes’ 15-20 estimate to 60-80, but still coming up short. Add to that the bizarre fact that three full sets of X-rays were taken, as they were going to X-ray until they found something, and the number grows again.

    [3] It has been argued that JFK’s coat was “bunched,” but although that could explain some discrepancy in the coat, it would not explain the shirt.

    [4] It should surprise no one that Rydberg, upon seeing the photos after he made the drawings, immediately impugned the accuracy of his own drawings. Dox, at best, admitted to having help with her tracings.

    [5] There is no tangible evidence as to the provenance of the skull pieces, or who delivered them.

    [6] James Jenkins, in his recent publication, insists that the lungs were not penetrated.

    [7] Finck was not present for the November, 1966 look-see; he was brought back to DC from Viet Nam for the 1967 event.

    [8] In the recent work by Jim Jenkins, At the Cold Shoulder of History, the number is suggested as 30 or 31.

  • Counterpunch, JFK , and Vietnam

    Counterpunch, JFK , and Vietnam

    As readers of this site will understand, Counterpunch has consistently been one of the far left’s bastions of ideological purity. They do some good work from that vantage point. But one of the problems with that point of view is that it tends to sweep up all of history into a sanctimonious vacuum. And one of the things that gets swept up and homogenized is the issue of John Kennedy and Vietnam. (Here is a previous example.)

    Their latest in this vein was posted on April 30, 2020. It is another of their “Letters from Vietnam” series. This one is from an American living in Vietnam named Mark Ashwill. Ashwill is an educational entrepreneur. The occasion for him writing his letter is the 45th anniversary of America leaving Indochina in 1975. This was due to the agreements that were negotiated by Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig under Richard Nixon’s supervision in Paris.

    Ashwill writes the letter as if he were a citizen of Vietnam (which he may well be) and is preaching to his former countrymen about the evil that they visited on his new nation. I would like to inform the editors of Counterpunch and also Mr. Ashwill that this history lesson is not exactly new. It has been going on at least since the rise of Students for a Democratic Society early in the sixties. It was given popular voice in the pages of Ramparts magazine, and was in book form during that decade through the work of men like William Appleman Williams and historians influenced by him who created New Left studies.

    In fact to go through his rather antique complaint today is kind of boring. Most of us know that Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam free from French domination at the end of World War II. That he used American historical documents like the Declaration of Independence to do so. Many, many years ago Williams produced the letter that Ho sent to Harry Truman in 1945 asking the American president to cooperate with his cause against France. We also know how that letter was ignored and Harry Truman and his later Secretary of State Dean Acheson decided to side with France. And America ended up bankrolling about 80% of the French war effort. We also know the rest of Ashwill’s litany: how the defeat at Dien Bien Phu led to the Geneva Accords, and how President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sabotaged that agreement by not holding elections in 1956. And that this key event inevitably led to the USA getting involved in a second war against North Vietnam. This would have been prevented if the Geneva Accords had been honored.

    Ashwill now makes a large leap to 1961 and President John F. Kennedy. The reason I say this is a large leap is because by leaving out 1956-60, in his own David Halberstam-ish way, the author eliminates a central point. John Foster Dulles clearly ran the American participation at Geneva. The attorney realized that his oral agreement with the Accords could easily be broken if he did not sign them and this is what he advised the president to do. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, p. 137)

    Within days of the end of the conference, Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, director of the CIA, began a long series of clandestine actions in order to create a new country called South Vietnam. These actions were supervised by General Edward Lansdale, who was in reality a high-level CIA action officer. It included a psychological terror war in the north to convince the Catholics that they would be persecuted by Ho Chi Minh and they should flee to the south. This helped prop up America’s chosen leader of this new country, the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem. Once this creation was completed, Foster Dulles made the infamous assertion, “We have a clean base there now, without a taint of colonialism. Dien Bien Phu was a blessing in disguise.” (Blum, p. 139). Leaving out Lansdale and the Dulles brothers is not just reminiscent of Halberstam, it is also what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick did more recently in their long dud of a documentary series called The Vietnam War.

    There was no South Vietnam before this. Eisenhower, the Dulles brothers and Vice President Richard Nixon created it. Once it was created, the USA was committed to propping it up any way it could. It was through Diem that America formally cancelled the scheduled unification elections. (Blum, p. 139) This also meant using the fig leaf of communist infiltration from the north as a pretext to invoke the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) as a mutual defense doctrine. Omitting these details thus ignores the fact that those four men had split the country in half and then fabricated a civil war for their own purposes. It was this threat that gave Ho Chi Minh pause about enforcing the Geneva Accords and forcibly holding the elections––which could have easily been achieved. ((Blum, p. 139)

    The USA now began to send new military advisory units to Saigon in further defiance of the Geneva Accords. Lansdale began to rig elections to keep Diem in power. The Dulles brothers were not furthering democracy. They had installed and now supported a dictator. And they trained his security forces at Michigan State University. (Blum, p. 140) These techniques included torture and imprisonment in the infamous “tiger cages”.

    To skip over all this, plus the large amounts of aid we were giving Diem, is to paper over why it was not easy to get out. The Saigon government was a creation of Washington. And, to say the least, Diem was not a good choice for its leadership. But in doing all this, it created a tactical and strategic commitment that had not existed in 1952. In my opinion, it is not something that can be discounted or ignored, since in historical terms, it is crucial. To make this Bob Beamon leap to President Kennedy and 1961 is bad history, even for an informal letter.

    What makes it all worse is the fact that the editors at Counterpunch then placed a picture of President Kennedy at the top of the article next to a map of a divided Vietnam. As if, somehow, Kennedy was involved in the decision to split up the country. This is misleading not just because he was not involved, but because Kennedy was one of the very few voices in Washington to oppose the Dulles/Eisenhower policy not just in Vietnam, but throughout the Third World. This conflict between the senator and the White House was documented by Richard Mahoney back in 1983 in his important book, JFK: Ordeal in Africa. In that book, Mahoney specifically noted Kennedy’s 1957 landmark speech about the ongoing French colonial war in Algeria. During that speech Kennedy harked back to Dien Bien Phu and said what happened in Indochina will happen in Algeria, and that it would thus behoove America to be on the right side of history this time. (The Strategy of Peace, edited by Allan Nevins, pp. 66-80)

    So there is ample evidence that Kennedy understood the appeal of nationalism in Third World countries emerging from the shackles of colonialism. (For more current scholarship describing Kennedy’s familiarity with the issue, please read Betting on the Africans, by Philip Muehlenbeck, and Kennedy, Johnson and the Nonaligned World, by Robert Rakove.) But further, what Ashwill does with Kennedy’s presidency in relation to Vietnam is, well, the best word I have for it is “minimalist”.

    Ashwill describes a meeting between Kennedy and French President DeGaulle in May of 1961 in Paris where the former French resistance leader warned Kennedy about the quagmire he would be getting into if America intervened in Indochina, that it would be an endless entanglement America could not win. He then quotes DeGaulle as later saying that Kennedy listened to him but that events proved he had not convinced him.

    First of all, this discussion between Kennedy and DeGaulle is again an antique bit of news. To cite just one source, it was already described back in 1972 by Dave Powers and Ken O’Donnell in Johnny We hardly Knew Ye. (p. 13) But Kennedy was not just getting this kind of advice from DeGaulle. He also got it from General Douglas MacArthur. The retired general warned him that even if he placed a million men in Asia, it would not work. (Powers & O’Donnell, pp. 13-14). He also got the same advice from Senator Mike Mansfield. (p. 15) And most importantly, he heard the same thing from his ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.

    This is why during the debates in the oval office in November of 1961, Kennedy refused to commit combat troops into the theater. And that was a line that he never crossed. (John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 136-39). But, as Galbraith biographer Richard Parker demonstrates in the above link, Kennedy went further than this. He sent Galbraith to Saigon and asked him to write a report, knowing that the ambassador would advise against any further involvement. (Virtual JFK, edited by James Blight, pp. 72-73). Galbraith did write such a report, and when the ambassador returned to Washington in April of 1962, Kennedy had him hand deliver it to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. (Newman, pp. 236-37). One month later, McNamara arranged to meet with all the inter-agency chiefs of all American forces in Vietnam. After going through the regular agenda items and adjourning the meeting, he called aside General Paul Harkins, the overall commander of American forces in Indochina. He told Harkins that it was time to switch responsibility for the war over to the ARVN, the Army of South Vietnam, and he wanted to begin the planning on the reduction of American advisors as soon as possible. This was the beginning of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. (Newman, p. 254)

    As anyone familiar with the newly declassified record should know, in May of 1963, McNamara called another such meeting, this time in Hawaii. At this meeting the withdrawal schedules were submitted to the Secretary. He said that they needed to be accelerated. He wanted a thousand advisors withdrawn by the end of the calendar year. He directed that those plans be drawn up. (James Douglass, JFK the Unspeakable, p. 126). In October of 1963, Kennedy signed National Security Action Memorandum 263 ordering the first thousand advisors to be withdrawn by the end of the year and the rest by 1965. (Douglass, p. 188). In other words, there was not one more combat troop in Vietnam at the time of Kennedy’s death than there was when he took office. And he was in the process of removing all advisors.

    Somehow, Mark Ashwill missed all of this with a completeness that is astonishing. But the Vietnamese educator also missed a chance to have this confirmed by a source in his adopted country, namely, the son of the late North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. If someone visiting Vietnam from the USA could do this, then why couldn’t Mr. Ashwill?

    From here, Ashwill takes another leap forward. This time to 1966. By the end of that year, Lyndon Johnson had committed 385,000 combat troops, with 60,000 sailors stationed offshore. In just that one year, 6,000 Americans would perish and 30,000 would be wounded. Ashwill discusses a speech by Ho Chi Minh in which the North Vietnamese leader says America took “the wrong fork in the road”. Ashwill never explains how America went from having no combat troops in Indochina to having nearly 400,000. The man who took the wrong fork in the road was Lyndon Johnson. And if any president’s picture should be at the top of the article, it should be his.

    As any serious study of the Vietnam War reveals, there were three events that took place––a meeting and two specific orders issued––that overturned Kennedy’s withdrawal plan and replaced it with an escalation plan that was quite apparent by 1966. These were the first Lyndon Johnson meeting on the war on November 24, 1963; the last draft of NSAM 273 signed on November 26th; and NSAM 288 finalized in March of 1964.

    At the November 24th meeting, the principals realized that Johnson’s attitude and style about Vietnam were both quite different from Kennedy’s. He said things that Kennedy never did. For instance: “I am not going to lose Vietnam. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way that China went.” (Newman, p. 442) Kennedy never expressed these kinds of Cold War sentiments about Indochina. He simply did not think Vietnam was imperative to American security. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy agreed with this evaluation in comparing the two presidents. And he expressed those characterizations in discussions with both James Blight and his biographer Gordon Goldstein. (Goldstein, Lessons in Disaster, p. 231)

    NSAM 273 was altered to allow direct American naval involvement in patrols against the North Vietnamese coast. According to Bundy, it was altered by Johnson. (Newman, pp. 445-49) This allowed for the OPLAN 34 A plans and the so called DE SOTO patrols. The former were hit-and-run attacks by speedboats, the latter were American destroyers meant to decipher where return fire from North Vietnamese bases was coming from. In December, Johnson requested these types of covert actions against the North, with the help of Americans forces if need be. The operations ended up being largely American. (Edwin Moise, Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam War, pp. 5, 7-8, 14) As many commentators agreed , including those inside the White House, these patrols were, in fact, provocations. (Moise p. 68; Goldstein, p. 125)

    NSAM 288 was Johnson’s specific preliminary design to escalate the war, including an air war against North Vietnam. This included 94 bombing targets. In three years Kennedy had never even contemplated this. The combination of the DESOTO patrols with NSAM 288 resulted in the casus belli the White House sought in order to escalate the war. (Moise, pp. 26-28) This was of course the Tonkin Gulf incident. And this is what Ashwill skips over to get to 1966.

    The rest of the article is a listing of all the damage inflicted on Vietnam, in bombs, land mines, defoliants, and so forth. Which, of course, any interested party already is cognizant of. Are we supposed to believe that the editors at Counterpunch do not know that 99% of all this happened after Kennedy’s death? And if his plan had been left intact, we would not be having this discussion? That is not speculation. Today, with the declassified documents of the Assassination Records Review Board, it can be proven.

    Near the end, Ashwill says that the American leaders did not understand what the war was really about. As I have labored to show, President Kennedy did know what it was about. That is why he was getting out. Just ask General Giap’s son.

  • The CIA and the Texas School Book Depository

    The CIA and the Texas School Book Depository


    According to former CIA finance officer James B. Wilcott’s testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), Lee Harvey Oswald “was a regular employee, receiving a full-time salary for agent work, for doing CIA operational work.”[1] A memorandum by Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin said that Oswald’s CIA payroll number was 110669.[2] As we shall see, there is evidence that Oswald worked with another CIA agent in Dallas. That would be William Shelley, who Oswald worked under for six weeks as an order filler for the Texas School Book Depository (TSBD). With perhaps two CIA agents on the same premises, a careful scrutiny of the company they worked for is needed to understand what happened the day President Kennedy was killed.

    The book depository was in a seven-story, red brick building located at 411 Elm Street. Also at this location were the office suites of eight schoolbook publishing companies, including Scott Foresman, Southwestern, Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill. These companies were part of a complex system involving:

    (a) the state legislature, which purchased textbooks through a process called adoption

    (b) the publishers, who were responsible for maintaining sufficient reserves

    (c) the book depositories, which received the books, stored them, and shipped them out as needed to schools around the state

    There were two depositories in the state of Texas. The other one was the Lone Star School Book Depository, also located in the city of Dallas.

    On November 22, 1963, there were sixty-nine people working in the building at 411 Elm Street—thirty-three for the TSBD and forty-six for the publishers. In the decades following that fateful day, former employees of these companies have been reluctant to answer questions. If they do agree to be interviewed, they are truthful in what they say, except on one particular point: the year when they moved into the building. Retired TSBD vice president Ochus Campbell said the move took place about five years prior to the assassination. Spaulding Jones, former branch manager of MacMillan, said they moved in around 1957 or 1958. Mary Lea Williams, a receptionist for Allyn & Bacon, said the move occurred two or three years before the assassination. Dorothy Ann Garner, former staff supervisor of Scott Foresman, thought the move occurred around 1960 or maybe a little later.[3]

    Actually, the move took place a few months before the assassination. According to an FBI report dated November 22, 1963, warehouse manager Roy Truly said, “The Texas School Book Depository has occupied the building at 411 Elm Street for only a few months. Prior to this time, the building was occupied by a wholesale grocery company engaged in supplying restaurants and institutions.”[4] The wholesale grocery company was the John Sexton Company. Two retired Sexton officials told me that they moved out of the building on November 14, 1961, and that it remained vacant for at least a year.[5] Examination of city directories and phone books in the Dallas Public Library shows that the book depository and the publishing companies did not have the 411 Elm Street address until 1963. (Their previous address was 501 Elm Street on the first floor of the Dal-Tex building.)

    Was there something more to this move than meets the eye? Occupation of the building during the summer of 1963 could be a first step in a planning stage. This would include things like:

    (1) determining lines of fire from upper story windows

    (2) planning the access and escape routes for the sniper team

    (3) positioning and controlling the designated patsy as a workman inside the building

    (4) fabricating evidence such as rifle, cartridges, and paper bag to implicate the patsy

    (5) selecting the so-called “sniper’s nest” where the ersatz evidence would be planted

    And perhaps even having people inside the TSBD as assets.

    As described to me by Joe Bergin, Jr., son of the regional manager of Scott Foresman, working conditions changed dramatically after the assassination. New security officers appeared.[6] They held a big meeting during which they warned everyone not to discuss the assassination with outsiders. All visits to the building must be strictly business-related. For example, Joe’s father had to clear visitors with Roy Truly, the building manager, even though they were top executives from the company headquarters in Chicago. Reminder warnings were given on an individual or a small group basis. The rationale for these restrictions was to prevent unscrupulous people cajoling them for information or committing hostile acts against them, because of the notoriety Dallas was suffering. As we shall see, this might have been designed to conceal the fact that some people working there were being harassed and bullied.

    The home of Joe Bergin, Sr. and his wife seemed to have been a target for persecution, perhaps because Mrs. Bergin was strongly pro-Kennedy and actively worked for his election in 1960. She enjoyed keeping up on the Kennedy family during their years in the White House.[7] The Bergins’ house appeared to be under surveillance and their telephone line seemed to have been tapped. They received threats over the telephone, even death threats. Ruffians driving by yelled derogatory things and threw objects at the house such as half-empty beer cans.

    Conditions at home and at work put a severe strain on Joe’s parents. His father lost weight and developed a stoop in the way he stood and walked; his hair and facial features aged prematurely. His mother was a strong, confident woman before the assassination, but afterwards she suffered a complete breakdown in her health and had to be hospitalized. She died in 1969. About a year or two after her death, while his father was away, someone broke into the house and set it on fire, creating a furious blaze. It was a total loss. Joe was unable to determine if the arson was assassination-related.

    Other people who worked at the book depository suffered as well. Jack Cason, the TSBD president, was a stocky, robust man before the assassination. Afterwards, Joe visited him in his office and could hardly believe the change that came over him. He was sickly looking, and, like his father, had lost weight. Unknown adversaries tormented Cason so much at his home on Druid Lane, that he was forced to relocate to another part of the city.

    Apparently, security measures to keep people from talking continued even after they went into retirement or found other occupations. Roy Truly was, up to the time of his death in 1985, continuously frightened by “federal authorities.” His wife Mildred refused to talk about the assassination even with members of her own family.[8] Carolyn Arnold, a secretary for Vice-president Ochus Campbell, told a friend in 1994 that she had been, and still was, terrified. She said that “there is a whole lot more to tell about the TSBD than what has been published—that the whole building should be suspected as more or less of a ‘safe base’ to operate from that day in November 1963.”[9]

    II

    This fear casting a shadow over the lives of former employees was also directed against journalists seeking to lift the veil of secrecy. Consider the following letter:

    June 2, 1989

    Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow

    The Alternative Information Network

    P.O. Box 7279

    Austin, Texas 78713

    Re: THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY

    Dear Mr. Kellner and Mr. Morrow,

    While working as a journalist in Dallas late in 1974 and early 1975, I met and spoke with Lee Harvey Oswald’s supervisor at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas. (At this time the school book depository had been relocated to a warehouse near the intersection of Royal Lane and Interstate 35.)

