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.

The Larry and Phil Show

As most of us know, the National Archives began a premature release of JFK assassination documents on July 25^th. The legal target date had previously been late October. For whatever reason, NARA decided to begin early. As I noted in my Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis, the first week was marked by many problems. Most of which, in my opinion, could have been avoided.

Anyone familiar with the JFK case understands that these documents are the leftover residue from the work of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Formed to declassify all the records in the JFK case, that citizens’ panel ceased operations in 1998. But they specified that, by law, certain documents could be exempted from their declassification efforts. They also stated, however, that 2017 would be the termination date for those documents.

There were many valuable documents that the ARRB declassified, dealing both with the Kennedy presidency, and Kennedy’s assassination. Concerning the former, the ARRB declassified the records of the SecDef conference of May 1963, which cinched the case that President Kennedy had assigned Robert McNamara to implement his withdrawal plan from Vietnam. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 366) Concerning the latter, the ARRB declassified the Lopez Report, which raises the most profound questions about Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico seven weeks before the assassination. Chief Counsel of the ARRB, Jeremy Gunn, conducted a long inquiry into the medical evidence in the Kennedy assassination. The highlight of this was the testimony of official photographer John Stringer. Under oath, Stringer told Gunn that he did not take the photos of Kennedy’s brain at NARA. (James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 164)

Unfortunately for the public, there was little fanfare attended to both the process and the discoveries of the ARRB. There were some sporadic stories, for instance, about the Vietnam withdrawal plans and Operation Northwoods, but generally speaking, the MSM did not explain the task of the ARRB, nor did it inform the public about the gold in the treasure trove of documents—over two million pages—that finally saw the light of day after over 30 years of secrecy.

Last week’s early batch of releases also featured some bracing documents. For instance, there was a document revealing the CIA status of Dallas Mayor Earle Cabell. Another one showed that, by the seventies, Collins Radio was quite close to the CIA. Collins Radio relates to the assassination through both George DeMohrenschildt and Carl Mather. And this is only from a first glance through several thousands of pages of newly declassified documents.

Which brings us to the Larry and Phil Show. I refer here to the commentary on this NARA release by authors Larry Sabato and Phil Shenon. These two men penned two largely irrelevant books at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination: respectively, The Kennedy Half Century, and A Cruel and Shocking Act, told us very little that was new about either the Kennedy presidency or the facts of his assassination. (For a review of the former, click here, for a review of the latter, click here) What is exceptional about that fact is this: Both men wrote their books over a decade past the closing down of the ARRB. Yet one would be hard pressed to show how those millions of documents, or Gunn’s extensive medical inquiry, figured into those two books, both of which, unsurprisingly, came to the conclusion that none of the documents mattered. Neither did Jeremy Gunn’s inquiry. The Warren Commission was right all along. Lee Oswald killed JFK; the Magic Bullet lived.

Nevertheless, that conclusion did not jibe with the information dispersed by the ARRB. To cite one example, the new files proved that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had lied about key witnesses identifying the Magic Bullet as the projectile recovered from Parkland Hospital (DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, p. 90). Even though, as Jeremy Gunn’s inquiry proved, the autopsy doctors 1.) could not find a pathway through Kennedy’s back to exit the Magic Bullet through the neck, and 2.) could not connect their malleable probes inserted through the body at a downward trajectory, which is necessary to make the Single Bullet Theory possible. In fact, James Jenkins, an autopsy assistant, later said it simply was not possible to pass the probe through the front wound. (ibid., pp. 140-41)

In spite of the above, the underlying Sabato-Shenon message was this: The ARRB did not matter. Sixty thousand documents did not matter. Two million pages did not matter. If you mostly bypass it all, yeah, they don’t. Censorship makes almost anything work.

Well, Larry and Phil are at it again. On July 25th, the day of the early release of the JFK documents, the two authors published a joint editorial in the Washington Post. In that article they stated that only President Trump could stop any of the still classified JFK documents from being released in full. Which meant that an agency, like the FBI, would have to appeal to the president to halt declassification of a document, or a set of documents. Trump’s option would be either to sustain or deny the request. They urged Trump not to sustain any such request. But the plea was couched in some peculiar padding. For instance, Larry and Phil say that Oswald’s journey to Mexico City was not fully explored by the Warren Commission. It would be more proper to state that it really was not explored at all by the Commission, as the ARRB-declassified David Slawson/William Coleman report reveals. When one compares that 36-page document with the 300-page Lopez Report, one sees just how empty the Warren Commission version of Mexico City was.

In the last three paragraphs, the authors reveal their real point. They actually write that “21^st century forensic science demonstrates that Oswald was almost certainly the lone gunman in Dallas …” What on earth can they be speaking of? Can they really be referring to the work of Lucian and Michael Haag, which was part of the media circus for the fiftieth anniversary on PBS? Can Larry and Phil not be aware that Gary Aguilar and Cyril Wecht completely eviscerated the work of those two men in a forensic journal—to the point that neither one will appear in public to debate Aguilar, even though he has offered to pay their plane fare and hotel accommodations? (Click here to read all 31 pages of this demolition) If not to this program, then I have no idea what they are referring to, since as stated above, the work of the ARRB has spelled finis to the Magic Bullet.

But if one combines that with the closing, one gets an idea of what their agenda really is. And it’s not pretty. At the end, in urging Trump to declassify it all, they write that if he does, he will “show that the government no longer has anything to hide.” If one combines their enigmatic “21^st century forensic science” with this last plea, then one gets the drift: Let it all loose, since Oswald did it anyway.

That agenda was confirmed in Politico on August 3, 2017. Both men wrote an article one week after the initial release of documents. Here they correct a faux pas they made the week before. There, they implied that the first release was of only 441 documents. Here, they correct that by saying it was 441 documents that had been withheld in full, and 3,369 other documents that had been partly redacted. And the grand total would have been well over ten thousand pages of material. In other words, it is a formidable pile of records which no one could have possibly read before they wrote this story. If it was published on August 3^rd, it was likely started at least two days in advance. But further, the article does not mention any of the numerous problems with the release that many researchers, including this author, have previously noted: the fact that many of the documents are illegible, some are still being withheld in full, some still have redactions in place, etc. It is very odd that if one really was interested in what these documents contained, one would not note any of these problems. But they did not.

Yet, in spite of all of that, they can write that none of the documents “released last week undermines the Warren Commission’s finding that Oswald killed Kennedy … .” How could they possibly write such a thing if no person has actually read and annotated these thousands of pages? In fact, some of them are still being released as fully classified. Any real analysis of that size of a release would take weeks, if not a month to accomplish. But further, as has been proven by their track record, neither Sabato nor Shenon would print such material if it was there anyway. In addition to the material above “undermining” the single bullet theory, neither man discussed Jeremy Gunn’s medical review or John Stringer’s bombshell testimony of him not taking the photos of JFK’s brain at NARA. The latter would then necessitate the questions: 1.) Who did take the photos, and 2.) Why would they need to be substituted? That is a territory they do not want to venture into—or they lose their MSM face time. And they value that way too much. After all, that is why they get printed in the Washington Post, and Politico, which was started by two former reporters from the Washington Post.

What do they give us instead? The bulk of the story is comprised of Shenon’s usual, mildewed ideas that somehow, some way, agents of Fidel Castro influenced Oswald, and that the CIA became curious about this story, and decided—years later—that they had missed this angle. If Shenon and Sabato had been serious and sober authors, they would have qualified this by saying that, among others, David Phillips actually pushed the Cuban angle at first, but the story was discredited. (See Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, by Michael Benson, pp. 11-12) It was later discovered that each story associated with the Castro/Oswald angle could be traced to a Phillips asset, a fact which made the CIA officer very nervous under questioning by Dan Hardway of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. (See The Last Investigation, by Gaeton Fonzi, pp. 292-293)

The game that Sabato and Shenon are playing is pretty clear for any discerning reader. They are urging the president not to deny declassification of any document that the ARRB allowed to be delayed, since that could lead some pesky and curious researchers to say that, “Look, the government is hiding something!” Trust us in this plea. Because we won’t print anything that negates the official story anyway. After all, look what we did in our books.

The legacy of Shenon and Sabato is that they shamelessly continue their own JFK cover-up fifty-four years after Kennedy was murdered.

August 5, 2017
Open Letter to NARA Concerning First Release of Documents
An Open Letter to Martha Murphy and John Mathis at NARA

Re: Last Releases of the JFK Act

From: James DiEugenio, Editor and Publisher, kennedysandking.com

As both of you know, when the Assassination Records and Review Board closed its doors way back in 1998, they specified that after four years of operation, there were still many documents related to the JFK assassination that had yet to be declassified. That body had been set up as a direct result of the firestorm of controversy that swept the country as a result of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK. At the end of that film, a title card appeared which said that the files of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were classified until the year 2039. Stone’s film raised many questions about the circumstances of President Kennedy’s assassination. The most direct one was: Did Lee Oswald shoot the president? For about ten months in 1991-1992 the country was involved in a debate about this question which encompassed all forms of media.

Finally, due to this furor, the JFK Act was passed in 1992 and the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was later established by President Clinton. After some initial delay, it got up and rolling in 1994 and lasted until 1998. In retrospect, the ARRB did not last long enough and it was also underfunded. I say this because it has become apparent that many of the documents now being released should not have been withheld in the first place. But the main point is, everyone involved in the field knew that the 2017 date for final release was coming.

The original date for final release was late October of 2017. NARA had announced previously that, for whatever reason, it would be releasing withheld documents prior to that date. And beginning on July 24th, with little advance fanfare, this is what you did. According to a previous announcement by Ms. Murphy, there was a team of four archivists and three technicians working on this project many months in advance. One would therefore have expected that you would only begin the advance release if you were ready to do so. You must have realized that there were many people interested in the subject and that these people were eager to begin going through the remainder of the documents. Why begin the process early if everything was not in place?

After one week of sorting through the initial release of last week, that is a question that hangs pregnant in the air. To put it frankly, this early release has been the equivalent of “jumping the gun”. There have been many complaints by many researchers. But to name just some of the more popular ones:
1. Some of the documents are so poorly copied they are, quite literally, illegible.
2. Some of the documents are related to the MLK case, not the JFK case.
3. Some of the documents are being released with a withheld notice on them. That is, they are not declassified at all.
4. Some documents have not been released but should be there, since the document was already known about.
5. Some of the documents still contain redactions.
6. Many of the documents in the index do not have titles.
As I noted above, many people in the JFK community, and some in the media, were eagerly awaiting the final release of the ARRB documents. The creation of the ARRB, as you know, was a very unusual act of Congress. In fact, I can think of no other body quite like it. Many, many important and revealing documents were finally declassified by that citizens’ panel. These documents had a profound impact on the information that informed people now have about the career and assassination of President Kennedy. Whole books have been written on the JFK case that have been largely based on those documents. It would not be an overstatement to say that those documents changed the calculus on that crucial historical episode. In retrospect, as beneficial as the ARRB was to the information database on the JFK case, it is clear that many of the documents released during the last week should not have been withheld either from them or by them. In my opinion, that is a matter for them to explain, not you.

But concerning the six points listed above, these are all matters that were up to NARA. The assassination of President Kennedy was perhaps the single most tragic event of the second half of the 20^th century. According to polls conducted by author Larry Sabato for his book The Kennedy Half Century, that event had a profound impact on the course of history. Many people interviewed for that book said that the nation has not been the same since. This is one of the reasons that this case still haunts America. You should have been aware of this fact. In my opinion, and the opinion of many others, there should have been no redactions or no withholdings upon the July 24^th release. And given that there are, there should have been no early release. That matter should have been resolved in advance. You also should have furnished a complete and thorough index to the documents prior to their release. That way there would have been no dispute about what was there and what was not. There should have been an explanation of why there are MLK documents in the JFK collection. And finally, you should have demanded from the originating agency that every document be readily legible.

This case has been prominent in the public’s consciousness for 54 years. It has caused much pain, confusion, debate, and deliberate obfuscation. In this regard, it deserved a first class resolution −− one which, for some reason, NARA has yet to provide. President Kennedy deserved better. I hope the situation is corrected, for his sake as well as others’.

Sincerely,

James DiEugenio, Editor/Publisher of kennedysandking.com

Author of Destiny Betrayed, Reclaiming Parkland, co–editor, The Assassinations

See also: What is new in the files (Earle Cabell’s 201 file from 1956).
August 2, 2017
Oswald’s Intelligence Connections: How Richard Schweiker clashes with Fake History
“We do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere

you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

~Senator Richard Schweiker, The Village Voice, 1975

Introduction

There are many statements from official sources that contradict Warren Commission findings and most history books’ description of the JFK assassination. They are on the record in the numerous reports following other governmental investigations of the JFK assassination or they were captured in interviews and writings of many of those directly involved in them, but Schweiker’s was perhaps the most damning. Not only because of what he said, but also because of who he was.

Schweiker was a well-respected Republican politician who served under President Reagan from 1981 to 1983 as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He served over 20 years as a Pennsylvania U.S. Representative (1961–1969) and U.S. Senator (1969–1981). In 1976, he had an unsuccessful run to become Vice President in Reagan’s losing presidential campaign.

Most crucial for the purposes of this essay, from 1975 to 1976, Schweiker was a member of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. Which, in deference to its chair Senator Frank Church, was commonly known as the Church Committee. This famous investigative body issued fourteen reports after interviewing hundreds of witnesses and studying thousands of files from the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

Thanks to its work, this is when most Americans were first told about the infamous U.S. assassination plots against foreign leaders, which were a key component of CIA regime control or “change operations”. Targets included the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Diem brothers in Vietnam, General Schneider of Chile and President Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Ex CIA director Allen Dulles’ pact with the mob to assassinate Castro was also part of their findings. This information, which could have had an impact on the Warren Commission investigation, was kept secret by Dulles while he served on the Commission –– something CIA historians now refer to as a benign cover-up.

Under senators Gary Hart and Richard Schweiker, the Church Committee also conducted a focused investigation (Book 5) of the Kennedy assassination, concentrating on how the FBI and CIA supported the Warren Commission. Its report was very critical of these agencies:

“… developed evidence which impeaches the process by which the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions about the assassination, and by which they provided information to the Warren Commission. This evidence indicates that the investigation of the assassination was deficient.”

To say the least, Schweiker was quite vocal in his views. Consider the following instances:

In 1976 he told CBS News that the CIA and FBI lied to the Warren Commission and that the case could be solved if they followed hot new leads. He also claimed that the White House was part of the cover up.

In a BBC documentary, The Killing of President Kennedy, he made the following blistering statement about the Warren Commission investigation:

“The Warren Commission has in fact collapsed like a house of cards and I believe it was set up at the time to feed pabulum to the American people for reasons not yet known, and one of the biggest cover-ups in the history of our country occurred at that time.”

In this revealing documentary, he goes on to say that the highest levels of government were behind him and his committee being mislead. They were continuing the cover-up, and also that Oswald was clearly involved with pro-Castro and anti-Castro groups, which smacked of an intelligence role as a double agent, and that these relationships were not investigated.

In his Kennedys and King article, JFK and the Unforgivable, this author chronicled some thirty examples of other investigation insiders who contradict the Warren Commission’s conclusions about Oswald being a Lone Nut assassin, which is still the basis of what we can find in most of today’s history textbooks.

Donald Trump and the Mainstream Media’s double standard

Since Donald Trump’s election, CNN has featured non-stop coverage of the President and the ongoing probe into Russia’s alleged meddling in the U.S. elections and possible connections to Team Trump. The Washington Post and New York Times are also piling on with a vengeance. Concerning whether Trump and his network of advisors were complicit, the recent quote from Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, kind of summarized the position mainstream media is going with: “We do not have enough evidence to bring to a jury yet but there is enough smoke that warrants an investigation.” And this was before anyone knew of the actual meetings between Russian point-people and Donald Trump, Jr. The smoke that has often been talked about seemed to revolve around six or seven people close to Trump who had contact with Russian persons of interest before the election.

CNN pundits, specialists and reporters are going through each word of each tweet made by the president; each statement made by him and others in his surroundings; and every single touch point between them and the Russians going back for years. At least three separate government bodies are spending millions in investigating the case.

And then, during a rare non-Trump related show on CNN, there it was: on their series The Sixties, re-broadcast in the middle of the Trump cavalcade, we were given their take on the JFK assassination: Krazy Kid Oswald did it alone. It was all explained to us up by their panel of experts: Max Holland, the late Vincent Bugliosi, and Priscilla Johnson McMillan were earnestly telling the audience this discredited tale, in spite of what had been revealed by the Church, HSCA and ARRB investigations. And in spite of what actual participants like Schweiker, Gary Hart, Senator Richard Russell, House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) Chief Counsel Robert Blakey, Schweiker-Hart investigator Gaeton Fonzi, HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum and many, many other investigation insiders had to say. CNN was doing exactly what Trump has been Tweeting to his cast of fiercely loyal followers: Peddling fake news! Which certainly bolstered historians’ egos around their shameful role in perpetuating fake history about this landmark, trust-breaking event.

In his article The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK: The Historians’ Guide on how to Research his Assassination, this author showed how historians, journalists and investigators could learn a lot by investigating the failed plots that preceded the assassination and no less than six other potential patsies who had many similarities with Oswald. In this article we will try to decode the famous lines that make up the epigraph to this essay, and point out a whole area of investigation that the Warren Commission was almost completely shielded from and that journalists and historians have turned a blind eye to. Namely, the cast of characters Oswald crossed paths with who were plausibly, and in many cases definitely, connected to intelligence. These names originate with the work of some of the very best researchers in the field. We are at a point where we can now take stock of what has already been done, crosscheck work and ask ourselves: What does this mean? This author would like to underline the incredible travails of determined independent researchers who did a lot of the grunt work and represent many of the key sources for this article. Hopefully this will serve as a small testament to what they have accomplished.

If you think that seventy-one-year-old billionaire Trump connects well with Russian meddlers according to CNN and others, wait until you see just who twenty-four-year-old Lee Oswald, the truant/loner/murderer, connects with. It should make serious historians pause and ask themselves if they may have missed something.

Oswald and Intelligence: Odds and Ends

Before getting to who Oswald links up with let us look at general points where we can find fingerprints of intelligence. From Jim Marrs’ Crossfire we can read about how Oswald:
1. Possessed a Minox spy camera.
2. Had a notebook that included microdots.
3. Loved James Bond and the spy program I Led Three Lives.
4. Worked at Atsugi air base in Japan as a radar operator with possible security clearance. This was the base where the CIA’s U2 top-secret high altitude surveillance program was housed.
5. Was discharged from the Marines, entered Russia through a favorite spy-friendly crossing point in the middle of a false defector program, threatened theatrically to give away U2 secrets to the Russians in the U.S. embassy, and returned easily to the U.S. with his Russian wife, who herself had ties to Russian intelligence. All this with financial support in ways that could have only been state-sponsored.
6. Learned Russian in a way which New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, himself an ex-marine, concluded could only have been through special training for an intelligence assignment. He also discovered that Oswald’s base for his Fair Play for Cuba activities was right in the heart of New Orleans’ intelligence establishment, and that he was most probably playing an agent-provocateur role. He grew convinced that intelligence assets were obstructing his investigation into Oswald’s links, something that was confirmed by the HSCA and ARRB releases.
7. Applied, while in the Marines, to a very obscure Swiss college called Albert Schweitzer that appears to be CIA-linked.
Researcher Mae Brussell argued that Oswald’s mission in Russia was to help the Russians bring down Gary Powers’ U2 flight over Russia and therefore sabotage Eisenhower’s attempt at rapprochement with the Russians at an upcoming summit meeting. Others have pointed to those who were convinced Oswald was a spy, including Marines Oswald served with, Gerry Patrick Hemming, Oswald’s mother and others.

According to Gaeton Fonzi, former CIA Director Richard Helms told reporters during recess of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978 that “no one would ever know who or what Lee Harvey Oswald … represented.” Asked whether the CIA knew of any ties Oswald had with either the KGB or the CIA, Helms paused and with a laugh said, “I don’t remember.”

According to author and intelligence specialist John Newman, a CIA propaganda associate of David Phillips, William Kent, intimated to his daughter at a family Thanksgiving gathering: “Oswald was a useful idiot.”

It was common knowledge in the Tokyo CIA station that Oswald worked for the agency … . Right after the President was killed, people in the Tokyo station were talking openly about Oswald having gone to Russia for the CIA. Everyone was wondering how the Agency was going to be able to keep the lid on Oswald. But I guess they did.

~ interview of Jim and Elsie Wilcott, former husband and wife employees of the Tokyo CIA Station, San Francisco Chronicle, “Couple Talks about Oswald and the CIA,” September 12, 1978

Jane Roman, who in 1963 was the senior liaison officer on the Counterintelligence Staff of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley, Virginia, gave Jefferson Morley and John Newman this revealing answer to the following question during a seventy five-minute taped interview in 1994: “is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?” This was the key question of the interview, and Roman took it head on. “Yes,” she replied. “To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need to know basis.”

John Newman is one of the researchers who did the most work in analyzing intelligence files on Oswald, and has uncovered, along with Malcolm Blunt, content and patterns that can only be explained by Oswald being used for intel purposes. This includes the very late opening of a standard CIA 201 file that would have been normally immediately opened upon a defection.

Lisa Pease wrote for Probe magazine in 1997 about Otto Otepka, who was the very competent head of the State Department’s Office of Security (SY) during much of the Oswald saga. He would have been the one who was behind initiating a study of defectors to Russia in 1960. The CIA –– probably James Angleton, who is suspected of running Oswald at this time –– gave instructions not to delve into Lee Harvey Oswald. That may be the reason Otepka was fired a few weeks before the assassination.

By the time Oswald returned from Russia, his days were numbered. However, during the year remaining in his life, the additional traces he would leave linking him to intelligence would be omnipresent: Only later dug into by serious researchers but ignored by mainstream media and historians.

During the summer of 1963, Oswald would ostensibly abandon his expecting wife and young baby to open an FPCC Chapter for which he was the lone member in the very hostile environment of New Orleans. In his previous article (The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK), this author presents the case that Oswald was more likely involved in an intelligence operation to counter this has-been, informant-infested outfit, publicize his Marxist legend and weed out communists. The similarities with six other potential patsies profiled in the article reinforce this notion.

A clue to Oswald’s real loyalties came during a televised interview he gave in August 1963 with a revealing Freudian slip he made when he said he was (while in Russia) “under the protection of the government,” which he quickly corrected –– but it was too late.   The “Hands Off Cuba” flyers that he distributed with the now infamous Camp Street address represented a major gaffe, as it placed him directly in the presence of his anti-Castro friends and blew his cover to people willing to investigate this like Jim Garrison and Senator Schweiker.

Thanks to the HSCA and the ARRB record releases, we know for sure that intelligence networks played very important roles in hiding key facts from the Warren Commission and obstructing the HSCA, Garrison, and ARRB activities which were getting close to linking Oswald to the world of intelligence.

Perhaps the most explicit links came in the form of the Lopez Report written up for the HSCA and kept secret for many years. Because of the diligent work of HSCA investigators Dan Hardway and Ed Lopez, we now know that Oswald was, at the very least, partly impersonated in Mexico City under the watchful eye of CIA operatives there –– who later played starring roles in covering this incident up. Perhaps the most explicit links came in the form of their report, “Oswald, the CIA, and Mexico City” (aka the Lopez Report), written up for the HSCA and kept secret for many years.

Oswald’s Intelligence Touch Points

The Warren Commission portrayed Lee Oswald as a lone-nut, Marxist, and drifter who was not on anyone’s radar. The New York Times coverage of the Warren Commission’s Report release includes the following statement:

The Warren Commission also rejected, after complete access to the files of the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency, the claim that Oswald may have been some kind of American undercover agent.

This conclusion of course has today proven to be founded on quicksand. Far from their having “complete access”, it has been confirmed that intelligence agencies played a key role in keeping information about Oswald hidden away from the Commission, for example regarding Oswald in Mexico City. Schweiker’s bombshell assertion clearly advances that Oswald had intelligence connections. The Church Committee and the HSCA both impeached the Warren Commission by unequivocally concluding that, among other inadequacies, it had not properly investigated the possibility of a conspiracy. (For more, see this author’s article on the historical record of Government investigations).

