Kennedys and King Test host626

Category: John Fitzgerald Kennedy

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

  • Oswald’s Last Letter: The Scorching Hot Potato

    Oswald’s Last Letter: The Scorching Hot Potato

    So much time is spent in the JFK assassination debate arguing about shaky evidence that we have seen serious researchers sometimes turn on one another and lone-nut apologists then pounce and deliver their salvos portraying the research community as made up of quacks. This is even though the official HSCA conclusions, as well as the opinions of an overwhelming number of government inquiry insiders, clearly discredit the Warren Commission conclusion that Oswald and Jack Ruby both acted alone. Therefore, this author has steered clear of discussions around subjects such as Judyth Vary Baker, Madeleine Brown, James Files, the Badge Man photo, the Prayer Man photo, etc.

    My focus has always been on smoking gun evidence. There are three levels of smoking guns:

    1. Those that prove that the Warren Commission inquiry is impeached.
    2. Those that demonstrate conclusively that there was a conspiracy.
    3. Those that prove who some of the conspirators were.

    There are a number that prove the first two points:

    1. Conclusions from post-Warren Commission inquiries and statements made by the investigation insiders.
    2. Oswald during his short life had touch points with over seventy-five people with plausible intelligence links including over thirty with definite ones.
    3. Ruby had ties with the mob including some who are suspects in the assassination such as Santo Trafficante.
    4. Oswald was impersonated in Mexico City.
    5. Too many witnesses in Dealey Plaza, as well as those who inspected the president’s wounds, confirmed a front shot.
    6. The demolishing of the Single Bullet theory.
    7. The similarities in the prior plots to kill JFK.
    8. The weak security on November 22, 1963, and the behavior of some Secret Service operatives.
    9. The obvious cover-up.

    There are none at this point that prove beyond a shadow of a doubt who the conspirators were. Some do expose persons of extreme interest, these include:

    1. Oswald’s summer in New Orleans in 1963.
    2. Oswald’s and Ruby’s links to Trafficante and intelligence.
    3. The case against David Atlee Phillips.

    In this article, we will look at another important piece of evidence and let the reader decide whether it rises to the level of a smoking gun: Oswald’s last letter!

    Dueling Spins

    On the very day that Kennedy was assassinated, forces that desperately wanted the overthrow of the Castro regime went into a press relations frenzy, most likely led by CIA propaganda whizz David Atlee Phillips. The tale they were peddling was that Cuba and Russia were Oswald’s backers.

    Much has been written about the steps taken to sheep-dip Oswald in 1963, so that he could come out looking like an unbalanced Castro sympathizer: the famous backyard photos of him holding alleged murder weapons, as well as communist literature, his recruitment efforts for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his scapegoating in the General Walker murder attempt, and his interviews in New Orleans where he openly paints himself as a Castroite.

    Some steps, however, went further. They were designed to make Oswald seem to be in league with Cuban and Russian agents, plotters, and assassins. They came out of the assassination play-book code-named ZR Rifle, authored by exiled, CIA super-agent William Harvey. It would have given the U.S. the excuse they needed to invade Cuba. But the new President Lyndon Johnson eventually nixed this stratagem.

    Persons of interest like John Martino, Frank Sturgis, and Phillips-linked contacts (Carlos Bringuier, Ed Butler, and journalist Hal Hendrix) began a “Castro was behind it” spin to the assassination.

    Carlos Bringuier of the DRE, who had gotten into what was likely a staged fight with Oswald on Canal Street in New Orleans in August of 1963, also wrote a press release that was published the day after the assassination to position Castro as being in cahoots with Oswald.

    The DRE was actually set up under William Kent in 1960, working for David Phillips. David Morales was the group’s military case officer. Later, with Phillips in Mexico City, Kent was George Joannides supervisor. Kent’s daughter told Gaeton Fonzi that her father never mentioned Oswald except one time over dinner. He stated that Oswald was a “useful idiot”.

    Through Ed Butler and the CIA-associated INCA, Oswald’s apparent charade and his televised interview went a long way in painting his leftist persona to the public at large. INCA had been used by Phillips for propaganda purposes during the period leading up to the Bay of Pigs. Butler was quick to send recordings to key people on the day of the assassination.

    These frame-up tactics were the ones the cover-up artists wished had never occurred and worked hard to make disappear. The perpetrators of the framing of Castro offensive soon ran into stiff competition after Oswald was conveniently rubbed out. The White House and the FBI concluded, without even investigating, that both Oswald and Ruby were lone nuts. The pro-Cuba invasion forces were overmatched and their intel leaders had no choice but to fall in line.

    But it was too late, there was too much spilled milk around plan A. In time, government inquiry investigators like Gaeton Fonzi, Dan Hardway, and Eddie Lopez, along with some very determined independent researchers, would uncover leads that all pointed in the same direction: Oswald was framed to appear to be in league with Cuban and Russian agents.

    This can only lead to two possibilities. If Oswald was in cahoots with foreign agents, there was a foreign conspiracy to remove the president. In the more likely scenario that Oswald was being framed to look like he was cahoots with foreign agents, there was a domestic conspiracy to remove the president. In both cases, the lone-nut fairy-tale is obliterated.

    Spilled Milk

    Oswald and Kostikov

    On September 27, 1963, Oswald allegedly travelled to Mexico City and visited both the Cuban consulate and the Russian embassy, in a failed attempt to obtain a visa to enter Cuba. FBI agents, who had listened to tapes of Oswald phone calls made while in the Cuban consulate, and Cuban consul Eusibio Azque, confirmed that there was an Oswald imposter.

    In October 1963, the CIA produced five documents on Oswald that linked him to Valery Kostikov. One of the claims was that they had met in the Russian Embassy in Mexico City. Kostikov was later described as “an identified KGB officer … in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB’s 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination).” They also confirmed that they felt that there were either fake phone calls made by an Oswald impostor to Kostikov while he was allegedly in Mexico or at least faked transcripts.

    In September 1964, the case against Kostikov took a bizarre turn, when a September 1, 1964, Hoover memo (105-124016) to the CIA seemed to indicate that the CIA (James Angleton’s department) in fact had no evidence to prove Kostikov was part of the infamous Department 13.

    This means either one of two things:

    1. Angleton knew Kostikov’s connection to Department 13 was unfounded, but tried to recycle that info in November.
    2. Angleton lied to Hoover on June 25, 1963, perhaps for the same reason (to keep the lid on it until November 22).

    David Atlee Phillips’ dirty tricks

    HSCA investigator Dan Hardway hypothesizes that, because of compartmentalization, Phillips and Oswald may have found out on November 22, 1963, that Oswald was a patsy and Phillips received orders to tie the murder to Castro.

    In a critique of Phil Shenon’s work written for the AARC in 2015, Hardway expresses the opinion that the CIA is heading to what he calls a limited hang-out by admitting that Oswald may have received guidance from Cuba and that the CIA director at the time, John McCone, was involved in a benign cover-up.

    Following the assassination, it became obvious that Phillips was connected to several disinformation stories trying to link Oswald to Castro agents. HSCA investigator Hardway called him out on it:

    Before our unexpurgated access was cut off by Joannides, I had been able to document links between David Phillips and most of the sources of the disinformation that came out immediately after the assassination about Oswald and his pro-Castro proclivities. I confronted Phillips with those in an interview at our offices on August 24, 1978. Phillips was extremely agitated by that line of questioning, but was forced to admit that many of the sources were not only former assets that he had managed, in the late 50’s and early 1960’s, but were also assets whom he was personally managing in the fall of 1963. Mr. Phillips was asked, but could not explain, why the information that came from anti-Castro Cuban groups and individuals pointing to Cuban connections, all seemed to come from assets that he handled personally, but acknowledged that that was the case.

    One of these assets was Nicaraguan double agent Gilberto Alvarado who, on November 25, claimed to have witnessed Oswald being paid off to assassinate Kennedy when Oswald was in Mexico City. A tale that was quickly debunked.

    While the HSCA hearings were going on, Phillips himself made the claim to a Washington Post reporter that he had heard a taped intercept of Oswald when he was in Mexico City talking to a Russian Embassy official offering to exchange money for information (Washington Post, November 26, 1976). Something he never repeated. Phillips also tried to get Alpha 66 operative Antonio Veciana to get one of his relatives in Mexico City to attest that Oswald accepted bribes from a Cuban agent.

    Letters from Cuba to Oswald—proof of pre-knowledge of the assassination

    For this obvious frame-up tactic, it is worth revisiting what was written in this author’s article The CIA and Mafia’s “Cuban American Mechanism”.

    In JFK: the Cuba Files, a thorough analysis of five bizarre letters, that were written before the assassination in order to position Oswald as a Castro asset, is presented. It is difficult to sidestep them the way the FBI did. The FBI argued that they were all typed from the same typewriter, yet supposedly sent by different people. Which indicated to them that it was a hoax, perhaps perpetrated by Cubans wanting to encourage a U.S. invasion. However, the content of the letters and timeline prove something far more sinister according to Cuban intelligence. The following is how John Simkin summarizes the evidence:

    The G-2 had a letter, signed by Jorge, that had been sent from Havana to Lee Harvey Oswald on November 14th, 1963. It had been found when a fire broke out on November 23rd in a sorting office. “After the fire, an employee who was checking the mail in order to offer, where possible, apologies to the addressees of destroyed mail, and to forward the rest, found an envelope addressed to Lee Harvey Oswald.” It is franked on the day Oswald was arrested and the writer refers to Oswald’s travels to Mexico, Houston and Florida …, which would have been impossible to know about at that time!

    It incriminates Oswald in the following passage: “I am informing you that the matter you talked to me about the last time that I was in Mexico would be a perfect plan and would weaken the politics of that braggart Kennedy, although much discretion is needed because you know that there are counter-revolutionaries over there who are working for the CIA.”

    Escalante informed the HSCA about this letter. When he did this, he discovered that they had four similar letters that had been sent to Oswald. Four of the letters were post-marked “Havana”. It could not be determined where the fifth letter was posted. Four of the letters were signed: Jorge, Pedro Charles, Miguel Galvan Lopez, and Mario del Rosario Molina. Two of the letters (Charles & Jorge) are dated before the assassination (10th and 14th November). A third, by Lopez, is dated November 27th, 1963. The other two are undated.

    Cuba is linked to the assassination in all of the letters. In two of them, an alleged Cuban agent is clearly implicated in having planned the crime. However, the content of the letters, written before the assassination, suggested that the authors were either “a person linked to Oswald or involved in the conspiracy to execute the crime.”

    This included knowledge about Oswald’s links to Dallas, Houston, Miami, and Mexico City. The text of the Jorge letter “shows a weak grasp of the Spanish language on the part of its author.” It would thus seem to have been written in English and then translated.

    Escalante adds: “It is proven that Oswald was not maintaining correspondence, or any other kind of relations, with anyone in Cuba. Furthermore, those letters arrived at their destination at a precise moment and with a conveniently incriminating message, including that sent to his postal address in Dallas, Texas … The existence of the letters in 1963 was not publicized or duly investigated and the FBI argued before the Warren Commission to reject them.”

    Escalante argues: “The letters were fabricated before the assassination occurred and by somebody who was aware of the development of the plot, who could ensure that they arrived at the opportune moment and who had a clandestine base in Cuba from which to undertake the action. Considering the history of the last 40 years, we suppose that only the CIA had such capabilities in Cuba.”

    We will see that these letters are suspiciously similar to Oswald’s “last letter.”

    Policarpo Lopez

    Attempts to link foreign governments to the assassination were not just limited to the framing of Oswald. As reported in the article The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK, eight alternate patsies were profiled and no fewer than five of these made strange trips to Mexico City and at least four had visited Cuba.

    One who did escape authorities to Mexico and was reportedly the lone passenger on a plane to Cuba shortly after the assassination was Policarpo Lopez. Even the HSCA found this case egregious.

    The HSCA described parts of what it called the “Lopez allegation”:

    Lopez would have obtained a tourist card in Tampa on November 20, 1963, entered Mexico at Nuevo Laredo on November 23, and flew from Mexico City to Havana on November 27. Further, Lopez was alleged to have attended a meeting of the Tampa Chapter of the FPCC on November 17 … CIA files on Lopez reflect that in early December, 1963, they received a classified message requesting urgent traces on Lopez … Later the CIA headquarters received another classified message stating that a source stated that “Lopes” had been involved in the Kennedy assassination … had entered Mexico by foot from Laredo on November 13 … proceeded by bus to Mexico City where he entered the Cuban Embassy … and left for Cuba as the only passenger on flight 465 for Cuba. A CIA file on Lopez was classified as a counterintelligence case.

    An FBI investigation on Lopez through an interview with his cousin and wife, as well as document research, revealed that … He was pro-Castro and he had once gotten involved in a fistfight over his Castro sympathies.

    The FBI had previously documented that Lopez had actually been in contact with the FPCC and had attended a meeting in Tampa on November 20, 1963. In a March 1964 report, it recounted that at a November 17 meeting … Lopez said he had not been granted permission to return to Cuba, but was awaiting a phone call about his return to his homeland … A Tampa FPCC member was quoted as saying she called a friend in Cuba on December 8, 1963, and was told that he arrived safely. She also said that they (the FPCC) had given Lopez $190 for his return. The FBI confirmed the Mexico trip (Lopez’ wife confirmed that in a letter he sent her from Cuba in November 1963, he had received financial assistance for his trip to Cuba from an organization in Tampa) … information sent to the Warren Commission by the FBI on the Tampa chapter of the FPCC did not contain information on Lopez’ activities … nor apparently on Lopez himself. The Committee concurred with the Senate Select Committee that this omission was egregious, since the circumstances surrounding Lopez’ travel seemed “suspicious”. Moreover, in March 1964, when the WC’s investigation was in its most active stage, there were reports circulating that Lopez had been involved in the assassination … Lopez’ association with the FPCC, however, coupled with the fact that the dates of his travel to Mexico via Texas coincide with the assassination, plus the reports that Lopez’ activities were “suspicious” all amount to troublesome circumstances that the committee was unable to resolve with confidence.

    Oswald’s Last Letter

    On November 18, 4 days before JFK’s assassination, the Russian Embassy received a letter dated November 9 from “Oswald”, which was uncharacteristically typed and was in an envelope post-marked November 12. The letter, as was the case for all mail sent to the Russian embassy, had been intercepted by the FBI (Hoover phone call to Johnson November 23 10:01). The envelope is addressed to Tovarish Reznekohyenko, N. (note that Tovarish means Comrade).

    Before this incriminating letter, there were at least 6 exchanges in writing between the Oswalds and the Russian Embassy between February and November 1963, where the Russian contact was Nikolai Reznichenko according a number of Warren Commission exhibits. We can assume he is also the recipient of the last letter, despite different spellings.

    The FBI sent a briefing about the letter to the FBI Dallas office who received it on the day of the assassination. The Russians, sensing they could be blamed, handed over a copy of the letter to the Americans after noting correctly that it was the only one of all the letters from Oswald that was typed and that its tone differed from all previous correspondence. As the Soviet Ambassador pointed out at the time, the tone was also quite dissimilar to anything Oswald had communicated before; it gave “the impression we had close ties with Oswald and were using him for some purposes of our own.” Their opinion was that it was either a fake or dictated to him. Previous letters were more straight to the point dealing with visa applications.

    This letter became a hot potato. One that posed problems for the Warren Commission and the HSCA, which were amplified by the different takes Ruth and Michael Paine, Marina Oswald, the CIA, and the Russians had on it and the incredible lack of depth in the Warren Commission probe.

    With time, researchers like Peter Dale Scott, James Douglass, and Jerry D. Rose pointed out several troubling points, not only in the letter itself, but also with a Ruth Paine generated handwritten draft of the letter, as well as a Russian analysis of it.

    Warren Commission Volume 16 Exhibit 16

    Letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to the Russian Embassy, dated November 9, 1963:

    Warren Commission Volume 16 Exhibit 15

    The mistake-riddled letter was linked to Ruth Paine’s typewriter. Ruth Paine and Marina Oswald testified that they had seen Oswald working on the letter shortly before it was sent and Ruth and Michael Paine both testified that they had seen a handwritten draft of the letter, which Ruth Paine handed over to an FBI official on November 23. Somehow, investigators who had combed through the Paine house had missed it. Handwriting analysis apparently confirmed it had been written by Oswald.

    For some incredible reason, by April 1964, the Warren Commission had accepted a Ruth Paine request to have Oswald’s draft returned. However, when the Dallas FBI did return it to her, she decided to send it back to the Commission, because, finally, she felt it would be more proper for it to be kept in the public archives, but would take it in the event it would not be archived. Hoover said with finality that the Commission would not hold onto it and, by May 1964, had the original sent back to Ruth Paine, which escaped further examination as to its authenticity. (JFK and the Unspeakable, p.443)

    Oswald’s draft of the letter found by Ruth Paine:

    HSCA exhibit F 500/Warren Commission exhibit 103

    The Warren Report’s descriptions of Oswald’s trip to Mexico City and his last letter are among the best examples of just how weak their investigation was and how misleading they were in their disclosures.

    It seems the only thing that they found perplexing from the letter was how a “drifter” like Oswald could have known that a consul from the Cuban consulate in Mexico City could have been replaced. So, they asked the CIA to weigh in. The CIA surmised that the consul in question was Eusebio Azque and speculated that Silvia Duran or some Soviet official might have mentioned it if Oswald had complained about an altercation with Azque.

    The Commission recognized that Kostin, who Oswald talks about, was KGB officer Valery Kostikov, but dilutes the meaning of this by stating “that it was common procedure for such KGB officers stationed in embassies to carry on normal duties along with undercover activities”.

    Buried in the appendices of the Report, we can find a memo (Warren Commission Document 347 of January 31, 1964, p. 10) by the FBI’s Ray Rocca, sent to the Commission in January 1964:

    Kostikov is believed to work for Department Thirteen of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. It is the department responsible for executive action, including sabotage and assassination. These functions of the KGB are known within the Service itself as “Wet Affairs” (mokryye dela). The Thirteenth Department headquarters, according to very reliable information, conducts interviews or, as appropriate, file reviews on every foreign military defector to the USSR to study and to determine the possibility of using the defector in his country of origin.

    Richard Helms, while heading the CIA, went on to confirm this very important detail. Kept hidden from the public was an allegation that Oswald had met Kostikov just a few weeks earlier in Mexico City and that a likely Oswald impostor had placed a call to Kostikov that was intercepted by the CIA! This makes the reference to “unfinished business” that we can read in the letter quite suggestive.

    It is interesting to note that the letters from Cuba designed to incriminate Oswald and link him to Cuban agents use some of the same suggestive language. “Close the business”, “after the business, I will recommend you”, and “after the business I will send you your money” are some of the phrases that can be found in just one of the letters. Others talk about “the matter” or “the plan”.

    A real investigation and transparent report would have revealed a lot more about Kostikov’s explosive background and would have blown the lid off what really happened in Mexico City. It would have also delved into who the recipient of the Washington letter was and its important significance, if Plan A (blaming foreign foes for the assassination) had been pursued. Something we will discuss later.

    Instead, the report concludes its extremely hollow analysis on a whimper: “In the opinion of the Commission, based upon its knowledge of Oswald, the letter constitutes no more than a clumsy effort to ingratiate himself with the Soviet Embassy.” The truth was that, had plan A gone ahead, the letter would have been peddled as further proof of complicity between the president’s “murderer” and foreign adversaries.

    The Warren Report on the letter

    While Jim Garrison clearly suspected something unholy occurred in Mexico City, as well as with the letter, the public had to wait until 1970 to see some of the first clues about what the FBI really thought about this correspondence, when newsman Paul Scott revealed the following:

    The F.B.I. discounts the C.I.A. suggestion to the Warren Commission that Silvia Duran, a pro-Castro Mexican employee of the Cuban Embassy, might have told Oswald about Azque being removed. In her statement to Mexican officials concerning her discussion with Oswald, Mrs. Duran made no mention of Azque. And, although she was questioned at the request of C.I.A., no attempt was made to quiz her about whether she knew of Azque’s recall. This makes the C.I.A. conclusion highly dubious, to say the least.

    Although the F.B.I. still has not been able to resolve the key mystery of the Oswald letter, it has narrowed the sources of where he might have obtained information about Azque. These sources are: (1) An informant in the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City who contacted Oswald after he returned to the U.S. (2) The Central Intelligence Agency. Or (3), the Soviet Secret Police (K.G.B.) in Mexico City. Significantly, the F.B.I. probe discovered that the K.G.B. and the C.I.A. learned of Azque’s replacement at approximately the same time and not until after Oswald visited Mexico City. This finding has raised the possibility that whoever informed Oswald contacted him after he returned to Dallas from Mexico City.

    According to Paul Scott’s son Jim, his father was wiretapped for over 50 years, because of his dogged investigations into the assassination.

    The HSCA

    Perhaps the biggest blow to the Lone Nut fabrication came when the Church Committee and the HSCA investigations deciphered one of the most important ruses, which would turn the tables on the frame-up artists who concocted the aborted Plan A stratagem. This had to be kept secret.

    One thing the Lopez Report makes very clear is that an Oswald impostor made a phone call designed to lay down a trace that would be used as proof of Russian complicity in the assassination and would provide the types of motives and stratagems that were part of the ZR/RIFLE and the Joint Chiefs of Staffs Operation Northwoods play books, both which involved having adversaries blamed for their own covert acts of aggression. The letter served to authenticate the Oswald-Kostikov relationship and add a third player to the mix. The potato became scorching hot.

    This analysis needed to be buried as much and as long as possible. The HSCA did not want to be the ones exposing this in the 1970s. The world had to wait nearly 25 years for the declassification of the explosive reports concerning Oswald’s trip to Mexico City and the mysterious letter and sometimes much later for their eventual release.