    During this same time, I also met and spoke with relevant employees who later worked for Lee Harvey Oswald’s supervisor after the assassination of President Kennedy. One of said employees, her husband, and child, disappeared without a trace a few hours after granting me an interview.

    In addition, all of my interview notes and tapes inexplicably disappeared. Finally, under threats and intense harassment from Dallas Police, I was forced to flee Dallas in early 1975.

    In late 1977, while working as a reporter for the Avalanche-Journal newspaper in Lubbock, Texas, I submitted written testimony to the United States House of Representatives’ newly-formed Select Committee on Assassinations. Enclosed is a copy of the response from G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel and Director of the Select Committee on Assassinations. Copies of my written testimony have disappeared from my personal files.

    My testimony included numerous meetings with a man named Bill Shelly (I am no longer certain of the correct spelling of his last name.) Mr. Shelly was Lee Harvey Oswald’s supervisor at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy. Mr. Shelly claims to have been an intelligence officer during World War II and thereafter joined the CIA.

    Bill Shelly claims he was arrested by the Dallas Police and formally charged with the assassination of President Kennedy. He claims the charges were dropped, but he stated that he turned away several newspapers and magazines offering huge amounts of money for his personal account of the assassination. He refused to let me quote him or use his name in print.

    One of the aforementioned employees (whose name I cannot recall) stated that when she went to work for Bill Shelly at the school book depository in the early 1970’s she was interviewed for the job by some type of “government agents” who asked if she had been recruited by the F.B.I. or C.I.A. As you can well imagine, she was quite confused because the job was low-paying and involved minor duties.

    This employee said that fellow employees were subjected to similar job interviews by government agents. As mentioned, this woman, her husband, and young child disappeared within hours after my interview. Their apartment looked as if no one had ever lived in it. All I remember is that her husband was previously a member of the musical group “The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.” She didn’t show up for work the next day and didn’t pick up her final paycheck. Their whereabouts are completely unknown.

    The day after their disappearance, an estimated 20 Dallas policemen pulled up on front of my apartment. They lingered in front of my apartment for nearly an hour, pointing their pistols at my window and shouting in a very threatening manner. As mentioned, I was forced to flee Dallas until another day.

    Insofar as I know, this information has never been made public. Feel free to use any part of it as you please. However, please contact me before mentioning my name to anyone. I will help any way—I just want to be forewarned. There is a very large spider guarding this web of secrecy. I have entered other webs, but this one is different because the spider leaves the web and stalks its prey—sometimes for many years.

    By the way, I am a Mr.—not a Ms.—as the letter from Mr. Blakey indicates.

    In Solidarity,

    (name inked out)

    Cc: My Will

    Below is the letter from Blakey:

    Dear Ms. Glaze,

    Thank you for your letter. It has been directed to the Deputy Chief Counsel in charge of the investigation for his review. Your interest in the work of our Committee is appreciated.

    Sincerely,

    G. Robert Blakey, Chief Counsel and Director

    Obviously, if Shelly had been arrested, someone with the police had that record expunged.

    The letters themselves came to me from Larry Ray Harris, a prominent researcher of the Kennedy assassination, who knew a lot about the shooting of Officer Tippit and was featured in the British television documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy. During a phone conversation, he told me that he had a letter that mentioned Shelley joining the CIA. At my request, he sent me a copy. He also sent a copy of the letter from Blakey as well as a 1978 article from the Dallas Morning News concerning the aforementioned Carolyn Arnold, “who states she definitely saw Oswald in the second-floor lunchroom at 12:25 pm.” She told a reporter that the FBI falsified her statement to read that she “thought” she caught “a fleeting glimpse” of Oswald on the “first floor” at “12:15.”

    Below is an excerpt from Harris’s letter dated December 15, 1992:

    Dear Bill,

    Enclosed is the Bill Shelley document I read to you over the phone. I don’t recall its origins with clarity, but I think it was given to me by a professor at Southern Methodist University here in Dallas. Regardless, it ended up in my files around the time we opened the JFK Center in 1989. I don’t know that anyone has ever looked into it. It could be a hoax, but sounds sincere. It would be easy to verify:

    (1) if a reporter named Glaze has ever worked for the Lubbock newspaper

    (2) if a journalist named Glaze was living in Dallas in 1974/1975

    (3) if there is/was an ‘Alternative Information Network’ in Austin, or if Kellner and Morrow are real persons and remember receiving the letter.

    If it is true that Shelley was affiliated in some way with CIA or U.S. intelligence, that would be a disturbing and potentially significant development.[10]

    III

    My efforts to follow up on the leads suggested by Harris were initially unsuccessful. I called the number of the Avalanche Journal in Lubbock, Texas and got the personnel director. She said that no one by the name of Glaze was currently working for the newspaper, nor was that name among the files of past employees. She said that she had been in the personnel department since 1982, and she never knew anyone by that name. Years later, I found out that he moved to Austin, Texas, where he began working for the Austin American Statesman in 1979.

    My next call was to the Alternative Information Network founded by Doug Kellner and Frank Morrow. They were co-hosts of a program called “Alternative Views” featuring news, interviews, and opinion pieces from a progressive point of view. It was first broadcast in 1978 on a public access television channel in Austin, Texas. In 1984, they began sending tapes of their programs to public access channels in Dallas and San Antonio and then to other cities around the country, hence the name of the umbrella organization, the Alternative Information Network.

    When Doug Kellner answered the phone, I described to him the contents of the letter. He said he never saw it and said it was strange that I should possess a letter that was addressed to him. He asked that a copy of the letter be sent to his home—not to the business address—and after he read it, he would check into it. Two weeks later when I made a follow-up call, Kellner said that his partner Frank Morrow vaguely remembered the letter, but could not provide any additional information.

    I next called John Peets, the manager of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. The band started out in 1966 in Long Beach, California, and became known for its unique blend of country western and rock and roll. It achieved commercial success in 1970 with a hit song called “Mr. Bojangles.” In 1992, the band was still active, touring the country and recording albums. I asked Mr. Peets if he knew of any member of the band who disappeared in Dallas in the mid-1970s. He said there were two musicians who had been with the band since the beginning and he would speak to them. During a follow up call, he told me that the two musicians were not in contact with former members of the band and knew nothing of their whereabouts nor of their current activities. It was not until 1999 that I located and spoke with Leslie Thompson, one of the original members. Although he left in December 1973, he was certain that the musician who disappeared in Dallas was not among the core members of the band. Instead, he might have been one of the temporary musicians. In the mid-1970’s, the band employed a ten-piece orchestra to back them up.

    IV

    After failing to get anywhere, I let the matter sit for six years. In 1999, a friend and fellow researcher named Steve Gaal discovered among the listings of the JFK assassination section of the National Archives website a notice of a letter written by a Mr. Glaze to the HSCA. Upon request, the National Archives sent me a copy of the letter. It was dated December 12, 1977,[11] and, at the bottom, it had the author’s full name. I then proceeded to write an article called “The Glaze Letters” for the May 1999 issue of Jerry Rose’s JFK assassination research journal called The Fourth Decade. Below is Mr. Glaze’s letter:

    House of Re. Kennedy Assassination Committee

    Wash, D.C.

    Dear Persons,

    I have some information concerning the assassination of President John Kennedy that I wish to submit for your scrutiny.

    While working as a journalist in Dallas, Tx. In 1974, I met a person who says she was at that time working for Bill Schelly, who says he was Lee Harvey Oswald’s superior at the time of the assassination.

    According to this person, shortly after going to work for Bill Schelly, she & another new employee were subjected to some rather odd questioning when considering they were hired as clerks.

    Two men, who identified themselves (with I.D.) as members of the F.B.I., approached the two new employees at work & took them to an empty room inside the building. The two new employees were administered a written questionnaire asking about their opinions of current topics of the day, especially social issues. After completing the questionnaire, the two F.B.I. men asked the employees point blank if they were members of the C.I.A. The incident occurred in about 1969.

    The incident interested me enough to question the F.B.I. about it & possibly do a story on it. However, the woman became terrified at the mention of it & said she would deny she ever said it if I tried to publicize the incident.

    She & her husband left Dallas shortly afterward.

    I must admit that my own fear of getting involved in the investigation has prevented me from writing you earlier. I apologize.

    Please excuse this messy letter. Of all times to break down, my typewriter chose tonight to do it. Obviously, my handwriting has long been broken down.

    If you should need to contact me, you may do so in care of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal newspaper in Lubbock, Tx. I am a reporter there.

    God bless you all,

    Nervously yours,

    Elzie Dean Glaze

    Common to both the 1977 and 1989 letters are the strange men asking strange questions. They appear to be members of the security staff described by Joe Bergin, Jr. Glaze’s letters add a further detail that they were members of the FBI. It must have been puzzling to Glaze, as it is to us reading his letters, why a government agency would be providing security for a privately-owned company. Also puzzling is the manner by which they asked new employees “point-blank” if they were members of the CIA. Why would men who had just shown their FBI identification badges suspect that new employees were concealing the fact that they too were connected to an intelligence agency?

    The search for a solution to these riddles leads into the murky world of intrigue involving the FBI and CIA dirty work. CIA finance officer James Wilcott said, “Several different individuals or firms in Dallas had been involved in one way or another with acting as cut-outs for arms shipments to Cuban exiles for the invasion. This we concluded from putting various pieces of information together. I remember hearing about some CIA people who had somehow helped the right-wing Minute Men in Texas to get arms, originally intended for the invasion.” Among the Dallas individuals and companies engaged in supplying arms to Cuban exiles and the Minute Men might have been the ones occupying the building at 411 Elm Street.[12]

    A suggestion of smuggling activities within the TSBD comes in the form of boxes too large to be practical containers of books. Henry Hurt, author of Reasonable Doubt, discovered such boxes while investigating the claims of an alleged conspirator. This man said that a large wooden box, 36 x 48 x 60 inches, was used to import arms into the building, one with a false bottom. Hurt initially doubted that such a large container could be moved into the building inconspicuously. The largest typical box for books measured 12 x 14 x 18 inches, was made out of cardboard, and when filled with books weighed 55 pounds. However, while visiting the vacant building in 1983, Hurt saw seven large wooden boxes on the sixth floor, left behind by the TSBD when it moved to a new location in 1970. All seven boxes had the names of schoolbook publishers stamped on them. One label read Texas School Book Depository, 500 Red Pony books by John Steinbeck, from Bobbs-Merrill. Three of the seven boxes appear in a photograph in his book. By comparing the window next to them, which measured 14 inches off the floor, one box was about 15 x 30 x 60 inches, and thus had an estimated capacity of 15 cubic feet. Since a cubic foot of books is about 25 to 30 pounds, a box such as this, when loaded with books, would have weighed around 375 to 450 pounds—too heavy to manage with a handcart.[13]

    (As an aside, CIA officer William Harvey worked for Bobbs-Merrill in the last years of his life as a law editor.[14])

    Oversized boxes were also seen by Joe Bergin, Jr. when he visited his father at the 411 Elm Street building. He could not remember when this occurred, but it was before the assassination, but after extensive remodeling had been done on the third and fourth floors to add office suites for the publishing companies. This would put his visit in a period sometime during the summer or fall of 1963. When Joe entered the building, he took a recently installed passenger elevator to the fourth floor. Upon exiting the elevator, he saw a short hallway. To his left was a door that led into the office of Scott Foresman. At the end of the hallway to his right was another door. Out of curiosity, he opened this door and saw a large storage area that took over half of the square footage of the fourth floor. In this area were numerous cardboard boxes, four feet square by five feet high. Since the floors were not strong enough to accommodate forklifts, he wondered how the warehouse men could have moved such enormous boxes.

    Yet the mere existence of oversized boxes on the premises does not constitute proof of ongoing illegal activities. The significance of Glaze’s 1989 letter is that it provides a tantalizing piece of information which may indicate a covert side to the depository itself. Namely the mention that Shelley was a CIA operative, while at the same time he was an employee in the schoolbook business.

    At the time of the assassination, Shelley was in his sixteenth year of employment at the TSBD. His first day on the job was October 29, 1945. Earlier that year, he graduated from Crozier Technical School in Dallas. According to his testimony to the Warren Commission, after graduating from high school, he “worked in defense plants a little bit during the war and started working at the Texas School Book Depository.”[15] The short amount of time between his graduation in late May 1945 and the end of World War II on September 2 plus his employment in defense plants seems to conflict with his claim that he joined an intelligence service and became an officer. However, information on the Prayer-man.com website shows that Shelley was indeed an officer during the war, albeit as a lieutenant in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Crozier Tech. Shelley’s claim that he was an “intelligence officer” would make sense if, as an ROTC lieutenant, he received intelligence training and perhaps even given some assignments in counterespionage. After leaving high school he might have continued as an intelligence operative working undercover in local “defense plants” (plural) during the last months of the war.

    Shelley’s second claim was that he joined the CIA. In 1947, the year when the CIA was formed, the Dallas city directory lists William Shelley as a clerk for the Hugh Perry Book Depository (the old name for the Texas School Book Depository), and that he had a room at 515 Martinique Avenue. The 1960 directory lists him as a department manager for the Texas School Book Depository, living in a house at 126 Tatum Avenue. He was still living on Tatum Avenue at the time of the assassination. If Shelley’s claim to Glaze about his association with the CIA is true, it indicates that he was leading a double life as a schoolbook man as well as an intelligence operative.

    Having a double life would not have made Shelley unique among the people who worked at the book depository. Roy Truly, who started working for the book depository in 1934, took a part-time job at the North American Aviation plant in Arlington, Texas during the war years.[16] At the same time, the president of the company, Jack Cason, spent five days a week, Monday through Friday, in uniform at Fort Wolters at Mineral Wells (80 miles west of Dallas). It was an infantry replacement center as well as a German POW camp.[17] Joe Bergin, Sr. became a Texas Ranger in 1934, while serving concurrently as a school superintendent in Greenville, Texas. In 1938, he became a salesman for Scott Foresman. That he continued to serve in a military, or semi-military, capacity at the same time he was working for a schoolbook company is indicated by his obituary, which said he was a veteran of World War II. Joe Molina, credit manager for the book depository since 1947, worked with FBI informer William Lowery in infiltrating leftist organizations. Apparently, work at the book depository was not so demanding as to preclude these forays into military, law enforcement, or intelligence organizations.

    Investigations of the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s shows that the agency had embedded agents in a wide variety of organizations and institutions, including labor unions, airlines, college student associations, foundations, law firms, banks, savings and loans, investment firms, travel agencies, police departments, post offices, publishing companies, newspapers, call girl services, and mental health institutions. Considering the far-reaching extent of control over so many occupations in American society, the CIA could very well have infiltrated the schoolbook depositories and their associated publishers. The owner of the establishment, rightwing oil man, D. H. Byrd would have had little problem approving that kind of clearance.

    Carolyn Walther, a street spectator waiting to see the president’s motorcade, observed a two-man sniper team at a window on the fifth floor on the far-right side of the building. One man had blonde or light-brown hair, wore a white shirt, and was armed with a rifle. Standing next to him was a man wearing a brown suitcoat. Walther was sure they were not as high as the sixth floor. Confirming these observations were two more spectators, Ronald Fischer and Robert Edwards, who saw a man with light-colored hair and a light-colored open-neck shirt at a window on the fifth floor.[18]

    Less than a minute after the assassination, two Scott Foresman employees, Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles, who were on the fourth floor, ran down the stairs to the first floor. Near the two freight elevators were Shelley and co-worker Billy Lovelady. Adams said, “I believe the President has been shot.” Neither Shelley nor Lovelady said anything in reply.[19] Immediately after Adams and Styles went out the back door, Officer Marion Baker came in through the front door and met Roy Truly. He saw two white men sitting by the stairs.[20] Before going up the stairs, Truly paused to tell Shelley to guard the stairs and elevators to make sure no one uses them.[21]

    There is an interesting paradox about this issue. For in Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs, the reader will read that both Vickie Adams and Sandy Styles told Barry that they did not see either Shelly or Lovelady when they descended from the fourth floor to the first. The Warren Commission did all they could to delay the arrival time on the first floor by Adams and Styles in order to remove the two girls from the stairs when Oswald would have likely been on them.[22] And this likely included coaxing Shelly and Lovelady into making an ersatz trip across the street to the railroad yards before their return to the TSBD, which is now when they said they saw Styles and Adams.

    About a minute or two later, NBC news reporter Robert MacNeil came in through the front door, amazed to see three calm men.

    I went immediately into the clear space on the ground floor and asked where there was a phone. There were, as I recall, three men there, all I think in shirt sleeves. What, on recollection, strikes me as possibly significant is that all three seemed to be exceedingly calm and relaxed, compared to the pandemonium which existed right outside their front door. I did not pay attention to this at the time. I asked the first man I saw—a man who was telephoning from a pillar in the middle of the room—where I could call from. He directed me to another man nearer the door, who pointed to an office. When I got to the phone, two of the lines were lit up. I made my call and left. …I was in too much of a hurry to remember what the three men looked like. But their manner was very relaxed.[23]

    The man using the pay phone was Shelley, for in an affidavit made out that same afternoon, he said, “I went back into the building [from outside where he viewed the shooting of the president] and went inside and called my wife and told her what happened.”[24] Lovelady must have been one of the other calm men, since, as previously noted, he made no response when Adams said that the president had been shot. The third calm man was probably Wesley Fraizer, who stuck close to Shelley and Lovelady. After standing on the front steps to see the shooting of the president, Frazier did something odd, about which he seemed to contradict himself about in an interview with the Sixth Floor Museum in 2013. He said he went back inside and went into the basement for ten minutes, supposedly eating his lunch.[25]

    There was a fourth calm man, perhaps unnoticed by MacNeil, who was getting a coke on the second floor. According to one of the FBI reports of the first interrogation of Oswald in the Dallas homicide office:

    OSWALD stated that he took this Coke down to the first floor and stood around and had lunch in the employees’ lunch room. He thereafter went outside and stood around for five or ten minutes with foreman BILL SHELLEY, and thereafter went home. He stated that he left work because, in his opinion, based upon remarks of BILL SHELLEY, he did not believe that there was going to be any more work that day due to the confusion in the building.[26]

    Pierce Allman, a local newsman, later said that after he approached the TSBD, a man he recalled as Oswald near the front of the building, directed him to a phone inside.[27]

    Considering the noise of gun blasts and the uproar going on outside, it is odd that Oswald continued to be unconcerned. Like Frazier, who was “eating lunch” in the basement, Oswald went to the first-floor lunchroom to eat his lunch. The fact that he went and got his gun afterwards and then walked to the Texas Theater, perhaps to meet with someone, this suggests that he had some kind of agenda to fulfill. What it was is hard to guess. Yet judging by the disgust in his voice when he said at the police station “I’m just a patsy,” he probably did not know that he would be the one accused of killing the president.