Based on the standards we are currently witnessing with the barrage about Trump and friends in Moscow, let us look at who should have been turned inside out in a serious investigation about a far more serious crime. In the following section we will briefly go over a long list of persons with definite or plausible intelligence credentials/links who crossed paths with Oswald in one way or another. Some of the links are loose, others are solid; of course not all are involved in the assassination. All, however, would merit an in-depth analysis by true investigators. For the purpose of this article we will provide short snapshots. To know more about an individual, the author encourages the reader to follow the links/sources.

If we were to add persons with indirect intelligence connections, Cuban exiles of interest, Mob-related personalities, the number of persons of interest that would give insight into who Oswald really was and what he and others were up to would more than likely double.   Seen in their entirety, we can conclude that if there is smoke around the current Russia meddling intrigue, what we have here is a forest fire and a cover-up that was more than just “benign.”

New Orleans, Atsugi, California, Russia, Dallas

Let us look at who Schweiker could be plausibly referring to when he confirmed that Oswald had intelligence connections. (Next to the name, we will list the source material in the literature.)

David Ferrie (Jim Garrison)

The young David Ferrie

Oswald’s first Intel connection is one of the most important for confirming Schweiker’s assertion. David Ferrie plays an important role in Oswald’s fate during two phases of Oswald’s short life. In 1955, both Ferrie and Oswald were members of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol where Ferrie taught aviation. Author Greg Parker, in Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, makes the case for the CAP being linked to the CIA’s recruitment activities and Texas School Book Depository’s owner Harold Byrd –– an oil-man known for his deep hatred of JFK and who is connected with many persons of interest, as well as the world of espionage. Ferrie later became a contract CIA agent flying bombing missions over Cuba at the request of Cuban-exile Eladio Del Valle, who was himself intelligence connected and a person Jim Garrison was pursuing concerning the assassination until Del Valle was killed, within 24 hours of Ferrie’s own mysterious death.

During the summer of 1963, Ferrie and Oswald link up once again at 544 Camp Street. This location was an address on some of Lee Harvey Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba literature. The building was a hub for right-wing, anti-Castro activities centered around the office of FBI- and CIA-connected Guy Banister, as well as intelligence-backed Cuban exiles. During this period, Ferrie was frequently seen in the building and elsewhere, in the company of Banister, CIA agent Clay Shaw, CIA-connected Sergio Arcacha Smith, Oswald and others of this ilk who became key suspects in the Garrison investigation, which was sabotaged by special interest groups. The HSCA and ARRB findings clearly confirm as much. Ferrie confessed a lot about the assassination to Garrison’s investigator Louis Ivon, but died mysteriously before he could be taken to trial.

Gerard Tujague (Destiny Betrayed – JFK: The Cuba Files)

In early 1956, Oswald joined Gerard Tujague’s shipping company. Tujague was also vice-president of the Friends of Democratic Cuba (FDC), which is believed to be a CIA and FBI front that was largely created by Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, and was also linked to Clay Shaw. Cuban intelligence identified this organization as a perpetrator of hostile acts against Cuba.

In a strange incident in 1961 while Oswald was in Russia, the FDC used Oswald’s name in an attempt to buy 10 Ford pick-up trucks at the Bolton Ford lot in New Orleans.

Richard Case Nagell (The Man who Knew too Much – Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison)

Richard Case Nagell

While in Atsugi, Japan, Oswald met up with Army Intel agent Richard Case Nagell for the first time. Nagell began a CIA career in 1955-56, which eventually brought him into the world of Black ops where CIA people like E. Howard Hunt and Tracy Barnes excelled.

In 1962, he served as a double agent in Mexico City. He hinted to a friend that he knew the CIA’s David Phillips who, as we will see, became a key suspect for many researchers with respect to the Oswald sheep-dipping operations. By October 1962, the Soviets advised him that the violent Cuban exile group Alpha 66 was plotting to assassinate Kennedy. They thought this would be blamed on them. So they hired him to investigate, and possibly abort the plot. His investigations allowed him to identify Arcacha Smith, Ferrie, Carlos Quiroga, Tony Cuesta and a Leopoldo as possible conspirators. In 1963, he tried to convince Oswald he was being set up to be the fall guy. He failed. Nagell eventually faked a bank robbery so as to be in jail when the assassination took place.   His interviews with researcher Dick Russell, his material links to Oswald when he was arrested, and his pre-assassination warnings go a long way in proving his credibility.

Colonel Nikolai Eroshkin

According to what Nagell told Russell, while Oswald was in Atsugi, he met with GRU agent Colonel Eroshkin: a CIA defection target.

Kerry Thornley (Destiny Betrayed)

Kerry Thornley

When Oswald was moved back to California in 1959, few Marines bought into his communist-leaning persona. Also, many described him as quite a poor marksman.   It is here that fellow-Marine Kerry Thornley met him for the first time. He wrote a book about him before the assassination called the Idle Warriors, and then another in 1965. He became the go-to Marine for the Warren Commission in their attempt to paint Oswald as unpatriotic.

In the summer of 1963, Thornley popped backed into the picture in New Orleans where several witnesses saw him with Oswald either in public or at Oswald’s apartment. There is evidence that Thornley picked up Fair Play for Cuba flyers for Oswald. An FBI memo states that Thornley and Oswald went to Mexico together. And despite preliminary denials, he eventually admitted links to David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Carlos Bringuier and Ed Butler –– all intelligence-connected persons of interest who will be covered in this article. He also eventually confirmed his utter hatred of Kennedy. Thornley was actually indicted by Jim Garrison for perjury because of his lies about this association with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. Further, two witnesses told Garrison that Thornley had said that Oswald was not a communist. Which makes his performance before the Warren Commission quite suspicious.

Rosaleen Quinn (Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War)

In 1959, fellow Marine Henry Roussel set up a date between Oswald and his aunt Rosaleen Quinn, an airline stewardess who studied Russian with a Berlitz tutor for the State Department exam, as she was interested in working in the American embassy in Russia. She is suspected by some as having monitored Oswald’s skills with the Russian language, which she qualified as very good. This coincided with Oswald’s imminent departure from the infantry and the beginning of his Russian adventure. In Lee Harvey Oswald’s Cold War, Greg Parker underscores an intelligence angle to her that he thinks should be explored.

Gerry Patrick Hemming (Oswald and the CIA)

Gerry Hemming

Hemming has been a difficult nut to crack for many of the researchers who interviewed him. He was someone who seems to have known something about the assassination, but is difficult to read.

Hemming was in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1954 to 1957. He was honorably discharged and became a soldier of fortune who eventually fought for Castro’s revolutionary army with another person of interest, Frank Sturgis. They both came back quickly after feeling disillusioned by Castro. Hemming also spent some time in Atsugi. Though the CIA has denied any relationship with Hemming and Sturgis, this has been contradicted by files that show that Hemming frequently interacted with the CIA. Frank Sturgis’ later association with CIA’s E. Howard Hunt and James McCord, along with Cuban exiles, during the Watergate scandal, further contradicts this claim.

Hemming eventually founded Interpen in 1961. This was a paramilitary exile group that specialized in the penetration of revolutionary forces. Interpen is linked to many people involved in the training of Cuban exiles and persons of interest in the assassination. Interpen set up shop right in the midst of the Miami CIA JM/WAVE station and Cuban exile communities. HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi came to believe that much of the brainwork behind the plot came from disillusioned rogue CIA officers associated with this Miami nexus and involved in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

It is quite possible that some of Hemming’s contacts with the CIA took place in Los Angeles in early 1959 when he would have met Lee Harvey Oswald who, along with his El Toro base friend Nelson Delgado, showed interest in joining the Castro forces before he had become persona non grata in the United States. Hemming claims that Oswald bumped into him at the Cuban consulate in Los Angeles and inquired about joining up with him. Hemming thought of him as a snitch and later met him at the base gate where he confronted him. He says he relayed this information to James Angleton. There is some corroboration of these meetings to be found in CIA files, and from Nelson Delgado, who confirmed that Oswald was at the Cuban consulate for discussions about their project and met a civilian for almost two hours at the base gate at the times Hemming states these took place.

Hemming, in later interviews, went on to express his opinion that Oswald was a patsy.

Gregory Golub (Destiny Betrayed)

The logistics involved in getting Oswald into Russia in October 1959 has been found by many to be perplexing. The nature and speed of his discharge, his financing, his route through Helsinki, his stay in expensive five-star hotels, and finally, the expedient issuing of a visa into Russia within 24 hours of his application –– these all seem too complex for an uneducated former truant. Golub, who issued Oswald’s visa, may have had direct ties to the American State Department.

Here is how the HSCA describes the visa situation:

HSCA Report Findings on the Issue of Oswald’s Visa:

In an effort to resolve this issue, the committee reviewed classified information pertaining to Gregory Golub, who was the Soviet consul in Helsinki when Oswald was issued his tourist visa. This review revealed that, in addition to his consular activities, Golub was suspected of having been an officer of the Soviet KGB. Two American Embassy dispatches concerning Golub were of particular significance with regard to the time necessary for issuance of visas to Americans for travel into the Soviet Union. The first dispatch recorded that Golub disclosed during a luncheon conversation that:

MOSCOW had given him the authority to give Americans visas without prior approval from Moscow. He [Golub] stated that this would make his job much easier, and as long as he was convinced the American was “all right” he could give him a visa in a matter of minutes …

The second dispatch, dated October 9, 1959, 1 day prior to Oswald’s arrival in Helsinki, illustrated that Golub did have the authority to issue visas without delay. The dispatch discussed a telephone contact between Golub and his consular counterpart at the American Embassy in Helsinki:

… Since that evening [September 4, 1959] Golub has only phoned [the U.S. consul] once and this was on a business matter. Two Americans were in the Soviet consulate at the time and were applying for Soviet visas through Golub. They had previously been in the American consulate inquiring about the possibility of obtaining a Soviet visa in 1 or 2 days. [The U.S. consul] advised them to go directly to Golub and make their request, which they did. Golub phoned [the U.S. consul] to state that he would give them their visas as soon as they made advance Intourist reservations. When they did this, Golub immediately gave them their visas …

Thus, based upon these two factors, (1) Golub’s authority to issue visas to Americans without prior approval from Moscow, and (2) a demonstration of this authority, as reported in an embassy dispatch approximately 1 month prior to Oswald’s appearance at the Soviet Embassy, the committee found that the available evidence tends to support the conclusion that the issuance of Oswald’s tourist visa within 2 days after his appearance at the Soviet consulate was not indicative of an American intelligence agency connection. Note: If anything, Oswald’s ability to receive a Soviet entry visa so quickly was more indicative of a Soviet interest in him.

Author’s comment: If this is what it did in fact indicate, why wasn’t a CIA 201 file immediately opened after Oswald’s defection? It was not opened until one year later.

Richard Snyder (Destiny Betrayed)

John McVickar & Richard Snyder

In early November of 1959, Oswald decided to pay a visit to the American Embassy in Moscow to renounce his citizenship. He met with former CIA recruiter Richard Snyder, who was probably working under diplomatic cover as a consular official. He had previously spotted student talent for the CIA who could travel to Russia under operation REDSKIN. Some of his notes while in Russia refer to false defectors. Snyder used well-studied delay tactics to avoid having Oswald fill out the necessary forms to renounce his citizenship. This made Oswald’s re-entry to the U.S. a lot easier and demonstrated Snyder’s knowledge of the fake defector programs in place.

In his exchange with Snyder –– which researcher Malcolm Blunt refers to as theatrical and designed to be picked up by Russian eavesdropping –– Oswald threatened to give away military secrets. This most likely was a reference to the U2 surveillance operations. This makes the opening of a 201 file only a full-year later incredible, as Oswald now should have also been considered a traitor. Unless, of course, something else was going on.

John McVickar (Oswald and the CIA)

While Oswald was going through his charade with Snyder, they were being observed by embassy official John McVickar. He is the one who alerted and then set up intelligence-linked journalist Priscilla Johnson to interview Oswald in his Moscow hotel room. He was then was later debriefed by her. She would go on to make a career out of endorsing the Warren Commission line.

Priscilla Johnson (Oswald and the CIA)

In 1959, Johnson was a correspondent for the North American News Association (NANA). Her November 13th interview with Oswald was the basis for news reports that would publicize Oswald the defector to a U.S. audience. In 1977 she published her book Marina and Lee after building a relationship with Marina Oswald, who by then was still very cooperative with authorities. She went on to become a staple in pro-Warren Commission propaganda and one of the first in a long line of intelligence friendly so-called JFK assassination experts.

Marina Oswald & Priscilla Johnson

Her job and relationship with the U.S. embassy at the time of Oswald’s defection already made her a natural ally for intelligence organizations. She identified propaganda specialist Cord Meyer as one of the CIA recruiters who took an interest in her. Documented cases of her passing on information to the CIA, her access to CIA space and resources, her own writings and her role in hosting star-defector Svetlana Stalin, daughter of Joseph Stalin, in 1967, represent strong evidence of her ties to intelligence. She was even given permission to live with heavily guarded Marina Oswald for months in 1964 while they worked on the book.

The release of intelligence files in 1993 by the ARRB seal the deal, as the following information from a contact report reveals. CIA recruiter Donald Jameson reported this about her in 1962, after a ninety minute interview: “I think that Miss Johnson can be encouraged to write pretty much the articles we want … .”   We also know that the CIA had a 201 file opened on her in the mid-1950s and that she was considered to be knowledgeable about Soviet affairs.

Leo Setyaev (Oswald and the CIA)

Lev Setyaev

According to John Newman, Oswald had a name he could contact while he was in Russia if he needed anything. Leo Setyaev is a name that appears in Oswald’s address book, and, according to Marina, is who Oswald intended to call in 1961 when visiting the American embassy. She also stated that he had met Oswald in the Hotel Metropole in Moscow shortly after his arrival and had helped Oswald get on a Radio Moscow show, where he criticized the U.S. for a Russian audience. The FBI and CIA had files on Setyaev, who was quite possibly an informant for the CIA.

Robert Webster (Destiny Betrayed)

Robert Webster

Webster is another person some researchers suspect was a false defector who entered Russia and returned to the U.S. at around the same times Oswald did. He worked with the CIA-linked Rand Corporation, which was known for its high-tech products, which were of interest to Russia. Oswald, when planning to leave Russia in 1961, inquired about Webster’s status to a U.S. embassy official.

Strangely, Webster had met Marina Prusakova in 1959 before she married Oswald, and Webster’s Leningrad address was found in Marina’s address book after the assassination. It appears Webster spoke English with her, a language she claimed to not understand. All this suggests that Russia was aware of the false defector program and that Marina may have been assigned Russian intelligence tasks to identify some of them. Webster also brought back a Russian spouse some feel was linked to Russian intelligence.

Marina Oswald (Destiny Betrayed – Richard Schweiker)

Marina’s uncle worked for the Russian version of the FBI. Her interactions with both Oswald and Webster and the ease by which she was allowed to leave Russia are among the reasons that some researchers believe Marina was intelligence-linked, and that Oswald’s and Webster’s suspected false defector roles are why she was made to cross paths with them in the first place.

Schweiker was onto this:

The key is why did they let him (Oswald) bring a Russian-born wife out contrary to present Russian policy, he had to get special dispensation from the highest levels to bring his Russian-born wife out, that in itself says somebody was giving Oswald highest priority either because we had trained and sent him there and they went along and pretended they did not know to fake us out, or they had in fact inculcated him and sent him back and were trying to fake us out, but he had gotten a green light no other American had gotten.

Francis Gary Powers (Oswald and the CIA)

Francis Gary Powers

Powers is the U2 pilot whose plane was shot down over Russia while Oswald was there after threatening to give away U2-related secrets. This scuttled Eisenhower’s upcoming summit meeting with Khrushchev and is what probably contributed to Eisenhower’s warnings about the power of the military industrial complex in his farewell address to the nation. There has been some speculation that Oswald was at his trial in Russia. Powers and others have blamed Oswald for his being shot down. Oswald, while in Russia, wrote a letter to his brother, Robert, in which he says that he saw Powers in Moscow.

Spas Theodore Raikin (JFK and the Unspeakable)

Spas Raikin

Since the ARRB cleared the release of a large number of classified documents, a number of CIA files have shed light on the person assigned by the U.S. State Department to greet the Oswald family on June 12, 1962 when they stepped off the ocean liner Maasdam in Hoboken, New Jersey. Raikin was a representative of the Traveler’s Aid Society who helped them pass smoothly through immigration and customs.

Here is how James Douglass describes what the Warren Report did not reveal about him: “Raikin was at the same time secretary-general of the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations, an anti-communist organization with extensive intelligence connections –– like the American government, an unlikely source of support for a traitor.”

Andy Anderson/Eleanor Reed (Joan Mellen)

The Agency claims that they did not debrief Oswald upon his return to the USA from Russia. On the surface, this seems ridiculous. But he may have been when he went through Copenhagen on his way back to the United States. In 1978, Donald Denesyla told the HSCA that he had in fact received a report about a defector who returned from Russia in 1962 who had worked in a radio factory. This report, written by Andy Anderson, went to Robert Crowley, a close friend and colleague of James Angleton. Crowley also handled the Webster case.

Joan Mellen argues that the actual de-briefer may have been Eleanor Reed.

Further corroboration that the CIA Soviet Russia Division, Soviet Realities, SR6, in the person of Eleanor Reed, debriefed false defectors is contained in a document that I have just discovered that the CIA released “as sanitized” in 1998. The document resides in Robert Webster’s file, is dated 17 August 1962, and is telling for several reasons; the cases of Oswald and Webster are so similar that we can await, with reasonable expectation, that a parallel document of Oswald’s debriefing by Reed (with, perhaps, her frequent debriefing partner, Rudy (“Valentino”) Balaban, may well surface. This document demonstrates beyond doubt that Reed (“Anderson”) was an SR6 debriefer.

In other words, Reed used the Anderson name at times.

John Fain (The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend)

In Dallas, Fain was the first FBI agent who interrogated Oswald in June and then in August 1962. He was interested in finding out if the Russians were using him or his wife. He described Oswald as impatient, insolent and secretive during the first meeting. Though more cooperative during the second, he was still not fully transparent. Fain showed his suspicions around the subject of Oswald wanting to be part of a country that represented the biggest threat to the U.S.

There is more to Fain’s involvement in the Oswald saga than this however, as he is probably the agent that Oswald’s mother Marguerite interacted with while her son was in Russia and he also made certain the FBI was in in sync with the CIA in the administration of Oswald’s files.

George Bouhe, Max Clark and the White Russians of Dallas (Destiny Betrayed)

In the summer of 1962, Oswald settled in Fort Worth, where he was greeted by White Russians. This group was very cooperative with intelligence forces, especially in welcoming anti-communist immigrants to their fold. These are the people our supposed pro-Marxist traitor cozied up with in what Jim Garrison referred to in his memoir as “The Social Triumphs of Lee Oswald”. Of course, the Warren Commission’s curiosity was not even piqued by these relationships of direct adversaries: a communist dealing with White Russians who wanted to overthrow the Red regime and bring back the czar. Probably many in this group had direct contacts with intelligence. Let us single out two: The leader George Bouhe kept files on the White Russians and just happened to be a neighbour of Jack Ruby. It is he who introduced Oswald to Max Clark, a retired Air Force Colonel who Bouhe suspected was involved with the FBI and security work. It was Clark and Dallas CIA Station Chief J. Walton Moore who would connect Oswald with one of his most prominent intelligence contacts …

George DeMohrenschildt (Destiny Betrayed – Family of Secrets – Spartacus – I’m a Patsy)

George DeMohrenschildt

DeMohrenschildt came from a family of Russian nobility; his father was governor of Minsk and director of the Baku oil fields before the Russian Revolution. Some family members became involved in intelligence activities against the communist regime that took over the country and relocated in foreign countries. There is even correspondence between George’s brother Dimitri, a CIA asset in Europe, and Allen Dulles that goes as far back as 1953. It goes without saying that Dulles kept these relations hidden from his Warren Commission colleagues.

George moved to the U.S. in 1938. The British suspected he worked for German intelligence at the time. Through his studies, work in the oil industry and involvement with the Texas Crusade for Freedom and other associations, he came into contact with George H. W. Bush, Clint Murchison, Harold Byrd, H.L. Hunt (all oilmen) and Dallas mayor Earle Cabell. His international travels dovetail with CIA relations for which he received favors.

He is perhaps the person who interacted the most with the Oswalds before Lee’s move to New Orleans. In the fall of 1962, he persuaded Oswald to move to Dallas. DeMohrenschildt helped Oswald gain employment by January 1963 at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. This is surprising, as JCS was a graphics art house that seems to have done some work related to U2 flights over Cuba, and Oswald’s notebook lists it with the words micro dot beside it. While there he showed co-worker Dennis Ofstein photos of Soviet military headquarters he had taken and gave him detailed descriptions of military related observations he was able to make while in Russia. DeMohrenschildt is also the one who introduced the Oswalds to Ruth Paine in February. It has become apparent to many that DeMohrenschildt was a CIA-designated baby-sitter who had numerous meetings with Moore, which Moore tried to cover up. In March of 1963, George got a contract from the Haitian government, which he attributed to his relationship with the CIA. While he probably had nothing to do with the JFK assassination itself, according to Jim Garrison, he did help paint Oswald as a sociopathic communist before the Commission.

In Family of Secrets, Russ Baker chronicles DeMohrenschildt’s relations with George H. W. Bush, who most probably was a CIA operative orally briefed by Hoover shortly after the assassination. In 1976, as the JFK case was heating up again, DeMohrenschildt corresponded with his friend Bush, who was CIA director at the time, asking for help to get the FBI off his back, as he felt he had perhaps spoken too much about Oswald.

In his book I’m a Patsy, he expresses his opinion that Oswald was innocent and incapable of such a violent act. This is pretty much a reversal of what his testimony was before the Warren Commission. On March 29, 1977, just when he was about to be interviewed by the HSCA, he became another person of interest among many to die mysteriously during intense investigative activity.

Ruth Paine and Michael Paine (Destiny Betrayed – Someone Would Have Talked – Spartacus)

By the time they met the Oswalds, the Paines, who were Quakers, had separated but remained on friendly terms. From the beginning, Ruth Paine would be omnipresent in Marina’s life and seemed purposeful in separating her from her husband. After dropping Marina off to join Lee in New Orleans, she corresponded with her throughout the summer of 1963.

Ruth & Michael Paine

Towards the end of the summer, Ruth Paine picked up Marina to be with her when she delivered her second child in Dallas. This is when the Oswalds separated and Marina moved in with Ruth in Irving, Texas. It is in her garage that Lee Oswald stored many of his belongings. Ruth Paine’s roles in Lee Oswald’s demise were varied and numerous. She helped Oswald get his job in the Texas School Book Depository. Her garage became the go-to place to find convenient, and often suspicious, clues linking Oswald to the murder. She would go on to become one of the Warren Commission’s most important witnesses. In fact, she was asked more questions than any other single person.

Michael Paine might have played perhaps as important a role. A suspicious event involving the Paines occurred on the day of the assassination. At 1:00 pm on November 22, 1963, Michael Paine placed a collect call to his wife to discuss Oswald’s involvement in the assassination. While the telephone operator remained on the line, Michael Paine told his wife that he “Felt sure Lee Harvey Oswald had killed the President but was not responsible.” Rather ominously he added, “We both know who is responsible.” (FBI report of Robert C. Lish, November 26, 1963, JFK Document No. 105-82555-1437) The most extraordinary thing about this call is that it took place one hour before Oswald’s arrest. For obvious reasons, the Warren Commission wanted to sweep this little problem under the rug. So when junior counsel Wesley Liebeler questioned Michael about the call, he stated the date of the call as November 23^rd, giving Michael an easy way to deny its implications.