    The HSCA’s conclusions about the letter were even more hypocritical than the Warren Commission’s. While they recognize that it is “disturbing”, they seem to ignore the fact that the letter had been intercepted by the FBI and do not factor in the explosive findings of their very own Lopez Report, nor the confirmations about Kostikov’s role as Russia’s head of assassinations for the Western Hemisphere. When we consider the proof that they were sitting on, that an Oswald impersonator was recorded talking to Kostikov, and that Oswald (or an impostor) was said to have actually met him, we can easily see that the context of the letter and its explosive meaning were completely sidestepped in the Report:

    While the second paragraph represents a fake opinion designed to deviate from the real implication of the letter, the first one represents a blatant deception that can be proven outright by the transcript of Hoover’s call to President Johnson the day after the assassination:

    In short, the FBI did in fact examine all mail sent to the Soviet Embassy and had a copy of the letter all along.

    The ARRB and Russians Weigh In

    Thanks in large part to Oliver Stone and his landmark JFK movie classic, the ARRB was founded in 1992 and began declassifying files shortly after on the JFK assassination. In 1996, the Lopez Report was available. By 2003, a less redacted version was released. The explosive document shed light on Oswald impersonators, missing tapes, photos, and bold-faced lying by top CIA officials. The lone drifter was not alone!

    As reported by Jerry Rose in the Fourth Decade, in 1999, Boris Yeltsin handed Bill Clinton some 80 files pertaining to Oswald and the JFK assassination. One of the memos reveals that, at the time of the assassination, Russian ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin had right away seen the letter as a “provocation” to frame Russia by the fabrication of complicity between Russia and Oswald, when none existed. “One gets the definite impression that the letter was concocted by those who, judging from everything, are involved in the president’s assassination,” Dobrynin wrote. “It is possible that Oswald himself wrote the letter as it was dictated to him, in return for some promises, and then, as we know, he was simply bumped off after his usefulness had ended.” In late November, the Russians sent the letter to U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk explaining why the letter was a fraud. By then, the White House was peddling the lone nut fable. Kept hidden was the fact that the FBI already had a copy of the letter.

    In his article, Rose points out that the typed letter had many more spelling errors in it than the rough draft. Very odd indeed.

    If you go back to how the Warren Commission fluffs off the alleged Kostikov/Oswald (and/or impostor) exchanges and compare it with what is written by Bagley in the CIA’s November 23rd 1963 memo (declassified in 1998), you will see a startling difference in Kostikov’s status:

    Memo of 23 November 1963 from Acting Chief, SR Division, signed by Tennant Bagley, “Chief, SR/Cl.” CIA Document #34-538

    Just one of the reasons the Warren Report was impeached! But wait, it gets worse.

    The FBI’s Reaction to the Letter and the Mysterious Tovarish Reznkecnyen

    Since the mid-1990s, there have been a few revealing writings about the letter, but very little about the FBI’s take on it.

    Now, thanks to document declassification, we can see it through a wider scope that includes troubling dovetailing facts, such as the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City and multiple hoaxes to tie him in unequivocally with sinister foreign agents and the chief assassination officer in Mexico—Kostikov. The analysis of tape recordings and transcripts, the mysteriously disappearing evidence, the fake letters from Cuba, and the full-fledged perjury of CIA officer David Atlee Phillips during the HSCA hearings prove there was subterfuge beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    Hoover’s phone call to Johnson is already very revealing. The following FBI report (HSCA Record 180-10110-10104), released only in 2017, is nothing short of stunning. It was the one Scott wrote about in 1970. It is strongly urged that you follow the above link to understand the full implication of the report, which sheds light on the investigation mindset which preceded the whitewash. However, for this article, our attention will be on the following paragraph of the report which focuses on the letter Oswald sent to the Soviet Embassy in Washington.

    Oswald’s letter deeply troubled the FBI for a number of reasons. Its tone was one of ongoing complicity referring to “unfinished business” and convenient reminders of the alarming exchange between Oswald and Kostikov. But the letter stretches the elastic to add yet another element that has so far gone under the radar.

    The fact that the letter was sent to Tovarich Nikolai Reznichenko all of a sudden became alarming, even though the Oswalds corresponded with him several times in 1963. The FBI report clearly refers to him as “the man in the Soviet Embassy (Washington’s) in charge of assassinations.” In 1970, Scott had described him as “one of the top members of the Soviet Secret Police (K.G.B.) in the United States.”

    The significance of this report leads to many conclusions and as many unanswered questions. Hoover had already decided that Oswald acted alone and they would not “muddy the waters internationally”. The HSCA, who possessed this document, in reports debates the authenticity of the same letter that was given to Dean Rusk by the Soviet ambassador, when they knew full well of its existence and FBI worries about its explosive implications. While this author has found little corroboration about Nikolai Reznichenko’s status, or perceived status, he believes it should not be dismissed as a mistake or confusion with Kostikov. This is an official FBI report that was written in 1963. There have not been any clarifications made about this very significant statement, despite the fact that Paul Scott exposed this in 1970 and its access to HSCA investigators.

    The mere fact that he worked in the Russian embassy and that he often corresponded with a “defector” on a watch list and his Russian wife and that the last letter by Oswald addressed to him has a complicit tone while name dropping the Mexico-based KBG chief of assassinations and talking about unfinished business suggests that both the FBI and the CIA had files on him. Where are they? For him to be described by Hoover as the head of assassinations in Washington on the part of the Soviet government in an official FBI document is of utmost significance and requires an explanation.

    This is one issue that deserves more debate in the research community.

    Conclusion

    The last letter on its own, perhaps, does not rise to the level of a smoking gun that proves there was conspiracy. It is another compelling piece of evidence that does prove that the Warren Commission and the HSCA shelved important evidence and information from the public that they found bothersome.

    If one adds this letter to the other attempts to pin the blame on foreign agents, including the charade in Mexico City, false testimonies by CIA contacts, the perjury of CIA officials of interest in the case, the Policarpo Lopez incident, and the incriminating letters from Cuba, we have proof beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was conspiracy. The naysayers cannot have it both ways. Either these events were genuine, which proves an international conspiracy, or they were not, which proves a domestic conspiracy. There has been enough evidence to demonstrate that they were not genuine.

    The letter has one attribute that can play an important role, actually proving who some of the conspirators were. It pre-dates the assassination. As it refers to happenings and ruses that took place in Mexico City two months earlier that few knew about, we can narrow the scope on who was involved. When we inspect the propaganda aspect of the operation, the case against David Atlee Phillips as a person of extreme interest is almost airtight. He had many touch points with Oswald and is easy to link to all of the ruses behind the sheep dipping activities, including the incriminating last letter.

    See also Carol Hewett’s Ruth Paine “Finds” Evidence: Oswald’s Letter to the Soviet Embassy

  • The FBI, JFK and Jim Garrison

    The FBI, JFK and Jim Garrison

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  • Dennis Breo, the New York Times, and JFK

    Dennis Breo, the New York Times, and JFK

    On November 8, 2019, the New York Times printed a letter from an author named Dennis Breo. This was in reply to a review of Jack Goldsmith’s book In Hoffa’s Shadow. In the review of that book, Chris Nashaway wrote that the disappearance of Hoffa ranks with mysteries like the disappearance of Amelia Earhart and the identity of the so-called second shooter on the grassy knoll. Please note the term “so-called” in front of the second shooter.

    Well, even that large qualifier was not enough for one Dennis Breo. Breo promptly wrote a letter to the Times who, quite willingly, accommodated him.

    Dennis Breo

    Stepping up to his soap box, Breo wrote that what the Times had done by printing that sentence was a “serious disservice to history.” He then said that he had been a journalist for the Journal of American Medicine Association (JAMA) when they did interviews with the three autopsy doctors on the JFK case in May of 1992. He wrote that, because of that, he could assure the Times that “there was no second shooter from the grassy knoll or anywhere else.” He then said that the autopsy doctors proved that both wounds in Kennedy went from back to front, that is, his back of the neck wound and his head wound. Therefore, the only possible shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. He then ended his letter with the fact that the Times endorsed that article saying that “it offers proof against paranoia.”

    Dr, George Lundberg

    This was the first letter on the correspondence page. Above it, the Times bannered the letter with the rubric “There was no Second Shooter on the Grassy Knoll,” all seeming a bit much for printing the phrase “the so called second shooter.”

    Naturally, the Times did not reply to Breo’s letter to defend what they originally printed. They did not even let Mr. Nashaway respond. They were wise in doing so, because Breo is a huge target for anyone disputing the Warren Report’s version of events.

    First, Dennis Breo is not a doctor and has never been a doctor. He is now a retired journalist, living in Florida. At the time that the film JFK came out, he was working with Dr. George Lundberg, the editor of JAMA. Lundberg did not like the portrayal of his friend Dr. James Humes in that picture. Evidently, he did not care to find out that it was not really a portrayal. It was all based upon facts that were adduced at the trial of Clay Shaw in 1969 in New Orleans. Those facts, recited under oath by Dr. Pierre Finck, were accurately scripted for the film. There was nothing defamatory about these scenes. The film reflected Finck’s testimony on the stand, according  to the trial  record, which director/writer Oliver Stone had secured.

    Finck’s testimony, in and of itself, is quite a story. He was called by the defense. The reason being that Dr. John Nichols, a pathologist, had been an effective witness for the prosecution. He testified that, in his opinion, the Zapruder film proved a shot from the front and, therefore, showed a conspiracy. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 299) The defense was worried about the impact of both the Zapruder film and Nichols. So they called Kennedy autopsy physician Pierre Finck as a witness. The Justice Department was coordinating its coverage of the Clay Shaw trial through attorney Carl Eardley in Washington. (ibid, p. 299)  Eardley was the point man on the cover up of the medical evidence in the JFK case. For example, he had coordinated a meeting in 1966 so that four of those present in the Bethesda morgue room—where Kennedy’s autopsy was performed—would testify that all the photos of that procedure were accounted for. Even though everyone knew they were not, including Eardley. (ibid, p. 305). Eardley wisely kept his name off the final draft of the false document.

    Finck’s testimony in New Orleans was coordinated with Eardley in advance. (DiEugenio, p. 299) Finck was fine under direct examination. He was reduced to mumbling and bumbling by Jim Garrison’s assistant DA Alvin Oser under cross examination. The Shaw trial was the first direct exposure of the corrupt practices and hierarchical control of what went on in the Bethesda morgue on the evening of November 22, 1963. The examination got so bad that Finck began dodging questions and refusing to answer. The judge had to order him to answer. When he did, he admitted that Kennedy’s back wound was not dissected because the doctors—Humes, Finck, and Thornton Boswell—were ordered not to do so. He also admitted that Humes had to stop the examination once, because of all the interference. Once halted, Humes then asked aloud: “Who is in charge here?” Finck testified that an army general replied, “I am.” Finck then added: “You must understand that in those circumstances, there were law enforcement officials, military people, with various ranks and you have to coordinate the operations according to directions.” (DiEugenio, p. 300, italics added)

    Finck had given away the game. Kennedy’s back wound was not dissected, because the military presence there would not allow it. The doctors were not in charge; the Pentagon officers were. Because of this, no one would ever know for certain the precise circumstances by which President Kennedy was killed. Did the back wound transit the body? Did it meet the anterior neck wound as part of its trajectory? Those questions can never be answered, because of the military control of the Bethesda autopsy.

    Finck’s testimony was devastating to the official story, so much so, that when local US attorney Harry Connick informed Eardley what the doctor was saying, the maestro of the medical cover up panicked. When Dr. Boswell testified to the Assassination Records Review Board, he said that Eardley was really upset about what Finck said under oath at the Shaw trial. (DiEugenio, p. 304) Eardley told Boswell that he had to get someone to New Orleans quickly, because Finck was “really lousing everything up.” In other words, telling the truth was screwing up Eardley’s cover up efforts. Eardley flew Boswell to New Orleans, where he was met by Connick. But Eardley changed his mind and Boswell did not testify. Eardley’s intent was to have Boswell smear Finck as a “strange man.” Eardley probably changed his mind, because he realized that Finck was more experienced as a forensic pathologist than Humes or Boswell was. That was why they called him in a bit late in the procedure. It would have been difficult to discredit someone with better credentials than yourself. (DiEugenio, p. 304)

    This was what writers Oliver Stone and co-writer Zachary Sklar had based this part of the film upon, although they had not yet seen the declassified machinations behind the scenes from Washington with Eardley. But this was all sworn testimony at the Shaw trial. JAMA could have availed themselves of it rather easily by calling Mr. Stone or the court stenographer of the Shaw trial—Helen Dietrich—who was still alive at the time. There is no evidence that Lunderg or Breo did either. Lundberg’s reaction to the film was not at all scientific or medically sound. After he saw the picture, he wrote a letter to his friend Jim Humes. It said:

    Have you seen the movie JFK? Three hours and fifteen minutes of truth mixed with non-truth mixed with alleged truth. For the younger person, not knowledgeable about 1963—very difficult to tell the difference. Please either write the truth now for JAMA or let Dennis Breo (and me?) interview you…to set the record straight—at least about the autopsy. (Brad Kizzia in Assassination Science, edited by James Fetzer, p.73)

    In other words, Breo and Lundberg went to work to counter the facts that JFK had set forth. Which were based upon Finck’s sworn testimony. It was later revealed in a deposition that Lundberg likely did not know that these autopsy scenes were based upon Finck’s testimony, when he wrote that letter to Humes. (Brad Kizzia in Trauma Room One, p. 165, by Dr. Charles Crenshaw.)

    Dr, Charles Crenshaw

    Something else had happened while Lundberg and Breo were setting about their task to rehabilitate one of the worst autopsies ever performed. Dr. Charles Crenshaw had published his book, Conspiracy of Silence. In that volume, Crenshaw revealed that upon being shown the autopsy photographs by researcher Gary Shaw, he was taken aback, because they did not conform with what he recalled. (Crenshaw, p. 18) Crenshaw said the back of the head photo did not reveal the blowout wound he saw and the anterior neck wound seemed widened and enlarged. Crenshaw’s book was published in April of 1992. It became a best seller.

    Breo and Lundberg prepared the May 1992 issue of JAMA for the original autopsy doctors to tell their story. They even called a press conference, in advance, in New York City. The article and the press conference also brought into question the efficacy of Crenshaw’s book. In fact, Lundberg and Breo even questioned if Crenshaw was in the emergency room. (Crenshaw, pgs. 153, 161, 165)

    Somehow, in his recent letter to the New York Times, Breo forgot to mention some rather embarrassing reporting in the Times about that press conference. Dr. Lawrence Altman was at that 1992 event in New York. His two reports for the Times showed that all one had to do was peruse the Warren Commission volumes to discover that Crenshaw was in the emergency room at Parkland Hospital when Kennedy was there. (Crenshaw, p. 166). Even though the Altman articles were published before the issue of JAMA was distributed, there was no correction added to the issue.

    Crenshaw requested a right to reply and Lundberg refused. Crenshaw then launched a lawsuit for defamation. Brad Kizzia represented the surgeon. The depositions in that case were rather interesting. It is quite obvious that Lundberg and Breo had an agenda. And they did not care about the long factual record of the Kennedy case. For instance, in his letter to the Times claiming he knows there were only two shots from the rear and they were by Oswald, Breo writes that the lower rear wound came in at the neck. This proves that not only did Breo not study the case before he wrote the JAMA articles—he has not studied it since. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) had the autopsy photographs. They published artists’ renditions of the wounds. That wound, which Breo says is in the neck, is clearly in Kennedy’s back. (Crenshaw, p. 269) This is a fact that not even Dr. Michael Baden of the HSCA could deny. If a writer will not even admit that, then how can anyone trust him with the rest of the facts of the JFK autopsy.

    For in addition to the autopsy doctors being stopped from dissecting the back wound, there is no existing record of them sectioning Kennedy’s brain. This should have been done, in order to track the bullet path through the skull. No examining doctor since—from the HSCA or the ARRB—has been able to find any records from a sectioning process. (Although Doug Horne has made the case it was done and then covered up. Click here to read that essay.) To say that this was a failing is a monumental understatement.  For if the brain was not sectioned, then:

    1. How can one chart the bullet path through the skull?
    2. Say with confidence that JFK was hit by only one bullet in the head?
    3. Tell us that only one bullet came in from behind?

    Adding to this problem, the angle from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository to the limousine below is slightly right to left.  But if one believes the autopsy, the bullet exited going left to right. There is also the problem that the 1968 Ramsey Clark Panel moved the rear skull wound up four inches to the cowlick area. But yet, for JAMA, Lundberg and Breo moved it back down again. These serious issues in the Kennedy case were all either discounted or ignored by JAMA. (Crenshaw, p. 203) As was the riddle of the weight of Kennedy’s brain. The supplementary autopsy report, filed on December 6, 1963, says that the weight was 1500 grams. (ibid, p. 238) This is virtually impossible to believe. Too many witnesses saw a brain that was missing a significant amount of mass. Secondly, from films and pictures of the assassination, one can see the blood and tissue that was ejected from Kennedy’s skull. This has led many to believe that there was some real subterfuge going on, with not just the autopsy, but the supplemental autopsy days later. It is why so many observers, e.g. forensic scientist Henry Lee, believe that the autopsy in the JFK case was such a mess that no observer can come to real conclusions about precisely how Kennedy was killed. (Lee said this in an interview with Oliver Stone for the upcoming documentary JFK: Destiny Betrayed)

    As both Gary Aguilar and Cyril Wecht noted in their review of JAMA’s articles (there was more than one), the fundamental factual errors that Breo and Lundberg made would not pass muster in a high school class on the JFK case. In the first sentence of the first article, Breo wrote that only Humes and Boswell knew what really happened during the autopsy of JFK. Thus ignoring Pierre Finck, who actually was the only experienced forensic pathologist of the three. (Aguilar and Wecht in Crenshaw, p. 202) Breo then added that the JAMA interview was the only time that Humes and Boswell had publicly discussed the JFK case. This was wrong in more than one sense. In 1967, Boswell had granted an interview to Josiah Thompson for attribution in his book Six Seconds in Dallas. In that same year, Humes gave an interview to Dan Rather for a CBS special broadcast in the summer of 1967. All three doctors had appeared in public before the HSCA; Humes was even on television for a second interview done alone. Boswell had given interviews to both the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times. Humes had given an interview for attribution to David Lifton. All of this betrays the fact that JAMA wanted to trumpet their articles as being somehow unprecedented in the literature, when, in fact, that was not an accurate assessment.

    In the second article, JAMA stated, through one of the Parkland doctors, that none of what the Dallas doctors saw contradicted that the bullets were fired from behind Kennedy and above. Now, at this time, the Assassination Records Review Board had not declassified the drawings and affidavits given to the HSCA. These clearly denoted a large, avulsive wound in the rear of Kennedy’s skull, which would suggest a shot from the front. But even in 1992, there was testimony and evidence that such was the case. To cite just two examples: the Warren Commission testimony of Secret Service agent Clint Hill and the drawing on page 107 of  Thompson’s book Six Seconds in Dallas directed by Dr. Robert McClelland. (Click here for Hill)

    One of the worst things about the JAMA articles and Breo’s performance was that, as attorney Brad Kizzia discovered, neither Lundberg nor Breo ever talked to Crenshaw himself. (Crenshaw, p. 164) But, beyond that, Kizzia also discovered that there was no peer review of Breo’s writing about the JFK case. (ibid, p. 165) The excuse given was that Breo’s work was only considered journalism. Considering that this “journalism” discussed and reviewed a quite complex and controversial subject and that Breo was not a physician, this is a truly remarkable decision by the editors at JAMA. And it’s why many doctors suspended their subscriptions to the magazine afterwards. Making all this even more troubling was the fact that Lundberg was a pathologist. Yet he admitted he had not read any books about the JFK case. (Crenshaw, p. 165) JAMA ended up settling with Crenshaw for about a quarter of a million dollars.

    The AMA board terminated George Lundberg seven years later. At that time, during the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings, he was running an article about what college students considered oral sex to be. The executives at the AMA declared that he had compromised “the integrity of the journal” and they had been inserted “into a debate that had nothing to do with science or medicine.” (BBC News, 1/18/99)

    That judgment could have been asserted back in 1992.

  • NOLA Express Interview with Mark Lane

    NOLA Express Interview with Mark Lane

    In the spring of 1968, Mark Lane was in New Orleans helping Jim Garrison with his case against Clay Shaw. While there, Lane met with the editors of an alternative newspaper called NOLA Express. He granted them an interview, which became part of his FBI file. We have extracted that interview for our readers to peruse. We should note that the FBI had surveillance on Lane almost everywhere he went at this time. He was not only aiding Garrison, but he also was helping young men resist the draft.

    Rob Couteau pointed out the interview which is housed at Black Vault.

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

    Dennis Riches has provided this typed transcription of the Mark Lane interview.

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

  • The Wilcott Affidavit and Interrogation by the HSCA

    The Wilcott Affidavit and Interrogation by the HSCA

    James Wilcott worked out of the Tokyo CIA station at the time of the assassination. He was not questioned by the Warren Commission. His information was that he had been unwittingly involved with paying Oswald through a high security clearance, since he worked in the finance office. He learned this after the fact through various sources within the Agency, who all recognized what had happened after the assassination and the association of Oswald’s name with the crime. Wilcott’s affidavit and deposition were declassified by the ARRB. We think our readers would be interested in reading his evidence./p>

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

  • Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and Co., 2019)

    Review of Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Henry Holt and Co., 2019)

    I

    In his latest book on the Central Intelligence Agency’s history of dirty tricks, longtime historian Stephen Kinzer attempts to paint a picture of the vast and shadowy tapestry that was the American intelligence apparatus at mid-century, using one of its most infamous henchmen, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, head of the Technical Services Division of the CIA, as its focal point. While the title would suggest that Kinzer has unearthed new biographical information about this sinister character, I found little that was not already available in other surveys of the field. Knowing the quotidian details of Sid’s family life, his habits, and his strange charm really did not advance a story, which was essentially a rehash of known facts repackaged as a biography of what Kinzer deems the CIA’s “Poisoner in Chief.” While there is some survey value in this book regarding the technical perspective of how the CIA dreamt up its machinations of torture, mind-control, psychological warfare, and exotic poisons, its real strength is in Kinzer’s narrative flair. I read it in a single, very uncomfortable sitting. And for that, I feel it does play a valuable role in the historiography of this unsettling topic, one of which most Americans are barely aware, or at best, would rather forget, despite its present-day relevance.