    V

    Not long after Oswald departed from the scene, Shelley told Truly that Oswald was missing.[28] A roll call of warehouse employees seemed to indicate that Oswald was indeed absent. Truly notified Police Captain Will Fritz, who immediately thought that it was “important to hold that man.”[29] What makes this even more interesting is the following new information. In the work that Oliver Stone has done for his upcoming four-part documentary series on the JFK case, he uncovered information that Truly was not being paid directly through the Texas School Book Depository in 1963. Which he was allegedly working for. We should not jump to conclusions, since we do not know the entity that was actually paying him. But in the light of the information in this essay, it seems interesting that it was Shelly and Truly who took the name of Oswald to the police. Fritz was on the sixth floor examining the scene when Truly told him of this. Which seems to be an odd premise, especially since, as Jerry Rose pointed out in his article, “Important to Hold that Man” there were at least 14 people missing from the building at the time; and they would not return until 1:30 PM. Charles Givens, like Oswald, had left the building after the assassination.[30] In that same article Rose writes that Shelly was one of the building employees who identified Oswald for the police when he was brought in to the station. As Rose points out, this is a bit odd also, since most of the building witnesses were taken to the sheriff’s office, which was much closer to the TSBD than police headquarters.

    Shelley told Glaze that he himself was arrested for the assassination. There are photos of him getting into a police car along with Bonnie Ray Williams and Daniel Arce. No doubt the police asked Shelley a lot of questions, and it is possible that they kept him in custody until he gave satisfactory answers. Admittedly, there is no record of Shelley’s arrest, but that does not necessarily mean Glaze was wrong. Missing evidence could be attributed to the systematic destruction of anything contrary to the official version.

    A puzzling aspect of Glaze’s 1989 letter was his reference to the book depository having moved to a location near the intersection of Royal Lane and Interstate 35. In 1970, the TSBD and the schoolbook publishers moved out of the old 411 Elm Street building. Yet their new location was seven miles south of the intersection of Royal Lane and Interstate 35 at 8301 Ambassador Row. Obviously, the distance to Ambassador Row was too great to serve as a useful guide to anyone seeking to verify Glaze’s account.

    It was not until 1999 that I spoke to someone who could solve this apparent discrepancy. Dorothy Ann Garner was a former office supervisor of Scott Foresman. She and three co-workers—Victoria Adams, Sandra Styles, and Elsie Dorman—viewed the shooting of the president from their fourth-floor office window. About four or five years after the assassination, she said, Scott Foresman and another publisher called Southwestern decided to sever ties with the Texas School Book Depository. They constructed a new building in the northwest part of Dallas, which both companies shared. I asked her if the new building was near the intersection of Royal Lane and Interstate 35, and she said yes, on Gemini Lane. (Its address, I later learned, was 11310 Gemini Lane.) Garner went on to say that at the same time, around 1969, William Shelley quit the book depository and began working for Scott Foresman. He was still there when Garner retired in 1986.

    Glaze’s meetings with Shelley were therefore not at the Ambassador Row facility, as I originally believed, but rather they occurred at the building on Gemini Lane. The incident involving two government agents asking new employees strange questions also occurred at this location.

    A fellow researcher named Eric Lee Jordan visited the site and took pictures of it. The building is a large, one-story, concrete tilt-up, ideal for storing and moving huge quantities of material goods with forklifts and palettes. Behind the building are five loading docks and an asphalt lot extensive enough to accommodate a number of trucks of any given size. Enclosing the back area is a high, chain-link fence with coils of barbed wire on top. At the time he visited the place, Scott Foresman was gone, and a carpet company was occupying the building.

    When the woman heard that Glaze was planning to go to the FBI, or had already been to the FBI, she was terrified and told him that she would deny everything. Afterwards, she, her husband, and their child quickly disappeared. This is an indication that the covert side of the schoolbook business had shifted to the Scott Foresman and Southwestern building, perhaps because the notoriety of the TSBD had hampered its ability to conduct smuggling operations and thus had to be discontinued.

    Just as in the case of Carolyn Arnold and Roy Truly, the strange menace that Glaze encountered in early 1975 continued to follow him through the course of his life. His desire to tell what he knew overcame his fear at least twice in his life. In the closing paragraphs of his 1977 letter, he wrote, “I must admit that my own fear of getting involved in the investigation has prevented me from writing you earlier. I apologize.” He closed his 1989 letter with a lurid metaphor: “I will help any way—I just want to be forewarned. There is a very large spider guarding this web of secrecy. I have entered other webs, but this one is different because the spider leaves the web and stalks its prey—sometimes for many years.”

    Through another researcher, I obtained Glaze’s mailing address. In my letter to him, I praised him for his courage and expressed the hope that someday he might fill in the gaps of his story for the sake of history. Two weeks later, he wrote back:

    July 14, 1999

    Dear Mr. Weston,

    Received your letter of July 7, 1999. Thank you for your kind words and interest. All that I know—and the attending dead ends—were passed along to a researcher and author in Dallas a few years ago. He is about to publish his book and, as you can understand, friendship and loyalty make me reluctant to discuss this matter with anyone else. It’s perhaps a moot point anyway, because based on what you’ve told me, you now know more than I do. Mine was a happenstance meeting and short, casual friendship with a man who appeared to have fallen through the cracks. Had the seemingly insignificant trail of bread crumbs I stumbled across had not been so he avidly guarded, I might never have given it a second thought. My actions were less courageous than they were the result of being naïve. I was up to my neck before I realized it. You may have noticed that at the end of my letter to “Alternative Views” I carbon-copied to “my will.” It was intended as a jab at myself lest I get too full of myself rereading it 50 years from now.

    “With that, I pass along my rather tiny candle, plus my best wishes and encouragement. Those generations who were there in 1963 are grateful that people like you are continuing the pursuit and taking another look at events which may have been too shocking for the rest of us to ever fully comprehend. Perhaps that is why I was so unprepared during that brief step into the looking glass.”

    Sincerely,

    Dean Glaze

    As far as I know, the unknown Dallas author who interviewed has not published his book.

    Elzie Dean Glaze passed away on November 15, 2019. Below is an obituary from the Austin American-Statesman published on Dec. 15, 2019.

    GLAZE, Elzie Dean Age 66, is celebrated by his family for his compassion, humor and willingness to help family, friends and the world at large. He was an accomplished journalist and author and had worked as a radio engineer in his early career. For many years he assisted organizations that helped veterans, monitored the nuclear power industry, and worked to ensure basic human rights. He had keen interests in history and weather, and much of his writing related to these. He followed environmental concerns and space exploration, and he enjoyed playing and watching sports. He was fortunate to have many travels, including celebration of his 60th birthday in Antarctica. Dean was the son of Elzie L. Glaze and Geneva I. Glaze and was born in Lubbock, Texas. He passed away on November 15, 2019, after a fall causing brain injury. He is loved and will always be remembered by his wife Sylvia Glaze, daughter Hailey Glaze, and sister, brothers, nieces, nephews and friends. He enjoyed giving to others, and loved the companionship of his four dogs. Many notes and gifts, often created by him, are left for us as a tribute to his kindness and love.


    [1] Testimony of James B. Wilcott, RIF 180-10116-10096, pp.25-26.

    [2] Midnight/Globe, February 14, 1978. The memo said that Oswald’s FBI informant number was S172 and that his CIA number was 110669. Mae Brussell showed copies of this document to the editors of Globe.

    [3] Telephone interviews of Campbell March 19, 1994; Jones, March 19, 1994; Williams, April 4, 1994; Garner, August 14, 1999.

    [4] FBI report of Roy Truly interview by Nat Pinkston, November 23, 1963, File No. DL 100-10461.

    [5] Interviews of Ted Leon and Thomas H. Butler. The November 14, 1961 date came from Leon, Sexton branch manager in Dallas from 1961 to 1964. He kept his pocket calendars from his years of employment, and he noted when the grocery company moved out of the building to a new facility in another part of Dallas. Butler took over as branch manager after Leon transferred to Los Angeles. Butler said that the 411 Elm Street building was vacant for at least a year after his company moved out.

    [6] Interviews of Joe Bergin, Jr. February 12 and 26, 1994 and August 7, 1999. When I interviewed him, he was living alone with his three cats, depending for his income on the charity of his father and disability checks. His father died on November 2, 1990. Joe died on August 29, 2001 at the age of 55.

    [7] Through some insider intrigue, a saleslady at Neiman Marcus found out what Jacqueline Kennedy was going to wear the day of her arrival in Dallas. She confided this information to Mrs. Bergin and told her that she had a copy of the First Lady’s dress, pink in color with the black velvet collar. Mrs. Bergin paid a great deal of money for that dress. She planned to wear it that Friday evening at a social gathering. Needless to say, she never did wear that dress.

    [8] Jim Marrs, Crossfire (Carroll & Graf. New York, 1989) p. 319.

    [9] Carolyn Arnold statement in “Byrd/TSBD Concerns” posted by Martin Barkley on May 24, 2000 on the JFK Today website.

    [10] Larry Ray Harris at the age of 44 died in an automobile accident on October 5, 1996. He was traveling from his mother’s house in Ohio to Georgia. Supposedly, he fell asleep at the wheel, or committed suicide, when he rammed into the back of a semi-truck. Since the CIA has the capability of engineering car crashes to look like accidents, Harris’s name should be added to the list of mysterious deaths, along with Warren Commission witness Lee Bowers, who died when his car ran off the road and ran into a freeway abutment.

    [11] Glaze misdated his letter as “12/12/74.”

    [12] Wilcott’s 3/22/78 HSCA deposition, pp. 25-26.

    [13] Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985), pp. 359-360, 386-387.

    [14] William Harvey obituary in The New York Times, June 14, 1976.

    [15] Shelley testimony, Volume 6 of the Warren Commission Hearings and Exhibits on page 327, hereafter to be cited as 6H327.

    [16] Roy Truly testimony, 3H213.

    [17] Gladys Cason, One Life, self-published book, 2004, pp. 66-67.

    [18] Carolyn Walther, 24H522; Edwards, 24H207; Fischer, 24H208.

    [19] Adams testimony, 6H388-390.

    [20] Baker testimony, 3H263.

    [21] Shelley testimony, 6H330.

    [22] Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact, p. 74.

    [23] William Weston, “Robert MacNeil and the Three Calm Men”, in the November 1994 issue of The Fourth Decade.

    [24] Shelley affidavit, 24H226.

    [25] Frazier testimony, 2H23.

    [26] FBI report of Oswald at the police station, Warren Report, p. 619.

    [27] Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust p. 115.

    [28] The Third Decade, May of 1986.

    [29] Shelley affidavit, 24H226.

    [30] Fritz testimony, 4H206.

  • The Dylan/Kennedy Sensation

    The Dylan/Kennedy Sensation


    As everyone who reads this site must know by now, Bob Dylan’s newly released song Murder Most Foul has created nothing less than a cultural and popular mini earthquake. (Click here) As of this writing, the song, his first in about 8 years, has registered 2.4 million views on You Tube. Over two million in 96 hours! The song is themed around the murder of President Kennedy, but I hesitate to call Murder Most Foul a song. Because, as most people understand, Dylan is one of the finest lyricists in the modern history of music. At his best—in classics like Blowin’ in the Wind and Like a Rolling Stone—he does not really write song lyrics, not in the normal sense. He writes poems. And to anyone who knows anything about the Kennedy assassination, this song is really a poem. It is an intricately designed, multi-leveled, cleverly-referenced poem about both the Kennedy assassination and what happened to America after that cataclysmic event. (Click here for a written lyric version of the song)

    For people who have studied the Kennedy case, Dylan has centered the lyrics around a conspiracy to kill JFK in Dallas. Consider these three lines: “We’re gonna kill you with hatred, without any respect/We’ll mock you and shock you and we’ll put it in your face/We’ve already got someone here to take your place”. (Click here for the official lyrics themselves) But, then, this theme gets hammered home a few lines later:

    Thousands were watching, no one saw a thing

    It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise

    Right there in front of everyone’s eyes

    Greatest magic trick ever under the sun

    Perfectly executed, skillfully done

    Many writers on the JFK case, including our own Milicent Cranor, have referred to the murder of JFK as a “magic trick”. One that was planned and designed in advance. Dylan captures this by saying that although the event took place right in front of all the spectator’s eyes, no one saw how it was really done due to the intricate trickery involved.

    The writer then shows how well he knows the literature on the Kennedy case. And beyond that, how well he has hidden his references and mixed them in with the historical period. He writes: “Slide down the banister, go get your coat/Ferry cross the Mersey and go for the throat/There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags/Pick up the pieces and lower the flags.” Vince Palamara had to point out to me and others that Dylan is likely referencing in the first line, Guy Banister, and in the second, David Ferrie. He then posits in more scenery from the assassination with the Three Tramps. He has covered this in a movement referencing the British rock invasion and a song by Gerry and the Pacemakers from 1965, Ferry Across the Mersey. This reference is intermixed with one to “The Beatles are comin’, they’re gonna hold your hand.” The Beatles first big hit in the USA, as opposed to England, occurred in December of 1963. It was the single, I Want to Hold Your Hand. This sub-theme of escape into music is accentuated with “Pick up the pieces and lower the flags/I’m goin’to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian Age/Then I’ll go to Altamont and sit near the stage.” Altamont was a free music festival held in California four months after Woodstock, featuring The Rolling Stones. Altamont was marked by the heavy usage of drugs and alcohol, which resulted in numerous fistfights. Four people died during the event, and one of them was killed near the stage. (See the documentary film Gimme Shelter)

    This is where the elegiac part of the poem begins to assert itself. Dylan tops off the Altamont reference and links it to the JFK murder adroitly and pungently. Right after the mention of Altamont, he writes “Put your head out the window, let the good times roll/There’s a party going on behind the Grassy Knoll.” Does it get much better than this kind of historical allusion per cause and effect? America was escaping into the drugs and hard rock music exemplified by Woodstock and Altamont. This is not Taylor Swift.

    II

    The entire 17-minute song is chock full of these kinds of references, including to the late disc jockey Wolfman Jack. The Wolfman became famous in movie history through his appearance in George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti. That picture had an elegiac tone to it. In fact, its ad campaign featured the question, “Where were you in’62?” That bubbly film about Camelot America, the early sixties, ended with a punch in the gut. At the end of the picture, it tracked its male protagonists past 1962: with one of them dying in Vietnam and another living in exile in Canada to escape the draft. As one critic described it, the film’s lighthearted tone was extinguished by a ten-foot wave showing an Ozzie and Harriet like American youth being thrown headlong into disaster. That awful fate was amplified even more by the 1991 film JFK and its accompanying book: John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam. Bob Dylan gets it.

    The title Murder Most Foul is a reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In Act One of that play, during the famous ghost scene, an apparition of his father tells Prince Hamlet that he, the former king, was murdered. The ghost then refers to his killing as, “Murder Most Foul”. He tells his son that he was done away with by the new king: his brother Claudius. His brother then married his widow to become Hamlet’s stepfather. This surreal revelation is what sets the action of the play in motion: a drama of crime detection and ultimate revenge. It all becomes a tragedy when, at the end, the stage is littered with the corpses of not just Claudius, but also Hamlet, his mother Gertrude, and the son of Polonius, Laertes. But beyond that, and cut from most film versions of the play, these deaths make possible the entry of an army from nearby Norway, led by the character Fortinbras. As Dylan notes: “We’ve already got someone here to take your place.”

    Front cover of Murder Most Foul by Stanley Marks

    But Kennedys and King contributor Rob Couteau has alerted us that the title may go even further than that. For there is a little-known book with that same Shakespearean title in the Kennedy canon. In 1967, writer Stanley J. Marks wrote a short volume on the case. He entitled it Murder Most Foul. From its appearance—Couteau actually has a copy of the book—it did not appear to be printer typeset. The volume looks like it might be self-published and, therefore, did not get much distribution. If so, that is understandable. The contents of the book and its political views on the assassination, especially those at the end, are far ahead of the intellectual arguments in classic texts like Accessories After the Fact and Six Seconds in Dallas, both published in 1967.

    The approach to the case taken by Stanley Marks is that of a magisterial judge out of the British system. During the course of the book, this judge (Marks) relentlessly asks question after question of the prosecution. By the book’s finish, the question count tallies to 975. Quite accurately, through his questioning, Marks concludes that the Commission suppressed important evidence and neglected to question certain important witnesses. His penultimate chapter is called “The Rape of the American Conscience”. There, one of his first conclusions is that the Warren Commission, contrary to what it wrote, discovered a conspiracy. Marks is utterly disdainful of both the efforts of the Commission and its aides. In that penultimate chapter, he accuses them of abusing legal procedure and the rights of witnesses. He calls the performance by the Commission both negligent and slothful. He says that the report deserves all the criticism it has gotten, for it could not even withstand exposure by the noon day sun.

    Marks then sounds a note that no other critic of that time voiced, but which is appropriate to Dylan. He says that because of the disbelief in the Warren Report, a cynicism has gathered in the public and this bodes ill for the future of the nation. For a nation whose moral fiber has been torn and shattered cannot long live.