According to a report written by Dallas Deputy Sheriff Buddy Walthers on the day of the assassination, upon searching Paine’s garage, officers found “a set of metal file cabinets that appeared to be names and activities of Cuban Sympathizers.” (19H520). These metal file cabinets did not make it onto the Dallas Police inventory sheets and were never entered into evidence alongside Lee Harvey Oswald’s belongings. By the time the Warren Commission got them, they had been reduced in number and attributed to Ruth Paine. And if Ruth and Michael Paine had a “set of metal file cabinets” containing “the names and activities of Cuban sympathizers”, then they were most certainly involved in the same intelligence activities that most researchers believe Oswald was involved in during the summer of 1963: rooting out “Un-Americans”.

Here is how long-time researcher Jim DiEugenio interprets these findings:

This cinches the case that the Paines were domestic surveillance agents in the Cold War against communism. (Hancock notes how the Warren Commission and Wesley Liebeler forced Walthers to backtrack on this point and then made it disappear in the “Speculation and Rumors” part of the report.)

The Paines were painted as Good Samaritans by the Warren Commission. Kept hidden were their eyebrow-raising associations with intelligence, beginning with their links to Russian expatriates. To begin with, the father of a witness who vouched for their character, Frederick Osborne Jr., was a close associate of Allen Dulles. Allen Dulles’ mistress was Mary Bancroft. Her best friend, Ruth Forbes Young, was the mother of Michael Paine. Forbes’ husband Arthur Young was one of the creators of Bell Helicopter where Michael worked and had a security clearance. Arthur Young also had worked for the CIA-linked Franklin Institute. Michael’s grand-uncle Cameron Forbes sat on the board of United Fruit with the members of the Cabot family. United Fruit was an important client of the Sullivan and Cromwell law firm where the Dulles brothers were partners. Michael’s cousin Thomas Cabot was United Fruit’s former president. Thomas’ brother John exchanged information with attorney Maurice Gatlin (who links up closely with Guy Banister) to help the overthrow of Jacob Arbenz of Guatemala.

In April 1963, some students at Southern Methodist University identified Michael Paine as a person who regularly would visit Luby’s Restaurant, a popular college hangout. While there he tried to root out those with Castro sympathies. In his pitch, he brought up his links to a communist-Marine who came back from Russia with a Russian bride.

Ruth Paine’s father William Hyde had worked for the OSS in World War II and stayed connected with the CIA later on through his work for the Agency for International Development (AID), which was infested with CIA operatives. Before picking up Marina in New Orleans, she had paid a visit to her sister who worked for the CIA. This is something that Ruth seemed intent on keeping from Jim Garrison in her appearance before the Clay Shaw grand jury. Her brother-in-law also worked for AID. Ruth seemed to have a penchant for weeding out communists as, later in her life, she is alleged to have played a role in identifying Americans who opposed U.S. policy when she was in Nicaragua during the Contra war.

James Hosty (Destiny Betrayed – Oswald and the CIA)

James Hosty

March 1963 is when FBI agent James Hosty was asked to monitor the Oswalds in Dallas. He lost track of Lee Oswald when he moved to New Orleans. By November 1^st, he had interviewed Ruth Paine and Marina in order to locate him. When Oswald found out about this, he left Hosty a note in an envelope at the FBI office in Dallas. What was on the note is still unclear. When Oswald was assassinated, Hosty’s boss Gordon Shanklin ordered him to destroy the note and Hosty’s memorandum about the event. Hosty’s name was in Oswald’s address book, something the FBI kept hidden from the Warren Commission.

This created great consternation when it was publicly disclosed in the seventies. Hoover had been very worried that Oswald’s possible role as an informant who infiltrated the Fair Play for Cuba Committee would blow up in the FBI’s face. Based on Oswald’s links to New Orleans FBI agents, which will be reviewed later, this role seems more than plausible.

Hosty was also present during Oswald’s interrogations after Kennedy’s murder. Hosty took heat for the security lapse that allowed someone like Oswald to be present on the infamous motorcade route in Dallas.

Return to New Orleans, Mexico, Return to Dallas

Victor Thomas Vicente

In the article The Three Failed plots to Kill JFK, the author shows how Oswald’s starting a Fair Play for Cuba Committee Chapter in New Orleans was more likely part of a covert operation than his demonstration of bonding with Marxism. By then the FPCC was infested with informants and linked closely to infiltration and sabotage programs overseen by prominent CIA operatives David Atlee Phillips, James McCord and William Harvey.

When Lee Harvey Oswald wrote his first letter to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee HQ in New York in April 1963, he asked for “forty to fifty” free copies of a 40-page pamphlet.

The author of the pamphlets, Corliss Lamont, turned out to be holding a receipt for 45 of these pamphlets from the CIA Acquisitions Division. These pamphlets were mailed to Oswald by FPCC worker Victor Thomas Vicente. Vicente was a key informant for both the CIA and the FBI’s New York office.

Novo Sampol brothers, Tony Cuesta, Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada (JFK: The Cuba Files)

Orlando Bosch

The CIA and FBI were not the only intelligence agencies tapping into Cuban exiles living in the U.S. Cuban Intelligence also had their share of informants. Fabian Escalante was put in charge of Castro’s security and later became Head of State Security. He directed the investigations that the Cuban government carried out at the request of the U.S. Select Committee of the House of Representatives. He also wrote a book called JFK: The Cuban Files. Having read the book, I was struck by how cautious he was in talking about potential leads.

Here are some of the people of interest who met Oswald according their files and analysis. By mid-1963 there was a meeting between Oswald and group of terrorists in a CIA safe house on the outskirts of Miami. Also present were:

Tony Cuesta

Orlando Bosch who among other things participated in the downing of a Cuban airliner, for which he was eventually incarcerated, and the murder of Chilean ambassador Orlando Letellier. He was considered such a threat to JFK that the Secret Service had him under special surveillance during JFK’s visit to Miami in November, 1963. According to Gaeton Fonzi, Antonio Veciana considered him a good friend.

Tony Cuesta was a higher-up in Alpha 66 and a close colleague of Veciana. He was indicated by Richard Case Nagell as a suspect in the assassination. He also confessed to Escalante his role in the assassination after being captured during a failed raid in 1966. He identified Herminio Diaz and Eladio Del Valle (a key suspect of Garrison) as conspirators.

The Novo brothers, Posada and Bosch were all allegedly part of team of assassins called Operation 40.

John Martino (Someone Would Have Talked)

From Larry Hancock we learned about another person who may have crossed paths with Oswald:

John Martino

Martino certainly did have CIA connections in 1963, primarily (David) Morales and Rip Robertson …

John Martino had pre-knowledge of the plan to kill John Kennedy in Texas. John Martino “talked” in a very believable and credible fashion. At first, he talked only to his immediate family, nervously, hesitantly, and excitedly. Shortly before his death, he talked with two long time friends –– part confession and part simply recollection. He made no grand claims, downplayed his own role and limited his statements to things he would have personally come in contact with in playing the role he described with the Cuban exiles whose cause he was demonstrably devoted to at the time. His story is certainly consistent and totally in context with his documented activities and personal associations in 1963.

Martino also admitted observing Oswald during the summer of 1963.

William Monaghan and Dante Marichini (Deep Politics)

Reilly Coffee Co.

During the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, Oswald gained employment at the Reilly Coffee Company, an organization of interest because of its links to Caribbean anti-communist politics. The Reilly brothers backed Ed Butler’s INCA (the CIA-linked Information Council of the Americas which factors heavily in Oswald’s later Marxist PR activities) and the CRC (Cuban Revolutionary Council).

William Monaghan was the V.P. of Finance there who ended up firing Oswald. He was also an ex-FBI agent. He was listed as a charter member of INCA in a 1962 bulletin. He is believed by some to have played a role in the friendly hosting of Oswald at Reilly’s during his covert Intel-linked mission.

Other employees there of interest to researchers included four of Oswald’s co-workers who joined NASA during the summer of 1963. Dante Marichini who was a friend of David Ferrie’s and the neighbour of Clay Shaw was one of these.

Guy Banister (Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison – Ed Haslam – Spartacus – How JFK was killed)

FBI investigators did not take Jim Garrison’s suspicions about David Ferrie seriously. Garrison had turned over Ferrie because of his incriminating behaviour on the day of the assassination. The FBI then let Ferrie get away with numerous lies during their questioning of him. If they had not done so, they would have been able to link Oswald to a network of informants, CIA-backed anti-Castro Cuban exiles and other intelligence assets who had in common their hatred of Castro and, by then, Kennedy. This violent, right-wing hub of anti-Castro activity just happened to be where Oswald set up shop for his Fair Play for Cuba Committee office, which became central in his renewed relationship with Ferrie and Thornley and the development of new contacts like Sergio Arcache Smith, Carlos Quiroga, Frank Bartes, Clay Shaw, Carlos Bringuier, Guy Banister and who knows who else. It is no wonder the Warren Commission investigators and pro-lone-nut mouthpieces have felt extremely uncomfortable about Oswald’s flyers with the 544 Camp Street address on them.

Guy Banister

Garrison’s investigation led him to this nest of anti-Castro intelligence activity that was at the antipode of Oswald’s new found pro-Castro hobby. Over and above working in very close proximity to one another and Banister’s close ties to Ferrie, proof that Banister and Oswald were working together is overwhelming:
1. An important number of Banister’s colleagues confirmed seeing Oswald with Banister and other persons of extreme interest.
2. Recall that the Banister-linked organization Friends of Democratic Cuba used Oswald’s name while he was in Russia.
3. There was evidence in Banister’s files that he kept tabs on Oswald.
4. Writer Ed Haslam discovered that Ed Butler, who played an important role in a radio interview of Oswald, kept the deceased Banister’s files hidden. We will get back to Butler later.
Banister’s ties to intelligence are well summed up even in the very early work of Joachim Joesten, How Kennedy Was Killed (1968):

Guy Banister, a former FBI official and onetime assistant superintendent of the New Orleans police department, had had a ‘stormy’ career, according to the New Orleans States-Item of May 5, 1967. After he had left police work officially, if not earlier, Banister was active for years as a top U.S. intelligence agent in the South and in Latin America. His spacious office, at 531 Lafayette Street, in New Orleans, served both as a rallying point for Minutemen, Cuban exiles and assorted right-wing and intelligence operatives and as an arms distribution centre for these elements. This has been brought out with dazzling clarity both by the Garrison investigation and through independent research by the local press.

A close friend and adviser of Banister’s told the States-Item the veteran FBI agent was a key liaison man for U.S. government-sponsored anti-Communist activities in Latin America, the New Orleans paper reported and added: “Guy participated in every important anti-Communist South and Central American revolution which came along while he had the office on Lafayette Street,” the source reported. The paper also stated that Banister is believed to have worked in cooperation with a U.S. military intelligence office here.

What emerges from all of this is that Oswald was assisting Banister, a known communist hunter, in identifying Castro-sympathizers and that Banister was deeply involved in activities supplying weapons to anti-Castro groups like Alpha 66 –– a key organization of interest in the assassination.

Clay Shaw (Jim Garrison – Joan Mellen – Destiny Betrayed)

Thanks to New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, we were introduced to a key person of interest in Clay Shaw. For his profile let me quote from a one of my previous articles:

Perhaps no other person who believed there was a conspiracy was vilified more than Jim Garrison. He has been called a charlatan, a publicity-seeker and crazy, among other things. With time however, many of his claims have been vindicated. While some described his case as a farce, it is often overlooked that Garrison had presented his evidence beforehand to a three-judge panel who concluded that he was justified to bring it to court, and that the subsequent HSCA investigation concluded that Garrison and his office “had established an association of an undetermined nature between Ferrie, a suspect in the assassination of President Kennedy, and Clay Shaw and Lee Harvey Oswald” –– a devastating blow to Garrison detractors. Many witnesses have confirmed this.

Clay Shaw

Other information from later investigations reveals that his efforts were sabotaged by adversaries who infiltrated his volunteer team and weakened his efforts; well-orchestrated propaganda attacking both his case and reputation; refusals to his subpoenas for out-of-state witnesses and the harassment, turning and untimely deaths of some of his key witnesses, including the suspicious deaths of star-witness David Ferrie and the murder of Eladio Del Valle. Other irrefutable documentary evidence that began to emerge showed that Clay Shaw, despite his denials, was in fact a CIA asset and part of a CIA organization of interest called Permindex.

In Destiny Betrayed, Jim DiEugenio underscores other Shaw links with the CRC and with Banister, CIA-cleared doctor Ed Ochsner, and Ed Butler, who are all connected to The Information Council of the Americas which appears to have played a role in the sheep-dipping of Oswald (see Ed Butler). He also shows that Shaw was cleared for a project called QK/ENCHANT during the Garrison investigation. Howard Hunt also belonged to this project , which was part of the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division, according to CIA insider Victor Marchetti.

William Gaudet (Destiny Betrayed)

William Gaudet

Gaudet had worked for the CIA before he crossed paths with Oswald. He most likely continued freelancing for it. He worked virtually rent-free out of Clay Shaw’s International Trade Mart. He told the HSCA that he observed Oswald and Banister talking on a street corner on a number of occasions. Gaudet links up with many in the Banister network.

And then there is this little plum, according to author Anthony Summers: Gaudet … happened to be next in line to Oswald when Oswald applied for his Mexican tourist visa.

It seems plausible that Gaudet played a part in monitoring Oswald, perhaps for the benefit of Clay Shaw.

Dean Andrews (Jim Garrison)

Lawyer Dean Andrews was called by Shaw under the pseudonym Clay Bertrand, and given instructions to represent Oswald, as told by Garrison in his famous interview with Playboy:

A New Orleans lawyer, Dean Andrews, told the Warren Commission that a few months before the assassination of President Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald and a group of “gay Mexicanos” came to his office and requested Andrews’ aid in having Oswald’s Marine Corps undesirable discharge changed to an honorable discharge; Oswald subsequently returned alone with other legal problems.

Dean Andrews

Andrews further testified that the day after President Kennedy was assassinated, he received a call from Clay Bertrand, who asked him to rush to Dallas to represent Oswald. Andrews claims he subsequently saw Bertrand in a New Orleans bar, but Bertrand fled when Andrews approached him. This was intriguing testimony, although the Warren Commission dismissed it out of hand; and in 1964, Mark Lane traveled to New Orleans to speak to Andrews. He found him visibly frightened. “I’ll take you to dinner,” Andrews told Lane, “but I can’t talk about the case. I called Washington and they told me that if I said anything, I might get a bullet in the head.” For the same reason, he has refused to cooperate with my office in this investigation. The New York Times reported on February 26th that “Mr. Andrews said he had not talked to Mr. Garrison because such talk might be dangerous, but added that he believed he was being ‘tailed.’” Andrews told our grand jury that he could not say Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand and he could not say he wasn’t. But the day after NBC’s special, Andrews broke his silence and said, yes, Clay Shaw is not Clem Bertrand and identified the real Clay Bertrand as Eugene Davis. The only trouble is, Andrews and Davis have known each other for years and have been seen frequently in each other’s company. Andrews has lied so often and about so many aspects of this case that the New Orleans Parish grand jury has indicted him for perjury. I feel sorry for him, since he’s afraid of getting a bullet in his head, but he’s going to have to go to trial for perjury. [Andrews has since been convicted.]

Sergio Arcacha Smith (Destiny Betrayed – Jim Garrison – JFK: The Cuba Files)

Arcacha Smith is considered by many to be one of the leading organizers of the Cuban exiles who probably played a role in the assassination. He is perhaps also the Cuban exile with the most links with suspected participants from the mob, intelligence and business communities. He was sprung from Cuba by New Orleans lawyer Guy Johnson, an Office of Naval Intelligence reserve Officer and friend of both Guy Banister and Clay Shaw. The CIA selected him to be a key leader of Cuban exiles as a representative of the Cuban Revolutionary Council that was created by Howard Hunt as an umbrella organization of many Cuban exile groups such as Alpha 66 and the DRE. It is in this role that he befriended David Ferrie who he worked with in CIA Bay of Pigs training of Cuban exiles. According to Richard Case Nagell, Arcacha Smith, along with his right-hand man Carlos Quiroga, were among those setting Oswald up to take the fall.

Sergio Arcacha Smith

When in New Orleans he associated closely with Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Doctor Alton Ochsner. Gordon Novel, who later played a role in sabotaging the Shaw trial, claims that David Phillips participated in at least one meeting where Smith and Banister were in attendance. Arcacha Smith helped found the Friends of Democratic Cuba, the organization that borrowed Oswald’s name when he was in Russia and connects Arcacha Smith to Banister, Shaw and Ferrie. Jim Garrison discovered that this group worked closely in sync with New Orleans FBI agents Regis Kennedy and Warren DeBrueys, who were also monitoring Oswald. Jack Martin, who worked for Banister, claimed that he had been introduced to Oswald in the presence of Arcacha Smith.

Arcacha Smith also interacted with mobster Carlos Marcello and oilman H.L. Hunt, who saw him as a good contact for when Cuba would be won back. Cuban intelligence placed him in the top twelve suspects in the conspiracy.

After David Ferrie’s mysterious death, Garrison tried to extradite Arcacha Smith out of Texas for questioning under oath. This was blocked by Texas Governor John Connally, and the world never heard from one of the assassination’s most important witnesses.

Carlos Bringuier, Carlos Quiroga, Celso Hernandez and Frank Bartes (Destiny Betrayed – The Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend – Spartacus)

Bringuier was part of the DRE, a militant right-wing, anti-Communist, anti-Castro, anti-Kennedy group. Bringuier, based in New Orleans, was placed in charge of DRE publicity and propaganda. According to Bringuier, the following summarizes his strange encounters with Oswald:

Carlos Bringuier

On August 5, 1963, Oswald walks into Carlos Bringuier’s shop and starts up a conversation with him about wanting to help in the fight against Castro. Bringuier does not trust him and refuses his help. The next day Oswald drops off a copy of a Marine manual; on August 9. 1963, Oswald, while leafleting FPCC flyers on Canal Street, drew the ire of Bringuier and his Cuban associates Celso Hernandez and Miguel Cruz. Bringuier did the swinging while Oswald tried to block his blows. Within a few minutes all four were arrested for disturbing the peace; Oswald spent the night in jail while the other three were quickly let go; Oswald is then interviewed on a Bill Stuckey show along with Bringuier where his Marxist and FPCC credentials were discussed for all to hear.

Through this episode Oswald’s persona was archived on tape for strategic distribution on the day of the assassination. Bringuier himself wrote up an article that was published the day after the assassination that described this experience which he used as a call to arms against Castro. Oswald had actually described this event on August fourth, before it happened, to the head office of the FPCC, proving that it was staged. Bringuier’s links to intelligence were numerous. According to E. Howard Hunt, the DRE was started by David Phillips, who we will see is the CIA career employee who has the most links with Oswald. The DRE was eventually overseen in 1963 by George Joannides, a fact which was kept hidden from the HSCA when he became the CIA liaison to that committee and directly sabotaged investigation efforts.

Arcacha Smith, Manuel Gil,
& Carlos Quiroga

According to Richard Case Nagell, a Bringuier colleague who played a role in setting Oswald up as a patsy was Carlos Quiroga. A Jim Garrison polygraphed interrogation of Quiroga and other research proved that Quiroga knew Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith, had met Oswald more than once, and had supplied Oswald with Fair Play for Cuba literature on the orders of Carlos Bringuier. Quiroga was shown to be lying when he claimed to have met Oswald only once in an attempt to infiltrate the FPCC New Orleans Chapter.

One of the Cuban exiles arrested during the so-called skirmish was Celso Hernandez, who may have met Oswald before. According to Bill Simpich’s research, the CIA examined Celso Hernandez as a Castro penetration agent:

There is an intriguing report of FPCC member Oswald being arrested with Celso Hernandez in New Orleans in late 1962. The ID of Hernandez was made years later and is admittedly shaky. The ID of Oswald is more substantive, as he id’d himself to the police as an FPCC member –– but he was living in the Dallas area. The story is that the two men were picked up at the lakefront in Celso’s work truck, owned by an electronics firm that was Celso’s employer.

The most important thing is that right about this time, Bill Harvey –– who worked both the wiretapping side and the Cuban beat for the CIA during 1962 –– was tipped off on 10/1/62 that Celso Hernandez might be a communist. This kicked off an investigation that revealed in the autumn of 1963 that there was a left-wing Celso and a right-wing Celso, and a brother and sister who couldn’t agree on who was who. Oswald and Celso Hernandez were arrested together again in August 1963. What we do know is that throughout this era, Hernandez was under close scrutiny as a possible pro-Castro infiltrator.

While Oswald and Bringuier were in court after their altercation, a sympathizer and friend of Bringuier’s, Frank Bartes showed up to offer moral support. This Cuban exile went on to conduct anti-Castro press relations.

Bartes just happened to be the CRC leader of New Orleans based in a building near Banister. He was suspected of holding meetings later on Camp Street, with perhaps Oswald present and other persons of interest like Sergio Arcacha Smith. While this is mind-boggling enough, in 1993 the ARRB released files confirming that Bartes was an informant to the FBI agent who just happened to be monitoring Oswald, Warren DeBrueys.

(Author’s comment: This takes the cake!)

Jesse Core (Destiny Betrayed)

Core was Clay Shaw’s right-hand man who was present during the incident on Canal Street and Oswald’s leafleting near the Trade Mart. He contacted Shaw’s friends at WDSU TV. He also is the one who warned his team about the blunder by Oswald of placing Banister’s address on some of the literature he was handing out.

John Quigley and Warren DeBrueys (Destiny Betrayed – Joan Mellen – Sylvia Meagher)

After the altercation with Bringuier, it was New Orleans police Lieutenant Frank Martello who questioned Oswald first. The Warren Commission seemed to dismiss his testimony that Oswald: “… seemed to have set them up, so to speak, to create an incident …”.

While under arrest, Oswald made a bizarre request. He asked to see an FBI agent. One would think a true Marxist/FPCC recruiter would want to avoid such an encounter at all costs. It’s more likely that Oswald knew he would be joined by a friendly party he could pass on information to and who might spring him from jail without him having to pay bail. Just as interesting, the FBI sent agent John Quigley, who spent between ninety minutes and three hours with Oswald. It’s safe to say that they were not discussing Bringuier simply being mean to the alleged communist.

Quigley stated that Martello told him that Oswald wanted to pass on information about the FPCC to him. Joan Mellen’s research finds that Oswald actually asked specifically for Warren DeBrueys. DeBrueys, who ran Bartes as an informant, would further nail down the real reason Oswald started an FPCC chapter in a hostile place like New Orleans. William Walter, an employee at the New Orleans FBI office, claimed to have seen an FBI informant file of Oswald with DeBrueys’ name on it.

Warren DeBrueys

Coupled with the communist witch-hunts taking place out of Banister’s office, the FBI and CIA FPCC penetration operations that were in full-swing, and the fact that Quigley’s colleague, Warren DeBrueys, was in charge of monitoring the New Orleans FPCC chapter –– whose one and only member was Oswald –– it is only normal that this event has been interpreted by many as an intelligence officer interacting with an informant. The same informant who was helping Banister and would later give a note to Dallas FBI agent James Hosty that was so provocative that Hosty was asked to destroy it, and which became an explosive topic for the Church Committee.

In his questioning of DeBrueys, Schweiker clearly showed disbelief in Oswald the communist having a Camp Street address for his FPCC activities, something the FBI agent fluffed off by saying that perhaps Oswald had a sense of humor.

Arnesto Rodriguez (Joan Mellen)

The number of links between DeBrueys and Oswald are to say the least impressive. For our next Oswald intel contact let us return to a Joan Mellen essay:

124 Camp Street

Supporting the conclusion that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination is the fact that in New Orleans Oswald associated only with people with intelligence connections, beginning with Arnesto Rodriguez, an FBI informant with family members rooted in the CIA’s clandestine services. Rodriguez was one of FBI Special Agent Warren DeBrueys’ informants. One day Oswald appeared at Rodriguez’s office at the International Trade Mart building at 124 Camp Street. He wanted to help the Cubans, Oswald said. He wanted to be part of the training camps. Rodriguez was suspicious. Who had sent Oswald to him? he wondered. How did Oswald know that there was “a training camp across the lake from us, north of Lake Pontchartrain?” It was top secret at the time, yet Oswald knew about it.