    Kinzer begins his book with a stark postwar vignette:

    White flags hung from many windows as shell-shocked Germans measured the depth of their defeat. Hitler was dead. Unconditional surrender had sealed the collapse of the Third Reich. Munich, like many German cities, lay in ruins. With the guns finally silent, people began venturing out. On a wall near Odeonsplatz, someone painted:  “CONCENTRATION CAMPS DACHAU—BUCHENWALD—I AM ASHAMED TO BE GERMAN.” (p.13)

    The Allies were faced with some of their most trying decisions after the Soviet Union’s capture of Berlin and the subsequent surrender of all Nazi forces in Europe. Many Allied officials knew that ideologies as entrenched, compelling, and destructive as fascism died hard. Just because their nation was in ruins, leaderless, and at the mercy of rampaging Red Army troops on one end and embittered, battle-weary Americans on the other, this did not necessarily mean the German people would go quietly into the night and embrace ideas like peaceful co-existence with their European brethren, or even American-style “democracy.” Some, like Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, wanted Germany reduced to an agricultural backwater with no future prospect of industrial production, military rearmament, or political clout in a world they had only years earlier sought to conquer and rule. Others had different ideas.

    As the OSS would soon discover, clandestine warfare and the implied threat of biological warfare had played a major role in both the Japanese and German governments’ early chess moves. As new to the game, that spy agency was only beginning to understand these matters. While Roosevelt begrudgingly fulfilled Winston Churchill’s 1944 request for half a million bomblets filled with anthrax, by the time the batch was coming off the production lines of a converted factory in Indiana, the Nazis had surrendered.

    In the ensuing discoveries made in the wake of German capitulation, however, word soon spread that Nazi doctors like Kurt Blome had weaponized dozens of biological agents, diseases, and plagues. Further, that he had been in friendly competition with the sadistic Japanese scientist and biological researcher Shiro Ishii, whose Unit 731 committed human atrocities on captured Allied and Chinese soldiers and civilians that would have made Caligula wince. Much like in their technical advances in rocketry, jet propulsion, tanks, artillery, and submarines, the Nazis were apparently leaps and bounds ahead of the United States in this dark field too. OSS officers on the ground were curious and would soon make a choice that would color and shape the moral landscape of the newly formed CIA in the years to come. As Kinzer notes:

    Nazi doctors had accumulated a unique store of knowledge. They had learned how long it takes for human beings to die after exposure to various germs and chemicals, and which toxins kill most efficiently. Just as intriguing, they had fed mescaline and other psychoactive drugs to concentration camp inmates in experiments aimed at finding ways to control minds or shatter the human psyche. Much of their data was unique, because it could come only from experiments in which human beings were made to suffer or die. That made Blome a valuable target—but a target for what? Justice cried out for his punishment. From a U.S. Army base in Maryland, however, came an audaciously contrary idea:  instead of hanging Blome, let’s hire him. (p.14)

    The author then continues:

    For a core of Americans who served in the military and in intelligence agencies during World War II, the war never really ended. All that changed was the enemy. The role once played by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was assumed by the Soviet Union and, after 1949, “Red China.” In the new narrative, monolithic Communism, directed from the Kremlin, was a demonic force that mortally threatened the United States and all humanity. With the stakes so existentially high, no sacrifice in the fight against Communism—of money, morality, or human life—could be considered excessive. (p.25)

    The psychic shock of totalitarian ideologies, unleashed in those roughly five and a half brutal years of WWII, was an enduring one for the case officers and assets that now made up the fledgling CIA. And with President Truman’s signing of the National Security Act in 1947, clandestine operations were essentially ratified in legal writ, with the stamp of the highest offices of government, a decision Truman would famously lament in his retirement. As Kinzer shows, the nebulous and ill-defined limits circumscribing this new shadow warfare were quickly pushed to their logical end by those who seemed to believe nothing was too extreme when the fate of the “free world,” as they understood it, was concerned. Given an unprecedented opportunity to play James Bond, an almost unlimited budget to fund new and exciting ways to overthrow governments, assassinate leaders, poison food supplies, and expose innocent people to mind-shattering substances in their search for mind control, they took the ball and ran with it. Things fell into place. Truman left office in 1953 and President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, were all too willing to use the CIA to achieve political ends. With John’s brother, Allen Dulles, now appointed as head of the Central Intelligence Agency, the circle was complete:  foreign policy would be a spy’s game, with very real conventional wars interspersed for flavor, but essentially, a secret and enduring war in the shadows. And to play the game, they needed the tools.

    Kinzer’s ability as a storyteller is pronounced in these early chapters. The book at this point reads like a John Le Carré novel, as much as it does a well-researched, thoroughly footnoted monograph of the early Cold War. Familiar names are given a face, a voice, a temper:  Wild Bill Donovan, Bill Harvey, Ira Baldwin, and of course, a young Jewish man from the Bronx named Sid with a club foot and a stammer who was studying biology back in the States.

    II

    Lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD, or “acid” on the street, plays a central role in Kinzer’s book, with many chapters devoted to the CIA’s explorations into its potential to manipulate human beings for political and social engineering ends. Wilson Greene, an officer of the United States Chemical Corps, discovered scattered reports and rumors of a Swiss doctor named Albert Hoffmann, who Kinzer believes is the first person ever to have had an acid trip. Though Hoffmann, who worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, had taken this journey in 1943, it would not reach Washington until 1949. Kinzer describes the thesis of Greene’s paper to government officials, entitled:  “Psychochemical Warfare:  A New Concept of War:”

    Their will to resist would be weakened greatly, if not entirely destroyed, by the mass hysteria and panic which would ensue. The symptoms which are considered to be of value in strategic and tactical operations include the following:  fits or seizures, dizziness, fear, panic, hysteria, hallucinations, migraine, delirium, extreme depression, notions of hopelessness, lack of initiative to do even simple things, suicidal mania. Greene proposed that America’s military scientists be given a new mission. At the outer edge of imagination, he suggested, beyond artillery and tanks, beyond chemicals, beyond germs, beyond even nuclear bombs, might lie an unimagined cosmos of new weaponry:  psychoactive drugs. Greene believed they could usher in a new era of humane warfare. (p.29)

    This, along with reports of recently-returning soldiers from the Korean War who seemed to sympathize more with the enemy they were sent to kill than their American brethren, led some policy planners in Washington to suspect that the Reds were up to more than conventional propaganda. That, as Kinzer notes, none were actually “brainwashed” as Washington suspected, but simply critical of what they viewed as a hypocritical, unjust, capitalistic and segregated mid-century America, didn’t matter in the binary option set of hard line anti-communists like CIA officers Dulles, James Angleton, Richard Helms, and their colleagues. These were the same people who essentially green-lit what would eventually turn into the MK-ULTRA program, whose directive was to probe the limits of the human psyche, with the express aim to eventually discover how a fully functional person could be “depatterned” and remade, as it were, in the image of his or her handler for any number of field-deployable roles.

    While that program is exhaustively detailed elsewhere, Kinzer does add some colorful vignettes to the story that seem like they jumped from the pages of a Thomas Pynchon novel rather than the historical record:  secretly dosing colleagues at dinner parties, most famously Frank Olson, who of course “jumped or fell” from a 13-story Manhattan hotel room after having an acid-induced nervous breakdown and frantically seeking an exit from the intelligence field, paying crooked cops in cash to sit behind two-way mirrors in rented San Francisco brothels to watch prostitutes try to illicit sensitive information from acid-dosed patrons, injecting an elephant at an Oklahoma zoo with a lethal dose of LSD, releasing “benign” but actually toxic bacterial aerosols off the coast of California (Operation Seaspray) to test their dispersal pattern on an unaware American population getting their Sunday morning newspapers. The list goes on and only gets more absurd as it does.

    What Kinzer accomplishes in Poisoner in Chief is to show just how unscientific so much of what we call MK-ULTRA and its hundred-plus “sub-projects” really were. With little oversight, and an actual legal license to kill, torture, abduct, and abscond, the early case officers and assets tasked to the CIA’s biological and mind-control initiatives were dangerously out of control, yet in some sense, legally justified, given the vague language and imperatives of the National Security Act which legitimized their activities. As George White, the crooked cop mentioned earlier, said years later in a grateful letter to his mentor and boss, Sidney Gottlieb, “… it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill and cheat, steal, deceive, rape, and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” (p.155)

    Indeed. Where else but in the CIA?

    III

    Poisoner in Chief proceeds predictably enough through the sixties and seventies, with the major uses of Gottlieb’s Technical Services Division of the CIA highlighted against the backdrop of a given foreign policy episode. Crafting ever sillier ways to kill Fidel Castro—boots laced with thallium to make his mighty beard fall out, exploding ornate seashells to catch his eye on one of his frequent scuba dives, and botulin-laced cigars that only needed to be held between the lips for seconds to kill—Gottlieb and his junior staff of kids from local technical colleges and workshops were never out of ideas. Poisoned tubes of toothpaste for the first democratically elected leader of the Congo? No problem. “Joe from Paris” (Gottlieb’s code-name in the Congo operation) will arrive in Leopoldville shortly. So will QJ/WIN, the backup shooter. Standby.

    This is an exciting part of the book and provided a rare glimpse into the devil’s workshop that was TSS (Technical Services Staff). But, at the same time, it contains some critical oversights that must be addressed. Namely viewing President Kennedy as a younger, fresh-faced continuation of Eisenhower, and someone who laid the groundwork for Johnson, rather than as someone opposed to either of his executive bookends. A president who was rather unique in his conciliatory vision of peaceful coexistence; a president who, unbelievable as it may sound today, had genuine empathy for the developing nations of the world. This is not a debatable point in 2019, despite the MSM’s dogged, fifty-five-year smear campaign against a most promising U.S. leader, as any reader at Kennedys and King should know by now.

    Yet there is a real political vacuum in this section of the book. In his tracing of the Gottlieb attempts to poison Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, there is no mentioning of how these plots were hurried in late 1960 after John F. Kennedy won the election. Yet, there are authors who have come to this conclusion after reading the cable traffic. (John Morton Blum, Years of Discord, pp. 175-76) Almost everyone agrees today that Kennedy clearly favored Lumumba in his struggle to free Congo from European imperialism. And it appears that the CIA knew that.

    As most authors also realize today, the CIA plots with the Mafia to assassination Fidel Castro did not have presidential sanction. This was the conclusion expressed by the Church Committee in 1975 and is fortified by the release by the Assassination Records Review Board of the CIA Inspector General Report on that subject. Yet, in the face of all this, plus the declassified files of the Assassination Records Review Board, former New York Times reporter Kinzer claims,

    Plotting against Castro did not end when Eisenhower left office at the beginning of 1961. His successor, John F. Kennedy, turned out to be equally determined to “eliminate” Castro. The spectacular collapse of the CIA’s 1961 invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs intensified his determination. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, his brother, relentlessly pressured the CIA to crush Castro and repeatedly demanded explanations of why it had not been accomplished. Samuel Halpern, who served at the top level of the covert action directorate during this period, asserted that “the Kennedys were on our back constantly … they were just absolutely obsessed with getting rid of Castro.” Richard Helms felt the pressure directly. “There was a flat-out effort ordered by the White House, the President, Bobby Kennedy—who was after all his man, his right-hand man in these matters—to unseat the Castro government, to do everything possible to get rid of it by whatever device could be found,” Helms later testified. “The Bay of Pigs was a part of this effort, and after the Bay of Pigs failed, there was even a greater push to try to get rid of this Communist influence 90 miles from United States shores … The principal driving force was the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. There isn’t any question about this.” (p.122)

    First, to take the testimony of a practiced liar like Richard Helms regarding his sworn enemies, the Kennedy brothers, at face value, is almost comical. Richard Helms ordered Sidney Gottlieb to shred every accessible document pertaining to MK-ULTRA before congressional investigations discovered his illegal program’s dirty paper trail. Helms famously walked into the Oval office with a rifle, plopped it on JFK’s desk, and said the CIA had just discovered (through acid-based swaths), a Soviet serial number on the stock, and that the gun was from Cuba, strengthening, so he thought, his case that Kennedy should immediately invade the island before the Russians had time to reinforce Castro. Kennedy asked to see more proof, since Helms said the magic acid test only worked for a few seconds and then destroyed the numbers it allegedly revealed. Kennedy then waved him out of the office to finish opening his daily mail. Not exactly hell-bent, as Kinzer would have us believe.

    Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell planned the Bay of Pigs to fail, stacking the initial invasion waves with the lowest quality, most poorly trained groups of the Cuban exiles slated for the assault. They did this anticipating that Kennedy would cave once reports got back to him that they could not get off the beach and capture strategic inland objectives without naval and air support (and, in all likelihood, the landing of U.S. Marines). Kennedy later understood this and complained about it. But the lie was fortified when Allen Dulles and E. Howard Hunt commissioned a ghost-written article in Fortune that created the narrative Kinzer and others have fraudulently promulgated:  JFK got cold feet and “called off” the air support, leaving those poor Cuban exiles stranded on the beach. Kennedy inherited the operation from Eisenhower, reluctantly green-lit it only because the CIA was lying to him at every step, and when he realized its quixotic goals were impossible without escalation and the commitment of non-clandestine U.S. forces, sat anxiously in his briefing room as it fell apart. He then quietly fired Dulles, Bissell, and Cabell.

    Similarly, to say that Robert Kennedy was hell bent on killing Castro is to fail to acknowledge the declassification of the CIA’s Inspector General report on the CIA/Mafia plots. That long report states that Robert Kennedy had to be briefed about the plots by the CIA after the FBI accidentally discovered them. Obviously, if the Kennedys had been in on them, there would have been no briefing necessary. But making it worse, the CIA told Robert Kennedy that they would now put a halt to them, since RFK was very upset by the briefing. This was a lie. The plots continued along without his knowledge, pairing mobster John Roselli and CIA officer Bill Harvey. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, pp 327-28) The obvious question that Kinzer does not ask is:  Why would the CIA have to lie to RFK, if he was in agreement with the plots? Kinzer also overlooks the apparent understanding of Castro’s own feelings towards the matter. He ignores the fact that it was largely Robert Kennedy, through Soviet back channels during the Cuban Missile Crisis, who averted what looked almost certainly to be a nuclear Armageddon. That incident provided a perfect opportunity to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Afterwards, Castro suggested a détente with Washington and JFK obliged him. It’s easy to see why the CIA hated both of the brothers. And while this misreading of history is only a few paragraphs of an otherwise fairly well researched and engaging book, it provides a disappointing and misleading aspect that readers unfamiliar with the true history of the Kennedys’ views about the developing world. If anyone disagrees, it would be good for them to fact-check for themselves. Reading the IG report would be a good place to start. (Click here for that link)

    Overall, while largely a repackaging of long-known facts, the book is an interesting introduction for those unacquainted with the dark side of the CIA at mid-century and into the latter years of the Cold War. Gottlieb remains a mysterious, infrequently quoted figure in the book, with a few interspersed interviews with his children and friends. Perhaps most interesting is Kinzer’s chapters on Gottlieb’s attempted retirement and disappearance from the TSS, floating around abroad, in a leper colony in India and other exotic hideouts. His very face and name would have remained unknown to the general public and, likely, the research community had it not been for late 70s probes like the Church Committee. Kinzer does a fine job here and this probably represents the only unique aspect of the book, focusing as it does on their attempts to see how deep the CIA’s rabbit hole was when they stumbled upon the last surviving documents detailing projects like MK-ULTRA and MKNAOMI.

  • JFK Records Release: Why the Redactions?

    JFK Records Release: Why the Redactions?

    Like many Americans dedicated to learning the truth of the political assassinations of the 1960’s, I was eager to see in October of 2017 what our government had been withholding for decades. The President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (referred to throughout as the Act or JFK Act), passed into law by President Clinton, ensured the American public complete access to the government’s records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy subject to very specific exceptions.[i] Needless to say, after spending many hours reviewing the “newly released” JFK assassination records, I have been frustrated and outraged by the government’s efforts to comply with the JFK Act.

    JFK Records Collection Act: Brief Overview

    If one reads the actual text of the JFK Act, something jumps off the page at the very beginning. In its “Findings, Declarations and Purposes” behind the legislation, the U.S. Congress states: “most of the records related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest of cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.”[ii] This declaration of Congress was made in 1992!

    Now, almost 27 years after the creation of the JFK Act, and almost 56 years after the John F. Kennedy assassination, we should be, according to the JFK Act, fully informed on the history surrounding the assassination of our 35th president, subject only to the rarest of exceptions and with specific disclosures to the American public regarding the continued postponement of any record. That is what the JFK Act says in the clearest of language. Well, we are not even close to what the Act required and one could argue that the recent “records release” has put the American public in an even worse position. The reader may be asking how we can be in a worse position in light of the recent records “release”. As explained in this article, the records we have access to are still in redacted form. A “protected collection” is still withheld in full. Unfortunately, the American public must now take legal action and that should be extremely troubling to our citizens considering the clear requirements of the JFK Act.

    Where Are the “New” Records?

    The JFK Act authorized the creation of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB), an independent body of individuals who were given authority to collect and review assassination records and make determinations regarding disclosure to the public. Many people do not realize, however, that most of the government’s assassination records were already released by the ARRB in the 1990’s. Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK” sparked a major public interest in the assassination, compelling a response from Congress. As discussed above, that response was the JFK Records Collection Act and the creation of the ARRB. A significant portion of the records released in the 1990’s were archived on a fantastic website operated by the Mary Ferrell Foundation.[iii] That website now has a searchable database for assassination records known as the “JFK Database Explorer”.[iv] The problem we face is that the records release of the 1990’s was a collective maze of redacted records. The redactions resulted in an unexplained and unclassified removal of names (i.e. intelligence code names, in particular), locations and addresses. The redactions make it difficult if not impossible for a researcher to make any determination of what the records actually say. The mandated 2017 release was supposed to reveal new records and previously-released records without redactions. As explained below, the Act requires a certification from the President for any portion of a record that is not released in full (i.e. un-redacted) by now. Not only has this not happened to date, but what have seen since October 2017 is a blatant and continuing disregard of the JFK Act.

    What Did I Find?

    Assassination records can be searched and viewed through the “JFK Assassination Collection Reference System” maintained by the National Archives.[v] In the past 24 months, the national media has covered the various batches of new records released or “re-released” in 2017 and 2018. I say “re-released” because a significant portion of the “new” records released in 2017-2018 were again released, but with the same redactions. Did the people in charge of these records do any actual work, or were they directed to do a superfluous job? More troubling is that the same records with the same redactions were released without any kind of explanation or certification from the President or any other government official as required by the JFK Act.

    Another group of records have been released with some redactions removed. The problem is that the vast majority of “new” information I have seen involves only the names of cities and countries, again with no explanation from a government agency regarding the purpose or rationale for now providing “new information” but withholding other information within the records. When read in context, it appears that these cities and countries identify foreign CIA stations that were exchanging information on various subjects of interest. However, the author or recipient of the record remains redacted in almost every case, so it is difficult to learn any new information from the record. At the end of this sentence, we have provided a hyperlink to some select samples of these so-called “new” records, which allow the reader to see how unhelpful the “new” records are in terms of receiving the actual history and circumstances surrounding the assassination.

    104-10320-10039

    104-10326-10075

    104-10326-10077

    104-10326-10078

    104-10326-10079

    104-10326-10080

    How Bad is it, and What Can We Do About it?

    The violation of the JFK Act is obvious. We are left with a collection of incomplete records that the government is apparently comfortable in releasing. Is it laziness, or something worse? The good news is that the violation of any law or statute has a remedy for the wronged party. This is no different. There is a troubling atmosphere regarding the public disclosure of the JFK records, as if it’s acceptable to continue violating the Act due to the “sensitivity” of the JFK assassination. Is it the assassination itself that is still sensitive, or is it the information in these “protected” records that is too embarrassing to those individuals or agencies that were involved? As we approach 2020, 56 years after the JFK assassination, we should have extreme discomfort about the operations of our government that apparently are still in use today. Can we assume otherwise? We have not received an explanation for continued postponement on one single assassination record.

    Those interested in the truth of our nation’s actual history must remember that the JFK Act is a federal law. Why should it be treated as a mere “suggestion” or a casual attempt to provide Americans with a hint of what may have occurred in 1963? The Act has a clear and defined process for continued postponement of assassination records. Specifically, the Act requires that each assassination record be publicly disclosed in full by October 26, 2017 unless the President certifies based on clear and convincing evidence that: (1) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (2) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.[vi] For continued postponement, the Act requires an unclassified written explanation specifying the decision for postponement on very specific grounds.