    Marks expounds on this idea by writing on page 139 that the Constitution contains the American Creed in the preamble. The Warren Report violated that creed. Because the United States, “…was not born on the idea that its president could be shot like a dog on the street and his murderers be shielded from that day on, because it would be ‘against the national interests’.” He concludes his penultimate chapter with what could be called an ode: “How long O how long, Americans, will we permit our silence to perpetuate the evil in the Warren Report?” This condemnation is a far cry from say Josiah Thompson who, at the end of his book, said he was not really sure that the evidence he adduced justified a conspiracy. (Six Seconds in Dallas, p. 246)

    In his final chapter, Marks again does something that neither Meagher nor Thompson did—quite the contrary. He praises and appreciates the efforts of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison. He compares Garrison’s ordeal against the media to St. George galloping forth to duel with the dragon. He also says something quite prescient for the time: he accuses some of Garrison’s attackers of being in bed with the CIA. Which, we now know, is an accurate assessment. Again, if Bob Dylan knew about this obscure book, even more praise to him.

    The poem never lets up on the impact of November 22, 1963. It mentions the Zapruder film and also the deeply flawed autopsy—“They mutilated his body and they took out his brain”—and even the magic bullet and Oswald’s pronouncement that he was just a patsy. Dylan even seems to reference some of the work done by authors like myself on the attempt to smear Kennedy’s reputation posthumously. This is suggested when he writes in verse 3, “They killed him once and they killed him twice.”

    The elegiac part really picks up at the end of verse 3 when, right after mentioning “they killed him twice”, Dylan writes:

    The day they killed him, someone said to me, “Son

    The age of the Antichrist has just only begun”

    Air Force One comin’ in through the gate

    Johnson sworn in at 2:38

    Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel

    It is what it is, and it’s murder most foul

    I really don’t see how the lines about the Antichrist, Johnson, and throwing in the towel could be any clearer in their meaning.

    As they should, with the mention of the Antichrist, in verse four, the elegiac tones become more pronounced. Dylan begins that verse with a reference to the forgettable 1965 film written by Woody Allen, What’s New Pussycat? He then juxtaposes the frivolity of that piece of ephemera with the following lines: “I said the soul of a nation has been torn away/And its beginning to go into a slow decay”. He then lists some songs Wolfman Jack could turn, pointedly including Only the Good Die Young and saying Wolfman should also play a song “for that strip club owner named Jack.”

    In the last verse, verse five, the author asks the Wolfman to play a song for Jackie Kennedy, since she “aint’t feeling very good”. He then lists a whole slew of songs, some with suggestive titles like In God We Trust and Another One Bites the Dust. He then begins to turn to his main theme when he writes:

    Don’t worry Mr. President, help’s on the way

    Your brothers are comin’, there’ll be hell to pay

    Brothers? What brothers? What’s this about hell?

    Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming” we’ll get them as well

    Love Field is where his plane touched down

    But it never did get back up off the ground

    Was a hard act to follow, second to none

    As we know, they did get JFK’s brother, Bobby, through another murder and Ted was blocked from the White House through the tragedy of Chappaquiddick. (Or as Pamela Brown has suggested the other brother could be, figuratively, Martin Luther King.) And evidently, like most of the American public, Dylan thinks that the following presidents were not up to Kennedy’s standard. (Dylan wrote the song several years ago, the occasion of President Trump’s epic fail on the novel corona virus may be the reason he released it at this time.) After listing some other evocative song and film titles like Lonely are the Brave and Lonely at the Top Dylan concludes with this:

    Play darkness and death will come when it comes

    Play “Love Me Or Leave Me” by the great Bud Powell

    Play “The Blood-stained Banner”, Play “Murder most Foul”

    Bud Powell was a great American pianist and Love Me or Leave Me was the name of both a famous song and much later, a lesser known film. But The Blood-Stained Banner is a name given to the confederate flag. And we know where the line Murder Most Foul comes from, it happens to be the title of the song everyone is listening to. I believe the reference to the confederate flag works in three ways: the predominant color in the flag is red, Kennedy died in the south, and JFK—as Dylan well knows—had all kinds of problems in his struggle against Jim Crow at places like the University of Alabama and Ole Miss. In other words, the ugly side of America, as represented by the confederacy, eventually won out. Dylan is to lyric composition what Frank Lloyd Wright was to designing home architecture.

    III

    The reaction to this evocative and moving piece of poetry and song writing has been both troubling and predictable. I can do no better than to quote David Talbot at length to illustrate it:

    Idiot Wind. This is how pathetic and cowardly and willfully ignorant that our media is. Bob Dylan, America’s greatest living songwriter, has just released a profoundly disturbing song about the powerful conspiracy that killed President Kennedy and the subsequent loss of our nation’s soul. Stop the presses! There’s your story, quarantined media hacks with nothing better to do—call up Dylan and ask him why he released this stunning song now, his most politically charged work in decades. Or call assassination researchers who actually have investigated Kennedy’s “murder most foul”—authors whose work probably informed Dylan.

    Instead, what do NPR’s intrepid culture reporters—Bob Boilen and Ann Powers—do? They put together a playlist of the songs that Dylan references in his epic ballad. Likewise, the New York Times’s Jon Pareles also can’t bring himself to explore the meaning of Dylan’s haunting lyrics. He’s obviously read the memo from the Times front office—don’t go there if you value your job. All of these music critics are old enough and wise enough to know the huge import of this new Dylan song. And none of them has the guts to wade into these dark waters.

    What sniveling and cowering “journalists.” This is why America’s Fourth Estate has been complicit with the Kennedy assassination conspiracy for over five decades. While American democracy was riddled with bullets and buried so deep we now have a mad clown as president, our press “watchdogs” licked the hands of the conspirators and snarled at anyone brave enough to question the official story.

    But hey, instead of pondering the light in Dylan’s darkness, we can all listen to this fun NPR playlist!

    The New Yorker compared some of the lyrics to QAnon, which shows that one can only understand this poem if you know or care anything about the JFK case. (Kevin Dettmar, 3/28/2020) Ty Burr, in the Boston Globe, said that the musical arrangement should have been stronger and more pronounced. (March 28, 2020) Mr. Burr does not understand that this work is really meant as a poem; therefore, the music is in the background. If one can believe it, the Rolling Stone said that the song is about how music can comfort us through troubled times. (3/27/20, by Simon Voznick Levinson). As I pointed out, in the work’s overtones, what Dylan is showing is how the shallowness of American culture could not deal with an event the size, scope and trauma of the Kennedy assassination. Our cultural and media gatekeepers just wanted to bypass it as quickly and as easily as possible.

    In that aspect, Dylan has come a long way on the subject. Accepting an award in 1964, in an allegedly drunken state, he said he could see how some people could relate to what Oswald did. Like most of us today, he understands Oswald did not do anything that day. Like the alleged assassin said of himself, he was just a patsy. The damage was done by assailants unknown to America.

    There are few poems, and even fewer songs today, that can be called folk epics. Perhaps in remembrance of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie, this one lays claim to that rubric.


    Additional materials provided by Rob Couteau:

    Rear cover of Murder Most Foul by Stanley Marks

    Stanley Marks indexed by the HSCA Volumes 11-12 page 695

  • The Evidence is the Conspiracy – The Carbine on the 6th Floor

    The Evidence is the Conspiracy – The Carbine on the 6th Floor


    I will be sharing with you how the DPD, Secret Service, and FBI dealt with the rifle evidence they gathered, as they gathered it, and how Hoover’s FBI, with the help of the US Postal Service, steered this evidence toward Oswald.

    Forensics with firearms includes examining those things that make the firearm unique, which is one of two ways to authenticate our evidence. Authentication, in the law of evidence, is the process by which documentary evidence and other physical evidence is proven to be genuine and not a forgery. Generally, authentication can be shown in one of two ways. First, a witness can testify as to the chain of custody through which the evidence passed from the time of the discovery up until the trial. Second, the evidence can be authenticated by the opinion of an expert witness examining the evidence to determine if it has all of the properties that it would be expected to have if it were authentic.

    The Roman numeral XVIII (18) and the bottom of TERNI do seem ground off—yet we can’t be 100% sure. 1940 only needed adding if the original was from a different year or the entire year and Roman numerals were removed. If the rifle had been a 1939 or 1938, there is a greater likelihood it was a 7.35mm FC carbine.

    Luciano Riva, or someone else, did grind some things off and added others. The rifles were so unsound, that without first checking them, the first batches sold for use caused horrific accidents and even deaths. It is from Crescent (Louis Feldsott’s sister business to Adams Consolidated) that retail orders are first forwarded to Fred Rupp, a licensed gun dealer who was enlisted to check, then fix, and/or replace defective rifles, noting the change on the enclosed packing slips. Our 10 slips show no changes, no substitutions, and still represent the shipments from Italy to Crescent in NYC.

    We have 2 – 6.5 stamped Fucile Corto Barrels and an image from CE541. This is the ONLY image of the caliber on a rifle claimed to be CE-139. I welcome any detailed images of the carbine caliber prior to this image. As you will see, the 6.5 and 7.35 FC rifles are virtually identical.

    The 7.35 Fucile usually had the caliber burned into the butt of the stock on the side with the sling mount. In 1940, when the Army goes back to 6.5mm, it is stamped on the fixed rear sight, in order to help avoid an ammunition mix-up. In the 15-20 years since their use, the parts and pieces of numerous rifles used for parts, can be found in a single, finished weapon.

    We have a wonderful image of Lt. Day carrying the rifle from the TSBD. It is both very large and very clear. Since we’ve never seen an image of the rifle prior to the FBI exhibit images, the possibility of a rifle with no CAL markings prior to the FBI acquiring it – is not so far fetched.

    Early reports from Italy claim the rifle in question is a 7.35 M91/38. Without a clear image of the CAL designation, the 6.5mm shells on the floor – especially in their condition – may have had little to do with the rifle. The white versus black numbers will be a reoccurring theme.

     

    “C14 is C2766” is a FBI fib used to incriminate Oswald. This declaration came in early December. The report from William Harvey’s Italy said it was a 7.35 model 91/38, among all sorts of interesting things that never made their way into the Warren Commission Report (WCR). Instead, we are told by the FBI that C14 is C2766. Hail Hoover. C14 ≠ C2766b>. On March 27, 1964, Alfred Finish, “professional gunsmith at the Empire Wholesale Sporting Goods,” Montreal, Canada, “assisted in taking critical measures” of the rifles then shipped to Mr. Ouimet. Mr. Ouimet claims to be the owner of Empire Wholesale (aka Century International Arms) owned by William Sucher and source for 700 identical rifles to the one pictured above. We’ll return to Mr. Sucher and Century International Arms (C.I.A.). Mr. Ouimet gives these measures of an “identical model” of the rifle used in the JFK assassination: total length 40 3/16″ – stock 34 3/4″ – barrel and action 28 15/16″ – barrel only 21 1/8″ – rear to receiver 26 1/2.” He underscores the Carcano he had examined during the years “had no set pattern regarding serial numbers.”

    For argument sake, let’s agree with “C2766” identifying that rifle uniquely. It’s much easier to create paper copies of copies than to stamp a rifle.

    Given Texas in 1963, how did they fall upon Feldsott in NYC?

    FBI SA Nat Pinkston is listed as a TSBD employee in the WCR index. He was an FBI agent. His testimony only dealt with Oswald’s clipboard from December 2. His name is on this report having spoken to Al Yeargan about the rifle at the H.L. Green Company (a local department store selling surplus WWII weapons), yet he is never asked about the conversation. 40 years later, H. L. Green is no longer included. We go from Titche-Goettinger right to Klein’s. What SA Pinkston did in 1963/4 and recounts years later bear little resemblance to each other. His recent revelations are uniquely his and are not authenticated or corroborated by any other evidence.

    The SAC in New York City is talking about the records of H. L. Green in Dallas to Chicago 7 hours after the fact. Green says they get their stuff from Crescent Firearms in New York City. Again, info on a 6.5mm C2766 takes 7 hours to convey thru New York City to Chicago, so the Chicago FBI can go to Klein’s?

    Here is the famous affidavit and, not so famous, Rankin note that came with it. Rankin sends Al Feldsott a completed affidavit for his signature and notarization in July 1964. The same thing happens with the H. L. Green employees. This concludes that C 2766 was, indeed, sold to Klein’s Sporting Goods on June 18, 1962, and this info was conveyed to the FBI on the night of November 22. Subsequently, other records are turned over as well.

    On the evening of November 22, the FBI has its evidence. “Mr. White in the study with a candlestick” à la the game, Clue. Crescent to Klein’s on June 18th with C2766.

    William Sucher, owner of Century International Arms, Inc., and Empire Wholesale are the sources to the FBI that the serial numbers on World War 2 surplus rifles are by no means unique. Not one of the 700 has a letter prefix identified. As I discovered, James Ouimet, who is referred to as the “President” of Century Arms, was actually a figurehead, put in place by Sucher and his associates to run Century on their behalf. (G. Murr Education Forum post of 11/26/17) Owner: Empire Wholesale & International Firearms Limited, now known as Century International Arms, CIA.

    We also learn that they are the exact same rifles as the Century 700. “38E” internationally known and “T-38” domestically known as Carcano Fucile Corto rifles. The Klein’s customer invoice copies are simply the duplicates of the original 1960 shipments to Crescent from Italy.

    The rest of that November 22 memo confirms a June 18, 1962, shipment sent to Klein’s, yet the rifle listing only includes an N 2766, not C.

    The New York City FBI SAC confirms with the FBI lab that the rifle in question has 5 digits: C 2766. The records of Klein’s from the night before shows they received “N 2766”. What is the FBI at Klein’s to do now?

     

    The New York City FBI revises their story on the November 24, confirming that C2766 was received by Crescent from Italy. Thank you, Sherlock Holmes. That it was sold to Klein’s “subsequently” as indicated above, on June 18, 1962. Yet somehow, 2 days earlier, SA Dolan and Waldman and Scibor from Klein’s find the order blank on microfilm.

    Does the FBI know something we didn’t that needed proof by November 24?

    N 2766 does not appear anywhere in the WCR. June 18, 1962, is on the Feldsott contact sheets, an affidavit, and reconfirmed a number of times in FBI documentation.

    This single sheet of paper related to a February 1963 delivery is based upon 10 packing slips sent from Italy to Crescent for Adams Consolidated and in the possession of the FBI on Friday evening, according to the evidence. Notice the 1259 in the top right-hand corner. Yet, the order was 1243, as testified to by General Manager Michael Scibor and Klein’s VP William Waldman. It is very possible the original order written on this page was 1259. As we saw, there were orders in June 1962 and March 1963 in the Klein’s and Crescent records, not February 22, 1963.

    The 10 Feldsott slips would not have been sent to Klein’s as part of their order. Sadly though, we do not know what they would send, for all we have are these 10 slips referring to 38 E, not T-38. It is a small detail I know, yet another brick in the wall.

    Here’s the evidence, the microfilm creates the order blank. The order blank’s handwriting connects the rifle with the list and nothing else. The “VC=Serial # list” claimed to be kept in a master ledger by Klein’s General Manager Michael Scibor, is claimed to be Klein’s way of tracking serial numbers on rifles. When a shipment comes in, the next blank VC# is used to start listing the rifle serial numbers in the shipment. Unless we can see another VC=Serial # list that actually matches real rifles with real orders or any other order showing any one of these 99 rifles, the data on this page could conceivably have been created that night. The details of the evidence will bear this out. At this point, the “VC List Evidence” simply corroborates itself and only for this one rifle. There were 99 more in inventory.

     

    With just those 2 pieces of evidence, the FBI is able to connect the receipt of C2766 with an order sent to Klein’s in February 1963. Yet, the FBI also told us on the 22nd about the March 1963 order with C2746. On November 22 and 23, there was no mention of a February 1963 order at either Crescent or Klein’s. There is more to it than that, but you’ll need to read my paper, The Klein’s Rifle.

    This is page 2 of 2 for order 1243. The original order number from January 1962. It also says “1259 Page 2 of 2 pages”. A subsequent order becomes the February 1963 order now containing C2766.

    How did they use the information that Crescent supplied the rifle to find this customer order? (Does this make any logical sense?)

    The receiving records from vendors would make it much easier to locate a shipment from a vendor, whereas how does one even begin to locate a sales order with only the serial number and vendor? Those 2 memos on the 22nd and 23rd left the FBI kinda screwed.

    Remember that on Friday and Saturday there are no records for C2766.

    Or that Crescent sent them orders in June of 1962 and March of 1963, not February 1963.

    After Friday evening into Saturday morning, 3 FBI Special Agents including Dolan put their names on a report (WCD7, page 187). SA’s Toedt and Mahan will provide virtually nothing else to the Warren Commission Documents.

    The next page of the report/memo does not have any signatures, but does tell us that Waldman kept the microfilm.

    Virtually the same report is found on the next page (WCD7, page 189), yet the outcome is completely different. This time only Dolan writes a report, in which he claims to have taken the microfilm and provided Waldman with a receipt. The chain of custody for this microfilm is now a hot mess.

    Months later, in testimony, Waldman is no longer talking about his safe and being subpoenaed. He gave that microfilm to the FBI. I’m told by those who went, the microfilm itself is no longer in its box at the archives. Just an empty box. If only a copy of the film was made.

    FBI SA Dolan alone claimed he took the microfilm by the morning of the 23rd. What we come to learn is that copies of this film are made in the weeks after November 22. Dolan gives a copy back to Waldman and once again it is said that Dolan acquired the film from Waldman on the 23rd. Originals with the FBI and copies to the Warren Commission were standard FBI operating procedure. With the original in the FBI’s hands from November 23 until the first copy is returned on December 6, there is no way to know what transpired with that film. I wonder if the copy and the FBI original have the same things on them?

    The microfilm creates the Order Blank. The Order Blank connects to the February Klein’s shipment via 1 piece of paper. What was on the original microfilm is simply no longer knowable.

     

    Waldman tells us he removed the remaining stock of “assassination” rifles on Monday the 25th. In 1978, we learn the FBI had Klein’s mount scopes on at least 12 rifles, that 40″ rifles were not scoped, and some rifles have no inscription at all. Sharp is not called to the Warren Commission.