Author’s Note: This writer does not agree at this point that this gives evidence that the CIA, as an organization, was behind the assassination. The relationships indicated here show so far that Oswald was linked to intelligence-related covert activities (such as infiltrating the FPCC to discredit it or to identify Castro sympathizers or to gain eventual entry into Cuba.)

Orestes Pena, Joseph Oster, David Smith, Juan Valdes and Wendell Roache (Bill Simpich)

Orestes Pena

DeBrueys’ relationship with Oswald reaches a whole other dimension of intensity according to another one of his informants, Orestes Pena. He also connects Oswald with Customs and the INS. Relying on Church Committee testimonies, Bill Simpich wrote the following in the Twelve Who Built the Oswald Legend part 9:

Curiously, the evidence that Oswald collaborated with Customs is stronger than with any other agency. Cuban exile Orestes Pena testified that he saw Oswald chatting on a regular basis with FBI Cuban specialist Warren DeBrueys, David Smith at Customs, and Wendell Roache at INS. Pena told the Church Committee that Oswald was employed by Customs. Informant Joseph Oster went farther, saying that Oswald’s handler was David Smith at Customs. Church Committee staff members knew that David Smith “was involved in CIA operations.” Orestes Pena’s handler Warren DeBrueys admitted he knew David Smith. Oswald was also frequently seen with Juan Valdes, who described himself as a “customs house broker”.

Orestes Pena also claimed that DeBrueys, who admitted arguing with Pena, tried to intimidate him with respect to what he had witnessed.

Ed Butler and Bill Stuckey (Destiny Betrayed – Ed Haslam)

Carlos Bringuier with Ed Butler

Ed Butler was the director of INCA, the Information Council of the Americas, a right-wing, CIA-associated propaganda outfit. Doctor Alton Ochsner and the Reilly Coffee Company were among its chief sponsors.

The Canal Street incident led to Oswald being part of a debate on WDSU reporter Bill Stuckey’s weekly radio program called Latin Listening Post. Later, Butler and Carlos Bringuier were also invited to debate Oswald about his Marxist views on a show called Conversation Carte Blanche. Stuckey claimed that his show helped destroy the FPCC in New Orleans. It is during this show that Oswald let slip that he was under the protection of the government while in Russia.

INCA – WDSU
“Conversation Carte Blanche”

Both Butler and Stuckey were briefed in advance about Oswald’s defection to Russia: Stuckey by the FBI, Butler by the House Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC). Therefore they were able to ambush Oswald and expose him as a Soviet defector, which compromised his debate position as one who desired “fair play” for Cuba. The records of this show were used immediately after the assassination (through Butler and Bringuier) to paint Oswald as the lone-nut Marxist. In fact, Butler was flown up to Washington within 24 hours to talk to the leaders of the HUAC.

Ed Butler is also the one who helped link Gordon Novel to Arcacha Smith and David Phillips. According to author Ed Haslam, he also became the secret custodian of Banister’s files years after his death.

Leopoldo and Angel (HSCA – Dick Russell – Joan Mellen – Larry Hancock)

Before commenting on our next two intelligence-linked Oswald contacts, let us review how they may have been involved in the Sylvia Odio incident as described by the HSCA:

Silvia Odio

The Commission investigated (Mrs. Odio’s) statements in connection with its consideration of the testimony of several witnesses suggesting that Oswald may have been seen in the company of unidentified persons of Cuban or Mexican background. Mrs. Odio was born in Havana in 1937 and remained in Cuba until 1960; it appears that both of her parents are political prisoners of the Castro regime. Mrs. Odio is a member of the Cuban Revolutionary Junta (JURE), an anti-Castro organization. She testified that late in September 1963, three men came to her apartment in Dallas and asked her to help them prepare a letter soliciting funds for JURE activities. She claimed that the men, who exhibited personal familiarity with her imprisoned father, asked her if she were “working in the underground,” and she replied that she was not. She testified that two of the men appeared to be Cubans, although they also had some characteristics that she associated with Mexicans. Those two men did not state their full names, but identified themselves only by their fictitious underground “war names.” Mrs. Odio remembered the name of one of the Cubans as “Leopoldo.” The third man, an American, allegedly was introduced to Mrs. Odio as “Leon Oswald,” and she was told that he was very much interested in the Cuban cause. Mrs. Odio said that the men told her that they had just come from New Orleans and that they were then about to leave on a trip. Mrs. Odio testified that the next day Leopoldo called her on the telephone and told her that it was his idea to introduce the American into the underground “because he is great, he is kind of nuts.” Leopoldo also said that the American had been in the Marine Corps and was an excellent shot, and that the American said the Cubans “don’t have any guts … because President Kennedy should have been assassinated after the Bay of Pigs, and some Cubans should have done that, because he was the one that was holding the freedom of Cuba actually.”

Because this story was corroborated by her sister, and Odio had talked to others about it before the assassination and remained consistent throughout the years, the HSCA concluded that she was credible:

It appears that Silvia Odio’s testimony is essentially credible. From the evidence provided in the sworn testimony of corroborating witnesses, there is no doubt that three men came to her apartment in Dallas prior to the Kennedy assassination and identified themselves as members of an anti-Castro Cuban organization. From a judgment of the credibility of both Silvia and Annie Odio, it must be concluded that there is a strong probability that one of the men was or appeared to be Lee Harvey Oswald. No conclusion about the significance of that visit could be reached. The possibilities were considered that Oswald actually had some association with JURE, the anti-Castro group headed by Manolo Ray, and that Oswald wanted it to appear that he had that association in order to implicate the group, politically a left-of-center Cuban organization, in the Kennedy assassination.

Some researchers interpret the goals of this highly incriminating, Warren-Commission-debunking incident as 1) a further attempt to sheep-dip Oswald as anti-Kennedy and 2) a ploy to link the Cuban exile group JURE that Odio was connected to with Oswald. For the Kennedys seemed to favor this left-leaning organization over others that were much closer to the intelligence networks. Richard Case Nagell revealed that Leopoldo and Angel were war names for two Cuban exiles who had also, in the spring of 1963, looked into the possibility of setting up an executive of the Los Angeles chapter of the FPCC called Vaughn Marlowe.

Joan Mellen’s research has led her to believe that they were Cuban exiles Angelo Murgado and Bernardo De Torres.

Angelo Murgado and a fellow veteran of the Bay of Pigs, in September, were the men who traveled with Oswald from New Orleans to Dallas where they visited Sylvia Odio. (Mrs. Odio testified that the three traveled together although Angelo says that when he and Leopoldo, who drove from New Orleans together, arrived at Sylvia Odio’s, Oswald was already there, sitting in the apartment. That “Leopoldo” and Angelo both knew Oswald, there is no doubt) …

“Leopoldo” was Bernardo de Torres, who testified before the HSCA with immunity granted to him by the CIA, so that he was not questioned about the period of time leading up to the Kennedy assassination, as the CIA instructed the Committee on what it could and could not ask this witness. Both the Warren Commission and the HSCA buried the anti-Castro theme, and never explored what Bobby Kennedy might have known.

Bernardo De Torres

Although her conclusion, to put it mildly, is not shared by all pro-conspiracy researchers, many do consider them –– especially De Torres –– to be persons of interest in the JFK assassination. De Torres’ ties to the CIA were later confirmed by his daughter. Larry Hancock in Someone Would Have Talked identifies other key links: De Torres is known to have associated with several of Hemming’s Interpen members and he was well acquainted with Frank Fiorini/Sturgis. De Torres also had strong operational contacts in Mexico City all the way up to Miguel Nazar Haro in Mexican police intelligence. Haro was later revealed as a key individual in drug trafficking into the U.S. and has been associated with both Sam Giancana and Richard Cain. An FBI report on De Torres from the 1970’s refers to his “high level contacts” with the CIA, but this is otherwise unsubstantiated (unexplained is perhaps a better description).

After the assassination, De Torres infiltrated the Garrison investigation and played a key role in messing up his efforts. In 1977, the HSCA came to believe that he may have played a role in the assassination: “De Torres has pictures of Dealey Plaza in a safe-deposit box,” a HSCA report states. “These pictures were taken during the assassination of JFK.”

Sylvia Duran and Eusebio Azcue (State Secret – The Lopez Report)

Duran worked at the Cuban Consulate in Mexico City and received “Oswald” on September 27^th 1963 when he talked about his plans to visit Cuba and then move to the Soviet Union and asked for a visa. She was suspicious of him and instructed him to go through the Russian embassy instead. It is during this episode that the CIA Mexico City station used imposters to create phoney telephone calls between a fake Oswald and workers at the Russian embassy exchanging compromising information that could be used to position Oswald as a communist assassin who had received help from either the Cubans, Russians or both.

Silvia Duran

Suspiciously, the CIA could not produce any photos of Oswald’s five entrances and exits as surveyed by their cameras. They claim that these were all out of order during the two days of Oswald’s visits. David Phillips lied under oath to HSCA Chief Counsel Richard Sprague by claiming that the tapes of these calls had been recycled. It was proven that several investigators had heard at least one recording on the weekend of the assassination. They confirmed that the voice on the tape had survived and was not Oswald’s. This impersonation, followed by the obfuscation, is one of the most important choke points in the whole case.

After the assassination, Sylvia Duran was picked up by Mexican police, on order of Win Scott –– chief of the Mexico City station, and forcefully interrogated. The CIA had been monitoring her and knew she had an affair with Cuban ambassador to the United Nations Carlos Lechuga. Furthermore, through a made-up story by CIA operative June Cobb, Duran was accused of have had a fling with Oswald.

Eusebio Azcue

It is believed that the CIA had perhaps even recruited Duran according to the Lopez Report: “… the circumstantial evidence tends to indicate that Duran had a relationship with Mexican or American intelligence [and] cannot be dismissed.”

Eusebio Azcue, a co-worker of Duran, also met “Oswald” when he was in the office. Curiously, he described him as short and blond, which corresponds to Cuban photograph of the visitor. In State Secret, Bill Simpich makes the argument that Azcue may have been a CIA-linked case officer of another FPCC-related potential patsy called Santiago Garriga who would have penetrated the FPCC for Bill Harvey while David Phillips was running the FPCC monitoring and discrediting project called AM/SANTA.

Antonio Veciana (Dick Russell – JFK: The Cuban Files – Gaeton Fonzi)

For our next person of interest let us refer to renowned researcher Dick Russell, who was one of the first to interview Veciana (From “Interview with an assassin”):

Alpha 66’s Cuban leader Antonio Veciana claimed that at one of his hundred or so meetings with Bishop, Oswald was there. “I always thought Bishop was working with Oswald during the assassination,” Veciana told Russell. Veciana’s cousin worked for Castro’s intelligence service and after the assassination Bishop wanted Veciana to bribe his cousin into saying that he met with Oswald, in order to fabricate an Oswald-Castro connection.

Antonio Veciana

Investigators never established for sure that Bishop and Phillips were one and the same, but descriptions of Bishop’s appearance and mannerisms mirrored Phillips’. Veciana drew a sketch of his old controller and Senator Richard Schweiker, a member of the assassination committee, recognized it as Phillips.

When the select committee’s star investigator Gaeton Fonzi finally brought Veciana and Phillips together, the two started acting weird around each other. After a short conversation in Spanish, Phillips bolted. Witnesses to the encounter swear that a look of recognition swept Veciana’s visage, but Veciana denied that Phillips was his case officer of more than a decade earlier.

Veciana’s reluctance to make the ID, Fonzi theorized, was related to two unfortunate events that had befallen him of late: one, he was convicted of running drugs and suspected that Bishop set him up to silence him; two, he was shot in the head. Veciana’s desire to clear his drug rap and avoid absorbing another bullet may have had something to do with the fact that he would not rat on his old benefactor.

Fonzi was proven right posthumously by a letter Veciana sent to his widow Marie, interviews Veciana gave and a book he has since written confirming that Bishop and Phillips were one and the same. Schweiker did not find Phillips’ denials of knowing Veciana credible; he was unconvinced by this evidence. He found it difficult to believe Phillips would not have known the leader of Alpha 66. Especially as Phillips had been in charge of covert action in Cuba when Alpha 66 was established. Another CIA agent who worked in Cuba during this period claimed that Phillips used the code name Maurice Bishop.

According to Veciana, after the assassination, Phillips tried to convince him to get a relative of his in Mexico City to claim he had seen Oswald receiving money from Castro agents.

(Author’s comment: Because Alpha 66 was the most active and reliable Cuban exile group involved with Castro assassination attempts; because Richard Case Nagell and Cuban intelligence leader Fabian Escalante both fingered Tony Cuesta, another Alpha 66 higher-up, as having been involved in the assassination; and because it is difficult to believe that Phillips would let himself be seen with Oswald by non-participants in a plot; and because of reports of Oswald being present in a Dallas Alpha 66 safe-house, and because of Oswald’s probable links to other prominent people in the Cuban exile community such as Orlando Bosch, this author wonders what other details could be brought forward by Veciana.)

David Phillips

Out of all the CIA-linked people that crossed paths with Oswald, Phillips is perhaps the most important. Because of his rank and the multi-faceted way he links with Oswald beyond the Veciana reports, as well as the government investigators belief of Veciana, this author has reserved a special section to cover this highly revealing relationship that most historians do not even have a clue about. They are not aware of what people like Richard Schweiker came to believe, because they are frozen in the Warren Commission era which set in motion what has been perhaps the U.S.’s worst case ever of perpetuated “Fake News” and Fake History.

Manuel Orcarberrio

Manuel Rodriguez Orcarberrio (JFK: The Cuban Files)

According to Escalante, Alpha 66 opened a chapter managed by Orcarberrio in Dallas in September 1963 on Harlendale Street, where Oswald was seen a few days before the crime by an informant of Dallas Deputy Sherriff Buddy Walthers.

Pedro Charles and friends (JFK: The Cuban Files)

One rarely discussed subject about the assassination are the letters from Cuba sent to Oswald, media outlets and Robert Kennedy which were received or intercepted shortly after the murder. A “Pedro Charles” (probably a fictitious name) signed one of these letters and is referred to in another as a Castro agent. These letters suggested that Oswald was being assisted by Cuban agents. The FBI found that, though different people signed off on some, they were written from the same typewriter and concluded they were a hoax perhaps perpetrated by anti-Castro rebels in Cuba hoping to encourage a show-down with the U.S.

Cuban Intelligence had a different take on this mystery. They found it resembled the Mexico City disinformation tactics used by David Phillips and concluded that it was an intelligence operation. Indeed, the letters refer to Oswald’s travels to Dallas, Mexico City, Houston and Miami which would have been known to very few people at the time the letters were sent (“franked” from November 23^rd to November 30^th). Also analyzed was the Cuban postal system, which presented severe logistical problems around the dates the letters were written, franked and received and were never explained in U.S. investigations.

John Hurt (Dr. Grover B. Proctor, Jr.)

On Saturday night November 23^rd Oswald placed a call that even the head of the HSCA described as very troublesome. Doctor Grover B. Proctor, Jr. wrote a comprehensive article about that phone call. It shows that Lee Oswald tried to make a phone call on Saturday night that the Secret Service did not allow to go through. Proctor then investigated why:

Surell Brady, a Senior Staff Counsel for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), summarized Mrs. Treon’s version of events this way:

Mrs. Treon stayed on the line. She said she was therefore able to hear everything Oswald said and she is sure he asked for the name John Hurt and gave the two numbers. She said that as she listened she wrote the information down on a regular telephone call slip. However, since Mrs. Swinney actually handled the call, Mrs. Treon signed her [Mrs. Swinney’s] name to the slip she intended to keep as a souvenir. She said the notations on the slip of “DA” and “CA” stand for did not answer and cancelled, because the call was never actually put through. Mrs. Treon said she never retrieved any paper from the wastebasket on which Mrs. Swinney supposedly entered the information.

Billie & J. D. Hurt

Had Mrs. Treon not kept the LD call slip that she filled out as a souvenir, this story would be no more than the most minor of footnotes in the tragedy of the Kennedy Assassination. However, years later, when the identity became known of the man to whom Oswald was trying to place a call, its significance would rise to the “very troublesome” and “deeply disturbing” levels ascribed to it by HSCA Chief Counsel Blakey.

Grover goes on to write:

What Mrs. Treon recorded for history on her LD slip is that Lee Oswald requested to call a “John Hurt” in Raleigh, North Carolina. But what would become important is the fact that the John Hurt who had the first phone number on the slip was a former Special Agent in U.S. Army Counterintelligence. In short, Oswald attempted to place a call from the Dallas jail to a member of the American Intelligence community on Saturday evening, November 23, 1963, but was mysteriously prevented from completing the call.

Jack Ruby and Robert McKeown (John Armstrong website)

As we can see, the claim that Oswald was a loner with no ties with intelligence agencies is one of the largest deceptions put forth by the Warren Commission. The description of his murderer by the Warren Commission as another deranged person with no mob ties comes very close. For example, the phone calls that he was part of in the weeks leading up to the murder and that were analyzed by the HSCA revealed a frenzy of communications with known mobsters.
1. His first visitor when he was jailed was Dallas head-mobster Joe Campisi.
2. His idol and acquaintance Lewis McWillie was a mobster who became an associate of Mafia Don Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, leaders in the CIA-mob alliance to take out Castro.
3. There is strong evidence that Ruby visited Trafficante when the latter was in a Cuban jail and that he tried to free him.
The use of known-mobsters by the Warren Commission to vouch for Ruby not being linked to the mob is not re-assuring to say the least.

Ruby’s ties to the mob are what got Robert Blakey, head of the HSCA, to write a book about organized crime being behind the assassination.

Ruby at press conference

Did Jack Ruby cross paths with Oswald before he stalked him during his weekend in jail? According to reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, who interviewed Ruby after he was arrested, at least ten people signed affidavits saying they saw Ruby with Oswald. She claimed that she was going to blow the lid off the case before dying mysteriously.

During a press conference by Dallas attorney Henry Wade, where he claimed that Oswald was part of the Free Cuba Committee, it was Ruby masquerading as a journalist who corrected him by saying it was the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

John Armstrong is the researcher who has done the most investigation on the case of two Oswalds, one he calls Harvey (the patsy) and the other Lee. It is known that Oswald was often times impersonated. He presents the case that while Harvey was in New Orleans, Lee was a frequent client in Ruby’s Carousel Club.

Another link between Oswald and Ruby comes through their interactions with a gun smuggler and friend of Castro. Robert McKeown, who had been jailed for these activities, at one time got a call from Ruby who tried to use these ties in his efforts to convince the Castro regime to free Trafficante. McKeown did not want to get involved.

Robert McKeown

In his website-article, Armstrong describes this stunning event: Robert McKeown watched as a car arrived, parked, and two men got out and walked toward his home. One of the men introduced himself to McKeown as Lee Oswald, and said that he wanted to purchase rifles. McKeown, who was still on a 5-year probation for selling arms, refused to sell guns to Lee Oswald. The two men left but returned a few minutes later and again asked McKeown to sell rifles, but he refused. Lee Oswald’s attempt to purchase rifles from Robert McKeown, who was a very close personal friend of Fidel Castro, was very significant and an obvious attempt by the conspirators to link Lee Oswald to Cuba.

Other than his links with Trafficante, what were Ruby’s links to intelligence? Here are some of the arguments John Armstrong brings forth:

There are indications that Jack Rubenstein, of Chicago and Dallas, may have been hired as an informant for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) to report on Communist Party activities. A memorandum written by a HUAC staff assistant on November 24, 1947 reads, “It is my sworn statement that one Jack Rubenstein of Chicago noted as a potential witness for hearings of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities is performing information functions for the staff of Cong. Richard M. Nixon, Rep. of California. It is requested Rubenstein not be called for open testimony in those aforementioned hearings.”

As a gun-runner for Cuban revolutionaries, Ruby’s links were monitored by the CIA. Some of his gun-running was done with a CIA operative called Donald Browder at a time when Customs and the CIA were not opposed to Castro’s revolution.

Thomas Eli Davis III

His ties with another gun-runner named Thomas Eli Davis brought forth this interesting connection Armstrong wrote about:

When JFK was assassinated, Davis was in jail in Algiers, charged with running guns to a secret army terrorist movement then attempting to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle. Davis was released from jail through the intervention of the CIA’s foreign agent code-named “QJ/WIN,” who was identified by the top-secret CIA Inspector General’s Report as the “principle asset” in the Agency’s assassination program known as ZR/RIFLE.

After Ruby’s arrest for killing Oswald, his defense attorney (Tom Howard) asked Ruby if he could think of anything that might damage his defense. Ruby responded and said there would be a problem if a man by the name of “Davis” should come up. Davis was later identified as Thomas Eli Davis III, a CIA-connected gun-runner and “soldier of fortune.” In December, 1963 the Moroccan National Security Police informed the US State Department that Davis was arrested for an attempted sale of firearms to a minor. When Davis was searched, the police found “a letter in his handwriting which referred in passing to Oswald and to the Kennedy assassination.” Ruby told Howard that “he had been involved with Davis, who was a CIA-connected gun runner entangled in anti-Castro efforts and that he (Ruby) had intended to begin a regular gun-running business with Davis.” … Tom Howard died of a heart attack within a year at age 48. The doctor, without an autopsy, said that he may have suffered a heart attack. But some reporters and friends thought Howard had been murdered.

The HSCA, under Robert Blakey, was intent on covering up any CIA connection or gun-running activities connected with Ruby and failed to investigate the Ruby/Davis connection. They explained, in typical government prose, “Due to limitations of time and resources … it was not possible to confirm these (Seth Kantor’s) allegations.”

Gerald Ford, in his otherwise uninformative book, Portrait of an Assassin, did reveal that Ruby had been an FBI informant. Before dying, Ruby made the claim that there was a high level conspiracy. The Warren Commission did not even want to question Ruby, when they finally did meet him they were not very probing to say the least!

Synopsis

There you have it folks … sixty-four people with whom Oswald had touch points, and, who also had either plausible, probable, or definite intelligence links. The list could be much longer because this author decided not to include certain witnesses who have not yet convinced enough researchers of their credibility. Furthermore, we do not know about all those who Oswald spent time with learning Russian, acquiring a Minolta camera, were connected to his U2 duties, were in Copenhagen on his return, and possibly in Montreal, and so forth.

In part 2 of his excellent essay “Tokyo Legend? Oswald and Japan,” Kevin Coogan compared the investigation into two genuine defectors who embraced the Soviet Union almost one year after Oswald defected. On September 6, 1960, two former National Security Agency (NSA) employees named Bernon Mitchell and William Martin held a press conference in Moscow. The two mathematician/cryptographers formally announced their defection. As it so happened, the two men had earlier worked at the U.S. military base at Atsugi, Japan.

Contrary to what happened with Oswald, in this case the level of alarm and degree of scrutiny were off the charts: The Mitchell-Martin defection was a tremendous shock to the NSA, which launched an internal investigation that involved speaking to some 450 witnesses. The FBI, the CIA, and military intelligence all worked the case. The inquiry included a microscopic look at both men’s earlier experiences in Japan.

As we can see, not one stone was left unturned in getting to the bottom of what happened, something we are now seeing in the Trump-Russia meddling affair. The underlying assumption here is that all leads must be followed to the end no matter how much time it takes or how much it costs. In the case of the JFK assassination, the opposite happened: A lead’s merit needed to be justified in full in order to be followed up, while respecting budget and time constraints.

Mark Lane found that intelligence’s investigation into Oswald’s defection was very shallow and pro forma. Schweiker added this telling insight: “The most important thing was that the intelligence agencies did all the wrong things if they were really looking for a conspiracy or to find out who killed John Kennedy.”

Two comments from important witnesses further confirm this:

Oswald, it was said, was the only Marine ever to defect from his country to another country, a Communist country, during peacetime. … When the Marine Corps and American intelligence decided not to probe the reasons for the ‘defection,’ I knew then what I know now: Oswald was on an assignment in Russia for American intelligence.