    What are the grounds for continued postponement of the JFK assassination records? The specifics may surprise you and will probably upset you given that the assassination occurred 56 years ago. Postponement, in whole or in part, is only authorized by the Act if there is clear and convincing evidence that:

    (1) the threat to the military defense, intelligence operations, or conduct of foreign relations of the United States posed by the public disclosure of the JFK assassination (record) is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest, and such public disclosure would reveal:

    (a) an intelligence agent whose identity currently requires protection;

    (b) an intelligence source or method which is currently utilized, or reasonably expected to be utilized, by the U.S. government and which has not been officially disclosed, the disclosure of which would interfere with the conduct of intelligence activities; or

    (c) any other matter currently relating to the military defense, intelligence operations or conduct of foreign relations of the U.S., the disclosure of which would demonstrably impair the national security of the United States;

    (2) the public disclosure of the assassination record would reveal the name or the identity of a living person who provided confidential information to the U.S. and would pose a substantial risk of harm to that person;

    (3) the public disclosure of the assassination record could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, and that invasion of privacy is so substantial that it outweighs the public interest;

    (4) the public disclosure of the assassination record would compromise the existence of an understanding of confidentiality currently requiring protection between a government agent and a cooperating individual or foreign government, and public disclosure would be so harmful that it outweighs the public interest; or

    (5) the public disclosure of the assassination record would reveal a security or protective procedure currently utilized, or reasonably expected to be utilized, by the Secret Service or another government agency responsible for protecting government officials, and public disclosure would be so harmful that it outweighs the public interest.[vii]

    Those were the criteria for postponement in 1992, and they are still the criteria today. If there are in fact records in existence that would harm the United States and its national security operations for a reason stated above, we are still entitled under the JFK Act to an unclassified written document explaining for the specific reason for postponement, and this applies to each and every record.[viii]

    To me, there is a logical remedy for this continuing struggle, which is contained in the JFK act itself. As explained above, the ARRB was appointed to ensure an independent review of assassination records for disclosure to the public. While the ARRB did a lot of great work, resulting in the transfer of thousands of assassination records to the National Archives for disclosure to the public, we are still left with the redacted records and no legitimate certification from the President regarding the continued postponement.

    I think the ARRB is still relevant, and there is no reason that it could not reconvene and finish the work required by the Act. In fact, the President with support from Congress has the authority to do it.[ix] The Act has certain provisions for the winding down and dissolution of the ARRB, but that assumes that the ARRB was allowed to complete its work. Given the secrecy and inaction we still face to this day, it is certainly appropriate and warranted under the JFK Act to reconvene the ARRB or some independent body that has authority to complete the review of the “protected collection” and make the appropriate disclosures to the public.

    What is the “protected collection”? If approved for postponement by the ARRB in the 1990’s, under the specific standards of the Act and based on clear and convincing evidence, the ARRB was required to transmit these records to the National Archives as part of a “protected collection”.[x] The National Archives was then required to consult with a Congressional committee regarding the treatment of this “protected collection”. This committee is a joinder of a) the Committee on Government Operations of the House; and b) the Committee of Government Affairs of the Senate.[xi] What have these committees done, if anything? What we do know is that these committees continue to have jurisdiction over the disposition of postponed records following the termination of the ARRB.[xii]

    One would think, based on the lack of continued progress from 1992 until 2017, that there was a 25-year delay authorized by the JFK Act. Again, that is wrong. After the creation of this “protected collection” as approved by the ARRB, the government agencies that created the assassination records were required to continue a “periodic review” of the protected records in order to ensure compliance with the Act.[xiii] This was the mechanism installed into the Act to ensure that disclosure of the assassination records would continue after the dissolution of the ARRB. Notably, the postponement of release of any assassination record required an unclassified written description of the reason for the continued postponement, to be provided to the National Archives and published in the Federal Register.[xiv] What happened instead? The ARRB was permitted to wind down, and to our knowledge all government agencies ignored their continuing “periodic review” obligation.

    Moving forward to 2017, there should have been little drama concerning the mandated final release after 25 years. After all, if the government agencies responsible for the “periodic review” had done their jobs, the 2017 deadline should have been a non-event. What happened instead? On the eve of the final deadline, we saw tweets from the President about a full release as if that was a gift to the American public. However, at the eleventh hour, for reasons not disclosed to the American public, President Trump backed down and authorized another 6-month delay. Did we get an explanation under the criteria required by the Act? No. This was on the heels of a 25-year period in which those agencies and security committees in charge of the “protected collection” were obligated to perform a periodic review for public disclosure and provide the National Archives with an unclassified written descriptions of the reason for any continued postponement. Clearly this critical part of the JFK Act was intentionally ignored or at best carelessly neglected by those in charge.

    Giving the government the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that there were in fact a handful of records that legitimately qualified for continued postponement after 25 years. Remember, Congress declared in the Act that this could happen in the rarest of cases. What was the President supposed to do in October of 2017 regarding these records? The President was required to issue a written certification stating that (i) continued postponement is made necessary by an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations; and (ii) the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.

    The reader may be asking if certain assassination records may be exempt or subject to special treatment. The answer is no. The disclosure requirements of the Act apply to executive branch records, Warren Commission records, and records of all intelligence and assassination Congressional committees including the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). The HSCA determined in 1978 that JFK was probably assassinated in a conspiracy, perhaps involving elements of organized crime and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans. We have known for years that the CIA, before JFK took office, had been involved in creating and training an assassination team involving organized crime and anti-Castro Cubans. Researchers have found evidence that this assassination program is linked to the JFK assassination. Is this what the government is trying to “conceal” by continuing to postpone the release of records? Or is there something deeper? We may not know the answer by having access to all records in unredacted form. However, the JFK Act is a federal law still in effect, and what we do know without question is that the government to date has been allowed to treat the JFK Act as a weak “suggestion” of how to treat these important records.

    So what actually happened at the statutory 25-year “deadline”? We have already discussed President Trump’s last minute delay and the fact that we received no certification from the President as required by the JFK Act. However, what’s equally alarming is that the records were released to the National Archives in 2017 and 2018 in redacted form and without the unclassified written explanation on the specific reasons for continued postponement. It’s certainly worth noting that the JFK Act has a specific and separate provision governing executive branch assassination records.[xv] Presidents Nixon and Bush (George H.W.) were involved in operations linked to the assassination, including the aforementioned assassination team and the Bay of Pigs operation. President Nixon was in charge of anti-Castro operations as Vice President and was doing so when the deal between organized crime, the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans to form and train a political assassination team was enacted. President Bush was CIA Director when the HSCA encountered significant obstacles in obtaining CIA assassination records. We now know that the CIA assigned a “liaison”, George Joannides, to the HSCA during its investigation, without disclosing to the HSCA that Mr. Joannides was managing the anti-Castro group that had a staged public altercation with Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans before the assassination. We now know that this altercation and other intelligence operations were designed to portray Oswald as a pro-Castro communist when in fact that was untrue. Former ARRB chairman John R. Tunheim commented to the Boston Globe in 2013: “There is a body of documents that the CIA is still protecting, which should be released. Relying on inaccurate representations made by the CIA in the mid-1990s, the Review Board decided that records related to a deceased CIA agent named George Joannides were not relevant to the assassination. Subsequent work by researchers, using other records that were released by the board, demonstrates that these records should be made public.” Mr. Tunheim said in a separate interview “It really was an example of treachery…If (the CIA) fooled us on that, they have fooled us on other things.”[xvi]

    We also now know that President Bush was affiliated with the CIA at the time of the assassination. Bush’s oil company “Zapata Oil” supported the Bay of Pigs operation (named “Operation Zapata” by the CIA). Bush was also specifically referenced in a memo issued by J. Edgar Hoover immediately after the assassination as the CIA contact for suspected Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans.

    This again comes back to our current President. The JFK Act states that the President has the “sole and non-delegable” duty to disclose the executive branch records to the National Archives, and he is only allowed to continue postponement with an unclassified written explanation stating the applicable grounds under the JFK Act.[xvii] Given the extreme power given to the President under the Act, one is left to wonder whether the executive branch is continuing a cover up of assassination operations going back 60 years now. If that is not the case, then it should be relatively easy for the President to state the reason(s) for continued postponement as required by the JFK Act.

    Again, one obvious remedy is for Congress to authorize the reconvening of the ARRB. An independent body with proper experience and a proper budget could finish the work that was intended by the JFK Act. If appropriate pressure was put on the President and the aforementioned House and Senate security committees, they should be compelled to respond. However, the concern is that a second ARRB would encounter the same inaction from the executive branch and other agencies that continue to violate the Act. However, it is a start. The JFK Act authorizes the ARRB to seek assistance from the Attorney General regarding any records that may be held under court seal or injunctive order. The Act also requires all executive agencies to cooperate in full with the ARRB to seek the “disclosure of all information relevant to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy consistent with the public interest.”[xviii]

    Some closing provisions of the JFK Act may answer our frustration, and they are somewhat troubling. Section 11(a) of the JFK Act states that the Act has precedence over any other law of the United States other than a) tax laws that prohibit the disclosure of an individual’s tax return; and b) deeds of gifts or donation of assassination records to the U.S. government. The JFK Act was Congress’s attempt to set the one and only legal standard for release of assassination records, so are we to assume that the only records in the “protected collection” are tax returns and records donated by the Kennedy family? Not likely. We know the reasons (if any) given to us for postponement, namely that protection of the records was and is still necessary for reasons of “national security”. However, that is not a legal standard or authority, and the JFK Act clearly mandates the authority for release of assassination records.

    The good news is that the JFK Act is still a valid law that can be enforced. Specifically, section 12 of the Act states that it will remain in effect until the National Archives has certified that all assassination records have been disclosed in full to the American public, and it authorizes judicial review of any final action taken by a government agency with respect to the records.

    As we approach 2020, it is time to recognize that the President and the other committees and agencies in charge of these records have taken “final action”. That action is an unexplained refusal to provide unredacted assassination records to the public in blatant violation of the JFK Act. We are either entitled to a complete release of records, or an explanation on why disclosure would compromise the national security operations of the United States. In 1964, our government concluded that the assassination was committed by a single man who had no accomplices. In 1978, our government concluded that the assassination was the result of a probable conspiracy perhaps involving organized crime and anti-Castro Cubans. If one or both were true (i.e. that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or was involved but assisted by organized crime and anti-Castro Cubans), there would seem to be zero correlation with the continuing security of our nation at this time. The only explanation is that we are continuing to use organized crime and/or Cuban agents to protect our nation, or the full disclosure of records would compromise certain other individuals or operations that still need protection for reasons of “national security”.

    Almost 60 years later, and almost 28 years after the ARRB was formed, it is difficult to imagine that there is a legitimate harm in releasing the records. Perhaps certain agencies or individuals would be embarrassed, but it’s time to get over that. At a minimum, we are entitled to a detailed certification, or judicial review if necessary, on each and every record still withheld. Fortunately, the JFK Act is still in effect and there are multiple alternatives within the Act itself to finally ensure compliance.

    [i] President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collections Act of 1992, 44 U. S. C. §2107, Public Law 102-526 (October 26, 1992), referred to in citations as the “JFK Act”.

    [ii] JFK Act, §2(a)(7).

    [iii] Mary Ferrell Foundation, maryferrell.org/pages/Documents.

    [iv] Mary Ferrell Foundation, maryferrell.org/jfkdb.php.

    [v] National Archives, archives.gov/research/jfk/search.

    [vi] JFK Act, §5(g)(d)

    [vii] JFK Act, §6

    [viii] JFK Act, §5(g)(2)(b)

    [ix] JFK Act, §7(b)

    [x] JFK Act, §5(e)(2)

    [xi] JFK Act, §4(d)

    [xii] JFK Act, §7(k)(1)

    [xiii] JFK Act, §5(g)

    [xiv] JFK Act, §5(g)

    [xv] JFK Act, §9(d)

    [xvi] Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_John_F._Kennedy_Assassination_Records_Collection_Act_of_1992

    [xvii] JFK Act, §9(d)

    [xviii] JFK Act, §10

  • The FBI Knew about David Ferrie on 11/22/63

    The FBI Knew about David Ferrie on 11/22/63

    The following document was uncovered by British researcher Malcolm Blunt and sent to us by his associate Bart Kamp. This writer, who is pretty up to speed on New Orleans, had never seen it before.

    It is a memo of a telephone conversation between a member of the New Orleans police intelligence unit and an FBI agent working out of the New Orleans office. That call took place on the day of the assassination. The police officer, P. J. Trosclair, is telling the FBI that David Ferrie was a possible suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy. He adds some reasons why, but then he also says that he thought that Lee Harvey Oswald was friends with Ferrie. The FBI agent, J. T. Sylvester, replies that the Bureau would be interested in any information that connected the two.

    Two days later, Sylvester gets more information from a local newsman about the connection of Oswald to Ferrie through the Civil Air Patrol. In other words, the FBI had information that Ferrie could be a suspect before Jim Garrison actually did. In fact, the document also says that Ray Comstock of the District Attorney’s office called the Bureau on November 25th to ask if they knew where Ferrie was.

    Sylvester then calls Special Agent John Rice and Rice says he would be interested in talking to Ferrie. Apparently, this then got too hot. Because at this point, Sylvester now says he is going to call Deke DeLoach in Washington, the number three man in the Bureau, to advise him of any comments he should make about Ferrie.

    The second document shows that the cover up about this was then snapped on by the Washington chiefs. They now say that Ferrie did not train Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol. And then the discreditation process begins. Jack Martin’s word could not be trusted about Ferrie. Ed Voebel who knew both Oswald and Ferrie, somehow does not have a good memory.

    So who does the FBI trust? David Ferrie, who, as the reader can see, lied his head off to them. The late Vincent Bugliosi wrote that there was not a scintilla of evidence of an FBI cover up in the JFK case. Technically, as shown by this document, he was right. There was a mountain of evidence to show an FBI cover up.

    ~ Jim DiEugenio

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

  • The Tragic ‘Years of Lead’: Puppetmasters Author Philip Willan Talks about the Manipulation of Terrorism, the Global War on the Left, and the Links between the JFK and Aldo Moro Assassinations

    The Tragic ‘Years of Lead’: Puppetmasters Author Philip Willan Talks about the Manipulation of Terrorism, the Global War on the Left, and the Links between the JFK and Aldo Moro Assassinations

    A prolific journalist and regular contributor to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Philip Willan is author of The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons, and the Killing of Roberto Calvi (2007), recently revised and updated under the title The Vatican at War: From Blackfriars Bridge to Buenos Aires (2013). In 1991, he published what would eventually become a classic history on the crimes of politically-motivated violence that occurred during Italy’s horrendous Years of Lead. Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy is both an in-depth analysis and a chronicle of such events. Its publication date is also significant. Just a year before, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti acknowledged the existence of a top-secret NATO operation, code-named Gladio. This clandestine network featured paramilitary groups that, in certain cases, employed rabidly right-wing operators whose sympathies lay closer to fascism and “black” terror than to democratic institutions. Questions concerning the interweaving threads between Gladio and right-wing terror constitute a principal theme running throughout Puppetmasters. The author also explores how left-wing or “red” terror was manipulated and possibly controlled by Western security forces in order to cripple Italy’s Communist Party and enfeeble the Socialist Party.

    Willan’s approach is that of a scholar: balanced, even-handed, and firmly rooted to the facts. At the same time, this highly informative tome, which is packed with fascinating material on every page, remains eminently readable and engaging. It unfolds like a detective story; but, unlike most pulp fiction, there are pieces to this puzzle that will forever remain missing and strands that will be left dangling in a suggestive variety of patterns and shapes. (This includes the question of covert CIA involvement in Italy and how certain figures involved in this drama may also have played a role in the deaths of Aldo Moro and JFK.) In his own words: “The story of secret service manipulation of left-wing terrorism is highly controversial and will certainly never be told in full.”

    The overarching theme of the tale is reflected in a quote from a book about marionettes that appears halfway through the account:

    Finally, the profound difference that exists––even at a psychological level––between the two methods of moving the ‘wooden actor’ should be emphasized: the puppet constitutes a prolongation of the puppetmaster’s hand, a direct amplification of his movements; it is given life by the arm and fingers of the person maneuvering it. The marionette, in contrast, is moved in an indirect manner, which I have heard compared by some marionettists to the act of playing a stringed musical instrument: and it therefore requires attention of a rational type.

    –– Italo Sordi, Introduction to Pëtr Bogatyrëv’s Il Teatro delle Marionette (The Marionette Theatre), Brescia, 1980.

    Willan deftly fleshes out this idea in the context of his overall story: “If many right-wing terrorists were glove puppets,” he says, “with their manipulator’s hand inserted up their backs and controlling their every move,”

    left-wing terrorists were more like marionettes, dancing on the end of invisible strings; their manipulation was an altogether subtler art. The ideal for the secret service marionette-masters was, after all, to use left-wing extremists to serve their conservative cause without any direct contact or collusion. This was their greatest theatrical exploit, to have their genuine adversaries unwittingly follow the secret service script. Nevertheless, a number of people involved in left-wing terrorism appear to have been in direct contact with Western secret services, marionettes controlled by real, if barely discernible, strings.

    One figure that was in a position to know about such things was General Gianadelio Maletti, director of counter-espionage for Italy’s SID, or Defense Information Service. In a series of notes that were later confiscated by police in 1980 (and included in the P2 Commission report), Maletti contemplates how such manipulation may have been enacted. In an entry titled “Guard Dogs,” he rhetorically asks: “Is Italy the master of its own destiny?” After contemplating the role of foreign intel services in his native land (including the CIA, DIA, and FBI), Maletti wonders: “To what extent do our allies have an interest in maintaining an inefficient, corrupt, and therefore weak ruling class in power” in Italy, “an ‘awkward’ industrial rival of its Western partners in the 1960s.”

    In a series of telegraphically rendered reflections, the final entry in the general’s document includes, among other things, a reference to Gladio. “The coup plots originate a long way off (1947-48 …) and they go far. The hypotheses of urban guerrilla warfare … of the intervention of groups secretly trained by the ‘Parallel SID’ [Gladio]: who are the puppetmasters operating in Italy to keep the country tied to ‘choices’ made 30 years ago?” Note how the term choices is presented between quotation marks. With witting irony, Maletti is reminding us that these “choices” were not in fact “chosen” by Italy but, instead, were imposed upon her by an external power. Just to be perfectly clear, he adds: “The ‘hypothesis’” is “in fact no such thing” (i.e., it is a certainty). Maletti might have known a thing or two: both he and his boss, a bitter rival named General Vito Miceli, head of military intelligence, were imprisoned ”for protecting right-wing extremists.”

    Like a main chord sung to lead an orchestral improvisation hovering beneath, the term puppetmasters appears at several notable points in the narrative. In this deftly staged opera played out between puppets and puppeteers, marionettes and marionettists, an obvious candidate for such a role appears in the figure of one Licio Gelli, Venerable Master of Propaganda Due: a masonic lodge that served as a secret “parallel government.”

    In the interview that follows, Willan refers to Gelli as “the representative of American intelligence interests in Italy” who “might have been in a position to give instructions to the leaders of the Italian secret services.” He also remembers Gelli as an attention-seeking performer who loved to tantalize journalists by dangling cryptic, subtly worded, “sibylline” phrases. No wonder that, when Gelli was once asked in a carefully contrived, staged interview, “How do you reply to the question: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’” he unhesitatingly replied: “A puppetmaster.” Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, the Venerable Master of Propaganda Due (P2) played a principal role in many of these pivotal and horrific events. Willan also raises the question of whether Prime Minister Andreotti’s decision to reveal the official Gladio network may have served as a smokescreen to divert attention away from some of the more diabolical forces at work behind the scenes during the Years of Lead, a period that even members of La Cosa Nostra refer to as the “tragedies.”

    Rob Couteau: What led to your interest in Gladio? Were you living in Italy during the Years of Lead?

    Philip Willan: I’ve had a base in Italy for more than fifty years. I came here with my parents when I was nine years old. My father worked at the Food and Agriculture Organization here at the United Nations. I went to boarding school and university in England, and I came over here for holidays while a lot of things were going on that I wasn’t really aware of.

    My family lived in a modern suburb of Rome called EUR. A lot of the time that I was staying with them I wouldn’t even go into the center of Rome. I was very young and not particularly interested in the topics that would interest me later. Also, I was living in another environment when the left-wing protests were at their height. At a particular period in the 1970s, more or less every Saturday, large crowds would congregate in the center of Rome. There’d be violence, and the place would be full of tear gas, and there’d be fighting with the police. But I wouldn’t be aware of that, because I’d be in school in the UK, or in the EUR, blithely unaware.

    RC: I thought I might begin by asking about the strategy of tension. What are its origins, and who first coined the term?

    PW: I think it was in an article by Leslie Finer for the Observer, coining the term to describe the particularly right-wing terrorism, coup plots, and terrorist bombings that had the effect of shoring up the Christian Democrat-dominated governments and ensuring there was no slippage into a left-wing or communist government.

    RC: You refer to it as “an action of destabilizing in order to stabilize.”

    PW: Yes. I think that sums it up, rather clearly and accurately, that this was going on.

    RC: In 1965, the Alberto Pollio Institute held a three-day conference in Rome, “branded as the ‘momento zero’ of the strategy of tension.” It “endorsed the view that ‘the Third World War is already under way.’” What’s the historical significance of this meeting? And what came out of it over the years; what influence did it have?

    PW: It laid the theoretical groundwork for what came afterward, and the variety of people attending was very significant as well. You had representatives of the military and the secret services. But also, young right-wing militants, and a very strong representation of extreme right-wing opinion among the participants and the speakers. So, it was an important moment in the sort of worlds that probably came together subsequently, to do what they felt was needed: to take stock and decide that they needed to do something. In their eyes, the Western system was under a permanent assault from communism in all sorts of forms and guises; therefore, they needed to “up their game” and respond in kind to the type of assault that they felt they were being subjected to.

    RC: What was so special about postwar Italy that it attracted so much covert action and monkey business such as this?

    PW: Italy’s position made it a sort of fault line for conflict in multiple ways. For one thing, clearly, they’d been on the losing side in the war. They were governed immediately afterward by the Allied government Commission, dominated by the United States, and also with the British playing an important role, after the end of the war.

    Italy itself had been divided. Mussolini, when he was firmly in control, had enormous support from the people; the resistance was a very minority activity to be involved in. In the latter stages, when there was the Armistice and the Italian government effectively changed sides, and Mussolini had his last-stand Republic of Salò all under complete control of the Germans, then many more Italians became involved in the resistance, and joined the partisans, and fought in the latter stages against Fascism. So, again: that fault line within Italy. More or less everybody had gone along with him for a long time, with a very small minority resisting from the very beginning. And then, larger numbers, particularly members of the Communist Party, being a strong component of the anti-Fascist resistance.