    It’s as if those 100 rifles were never at Kleins in the first place.

    None of the people who were actually involved in receiving/shipping this product are interviewed, while Dolan remains an integral part.

    Westra concurs with Sharp about scoping 40″ rifles, but then is set straight. Since the 40″ rifle at the archives is scoped, y’all must have done it. Any information on Lido Luccesi would be appreciated.

    Given the mountain of paper we are given in this case, it remains an obvious “mystery” how Oswald can go through his paces from January 1963 to November 1963: order, pay for, and get delivered both a rifle and a pistol—and yet not have a single page written about those occurrences in any report from any agency prior to November 22nd.

    At the end of the day, the only things with a print of Oswald’s are a box and some paper. The rest is Lieutenant Day being helpful.

    It is not until well after Oswald is dead, that these fingerprint lifts even get consideration at the FBI.

    The rifle goes to Washington DC with SA Vincent Drain on the night of the 22nd, only to be returned and taken again on the 26th. Amazingly, the prints travel from one side of the trigger guard to the other.

    Having taken no photos of the print where it was found, there is only a photo of the lift which was not sent to the FBI with everything else that night.

    There is no part of the barrel showing from the underside of the rifle. Day’s palmprint appears to exist only to suggest Oswald assembled and disassembled the rifle. Despite numerous smooth metal parts including the shells and clip, Day’s prints are highly suspicious.

    Lt. Day needed to explain quite a few things that went awry that first day. Claiming he was told to stop working on the rifle, he claims that’s exactly what he did in mid stroke. Subsequent reports are filled with his excuses.

    In 1978, the HSCA requested to see this “lift”, seeing it was part of the evidence Drain takes again on the 26th. Yet again, we have Day stating all the evidence was taken the 22nd. This palmprint cannot be found—the official reason states:

    In other words, they lost it.

    In the 50’s, the FBI copied and planted prints regularly, along with lying about informants, as well as, virtually all manner of evidence.

    What if there was no money order, like there was no February order? But the FBI needed evidence of one.

    The evidence shows the Postal Money Order (PMO) found on 3 different timelines.

    The first is in Kansas City by the Secret Service

    The second is reverse engineered by Holmes and gang by looking at magazines and guessing about shipping. “Now you thumb through those,” I said, “and when you come to Klein’s Sporting Goods, let’s see what it looks like.” It wasn’t but a couple of minutes that one of the girls hollered, “Here it is!” So I looked at it and down at the bottom of the ad it said that that particular rifle was such and such amount. But if it could not be carried on a person, such as a pistol, like a shotgun or a rifle, then it was $1.25 or $1.37 extra. Shipping charges were also added, so I added those together, took that figure and called around to all the different stations and the main office where these crews were checking stubs. It wasn’t ten minutes that they hollered, “Eureka!” They had the stub!

    The third, and most interesting, is that of the FBI’s in Alexandria, Virginia. You can read all about it in the Rifle Money Order Timeline. For our purposes, the most important things to know about this money order are:

    Remember, the year is 1963. Who saw Catch Me If You Can? Passing bad checks was easier then, because the process took so long and was not computerized.

    We have a number of proofs outside of the Warren Commission Report. J. Harold Marks—the same man—testified in 1960 about tracking Postal Money Orders “as paid through the Federal Reserve Bank.” Another 1960 bit of evidence is this New York Federal flyer explaining how Postal Money Orders are to be accepted as cash items.

    And finally, in the Warren Commission Documents themselves, with Lester Gohr of the Federal Reserve and Wilmouth of Chicago 1st National reconfirming that Postal Money Orders are processed and recorded by these banks for very specific reasons.

     

     

    I’d like to begin finishing up with some of the evidence which suggests there were never any shipments of merchandise to Oswald. At his Dallas Post Office Box, Hidell was not listed. Given what was going on with the Dodd investigations (a Senate Committee investigating mail order pistol and rifle sales in the US—Klein’s and Seaport were 2 of their targets), it would seem that a 5′ carton addressed to the wrong person constitutes “where possible”. In the weeks after the assassination, VP Waldman will tell his “partner in microfilm crimes”, SA Dolan, that Senator Dodd’s Committee “was on his back.” It was known that Dodd used “cut-outs” to order rifles as part of his investigation—some surmise that Oswald may have been one of these cut-outs using the name Hidell.

    Given the reality of this and how this rifle suddenly appears after November 22, it defies common sense and logic to believe this goes unnoticed.

    In fact, a box of that size would have triggered the mailing of a notice for Oswald to come claim his oversized package. Yet the package is addressed to Hidell.
    With the need to generate this notice, the rules and regulations are put to an even more stringent test. As we now know, none of this happened.

    I’d like to end today with some more evidence, which I see betraying the conspiracy. The evidence shows that he took 2 small bags with him, when leaving Magazine Street after Ruth leaves with Marina. Yet, the rifle is placed at the Paine’s in October. There’d be only 1 way to get it there.

    If Ruth was supposed to help incriminate Oswald, this didn’t help.

    Neither did this and neither does Michael.

    While many have erroneously injected themselves into this storyline for personal gain or profit, we must look to those who suffered at the hands of the FBI for telling an inconvenient truth.

    Abraham Bolden comes to mind. FBI recalls Yates for a polygraph January 4, 1964: “No significant emotional responses were recorded.” The FBI could therefore not reach a conclusion about Yates. On January 5, 1964, at the insistence of the FBI, Yates begins 11 years of mental institutionalization. “They told me that he was telling the truth [according to the polygraph machine], but that basically he had convinced himself that he was telling the truth. So that’s how it came out. He strongly believed it, so it came out that way.” (Dorothy Yates Walker 2006)

    Despite being the object of numerous 3 letter agencies, we find nothing in the evidence related to these weapons prior to November 22nd.

  • Was the TFX Case a Scandal?

    Was the TFX Case a Scandal?


    The first time I ever heard of the TFX affair—as we shall see, it should not be called a scandal—was in doing work on my first book about the JFK assassination. That was the first edition of Destiny Betrayed back in 1991-92. I was assisted in writing the footnotes for that book by Bob Spiegelman. Bob had worked as a researcher on the film JFK. He had access to an unpublished manuscript by Peter Scott called The Dallas Conspiracy, issued in 1971. Therefore, in the notes section to the first edition of Destiny Betrayed, one will see a mention of “the TFX scandal” in relation to Navy Secretary Fred Korth and also to Lyndon Johnson. That passage states that President Kennedy forced Korth to resign in October of 1963 over the TFX affair. Bob also added that the episode had the potential to destroy Lyndon Johnson. (See footnote 2 on page 340)

    I don’t stand by that information today. I have found no credible evidence that Korth was asked by Kennedy to resign and neither is there credible evidence showing his resignation was related to the dispute over the tactical experimental fighter/bomber plane (TFX), eventually called the F-111. (Boston Globe, October 15, 1963, article by Robert Thompson) But the fact that these accusations were made shows just how wild the misinformation got about this defense project procurement episode. There are, of course, several other mentions of the TFX affair in other Kennedy assassination volumes, e.g. Seth Kantor’s The Ruby Cover-Up (p. 51). But, to my knowledge, in those volumes there has been little detailed discussion of the TFX dispute in historical and factual terms. As President Kennedy complained, there had been nothing more than innuendo. (See aforementioned Thompson article)

    But yet, despite this rather barren database of information, partly made up of newspaper stories by people like Drew Pearson, the F-111 affair lives on. In fact, a bit over a year ago, a protégé of Scott’s, Jonathan Marshall, made an entire speech about the episode. Many years ago, Marshall contributed to a journal Scott put out called Parapolitics and he has co-authored two books with Scott. I expected to hear something new and scholarly on the subject at such a late date. I was disappointed when I didn’t. What Marshall spoke about was pretty much what he had written about back in 1996 and what Scott had written about back in 1971. (Click here for a sample)

    This was jarring, because the affair was as old as Kennedy’s assassination, of which there has been much new information released. And several speakers addressed that information at the informal, Gary Aguilar sponsored seminar Marshall spoke at. Because of this critical lapse, much of what follows will be new to the reader.


    I

    The TFX plane, that would eventually become the F-111, was not a product of the Kennedy administration. It was presented for production during the Eisenhower administration. In the period of 1959-60, General Frank Everest was commander over the Tactical Air Command and also a commander of U. S. Air Forces in Europe. (Robert T. Art, The TFX Decision, p. 15) Everest had decided that the current fighter/bomber in use for Europe, the F-105, was outdated. He envisioned a new plane to replace it. To say that his vision was ambitious is too modest a characterization. Everest wanted the new fighter/bomber to be able to:

    1. Participate in air to air combat over the battlefield
    2. Be able to impose effective interdiction of supply routes behind enemy lines
    3. Supply air to ground cover for combat troops
    4. Be able to take off from and land on short sod runways

    This last requirement was formed to counter what the Air Force saw as a problem in their role as part of the nuclear triad (i.e. missiles, submarines, and bombers). Namely, that when the F-105 was stationed in Europe on a long 11,000-foot runway, it would be easily detectable and, therefore, easy to knock out. Therefore, it would not be a factor in an atomic exchange. (Robert Coulam, Illusions of Choice, p. 93) So this design requirement was made to neutralize that criticism and maintain an Air Force role in the atomic triad. But Everest went further in this aspect. He also wanted the plane to be able to cross the Atlantic nonstop, without refueling in the air. The point was to further safeguard the TFX from being knocked out on the ground. (Coulam, p. 37)

    What made the upcoming decision on Everest’s plane more complicated was the fact that the Navy also wanted a new fighter. This was called the F-6D Missileer. Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates stopped development of both planes before leaving office. But further, the Eisenhower administration cancelled the F-6D.

    So, from the beginning, the reader can see two important problems with Everest’s vision. First, the aim was to preserve a role for his branch of the service in an evolving Cold War scenario that would be dominated by missiles and submarines. Second, Everest’s ambition for the F-111 was unprecedented. As authors Robert Coulam and Robert T. Art have stated, Everest wanted a plane that was not just a combination fighter/bomber. He wanted a plane that would operate and perform missions at both high and low altitude. And when the design stage was over, the requirement was it had to do these things at supersonic speed. (Art pgs. 17-19; Coulam, pp. 94-95)

    It is necessary to explain what made Everest’s design so difficult to achieve. The prime mission of the plane for the Air Force was that it be able to fly at extremely low altitude at a considerable distance in order to evade radar and drop its atomic payload without being shot down. (Coulam, p. 94). The performance requirements that it had to be able to take off on short runways, yet achieve high speeds for tactical combat above the battlefield, complicated the wing structure of the plane. On short takeoffs, the plane would need long, unswept wings; for high speed air combat at Mach 2.5, it would need short, sharply swept wings. (Coulam, p. 380) The many missions that Everest imagined for the plane created complex technical problems. To name just one: the differing wing necessities eventually caused the creation of the variable wing configuration. In other words, the plane’s wings could be altered. This had never been done successfully on a military plane before. But with the help of NASA engineer John Stack, it worked for the F-111. This was a significant design and development achievement. (Art, pp. 21-22) As Peter Davies notes in his detailed examination of the plane’s features and performance, that variable wing design was imitated later in at least seven different Air Force planes. (Davies, General Dynamic’s F-111 Aardvark, see Introduction)

    Davies’ analysis goes on to mention the fact that, to fulfill its many functions, the F-111 was the first fighter plane to have afterburning turbofan engines along with supersonic performance. As opposed to turbojets, this allowed the plane to increase its flying time by using less fuel. (Davies, Introduction) Finally, and again in following with the plane’s multi-missions, Davies also shows how the F-111’s excellent avionics allowed the aircraft to fly at night, in bad weather, and over all types of terrains. (ibid)

    But even that does not do justice to what the F-111 was supposed to ultimately do. To explain why the plane’s mission got even more complicated, we must turn to the career and character of the incoming Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.


    II

    To begin with a truism: McNamara was a brilliant student in mathematics and economics. He had an impressive ability to quantify both problems and solutions. After graduating from Berkley, he attended Harvard Business School. With a Harvard MBA in 1939, he took an accounting job at Price Waterhouse in San Francisco. But, in a year, he was invited back to Harvard to become their youngest professor. When the war broke out, Harvard helped the Defense Department form a production team to turn out aircraft. (Robert McNamara, In Retrospect, p. 8) McNamara was on that management team. By all accounts, McNamara was a good professor—but he was an even better manager. His talent for mathematical quantification, statistics, and computations, plus his ability to articulate his ideas, all became the stuff of legend. He attained the Legion of Merit by the time he left the service in 1946.

    After the war, through his friend and military colleague Tex Thornton, McNamara attained a management position at Ford Motor Company. At Ford, McNamara furthered his already formidable reputation for managerial analysis and problem solving. When McNamara and his colleagues came into Dearborn Michigan, the company was ailing. Henry Ford II knew he needed a young, energetic team to turn Ford around. Before Ford even met McNamara and his service cohorts, he had decided to hire them. (McNamara, p. 11) For what McNamara and his team achieved at Ford, they earned the nickname the Whiz Kids. McNamara began in planning and financial analysis; he soon rose to senior executive levels. He became known for his “scientific management” techniques (e.g. his uses of computers and spreadsheets, which were pioneering). He eventually became president of Ford, as he had brought them from a sickly state into striking distance of General Motors. His presidency lasted ever so briefly, since he soon got a phone call from Bobby Kennedy. His president elect brother wanted McNamara to be his Secretary of Defense.

    This is the point where John Kennedy’s ideas about reforming defense programs set up by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles meets up with Robert McNamara’s managerial skills. From his senate seat, Kennedy had criticized President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles quite often and on a wide variety of issues. Among them were their defense strategies of brinksmanship, the New Look, massive retaliation, and—closest to our subject—the duplication of weapons systems. Kennedy was referring to things like Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBM’s), cruise missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles. (Coulam, p. 46) Kennedy planned on overhauling all of these ideas, because he felt that they forced America into dangerous, atomic-threatening scenarios much too quickly, thus depriving the president of different registers of response to perceived security threats. This is where JFK’s concepts like flexible response and counterinsurgency came into play. Kennedy also felt that there was too much service rivalry to build exclusive weapons systems that, in reality, could be interchanged with other branches, in order to save money through economies of scale. The intelligent, experienced, imaginative Robert McNamara was going to be Kennedy’s agent of change in these matters.

    But there was one factor involved in all this which made the concept of what became the F-111 even more difficult to achieve—even for someone as highly skilled in these affairs as McNamara. As previously mentioned, Eisenhower had cancelled the F6-D. When McNamara entered office, he now cancelled the F-105, but approved continued production of the F-4, which was originally designed as a Navy fighter without a nuclear mission. (Coulam, p. 49) The importance of these decisions was that the Air Force now needed the F-111 for atomic bombing missions to replace the F-105. McNamara liked the versatility of the F-111 and he decided to do something rather daring. He wanted it to be an inter-service project from its inception. In other words, both the Air Force and the Navy would cooperate in the planning and development of the plane from the start. The Navy was meant to use the plane for fleet protection and infantry (Marine) support. But since the plane’s primary mission was going to be the atomic delivery angle, the Air Force would have the lead in the design stage.

    The Navy did not like the subordinate idea and they were not shy about voicing their disagreement. (Coulam, pp. 52-53) But McNamara was intent upon beginning a successful inter-service program, that he thought would reform weapons procurement. In fact, at the start, McNamara actually wanted the F-111 to be used by every branch of the military. (Art, p. 29) But he scaled that back to both the Navy and Air Force before the bidding process began.

    Before we get to that stage of the story, it should be stressed that—because of the plane’s many missions—the project was going to be a very difficult one from the start. To use just one example: no plane had ever been required to do a low-level mission combined with a transoceanic ferry mission before. (Art, p. 20) To only make Air Force General Everest’s dream a reality was going to be an uphill task. Versatility is a laudable aim, but one can have so much of it that, in achieving the different aims, they begin to erode the others. To use one example: the Air Force wanted the atomic delivery mission performed at supersonic speed. This required more fuel, which made the plane heavier. The Navy argued that the heavier weight would decrease the time the plane could stay in the air above ships for fleet protection. (Coulam, pp. 241-44) To have just succeeded as an Air Force plane, the multi-missioned F-111 would have required all of McNamara’s managerial skills and experience. His attempt to turn it into an inter-service plane went beyond even his abilities.


    III

    F-111 Aardvark

    In almost any discussion of the F-111 controversy, the process of the source allocation and bidding by manufacturers is made into a matter of intrigue and mystery. The reason being that, when the four bidding rounds were completed, the Pentagon unanimously endorsed the offer by the Boeing company. Because of the plane’s grand ambition and technical problems, this process went on for 14 months, until November of 1962. (Art, p. 55) The competition began with six competitors. There were three bids by single companies and three dual bids. In the last two rounds, the two competitors were Boeing and a dual bid by General Dynamics/Grumman. The Pentagon had worked out a complex multi-stage evaluation process that was point scored over four major areas.

    Almost every commentator notes that McNamara ended up overriding the Pentagon’s decision and awarding the contract to General Dynamics/Grumman. What no one notes is, that based on the Pentagon’s own points evaluation system, General Dynamics/Grumman won the competition! (Art, pp. 112-115) In other words, the Pentagon overruled its own evaluation. McNamara was restoring the original scored decision. It’s true that the scores were quite close. But in some areas, like the Technical and Management categories, General Dynamics/Grumman won by large margins. The Pentagon preferred the Boeing bid, because the company promised higher performance in certain areas. But as Robert Art points out, the Boeing bid was based upon an engine that was only in the planning stages. It had yet to be built or tested. And it would probably not be perfected and ready for the assembly line until 1967. (Art, p. 64) Whereas the General Dynamics/Grumman plane was scheduled to fly in 1965.