~James Botelho, former roommate of Oswald who would later become a California judge, in an interview with assassination researcher Mark Lane

When Oswald’s commanding officer John Donovan was questioned by the Warren Commission, he noted that they did everything they could to avoid exchanges about Oswald and the U2 program.

In the next section we will explore where investigators should have gone had they followed up on these leads by focussing on one of the most important ones.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire

David Phillips (Larry Hancock – Destiny Betrayed)

Concerning the CIA career officer who left the most intel fingerprints on Oswald, let us refer to Larry Hancock, who has written extensively about him, and from whose work we can conclude the following about his potential involvement in the conspiracy:

A) He had the perfect credentials.

David Atlee Phillips

Phillips joined the CIA in 1950. He played a significant role in the CIA coup that removed Jacobo Arbenz, the president of Guatemala in 1954. An ex ad-man and actor, Phillips was a master at propaganda. According to Hancock, Phillips was part of a cadre of like-minded CIA officers that specialized in regime change. Some of the techniques involved featured use of surrogates, putting the blame on a foe, creating a scenario, including paper trails, files and fabrications that could be plausible, and compartmentalized logistics on a need to know basis. This cadre included persons of interest in the JFK assassination: E. Howard Hunt, David Morales, and William Harvey are some of the key names that also figure prominently in many of the assassination writings.

There are reports Phillips worked with David Morales out of the JM/Wave Miami CIA station in attempts to remove Castro. Phillips helped launch Alpha 66, one of the most violent and active anti-Castro Cuban exile groups. He worked undercover in Cuba in 1959-60 when he recruited its leader Antonio Veciana. According to Howard Hunt, he was also involved with the DRE.

B) He had the motive.

He became one of many disillusioned officers who blamed and resented JFK after the failed Bay of Pigs and the firing of their popular chief Allen Dulles.

He demonstrated his insubordination to Kennedy: Phillips’ direction of Alpha 66 to attack Russian targets in Cuba was intended to provoke a direct U.S. –– Russian conflict which would result in the liberation of Cuba. Through Veciana, Phillips independently supported multiple unsanctioned assassination plots against Fidel Castro. Alpha 66, Veciana, Eddie Bayo and Tony Cuesta were not directed by the CIA but personally by Phillips. Phillips specifically told Veciana his goal was to provoke US intervention in Cuba by “putting Kennedy’s back to the wall.”

C) His quasi-confessions.

According to Larry Hancock, the author of Someone Would Have Talked, just before his death Phillips told Kevin Walsh, an investigator with the House Select Committee on Assassinations: “My final take on the assassination is there was a conspiracy, likely including American intelligence officers.” (Some books wrongly quote Phillips as saying: “My private opinion is that JFK was done in by a conspiracy, likely including rogue American intelligence people.”)

David Atlee Phillips died of cancer on 7th July, 1988. He left behind an unpublished manuscript. The novel is about a CIA officer who lived in Mexico City. In the novel the character states: “I was one of those officers who handled Lee Harvey Oswald … We gave him the mission of killing Fidel Castro in Cuba … I don’t know why he killed Kennedy. But I do know he used precisely the plan we had devised against Castro. Thus the CIA did not anticipate the president’s assassination, but it was responsible for it. I share that guilt.”

In his last conversation with his brother, who suspected him of being a conspirator and was pressing him on it, he refused to confirm his innocence and admitted being in Dallas on November 22^nd 1963.

D) E. Howard Hunt names him.

In January 2004, E. Howard Hunt gave a taped interview with his son, Saint John Hunt, claiming that Lyndon Baines Johnson was the instigator of the assassination (coded The Big Event) of John F. Kennedy, and that it was organized by Phillips, Cord Meyer, Frank Sturgis and David Sanchez Morales.

E) His lies.

He claimed to Fonzi that he had never met Veciana. How could the person who coordinated anti-Castro activities not know the Alpha 66 leader?

He claimed to Richard Sprague (HSCA) under oath that tapes of Oswald had been routinely recycled:

Phillips’ testimony was that there was no photograph of “Oswald” because the camera equipment had broken down that day and there was no audio tape of “Oswald’s” voice because they recycled their tapes every six or seven days. The problem with his story was, we had obtained a document, it was from the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, it was dated November 23rd, 1963, the very next day after the assassination. This document was a memo to all FBI supervisorial staff stating, in substance, that FBI agents who have questioned Oswald for the past 17 hours approximately, have listened to the tape made on October 1st, by an individual identifying himself as Lee Henry Oswald inside the Russian Embassy, calling on the phone to someone inside the Cuban Embassy and the agents can state unequivocally that the voice on the tape is not the voice of Lee Harvey Oswald, who is in custody.

He professed ignorance to Dan Hardway (HSCA) about all the disinformation stories trying to link Oswald to Castro agents that were initiated by his assets.

F) His omnipresence before, during and after Oswald’s demise.

Oswald’s opening of an FPCC chapter in New Orleans when this organization was spiralling out of control and infested with informants and Oswald’s extremely provocative way of promoting his supposed views smacked of an operational ruse overseen by Phillips who was running a program called AM/SANTA that was designed to infiltrate and undermine the FPCC. In the article The Three Failed Plots to Kill JFK, this author identified four other potential patsies who were FPCC-linked and who had travelled to Mexico City.

Phillips admitted knowing New Orleans-based FBI agent Warren DeBrueys, who was monitoring the FPCC and most likely using Oswald as an informant. Richard Case Nagell’s FPCC-related activities with Oswald, with another potential patsy Vaughn Marlowe, and a few FPCC chapters, combined with his visits to Mexico City and hints he gave to a friend that he worked with Phillips, add further weight to the Phillips-FPCC-Oswald conduit.

According to CIA-linked electronics wizard Gordon Novel, a person resembling Phillips, masquerading as an employee of the Double-Check Corporation, even attended a meeting along with Guy Banister and Sergio Arcacha Smith in Banister’s offices. Researcher Lisa Pease’s analysis led her to conclude that this person was in fact Phillips and Double-Check was a CIA front.

Banister, Smith and Ferrie at one time helped train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs near Lake Pontchartrain north of New Orleans on a CIA controlled site. In 1967, while the CIA was trying to keep this information hidden from Garrison, Phillips wrote a memo describing the status of that operation.

Related to these training activities is, according to this author, one of the most mysterious pieces of evidence: a training film that was seen by a few HSCA investigators before it eventually disappeared. According to HSCA Deputy Counsel Robert Tanenbaum, he viewed a film of a CIA training camp in New Orleans. He brought in witnesses to identify certain people in the film. From the work done of it, he said that Oswald, Banister and Phillips were depicted in the film.

E. Howard Hunt claimed that Phillips was a key person behind the DRE. Phillips admitted helping it in its PR efforts. Carlos Bringuier of the DRE got into a fight with Oswald on Canal Street in August of 1963. He wrote a press release that was published the day after the assassination to position Castro as being behind Oswald; the fingerprints of Phillips became even more evident. The fact that George Joannides –– who took over DRE coordination activities from Phillips –– was inserted into the HSCA investigation by the CIA as a key liaison and thereafter started an obvious obfuscation operation underscores this suspicious event. Here is how HSCA investigator Dan Hardway described this situation:

We have, since 1978, learned that George Joannides was running the propaganda shop at the CIA’s Miami JMWAVE Station in 1963. It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Joannides could have occupied that position and not have known, and worked with, David Phillips. In addition, in 1963, we now know, George Joannides was the case officer handling the DRE. In 1977 the CIA specifically denied that DRE had a case officer assigned when asked that question by the HSCA.

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 the day of the assassination.

Antonio Veciana, who was Phillips’ go-to guy in the Cuban exile community for some thirteen years also, over time named Phillips. He told Gaeton Fonzi he had seen him talk to Oswald in Dallas in September 1963. Phillips also tried to get Veciana to convince a relative of his in Mexico City to fabricate a story about seeing Oswald taking money from Castro agents.

In October 1963, the CIA monitored the impersonation of Oswald in Mexico City at the Cuban consulate in what appears to be a clear attempt to link him to Castro and the Soviets –– all this right under Phillips’ nose as he was based there. Phillips then was clearly involved with the manipulation of evidence (tapes, photos and transcripts) in the subsequent cover-up.

On November 24 1963, Jack Ruby terminated Oswald, thus sealing his lips. Phillips’ close friend, Gordon McLendon, was a close friend of Jack Ruby.

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

Following the assassination, it became obvious that Phillips was connected to a number of disinformation stories trying to link Oswald to Castro agents. HSCA investigator Dan 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.

Conclusion

So as we can see, the noose was getting very tight around the Phillips’ neck during the Church and HSCA investigations. By following leads as far as they could, investigators like Schweiker, Hart, Fonzi, Tanenbaum, Sprague, Hardway and Lopez were zeroing in on who was behind the plot. These real sleuths brought the ball forward: The Warren Commission was finally fully impeached and the outline of a conspiracy began taking shape.

And just when they had suspects like Hunt and Phillips in their sights, a combination of factors took place that stalled and then stopped all progress. George H. W. Bush became head of the CIA and called the shots so as to protect the integrity of this all-American institution; HSCA leaders Sprague and Tanenbaum were forced out and a collegial working relationship with the CIA was then put in place by its new head Robert Blakey, and George Joannides was installed strategically to sabotage investigative efforts.

Phillips was now off the hook.

Moving forward, we do need to be cautious about how we interpret all of this. One may be tempted to conclude from this article that the CIA as an organization was complicit in killing the President. This in my opinion is highly doubtful and quite different from suspecting persons who can be linked to intelligence. When one goes over the names of the usual suspects, one is struck by their outlier status. It is also easy to imagine implication by someone in a ruse which ended up going in a completely unforeseen direction: For example DeBrueys using Oswald to weed out Castro sympathizers while having no clue that he was being set up to be a patsy could be quite plausible in this author’s opinion. It would be however quite natural for intelligence agencies to want to distance themselves from the assassination and its embarrassing implications.

In 1993, the ARRB began ordering releases of declassified information. That information made all of this obvious to those who looked into the goldmine of new information. It added even more evidence that vindicated the authors who were discredited mercilessly by the pro-Warren Commission propaganda network. Absent from all this data-mining are the historians and journalists who are still frozen in the Warren Commission time-warp –– the same people who are fighting for their lives countering Donald Trump who has accused them of being peddlers of fake news.

On a positive note, Randy Benson spoke with an historian who saw his recent documentary, The Searchers, and who admitted not knowing about all the post-Warren-Commission discoveries, and pledged to change his way of relating the assassination. My bet is that students who read his account will respect him, the way we should all show our respect to Richard Schweiker.
July 29, 2017
The Dual Life of Albert Osborne
In the field of Kennedy assassination studies, Albert Osborne is the stuff of both legend and legerdemain. Much of that is due to the tales told by the man himself. Was he Albert Osborne or, as he tried to maintain, was he John Howard Bowen? Did he sit next to and talk to Lee Harvey Oswald on his bus trip to Mexico City? And why did he leave the country after that mysterious journey? A journey so fabled that the late author Philip Melanson once called it, “Oswald’s Mexican Mystery Tour.”

Oswald’s alleged trip to Mexico City in late September of 1963 has been the subject of abundant research and controversy. There has been much discussion about whether or not he actually took the trip to Mexico, and if that strange voyage was somehow connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The FBI, at the behest of President Lyndon Johnson, investigated the murder of the young president. In public at least, the Bureau and the Warren Commission declared that their probe led to the discovery that Oswald was seen sitting beside a man named John Howard Bowen on a bus bound for Mexico City. The FBI eventually discovered that Bowen was an alias. The man’s real name was Albert Osborne. Their investigation of Osborne, as can be expected, was not complete.1 Because of that fact, a mythos about the strange figure of Albert Osborne sprung to life in assassination literature. Even the late diehard Warren Commission defender Vincent Bugliosi wrote that “many of the questions about Osborne-Bowen remain unanswered.”2

The liveliest piece of disinformation about Osborne was printed in The Torbitt Document, sometimes called Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal. There, Osborne is actually supposed to be in charge of recruiting the assassination team from Mexico. And in October of 1963, he is depicted as having been in New Orleans meeting with Clay Shaw and CIA associated attorney Maurice Gatlin. As is the case throughout that misleading pamphlet, there is no proof provided for any of these claims. But the evidentiary problems about Osborne stemmed from the fact that he was an enigmatic and interesting character who told many lies to the FBI. Furthermore, the man seemed to have no steady source of income to finance his many journeys from Mexico, through various parts of America, and to Europe. But even with all the mystery about his traveling and his identity, the Bureau stopped investigating him in March of 1964 without ever establishing what, or even if, he had a job. It is difficult to place the circumstances of Osborne’s life at that time into any kind of legitimate employment. He himself told stories about what he did for a living, and as we shall see, those who knew him had suspicions he was involved in espionage work.

This article will continue the investigation into the life of Albert Osborne and will also provide a brief outline of the life of the real John Howard Bowen. We will conclude with a short discussion about whether or not the two ever met.

In the Beginning

Albert Osborne began his life in Grimsby, England on November 12, 1888 3 (Appendix 1). He was one of 12 children born to his father James, a fisherman, and his wife Emily.4 He attended St. James Academy in Grimsby until the eighth grade before leaving school.5 He worked as a grocer and served in the militia before enlisting in the British Army on December 12, 1906, at the age of 186 (Appendix 2).7 After joining the army he was sent abroad to serve in different posts in the British Empire. He went to India, Aden and Gibraltar, before been stationed in the British colony of Bermuda.8 His British army service records reveal that his time in the army was uneventful and that he did not participate in any military actions.

His stay in Bermuda would be a short one. He arrived on January 7, 1914 and he resigned from the army on June 29, 1914.9 His timing could not have been better, for on June 28, 1914, the day before he resigned, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia by Gravilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist. This tragic event was the fuse that ignited the powder keg that was European imperial politics, and led to the start of World War I in August of 1914. Albert Osborne would escape the horror of trench warfare, which would become the enduring symbol of this war, by departing for the United States.

Upon his arrival in the United States he can be found in the company of missionaries. The Washington Post reported that a man named Albert Osborne was one of a group of people who participated in a program that illustrated the life and customs of peoples in India, China and other countries. The presentation took place at the Seventh Day Adventist Washington Missionary College that operated missions in foreign countries.10 As we will see later, other newspapers in later years will also write stories about a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures about his travels in India, and he was the same man who would go by the name of John Howard Bowen.

In 1917 Osborne did something that cannot be explained. By that year World War I had been raging for three years and had killed millions of soldiers in Europe. But this horror did not stop him from enlisting in the Canadian Army, which had been fighting in Europe since 1914. Upon enlistment, he completed an “Attestation Paper Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force” (Appendix 3).11 This document was an army application form. On it he indicated that he enlisted at Toronto, Canada on August 2, 1917 and that his present address was Nashville, Tennessee.12

A comparison of his British and Canadian army application forms reveals that there are some important discrepancies between the descriptions of the man who enlisted in the British Army in 1906 and the man who joined the Canadian Army in 1917. There is a significant difference in his height, the year of birth is not correct and the middle names are different. These differences may suggest that someone other than Osborne had joined the Canadian army using his identity. A more likely explanation is that these differences can be explained, and that the man known as Albert Osborne who resigned from the British army in 1914 is the same man who joined the Canadian army in 1917.13

The most compelling difference between the two application forms is his height. When he enlisted in the British army in 1906 at the age of 18, his height was 5 feet 4.5 inches.14 When he joined the Canadian army in 1917, his height was 5 feet, 9 inches, a difference of 4.5 inches.15 His British army service records provide a clue that may explain this height difference. It states that “After six months service and gymnastic courses” his height was now 5 feet 5.5 inches; he had grown one inch in six months.16 His increase in height may be explained by his age. As he was only 18 when he enlisted in the British army; he may have been young enough to have not reached his full height, as can be seen by the additional one inch he gained in the six months after his enlistment. Unfortunately, his British army service records do not provide his height when he left the army in 1914 at the age of 25, by which time he must have attained his full height; consequently, it cannot be confirmed if he had added 3.5 inches during his tenure with the British army. Both of his British and Canadian military service records also do not include photographs of him that can be compared to determine if they are the same man.

There are two other discrepancies on his Canadian army application form. He stated that he was born on November 12, 1885; his correct date of birth is November 12, 1888. He also stated that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.17 These names are not included on his British army application form or on the “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” that provides his date of birth and his name when born.18 Osborne’s name can also be found in the 1891 and 1901 English censuses and the only name provided is Albert.19 These two differences suggest that someone else may have acquired Osborne’s personal information, and in the process of doing so did not did not acquire all of the correct data. This theory could be true if the year of birth had been the only personal information that was not correct because a person using his identity would use the date provided, believing it to be correct. This is not so with his middle names, because Osborne did not have any, and a person who had acquired Osborne’s identity would not have had any reason to state that his middle names were Victor and Emmanuel.

Then why alter his year of birth and add these two middle names to his application form? A possible explanation is that it is an early experiment in altering his identity and may also explain the one-year discrepancy in his age on his British army application form. Eventually he would take on a completely new identity, that of John Howard Bowen, and would continue to alter his identity when he saw fit to do so. For example, on his application for a new Canadian passport dated October 10, 1963, he used his real name Albert Osborne but added the middle name Alexander.20

Osborne’s enlistment in the Canadian army, like his stint in the British army, was uneventful. His army service records reveal that he spent the remainder of the war safely on Canadian soil, and he did not travel to Europe to join the fighting there. He did however become ill. His medical records indicate that he was diagnosed with malaria in June of 1918. He told the doctor treating him that he contracted it in Egypt in 1915 but does not state what he was doing there.21 How did he contract malaria? He may have gone to Egypt as he told the doctor treating him or he may have contracted it in Canada while serving in the army. According to an article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, malaria was brought to Canada by infected European immigrants in the nineteenth century and did not diminish until early in the 20^th century.22

Leaving the Military

On January 31, 1919, he was discharged from the Canadian army, and on his “Canadian Expeditionary Force Discharge Certificate” he said that his address on discharge was Nashville, Tennessee.23 According to an FBI interview given on March 3, 1964, Osborne went to Washington D.C. sometime after the war where he met a Syrian whose name he could not remember. The two of them went into the rug cleaning business and traveled throughout the United States cleaning rugs.24 Osborne did not provide any corroborating evidence to support his claim that he both met the unnamed Syrian and went into the rug cleaning business with him. But there is an advertisement in an Indiana, Pennsylvania newspaper that may shed some light on his story. The Indiana Evening Gazette published an advertisement with the title “A Letter from Mr. Osborne” that was signed by “Albert Osborne” (Appendix 4). The advertisement was placed by T.B. Buchholz & Company of Indiana Pennsylvania. The company’s services included rug cleaning for both oriental and domestic rugs.25 Could the Albert Osborne from this advertisement be the same man that also went by the name of Bowen? It is highly doubtful that Osborne would have used this company’s services. As of April 14, 1943, he was in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is over 500 miles from Indiana, Pennsylvania. Osborne may have vouched for this company’s services even though he had not purchased them; acting as a shill would be an activity that a man using false identities might get involved in. He may have also changed his story from the dubious activity of being a shill to the more lawful job of a rug cleaner when he was questioned by the FBI. The other possibility is that there was a man named Albert Osborne who resided in Indiana, Pennsylvania who had used their services.

While it is doubtful that Osborne worked as a rug cleaner, there are numerous newspaper articles that describe a man named Albert Osborne who gave lectures and acted. On November 19, 1924, The Winston Salem Journal reported that a “Dr. Albert Osborne, who has gained much fame as a lecturer on India …” spoke about his travels in India in Leakesville, Virginia. The same article describes him as a son of American missionaries and a graduate of Oxford University in England, which he added to his biography. The article also mentions that he had been on the Chautauqua26 stage for a number of seasons.27 On February 9, 1925, The Charlotte Observer reported on a Dr. Albert Osborne who had lectured about Christianity in India, Africa and Korea. He is again described as the son of missionaries and an Oxford graduate and is described as “… of Washington, D.C. lyceum and Chautauqua lecturer…” 28 Could this be the Albert Osborne that the FBI found on the Mexican bus manifest? He could lecture on India, as he had spent about four years there when he was in the British Army. Adding the title of doctor to his name and lying about his education and his parents is not beyond what he was capable of. This information is also corroborated by his sister, Ada Amos, who told the FBI in 1964 that he was an actor and lecturer on India.29 As we shall see, this is more credible than the rug cleaning story.

On October 9, 1925, The Knoxville News reported that the missionary Albert Osborne would be traveling to India (Appendix 5).30 Ten years later there is another man in Knoxville lecturing on life in India. His name is not Albert Osborne. It is John H. Bowen, who the newspaper describes as the “… Famous Teacher.” The Knoxville-News Sentinel report dated March 28, 1935 also mentioned that he taught in India for 11 years (Appendix 6).31 On April 14, 1935, the same newspaper said that J. H. Bowen, who had been a missionary in India for a few years, had been lecturing in different Knoxville schools about life in India.32 Is the man who is now lecturing about India and who goes by the name of Bowen the same Albert Osborne who departed for India in 1925? The similarities in the stories about India and being famous, which are mentioned in a previous story about him, are hard to ignore. Though one has to wonder if the newspaper reporters who wrote the stories, both of whom worked for the same newspaper, noticed the discrepancy in how much time he told them he spent in India.

Another interesting question about Osborne is how he could depart Knoxville in 1925 and return to the same city using a different identity without being recognized by anybody. The exact date of Osborne’s arrival in Knoxville after his alleged 11 year trip to India is unknown, but newspaper reports indicate that he was back as early as 1934. The Knoxville-News Sentinel dated October 10, 1937 wrote that on October 12, 1934, J. H. Bowen, F. M. Long, former YMCA Secretary for South America, local businessmen and professionals met with young boys and convinced them to join a new organization called the Campfire Council.33 He was also a member of the First Baptist Church in Knoxville by November 1934.34 Assuming that 1934 is the year that he arrived in Knoxville, then how can Osborne the Indian missionary become Bowen the Campfire Council member who also speaks about life in India, nine years later without being recognized by anybody as Albert Osborne? This is difficult to explain and needs to be explored further. One possible explanation lies in the fact that the 1925 article that placed him in Knoxville stated that he spoke there but did not say that he was a long-term resident of that city. A long-term resident would most likely have had associations with enough people to make it difficult to return without being seen by people who knew him as Osborne. This may explain why he was not recognized when he returned there.