    With a change of tide in the war, more and more people join in the winning side at the end. So you had a very bitter civil war in the last stages, and atrocities committed by Fascists against anti-Fascist Italians and Italian civilians. There were also reprisals against Fascists after the war. So there was a very bitter atmosphere in Italy as the conflict came to an end. And then, very quickly, maybe even before the “hot war” finished in the Second World War, there was this realignment for what was going to become the Cold War.

    And then there was Italy’s strategic position in the Mediterranean. Because of the fact that, in the latter stages of the war, the communists had been leading players in the resistance, and the fact that, in the postwar years––particularly in the 1970s––the Italian Communist Party became the largest communist party in Western Europe, this was a major source of worry for the Western system.

    And there were other fault lines. For example, the presence of the Vatican as a major anticommunist force: a global presence with global interests, and with its representatives suffering persecution behind the Iron Curtain. And itself divided to some extent: the Catholic Church divided by liberation theology and worker priests, and a component of the church sympathetic to left-wing causes; but probably, at the highest levels in the Vatican, there were some very conservative people, for whom it would be natural to be allied with United States. And working with the CIA, for example, to combat communism.

    The other area of conflict and division for Italy revolved around the question of how to align itself in relation to the Middle East. It was a country that didn’t have a great oil supply of its own, so it was dependent on oil imported from Arab-state oil-producing countries. There was also concern that Italy, and the Vatican, needed for Italy to have good relations with those countries, because there was a lot of concern for Christian minorities living in Islamic-dominated countries. And then, the other side was: sympathy with Israel, and close intelligence ties, and arms trading with Israel. So, there was this unresolved conflict. You know, “We want to be friends with everybody, so maybe we could be selling arms under the table to the PLO; but, at the same time, we’ll be helping Israel and collaborating with Mossad. A tricky balancing act. I think the Italian military intelligence service was very divided on this issue, as well. There was a faction that was in favor of Israel, and there was a faction that supported the Palestinian cause and wanted good relations with the Arab world.

    RC: A very complex situation.

    PW: Indeed, yes.

    RC: You brought up the Vatican, so I’m going to jump ahead to a question I’d planned to ask at the very end. It seems very clear now that from 1945 to 1990, the Cold War period, there was a worldwide covert war against the left: something we don’t hear about at school. In The Last Supper, you refer to an “undeclared global war” and discuss the banking mechanisms at work behind it. These include the Vatican bank, called the IOR or Institute for Religious Works, run by Archbishop Marcinkus, which supported murderous right-wing regimes in Latin America. And then, banks run by Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, such as Banco Ambrosiano, which had direct ties to the Vatican. You also include this incredible quote: you say that Carlo Bordoni, a money trader, testified that Propaganda Due (P2) member Michele Sindona was “involved in politico-financial operations” in “Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, and Greece. In Greece … Sindona had been active in financing the Regime of the Colonels.” What role did these financial institutions, linked very strongly to the Vatican, play in this global war on the left?

    PW: I think it provided a very useful conduit for funds they needed to support the right-wing causes and that were in conflict with communism. The IOR itself, by its very nature, had a global reach and was intended to support Catholic institutions, religious orders, monasteries and convents, and Catholic activities around the globe. But they also needed to be able to do that discreetly, because there would be parts of the world where Catholic activities might be sensitive or subject to prosecution. For example, in Islamic States. Or at that time, in countries behind the Iron Curtain. So, the mechanism was there to transfer money discreetly around the globe. And if there was a feeling that the right thing to do was to support Catholic activities that the CIA was involved in, combating communism around the globe, it was also a natural alliance between these institutions. Particularly with a man of Lithuanian descent such as Marcinkus, in charge of the Vatican Bank. He would have a natural affinity with his fellow countryman in the United States. But even more, there was sensitivity to the plight of Catholics who were left behind in Eastern Europe and in his own country of Lithuania. So, he was a natural for the role of CIA ally and assistant in this global battle.

    In the case of Roberto Calvi and the Banco Ambrosiano, one of the theories as to why the bank went bankrupt was that they had given too much money to the Solidarity Trade Union, in Poland. And therefore, there was this big hole in the bank’s finances. One of the theories behind Calvi’s murder, which left him hanging from scaffolding on the Blackfriar’s Bridge in London, was that some of this money was being laundered on behalf of the Mafia and possibly the Magliana crime gang in Rome. And when Calvi was unable to repay it, because it ended up supporting anti-Communist workers in Poland, these people didn’t take kindly to being bilked by somebody and were consequently directly involved in his murder, in London.

    RC: The Mafia does get a little touchy when it comes to money being paid back, doesn’t it?

    PW: [Laughs] Yes, it is an important issue for them. 

    RC: You say that evidence submitted at Roberto Calvi’s murder trial shows that Calvi and Archbishop Marcinkus were both “involved in laundering drug money for Cosa Nostra, taking over a role that had previously belonged to Sindona,” whom you call a “Mafia-linked murderer.” Strange bedfellows with the Vatican! And you include some of the testimony of Richard Brenneke, who says that the CIA sold illegal drugs to the Mafia. You conclude that some of this subsequent money laundering may have intersected with the Vatican bank, and with banks controlled by P2 members Calvi and Sindona.

    So, am I correct in understanding all this? Some of these laundered funds, which went through Vatican banks, were then channeled to Licio Gelli’s secret masonic lodge, Propaganda Due, to then pay for terrorism that killed ordinary citizens?

    PW: I think it’s a fair assumption that this happened. I don’t think we can actually trace concrete examples of it, and give instances of particular sums ending up in particular hands, and then being used to kill ordinary citizens on the street, or on trains, or railway stations in the country.

    One of the areas where there’s a particularly strong suspicion that this happened is with the Bologna railway station bombing. There’s a strong suspicion that it happened, and there are particular money flows that, it has been suggested, could have been connected to this atrocity.

    When I spoke to Roberto Calvi’s son, Carlo Calvi, in Canada, it was a hypothesis that obviously was very upsetting for him: to think that his father could have been involved in something like that. But it was, I think, something he was prepared to contemplate if it helped to draw the truth: the true picture of what had happened. And if it also helped to identify the people who were responsible for his murder. It was a traumatic idea, but it was something he was prepared to contemplate, and discuss. And certainly, that he didn’t rule out as being unthinkable.

    RC: But the evidence submitted at the murder trial is pretty solid in terms of showing that the Vatican bank laundered Mafia money, correct?

    PW: Yes, that is correct. The evidence was presented at the trial, and the judges of the various stages consented that it was factually correct. Yes, it is one of the findings of the trials.

    RC: It’s an amazing story. This I also found fascinating: You say that, from 1969 to 1976, in elections for the Chamber of Deputies, support for the Italian Communist Party or PCI steadily increased. During this same period, the “parabola of electoral support for the PCI was … paralleled by the amount of terrorist activity” in Italy. There were 398 attacks in 1969 and 2,513 during 1979. This is just mind-blowing. It seems clear now that only the right-wing could gain from this terror, and that the violence was coordinated by Western security forces, i.e., Operation Gladio. Are we correct to assume that some of this was paid for by these Vatican-linked banks?

    PW: I think it’s a fair assumption that they were actively involved in this global campaign. And that Propaganda Due was a strongly anticommunist organization, and it had key people in control of these institutions. So, it’s logical to assume that their resources were available to P2 when they were needed and that they would have been used. So, yes, I think it’s a fair assumption.

    I think on the question of Gladio’s involvement in all this, at least in the case of Italy, I know there are number of colleagues who believe that the official Gladio organization, which was revealed by Andreotti in 1990, may have been something of a smokescreen for other right-wing organizations that really did the dirty work. And that, instead, the official Gladio may have become a scapegoat for other people. It’s a complicated question and still open for debate. But there is this suggestion that it’s perhaps not correct to blame everything on the officially recognized Gladio that was set up in the immediate post-war years, and that had very few known members, according to the official accounts, but that it may have been used as a smokescreen for other organizations.

    RC: But even given if that’s true, the official Gladio did not bend over backward to try to stop the unofficial right-wing terrorists. And the CIA did not bend over backward to stop them either. I mean, they must have known about them, right?

    PW: Yes, I think that is correct: that there almost certainly was a level of contact and complicity. I think one of the big questions that are still open about the role of the CIA is to what extent the CIA knew about things that were going to happen and did nothing to prevent them from happening. And to what extent it actually controlled the people who were doing these things and then and encouraged them and backed their activities. That, I think, is still is open for debate. And there may have been things that may have gone down in different ways in the different episodes. But there’s a constant element, which tended to be that right-wing atrocities were supposed to set the stage for a right-wing coup. And, for one reason or another, the coup never actually went through, was never fully accomplished. But the people who were doing these things, what they were aiming for was a reaction of horror; revulsion on the part of the public; atrocities that were nearly always initially blamed on the left or on anarchists. And creating a climate where the people would have been happy to go along with a military government and were willing to support them.

    RC: Regarding what you just said about the official and unofficial Gladio: you write that when General Serravalle first took command of the Italian Gladio in 1971, he was “shocked by the extremist views” expressed by many of the gladiators. Serravalle also “speculated that Gladio may have been made public ‘because it was the presentable part of the whole thing.’” He added: “By fixing the searchlights on Gladio, the shadows behind it will grow and will serve to conceal ‘the usual suspects.”’ What did he mean by this remark? Was referring to what you were just talking about?

    PW: I think he was. He was probably a basically decent man who was uncomfortable with what was happening, and he was instrumental in trying to withdraw some of these weapons that had been hidden in underground caches around the country. And when he realized or suspected what was going on, he took action to try and prevent his organization from being complicit in those extreme activities. So, even within Gladio, it wasn’t this monolith where they were all fanatics colluding. There were some people who had deep misgivings about it. And General Serravalle was one of them.

    RC: And he was rewarded for all this, first by a probable assassination attempt: the plane he was supposed to be flying on blew up. And then he was fired after just a few years.

    PW: Yes. I think, in many cases, people who registered their objection to what was happening, or became whistleblowers, did, in many cases, meet with mysterious, suspicious deaths. Not Serravalle himself. I suspect his career was probably cut short. But a number of other people who had sensitive information on the coup plots and links to the terrorist activities died in mysterious car accidents, or apparent suicides. A pretty large number came to a sticky end.

    RC: In his book, Of Terrorism and the State, Gianfranco Sanguinetti writes that once a terrorist group has been infiltrated and taken over by the secret services, it “becomes nothing more than a defensive appendage of the State.” You add that, by 1974, most of the original leadership of the Red Brigades was imprisoned and subsequent leaders were “suspected of collusion with the secret services.” How would you characterize the differences between the old, original Red Brigades and the post-1974 group?

    PW: The question of the manipulation and infiltration of left-wing terrorism in Italy is very complex and has not, by any means, been clarified so far. But I do think it’s true that the first generation of Red Brigades were nearly all, unquestionably, idealists who dedicated their lives to the armed struggle. And who, in the early years, carried out acts of violence that were mainly demonstrative. There was an escalation over time, particularly with the new leaders after 1974. There was an escalation with the first generation, too, but I think they were less bloodthirsty and less ready to take human lives than their successors.

    Clearly, in a conflict like that, there’s an almost inevitable escalation in any case: that lives are lost on both sides. Both sides commit atrocities, and the hatred grows as the conflict moves forward. But the question, really, is whether key figures in the leadership of the Red Brigades after 1974 might have been working for Italian secret services, or the CIA, or the CIA via Italian secret services. And that, obviously, has huge implications.

    All of that comes to a head with the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, who was the mastermind behind the agreement for some form of power sharing with the Communist Party, known as the “Historic Compromise.” And who probably wanted Italy to move toward a situation where there could be a genuine democratic alternation, eventually, between the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party, as the two major political forces in the country, and who probably wasn’t on the point of selling out to the extent that he was perceived abroad.

    The country was moving to a situation where the Communist Party would give parliamentary support to a Christian Democrat-dominated government: that the Communist Party would actually support the government in parliament, which they had never agreed to do before. It’s said that he felt he needed to explain this to Allied countries: that he was still in control; he wasn’t opening the door to the communist enemy. And that it was a sort of recognition of force majeure: that the situation was such that they couldn’t avoid this. But he needed to explain it to Allied leaders, and, effectively, he didn’t have the time to do that.

    And there, the question is whether the Red Brigades would want to kidnap and eliminate a political leader like Aldo Moro for their own genuine reasons; or whether, ultimately, Western- and United States anxiety about what Moro was doing was the real reason why they kidnapped him and held him for fifty-five days, and then executed him in cold blood at the end of that time.

    RC: The short version of what I’m going to ask you is: Do you have any doubt that Red Brigades leader Mario Moretti was an agent of the state? The longer version involves things such as the Hyperion language school in Paris, where he made solo trips, about which an Italian police report states: “The Hyperion … is suspected of being the most important CIA office in Europe.” Also, there’s an interesting quote in this regard that you included by Gianfranco Sanguinetti: “All secret terrorist groups are organized and run by a hierarchy which is kept secret even from their own members.” What do you think about Moretti?

    PW: There are very good reasons to be suspicious of him. At the same time, there’s the fact that he has spent many years in prison. There are suggestions that maybe his treatment in prison was somewhat privileged. I’m not sure if whether, now, he still returns to prison to sleep at night and is allowed out in the day, to work. But one of the big questions about these figures who are suspected of having worked for the CIA, or Italian intelligence, is how they accept to pay for what they did with long prison sentences. And, if they were working for the secret services, how, after all these years, it still hasn’t emerged with clarity if that was this case: that they haven’t been convincingly denounced by their fellow Red Brigades members and with plausible, convincing evidence to make it clear that, at the end of the day, they were working for the other side.

    So, it remains an open question. But, clearly, it is very important and significant, because it completely changes the whole complexion of what happened. You know, they may have been useful idiots who served the interest of the opposite side; because they were naïve, and because they were sort of pushed in one direction or another. And obviously, it’s a completely different story if they were controlled and given their orders by the secret services. And particularly if those orders were to kidnap Aldo Moro and then to kill him. That would be a tremendous, extraordinary reality, if they had done that: secretly working for a Western intelligence organization.

    RC: In that regard, you talk about how, in the May 2, 1978 edition of Mino Pecorelli’s rather hermetic magazine, Osservatore Politico [Political Observer], Mino predicts that the first generation of the Red Brigades, who were in prison, would barter their silence in exchange for a general amnesty. He concludes: “The Red Brigades acted on behalf of others, Italians or foreigners, Italians and foreigners.” Was he correct regarding the reason for their silence? And how prescient was he in this prediction?

    PW: I think he was pretty prescient, actually. Because although many of them did spend many years in prison, eventually there was a kind of political settlement, and most of them were let out. In fact, one of the aspects where Italy, on the surface at least, comes out with considerable credit is how these people ultimately renounced the armed struggle, and paid a certain penalty of years in prison, and then were released and reintegrated into society.

    There has been a sort of reconciliation effort, which is ongoing even now, with meetings between relatives of the victims and certain members of the Red Brigades who were the perpetrators. In many cases, representatives of the Catholic Church actually played an important role in this reconciliation. Which has been very significant in some ways in that, despite the fact that there have been very strong social tensions in Italy because of the economic crisis, and the fact that the Italian economy has not been growing for years, and that there have been violent demonstrations and social conflict, there’s never been, so far, a return to the extreme conflict of terrorism. It’s as though the country’s been inoculated against that by the terrible experiences they had during the last century. But it’s one of these great puzzles as to what really did happen.

    On the other hand, of course, one could equally see that if these people had been working for the secret services, it’s the kind of thing they could never, ever publicly acknowledge. And the fact this secrecy has effectively held for all these years could be underpinned by the fact that lives would be at stake, one way or the other, if there was a public admission of what really happened. And assuming it’s true that some of these people were used by the intelligence organizations, in theory the lives of the people who had betrayed their comrades could be directly at risk. And equally, with the people who perhaps know that they were betrayed: that would be a very dangerous allegation to make, and they might have to pay for it with their lives.

    Mino Pecorelli, who was often very prescient and very well informed, paid for his excess of information and excessive candor with his life. He was shot dead in the street in Rome. And his death has remained substantially mysterious, and with this aura of mystery and sort of threat hanging around it. So, that also is an element of what perhaps we don’t know: large chunks of the story. Those were dangerous times, and the danger hasn’t entirely gone away perhaps.

    RC: Aldo Moro visited the United State in the role of foreign minister in September 1974. His meeting with Henry Kissinger was described as “traumatic.” Moro’s widow confirms that he was threatened while he was there. Mino published several slightly veiled death threats against Moro. And then, on September 13, 1975, Mino Pecorelli’s magazine reported: “An official visiting Rome with [President Ford] told us: ‘I see darkness. There’s a Jacqueline in the future of your peninsula,’” referring to JFK’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. What do you feel are the parallels between John Kennedy’s and Aldo Moro’s assassinations, specifically in terms of their mutual political outlook and the forces at work behind their murder?

    PW: I think there is a strong parallel between the two cases: that they were two leaders who wanted to open dialogue with the left and change the way things had been done in the past. And Moro, throughout his political career, had been involved with that kind of dialogue with the left. First, with the Socialist Party, in opening up to an alliance with them, which, in the 1960s, was seen as a very sinister development by members of the military establishment, and the intelligence services, and the far right. And so, he was the object of hostility, and threats, and even kidnap plots of the far-right from way back, because of his opening to the Socialists. And then he went a step further in the 1970s, when he was going so far as to open up a dialogue, and some measure of power sharing, with the Communist Party; and maybe conservative political forces saw that as going a step too far.

    That is obviously paralleled by Kennedy’s approach to global politics, and neocolonialism, and a desire for a new and more progressive future. And I think it’s interesting that the sort of conspiratorial forces that were arrayed against them contained shared elements. In the book by Michele Metta, which I noticed you mention in your article, he describes the forces arrayed around organizations such as the Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC) and Permindex, which involved all sorts of interests and forces that we know were involved in anticommunist activities and sometimes in violent and illegal activities, such as with P2.

    Figures who had been important in the Fascist regime, people with all sorts of conspiratorial threads, run through these organizations and are brought together. And I think it’s very interesting that Michele Metta’s documents show that board meetings of the CMC took place near the Spanish Steps in Rome in the offices of a lawyer who was a member of P2. And, already, that created a sort of symbiosis between those organizations. And Metta’s documents also seem to indicate a presence of Israeli intelligence interests and possible connections to Mossad.

    It’s very interesting that, in the highly conspiratorial period after the Second World War in Italy, you had someone like James Jesus Angleton playing a very significant role. He was somebody who, in his career, dealt with Italy and, clearly, with Cold War requirements in postwar Italy. He also dealt with the Vatican. And he also dealt with Israel. He had very close personal links to Mossad. And so he, in himself, tied together these various interests and forces and geographical areas. And he was also a hard-line anticommunist, who possibly eventually succumbed to a certain degree of paranoia.

    So, figures like him, and the organizations that they came into contact with, were the kind of instruments that, if you needed to do what happened, they were ideally suited. And the question is: Can we prove the connections and prove that “Subject A” really did these things and he discussed what needed to be done in these particular fora, where we know these people had an opportunity to meet.

    There’s quite a lot of information available now about the sort of conspiratorial fora where the decisions very likely were made, and where they could have been made, and where the kinds of interests that were represented would want those kinds of actions and outcomes. As far as I’m aware, we don’t have the things that make the connection that prove the crime and the order for it. But I do think that people such as Angleton represented exactly the interests and forces that were at work at that time. And it’s very interesting that he brought together, through his own personal contacts and friendships, the people who could do the necessary and were in the necessary positions of power.

    The other thing that I’ve thought for a long time is that the terrible things that occurred in Italy in the postwar era may have been the result of the people responsible for running the show having cut their teeth on the real war, where it was clear that “anything went” in order to win. You know: “No holds barred.” And it was an absolute struggle for survival, and you couldn’t be too prissy to get about what you did and how you did it. And that people with that experience and that mindset then ran the Cold War operations afterward. And they probably felt that the conflict that they were engaged upon was similarly vital. And again, the struggle for survival, and that you couldn’t be too particular about what you did and getting your hands dirty. And that mental conditioning of the warriors of the Second World War, who became the warriors of the Cold War, possibly explains certain things that most people in a democratic society would never have countenanced. But with these people, their history made them what they were and dictated that they were prepared to do these things for what they thought was a supremely important cause.

    RC: The euphemism that they love to employ is “unorthodox.”

    PW: Yes! [Laughs]

    RC: I’m sure this is purely coincidental. But it’s strange that we have Licio Gelli’s mattress company, called Permaflex; and then we have this very shadowy institution that Metta talks about in his book, Permindex. Just wondering if that ever struck you as being odd.

    PW: I never noticed that; it’s never occurred to me. Yes, it’s an interesting coincidence.

    RC: Moro’s former secretary, Sereno Freato, allegedly told the Moro Commission: “Find the people behind the Pecorelli murder and you will find those behind that of Aldo Moro.” This is an interesting statement, especially since Andreotti was initially convicted for the murder of Pecorelli in 2002, later overturned. What role do you believe Andreotti played in Moro’s death and in Operation Gladio? I know that’s a hard question, because he’s such a foxy figure, and he covered his trail so well. And it seems that there’s not enough that we know about this incredibly important person.

    PW: Yes, he is a really crucial figure in all of this. I think that he really was America’s man in Italy and also the Vatican’s man in Italy. He had a long career, and he was defense minister on numerous occasions and prime minister as well. He was prime minister when Moro was kidnapped. And we don’t really know of anything that he personally did to try and save him, to save his party colleague.

    As you mentioned, he was prosecuted for Pecorelli’s murder. First acquitted, then actually convicted on appeal, and then finally re-acquitted in the third stage of the justice system. So there was certainly strong reason to be suspicious of his role in relation to Pecorelli. And Pecorelli’s death is often linked to what he may have known about the Moro kidnapping and, particularly, if he had access to the full document that Moro wrote while he was prisoner, which we now have an incomplete version of, and where Moro launched a very bitter attack on Andreotti. And conceivably, there was more that was even more damaging to Andreotti; and that was the part that has been subtracted, and that has never emerged.