    The other factor that is usually used in adding intrigue to the episode is the fact that the Boeing bid was lower in price. As any experienced author in the field of weapons procurement understands, this issue is a tempest in a teapot, for the simple reason that it is a rarity when a weapons system comes in on time and on budget. For this reason, very few participants believe the original estimates anyway. By 1968, the average weapons procurement contract was 220% over budget and 36% over schedule. (Art, p. 86) Most everyone understood that many of these estimates were unrealistic for a purpose: they wanted the Pentagon to buy into the project on the promise of higher performance. By nature and experience manufacturers knew the Pentagon liked things like higher speed and more explosive power. Therefore, contractors would deliberately lower the price of their projects to make it easier for the generals to sell the contract to the Defense Secretary. A good example of this corrupt process occurred with the F-111. During congressional hearings, it was discovered that one of the evaluators, Admiral Frederick Ashworth, had not even read the final evaluation report. (Art, pp. 162-63) The practice that had become routine was this: the Pentagon would decide on the weapon it wanted, the company would fudge the figures to make it attractive, and all that would be required was an oral briefing so each evaluator would get the same canned message. (ibid) This was the system that McNamara and Kennedy were trying to challenge.

    Coming from his background, McNamara’s disagreement with all this was not just that the system was rigged and bloated—which it was. But that the Pentagon was a sucker for performance that went beyond the contract requirement. McNamara was specific about this in an interview he did with the Government Accounting Office. The Pentagon’s penchant for high performance caused decisions which misallocated scarce resources. And the Pentagon did this understanding that “greater incremental costs were inevitable because of the greater development risks…”. (GAO interview with McNamara of April 16, 1963) In other words, the promised performance would only be achieved after the contract was awarded in the form of additional, unawarded but substantial cost overruns.

    Which was another area that McNamara and Kennedy were trying to reform. As one observer wrote of him, “It has been said of Robert McNamara that he was the first Secretary of Defense to read the description of his job and to take it seriously.” (Coulam, p. 45) Prior to McNamara, almost all Pentagon contracts had been figured on cost plus terms. Which loosely meant that whatever the overrun was, it would be covered by the original contract. This had led to increases in the research and development phase of contracting of 300 % from 1953-63. (Art, p. 89) McNamara wanted to change this also. He wanted to alter the system by adding a ceiling price and also incentives for coming in ahead of schedule. In the case of the TFX, McNamara wanted more realistic estimates from both companies, since he understood the Pentagon’s past habit of buying into a false contract. His goal was to achieve high quality at the most economical price.

    Which leads into an important point that Jonathan Marshall misconstrued in his presentation about the TFX. Marshall said that when going through the final estimates McNamara did not present written reports before he made his decision, which ignores the fact that everyone was working from the same estimates that the Air Force had prepared. (Art, p. 134) McNamara thought both sets of estimates were unrealistic, but he thought Boeing’s was worse in that aspect. And he was specific in his analysis about the areas where he felt they had fudged the numbers, thereby showing that the price difference was a mirage (ibid, pp. 139-142) But McNamara also felt that he had to do this, because the Pentagon had performed a lousy job in their analysis of costs. During the entire long evaluation process, only 1% of their time had been spent on this important area. (ibid, p. 137)

    Another point missed in this regard is quite relevant: the Secretary of Defense did not have a systems analysis department in 1962. If the reader can comprehend it, for 14 years, the Defense Secretary was in essence rubber stamping what the Pentagon placed on his desk. It was McNamara who began systems analysis and it was a direct result of the TFX episode. (ibid, pp. 139-140)

    But the truth is that McNamara did have written reports at his disposal. He had a secret study made by a private consulting firm. Understandably, he did not wish to reveal this at the time. (Coulam, p. 59) Based on this private analysis, McNamara concluded that the Boeing estimate and plan was too risky technically, overindulgent in cost estimates, and almost ignored the interchangeable parts formula the secretary wanted between the Navy and Air Force version of the planes. (ibid, p. 58)

    In that last, crucial regard, the numbers were overwhelmingly against Boeing. By measurement against structural weight of the Air Force and Navy versions, the General Dynamics/Grumman model had a ratio of 92% interchangeable parts; Boeing’s rate was 34%. (Art, p. 150) The Defense Secretary noted that the General Dynamics/Grumman design has “a very high degree of identical structure for the Air Force and Navy versions. In the Boeing version, less than half of the structural components were the same.” (Davies, section on Design and Development.) McNamara justifiably concluded that, in reality, Boeing was going to produce two different planes. Yet, they were going to charge the Defense Department less for this? As Robert Art points out, this factor would greatly increase costs in the development of the plane. Yet it is one reason the Pentagon preferred Boeing. They preferred two separate planes. (Art, pp. 151-53)

    As McNamara stated early in his tenure during an interview with NBC News:

    I think that the role of public manager is very similar to the role of a private manager; in each case he has the option of following one of two major alternative courses of action. He can either act as judge or a leader. In the former case, he sits and waits until subordinates bring to him problems for solution or alternatives for choice. In the latter case, he immerses himself in the operations of the business or governmental activity, examines the problems, the objectives, the alternative courses of action, chooses among them, and leads the organization to their accomplishment. In the one case, it’s a passive role, in the other case an active role. I have always believed in and endeavored to follow the active leadership role, as opposed to the passive judicial role.


    IV

    As the reader can see, when presented with the true elements of the TFX case, McNamara and Kennedy were trying to reform a well-entrenched system that needed reforming. For whatever reason, the journalists working the story did not want to reveal that fact. Particularly poor in this regard was the work of Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who knew no boundaries in writing up unfounded rumors and gossip about the TFX, even if it came from the likes of Bobby Baker. But even more important in manufacturing the tidal wave of misinformation about the conflict was a figure who Marshall did not mention. This was Senator Henry Jackson from Washington. Jackson is important to this saga, because his nickname was “the senator from Boeing”. To leave Jackson out of the TFX affair is like not revealing that Jim McCord had worked for the CIA prior to his role in Watergate. As Joe Baugher notes at his web site, it was Jackson who instigated the initial congressional hearings on the subject, which went on for the better part of a year. (Art, p. 4) As Peter Davies observes, the many trials it took to perfect all of the plane’s technical achievements—variable wings, turbofan engines, the avionics—these all provided fodder for its congressional critics. (Davies, Introduction)

    Jackson’s investigation, chaired by Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, was created to prove that somehow McNamara’s supervision of the process was corrupted and this was why he rejected Boeing. By doing this, it managed to fudge the fact that the Pentagon did not stand by its own scoring system. For the many months that the congressional inquiry went on, nothing stuck to either McNamara, Johnson, or Kennedy. But since the inquiry was politically motivated—so that Jackson could stay on indefinitely as the senator from Boeing—the committee was forced to come up with something, anything. If they did not, then it would have exposed the fact that Jackson was running a political vendetta for his backers.

    What did they come up with? That Fred Korth, the Secretary of the Navy in 1962 and 1963, had been the president of a bank which had once loaned money to General Dynamics. The fact that this was what banks are supposed to do and that the loan occurred years prior to the TFX being bid on did not matter. The other point that the committee harped on was that Roswell Gilpatric, a deputy of McNamara’s, had done some work for General Dynamics at the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. The fact that his firm had also worked for Boeing did not matter, since the work they did for General Dynamics was more expensive. The fact that Gilpatric had next to nothing to do with the decision to award the contract was also not important to Jackson. (Art, pp. 4-5) As Robert Coulam points out in his book on the matter, not only could the committee not prove any impropriety, but they could not disprove that McNamara had awarded the contract on the merits. This made their failed attempts to show untoward influence even weaker. (Coulam, p. 64) Since the Jackson effort was political, Senator McClellan ended up being an ally of the Navy and their objective had always been to kill the plane. As Coulam notes in his book, during the evaluation process, at a flight demonstration, a Navy admiral told an Air Force officer, words to the effect: You will never see this airplane fly off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

    That prediction ended up being correct. Yet, in one of the most revealing sections of his book, Robert Coulam demonstrates in detail that every objection the Navy made to the F-111 could also have been made to the F-14 Tomcat—called the VFX in its development stage. But because it was originally designed as a Navy plane and they were in the driver’s seat throughout, failures the Navy would not accept in price and performance with the TFX, they would accept with the VFX. (Coulam, pp. 247-51) And he also shows that the much-storied expense of the F-111 was easily surpassed by the F-14. Yet, that plane was only a fighter, not a fighter/bomber. Thus, he proves the ingrained bias that McNamara was trying to overcome. And this is the bias and narrowness that Jackson and McClellan took advantage of to keep a corrupt and wasteful process intact. In fact, the moment the Navy learned about McNamara’s intent to resign in 1967, they began to go around him in order to cancel their version of the plane. (Coulam, p. 76) If the reader can believe it, around this time, congressional hearings resumed, led by Armed Services chairman John Stennis. The admiral mentioned above was quite prescient about what the Navy would do to stop the plane.

    Marshall ended his presentation with the usual Jackson/Pentagon talking points: the F-111 was an utter failure once it was used by the Air Force. Therefore, backward reasoning would dictate that this was owed to the corrupt process condoned by Kennedy and McNamara and influenced by those (unproven) criminals Korth and Gilpatric.

    The problem with this is simple: it’s not true. The F-111 stayed in use in America for 30 years and in Australia ten years longer, which is about an average to slightly above average run for such a plane. As Joe Baugher explains at his web site, the F-111 “turned out to be one of the most effective all-weather interdiction aircraft in the world” with a very good safety record. The reason it stayed in use for so long is that there was no other aircraft the Air Force had which could carry out its mission “…of precise air strikes over such long ranges in all-weather conditions.” Baugher continues, the amazing thing about the F-111 was that it could be fitted with up to as many as 50 750-pound bombs and it could carry a large payload over a range of 1,725 miles. Thus, although it was not designed for that conflict, it was often used during the Vietnam War. (It would later be used in Libya in 1986 and Desert Storm in Iraq.) As William Vassallo notes at history.net, one of the best things about the F-111 was its ability to fly at almost tree-top level, thus avoiding obstacles and radar. And, therefore, making bomb runs more accurate. Vassallo quotes Colonel Ivan Dethman, who commanded a detachment of the planes in Indochina: “That…was the best plane I had ever flown.” He even quotes a Navy pilot who flew the F-111B, the prototype made for that service: “There’s no aircraft now flying that can match it in the sky.” It also fulfilled its design mission of being able to land on runways less than 3,000 feet long. As Vassallo notes, “…even today this is unparalleled in most fighter aircraft.”

    But, as Vassallo also writes, the most impressive aspect of the F-111 was its overall ordnance carrying ability: “Never before had a fighter been as capable of carrying and launching such a mix.” This included conventional bombs ranging from 500-3,000 pounds, napalm, long range rockets, nuclear weapons, cluster bomb units, and even a Gatling gun. For a large plane, it could zoom to 60,000 feet at 1,750 mph. Finally, the plane had a terrain following radar and this allowed the navigator to see not just down and ahead, but also to each side. In addition to this, the plane could fly at well above MACH 2, because of its innovative afterburning turbofan engines. (Robert Bernier, Air and Space Magazine, 9/18) Because of this unusual speed and size combination, maintenance supervisor Mike Glenn, who worked on both planes, said that the later versions of the F-111 could fly circles around the early F 14s. Finally, one of the Navy’s prime objections was that they did not think the plane could land smoothly on a carrier deck. The Navy guaranteed that this criticism would stay alive, since they never landed the plane on a carrier until after it was cancelled. But in the summer of 1968, it did attempt such a landing. It was achieved without problems on the USS Coral Sea. (See Bernier)

    Major Jim Icenhour said, it was:

    …a hell of an airplane! It had an ordnance carrying capacity and internal fuel load that far exceeded any other fighter of the time. It was superb at low level. That faster it went, the better it handled. (Davies, ibid)

    As Peter Davies writes in his book about the plane, the F-111 was so good as an interdiction aircraft that, after production was halted in 1978, the Air Force had a hard time finding a replacement that could match it. In fact, the Air Force Study Group on the subject recommended bringing it back instead of buying into its successor, the F-15E Strike Eagle. In the interim, that service went ahead and rebuilt 13 F-111’s, because there was a shortage of them in use. The Air Force then planned on updating the plane and keeping it in use until 2015, which would have meant the plane would have been flying for a remarkable half century. But the budget cuts introduced under President Clinton ended up ruling this out. (Davies, see Conclusion) Davies closed his detailed study of the plane with the following:

    The F-111 overcame unrealistic design goals, muddled management, inter-service conflict, and ill-informed press criticism to become one of the most successful combat aircraft of the 20th century and the progenitor of an international generation of “swing-wing” designs.

    He also paid it the highest compliment, writing that the plane “…was in a class of its own…Its demise has left a gap in tactical strike capability that has not yet been filled”. The idea that the F-111 was a failure is a necessary part of a misleading myth.


    V

    In theory, I have no objections to the Deep Politics/Parapolitics approach to complex and officially unsolved political crimes. At times, in those instances, one has to resort to such oblique techniques, because of the deliberate cover ups employed. But, in practice, it should not be used in the place of real scholarship and genuine, relevant data collection. In his book, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Scott wrote that what he described there is a system of accommodations featuring alliances and symbiosis between lawless forces which the system is supposed to eradicate. (p. 312) But with the TFX, that kind of analysis resulted in errors and omissions that somehow missed the main culprit—the Pentagon’s corrupt practices—and mischaracterized the man who was trying to eradicate the practices, Robert McNamara. At the end of Marshall’s speech, he gave the impression that he had read at least some of the books written on the subject. To be kind, I hope he was bluffing. Because if he did read those books and he recycled the Pearson/Jackson talking points instead, it does not speak well for him.

    As a result of these lacunae, in all the instances where the subject was discussed in relation to the JFK case, it has been largely mischaracterized, and in just about every way. I have little problem in saying that what entered into the assassination literature was a diversion from what really happened. As I have stated elsewhere, one can make the argument that Henry Jackson was one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement. Like Ronald Reagan, he was ready to give the Treasury over to the Pentagon in his pursuit of a hawkish foreign policy. I never considered Drew Pearson a genuine journalist. But yet, using those kinds of sources, one can conceal what the true conflict really was in the TFX affair. It was not about the Chicago Outfit, financier Henry Crown, Fred Korth, or Roswell Gilpatric. It was about McNamara’s and Kennedy’s desire to reform the military and specifically the process of weapons procurement. As Robert Art has written, McNamara had done something no prior Secretary of Defense had done: “He developed the ability to make informed decisions on which of the choices before him would contribute the most to integrating and balancing military instruments of force.” (Art, p. 158) The military did not like McNamara’s integrating and balancing act. But McNamara understood how the procurement process in place would resist that kind of reform. As a result, in addition to setting up a systems analysis unit, he reversed the source allocation process from one of recommendation to one of advisement. (ibid, p. 164) By ignoring all of this (quite) relevant data, the Deep Politics/Parapolitics approach to the TFX episode has proven to be superficial at best and misleading at worst. And it does not appear to have been done as a last resort but as a first resort—and a repeating resort lasting about 50 years. It is not easy to read congressional hearings and Pentagon reports or to interview important people—some who wish to remain anonymous—but yet this is what primary sourcing is all about. And this is what good historical analysis is made from.

    Because of the flaws inherent in that approach and methodology, many people will only now have a (long-delayed) knowledge of what the whole TFX mélange really concerned, what the real battle was about—and how Jackson guaranteed McNamara would end up losing. Contrary to what many have wrongly conveyed, the F-111 was an exceptional plane. But the Navy was never going to admit that. As McNamara said, they sabotaged the aircraft rather than let it fly off their carrier decks.

  • Forensics Journal Unintentionally Proves Conspiracy in Cover-Up of JFK Assassination

    Forensics Journal Unintentionally Proves Conspiracy in Cover-Up of JFK Assassination


    Lucien C. Haag, BS, describes himself as a “former criminalist and technical director of the Phoenix Crime Laboratory, with nearly 50 years of experience in the field of criminalistics and forensic firearm examinations; president, Forensic Science Services Inc.” And he was an “expert witness” in the November 2017 mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, hosted by South Texas College of Law.

    In the December 2019 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, Haag demonstrates this “expertise” with his article, The Unique and Misunderstood Wound Ballistics in the John F. Kennedy Assassination.

    When it comes to this case, his expertise seems to be in the specialty of propaganda.

    His article demonstrates scholarship below the level of a junior high school term paper. The title, like the rest of his story, is misleading. The wounds were not unique, and would have been understood had they been properly explored, and truthfully explained in previous investigations. But Haag is correct when he says the evidence is misrepresented — and he himself grossly misrepresents the evidence in crude attempts to perpetuate the government-approved narrative. His techniques include the following:

    • Presents highly misleading and sometimes outright false information to support the Warren Commission.
    • Omits documented key facts that contradict it.
    • Provides almost no references to primary sources. Instead, he uses mostly his own articles as references. In other words, his “proof” of a particular statement is … that he said it before.
    • Litters the discussion with an obstacle course of “alternate facts” and distracting irrelevancies.

    Haag focusses on promoting a slightly tarted-up version of the single bullet theory: a bullet entered high in the base of JFK’s neck, exited his throat — traveling around 1800 fps (feet per second) — struck Governor John Connally while “yawing” (tumbling), perforated his torso, then wrist, and finally created a puncture wound in his thigh.


    Bullet Probably Not Yawing

    Haag’s main “proof” the bullet first went through Kennedy is the 15 mm elliptical wound in Connally’s back.

    Haag claims its size and shape prove the bullet struck Connally while turned somewhat sideways, that is, yawing (tumbling) — presumably a result of having first gone through JFK.

    Haag does not tell you that the wound in the back of Kennedy’s skull was also 15 mm long. No one claims that bullet had been yawing.

    Obviously there are two possible explanations for an ovoid or elliptical wound:

    The bullet strikes while turned sideways.

    The bullet strikes nose-on — but at a slant, and the nose travels a bit on the surface before entering the body. This is a tangential hit.

    Had the Connally hit been a tangential one, would the bullet have made a fairly straight path through his torso? Is this why Haag created this picture of a confused bullet tumbling around inside the governor?

    There is an additional, critically important fact to understand, which is either not understood or deliberately dismissed by conspiracy advocates who draw straight wound paths through Governor Connally’s torso … A yawing, tumbling, destabilized bullet entering the Governor’s body is not at all likely to follow a straight path through his body. Because Governor Connally lived, we do not have the benefit of an autopsy report and autopsy photographs through which the actual wound path might be ascertained

    Then why not report what Connally’s thoracic surgeon said about it?