Creating the Campfire Council

In 1934, Osborne, using his alias Bowen, became one of the founders of the Campfire Council. The goal of the Campfire Council as stated in its “Charter of Incorporation” of 1938 by the State of Tennessee was “… for the welfare, aid, and benefit of underprivileged boys and girls …” (Appendix 7).35 The Knoxville-News Sentinel story dated October 10, 1937 read, “Such crime prevention work on the part of the Campfire Council attracted the attention of those keenly interested in the reduction of juvenile delinquency.”36

By all accounts, the Campfire Council was a success. On April 23, 1939, The Knoxville News-Sentinel published an article, “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.” This article painted a glowing portrait of how the Council had helped “Well over 800 underprivileged boys spen[d] their leisure time in the gymnasium and playgrounds, operated by this organization.” The boys were able to participate in events such as woodworking, painting, basketball, softball and other activities. The Council also provided, among other things, free lunches and clothing.37 Campfire Council boys were also awarded prizes. James Thompson and Herbert Sams were awarded a prize of a trip to Bermuda because they were “… outstanding members of the organization.” They were accompanied on the trip by Osborne,38 who had visited Bermuda numerous times.39 The article also mentioned the work done by Osborne: “Mr. Bowen’s work has long passed the experimental stage. During these five years, seventeen juvenile gangs have been won over to a constructive program of good citizenship.”40

The Campfire Council’s success was followed by the creation of another organization: Boysville. Boysville was created to provide aid to delinquent boys and a meeting was planned for April 5, 1940 to discuss plans to create it. The newspaper report also stated that it was “… patterned after the Nebraska institution.”41 The Nebraska institution that was referred to was Boystown, which was founded in 1917 by Father Edward Flanagan and whose mission it was to help destitute boys.42

Osborne’s stellar record with the Campfire Council would soon be marred by an accusation made by Charles M. Pickel who lived in the vicinity of Boysville. He said that a boy at the camp had told a man named George Sharp that Osborne, who was known as Bowen at Boysville, had stomped on an American flag. Pickel accused the boys at the camp of thievery and vandalism, and complained about the noise made by the police dogs at the camp.43 The camp at Boysville had an American flag. A newspaper article written by J. H. Bowen, dated July 28, 1940, in The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that there was a flag raising and lowering ceremony every morning and afternoon at the camp.44 A Tennessee Highway Patrolman investigated these claims at the request of the FBI but could not find any evidence that Bowen had stomped on the flag. The only complaint that local residents had were in regard to the police dogs at the camp, of which they were afraid.45

Osborne’s reputation again came into question in 1943 when he was accused of making sexual advances to some of the boys at the Campfire Council. This time the charges stuck, since he left the Council. His departure was mentioned in the newspaper, but the accusations made against him were not divulged. This omission would allow him to return to Knoxville in the future with his reputation intact.46

In Canada and Announcing his Retirement

For the next few years there are scattered sightings of Albert Osborne. In a letter to the editor in 1946, Osborne, using his alias John Howard Bowen, writes that he attended a banquet in Laredo that was attended by both Protestant and Jewish congregations.47 In 1947 he spoke at the Knoxville Cavalry Baptist Church where he told his audience that he “… was director of religious education for the Baptist Church …” for the last five years,48 even though he had only left his position at the Campfire Council four years previously. In a 1948 letter to the Knoxville News-Sentinel he refers to himself as “Reverend” and describes how Christmas was celebrated in Huajuapan de Leon Oaxaca in Mexico.49

Osborne also traveled to Canada. A document sent by him to the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) in Ottawa, Canada requesting a copy of his military service certificate indicated that he was staying at the YMCA in Toronto.50 The request made by him is not dated, but was answered on June 4, 1953, which suggests that he was in Toronto sometime before June of 1953. The reason for requesting this document is not known, but on November 12, 1953 he would be 65, and he may have been eligible for veteran’s benefits because of his service in the Canadian army during World War I.

In 1953 Osborne claimed that he retired from missionary work. “Bowen’s” retirement was announced in an article published in The Knoxville News-Sentinel on December 5, 1953.51 The newspaper’s source for this information is a letter it received from Bowen’s successor at the mission. That person’s name is none other than Albert Osborne. Osborne also mentions that Bowen’s 73^rd birthday is in January and friends may write to him at Post Office Box 308 Laredo Texas. Why he is now using his real name is not certain, but he must have been confident enough to use his real name without someone in Knoxville making a connection between his real name and his alias, John Howard Bowen.

The Knoxville News-Sentinel was not the only newspaper to publish a story about his retirement. The Knoxville Journal also wrote a story about his retirement and it was published on the same day.52 Comparisons of the two stories reveal that the stories had some similarities and some differences. His successor, Albert Osborne, is not named and the source who told the newspaper that he was retiring is not provided in The Knoxville Journal story. The same Laredo mailing address is provided in both articles, but The Knoxville Journal article invites friends to write to him at Christmas, rather than in January for his birthday. The most important anomaly in the stories lies in the pictures that each newspaper published. The pictures were not the same. The Osborne portrayed in The Knoxville News-Sentinel appears to be heavier and has a receding hairline (Appendix 8). The man portrayed in The Knoxville Journal, is wearing a sun helmet and zippered jacket (Appendix 9). He is slimmer but his hairline cannot be determined because he has a hat on. Patricia Winston and Pamela Mumford, who were allegedly on the same bus as Osborne going to Mexico, were shown the picture in The Knoxville Journal and both could not identify him as John Howard Bowen.53 The pictures may have been taken at different times, which may account for the different appearances. But one has to wonder if Osborne’s friends and associates in Knoxville recognized both men in these two pictures as the man they knew as John Howard Bowen.

Was Osborne Really a Missionary?

Osborne’s retirement from missionary work raises the issue of whether or not he was a real missionary. There are some witnesses that say he was one, but none of them indicated that they actually saw him engaged in this work. In a newspaper report dated September 11, 1954, Claude L. Baker Sr. of Elmo, Tennessee, who knew Osborne as Bowen, stated that Osborne was involved in missionary work in the Mixteca Indian territory in Southern Mexico.54 His statement must be questioned because the article did not say if he met Osborne in Mexico doing missionary work, or if he was told by him that he was involved in it. Reverend Walter Laddie Hluchlan, who knew Osborne as Bowen, said that he gave bible lessons for many years to boys55 who resided at his residence.56 Even though Hluchlan did not say he actually saw him teaching those boys, there could be some truth to his statement. The Osborne who resided in Knoxville spent many years working at the Campfire Council, which catered to young boys. It would not be unusual for him to work with them, so this could be true. Mrs. Virgil Dykes, who was questioned about Bowen by the FBI, told them that she never met him but made contributions to his mission, and did not indicate that she had proof that he was doing missionary work.57 Oddly enough, The Knoxville Journal published a story dated November 28, 1954 in which he said that he had now returned to missionary work. And the story conveniently included a picture of him surrounded by Mixteca Indians (Appendix 10).58 The source for this article is a letter written by Osborne, so the veracity of it must be questioned. The inclusion of the Mixteca Indians could have been an attempt by him to convince his readers that he really was working with them. And the inclusion of his home address can be construed as a way to encourage people in Knoxville to send him money to support his alleged mission. As many who have studied the CIA understand, Allen and John Foster Dulles made extensive use of missionaries and other religious organizations as cover for intelligence agents and operations.59

During their investigation, the FBI confirmed that Osborne had a social security number (SSN) and that the number was 449-36-9745.60 His statement about having a SSN is confirmed by his application to obtain one, dated August 16, 1943, for which he applied using the name John Bowen. As can be seen on his application form, he states that he is unemployed (Appendix 11).61 This concurs with the fact that he lost his job at the Campfire Council in 1943. He also does not know his parents’ names. What is unusual about the application form is the way he spells the name “John”. The way that it is spelled is “Jno”. This spelling matches exactly the way his first name is spelled in the Knoxville City Directory in 1938 (Appendix 12).62

It is interesting to note that in September of 1962 Osborne made a comment about John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He had returned to Knoxville to speak at a rally at the North Glenwood Baptist Church. He told Fred Allen Jr., who was the church’s pastor and who knew him as Bowen, “… that he ‘felt that it is a very dangerous thing for the United States to have a Catholic as president.’”63 He also told Allen that he did not want to stay at his place because he “… ‘didn’t want to risk getting me involved in something.’”64 This statement by Osborne must have aroused Fred Allen’s suspicions about Osborne’s activities, given that he also made comments about Kennedy’s presidency. It is an interesting fact that when the FBI interviewed Allen in 1964 he failed to mention the conversation he had with Osborne in 1962. Instead, he told them that he had received a postcard from him on February 18, 1962.65 His apparent memory lapse is notable because he remembered an innocuous postcard he received from Osborne, but did not recall an actual conversation he had with Osborne, in which he was told that he might be involved in something and had also commented on the danger involved with having a Catholic president. And the purpose of the interview was an inquiry into that president’s death.

Osborne/Bowen, Mexico City, and Oswald

We now come to 1963. In that year, with no visible occupation, Osborne continued his wandering ways. He was still residing in Mexico, but continued to traverse the United States-Mexican border, something he had been doing since 1939.66 It was on one of these trips that the Warren Report said he ended up on the same bus as a man who was either Lee Harvey Oswald or someone impersonating him. Was he on this bus because there was an Oswald impersonator on it, and he therefore would be able to vouch for the impersonator’s presence on the bus?

Lyman Erickson was director of the Christian Servicemen’s Center in San Antonio Texas. This is where Osborne stayed before he died.67 Erickson knew him as Bowen. He said Osborne had told him “… ‘I traveled to Mexico with Lee Harvey Oswald, and I was called in and questioned about it.’” [emphasis added] Erickson did not quote him as saying, “‘I just happened to sit next to Oswald,’ …”68 A statement by Osborne to the FBI, however, contradicts what he told Erickson. FBI agent Bob Gemberling, in an interview with the BBC69 about Albert Osborne, said, “‘He denied he was sitting next to Oswald.’”70 Gemberling also told the BBC that Osborne’s denial about sitting next to Oswald, even though witnesses said they sat together, resulted in the FBI doing an extensive investigation of the man.71 That FBI report is over ninety pages long and features both an index and Table of Contents. (See Commission Exhibit 2195, in Volume 25 of the Warren Commission) It was due to that FBI inquiry that Osborne showed up not just in the Warren Report, but also in many books written about the JFK case. For instance, Osborne is written about by such authors as Jim Marrs in Crossfire, Philip Melanson in Spy Saga, and Anthony Summers in Conspiracy.

The Mexican authorities had disposed of the original and a copy of the passenger list for the Flecha Roja (Red Arrow) bus that Osborne rode in Mexico. Therefore, the FBI used the luggage manifest and immigration records to piece together who was on the bus.72 This is how they found the name of Mr. Bowen. But they could not find Bowen. One problem with finding Bowen/Osborne was that he had tossed out a bundle of tall tales to the people around him on the bus. As the FBI noted in their long report, he told some passengers that he had never been to England, that he was a retired schoolteacher, and that he was working on a book about the Lisbon earthquake.73

In January of 1964, when the FBI finally did catch up with Osborne in Mexico, he gave no clue that it was actually he on the bus. He told FBI agent Clarke Anderson that he was an ordained Baptist minister. He denied there were any English language speaking passengers on the Flecha Roja bus. He said he had not talked to Oswald, nor sat next to him as others said he did. In fact, the man he described as sitting next to him, dark-complected and Hispanic looking, did not fit the description of Oswald. During one of his four FBI interviews he was shown a photo of Oswald. He said he never saw the man before. During that interview, in February of 1964, he denied the FBI had interviewed him in January. (See the FBI report referenced above and Ron Ecker’s online essay, “From Grimsby with Love”.)

It was not until March of 1964, while staying at a YMCA in Nashville, that Osborne finally admitted he used Bowen as an alias. He offered the Bureau the excuse that John Howard Bowen sounded more American to him. Osborne’s lack of steady income, contrasted with his extensive travels, the tall tales he spewed about the Flecha Roja ride, and his use of a dual identity, should have made him a person of interest to the FBI. There is no evidence he was. Nor is there any evidence Osborne was confronted with perjury or obstruction of justice charges in a murder investigation.

The available evidence cannot reliably answer whether Osborne traveled to Mexico with Oswald, or if it was someone impersonating Oswald as part of a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Some evidence indicates he did sit beside Oswald. Pamela Mumford, allegedly on the same bus as Osborne, was shown pictures of Osborne and she confirmed that he was the man sitting next to him.74 Sitting next to someone on a bus however does not make a person a conspirator. This could have been a coincidence. Any person sitting next to Oswald would have been questioned by the FBI and would have been considered a suspect. But Osborne’s statement to Erickson that he traveled there with him and was not just sitting beside him on the bus cannot be ignored. If the conspirators who planned Kennedy’s murder wanted someone to accompany either Oswald or his impersonator, Osborne would have been a good choice because he could explain his presence on the bus by the fact that he frequently traveled between the United States and Mexico. If possible, more research has to be done on the trip to Mexico. Osborne did not explain to Erickson why he traveled there with Oswald, and it still has not been established to an absolute certainty what the trip’s role, if any, was in Kennedy’s assassination.

After he returned from Mexico, Osborne showed up in New Orleans at the Canadian consulate. He gave an address in Montreal as his permanent residence, saying he had been there since 1917 and that he was a Canadian national. He cancelled his previous Canadian passport and took out a new one. What makes this odd is that the previous passport was only four months old.75

With his new, clean passport Osborne was on the move again in November of 1963. The Knoxville Journal reported that Bowen had departed New York for Europe on November 13, 1963. The newspaper stated that the purpose of his trip was a speaking tour of England, Spain, Portugal and Italy.76 The timing of his trip is an interesting coincidence. The man with dual identities, and who was allegedly on the same bus as the president’s alleged assassin, decided to leave the country on November 13^th, nine days before Kennedy was assassinated.

After the Assassination

The FBI spoke to Reverend Walter Hluchlan about Osborne’s European speaking tour. He told them that he received an undated letter from him that stated that he had been on a preaching tour of England, Northern France, Spain and North Africa.77 The letter does not exactly match the newspaper report cited above, as Northern France and North Africa replaced Portugal and Italy. The problem with the letter is that the return address is Mexico and not Europe, so there is no European postal stamp to confirm that he had visited any of these four countries. Mrs. Lola Loving, who knew Osborne as both Osborne and Bowen,78 told the FBI that she had received a letter from him in Spain anywhere from a few weeks to two months ago.79 Her interview with the FBI however did not indicate that she showed them a copy of the letter with a Spanish postal stamp on it.80

We know that he was in England because his brother Walter and his sister Mrs. Featherstone confirmed that he had visited them in Grimsby.81 But this is where the truth ends and fiction begins. Walter Osborne told the FBI that his brother flew to Prestwick, Scotland with scientists who were traveling to Iceland to photograph a volcano. But it was not confirmed if Osborne got off the plane in Prestwick or went with them to Iceland.82 According to the FBI he arrived at his sister’s home by train from Prestwick.83 The FBI was able to determine that he arrived at New York City on December 5, 1963 aboard an Icelandic Airlines aircraft that he boarded in Luxembourg, Belgium.84 Flying on Icelandic Airlines suggests that he made a stop in Iceland. It is unlikely, however, that scientists, assuming that there was a group of them that went there to photograph a volcano, would allow him to accompany them on their trip since he did not have a scientific education.85 Osborne probably made up the story about the trip to Iceland and he flew on an Icelandic aircraft to corroborate his story about being there. He most likely said that he met the scientists in Prestwick because he arrived at his sister’s home from a train and this would add credibility to his story. To this day, his trip to Europe after the assassination is shrouded in mystery, and we do not know where he was on November 22, 1963.

For the wandering Osborne, his final destination was a hospital in Texas. He died at the Medical Arts Hospital in San Antonio on August 31, 1966.86 His “Certificate of Death” attributed his passing to a number of problems, one of which was kidney failure. The person who informed the authorities of his passing was Reverend Lyman Erickson. 87 When the FBI found out about his death they told him not to speak about Osborne’s passing. In an interview with the Knoxville News-Sentinel in 1993, Erickson said he was told by the Bureau “… ‘to forget everything I knew about him, told me to forget I ever knew him, and told me to never to speak of this matter to anyone.’”88 Reverend Erickson complied with the FBI request and asked Roy Akers Funeral Chapel in San Antonio, where Osborne’s remains had been sent, “… not to run notices in paper as FBI requested that it be kept quiet as possible.” (Appendix 13).89 Erickson must have also realized that the man who had been staying with him was enigmatic. He told The Knoxville News-Sentinel that the man he knew as John Howard Bowen owned a kit bag that had a false bottom that contained his Albert Osborne identification papers.90 He too was interviewed about Albert Osborne by the BBC and he quite logically said, “‘I think he was an agent. My problem is, I don’t know if he was an agent for the United States or a foreign government.’”91

John Howard Bowen

John Howard Bowen was born in Chester Pennsylvania on January 14, 1880.92 His parents were James and Nellie Bowen, and according to the 1900 United States Census, his father was born in 1853 and his mother in 1868.93 The census also indicates that they had two sons, Howard J., born in 1880, and Alfred V., born in 1882.94 Not much is known about his early life except for the fact that his father married after his two sons were born. The Chester Times dated May 11, 1886 announced the wedding of a Mr. James A. Bowen to Mrs. Nellie Gillen, both of Chester, in Camden, New Jersey.95 On Bowen’s application for social security (Appendix 14), he indicated that his mother’s name was Edith Montgomery; therefore, Bowen’s father was married prior to 1886 to another woman who bore the children, and then either died or they were subsequently divorced.

Bowen or his parents had some religious inclinations, as he was baptized on January 21, 1897. A record of baptisms from a United Methodist church shows that his brother Alfred Victor was also baptized on the same day.96 On September 13, 1905, Bowen married Fannie Mae Hall, 97 and their marriage produced no children.

In 1910 Bowen was employed as a printer in Camden, New Jersey.98 In 1910 or 1911 he began a career with the YMCA that would last over 20 years.99 He began work with the YMCA in their railroad Department100 in Camden, New Jersey.101 His job required him to move from time to time, and he lived in: Conemaugh, Pennsylvania; Gassaway, West Virginia; and Hamlet, North Carolina, where he remained until his employment with the YMCA ended in 1933.102

Tragedy struck Bowen in 1934 when his wife of 29 years, Fannie, died after being sick for a long time.103 In 1935 he moved to Tampa, Florida where he was employed as a hotel clerk.104 On July 6, 1937, John Howard Bowen applied for a SSN. The SSN number he was assigned was 239-12-4551, and this number can be seen on his application form (Appendix 14).105 Unlike Osborne, he knew his parents’ names and he included his middle name as well, which Osborne said he did not know.106 On his application for social security he also indicated that he was employed by the First National Institute of Applied Arts in South Bend, Indiana.107 In 1938 Bowen returned to Hamlet and began work as a desk clerk at a hotel.108 It may be just a coincidence, but when Osborne was interviewed by the FBI, he told them that Bowen had worked at a hotel in New Orleans.109 In 1947 he took a financial interest in the hotel by purchasing its stock with investors J. T. Capehart of Hamlet and A. A. Capehart Jr. of Washington.110

John Howard Bowen was also the subject of a newspaper article. A Hamlet, North Carolina newspaper, The News Messenger, published a series of articles called “People at Work” (Appendix 15). The article stated that Bowen worked at the Terminal Hotel,111 and the YMCA, and had been involved with the Hi-Y and Kiwanis Clubs, and had been a Sunday School Superintendent.112 On October 16, 1961, while out for a walk, Bowen was struck by a car. He never fully recovered from the accident and died on January 31, 1962.113

When did Albert Osborne begin using John Howard Bowen’s identity and did they know each other?

Osborne told a number of stories about when he began using Bowen’s name as an alias. He told the FBI that he first used it in 1916.114 He then told a different FBI interviewer that he began using it after World War I, when he went into the rug cleaning business with a Syrian man.115 Ada Amos told the FBI that she sent money to her brother in New York in the 1920s using the name John Howard Bowen.116 We cannot rely on Osborne’s account of when he used Bowen’s identity because of his tendency to lie. If we rely on Ada Amos’ testimony, then we know that sometime in the 1920s he was using the Bowen alias, because she sent him money using that name. But we must also consider the fact that both Osborne and his sister were questioned by the FBI about events that occurred over 40 years ago, and that their memories may have failed them.

There is a newspaper article that places both men in the same place at the same time. The Charlotte Observer dated December 24, 1929 stated that “Dr. Albert B. Osborne of India, spoke Sunday morning at the Methodist church here, while the devotional services (were) conducted by J. H. Bowen, general secretary of the YMCA at Hamlet” (Appendix 16).117 As mentioned above, Dr. Albert Osborne had given lectures about India, and it would not be uncharacteristic of him to add the initial “B” to his name. The real John Howard Bowen was a long time employee of the YMCA and at this time he resided in Hamlet, North Carolina.118 So it appears that at this event both Albert Osborne and John Howard Bowen are present. The newspaper article does not mention that they were associated in any way, only that they were at the same event. Without knowing if they had met before or were associated with each other in some way – for example through a fraternal organization – Osborne may have acquired personal information about Bowen prior to this event. If it was at this event that they first met, and Osborne was able to glean enough information from Bowen to begin using his identity, then this may explain how and when Osborne began using Bowen’s identity.

APPENDICES

1. “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth”3.
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2. British Army application form “Short Service (All Arms)”7.
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3. “Attestation Paper, Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force”11.
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4. “A Letter from Mr. Osborne”25.
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5. “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday”30.
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6. “Sequohay Children Hear About India”31.
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7. Campfire Council “Charter of Incorporation”35.
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8. “John Bowen Retires as Missionary”51.
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9. “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary”52.
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10. Bowen with Mixteca Indians58.
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11. Osborne application for a social security account number using his Bowen alias 61.
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12. 1938 Knoxville City Directory62.
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13. FBI request to keep Osborne’s death quiet89.
14. Bowen’s application for a social security account number105.
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15. “People at Work”108.
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16. “Dr. A.B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen”117.
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NOTES

1 The FBI investigation into the life of Albert Osborne can be found in the Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195.

2 Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007) 751.

3 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

4 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

5 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.

6 His British army application form states that Osborne’s age was 19 years I month when he enlisted. His correct age was 18 years 1 month as indicated on his “Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth” (Appendix 2).

7 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 “Picture Life in Far East,” The Washington Post, November 29, 1914.

11 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

12 Ibid.

13 A copy of Osborne’s Canadian army application form and service records can be downloaded from Library and Archives Canada’s website.

14 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

15 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

16 Ancestry.com, British Army World War One Pension Records 1914-1920 for Albert Osborne, online database, Provo, Utah.

17 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

18 Ibid.

19 Ancestry.com. 1891 and 1901 England Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

20 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 16.

21 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

22 “The return to swamp fever: malaria in Canadians,” J. Dick MacLean, MD and Brian J. Ward MD. Canadian Medical Association Journal, January 26, 1999, CMAJ 1999; 160: 211-2.

23 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

24 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 41.

25 “A Letter from Mr. Osborne,” Indiana Evening Gazette, April 24, 1943.

26 The Chautauqua Institution as it is now called was founded in 1874 in western New York by Methodists who wanted “… to extend the intellectual and critical capacities …” of Christians. Charlotte M. Canning, The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005) 6. Beginning in 1904, “Circuit Chautauquas” began delivering lectures, musical groups and other programs mainly to rural areas in the United States. Ibid., 1. Plays were added to their repertoire and after 1913 they were a regular part of the Chautauqua experience. Ibid., 14.

27 “Dr. Osborne is Heard on India,” The Winston Salem Journal, November 19, 1924.

28 “Remarkable Lecture at Chadwick Baptist Church,” The Charlotte Observer, February 9, 1925.

29 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37-38.

30 “C.H.S. Hi-Ys to Hear Knickerbocker Thursday,” The Knoxville News, October 9, 1925.

31 “Sequohay Children Hear About India,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, March 28, 1935.

32 “What a Place for Housewives – Hindu Women Throw ‘Dishes’ Away After Meal,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 14, 1935.

33 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, October 10, 1937.

34 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man,” The Knoxville-News Sentinel, Final Edition, November 28, 1993.

35 State of Tennessee, “Charter of Incorporation”, Campfire Council Incorporated, April 12, 1938.

36 “Organization for Underprivileged Boys From Knoxville’s Street,” op. cit.

37 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 23, 1939.

38 “Campfire Council Boys Felt as If Bermuda Were Home – They Were Greeted by Boys’ Church Brigade,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 20, 1939.

39 The Knoxville News-Sentinel reported that Bowen had made 14 trips to Bermuda. The current one, in which he accompanied two Campfire Council Boys, was financed by a local businessmen’s association. The reason for the previous trips are not explained but were financed by people described as friends. “Campfire Chief To Make 14th Bermuda Trip,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, August 5, 1939.

40 “Campfire Council Work Gets High Praise From Official and Committee.”

41 “Boys’ Home Plan Will Be Discussed,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, April 4, 1940.

42 http://www.boystown.org/about/father-flanagan/Pages/default.aspx

43 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.

44 J.H. Bowen, “Vesper Services and Raising of Flag Observed by Campers,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, July 28, 1940.

45 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 6.

46 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

47 John Howard Bowen, Letter to the Editor Letter Box, The Laredo Times, February 17, 1946.

48 “Religious Director To Tell of Travels,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, May 3, 1947.