    RC: As you say, Andreotti refused to do anything to help Aldo Moro when he was kidnapped, parallel to how the CIA refused to help in the search, which is just absolutely incredible!

    What do you think Mino’s real motivation was, particularly in the later years of his life? Earlier on, it seems as if he’s often working for blackmail purposes. You know, “I won’t publish it if you buy this painting.” That sort of thing. But near the end, this former P2 member appears like a muckraking, investigative journalist, who’s publishing things that clearly put his life in danger. What do you think was going on in his mind toward the end? Was there any self-righteous indignation, or am I being a completely naive American in thinking this?

    PW: No, I think that’s probably right: that he really had the sort of journalistic bug, and that was why he published these things that he shouldn’t have published. And he was looking for scoops, and he preferred to publish them if he could.

    In fact, his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in more recent times. His sister is still alive and has devoted her life to campaigning for his rehabilitation. In one of the court cases concerning him, the judges actually say very respectful things about him: that he did have this enthusiasm for investigative journalism and was a very good investigator. And obviously, he had extraordinary sources. And that he had this natural desire to publish and be damned, and that he deserves credit for that.

    RC: You refer to his “hermetic, elusive style.” You know, when I read these quotes by him, in part they almost strike me as a kind of cultivated, high avant-garde literature. They’re incredibly witty, and the wordplay that he uses! For example, in 1975, he referred to Aldo Moro as “Moro … bondo,” as in the Italian word for moribund: “moribondo.” He loved wordplay, and he was a talented writer in many ways.

    PW: Yes, I think that’s right. He was a very brilliant individual. And he was, it seems, a very one-man show. There were other people who worked with him on the magazine. But they don’t seem to have known what he was really up to, or what his sources were.

    RC: You say he had a lot of sources with the secret services, too.

    PW: That’s right, yes. I think there was even a period when a secret service officer named Nicola Falde was directly in charge in the office.

    RC: What did you mean when you said it’s possible that he was threatened if he published certain things, but also threatened if he didn’t publish certain things? Who was threatening him?

    PW: I think that’s something that he himself confided to his colleagues. It’s quite likely that he found himself in the middle of one of these battles between secret service factions. There was a faction that was loyal to Moro, and there was a faction that was loyal to Andreotti. There were all sorts of issues over which the secret services could be divided: Israel, or the Arab states, or the PLO. He had access to very delicate information. And so, this idea that: if one faction wants something to come out, they entrust it to him; but it could be with the understanding that if it doesn’t come out you will be in very serious trouble. Whereas, obviously, the idea that the people who don’t want something to come out are going to do something nasty to you: that is more or less normal.

    RC: I’m fascinated by your relationship with Licio Gelli. How many times did you meet with him in person?

    PW: I must have met him about three or four times.

    RC: How did you get him to warm up to you, and confide in you, to level that he did?

    PW: It was interesting that, over time, you could see he was becoming increasingly relaxed in talking about these topics that, closer to the time, would have been very sensitive. He’d been very tight-lipped about a lot of these stories. And then it became such an ancient history, and the direct protagonist might be gone from the scene. You could see that he gradually became more and more relaxed. But I also think that, when he was older and living in his villa outside Arezzo, he enjoyed the attention of journalists coming to talk to him, maybe getting bored or lonely at a point. I certainly noticed that if you went to interview him with a television camera he loved that, and he would keep talking and be very much available. If it was just you and the tape recorder, it was less gratifying to him. But definitely, there was a period of thawing on his part, and eventually he could be more indiscreet.

    RC: One P2 member claimed that Gelli reacted to the Moro murder by saying: “We have finally resolved the Moro problem.” What do you suspect Licio Gelli’s role was in Aldo Moro’s kidnap and death?

    PW: If it’s true that the intelligence services had a high-level person infiltrated into the Red Brigades leadership, then Gelli might well have known that and might have been running the show to some extent. Because it seems that, as the representative of American intelligence interests in Italy, he might have been in a position to give instructions to the leaders of the Italian secret services, so his organization would have been very much focused on what had happened. And that particular quote where he sort of assumes responsibility for what had happened––“The main part’s been done. Now let’s see how it pans out”––is very significant and raises the question as to whether that operation was conducted on the orders of people like Gelli. [On the day that Moro was abducted, Gelli’s secretary Nara Lazzerini overheard him make this remark to two of his colleagues.]

    RC: You say the Carabinieri raided his house early one morning. How long before this did Gelli leave the country? And was he tipped off?

    PW: I think he’d left maybe a matter of weeks before. Possibly tipped off, or possibly a lucky coincidence for him.

    RC: Do we know where he ended up in Latin America?

    PW: He had a strong presence in Uruguay. He may also have had some sort of a presence, and possibly properties, in Brazil, as well. But definitely, Uruguay was a base for him, where he was protected and was well “in” with the regime. And of course, he had historically very strong links to Argentina, and to Peron, and to the anti-Communists …

    RC: I believe he had dual citizenship with Argentina.

    PW: Yes. He was the economic attaché at their embassy in Rome, and he had very strong links to freemasonry in Argentina. And particularly, he had a personal friendship with Emilio Massera, who was a member of P2 and was the head of the Navy there, which was the armed force that was one of the most heavily involved in torturing and killing dissidents in the “Dirty War” in Argentina.

    RC: Well, Philip, that’s quite a story. Just a couple of final questions: What do you think Ronald Stark’s main task was when––how convenient!––he was imprisoned in the same place as the Red Brigades? Was his main task to teach them a Morse code that Gladio was already familiar with, so they could listen in?

    PW: I’m not sure. I mean, that’s another very mysterious part of the story. Stark himself is a fascinating character. Again, it’s difficult to say whether he’s a criminal interested in making money from drugs, who now has to cut a deal with State organizations and do things for them as well. Or whether he was an intelligence operative who’s very convincing, whose deep cover was as this drug manufacturer and dealer. And, as well, what his connections might have been to Israel for the Mossad, on top of everything else. And whether his activities really made a difference in Italy. Or whether the intelligence that he gathered from talking to the Red Brigades leaders in prison, whether those were significant contacts, and he then passed the information back to the United States and also to Italian intelligence officers. And whether that influenced the outcome of what was happening. Or, as you say, if he could get them to adopt a code that could then be comfortably broken by Gladio or by the CIA. Clearly, that would be an important breakthrough.  

    RC: Is there anything you could share with us that you’ve learned since beginning your new research on Aldo Moro’s death?

    PW: I think one of the things to come out of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry is the possible involvement in the case of a building on a street called Via Massimi in Rome, which was actually owned, curiously enough, by the IOR. There was an extraordinary collection of people with a connection to the building or actually living there. It was on a hill and, at one stage, was the highest building overlooking Rome and not overlooked by any other building. Archbishop Marcinkus reportedly had an apartment there. And Cardinal Egidio Vagnozzi: an interesting character who had been the Vatican’s diplomatic representative in the United States going back sometime, and involved in some sensitive diplomatic activities in relation to the United States. And also, somebody named Omar Yahia, who had Libyan intelligence contacts. And in particular, there was an office of a company called TumCo and the man behind it, John Tumpane. They were involved in American military logistics, particularly in servicing American airbases in Turkey, for example.

    So there’s a sort of concentration of extraordinary characters in this building. It was almost too good to be true from the point of view of a novel writer. And the suggestion is that Moro may have been held there, in the early days of the kidnap. This seems to have been endorsed by the president of the Commission, who wrote a book with an Italian journalist, after the Commission completed its work. And that, at the very least, the cars used by the Red Brigades in the kidnap may have been concealed in the garage of this building. Interestingly enough, Mino Pecorelli has a cryptic reference to a “complicit garage.” He was promising further revelations about “the complicit garage” that was involved in the story. And if this does turn out to be true, it’s an extraordinary development. Some people are still a bit skeptical about it, and there’s still no real clarity on it.

    To top everything else, the Commission had its own investigators work on this particular topic. And then, when they were concluding their work, they passed the information to the prosecutors in Rome, to continue. Which had the result that everything that they found out so far is covered by judicial secrecy. And may remain in that condition for a number of years.

    RC: In perpetuity, no doubt!

    PW: Yes! And the feeling is that the Rome magistrates know that their duty is to bury the sensitive aspects of the story. And they work very efficiently to achieve that.

    RC: Well, we can end with the words of the unrepentant terrorist, Vincenzo Vinciguerra, who said: “the State cannot convict itself.”

    PW: [Laughs] Indeed, a very sensible view. Well, it’s been a great pleasure talking to you.

    RC: This has been such a great talk. Thanks so much for your time, Philip.

  • Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer

    Why Officer Tippit Stopped His Killer

    The murder of Officer J.D. Tippit in Oak Cliff was famously cited by David Bellin, Assistant Counsel to the Warren Commission, as being the “Rosetta Stone to the solution” of the JFK assassination. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 340, all references are to the 1989 edition) “Once it is admitted that Oswald killed Patrolman J.D. Tippit,” the attorney for the commission observed, “there can be no doubt that the overall evidence shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of John F. Kennedy.”

    Following Mr. Belin’s questionable logic might also lead one to believe the opposite to be true. Once it is shown that Oswald likely did not kill Patrolman Tippit, the case for him having shot President Kennedy and Governor Connally is, therefore, demonstrably weakened.Picture1

    “I emphatically deny these charges!” shouted Oswald to news reporters while in Dallas police custody. “I didn’t shoot anybody, no sir … I’m just a patsy!” Oswald denied his guilt in many ways and more than once. (Mark Lane, Rush to Judgment, p. 81)

    Was the suspect telling the truth?

    Sadly, within less than 48 hours, shadowy nightclub owner Jack Ruby would all but terminate the official Dallas Police investigation into the Tippit homicide when he gunned down suspect Lee Oswald in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. That unfathomable event, broadcast live on national television, occurred in the presence of more than 50 Dallas policemen. It was their job to ensure Oswald’s safety while he was in custody—so the suspect might be tried on charges of assassinating President Kennedy and murdering Officer Tippit.

    “We never worked on any of his (Tippit’s) murder, because there was no use making a murder case (with the suspect dead),” admitted former District Attorney Henry Wade in an interview with veteran Tippit researcher Joseph McBride. “I think we had enough evidence that Oswald did it.”

    And despite Belin’s “Rosetta Stone” reference, not only did Dallas authorities abandon the Tippit case, but the Warren Commission, according to McBride, showed “almost no real interest in solving the crime … the commission was deliberately stonewalling a serious investigation of Tippit.”

    Any “serious” investigation into Tippit’s death must begin with one fundamental and all-important question: Why did Tippit stop Oswald?

    Based on the persistence of several indefatigable private researchers and investigators who kept digging into the Tippit mystery for decades, I believe we can now attempt to answer that question. The answer, it would seem, had nothing to do with the man walking on 10th Street in Oak Cliff matching the Dealey Plaza suspect’s generic description of being a young white male of average height and weight—as was suggested by the Warren Commission.

    In the words of Sylvia Meagher, writing in her 1967 book Accessories After the Fact, “The strangeness of Tippit’s actions,” suggests that “it was not probable, perhaps not even conceivable, that Tippit stopped the pedestrian who shot him because of the description broadcast on the police radio. The facts indicate that Tippit was up to something different which, if uncovered, might place his death and the other events of those three days in a completely new perspective.” (See Meagher, pp. 260-66)

    What follows in this article is a “new perspective.”

    12:00 P.M.

    Picture2tiny

    The “strangeness” of Tippit’s actions on 11/22/63 appear to have begun even before shots rang out in downtown Dallas. Tippit, whose normal area of patrol was in Cedar Crest, patrol area #78, was apparently called to a supermarket in the 4100 block of Bonnie View Road. Respected Tippit researcher Larry Ray Harris interviewed the Hodges Supermarket manager in 1978. As described in news reporter Bill Drenas’ oft-cited 1998 article Car #10 Where are You?, the manager told Harris he had caught a woman shoplifter on 11/22/63 and had phoned police.

    It was Tippit who responded to that location at about noon, just a half hour before the assassination. The manager knew Tippit, because Tippit routinely came to the market on calls for shoplifters. The interviewee said Tippit placed the woman in his squad car and left. However, Tippit appears not to have brought the shoplifting suspect back to his nearby base of operations. No record of the woman’s arrest or information on who she was or what happened to her has ever surfaced.

    12:30 p.m.

    President Kennedy’s motorcade was scheduled to have arrived at the Dallas Trade Mart at 12:30. However, because the motorcade was running a few minutes late, President Kennedy was assassinated at 12:30, and Governor Connally was gravely injured, as the motorcade proceeded through Dealey Plaza on route to the Trade Mart. The Hodges Market in the 4100 block of Bonnie View in Tippit’s district was more than seven miles southwest of Dealey Plaza.

    12:40 p.m.

    The DPD Channel 1 dispatcher reports a shooting in the downtown area involving the President. By this time, Texas School Book Depository employee Lee Oswald has already grabbed his blue work jacket and has left the TSBD on foot. He will board a city bus, but when that bus gets stalled in traffic, Oswald will ask for a transfer, depart from the bus, and walk to a cab stand to catch a quicker ride (with cab driver William Whaley) out to nearby Oak Cliff where the young man resides.

    The DPD Channel 1 dispatcher next orders “all downtown area squads” to Dealey Plaza, code 3 (lights and sirens). By 12:44, a general description of the Kennedy suspect (slender white male, 5’10” and 160 pounds) is broadcast over both Channels 1 and 2.

    12:45 p.m.

    Murray Jackson, the dispatcher, asks Tippit to report his location. Tippit replies, according to police radio logs, that “I am about Keist and Bonnie View,” which is still within Tippit’s regular patrol district down in Cedar Crest. (Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, p.441) However, this may not have been the case.

    Beginning at approximately 12:45, when Officer Tippit reports he is still in his regular patrol area, Tippit will instead be seen sitting inside his squad car parked at the GLOCO gas station, strategically situated in northernmost Oak Cliff next to the Houston Street viaduct. The viaduct connects downtown Dallas and Dealey Plaza to Oswald’s neighborhood in Oak Cliff—some five miles north of Tippit’s reported position.

    Picture3tiny

    Researcher William Turner, in a 1966 article in the magazine Ramparts, claimed he located five witnesses who saw Tippit sitting in his patrol car at the gas station at this time while watching traffic coming across from downtown Dallas. (McBride, ibid) The location is only 1.5 miles from Dealey Plaza. Two of the witnesses, a husband and wife who knew the officer, say they waved at Tippit who waved back at them. The story was reportedly verified by three of the GLOCO station attendants. Dallas researchers Greg Lowrey and Bill Pulte also interviewed all five of these witnesses to confirm the story. Some said that Tippit arrived at the GLOCO as early as just “a few minutes” after the assassination.

    Was Tippit watching for Oswald to come across the viaduct on a Dallas bus? Did he see Oswald instead in the front of William Whaley’s cab? What was Tippit doing?

    12:46 p.m.

    At this time, dispatcher Murray Jackson ordered Officers Tippit and R.C. Nelson into the Central Oak Cliff area, which was odd since an assigned officer (William Mentzel) was already patrolling Central Oak Cliff. (McBride, pp. 427-30) Tippit, according to witnesses, is of course already there in the northernmost part of Oak Cliff at the gas station. (This was probably unknown to Jackson, since Tippit had just responded to the dispatcher that he was in his assigned patrol area at Bonnie View & Keist some five miles to the south). Officer Nelson instead proceeded on to Dealey Plaza, possibly following the preceding 12:42 “code 3” order for all downtown area squads to report to Dealey Plaza. (Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 161-63)

    Meanwhile, Oswald will soon be crossing the Houston St. viaduct in William Whaley’s cab, heading for Oak Cliff.

    The witnesses say that after some 10 minutes of sitting at the gas station, watching traffic crossing from the downtown area, Tippit suddenly pulled out and took off south on Lancaster Avenue “at a high rate of speed.”

    12:52 or 12:53 p.m.

    Cab driver William Whaley lets Oswald out at the corner of North Beckley and Neely Street, several blocks south of Oswald’s rooming house, which the cab has already passed. Whaley had marked Oswald’s intended location on his run sheet as the 500 block of N. Beckley, even farther south and in the wrong direction from the rooming house. The 500 block of N. Beckley was, in 1963, dominated by the side parking lot of the El Chico Restaurant.

    12:54 p.m.

    Dispatcher Murray Jackson contacts Tippit, who is now about a mile from the GLOCO Station on Lancaster Street. (McBride, p. 445) Oswald and Tippit are both apparently moving in the direction of the Texas Theater.

    1:00 to 1:07 p.m.

    Texas Theater manager Butch Burroughs said Oswald entered the theater during this timeframe and later bought popcorn from him at the concession stand at approximately 1:15. (McBride, p. 520) Other movie patrons will similarly report having seen Oswald in the mostly empty theater during the start of the movie, changing seats frequently and sometimes sitting directly next to other moviegoers. Is Oswald supposed to meet someone he doesn’t know personally, perhaps his intelligence contact to whom he is expected to give a briefing?

    After 1:00 p.m.

    Picture4Employees of the Top Ten Records store, located a block and a half west of the Texas Theater on Jefferson Boulevard, later claim that Tippit parked his squad car on Bishop Street adjacent to the records store and came in hurriedly while asking to use the phone.

    A Dallas Morning News reporter interviewed former Top 10 clerk Louis Cortinas in 1981. Cortinas recalled that, “Tippit said nothing over the phone, apparently not getting an answer. He stood there long enough for it to ring seven or eight times. Tippit hung up the phone and walked off fast, he was upset or worried about something.” (McBride, p. 451)

    Had Tippit picked up Oswald near the El Chico Restaurant and then dropped him off at the Texas Theater? Had Tippit simply been watching the theater to confirm Oswald’s arrival? Or, was Tippit simply trying to contact someone to find out the latest news on the condition of President Kennedy and Governor Connally?

    1:03 p.m.

    Around this time, police dispatcher Murray Jackson tries to radio Tippit, but gets no answer. (Meagher, p. 266) Was this when Tippit was entering the Top 10 records store to place the phone call?

    Approximately 1:04 p.m.

    Several blocks east of Top 10 and the Texas Theater, an unknown young white male about 5’8” to 5’10” and 165 pounds wearing a white shirt and light tan Eisenhower jacket begins to quickly walk west on East 10th Street. The man is in such a hurry that he catches the attention of those inside of Clark’s Barber Shop at 620 E. 10th as he breezes by that establishment’s storefront window. A pedestrian, Mr. William Lawrence Smith, passes the same man as Smith walks east to lunch at the Town & Country Café just a few doors west of the barber shop. (John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 841)

    Approximately 1:05 p.m.

    As the unknown white male proceeds west and crosses the intersection of 10th and Marsalis, a major disturbance suddenly breaks out at that corner. Bill Drenas, author of the 1998 article Car #10 Where Are You?, mentioned that a person near the scene of the Tippit shooting told investigator Bill Pulte that, “If you are planning to do more research on Tippit, you should find out about the fight that took place at 12th & Marsalis a few minutes before Tippit was killed.” The interviewee spoke only on the condition of anonymity.

    Harrison Livingstone, in his 2006 book The Radical Right and the Murder of John F. Kennedy, adds more crucial detail about this mysterious neighborhood altercation. “There are neighborhood reports of a disagreement at the intersection of 12th & Marsalis,” writes Livingstone, “a few minutes before Tippit was killed. Tippit was headed precisely toward 12th & Marsalis when he left Lancaster & 8th (the report of the 12th & Marsalis argument is from someone whose identity needs to be protected).

    “The late Cecil Smith witnessed this fight which was actually at 10th & Marsalis (my emphasis). One of the two individuals was stabbed, but it was never investigated, apparently … just two blocks east from where Tippit was shortly murdered.” The fight also occurred, let it be known, at the same time and location the unknown gunman in the light jacket, white shirt, and dark trousers is passing on his way two blocks west to the fast approaching scene of the fatal Tippit shooting.

    But it was not until Dallas researchers Michael Brownlow and Professor William Pulte made public their findings in a 2015 Youtube video that we get the full scoop on this most unusual so-called “fight.”

    Picture5tinyBrownlow said it was actually three men and a woman who jumped on another man at the corner, who was then “violently” stabbed. The wounded man, bleeding profusely, was then inexplicably thrown into the back of a blue Mercury Monterey which sped away from the scene. Many people witnessed the assault. 10th & Marsalis was a commercial corner, with an auto parts store, a plumbing supply store, and other nearby businesses such as the barber shop and restaurant. It was Indian summer, pre-air conditioning days, and most of these businesses had telephones within easy reach. Neighbors and teens home from school also allegedly witnessed the noisy and bloody altercation. (See also, Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, pp. 447-48)

    Emergency phones calls were obviously placed to the Dallas Police, although you won’t find any mention of this incident in the DPD call logs for 11/22/63. Why not?

    Approximately 1:05:30

    Officer Tippit, now sitting once again in his patrol car outside of the Top 10 Records store, suddenly hears his police radio crackle to life. There has been a reported fight and possible stabbing at the corner of 10th & Marsalis, several blocks east of where his patrol car now sits near the corner of West Jefferson Blvd. and Bishop Avenue. A man has supposedly been stabbed and thrown into the back of a blue car which drove away from the scene. Tippit puts Car #10 into gear and moves out in a big hurry.

    Picture6tinyThe employees at Top Ten (Lou Cortinas and Dub Stark) watch through their front window as Tippit’s car goes charging through the intersection and races north up to Sunset Street where Tippit blows through the stop sign and disappears from view. (McBride, pp. 451-550)

    Approximately 1:06:00

    Tippit quickly reaches 10th Street and is about to turn right, heading east towards the disturbance at the corner of 10th & Marsalis. But he instead observes a late model Chevrolet headed west on 10th. Could this be the car escaping from the scene of the fight? So instead of turning right, Tippit makes a quick decision and turns left, following the Chevy that has just passed in front of him. Within a block the officer speeds up, passes the Chevy, turns the wheel, and forces the surprised driver to come to a stop at the curb.