    Robert Shaw, MD testified to seeing indications of a straight path though the torso. Among his observations: the bullet created a small “tunneling wound … The bullet struck the fifth rib in a tangential way.” And it “followed the line of declination of the fifth rib.” Even more revealing was “the neat way in which it stripped the rib out without doing much damage to the muscles that lay on either side of it.” Apparently not the behavior of a tumbling bullet.

    And watch how Haag tries to trick you into thinking the FBI said the bullet was tumbling:

    The yawed entry of a de stabilized bullet was confirmed by FBI firearms expert Robert Frazier upon an examination of the governor’s suit coat, which also showed an elliptical entry hole approximately 5/8 of an inch in length.

    In fact, the FBI couldn’t even swear the hole was caused by a bullet, let alone whether it was destabilized. Here’s what Frazier actually said:

    On the hole on the back of the coat although it had the general appearance and could have been a bullet hole, possibly because of the cleaning and pressing of the garment, I cannot state that it actually is a bullet hole nor the direction of the path of the bullet, if it were a bullet hole.

    No wonder Haag gives no references to primary source materials.

    (Nor does he mention that Frederick W Light, Jr, MD, Former Chief Wound Assessment Branch, Edgewood Arsenal, testified to the Warren Commission that he was not convinced Connally was struck by a yawing bullet.)


    JFK’s Throat Wound

    Haag mentions the well-publicized smallness and roundness of JFK’s throat wound, but says nothing about its lesser known but more compelling features. Malcolm Perry, MD who performed the tracheotomy said it was approximately 5 mm (originally he said 3-5mm, later he seemed to have been persuaded to say it was a bit larger), punctate, had clean edges, not punched out (i.e. not everted) and, more important, something considered by many to be definitive of an entrance — it had a contusion ring. And figures for its small size included this bruising. (Charles Baxter, MD who assisted Perry, supported this observation.) To see more on contusion rings, please go here; and to see my own work on the throat wound, go here.

    No one can say for sure whether the wound was an exit, but I cannot find any record of an exit wound associated with such bruising. And the back wound was never proven to connect with the throat wound. It was never dissected, and could not be probed with a finger. And, while viewing the open chest from the front, an autopsy technician said there was no entrance into the chest cavity from behind, and the bullet seemed to have stopped at the apex of the right lung.

    Haag tries to sell the wound as an exit:

    There is a common expectation that exit wounds from high-velocity rifle bullets will be larger than the entrance wound … The 6.5-mm Carcano bullet is not at all likely to behave this way. As will be shown, it is extremely stable as it penetrates soft tissue, resulting in exit wounds that are little different, to no different in dimensions, from entry wounds. This was, in fact, the case insofar as President Kennedy’s first gunshot wound.

    Further below, I present reasons for why Haag’s research proves no such thing. But first you should take a look at this next specimen. But don’t step in it. Step around it:

    The Carcano bullet, and others like it, are essentially a cylinder with a blunt, hemispherical nose. In such bullets, the CG [center of gravity] and CP [center of pressure] nearly coincide so the distance between them is very small. Any destabilizing force applied to the blunt, rounded nose when such a bullet deviates slightly from its nose-forward penetration into soft tissue is quickly counteracted by a much greater correcting force aft of this bullet’s CG … many, many shots have been fired by this writer into blocks of ballistic soap, 10% ordnance gelatin, 20% ordnance …These bullets consistently remain nose-forward throughout their journey …

    The above may be true, but is a distraction from more relevant realities.


    Relation of Wound Size to Exiting Velocity

    The very small size of Kennedy’s throat wound suggested it was an entrance — but that’s not the biggest problem for the single bullet theory.

    Here’s the biggest problem: a bullet, especially a 6.5mm FMJ bullet, exiting at 1800 fps, or even 1600 fps, does not create a 5mm wound — even if it exits straight out, that is, nose-on, and not sideways.

    This was proven with experiments using steel spheres performed by Frederick W Light, Jr, MD, (mentioned above). Their shape eliminates such variables as bullet orientation (sideways vs nose-on) since the presented area of a sphere is always the same. Light said “the size of the wound at a given point in a given type of tissue depends basically on only two things: (1) the presented area of the missile at the point, and (2) velocity of the missile at the point.”

    But what sort of wound would be created by an undeformed FMJ from a centerfire rifle, exiting straight out, without tumbling, at a velocity of ~1800 fps?

    Larry Sturdivan, an Army wound expert consulted by the HSCA — and one of Haag’s sources — told me in an email that such a wound would be large with obvious lacerations radiating from the center (“stellate”). He described how these lacerations are formed:

    Poke a finger through something flexible, such as cloth or saran wrap, and you will first see a “tenting effect,” a cone, with the tip of your finger at the small end. Push forward and you tear a hole in the material, and the tear grows into a laceration as you perforate the material.

    Sturdivan said that Kennedy’s throat wound would have looked like a typical exit — i.e., much larger than 5mm, had it not been a “shored” wound.

    Haag does not mention this argument about a shored wound, but you should be aware of it, lest he try to use it in the future: Sturdivan and the late John Lattimer, another favorite source of Haag, have spread the false claim that JFK’s throat wound was kept small and prevented from being stretched outward, because it was buttressed, or “shored,” by the collar and necktie. To understand why this could not have happened in this case, please take a look at what happens when shoring occurs:

    Skin between the outgoing bullet and the buttressing material is crushed, and it becomes stuck to the material. When that material is pulled away, it creates a wide abrasion collar consisting of skin tags that resemble a peeling sunburn.

    More important — grossly visible skin is left behind on the material. (Am J Foren Med Path 1983; 4(3):199-204) The FBI closely inspected Kennedy’s shirt, inside and out, and did not report seeing any skin on it.

    Another thing. The wound was reported to have been “right above” any material that might have shored it.


    Haag’s Scam: Don’t Use Skin! Don’t Even Mention it!

    Haag assassinated many blocks of gelatin in his quest to prove that a Carcano bullet does not tumble when burrowing its way through 7 inches of the stuff. That is the assumed distance between the alleged high entrance in back to the throat. But it tumbles after it exits.

    Therefore, says he, the bullet would (1) create a small exit, and (2) then tumble its way to fulfilling its job as a magic bullet. And never mind the effect of velocity alone on the size of the wound. He won’t tell you about that, even if he knows.

    But here is yet another reason to doubt Haag’s conclusions: The behavior of skin. Entrance and exit wounds are in skin. And, according to one study, gelatin “does not replicate the significant resistance that human skin provides in preventing penetration into sub-dermal tissue.” [And presumably out of such tissue.] According to another study,

    Hydrogels prepared from water solutions containing 10-20 mass% gelatin are generally accepted muscle tissue simulants in terminal ballistic research. They, however, do not have a surface layer which simulates the effect of human skin.

    Haag said the stable Carcano bullets went through gelatin without yawing. So of course their exit holes — in that simulant — were not much larger than the bullet’s diameter.

    Haag makes much ado about this. Look, he says, no yawing during its course through the simulant, and that “proves” why Kennedy’s throat wound was an exit, though small. And look, he says, the bullet does tumble right after it exits through those 7 inches. This “proves” why Connally’s wound was the size of a tumbling bullet.

    But in none of his experiments did Haag give the bullet the job of exiting skin.

    And he does not mention the fact that when the Warren Commission had the US Army perform experiments to reproduce the assassination — they did use skin, animal skin — but they did not reproduce small exits. Most of the bullets began to yaw during their exit, after going through only 5.3 to 5.7 inches of gelatin.

    But back to Haag’s penetration of 7 inches before the bullet yawed, how many more inches were between Kennedy’s throat — and the true location of his entrance in the back? Might that longer journey, plus an exit through skin, have resulted in more yawing? (See next section.)

    In any case, if Kennedy’s throat wound had been an exit, its small size suggests the bullet that created it was nearly out of energy — and could not have gone on to perforate Connally’s torso and smash his wrist.

    (And those who say a bullet exited Kennedy’s throat wound, but did not go on to strike Connally in the back should explain where it did go.)


    Haagwash Regarding JFK’s Back Wound

    A big problem for the government-approved narrative was, and still is, the location of the back wound. It was lower than the throat wound. How could a bullet from the sniper’s nest above come down, enter the back — then go back up again?

    To solve the problem, the late John Lattimer — one of Haag’s main sources of “information” — raised the back wound to the sixth cervical vertebra (C-6), using deceitful props, false reporting on X-ray findings, and fraudulent representation of neurological implications.

    If you want to see instant proof of how much of a fraud Lattimer was, just look at the picture below. It says it all.

    lattimer skeleton

    lattimer skeleton caption

    And the caption that went with the picture demonstrates one of Lattimer’s techniques in conning people. Lattimer created this prop himself, then said — as if he were an independent observer — “It appears that the first bullet … grazed the tip of the transverse process of his sixth cervical vertebra.” Of course it did: he put it there. (Note: the fragments of bone he mentions were dismissed as artefact.)

    Haag appears to have learned from past experience that some of Lattimer’s “research” is too blatantly fraudulent, so he would not likely want you to see Lattimer’s contrivance shown above. It is conspicuously at odds with the autopsy photo below:

    backwound

    Photo credit: JFK Lancer

     

    Like Lattimer, Haag tried to use X-ray reports to sell the higher entrance wound: He said:

    [There was a] possible graze to the right traverse [sic] process of one of the cervical vertebrae at, or adjacent, to C6.

    As usual, he provides no reference to support this assertion. In fact, the graze, if it happened, was assumed to have occurred lower, at the first thoracic vertebra — T-1, not the higher C-6:

    “There is an undisplaced fracture of the proximal portion of the right transverse process of T-1 … There is no evidence of fracture of the cervical spine or its associated appendages.”

    And why doesn’t Haag mention what is in the autopsy report? It said the wound was “just above the upper border of the scapula.” (But numerous witnesses thought it was even lower. Kennedy’s own physician said it was at the T-3 level.)

    Haag also recycles another Lattimer hoax — the “Thorburn position.” He repeats the false claim that JFK was struck at the C-6 level, based on the way he moved his arms after being shot for the first time. He said it was a reflex, tied exclusively to C-6, as described by the surgeon, Sir William Thorburn. As Haag put it:

    When the President first reappears from behind this sign [on the Zapruder film], his arms are in a very odd position, and it looks as though he is reaching for his throat. This is not the case; rather, it has been attributed to a little-known, involuntary response first described by the English spinal surgeon and military doctor, Sir William Thorburn,1 in 1887 …

    In fact, Thorburn described an entirely different position of the arms in response to damage at C-6. At no time did Kennedy ever move his arms in a way that resembled the position of Thorburn’s C-6 patient. That patient’s arms were abducted; Kennedy’s adducted.

    (Many readers of KennedyandKings.com are already familiar with this scam. Those who are not can go here for my detailed report. And see also Donald B. Thomas’s fraudulent revision of Lattimer’s scam.)

    Aside from using deceitful means for establishing a back wound at C-6 while omitting documented information that contradicts it, Haag pretends Kennedy’s back wound controversy concerns whether it is was an entrance or exit:

    Regarding this matter of entry or exit for this singular perforating gunshot wound, it is definitively solved by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) firearms examiner Robert Frazier when he notes and documents the presence of bullet wipe around the margin of the small, circular hole in the upper back of the President’s suit coat.


    Kennedy’s Head Wound

    Haag repeats the old government-approved line:

    A massive exit site with expulsion of bone, tissue, and brain matter was produced in the upper right-front of the President’s head.

    Yes, the wound was in right front and right side — but also the right rear, which he omits. Even the autopsy report says so: the wound extended into occipital bone. According to Parkland Hospital’s former chief of neurosurgery, enough occipital bone was missing to reveal a great deal of missing cerebellum.

    Haag also made this strange claim:

    The WCC Carcano bullet’s ability to totally change character into that of an expanding bullet once its nose area is breached by striking thick bone. In this situation, testing by this author and others (Lattimer2 and Sturdivan7) has shown that the nose of the full metal jacket Carcano bullet can be breeched [sic] upon striking skull bone, after which the bullet behaves much like a soft-point hunting bullet.

    But Lattimer said that, in all experiments — his and those performed by the Army — there was a “complete separation” of the copper shell and the lead core. After that, much of the bullet’s energy has been spent. So how could the jacket alone go on to do the damage of a soft-point hunting bullet? That sort of bullet does its damage immediately on contact.

    (Lattimer also claimed a complete separation of shell and lead core in the case of JFK’s head wound. But what was found in the front seat, and presumed to have been “the” head bullet, were two jacketed fragments, but that is another story.)

    Regarding JFK’s backward head movement, Haag chose not to get into this issue. Instead, he referred readers to past articles on the jet effect.

    Please go here to see my gallery of amazing scams related to this case, including my exposure of fraud — based on the omission of one fundamental fact — in all presentations of the so-called jet effect.


    Conclusion

    Haag published his article in a journal that makes the following claims about itself:

    Drawing on the expertise of leading forensic pathologists, lawyers, and criminologists, The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology presents up-to-date coverage of forensic medical practices worldwide. Each issue of the journal features original articles on new examination and documentation procedures. (Emphasis added.)

    Original? Haag is just a recycler. And what he recycles is crude pseudoscience.

    New examination? He repeated experiments performed long ago by others, and they don’t back up his conclusions with respect to Kennedy’s wounds..

    Documentation procedures? Haag violates the most basic principles of documentation. He provides no references to the primary sources that he pretends back up his misleading assertions. And he leaves out critical facts that challenge them.

    How does such an unscholarly piece get into a peer reviewed journal? Obviously its vetting process has been corrupted by the deep, insidious contamination of politics.

  • Public Relations and the JFK Case

    Public Relations and the JFK Case



    (Click here to open the document in another page.)

  • Destitute Cuban Studies Institute on the JFK Assassination

    Destitute Cuban Studies Institute on the JFK Assassination


    The Executive Director of the so-called Cuban Studies Institute (CSI), Pedro Roig, presents himself as an attorney and historian in posting “Castro’s Complicity in Kennedy’s Assassination.” The piece leaves much to be desired of Roig’s expertise in both legal and historic studies. It exposes the CSI as a sanctuary of shameless and mindless anti-Castro propaganda. Let’s review Roig’s endeavor to persuade without regard for truth.

    Oswald Contact with Cuban Security Agents

    • “It is now evident that Oswald made contact with Cuban intelligence officers while stationed at El Toro Marine Air Base in Santa Ana, California.”

    No, it’s not. The FBI interviewed 26 U.S. Marines acquainted with Oswald at El Toro. None of them connected Oswald to the budding Castro’s foreign intelligence. Roig cherry-picked Nelson Delgado and disguises his presumptions as quantum of proof.

    • “Under oath, Delgado stated that ‘Oswald told him he was receiving mail from Cubans and had developed contact with Cuban government officials in Los Angeles. Delgado recalled that Oswald met with an unknown visitor … and they spent about one and a half, two hours talking.’”

    Let’s summarize what Wesley J. Liebeler, assistant counsel of the Warren Commission, got from Delgado under oath, upon which Roig dares to even suggest that a Cuban handler came to a U.S. military base at night to talk with his agent Oswald.

    Liebeler: You never asked Oswald who this fellow was that he talked to?

    Delgado: No, no.

    Q: Did you connect this visit that Oswald had at that time with the Cuban Consulate?

    A: Personally, I did, because I thought it funny for him to be receiving a caller at such a late date time … After he started to get in contact with these Cuban people, he started getting little pamphlets and newspapers.

    Q: Did you have any reason to believe that these things came to Oswald from the Cuban Consulate?

    A: Well, I took it for granted that they did after I seen the envelope…

    Q: What was on this envelope that made you think that?

    A: Something like a Mexican eagle, with a big, impressive seal, you know. They had different colors on it, red and white … But I can’t recall the seal. I just knew it was in Latin, United, something like that.

    Q: You don’t know for sure whether it was from the Cuban Consulate?

    A: No. But he had told me prior, just before I found that envelope in his wall locker, that he was receiving mail from them.

    Q: Did he tell you what his correspondence with the Cuban Consulate was about?

    A: No, he didn’t.

    As earwitness, Delgado didn’t know who visited Oswald one night at El Toro; as eyewitness, he described an impressive seal that could be anything but Cuban stuff. Roig has simply recycled the failed 1975 CIA trick of giving Delgado evidential weight to dispel the growing cloud of suspicion over the CIA itself and to point the finger at Castro. Thus, Roig has only proven that the CSI comes to the JFK research community with the spurious arguments of a previous generation.

    In Oswald and the CIA (Carroll & Graf, 1995, 627 pages / Skyhorse, 2008, 696 pages), retired Major John M. Newman, who spent 20 years in U.S. Army Intelligence and became executive assistant of the National Security Agency (NSA), killed the two Delgado birds flown by the CIA with one stone. The ex-Marine Gerry Patrick Hemming told his 1960 CIA debriefers that he had met Oswald at the Cuban Consulate in Los Angeles and then confronted him about it outside the gate at El Toro the night before flying to Washington. In an interview by Dick Russell, Hemming destroyed the wild presumption of a 1959 link between Oswald and the budding Castro’s intelligence services:

    I ran into Oswald in Los Angeles in 1959, when he showed up at the Cuban Consulate. The coordinator of the 26th of July Movement [Castro’s political group] called me aside and said a Marine officer had showed up, intimating that he was prepared to desert and go to Cuba to become a revolutionary. I met with the Marine … I thought he was a “penetrator” [and] I told the 26th of July leadership to get rid of him. (Argosy, Vol. 383, No. 3, April 1976)

    In contrast to Oswald, Hemming did manage to join Castro’s army; in line with Oswald, he also exemplifies the adventurous spirit among many Americans in the early days of the triumphant Cuban revolution. Oswald was released by the U.S. Marine Corps at El Toro on September 11, 1959. On September 3-4, 1959, U.S. Ambassador Phillip Bonsal still expressed “the general sympathy with objectives of Cuban revolution and similarity with many of our own aims and aspirations.” (Foreign Relations of The U.S., 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, Document 359)

    Roig hides this Zeitgeist to portray Oswald as a fully dedicated soldier for Castro: “[Delgado] testified that Oswald kept on asking him ‘how he could help Castro’”. Roig stops here, but the beat goes on with Delgado explaining: “We were on friendly terms with Cuba, you know, so this wasn’t no subversive or malintent”. Delgado clearly revealed the adventurous spirit:

    [W]e had a head start, you see. We were getting honorable discharges, while Morgan [Delgado meant Major William Morgan, who also had been infatuated with the Cuban revolution and ended up executed by firing squad under charge of rebellion against Castro] got a dishonorable discharge from the Army and he went to Castro and fought with Castro. So, we could go over there and become officers and lead an expedition to some of these other islands and free them too … [W]e would do away with Trujillo [The dictator of Dominican Republic, the Caribbean nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti].