49 “Former Knox Minister Describes ‘Posadas,’ Which Mark Christmas Season in Mexico,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 25, 1948.

50 Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Expeditionary Force, RG 150, Accession 1992-93/166, Box 7492 – 41.

51 “John Bowen Retires as Missionary,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, December 5, 1953.

52 “Bowen Retires After Years As Missionary,” The Knoxville Journal, December 5, 1953.

53 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 10.

54 “Wants Southern Cooking in Libya,” The Knoxville News-Sentinel, September 11, 1954.

55 The following story has more information about Osborne’s life and his work with young boys: “From Grimsby with Love: The Travels of ‘the Reverend’ Albert Alexander Osborne,” Ronald L. Ecker, 2005, http://www.ronaldecker.com/osborne.html.

56 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 57-58.

57 Ibid, 53.

58 Pat Fields, “Once Boys’ Club Backer Missionary In Mexico,” The Knoxville Journal, November 28, 1954.

59 See George Michael Evica’s, A Certain Arrogance, 85 -154.

60 Warren Commission Hearings , Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 22.

61 John Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” August 16, 1943.

62 Knoxville City Directory, City Directory Company of Knoxville, 1938.

63 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

64 Ibid.

65 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 64.

66 Ibid, 42.

67 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

68 Ibid.

69 The link for this interview can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/yorkslincs/series2/kennedy_conspiracy/index.shtml .

70 Interview with Bob Gemberling, Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.

71 Ibid.

72 James Di Eugenio, Reclaiming Parkland: Tom Hanks, Vincent Bugliosi, and the JFK Assassination in the New Hollywood (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2016) 282.

73 Ibid., 283.

74 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, pg. 40.

75 John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee: How the CIA Framed Oswald (Arlington Texas: Quasar Ltd., 2003) 619.

76 “Bowen Leaves for Overseas,” The Knoxville Journal, November 14, 1963.

77 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 34.

78 Ibid., 54.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 35-36.

82 Ibid. 36.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., 43.

85 His sister Ada Amos told investigators that he did not have any scientific credentials. Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 38. Osborne told the FBI that he had left school after the eighth grade. Ibid., 41.

86 Albert Osborne, State of Texas, “Certificate of Death,” State File No. 49975, August 31, 1966.

87 Ibid.

88 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

8989 Letter from Robert Massey to Jim Balloch, post office marked March 1, 1993, The Harold Weisberg Collection, Digital Archive, Hood College, Weisberg Subject Index Files, O Disk, Osborne Albert, Item10.

90 Jim Balloch, “JFK: Trail led to Knoxville man.”

91 Interview with Reverend Erickkson [sic], Photo Report BBC Inside Out: Kennedy – The Grimsby Connection, 2003.

92 Ancestry.com, U.S. World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, online database, Provo, Utah.

93 Ancestry.com, 1900 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

94 Ibid.

95 “Married,” Chester Times, May 11, 1886.

96 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Church and Town records, 1708-1985, online database, Provo, Utah.

97 Ancestry.com, Pennsylvania, Marriages, 1852-1968, online database, Lehi, Utah.

98 Family Search, United States Census, 1910.

99 Bowen’s employment status with the YMCA for the period 1910 to 1933 can be found in the YMCA’s Yearbooks that were published on an annual basis. The YMCA Yearbooks are located at the University of Minnesota’s Kautz Family YMCA Archives, https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.

100 The YMCA’s Railroad Department was created in 1877. It offered railroad workers services such as: bible classes, reading rooms and places to exercise. The goal of this department was to reduce industrial unrest by teaching them Christian values. Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Ann Spratt eds., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997) 65-66.

101 YMCA’s Yearbooks https://www.lib.umn.edu/ymca.

102 Ibid.

103 “Mrs. J. H. Bowen,” The Charlotte Observer, March 24, 1934.

104 Ancestry.com, 1940 United States Federal Census, online database, Provo, Utah.

105 John Howard Bowen, “Application For Social Security Account Number,” July 6, 1937.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid.

108 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 11, 1958.

109 Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 11.

110 “Eure Charters 14 New Firms,” Greensboro Daily News, September 11, 1947.

111 In 1990 the Terminal Hotel was used to film scenes from the movie Billy Bathgate starring Dustin Hoffman. Mike Quick, “‘Billy Bathgate’ Created A New Set Of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993. In 1993 the hotel was destroyed by fire. “Terminal Hotel: A Collection of Memories,” Park Newspapers of Rockingham, North Carolina, May 2, 1993.

112 “People at Work,” The News-Messenger. In 1925 the Cavalry Baptist Church in Kokomo, Indiana, which is about 130 miles from Gary, Indiana where Osborne’s sister Ada Amos lived (Warren Commission Hearings, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 37), had a Sunday School Superintendent named Albert Osborne. “Sunday Services in the Churches,” The Kokomo Daily Tribune, December 12, 1925.

113 “John H. Bowen Dies at Hamlet,” The News-Messenger, Hamlet, North Carolina, February 2, 1962.

114 Warren Commission, Volume 25, Commission Exhibit 2195, 43.

115 Ibid., 41.

116 Ibid., 38.

117 “Dr. A. B. Osborne is Heard at Aberdeen,” The Charlotte Observer, December 24, 1929.

118 Year Book and Official Rosters of the National Councils of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of Canada and the United States of America, 1928-1929,95 and 1929-1930, 39.
July 21, 2017
How Max Holland Duped the Daily Beast

The year 2017 contains two important milestones in the mystery of the John F. Kennedy saga—one dealing with the man, the other with the mysteries of his assassination. The end of last month marked the centennial of Kennedy’s birth in Brookline, Massachusetts. This was commemorated with glossy news magazine special editions and a few TV programs—at least one with Caroline Kennedy, the last surviving member of the immediate family. There was also an act of Congress recognizing this event.

This October, another act of Congress will be honored in regards to John F. Kennedy. This one relates not to his life, but to his death. On October 17^th, the National Archives will release well over three thousand documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy. In other words, fifty-four years after his murder, 53 years after the Warren Report was issued, the American public will finally be allowed to read what the American government wanted to keep classified for still another 22 years. Because if it were not for Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, most of these documents would have remained classified until the year 2039. But due to the firestorm of controversy created by that film, an act of Congress was passed. That act created a citizens’ panel called the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). From 1994-98 it declassified over two million pages of documents dealing with the assassination of President Kennedy. But there were certain restrictions placed in the legislation that allowed for exceptions until the year 2017. Those exceptions will expire this October.

The secrets already released by the ARRB from 1994-98 were underplayed by the news media, but in fact they were quite bracing. For instance, the records of a meeting in May of 1963 helmed by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara showed that President Kennedy did have a plan to withdraw from Vietnam. Under questioning by ARRB chief counsel Jeremy Gunn, Kennedy pathologist James Humes revealed that he had burned both his notes and the first draft of his autopsy report. We learned from declassified records of the Church Committee that INS officers—on the trail of Cuban illegals—had followed David Ferrie to Guy Banister’s office in New Orleans. And they found Lee Oswald there.

On April 28^th of this year, Max Holland published an essay on the JFK case in The Daily Beast. Holland brought up a different milestone date. This one concerned the 50^th anniversary of a story originally published on April 25, 1967 in the (now defunct) New Orleans States Item. Holland’s article was called “How the KGB Duped Oliver Stone.” Holland stated that the 50-year-old article—titled “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to Plot Probe”—was a triumph for Moscow.

The article describes the arrest of Clay Shaw by New Orleans DA Jim Garrison on March 1, 1967. Holland characterizes the arrest of Shaw for conspiracy in the JFK case as “outlandish and baseless”. He adds that the reasons for Shaw’s arrest had already been reviewed back in 1963 by the FBI and found wanting.

But the arrest of Shaw created headlines around the world. And this led to several articles about Shaw’s work in Rome for a mysterious business entity called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). One Italian newspaper, which produced a series of articles, Paese Sera, was a leftwing publication that eventually wrote that CMC might have been a creation of the CIA, and a center of funding for illegal covert activities. Jim Garrison received copies of these Paese Sera articles. According to the author, this is how the DA now centered his investigation on CIA complicity in the Kennedy murder. The article then concludes that Garrison was really an unsuspecting dupe of Moscow. How? Because Paese Sera was really a conduit for KGB disinformation. And because Oliver Stone based his 1991 film JFK on Garrison’s memoir On the Trail of the Assassins, Stone was also made a Moscow dupe.

Holland’s source for this? The controversial Mitrokhin archives. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former archivist for the KGB. In 1992 he defected to the United Kingdom. As Russian scholar Amy Knight has noted, the story behind Mitrokhin and his defection strains credulity. But it began a whole new genre of academic studies and books. With a skeptical eye, she surveyed the books in all of their questionable aspects, i.e., the sales and marketing of former Russian intelligence employees who spirit out their notes on KGB files. (See this article in the Wilson Quarterly)

This new area of trade and barter reached its apogee in the instance of Alexander Vassiliev, still another former Russian intelligence officer who defected to England. In that case, it was shown that Vassiliev’s “notes” at times actually distorted the original memorandum beyond recognition.

Once in England, Mitrokhin was furnished with an official in-house British MI5 author. In turn, Christopher Andrew set up a syndication deal with Rupert Murdoch. The subsequent volume was called The Sword and the Shield. In 1995, the political angle behind the barter was accentuated. Based on the word of still another Russian intelligence defector, Murdoch and his subordinates accused former Labor Party leader Michael Foot of accepting funds from KGB agents. Foot promptly sued for libel. Understandably, Murdoch did not want to appear in court, so he settled the case in Foot’s favor.

Mitrokhin’s notes said that the late Mark Lane had been aided by two secret donations from the KGB: one for 1500 dollars and one for 500 dollars. As Lane later replied, the only donation he received even close to those amounts was from the extraordinarily wealthy Corliss Lamont, an heir to the JP Morgan fortune. Not a likely candidate for a KGB agent. Further, according to the Mitrokhin notes, the transfer occurred in New York City in 1966. As Lane has noted, he was living in London that year, finishing up and editing his book Rush to Judgment, which was being published by a British house. (Lane, Last Word, pp. 92-93) Third, the next largest donation Lane got for further research was from Woody Allen. It was for $50. Lane kept records of his donations. In other words, the Mitrokhin charges against him were quite dubious. Consequently, he challenged the veracity of the book in a letter to the author. Andrew never replied. (ibid, p. 96)

II

Which brings us to the pretext for this article. Clay Shaw was arrested on March 1, 1967. Three days later, Paese Sera began publishing its six-part series on the mysterious and suspicious activities of the CMC in Italy. The author tries to imply that there was a cause-effect relationship between the two events. He bases this on one of the notes in the Mitrokhin archive. That note says that in 1967, the Russians started a disinformation scheme in that Italian newspaper that was later picked up in New York. (ibid, p. 73) That is it. In other words, there is no specificity to the accusation. There is no mention in the Mitrokhin note of Jim Garrison, Clay Shaw, the CMC or any New York publication that picked up the story. Realizing how that paucity presents a problem, Holland had once said that there was a mention of the Paese Sera series in the socialist New York weekly the National Guardian. But this was only done because they had a contributor who lived in Rome.

In prior presentations, Holland had realized how thin this case was. So he added the testimony of CIA officer Richard Helms before a congressional committee concerning Paese Sera. The problem with this was that Dr. Gary Aguilar exposed Helms’ testimony as being rather faulty. It turned out that Helms, in order to discredit Paese Sera, used a story in which they said the CIA was complicit in the attempts to overthrow French president Charles DeGaulle. As Aguilar ably pointed out, this story was true. Even a sympathetic CIA author like Andrew Tully admitted this as far back as 1962, after the attempted coup of the French generals over the war in Algeria. The complicity was reported even earlier than that in The New York Times by Scotty Reston. (NY Times, April 29, 1961) More recently, David Talbot hammered the point home with multiple sources in his biography of Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard. (See pp. 412-24)

Another implication of Holland’s essay is that, somehow, the KGB dreamed up the story and gave it to Paese Sera on the occasion of Shaw’s arrest. As anyone in the newspaper business knows, usually the next day’s paper is locked down the night before. Which would mean that the KGB put the story together in about 48 hours. This author had the opportunity to read the six part series in translation. The idea that a foreign intelligence service could put together such a story on such brief notice is hard to buy. Clearly, the quite lengthy, detailed reporting was the result of a weeks-long inquiry into the whole business enterprise of the CMC. So unless this was all made up in Moscow—and it is hard to see how it could be—the idea of a KGB “planting” of the story is simply improbable.

Why would Paese Sera be interested in such a lengthy exposé? Because the CMC was a mysterious business agency with a suspect past. Prior to moving to Italy, the enterprise had been kicked out of Basel, Switzerland in 1957. The reasons were similar to those that Paese Sera complained about: murky financing and the questionable character of the company directors. Which included one George Mandel, who had been accused of working the Jewish refugee racket during World War II. When this unsavory fact surfaced in the Swiss press, Mandel threatened to sue the paper—but he didn’t. The editor was disappointed. He commented, “Too bad. We would have heard some great things at the trial.” (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 216; State Department Memorandum of April 9, 1958)

But further, as questions about the financing in Basel began to crest, another director of the firm, former Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Nagy, mentioned J. Henry Schroder Banking Corporation as a source of funds. He also mentioned J and W Seligman. As William Davy writes in his book Let Justice be Done, Allen Dulles had been general counsel to Schroder prior to becoming CIA Director. When the Dulles brothers law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, was still dealing with the Nazis in the thirties, they used Schroder’s as their conduit. When Dulles became DCI, he opened up a fifty million dollar emergency fund with Schroder’s. It was later reported that Schroder’s served as one of the recurring cut-outs for the Agency to transfer funds. (Davy, pp. 96-97) If one consults the book Millionaires and Managers, a 1969 analysis of the large Wall Street investment houses and legal firms, one will see that both banks—Schroder and Seligman—come under the purview and control of what the author calls the Sullivan and Cromwell/Marine Midland Group. This important back-story in Switzerland is ignored by Holland.

In 1958, because of all the controversy in Basel, the enterprise moved to Italy. This is when Clay Shaw entered the picture. The major board players in Italy were much the same as in Switzerland. But they were augmented by people like a former member of Mussolini’s cabinet, and the son-in-law of Hjalmar Schacht, financial guru of the Third Reich. They represented “a small cross-section of the aging royalists with whom Shaw liked to hobnob on his European jaunts and whose names and phone numbers were kept in his address book.” (Davy, p. 98)

Paese Sera was not the only newspaper that reported on the controversial company. So did Corriere della Sera, Il Messaggero and Le Devoir in Montreal. The latter likely reported on the enterprise because its general counsel was Louis Bloomfield, a Montreal corporate and international lawyer. Looking through what has been released of Bloomfield’s papers, researcher Maurice Phillips has discovered that Bloomfield was an important player in the CMC scheme. He actually coordinated meetings and investments for Nagy from some of the wealthiest men in the world, who were somehow interested in the CMC; e.g., Edmund deRothschild, and David Rockefeller. (Letter from Bloomfield to Dr. E. W. Imfeld, 2/10/60) Phillips has also uncovered documents that show that Nagy was a CIA asset and that he queried the Agency, offering them the use of CMC in any capacity. (March 24, 1967 CIA memo, released in 1998.) Phillips is now involved in a legal dispute with the Bloomfield estate, who wish to cut off any further access to these papers. This, in spite of the fact that Bloomfield’s will said his papers should be opened to the public twenty years after his death, and he passed away in 1984.

Finally, there is information about the CIA and the CMC from FBI agent Regis Kennedy, who, along with Warren DeBrueys, was J. Edgar Hoover’s man on the ground in the Cuban exile community in New Orleans. He reportedly stated that, “Shaw was a CIA agent who had done work of an unspecified nature over a five year period in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100) That description, of course, perfectly matches both the time span and the location of the CMC. Therefore, in two strands of Holland’s sixteen-year old yarn—concerning the CIA and the DeGaulle overthrow, and the Agency connections to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale—it turns out that Paese Sera was right and Holland was, shall we say, obtuse. After all the controversy in Italy, the CMC left and went to Johannesburg, South Africa. Thus the idea that CMC was somehow connected with the Central Intelligence Agency is anything but disinformation.

III

But Holland goes even further here. In defiance of the ARRB declassified record, he conceals from the reader the new documents about Clay Shaw. The author writes that both the Warren Commission and the FBI investigated the true identity of a man named Clay Bertrand, who New Orleans lawyer Dean Andrews said called him to go to Dallas and defend Oswald. Holland writes that the Bureau and the Commission determined that this allegation was false, and that Bertrand was not even a real person.

First, there is no evidence that the Warren Commission itself ever did any kind of search for the true identity of Clay Bertrand. The FBI did investigate the issue. And the results were pretty much contrary to what Holland describes. In 1967, the Justice Department committed a faux pas about it. They admitted that the FBI had investigated Clay Shaw back in 1963. (Davy, p. 191) This announcement caused much consternation at FBI headquarters, because the obvious follow up question would be: Why was the FBI investigating Shaw as part of its original inquiry into the Kennedy murder? J. Edgar Hoover did not want to answer that question. So the Justice Department issued a second announcement: the FBI had not conducted any inquiry about Shaw in 1963.

As the declassified record demonstrates, this was false. In fact, The New York Times actually printed the truth about this on March 3, 1967. They wrote, “A Justice Department official said tonight that his agency was convinced that Mr. Bertrand and Mr. Shaw were the same man … .” Behind the scenes, FBI official Cartha DeLoach admitted that, in December of 1963, several parties had furnished the FBI information about Shaw. (Davy, p. 192, italics added) Before Shaw was arrested, the FBI had multiple sources saying Garrison was correct: Shaw was Bertrand. (ibid, p. 193) The declassified record shows that the Bureau knew this and concealed it.

One of the most questionable statements in Holland’s essay is that it was because of the Paese Sera article that Garrison began to focus on the CIA as his chief suspect in the Kennedy murder. Again, this does not align with the record, or even with what Garrison himself has written. It is very clear what led Garrison down this path: Oswald’s Russian language test in the military, and the flyers Oswald was passing out on Canal Street in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. The former was a strong indication Oswald was receiving Russian language training in the Marines. Which suggests he was being prepared in advance for his defection to Russia upon his early release. As per the latter, some of the flyers Oswald was handing out in New Orleans contained the address: 544 Camp Street. As depicted in Stone’s film, Garrison visited this building. It turned out that Oswald had been seen there at the office of former FBI agent Guy Banister. It turned out that, again, as depicted in JFK, Banister’s office was a clearinghouse for many Cuban exiles, along with Oswald’s longtime friend, David Ferrie. And Garrison later learned that both Banister and Ferrie were involved with both the Bay of Pigs landing, and Operation Mongoose, the secret war against Cuba, also depicted in Stone’s film. Both of these were CIA sanctioned, supplied, and backed. The more Garrison peeled back 544 Camp Street, the more he discovered how residents of the address, like Sergio Arcacha Smith, were related to the CRC. This was the CIA’s anti-Castro Cuban government in exile, created by Howard Hunt. Therefore, the only way to explain Oswald’s presence amid all these CIA agents and Castro haters was that he was an agent provocateur against the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which was billed on the literature as being located at that address. Garrison goes through all of this in his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins. (See Garrison, pp. 22-25 and 34-36)

But another point that caused Garrison to consider the CIA as a chief suspect was the infiltration of his office. And also the fact that suspects and witnesses in his case were being furnished lawyers associated with the CIA. Again, this point has been reinforced with the release of declassified files by the ARRB. Through that process we have discovered that the CIA maintains what they call a Cleared Attorneys Panel in major cities. This panel is called upon when the Agency gets stuck in sensitive situations. The Garrison investigation caused word to get out in the New Orleans legal community about this panel, and soon letters were being sent to CIA Director Richard Helms to volunteer for work on it. (Letter from James Quaid, May 15, 1967)

This directly relates to the article Holland mentions in The New Orleans States Item. The Paese Sera article takes up two paragraphs in the over thirty-paragraph article. The reporting team had talked to one of the witnesses Garrison was trying to extradite back to New Orleans. Gordon Novel had volunteered for Garrison’s probe masquerading as an electronics expert who could ensure his office was not bugged. He ended up doing the opposite. Again, as Stone’s film shows, he wired the office for sound and sold some of the tapes to the producer of an upcoming NBC special. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second edition, pp. 232-34) When Garrison requested Novel testify before the grand jury, he fled the state. As the article reveals, Novel had worked for the CIA since the Bay of Pigs operation. And he planned on using those credentials for his defense—if Garrison ever got him back to New Orleans. Which he did not. In other words, a former CIA operative was ingratiating himself with the DA. He was then wiring his office and selling the tapes to an upcoming negative TV special. And, as Garrison revealed in his October 1967 Playboy interview, one of Novel’s attorneys was being paid by the CIA. Kind of interesting, no? But it is left out of Holland’s story.

IV

As one can see from what I have indicated above, the Mitrokhin Archives represents one notch of a string of former KGB agents who understood an important historical point in time had been reached. That, after the fall of the USSR, and especially after the rise to power of Boris Yeltsin and his disastrous economic policies, the writing was on the wall. One way to escape the oncoming socio-economic crisis was to curry favor with the American State Department, as depicted in the recent film, Ukraine on Fire. Another way was to win over the west with “notes” from the KGB Archives. (Evidently Mitrokhin did not have access to a copier for all those many years he was an archivist.)

But the East/West exchange actually goes back before Mitrokhin. It stems from the relationship of former TV/Radio journalist Brian Litman with the KGB after the USSR began to collapse in 1991. At that time, while working for an American cable TV company, Litman was living in Moscow. It is there that he began a relationship with the KGB and sold the American rights to a book called Passport to Assassination. That book proposed that Lee Harvey Oswald actually did go to the Russian embassy while he was in Mexico City. There, he met with the embassy chief consul and two assistant consuls. This occurred even though no surveillance camera captured Oswald’s image upon entrance or exit; and there was no recorded tape of his voice inside the embassy. Even though the embassy was under multi-camera surveillance and the interior was bugged.

The portrayal of Oswald in this book is that of a desperate man at the end of his rope. He carries a handgun with him since he thinks the FBI is following him around everywhere—even in Mexico. He says ominous things, like, “For me it’s all going to end in tragedy.” Or he breaks down and weeps, because he fears the FBI will actually kill him. This is allegedly due to the fact he wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington over the possibility of returning to Russia. In other words, by actually placing Oswald in Mexico City, this book countered what Mexico City CIA officer David Phillips said in public: namely, that when all the information is finally produced, there will be no evidence placing Oswald inside the Russian embassy. (Mark Lane, Plausible Denial, p. 82) Thus began a long migration of convenient helpers from the KGB who would paper over problems in the CIA’s version of the Cold War—including its difficulties with the Kennedy assassination. For instance, in the Litman/Nechiporenko version of Oswald in Mexico, Oswald (oh so conveniently) pulls his jacket over his head as he leaves the embassy—as if the authors were aware that the CIA surveillance took no photos of Oswald entering or leaving. One wonders, did he also do that upon entering the compound? If so, how did he know about the surveillance?

V

But perhaps the worst part of the essay is the charge that it was Jim Garrison who caused a loss of belief by Americans in the democratic institutions of their government. Because it was not Jim Garrison who provoked serious doubts about the Warren Commission. It was a wave of books, articles, and radio appearances by the first critics of the Warren Report, who preceded Jim Garrison. That is, writers like Edward Epstein, Vincent Salandria, Harold Weisberg, and Mark Lane. By 1967, the Gallup Poll revealed that belief in the Warren Report’s Oswald-Did-It-Alone concept was at about 30%. What drove it even lower—to 11% in 1976—were three major events, which we all know about. They were, in order, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the exposés of the Church Committee concerning the crimes of the CIA and FBI. This all began in 1965—with the first insertion of American combat troops into Vietnam—and continued until the last reports of the Church Committee in 1976.