    Mr. James Andrews, the motorist—who had been returning to work from his lunch hour—would later give Dallas researcher Greg Lowrey (as reported in Bill Drenas’ article Car #10 Where Are You?) the following description of this bizarre event:

    Drenas writes that “The officer then jumped out of the patrol car, motioned for Andrews to remain stopped, ran back to Andrew’s car, and looked in the space between the front seat and the back seat (emphasis mine). Without saying a word, the policeman went back to the patrol car and drove off quickly. Andrews was perplexed by this strange behavior and looked at the officer’s nameplate which read ‘Tippit’ … Andrews remarked that Tippit seemed to be very upset and agitated and acting wild.” (McBride, pp. 448-49)

    Much has been made of this incident, which apparently happened just a few short moments prior to Tippit’s death. Some have reasoned that Tippit was looking for Oswald, thought to be hiding in the back of an automobile on his way to Red Bird Airport to catch a flight out of town. Others have found the story so odd that they have tended to dismiss it altogether—couldn’t have happened.

    But now that we have a report about a fight at 10th & Marsalis, a stabbing in which the victim was thrown into the back of a car which then sped away from the scene, Tippit’s “wild” actions perhaps make more sense. Tippit may have been looking for the injured stabbing victim in the back of an escaping vehicle—and he was doing so alone, with no backup. That is why he was agitated and acting upset. President Kennedy and Governor Connally have just been gunned down in Dealey Plaza and now Tippit is dealing with a violent, potentially life and death situation in adjoining Oak Cliff.

    1:07:00 p.m.

    Officer Tippit heads east on 10th Street, heading towards the scene of the reported disturbance at the corner of Marsalis. By now, according to Texas Theater Manager Butch Burroughs—as well as multiple paying customers—Lee Oswald is most definitely in the building for the start of the afternoon’s double war movie feature. (Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 352-53)

    1:08:00 p.m.

    As Officer Tippit travels east on 10th towards Marsalis, he spots a lone figure walking west just two blocks from the scene of the stabbing incident. Tippit slows Car #10 as he cruises through the intersection of 10th & Patton. Cab driver Bill Scoggins, parked near the corner in his cab while eating his lunch, notices Tippit pass in front of his cab, slow down, and suddenly pull to the curb about 100 feet past Patton Street. The officer apparently summons the young pedestrian, who is wearing the beige Eisenhower jacket, dark trousers, and white shirt, back to his patrol car.

    Picture7tinyThe young man does an about-face, turning around to approach Tippit’s car sitting at curbside. Could this young man have been a witness? A participant in the fight? He doesn’t appear to have any blood on his jacket that the officer can see. Tippit and the young man, who is now leaning over, have a brief conversation through the open vent on the passenger-side window.

    1:08:30 p.m.

    Officer Tippit, who probably does not fully believe the young man’s story about who he is and what business he has on 10th Street, decides to get out of his car to question the subject further. He adjusts his police cap, begins to walk slowly towards the front of Car #10. As he does, the man pulls a .38 revolver from under his jacket and begins to fire.

    No one sees the actual shots. A passing motorist, Domingo Benavides, is startled by the gunfire as he approaches Car #10 while traveling west on 10th. In an act of instinct and self-preservation, Benavides turns his pickup to the curb and ducks down behind the dashboard. (Lane, pp. 177-78)

    Cabbie Bill Scoggins sees Tippit fall into the street. A few seconds later, he observes the figure of the young man walking quickly towards his cab, cutting across the adjacent corner property on 10th Street. Scoggins steps out of his cab and hides behind the driver-side fender. The young man emerges from the lawn’s hedges and begins to trot south on Patton Street, still tossing the occasional empty shell to the ground. (Lane, pp. 191-93)

    Hearing no further shots, Benavides pokes his head up in time to see the gunman heading for Patton Street, inexplicably tossing a couple of shells into the bushes. Benavides will later tell police he could not positively identify the gunman and will not be taken to any of the subsequent lineups.

    1:10:00 p.m.

    The gunman turns right on Jefferson Boulevard, as seen by multiple witnesses. He stuffs the pistol back into his pants, walks briskly west for a block before cutting through a service station and turning north on Crawford Street. At this point the young gunman disappears. (Armstrong, p. 855)

    Approximately 1:25 p.m.

    Picture8tiny“Someone” hands Captain William “Pinky” Westbrook a light tan Eisenhower jacket that was allegedly thrown under a parked car behind the Texaco service station at Jefferson & Crawford. This was supposedly the jacket worn by the fleeing gunman. Westbrook, however, can’t remember the name of the officer who turned over the jacket. (Lane, pp. 200-203)

    Approximately 1:36 p.m.

    As Dallas police cars continue swarming into Oak Cliff, the unidentified young man from 10th & Patton suddenly reappears again on Jefferson Blvd. near the Texas Theater. The man, who is wearing a white shirt, either purchases a ticket or simply ducks in without paying. The time is now approximately 1:37. Once inside, the new arrival goes upstairs to sit in the theater’s balcony section. (Armstrong, pp. 858-60)

    Approximately 1:40-42 p.m.

    Dallas police are tipped off to a suspicious person who has entered the Texas Theater.

    Approximately 1:42 p.m.

    Picture9At 10th & Patton, Captain Westbrook of the DPD shows FBI special agent Bob Barrett a man’s wallet. The Dallas investigators are going through the wallet, and apparently find two pieces of ID. Westbrook asks Barrett if he knows who either Lee Harvey Oswald or Alex Hiddell are. Barrett says no. (Armstrong, p. 856) Years later, when the story about the wallet is revealed by FBI personnel, the DPD will say that Barrett’s memory is faulty, there was no wallet found at the Tippit crime scene. But a check of archived Dallas TV news footage proved the DPD wrong. Later, the story seems to change that some unidentified person in the crowd at Tippit’s murder scene must have handed the wallet to reserve cop Sgt. Kenneth Croy, the first officer on site. Only none of the many Tippit witnesses reported seeing a wallet on the ground. Croy, incredibly, never filed a written report on 11/22/63. And Croy, in his testimony before the Warren Commission, said he knew several of the officers who eventually responded to the shooting at 10th and Patton—but couldn’t remember a single name of any of them.

    1:45:43 p.m.

    The DPD Channel 1 dispatcher broadcasts a report of a suspect who “just went into the Texas Theater.” A fleet of police cars, marked and unmarked, arrive to surround the theater front and back. (Armstrong, p. 863)

    1:50-1:51 p.m.

    Picture10tinyLee Oswald, still wearing his long-sleeved brown work shirt, is subdued in the main (downstairs) section of the theater by DPD officers and is whisked out the front door to a waiting unmarked police car.(Armstrong, p. 868) Meanwhile, a second slender young white male in a white t-shirt is arrested in the balcony and brought out the back door of the theater, as observed by Bernard Haire, the owner of the hobby store two doors east of the theater. The official Dallas arrest report will indicate that Oswald was arrested in the balcony, while in fact he was actually arrested downstairs in the theater’s ground-floor main section. (Armstrong, p. 871) What happened to the second man who was taken away?

    Approximately 1:55 p.m.

    While accompanied by four Dallas detectives in an unmarked car headed for DPD’s downtown headquarters, Oswald is asked to give his name. He ignores the request. Perturbed, Detective Paul Bentley pulls a billfold from Oswald’s hip pocket and begins to examine its contents. He finds ID cards for both a Lee Oswald and an A. Hidell. “Who are you?” asks Bentley again. “You’re the detective,” Oswald finally answers back. “You figure it out.” (Armstrong, p. 870)

    But wait. They just found Oswald’s wallet at 10th & Patton, right? (Armstrong, p. 868) So Oswald carried two wallets, one of which he was good enough to leave at the Tippit murder scene? Along with four shell casings from a .38 caliber revolver?

    In the words of an old Rockford Files TV episode: “that plant was so obvious someone should’ve watered it.” No wonder the 10th & Patton wallet disappeared after a billfold was found to have been in Oswald’s possession at the theater.

    The Dallas Police knew who Oswald was before they descended on and surrounded the Texas Theater.

    Approximately 2.p.m.

    Oswald arrives at Dallas Police Headquarters to be interrogated and booked. He will be shot dead that very same weekend. To quote one bluntly sarcastic journalist: “Lee Oswald miraculously managed to survive nearly 48 hours in the custody of the Dallas Police Department.”

    The DPD kept no known tapes or transcripts from the hours of interrogation undergone by their suspect. We have little idea what Oswald really said, only that he “emphatically denied these charges.” (Armstrong, p. 893)

    Ballistics

    Picture11tinyIf anyone is looking for ballistics to provide a definitive answer in the Tippit case, they will be sorely disappointed. The ballistics evidence tends to exonerate Lee Oswald as much as it implicates him. (For lengthy discussions of the following, see Henry Hurt, Reasonable Doubt, pp. 151-56 and Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare, pp. 252-57)

    Four shells from a .38 caliber handgun were recovered spread along the ground leading from the crime scene. The DPD officers on site at first figured these were from an automatic pistol (which automatically ejects the spent shells), not a revolver, because who would purposely remove and leave such incriminating evidence at the scene (along with a wallet full of ID)?

    The bullets found in Officer Tippit’s body at autopsy could not be matched to Oswald’s .38. And the shells so conveniently recovered at 10th & Patton could not be matched to the bullets. The shells were never properly marked by DPD, evidence was misfiled, and the chain of evidence for the ballistics was, unfortunately, suspect.

    In the words of homicide detective Jim Leavelle, the very man tasked with nailing Oswald for the Tippit murder, the ballistics in this case were quite frankly “a mess.”

    As Joe McBride notes in his book, Warren Commissioner and congressman Hale Boggs was one of the members of that body who had his doubts about their verdict. Boggs directly challenged the Tippit case ballistics when he said, “What proof do you have that these are the bullets?” (McBride, p. 258) Boggs apparently never received a satisfactory answer.

    New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who took an active role in the JFK assassination investigation in the late 1960s, believed that the ballistics evidence pointed to two shooters at 10th & Patton. Said Garrison in his October 1967 Playboy interview, “The evidence we’ve uncovered leads us to suspect that two men, neither of whom was Oswald, were the real murderers of Tippit.”

    Mr. Garrison added that, “… Revolvers don’t eject cartridges and the cartridges left so conveniently on the street didn’t match the bullets in Tippit’s body.”

    The cartridge cases—two Western-Winchester and two Remington–Peters—simply didn’t match the bullets—three Western–Winchester, one Remington-Peters—recovered from Officer Tippit’s body.

    “The last time I looked,” noted Garrison wryly, “the Remington–Peters Manufacturing Company was not in the habit of slipping Winchester bullets into its cartridges, nor was the Winchester–Western Manufacturing Company putting Remington bullets into its cartridges.”

    Witnesses

    Picture12tinyIf the ballistics evidence in the Tippit case could rightly be characterized as messy, then the eyewitness testimony regarding the Tippit homicide would have to be labeled a toxic waste site by comparison.

    Tippit authority Joseph McBride, author of Into the Nightmare, explained the bizarre situation succinctly when he stated, “The other physical evidence is also confused and contradictory—and the eyewitness evidence is so contradictory that it seems as though there were two sets of witnesses.” (McBride, pp. 460-61)

    One set of witnesses identified Oswald as the sole murderer of Officer Tippit. The second set said they couldn’t positively identify Oswald, or could positively exclude Oswald, and saw two or more suspects acting suspiciously, and even saw one of those persons apparently involved in the shooting escape in an automobile.

    Dallas authorities, and later the Warren Commission, focused almost exclusively on the first set of witnesses—while minimizing or completely ignoring the second set.

    A good example of “witness neglect” was reported by 10th Street neighbor Frank Wright. Wright later told Tippit researchers that “I was the first person out. I saw a man standing in front of the car. He was looking toward the man on the ground (Tippit). The man who was standing in front of him was about medium height. He had on a long coat, it ended just above his hands. I didn’t see any gun. He ran around on the passenger side of the police car. He ran as fast as he could go, and he got into his car. … He got into that car and he drove away as fast as he could see. … After that a whole lot of police came up. I tried to tell two or three people (officers) what I saw. They didn’t pay any attention. I’ve seen what came out on television and in the newspaper but I know that’s not what happened. I know a man drove off in a grey car. Nothing in the world’s going to change my opinion.” (Hurt, pp. 148-49)

    Picture13Acquilla Clemons, a caregiver who worked on 10th Street, was not simply ignored the same as was Mr. Wright. Clemons, who saw two suspicious persons escape the Tippit murder scene in different directions, told investigator Mark Lane (during a taped interview) that a man she suspected was a Dallas detective or policeman visited her home on or about 11/24/63. He was carrying a sidearm. Mrs. Clemons reported that the visitor warned her “it’d be best if I didn’t say anything because I might get hurt … someone might hurt me.” (McBride, pp. 490-94)

    Picture14Warren Reynolds, a used car salesman who saw the gunman escaping west on Jefferson Boulevard, was indeed hurt—and very badly. Reynolds told news reporters the afternoon of the assassination that he had seen the fleeing gunman, but was simply too far away to have made a positive identification. The FBI finally got around to interviewing Reynolds in January, 1964, at which time the witness reiterated his original story that he had been located across Jefferson Boulevard and was simply too far from the gunman to have made a positive identification. Two nights later, someone sneaked into Reynolds’ place of business, hid in the basement, and shot Mr. Reynolds in the head with a .22 caliber rifle. Miraculously, Reynolds survived. Even more miraculously, the car salesman made such a dramatic recovery that he now found his eyesight had improved and he was able to identify Lee Oswald after all. (Hurt, pp. 147-48; McBride pp. 476-78)

    Decades later, Dallas researcher Michael Brownlow tracked down Mr. Reynolds, who was still in the business of selling cars. At first, Reynolds would not admit who he was. But after Brownlow had gained his trust, the researcher asked Mr. Reynolds why he had suddenly changed his testimony regarding his identification of Oswald.

    “Because I wanted to live,” Reynolds admitted bluntly.

    When Mark Lane came to Dallas to make the documentary Rush to Judgment, his director, Emile de Antonio, made a rather interesting observation. “There was absolutely no tension at all on the scene of the assassination (Dealey Plaza),” commented de Antonio. “… All the tension is where Tippit was killed. That’s right and this (the Tippit slaying) is the key to it.” (McBride, pp. 460-61)

    The director’s sense of what was going on in Oak Cliff was seemingly verified by an anonymous letter appearing in Playboy that was sent to the editor after Jim Garrison’s October 1967 Playboy magazine interview:

    “I read Playboy’s Garrison interview with perhaps more interest than most readers. I was an eyewitness to the shooting of policeman Tippit in Dallas on the afternoon President Kennedy was murdered. I saw two men, neither of them resembling the pictures I later saw of Lee Harvey Oswald, shoot Tippit and run off in opposite directions. There were at least half a dozen other people who witnessed this. My wife convinced me that I should say nothing, since there were other eyewitnesses. Her advice and my cowardice undoubtedly have prolonged my life—or at least allowed me now to tell the true story…”

    There were four main witnesses who gave testimony that Lee Oswald had in fact been guilty. Many who’ve studied the Tippit murder have long felt that competent defense counsel would have reduced the case against Lee Oswald to shambles. If Oswald had received a fair trial, they say, he would have been exonerated of the charge he killed Officer J.D. Tippit.

    Of course, Oswald did not receive even the benefit of an unfair trial. The suspect received no trial whatsoever and was instead convicted in the court of public opinion based on government propaganda disseminated by a relentless disinformation campaign. In the words of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover on the evening of the assassination, “The thing I am concerned about, and so is Mr. Katzenbach (Deputy U.S. Attorney General), is having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.” (McBride, p. 142)

    That “thing” mentioned by Hoover would eventually, of course, be the pre-determined, hastily prepared whitewash known as the Warren Report … with the so-called “magic” bullet as its centerpiece.

    The four crucial witnesses against Oswald in the fatal Tippit incident would be William Scoggins, Ted Calloway, Helen Markham, and—belatedly—Jack Ray Tatum.

    Taxi Driver Bill Scoggins

    Picture15William “Bill” Scoggins was seated in his cab on Patton Street. (Warren Report, p. 166) He was facing the intersection with 10th Street, when he saw Officer Tippit’s patrol car pass by in front of him. (For discussions of Scoggins’ testimony, from which this material is drawn, see Meagher, pp. 256-57 and Lane, pp. 191-93) He saw no one walk by the front of his cab. The patrol car pulled to the curb on 10th Street approximately 100 feet east of the intersection. Mr. Scoggins’ vantage point was obscured by some bushes at the edge of the corner property on 10th. He suddenly noticed a pedestrian on the 10th Street sidewalk either turn around or walk over to the police car’s passenger side window. Scoggins resumed eating his lunch when, several seconds later, gunshots suddenly rang out. Scoggins, startled, looked up in time to see the officer fall into the street. Soon after the pedestrian, now brandishing a pistol, began walking in the direction of the cab. Scoggins exited his cab, thought about running away, but immediately realized he would be in the open and could not outrun any bullets. Instead, Scoggins opted to hide behind the driver-side fender of his cab. He saw the young man cut across the lawn on the corner property, squeezing through the bushes and stepping out onto the sidewalk very near the cab. Hunkered down by the fender, Scoggins heard the man mumble something like “Poor dumb cop.” He was afraid the gunman might try to steal the cab, but instead the young man proceeded on foot south on Patton towards Jefferson Blvd., crossing Patton at mid-block.

    At the Saturday (next day) six-man police lineup, Mr. Scoggins picked Oswald as the individual he had briefly seen emerging from the bushes. However, fellow car driver William Whaley, who had driven Oswald from downtown Dallas to Oak Cliff the previous day, also attended the same lineup as Scoggins. Mr. Whaley made the following cogent observation regarding the nature of that DPD lineup. He testified before the Warren Commission that “… you could have picked him (Oswald) out without identifying him by just listening to him, because he was bawling out the policeman, telling them it wasn’t right to put him in line with these teenagers. … He showed no respect for the policemen, he told them what he thought about them. They knew what they were doing and they were trying to railroad him and he wanted his lawyer.”

    Oswald, of course, had a visibly damaged eye, the result of his encounter with the DPD. Oswald was also asked to state his name and to tell where he worked. By Saturday, when Mr. Scoggins participated in this particular lineup, every functioning adult in Dallas and across the USA knew that the lead suspect in the assassination of JFK and the murder of Officer Tippit was a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald who worked at the Texas School Book Depository.

    As Mr. Whaley duly noted, “you could have picked him out without identifying him.”

    Mr. Scoggins, as it turns out, was actually not able to pick out Oswald during a separate photo lineup. In front of the Warren Commission, Scoggins said that he was shown photos of different men by either an FBI or Secret Service agent. “I think I picked the wrong one,” the cab driver testified. “He told me the other one was Oswald.”

    It seems abundantly clear that Mr. Scoggins got only the briefest of glimpses of the gunman, while hiding in fear for his life on the opposite side of his cab. He was unable to identify Lee Oswald as the gunman in the absence of a highly tainted lineup.

    And fellow cab driver William Whaley, who saw through the sham of these tainted DPD lineups and denounced them for what they were? Within two years of his Warren Commission testimony he would become the first Dallas taxi driver since 1937, while on duty, to fall victim to a fatal traffic accident.

    Ted Calloway

    Picture16After the Tippit gunman passed Bill Scoggins’s cab on Patton Street, he soon encountered used car lot manager Ted Calloway. Calloway, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, had heard the pistol shots and immediately began walking across the car lot towards Patton to investigate. (Warren Report, p. 169) He soon observed a young man heading south on Patton carrying a pistol in what Calloway would later describe as a “raised pistol position.” The young gunman, who noticed Calloway approach the east sidewalk on Patton, then crossed to the west side of the street to avoid the car salesman. (This following material is referenced in Meagher, p. 258 and Mc Bride, pp. 469-70)

    “Hey, man!” yelled Calloway as the suspect passed Calloway’s position. “What the hell’s going on?” The man glanced at Calloway, said something unintelligible, then continued past Mr. Calloway and towards Jefferson Boulevard, where he turned west and was soon out of sight.

    “Follow that guy,” Calloway instructed two nearby car lot employees. Calloway then hurried up to 10th Street where he saw a small crowd forming around Tippit’s prone body. Calloway next picked up the dead policeman’s handgun and told Bill Scoggins they would use Scoggins’ yellow cab to go hunt for the gunman.

    “Which way did he go?” Calloway asked Domingo Benavides, who had stopped his pickup truck only 15-20 feet from Tippit’s patrol car when he heard the gunshots. Is this not a strange question to be asked by a witness who had purportedly just seen the gunman fleeing by him on Patton Street?

    Calloway and Scoggins did indeed briefly search the neighborhood, although unsuccessfully, for Tippit’s killer. The FBI would later determine that Mr. Calloway had seen the gunman from a distance of 55-60 feet. Not nearly as close as Bill Scoggins, but Calloway had gotten a longer, clearer look.

    Calloway, a thoroughly believable, extroverted, and likeable individual, would have made an excellent witness for the prosecution. Calloway positively identified Oswald at one of the tainted DPD lineups and later told the Warren Commission how he saw Lee Harvey Oswald escaping from the scene of the crime at 10th & Patton.

    But a funny thing happened in 1986 when a television special was produced from London, On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald. This was a mock trial featuring prosecutor Vince Bugliosi and high-profile defense attorney Gerry Spence. Spence had the difficult assignment of defending the man widely accepted to be JFK’s assassin, Lee Oswald. When Ted Calloway took the stand, he was his usual affable, loquacious self. He told the courtroom that he was 100% confident that the man he saw carrying a pistol that day was Lee Harvey Oswald.