    However, Roig keeps on building a body of evidence about a Castroite Oswald, in a way that resembles the fate of the Cuban character “Chacumbele,” who killed himself. After acknowledging that “defectors like Oswald [were] under close surveillance” by the KGB, Roig broaches a “suspicious coincidence.” In Minsk (Belarus), Oswald was directed to enroll in a Foreign Language School “adjacent to the KGB Academy, attended by Cuban security personnel.”

    The coincidence is not suspicious, but absolutely irrelevant. There is not a shred of evidence in reference to Cuban security personnel and Oswald in his KGB file, which includes daily reports of intensive surveillance, even through a peephole into his bedroom. In addressing this lack of evidence, Roig has concocted an undrinkable cocktail: Marina Oswald “testified that Oswald bragged that he had gotten close to some of the Cubans [and] remembered the Cubans with pleasant memories.”

    Marina clearly stated that Oswald knew “a Cuban family” and she had heard about 300 Cubans in Minsk, “but I never knew even a single one.” In fact, Oswald knew a man named Alfred (last name unknown) from Cuba and a picture of them together is provided by [Warren] Commission Exhibit 2612. Newman demonstrated Alfred does not provide scope for suspicions. He was a student at the University of Minsk and his parents visited him. Oswald knew him through Anita Zieger, who was courted by Alfred. She and her family—of Argentinian origin—were friends of the Oswalds in Minsk.

    Oswald’s Alleged Visits to the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City

    Roig continues his deceptive handling of the facts by masking Oswald as “a militant advocate of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.” He also labels the FPCC “as a Communist front that supported the Castro’s Marxist-Leninist revolution.” Ironically, this remark closes his new avenue of deception for good.

    In the Spring 1963, Oswald formed a one-man New Orleans chapter of FPCC. Although its leadership warned him about “unnecessary incidents,” Oswald walked into a lair of the anti-Castro Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) to offer help. On August 9, he was handing out pro-Castro leaflets in downtown New Orleans. A brawl with DRE militants eventually ensued, but it was staged. Oswald had described the incident in a letter to FPCC postmarked five days before. Less than two weeks thereafter, Oswald and the local DRE head, Carlos Bringuier, met again on a debate at WDSU radio.

    Bringuier exposed Oswald as a re-defector from the Soviet Union. Oswald turned the tables by boasting about his stay there as “excellent qualification to repudiate charges that the FPCC is Communist controlled.” He stressed: “It is inconsistent with my ideals to support Communism … We do not feel that we are supporting international Communism in supporting Fidel.”

    Within a week, Oswald wrote to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), in order to leave a paper trail of the very linkages he had denied on the air: “I am the secretary of the local brach (sic) of the FPCC, a position which, frankly, I have used to foster communist ideals.” A prime soldier for Fidel Castro does not stab him in the back.

    Roig circumvents the most burning question about Oswald in Mexico City by quoting from the unpublished autobiography of Winston Scott [CIA Chief of Station]: “Every piece of information concerning Oswald was reported immediately … These reports were made on all his contacts, with both the Cuban Consulate and the Soviets … Persons watching these embassies photographed Oswald as he entered and left; and clocked the time he spent on each visit.”

    The core factual issue is that the CIA has never produced either a photo of Oswald nor a tape with his voice on it from Mexico City. Win Scott himself overlooked Oswald in his September 1963 report on the CIA telephone tapping program LIENVOY, although an American in phone contact with both Cuban and Soviet embassies was ipso facto of operational interest. In his attempt to escape from the facts, Roig falls into a preposterous dual story:

    In March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson … requested from his close associate (sic) Marty Underwood to meet with Scott in Mexico City. The timing was excellent … In the meeting with Underwood, Scott stated that early in the morning of November 22, 1963, a small Cuban airplane landed at the Mexico City Airport. The passenger transferred to another plane, that immediately took off for Dallas, Texas. Later that evening, the same plane returned from Dallas and the individual transferred to the Cuban aircraft the flew back to Havana. After many months of investigation, the CIA was confident that the individual was Fabian Escalante.

    Just the timing reveals Roig’s ignorance. Underwood’s only trip to Mexico City occurred in 1966. During his brief meeting with Scott, according to Underwood’s own notes, there was not the slightest reference to November 22, 1963. As a White House advance man, Underwood sought help from Scott for Johnson’s upcoming visit to Mexico. (ARRB Final Report, p. 136) And Escalante—as counterintelligence officer in the Section Q of Castro’s G-2—was so busy in 1963 watching anti-Castro fighters inside Cuba or in exile that he couldn’t have timed a wet operation, id est, involving spilling blood.

    It is incredible that Roig would fall for the deceased Underwood. Because, as noted above, Underwood was exposed for telling fairy tales back in 1998 when the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board was published. Not only was his canard about Scott then revealed, but he had also been telling tall tales to Gus Russo and Sy Hersh for the deceitful Judith Exner. And those two willingly gobbled them up. (Ibid)

    State Department: “Do Not Implicate Cuba”

    From the bamboozler Underwood, Roig jumps to Thomas Mann, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, who “has the answer” about what happened to the CIA files on Oswald in Mexico City. Mann “was personally ordered by the State Department, a few days after Oswald murdered President Kennedy, to shut down any investigation that would implicate Cuba’s involvement.” Roig added that a top CIA official, Tom Karamessinger (sic), memoed Scott: “Arrest of Sylvia Duran is extremely serious matter which could prejudice (us) … Request you ensure that her arrest is kept absolutely secret, that no information from her is published or leaked.”

    Roig is muddying the waters as if the report Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City (1978), written by HSCA staffers Dan Hardway and Edwin Lopez, hasn’t gone through rounds of declassification since 1993. It became clear that the CIA knew Oswald had been impersonated by phone on September 28 and October 1. Duran was also impersonated on September 28.

    That Saturday, a caller to the Soviet Consulate identified herself as Duran and announced that “an American that was just at the Soviet Embassy … is going to talk with you.” The CIA transcriber, Boris Tarasoff, commented that the American “speaks terrible, hardly recognizable Russian.” On October 1, a caller to the Soviet Consulate identified himself as Lee Oswald. Tarasoff noted he was “the same person who had called a day or so ago and spoken in broken Russian.” Duran was arrested and harshly interrogated by the Mexican Police on November 23 and November 28. The info taken from her included that she neither met Oswald nor made any call to the Soviet Consulate on September 28.

    Duran emphasized “she had no fear [of] extradition to the United States to face Oswald.” On the contrary, the CIA was afraid [that] “any Americans [might] confront Silvia DURAN or […] be in contact with her” [DIR 85318, 11-27-63, in [Duran’s] Information – NARA Record Number: 104-10102-10145, p. 14]. That’s why neither the eyewitness Duran nor the earwitness Tarasoff were ever questioned about the call by the Warren Commission. The CIA itself, not the State Department, shut down any further investigation on a Cuban connection after its Mexico City station not only produced both a tape and a photo that weren’t Oswald’s, but also spread stories—all of them debunked—of Communist conspiracies:

    • Mexican writer Elena Garro de Paz transformed Duran from the Mexican employee, who handled Oswald’s visa request at the Cuban Consulate, into the intelligence officer of Castro, who met Oswald again at a twist party in order to put him up to killing Kennedy.
    • Nicaraguan secret agent Gilberto Alvarado watched Oswald taking $6500 in the Cuban Embassy to kill Kennedy, while Mexican credit examiner Pedro Gutierrez saw Oswald taking money outside the Cuban Embassy.
    • Cuban Embassy employee Luisa Calderon expressed foreknowledge of JFK’s assassination…

    Fidel Castro vs. John F. Kennedy

    Roig comes to his overarching issue with an “unavoidable” clash between Castro and JFK. As veteran of the Brigade 2506, he is as misguided in his analysis now as he was as a member of the force that failed twice in making a diversionary landing near Guantanamo in mid-April 1961. Roig rarefies JFK’s oath—in the December 29, 1962, ceremony at the Orange Bowl stadium (Miami) with the participants in the Bay of Pigs invasion just released from Castro’s prison—that the flag of the Assault Brigade 2506 was to “fly again in a free Havana.”

    For Roig, it was the spark that ignited Castro to engage in “a personal fight to the end” against Kennedy but that’s an utter cognitive distortion of history. On Christmas Eve 1962, the American lawyer Jim Donovan boarded the last flight with the Bay of Pigs prisoners airlifted to Miami as result of his negotiation with Castro. Just before departure, Castro’s aide Dr. Rene Vallejo broached the subject of re-establishing diplomatic relations between the two countries.

    Let’s suppose Castro was, indeed, trying to lure Kennedy. Even so, killing the sitting U.S. President offered nothing else to gain than having Johnson in the White House with no hope of more favorable U.S. policies toward Cuba. The Soviet bloc’s diplomats in Havana were aware of it. On March 31, 1963, Hungarian Ambassador János Beck set out in a secret report to Budapest that Castro was convinced “Kennedy is the best” option among the possible candidates for the U.S. presidency in 1964 (“Talks between Cuba and the USA, March 31, 1963,” in Selected Hungarian Documents on Cuba, 1960-1963,” Cold War History Research Center [Budapest]).

    The anti-Castro fighter Roig is not aware yet of who his greatest enemy was. Castro knew that killing JFK wouldn´t solve anything and entailed risking everything. His personal fight was system-centered. Accordingly, he proceeded to infiltrate both the CIA and the Cuban exile community. Thus, Castro managed to win in the dirty USA-Cuba war.

    Rolando Cubela Secade (sic): The Double Agent Chosen to Kill Fidel Castro

    Nonetheless, Roig obsessively resorted to the neither logically nor circumstantially justified hypothesis brought by Senator Robert Morgan (D / N.C.) of the Church Committee: “JFK was assassinated by Fidel Castro or someone under his influence in retaliation for our efforts to assassinate him [and] this fellow [Cubela] was nothing but a double agent.”

    This fellow [AMLASH-1 for the CIA] was involved in two assassination plots against Castro. His key co-conspirators were the CIA officer Desmond FitzGerald [Chief of the anti-Castro Task Force known as Special Affair Staff (SAS)] and the CIA golden boy Manuel Artime [Chief of the anti-Castro paramilitary group Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MRR)]. Cubela does not fit at all into the facts as double agent loyal to Castro.

    • For unveiling the Artime-Cubela plot, Castro burned his intelligence officer Juan Felaifel, who had infiltrated the CIA in 1963. Another officer, Erasmo Terrero, was gathering evidence against Cubela in Paris. On March 11, 1966 Cubela was sentenced to 25 years.
    • For unveiling the FitzGerald-Cubela plot, Castro had to wait for a July 16, 1976, report by his State Security Department (DSE) stating that the “counterrevolutionary inmate” Cubela was the CIA agent AMLASH-1 who surfaced at the Church Committee. Before that, Castro lacked intel on this 1963 CIA plot.

    At the XI World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, Castro set up an agitprop court to prosecute the crimes committed by Yankee imperialism. On August 2, 1978, Cubela confessed to both CIA assassination plots against Castro and spelled an inconvenient truth for Roig: “It is absurd to think that a double agent would have spent 12 years in jail.” Cubela also testified before an HSCA panel in Havana. Castro rewarded him by granting the parole legally prescribed after serving half the sentence.

    The Cuban Exile Clandestine Operations

    As a fugitive from history, Roig runs so fast that he misses the two-track policy of the Kennedy administration towards Cuba after the debacle of Operation Mongoose. Roig just follows the track of (sometimes) autonomous operations by select Cuban exile groups, backed, in any event, by the CIA, and forgets the parallel track of accommodation with Castro. In fact, due to the ARRB, we now know just how feeble this activity was. For the incoming president Lyndon Johnson, CIA officer Desmond Fitzgerald wrote a report on what these operations consisted of at the time. He wrote that in the entire second half of 1963, there had been a total of five raids against Cuba. There were only fifty men involved in three cadres. In this letter, Fitzgerald admitted it was completely unrealistic to think that such a meager force would result in any real change in Cuba. He stated that they had now become counter productive, since they could not be taken seriously. And he advised they be discontinued. (Letter from Fitzgerald to McGeorge Bundy, 3/6/64)

    Ignoring this factual aspect, Roig can please himself with a pharisaic righteousness: Kennedy remained “true to his commitment to get rid of Fidel Castro,” thus ignoring Kennedy’s crackdown on other anti-Castro belligerent exiles groups. How the administration was going to overthrow Castro with fifty men is the author’s secret. Perhaps Roig was modeling his essay on the Peter Sellers comedy The Mouse that Roared?

    “Listen to Communications from Texas”

    After such an intermezzo, Roig next stages an act against intellectual integrity. The protagonist is the late Cuban defector Florentino Aspillaga, who back in 1963 was working for Castro at a listening post in Jaimanitas [a small beach town near Castro’s main residence, dubbed as Point Zero, seven miles west of Havana]. The script reads thus:

    On Friday morning, November 22, 1963, Aspillaga received precise orders: “The leadership wants you to stop all your CIA work, (repeat), All your CIA work” and listen to communications from Texas. Around 1:30 (Havana Time), “I began hearing broadcast on amateur radio bands about the shooting of President Kennedy in Dallas.”

    Roig drops the question: “Did Fidel Castro know Kennedy would be killed?” instead of asking: “Who would believe such a tale?” Castro would have never resorted to electronic intelligence to learn something that would have been instantly available through mass media. In 1963, info about anything occurring in Dallas during the JFK visit meant broadcast reports interrupting soap operas on the three national TV networks, and radio stations giving breaking news.

    Aspillaga was in fact a self-defeating storyteller. Radio amateurs must have just been chatting about what the commercial media had already reported. In late 1963, a unique witness gave conclusive evidence contradicting Aspillaga’s claim. French journalist Jean Daniel wrote a first-hand account (“When Castro Heard the News,” The New Republic, December 7, 1963). As Kennedy’s emissary, he was talking with Castro in Varadero Beach the very day of the assassination. After a phone call by Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticós, Castro got all the news “from the NBC network in Miami.” Daniel also recounted Castro was utterly shocked and turned to him saying—about the plans for rapprochement—that everything was going to change.

    Aspillaga told Dr. Brian Latell in 2007 that the CIA had learned the Jaimanitas’ story during his debriefing in 1987. However, it is not to be found among the documents—either declassified or withheld—from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on the JFK assassination. The CIA would not have objected to furnishing a carefully redacted Aspillaga debriefing to the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB).

    The Paris Meting (sic): Assurance of American support

    In this intermezzo, Roig again addresses Operation AMLASH to reinforce the discredited notion of Cubela as fake conspirator. The Castroite General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI) did not control but rather watched Cubela with a certain inefficiency. Before the Church Committee, the CIA moved to transfigure him into a double agent, even a provocateur, to hide its own shortcoming in recruiting a heavy-drinking, loquacious, third-rate Castro official who couldn’t provide any valuable service.

    The DGI manipulated Oswald’s Violent Outburst at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City?

    Roig stages this act with an outright lie:

    Oswald requested at the Cuban Consulate in the City of Mexico a transit visa to Russia via Cuba and was denied. Oswald turned violent and began screaming “I am going to kill Kennedy.”

    As FBI super-spy Jakob “Jack Childs” informed J. Edgar Hoover, Castro himself recounted:

    I was told this by my people in the Embassy exactly how he (Oswald) stalked in and walked in and ran out. That in itself was a suspicious movement, because nobody comes to an Embassy for a visa (they go to a Consulate) [W]hen Oswald was refused his visa at the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, he acted like a madman and started yelling and shouting on his way out, “I’m going to kill this bastard. I’m going to kill Kennedy” [Castro]was speaking on the basis of facts given to him by his embassy personnel, who dealt with Oswald, and apparently had made a full, detailed report to Castro after President Kennedy was assassinated.

    The Consulate was in a separate building from the Embassy. The Cuban diplomatic compound in Mexico City was located at Francisco Marquez Street (Colonia Condesa) with two main entrances: one to the Embassy, on the corner of Tacubaya Alley, and the other to the Consulate, on the corner of Zamora Street. Both the outgoing (Eusebio Azcue) and incoming (Alfredo Mirabal) consuls testified before HSCA that they did not hear Oswald threatening Kennedy’s life. Neither did the Mexican employee Sylvia Duran, who was consistent about it in both her interrogation by Mexican Police and her interview by the HSCA, nor did two other witnesses who had come downstairs from the Commercial Office.

    Roig’s opera seria continues as a vaudeville with a substandard duet: DGI defector Vladimir Rodriguez [dispatched by his own CIA debriefer, Harold Swenson, as lacking “any significant information” on Oswald] and Oscar Marino [an alleged former Cuban intelligence officer imported from the bestiary described by Gus Russo and Stephen Molton in Brothers in Arms (Bloomsbury USA, 2008)]. Roig closes the act by foisting two “outrageous lies [on Castro as] part of a premeditated deniability perfidy[:] that he knew nothing of Oswald’s existence before the Dallas assassination and that he was never informed of Oswald’s threatening remarks against Kennedy in the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City”. The latter is refuted by Childs’ report; the former is still wanting for any evidence.

    Fidel Castro Got Kennedy First

    Before the curtain falls, Roig concocts a Castroite Oswald with a Castro prone to react to the CIA plots against him in the spaghetti western manner summed up by Lyndon Johnson: “Kennedy was trying to get Castro, but Castro got to him first.” Such a fact-free approach thrives only on claques of people who cannot think logically or will not think logically, because they have a fanatical and counterproductive anti-Castro agenda.