    When Spence asked Calloway whether it was fair that Oswald was in the lineup with a bruised eye and cuts on his face and was not dressed in a shirt and tie like others beside him, Mr. Calloway said he didn’t think it mattered.

    When Spence asked Calloway whether Homicide Detective Jim Leavelle had prejudiced Oswald’s identification by telling Calloway that, “We want to try to wrap him up tight on the killing of this officer. We think he is the same one that shot the President. But if we can wrap him up real tight on killing this officer, we have got him.” Would that not be pressuring the witness?

    Ted Calloway, however, did not believe Leavelle’s statement to have been prejudicial, because the car salesman said Leavelle also told Calloway and the others to “be sure to take your time.”

    With Calloway refusing to admit he could have been mistaken or pressured in any way by police to make a positive ID, Spence had one final trick up his sleeve. The flamboyant defense attorney must have been a gambling man, because he was certainly gambling on his next move—but it worked.

    Picture17Spence’s final question for witness Ted Calloway was to ask him if he could identify someone in a particular photo. This was the infamous and controversial “Doorman” photo taken by a newsman the moment the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza. Some have speculated that the figure of this man in the doorway of the TSBD could have been Lee Oswald. It wasn’t. All evidence instead points to this man having been Billy Lovelady, a lookalike co-worker of Oswald’s at the depository.

    Calloway, mildly confused by the question and suspecting Spence was laying some sort of trap, nevertheless replied that the image being shown on the courtroom screen was “a likeness of Oswald.”

    But it wasn’t and that was just the point. At a distance of 55-60 feet, Ted Calloway could have easily mistaken Billy Lovelady (and a lot of other young, white males) for Lee Oswald. It is exactly this sort of testimony by a witness who is so “100% positive” that has led to innocent persons finding themselves on death row.

    Waitress Helen Markham

    Mrs. Helen Markham was the so-called “star” witness of the Warren Commission regarding the murder of J.D. Tippit. Mrs. Markham was the only witness in 1963 who claimed to have actually seen Lee Oswald shoot and kill Officer Tippit. Markham was hurrying to catch a bus downtown to her waitressing job when she, according to her version of events, came upon the scene of Oswald shooting Tippit from across the hood of Tippit’s patrol car. (Warren Report, pp. 167-68)

    Picture18The problem with Markham’s eyewitness testimony is that she maintained she saw many things that no other witnesses saw—things that not only did not happen, but that could not have happened.

    Markham’s testimony was considered worthless by several of the lawyers who worked for the Warren Commission. Some even considered it downright dangerous and lobbied to have Markham excluded as a witness. (Edward Epstein, The Assassination Chronicles, pp. 142-44) But the higher-ups on the commission realized that without Markham, without at least one supposed eyewitness, the already glaringly weak case against Oswald for the murder of Officer Tippit would potentially collapse. The lawyers were stuck with her. The commission deemed Markham to be a “reliable” witness, despite all evidence to the contrary. “She is an utter screwball,” stated Joseph Ball, senior counsel to the Warren Commission. He characterized her testimony as being “full of mistakes” and that it was “utterly unreliable.” (Anthony Summers, Conspiracy, p. 87)

    According to Mrs. Markham’s version of events, she was hurrying to catch a bus to work, walking south on Patton Street towards Jefferson Boulevard. (The major part of her testimony is located in Warren Commission Vol. III, pp. 306-22)

    As she approached 10th Street and was waiting for traffic to pass, Markham observed a young man crossing Patton in front of her on the opposite side of 10th Street, As the man continued walking east on 10th, a police car approached from the same direction, rolling slowly through the intersection a few seconds later. The man kept walking, and the police car kept moving slowly forward. Eventually, the patrol car pulled curbside and the officer called or motioned to the young man to approach his patrol car. The man came over and leaned in the open window on the passenger side, talking to the officer. The conversation seemed “friendly” and Markham paid it “no mind.” After several seconds, the policeman got out of his car and began to walk towards the front of his car. The young man stepped back, put his hands to his sides, and also began walking towards the front of Officer Tippit’s patrol car.

    When the policeman and the pedestrian passed the windshield and were opposite each other over the hood of the car, the man pulled out a pistol and shot Officer Tippit “in the wink of your eye.”

    The gunman then turned and began walking west back to where he had come from. As he was reaching the corner of 10th & Patton again he looked across the intersection and saw Mrs. Markham. Their eyes locked. Mrs. Markham screamed and put her hands over her face. She did so for several seconds. When she began to pull her fingers down to peek, she watched the man escaping the scene by walking across a lot and then disappearing down the alleyway that runs between 10th Street and Jefferson Boulevard. Here is a graphic of the crime scene from Tippit author Dale Myers:

    Picture19tinytinyI have taken the liberty of slightly altering this graphic by putting a circle around Mrs. Markham’s reported position. The graphic is from Mr.Myers’ book, With Malice: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Murder of Officer J. D. Tippit.

    After the gunman had disappeared down the alley, Mrs. Markham went to the policeman’s side. The injured officer tried speaking to Mrs., Markham, but she could understand little if anything he said. Mrs. Markham stayed with the policeman, alone in the middle of 10th Street, for almost 20 minutes. Then some people finally came by, and eventually some police too, and then the ambulance. She spoke with the officer until they loaded him into the ambulance and left for the hospital.

    The problems with Mrs. Markham’s story are many:

    1. The gunman, according to the other witnesses, had been walking west on 10th Street, not east as stated by Mrs. Markham. The official Dallas Police report describes the suspect as walking west.
    2. The passenger side window on Tippit’s patrol car had been rolled up. The gunman could not have leaned inside the window and rested his elbows and arms on the door as described by Mrs. Markham.
    3. All other witnesses saw the gunman flee west on Jefferson Boulevard. No one else saw the gunman go across an empty lot and disappear down the alley.
    4. All witnesses and the Dallas County coroner said that Officer Tippit was almost certainly dead when he hit the ground. It was not possible for the dead officer to have held any conversation with Mrs. Markham.
    5. A crowd formed at that scene very quickly and grew larger with each passing minute. Mrs. Markham’s assertion that she was alone in the street with Tippit for nearly 20 minutes was simply inconceivable. The ambulance came from two blocks away and retrieved Tippit’s body in probably five minutes or less. (For a good review of the problems with Markham, see McBride, pp 478-82)

    Mrs. Markham would describe the gunman as being a little bit chunky and with somewhat bushy hair. Lee Oswald had thinning hair—and at 5’9” and 130 pounds could hardly have been described as being even a “little” chunky.

    At the downtown police lineup, Mrs. Markham became hysterical and there was some discussion about bringing her to the hospital for medical attention. She was able to continue with the lineup only after someone kindly administered some ammonia to revive her and settle the poor woman’s frazzled nerves.

    Markham was able to pick Oswald out at the lineup … not because she recognized him as the gunman, but because she said that when she looked at the “number two man” in the lineup, his appearance gave her chills. Perhaps this may be explained by the fact that, while Oswald stood in that lineup next to well-dressed Dallas police detectives using fictitious names, his face looked as if he had done a few rounds with then reigning heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston.

    “When I saw this man, I wasn’t sure but I had cold chills run all over me,” was Mrs. Markham’s description to the Warren Commission of her so-called “identification” of the suspect. This, mind you, from their “star” witness.

    No less than a half dozen times did Mrs. Markham attempt to explain to the Warren Commission that she did not know any of the men in the lineup and did not recognize any of them either. But Assistant Counsel Joseph Ball refused to settle for this: “Was there a number two man in there?” Ball asked Markham, a rather leading question posed to this witness, one that would have been immediately objected to by any competent defense attorney at a jury trial. Finally, Mrs. Markham was forced to concede that “the number two man is the one I picked.” Not because she recognized the man, but because he gave her chills. (McBride, p. 479)

    “Contradictory and worthless” was the description given by Assistant Warren Counsel Wesley Libeler regarding Mrs. Markham’s testimony. “The Commission wants to believe Mrs. Markham and that’s all there is to it,” added staff member Norman Redlich. (McBride, p. 479)

    Remember, these were the folks putting their careers on the line and being paid to “wrap him up tight”—not to exonerate the apparent sole suspect of these monumental crimes.

    Picture20Jim Garrison, in On the Trail of the Assassins, commented dryly that, “As I read Markham’s testimony, it occurred to me that few prosecutors had ever found themselves with a witness at once so eager to serve their cause and simultaneously so destructive to it.” (Garrison, p. 195) Garrison may have been onto something here. What was causing this lady’s testimony to be so strangely bizarre and baffling?

    Tippit researchers Joseph McBride, William Pulte, and Michael Brownlow have all hinted at a potential answer. At the time of the JFK assassination and J.D. Tippit’s death, Helen Markham’s son, Jimmy, was facing serious criminal charges in Dallas County. Markham, a single mother of very limited means, could do little in the way of protecting her troubled, at-risk boy. Then, suddenly, the Tippit incident occurred and Mrs. Markham was, in her words, “treated like a queen” by Dallas Police. It must have crossed Helen Markham’s mind that, if she helped the police and the Dallas authorities, her son might receive favorable treatment by the court. Worse, if she refused to help and did not identify Oswald as Tippit’s killer, it might be her son who paid the heavy, immediate price. (McBride, p. 479) But helping Dallas authorities, in this particular highest of profile cases, meant having to finger an innocent man, whether dead or not, for a crime he did not commit. Oswald was simply not the short, slightly heavy, bushy-haired cop-killer who disappeared behind Ballew’s Texaco.

    So, it may have been Mrs. Markham’s solution to this conundrum to appear to be helping the authorities while she was actually rendering her testimony useless and therefore harmless to the defendant. Save son Jimmy, but also protect Lee, the young man who was in the Texas Theater as the fatal shots rang out at 10th & Patton.

    Medical Photographer Jack Ray Tatum

    Picture21Witness Domingo Benavides, the closest passerby to the shooting of Officer Tippit, was unable to make a positive ID of the suspect, because Benavides had instinctively ducked down behind the dashboard of his pickup truck when he heard the shots. Benavides mostly saw the gunman as he was walking away, towards the corner of 10th & Patton, while tossing shell casings into bushes along the way. Benavides did report that the gunman had a haircut that was squared off in the back along the neckline of his Eisenhower jacket. Lee Oswald on that day clearly had hair that was tapered in back, not squared off. (WC, Vol 6, p. 451)

    Benavides also noticed something else that would later prove significant—a red Ford Galaxie about six car lengths ahead of his pickup, going west, that pulled over same as Benavides when the shots occurred. (HSCA Vol 12, p. 40) The red Galaxie and its driver supposedly stopped and stayed at the scene for a time—and then left as a crowd quickly gathered. No one ever got the name of this potential important witness.

    In September, 1976 the U.S. House of Representatives voted 280-65 to establish the Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), in order to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. This bold move was primarily caused by the first national airing in March of 1975 of the 8 mm film shot by Abraham Zapruder of the JFK assassination. Geraldo Rivera hosted the showing which took place on the ABC show Good Night America. When American citizens finally got to witness the shooting with their own eyes, their response was one of outrage, which in turn prompted the reopening of the investigation. The HSCA would not complete its work until late in 1978 and did not issue a final report and conclusion until the following year, 1979. The final conclusion of the HSCA was that President Kennedy had likely been assassinated as the result of a conspiracy.

    A reopening of the JFK assassination necessarily meant the HSCA would also be taking a second look at the Tippit murder. The case against Lee Oswald in the murder of Officer Tippit had been a house of cards from the beginning and there were those in positions of power who apparently did not wish for any second inquiry of the murky, little-investigated events at 10th & Patton on the day of JFK’s assassination.

    It was against this backdrop that a Dallas native, Jack Ray Tatum, stepped forward with the claim that he had been the driver behind the wheel of the mysterious red Ford Galaxie seen stopped near the intersection of 10th & Patton on 11/22/63.

    Mr. Tatum would proceed to tell an amazing story—perhaps one even more unbelievable than that of the unfortunate Mrs. Markham. Yet unlike that of the much-maligned waitress, it has generally, and inexplicably, been accepted as fact for more than four decades. In a filmed interview with the PBS television show Frontline in 2003, Mr. Tatum re-created his alleged experience on that fateful day in Dallas, 1963.

    While taking a detour through the neighborhood to circle back to a jewelry store on Jefferson Blvd. to buy his wife a gift, Tatum said he found himself driving north on Denver Street around 1 p.m. at which time he turned left to head west on 10th Street.

    Picture22tinyTatum explained that after he made the turn and began driving west on 10th, he noticed an individual walking in his direction (walking east towards Tatum). A Dallas police car was just pulling over to the curb. As Tatum drove towards where the squad car was now parked he noticed the young man leaning over and talking to the officer. The man had both hands in the pockets of his light-colored tan jacket. Tatum continued on to the intersection of 10th & Patton. As he was about in the middle of that intersection he heard “three, maybe four shots.” Tatum continued through the intersection and then braked to a stop.

    What Tatum describes next was seen by no other witnesses.

    Tatum looked in his rearview mirror and saw the policeman laying in the street. The gunman, still on the passenger side of the squad car, walked to the rear of Tippit’s car, hesitated, came around the back of the car, then walked up along the driver’s side of the car … and shot Tippit one final time at close range. (McBride, p. 496)

    The gunman, according to Tatum, then looked around, surveyed the situation, and started a slow run west in Tatum’s direction. Tatum put his car in gear, drove forward down 10th Street to avoid danger, and kept his eye on the gunman in the rearview mirror.

    Tatum said he could see the gunman very clearly and that the corners of his mouth curled up, like in a smile, which was distinctive and made this individual stand out. Then, Tatum delivers his punch line, the big money words the PBS audience is waiting for:

    “And I was within 10-15 feet of that individual and it was Lee Harvey Oswald.”

    Now, to the casual viewer of this PBS documentary, Mr. Tatum has just laid to rest any and all the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of J.D. Tippit—and has apparently put the final nail in the coffin of Lee Harvey Oswald. Tatum is so smooth in his delivery, so convincing, so sincere: 10-15 feet? How could he have not identified Oswald?

    Frontline and PBS should be ashamed for having filmed this charade and then presenting it to the American public as fact. (The reader can see this interview at Youtube, under the title, “J. D. Tippit Murder Witness Jack Tatum”) Since the entire interview was shot from within Tatum’s vehicle, the viewer can’t see that, according to Tatum’s own description of events, the gunman was likely never closer than 100 feet of Mr. Tatum’s alleged position (in red). Here is the overhead satellite view of that intersection today, with the distance legend in the lower right corner (blue arrow points to 20 ft.):

    Picture23tinyAccording to a study cited by the Innocence Project, after 25 feet face perception diminishes. At about 150 feet, accurate face identification for people with normal vision drops to zero.

    Picture24Could Jack Tatum, while watching a fleeing gunman in his rearview mirror from 100 feet or more away (and remember, Tatum said he drove forward again as the gunman approached), have been able to tell that the corners of the gunman’s mouth turned up? Positively ID him as Lee Harvey Oswald? A gunman in a rearview mirror who was ducking behind trees, bushes, Mr. Scoggins’ yellow cab, and all the while brandishing a pistol?

    Was Jack Ray Tatum even there? Who says so besides Jack Ray Tatum? Tatum himself admitted that “When they were getting witnesses to go to the Warren Commission, I thought, they hadn’t missed me—no one had mentioned I was there.”

    Tatum later claimed he didn’t want to get involved on 11/22/63, that they already had enough witnesses. (McBride, p. 498) And that Mrs. Markham—who Tatum said was there—(with her hands over her eyes) got a better look than he.

    Oh, yes, Mrs. Markham. Tatum first said he simply drove away and left the scene of the Tippit slaying. Later he explained that he came back to help poor Mrs. Markham, eventually driving her to a police station to give her statement. A noble gesture to be sure. Only problem is, DPD records indicate that Mrs. Markham was taken to DPD headquarters by Office George Hammer, not Mr. Tatum.

    Tatum’s assertion that “Oswald” came within 10-15 feet of him may be an exaggeration of colossal proportion. However, Tatum’s other claim that “Oswald” circled the squad car and then shot Tippit—basically point blank “execution style”—is as absurd as anything Mrs. Markham told the Warren Commission in 1964. Yes, the eyewitness testimony in general was both conflicting and contradictory. Yes, Benavides and Scoggins missed witnessing crucial pieces of the crime as they went ducking for cover. And we can only guess at what Mrs. Markham actually saw. But while the eyewitness testimony may have been difficult if not impossible to reconcile, the ear witness testimony remained extremely consistent.

    Witness after witness described Tippit as being killed by a fusillade of shots. They all heard basically the same thing: Pow pow pow pow.

    “They was fast,” remarked cabdriver Bill Scoggins, describing how the shots were fired extremely close together, in rapid succession.

    “Pow pow, pow pow,” is how neighbor Doris Holan, whose second-floor apartment overlooked the scene, described the loud bangs to researcher Michael Brownlow.

    “He shot him in the wink of your eye,” noted Mrs. Markham.

    Domingo Benavides described hearing a loud boom followed quickly by two more fast booms.

    “Bam bam – bam bam bam,” remarked Ted Calloway, likening the shot sequence to Morse code.

    Yet Mr. Tatum insisted that “Oswald” fired 3-4 shots from the front passenger side, stopped, walked to the back of the patrol car, hesitated, then walked behind the squad car, turned, and walked up the driver’s side until he stood over Tippit and fired one last bullet up-close-and-personal.

    Except, no one heard that. No one heard anything even remotely resembling that. Nobody heard shots—followed by a several second delay—followed by one final shot.

    Picture25Yet today, if you watch a documentary, movie, or television show describing Tippit’s murder, Jack Tatum’s version of events is what you are almost sure to see. But it never happened that way, couldn’t have happened that way.

    “That just didn’t happen,” Calloway told one researcher regarding Tatum’s scenario. “Boy, those shots are as clear in my ear today as the day it happened. Bam. Bam. Bam, bam, bam. Just like that.”

    Problem is, the forensic evidence showed that one of the shots was likely fired from a steep downward angle, from above the officer, unlike the other three shots. The final shot was more accurate, more deadly, and apparently done from a much closer distance.

    But the man in the light tan Eisenhower jacket didn’t have time to do what Mr. Tatum said he did. After the shots, he began almost immediately to walk in the direction of Bill Scoggins’ cab. That gunman never went around the car and stood over Tippit. Again, there was no time for that. And nobody heard that.

    Someone else was there. Someone else who also shot Tippit but escaped before the man in the light tan Eisenhower jacket started dropping shells and walking towards Patton Street. Someone such as the man in the long coat seen by Mr. Wright. The man who looked down at Tippit in the street and then ran fast to a grey 1950 or 1951 coupe and sped away.

    “Those are pistol shots!” exclaimed Mr. Calloway when the murder happened. With that the used car manager was on his feet and out the office door. “I could move,” he recalled, “and just as I got to the sidewalk—which is about thirty-feet away, I guess—I looked to my right and there’s Oswald jumping through the hedge.”

    Calloway was asked, “If someone tried to convince you that there were four shots and a short pause and then another one fired, you wouldn’t believe that?” “No, I wouldn’t,” Calloway answered, repeating the cadence he recalled, “Bam–bam–bam, bam, bam.”

    No time, no how, no way.

    So what was accomplished by Jack Tatum’s strange, belated testimony before the HSCA?

    1. It helped to repair Mrs. Markham’s highly controversial and highly criticized testimony before the Warren Commission in 1964—and helped to verify her presence (doubted by some) at that corner when the shots were fired.
    2. It reinforced the idea that the gunman had been walking east, not west, a crucial detail needed to allow Lee Oswald to have reached the scene in time to murder Officer Tippit.
    3. It explained the previously unexplainable, the forensic evidence that showed Tippit had been hit by one bullet from a different, much steeper angle which was also fired from a distance relatively closer than the other bullets.
    4. It maintained the fiction of only one gunman at the Tippit scene.
    5. It fingered Lee Oswald as that lone gunman at the Tippit scene.
    6. Most of all, it gave the HSCA a reason not to delve too deeply into the Tippit case. Which, in retrospect, is one of the HSCA’s many failures: their lack of rigor in reviewing the Tippit case.

    Today, under analysis, his testimony has the quality of paper mache. Tatum saw things no one else saw and heard things no one else heard. And his identification of Oswald simply has little or no credibility from that distance. His alleged escorting of Markham is also dubious. It’s almost as if he was a salesman. The ruse, a highly pernicious one, has apparently succeeded—at least so far. Yet, in spite of all this—and because of late Frontline producer Mike Sullivan—his twist on critical events is continually presented as fact.

    In the end, however, the HSCA still managed to “overturn” the 1964 pre-determined conclusion offered by the Warren Commission. The HSCA reported that President Kennedy was probably slain as the result of a conspiracy, and that there were likely at least two gunmen in Dealey Plaza—both in the Texas School Book Depository and behind the fence on the Grassy Knoll.

    And so now at the end of this article, we have finally come full circle … back to Counsel David Bellin’s “Rosetta Stone” logic. For if President Kennedy was assassinated in downtown Dallas as a result of a conspiracy, then it follows that Officer Tippit was likely murdered in adjoining Oak Cliff in an attempt to further that same conspiracy. 10th and Patton was a setup, the disturbance at 10th was in all likelihood a ruse. The designated patsy sat in a darkened nearby movie theater as Officer Tippit, drawn into a trap, was shot down on a quiet residential street in a Dallas suburb. All went as planned—until the scheme to kill the patsy in the movie theater fell through. That’s when the conspirators, suddenly desperate, went into all-out damage control mode and brought in Mafia bag man Jack Ruby to silence the pasty once-and-for all—live and in front of a national television audience.

    Messy, very messy.

    And in the words of Tippit author Joseph McBride, America then took a turn and walked into the nightmare. Along the way, they turned a former Marine into a patsy.

    Picture26