The unfolding of these three events on national TV, radio, and in daily newspapers, was incessant and, in its cumulative effect, oceanic. They literally dominated all news cycles for over ten years. Has Holland completely forgot about the Tet Offensive and the cover up of the slaughter of civilians at My Lai? What about Richard Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre? Or the indictments of over sixty employees of his administration, and the convictions of over forty of them? Perhaps he missed the Church Committee’s exposure of the attempts by the CIA to assassinate Patrice Lumumba of the Congo? Or J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO programs to infiltrate, disrupt, and sometimes eliminate leftist groups?

It was the tremendous impact of these three events that drove down all belief in government. And anyone can see this by looking at the graph in Kevin Phillips’ 1995 book Arrogant Capitol, which first appeared in US News and World Report. But interestingly, on that US News graph, the drop-off in belief begins in 1964, the year the Warren Report was issued, three years before Jim Garrison’s inquiry was made public. This would suggest that, from the beginning—and without any outside influence—the American public thought something was awry with the official story of President Kennedy’s assassination.

As author Larry Sabato noted in his 2013 book The Kennedy Half Century, there is an underlying reason that Kennedy’s life and death is celebrated on so many occasions. Sabato commissioned extensive polling and focus groups for his book. At the end, he revealed that 78% of those polled thought that Kennedy’s presidency had a deep impact on the USA. Which is remarkable since Kennedy only served two years and ten months of his term. Even more remarkably, 91% of the public believes that Kennedy’s murder changed the country a great deal. The last polling result was that 75% of the public did not believe the Warren Report verdict of Kennedy’s assassination, namely that Oswald acted alone.

The Daily Beast preferred printing this article instead of previewing the upcoming releases of the ARRB in October, or the mock trial of Oswald in November in Houston. Which is somewhat surprising, since those upcoming events are rather singular in more ways than one. Holland’s article is nothing more than a rerun of an essay he started marketing at least 16 years ago. In the Spring 2001 edition of Wilson Quarterly , it was entitled “The Demon in in Jim Garrison”. In 2004, he made a very similar presentation at the Assassination Archives Research Center Conference, which, as mentioned above, was rebutted by Gary Aguilar. In 2007, the piece was printed in the CIA’s Center for the Study of Intelligence. Any differences between the versions is marginal. So if The Daily Beast paid Holland, it was like a photographer dusting off photos in his drawer from 15 years ago—easy money. But what makes it worse is that they were all done after 1998—the termination date of the Assassination Records Review Board. As the reader can see, Holland ignored the new information on Clay Shaw and Jim Garrison. Instead, he went with records from an alleged KGB archives which are easily rendered dubious.

For many, many years now Holland has been ignoring the declassified records of the ARRB. Even when he was supposed to be reporting on those files. The fact that he still does so, even on the eve of their final disbursement, tells us all we need to know about him.

See also: Max Holland and Donald Carpenter vs Jim Garrison and the ARRB

June 23, 2017
The Deceptions and Disguises of Noam Chomsky

One of the most telling moments in John Barbour’s new film, The American Media and the Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy, is his presentation of Noam Chomsky briefly discussing the JFK case. It’s a scene I will return to later. But along with Barbour’s depictions of Dan Rather and Bill O’Reilly, I thought these formed the most potent scenes in his film. I am glad Barbour depicted Chomsky because it reminds us just how bad the so-called American Left was and is on both the Kennedy assassination and his presidency. I once wrote an essay on this general subject based upon the work of Martin Schotz and Ray Marcus. (Click here for that essay) Like the Chomsky scene in the Barbour film, we will later return to Marcus’ revealing work on Chomsky.

As many of us will recall, at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, Chomsky, along with his deceased cohort Alexander Cockburn, went on a jihad against almost everything depicted in the movie. Their critiques were as bad, in some ways worse, than those of the MSM. Their campaign was two-pronged. The first angle was to promote the idea that the Warren Commission was correct; that is, Oswald alone shot President Kennedy. In this regard, Cockburn obsequiously interviewed Warren Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler in the pages of The Nation. That interview amounted to a pattycake session, as Cockburn served up softball after softball to his performing seal Liebeler. Their second line of argument stemmed from the first: There was no high level plot because President Kennedy was no different than Dwight Eisenhower who preceded him, or Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon who followed him. So, with both polemicists, there was no political difference between, say, Kennedy and Nixon, Kennedy and Eisenhower, or Kennedy and Johnson. Even back in 1991, this was a difficult dual thesis to uphold. With the releases of the Assassination Records Review Board, it is well-nigh impossible to defend today. And later we will see how new evidence has forced Chomsky to modify his position. (For my discussion of Cockburn click here)

There were so many crevices—actually Florida-sized sinkholes—in their arguments that it became apparent that both men were arguing from a preconceived position.

That position, of course, is the approach to history common to the intellectual or academic Left. One might characterize the general tendency of such Marxist-influenced (or Neo-marxist) sociological analysis as ‘structural’ or ‘system-oriented’, in the sense that it views the actions of individuals as having little import or consequence, that the subject is merely an agent of larger cultural forces that impinge upon it. When applied specifically to the realm of politics, it leads to positing that institutions of power seek to protect and perpetuate themselves in a manner which is nearly blind to the choice or consciousness of the participants, that indeed the very status of the acting subject is suspect as a category of analysis. In its most extreme application, this theoretical perspective leaves no room for flexibility, for the notion that biography—personal background and characteristics—can make a difference, or that innovation from within the system can occur that can benefit many rather than a few. This concept differs somewhat from the “deep state” thesis, as advocates of the latter will allow for exceptions. But they will then note that the Deep State will correct the exception. In President Kennedy’s case, it was a correction by assassination. The former view is more rigid and zealous in its ideology insofar as it denies that there can be any political exceptions. As with extreme upholders of all theories, its proponents must work to erase the evidence that there ever were any exceptions. And as with any kind of inductive reasoning based upon dubious premises, this leads to the making of some thunderous—and pretentious—truisms.

II

Before we address some of Chomsky’s pronouncements on the Kennedy case, it is important to address some of his intellectual background, because it is very hard to adhere to such a system of thought without it leading to some thorny practical problems with specifics. This is simply because theories sometimes do not explain all that happens in the real world. Therefore their practitioners are forced to bend and mold facts and events in order to shape them to fit their doctrine. In the political field, this practice usually leads to questions of how ideology influences analysis. In other words it brings up questions of bias and balance. Chomsky’s career gives us prior illustrations of these characteristics. It is startling to note how Chomsky’s acolytes ignore them.

The first is the fact that Chomsky has been known to butcher quotations for political advantage. A famous example being a quote by Harry Truman which Chomsky altered in his early book American Power and the New Mandarins. This was later exposed by Arthur Schlesinger in a letter to Commentary in December of 1969. Another example would be the misconstruing of the words of Harvard professor Samuel Huntington. Chomsky wrote that the professor said that he advocated demolishing in toto North Vietnamese society. Huntington corrected the record in the New York Review of Books (See 2/26/70)

There are parallels to these kinds of ersatz presentations with Chomsky and the Kennedy case. With Kennedy, Chomsky has tried to insinuate that somehow JFK was involved with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. This wasn’t possible for the simple reason that Kennedy had not been inaugurated at the time Lumumba was killed. But further, as some have noted, Allen Dulles and the CIA most likely hastened their assassination plots against the African leader for the precise reason that Dulles knew Kennedy would not support them. (John M. Blum, Years of Discord, p. 23) In fact, there is a famous picture of President Kennedy getting the news of Lumumba’s death which shows just how pained he was by Lumumba’s passing.

In and of itself, this photograph nullifies the Chomsky thesis that there was no difference between Eisenhower, LBJ, Nixon and Kennedy. For we can safely say that none of those other men would have reacted like this upon hearing of Lumumba’s death. According to the Church Committee, Eisenhower and Allen Dulles ordered the murder of Lumumba. (The Assassinations, edited by James DiEugenio and Lisa Pease, p. 326) Lyndon Johnson reversed Kennedy’s policies in the Congo. He ended up using Cuban exile pilots to wipe out the last followers of Lumumba, helping to destroy the first attempt at a democracy in post-colonial Africa, and allying the USA with the former colonizer Belgium to back Josef Mobutu. Mobutu became a dictator who enriched himself and his backers, and allowed his country to be utilized by outside imperial interests. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, pp. 372-73) Nixon was Vice President under Eisenhower, and in National Security Council meetings spoke derisively and patronizingly of African leaders trying to break out of colonialism. He once said these leaders had only been out of the trees for fifty years. (Muehlenbeck, p. 6) Kennedy’s attitude on this subject, and Lumumba, was contrary to all these men. I cannot do better than to refer the reader to Richard Mahoney’s landmark book JFK: Ordeal in Africa, and the equally fine volume Betting on the Africans by Philip Muehlenbeck. (Click here for a review)

To show just how pernicious Chomsky’s influence on some Left luminaries is on this subject, consider David Talbot’s last appearance on Democracy Now hosted by Amy Goodman. In discussing his book on Allen Dulles, The Devil’s Chessboard, he mentioned the differing views of Lumumba by Eisenhower and Kennedy. Incredibly, Goodman challenged him on this point. Talbot referred to the aforementioned picture of Kennedy as evidence of JFK’s feelings on the subject. But further, as Mahoney’s book demonstrates, the first foreign policy reversal of Eisenhower that Kennedy made once in office was on the Congo. And when Dag Hammarksjold was killed (likely murdered) in a plane crash, Kennedy decided to carry on the UN Chairman’s campaign for a free and independent Congo. (Click here) That any informed person could suggest otherwise shows both a massive ignorance and a massive bias on the subject. Yet, Goodman has hosted Chomsky many times. She reportedly vetoed an appearance by Jim Douglass.

Chomsky has also tried to say that Kennedy approved the action plan to overthrow President Goulart of Brazil. (E-mail communication with Steve Jones, July 20, 2017) Yet, this plan did not occur until over four months after Kennedy was dead. Consider the information in A. J. Langguth’s Hidden Terrors. Although it is true that Kennedy wanted Goulart to broaden the political spectrum of his government, Langguth makes it clear that the actual Brazil overthrow was similar to the action against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. A group of wealthy and powerful businessmen petitioned the White House for help in getting rid of a man they feared would endanger their investments. Langguth describes this group in detail. It was led by David Rockefeller. (p. 104) The author notes that Rockefeller’s coalition had not been accepted at the White House previous to January of 1964. But they were welcomed by President Johnson. And this made the difference. This demarcation is also noted by Kai Bird in his book, The Chairman. For it was John McCloy, the subject of Bird’s book, who was sent by Rockefeller’s group to make a deal with Goulart in February of 1964. When McCloy’s presence in Brazil was detected, it polarized forces of the left and right. (Bird, pp. 550-53) And this triggered the coup operation, codenamed Operation Brother Sam, which McCloy acquiesced in after causing. As Bird notes, Johnson’s willingness to cooperate with Rockefeller and McCloy ended Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress plan: “The Johnson administration had made clear its willingness to use its muscle to support any regime whose anti-communist credentials were in good order.” (ibid, p. 553) Further, anyone who has read Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street would understand the antipathy between President Kennedy and Rockefeller and why such a meeting was unlikely under Kennedy.

III

These two examples are good background for even worse gymnastics by Chomsky. And it brings us closer to Vietnam. In June of 1977, Chomsky co-wrote (with Edward Herman) a now infamous article in The Nation. It was titled “Distortions at Fourth Hand.” There is no other way to describe this essay except as an apologia for the staggering crimes of the collectivist Pol Pot regime that took place in Cambodia after the fall of both Prince Sihanouk and Lon Nol. At that time a book had been published called Cambodia Year Zero by François Ponchaud. It was the first serious look at the terrors that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had unleashed in Cambodia. Chomsky and Herman criticized this pioneering work by saying that it played “fast and loose with quotes and numbers” and that since it relied largely on refugee reports, it had to be second hand. They then added that the book had an “anti-communist bias and message.” In retrospect, those two comments are startling, and again show a remarkable selectivity in an effort to discredit sources. In this same article, the two authors praised a book by George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter entitled Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution. They wrote that this book presented “a carefully documented study of the destructive American impact on Cambodia and the success of the Cambodian revolutionaries in overcoming it, giving a very favorable picture of their programs and policies, based on a wide range of sources.”

In other words, not only were the authors attempting to discredit information that turned out to be true; at the same time, they were crediting information that turned out to be—to put it mildly—inaccurate. The net effect of this propaganda was to distort and conceal the efforts of a murderous regime in killing off well over one million of its citizens in an attempt to recreate a Maoist society overnight. Pol Pot’s was one of the greatest genocides per capita in modern history.

What makes Chomsky’s performance here even worse is that two years later he and Herman were still discounting and distorting the Khmer Rouge in their book After the Cataclysm. They refer to what Pol Pot did as “allegations of genocide” (p. xi, italics added). On the same page they tried to imply that Western media created the mass executions and deaths. They later added that evidence was faked and reporting was unreliable. (pp. 166-77) They again attacked Ponchaud’s book by saying “Ponchaud’s ’s own conclusions, it is by now clear, cannot be taken very seriously because he is simply too careless and untrustworthy.” (p. 274) Later, more credible and responsible authors, like William Shawcross, demonstrated Chomsky’s pronouncements to be astonishingly wrong. They were so bad that Chomsky has never let up trying to minimize what he did. In fact, his whole emphasis on the Indonesian invasion of East Timor has been to try and demonstrate that that slaughter was really worse than what happened in Cambodia! The implication being that if that were true it would then somehow minimize his previous giant faux pas. And even in that he has lowballed the fatalities in Cambodia to do so. (For a complete and thorough expose of this subject, click here)

Why is this important? Besides demonstrating what a poor scholar and historian Chomsky is, it shows that, contrary to his claim of being an anarchist, he went to near ludicrous extremes to soften the shocking crimes of a Maoist totalitarian regime. In any evaluation of Chomsky, this episode is of prime importance. For the simple reason that it clearly suggests that—as Ted Koppel recently said of Sean Hannity—ideology is more important to him than facts.

A second notable aspect of Chomsky’s work is his association with the notorious Holocaust denier Professor Robert Faurisson. When Faurisson’s writing on this subject became public, he was suspended from his position at the University of Lyon. Chomsky then signed a petition in support of Faurisson’s reinstatement. He followed that up in 1980 with a brief introduction to a book by Faurisson. Chomsky later tried to say that he was personally unacquainted with Faurisson and was only speaking out for academic freedom. But, unfortunately for Chomsky and his acolytes, this was contradicted by Faurisson himself. For the Frenchman had written a letter to the New Statesman in 1979. It began with: “Noam Chomsky … is aware of the research work I do on what I call the ‘gas chambers and genocide hoax’. He informed me that Gitta Sereny had mentioned my name in an article in your journal. He told me I had been referred to ‘in an extraordinarily unfair way’.” (This unpublished letter was quoted in the October, 1981 issue of the Australian journal Quadrant.)

Consequently, Chomsky’s later public qualifications about his reasons for signing the petition and writing the introduction ring hollow. He did know Faurisson. He was in contact with him personally, and apparently was encouraging him to defend his work.

When he found this out, author and professor W. D. Rubinstein had a correspondence with Chomsky, which seemed to certify the worst fears about the noted linguist and Faurisson. Chomsky wrote the following: “Someone might well believe that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust … ” (ibid) In defending Faurisson’s writings Chomsky then wrote that anyone who found them lacking in common sense or accepted the established history, was exhibiting “an interesting reflection of the totalitarian mentality, or more properly in this case, the mentality of the religious fanatic.” (Ibid) Rubinstein replied that to hold that there were no gas chambers but there was a Holocaust was an absurd tenet. Chomsky went ballistic. He wrote back that the respondent was lacking in elementary logical reasoning, and he was falsifying documentary evidence. He then said that the Nazis may have worked these Jews to death and then shoveled their bodies into crematoria without gas chambers. He concluded his blast with this: “If you cannot comprehend this, I suggest that you begin your education again at the kindergarten level.” (Click here for this remarkable article)

As Werner Cohn has shown, Chomsky has tried to conceal his friendly relations with a Holocaust Denial group in France. This group included Serge Thion, Faurisson and Pierre Guillame. He seems to have gotten in contact with this group through Thion, another leftist critic of the idea of calling what Pol Pot did in Cambodia a genocide. This group ran a publishing house called La Vieille Taupe, which featured prints of Holocaust Denial literature. The petition that Chomsky signed contained the following sentence about Faurisson: “Since 1974 he has been conducting extensive independent historical research into the ‘holocaust’ question.” The framing of the last two words in that statement should jar anyone’s senses. (For an overview of Chomsky’s association with this group click here; for a specific example of his attempt to cover it up, click here.)

As with his resistance to the Khmer Rouge genocide, Chomsky’s defense and association with Faurisson is startling to any objective person. Which again excludes his acolytes. Today, the low estimate for the fatalities caused by the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is 1.7 million. (see this NYT article from 2017) The idea that there were no mass gassings and crematoria at the Nazi death camps was thoroughly debunked at the trial of David Irving. Irving was a friend and colleague of Faurisson. That court action was instigated by Irving himself. There has been a very good web site constructed from the materials devoted to that trial. I strongly recommend reading the reports given to the court by Robert Jan van Pelt, Christopher Browning, and Richard Evans. They seem to me to be models of what scholarly research should be about.

IV

Before centering on the issues of Kennedy’s assassination and his presidency, it is important to discuss briefly the general issue of the Cold War, if only to place those subjects in historical context. As with many leftist polemicists, Chomsky usually does not do this. And when he does, he almost exclusively centers on what western powers did to cause the Cold War and continue it.

Yet it would seem to most people to be important to review objectively these matters in any historical discussion of American foreign policy from 1945-1991—the obvious reason being that it was the most powerful influence on American foreign policy and world events in that time period. Every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush was strongly influenced by it, to the point that almost every major foreign policy issue was colored by it. Therefore, if one is writing the history of this period, or a part of it, one has to factor this into the discussion. If not, then one can be accused of ignoring, or discounting, the historical backdrop.

For to deprive these events of their context is to sap them of some of their meaning. Related to this, another problem with Chomsky—as noted above—is imbalance. The policy of aiding foreign countries in their resistance to communism was spelled out way back in 1947 with the Truman Doctrine. This was then endorsed by Congress, and legislation was passed to carry out the policy. One can argue whether or not the Cold War was exaggerated, whether it was too covert, even whether or not it was justified. But one cannot act as if it did not exist. Or that the communist side had no provocations to it, or had no atrocities done in its name. For how else can one explain the Korean War, Hungary in 1956, or the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968? We can continue in this vein with the Chinese usurpation of Tibet or the crimes of Fidel Castro, or those of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong, the latter of which are both mind-boggling.

But as with Pol Pot in Cambodia, these things are minimized, discounted or ignored by people like Chomsky, and the late Alexander Cockburn. Almost all of the critical analysis was and is of the USA. But if things like balance and historical context are left out, then what is this kind of writing really worth?

Which is another way of saying the following: A theoretical approach is only as good as the person who uses it. If that writer is too biased one way or the other, the result will suffer greatly. To make a point of comparison: Michael Parenti is also an advocate of the aforementioned style of analysis we have called “structural” or “systemic”. Yet he understands that there are men and women who occasionally manage to rise above the system and do some good for a great number of people. And Parenti also understands that political conspiracies do exist, and have been proven to exist. To use just one example, the heist of the 2000 election in Florida by Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris.

Even though this crime was done in broad daylight—what with roadblocks set up to hinder people from voting—no person was even interviewed by any law enforcement arm, let alone indicted. The political result of this was horrendous: George W. Bush created a totally unjustified war in Iraq. A war that Al Gore would not have started. Not only do political conspiracies exist, if not addressed, prosecuted, and stopped, they can have terrible results for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people. So to deny they occur is to deny reality. And as Parenti has said, reality is sometimes radical.

A second problem with using this system-oriented approach is that—as we have seen with Cambodia—it tends to sweep all contrary facts or evidence into an ideological whirlpool. That is, facts get discounted, data gets warped, and key events are sometimes omitted. What is important is keeping the model of that oppressive structure intact. If facts or data collide with that model, it’s the facts or data that get discarded or discounted. The theoretical underpinnings of Chomsky and Edward Herman’s writings on Cambodia were to show that American and western media was distorting a communist revolution. Therefore, they repeatedly used phrases like “the alleged genocide in Cambodia”, or they wrote that “executions have numbered at most in the thousands”. (See this article) This last comment was written in 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime had fallen and some reporters had visited the country to actually see the horrible devastation with their own eyes. At times Chomsky and Herman used Khmer Rouge sources and endorsed books that extensively sourced footnotes to Pol Pot’s government releases. This approach is a serious problem for people who actually care about things like accuracy, fairness, and completeness.

In the wake of Oliver Stone’s JFK, what was so odd about the Chomsky/Cockburn allegiance to a point of view which privileges the critique of institutions as systems is that it disappeared upon their inquiry into Kennedy’s murder. That is, in both men’s comments on the Warren Commission and its presentation of evidence, you will nowhere find any discussion of the lives and careers of the persons who controlled that investigative body. Men like Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gerald Ford, and J. Edgar Hoover. Yet, those four men dominated the Commission proceedings. (See Walt Brown’s book, The Warren Omission, especially pp. 84-87).

This is odd—in two respects. First, it was these men, not Kennedy, who had played large parts in being ‘Present at the Creation’—that is, in forming and then supporting the Eastern Establishment, which was responsible for setting up and maintaining the structure of American government in the 20^th century. Any critic of the way institutions of power function would surely be concerned with this detail, because in presenting that particular case, one does not have to juggle, manipulate, and distort the evidence. There are books on these men in which tons of evidence exist to make that demonstration. These four were clearly responsible for some of the worst American crimes of the 20^th century. (See James DiEugenio, Reclaiming Parkland, second edition, pp. 234-40, 321-40.)

Secondly, to somehow suppose that those four would not manipulate the evidence in a murder case is simply to ignore the reality of who they were. Yet this is the concept that both Chomsky and Cockburn supported. For instance, as mentioned earlier, Cockburn actually interviewed a junior counsel for the Warren Commission in the pages of The Nation. He never asked him one challenging question. Which is incredible considering the record of that Commission.

Regarding Chomsky, consider an incident from 1994. Two subscribers to Probe Magazine, Steve Jones and Bob Dean, went to a meeting of the Democratic Socialist Club of Reading, Pennsylvania. Chomsky was the guest speaker. Both Jones and Dean were surprised when Chomsky seemed to veer off topic to go into a tirade against President Kennedy. When Jones and Dean tried to approach and talk to Chomsky about Kennedy afterwards, he became “very defensive and dismissive of us, brushing us off by saying that he’d seen all of the evidence.” Apparently, this meant the declassified record, and therefore there was nothing to address. (e-mail communication with Jones, 6/19/2017)

Again, this tells us much about Chomsky’s respect—or lack of—for scholarly practice. Because, at that time, the Assassination Records Review Board had just begun declassifying two million pages of records that had previously been kept secret from the public on the JFK case. Hence no one had seen them prior to this time. Including Chomsky. So what was he talking about? The evidence the ARRB declassified concerning the actual circumstances of Kennedy’s murder make the case against Oswald pretty much insupportable. And in just about every way: concerning Oswald, Kennedy’s autopsy, the ballistics evidence, and Oswald’s alibi. (For the last, see Barry Ernest’s book, The Girl on the Stairs.)

Further, neither Cockburn nor Chomsky seemed to be aware of the transcript of the final executive session of the Warren Commission. Sen. Richard Russell, Representative Hale Boggs, and Senator John Sherman Cooper—who I have previously called the Southern Wing—had planned on expressing their reservations at this meeting about the Single Bullet Theory. The idea that one bullet, CE 399, had gone through both Kennedy and Governor John Connally, smashing two bones, making seven wounds, emerging almost entirely unscathed, and losing almost no volume from its mass. Russell, especially, wanted his objections expressed in the record of this final meeting. Today, we have the record of that meeting. There is no trace of his, or anyone else’s, reservations about the Single Bullet Theory. For the simple reason that there was no stenographic record of that final meeting. (Gerald McKnight, Breach of Trust, p. 284) In other words, the Eastern Establishment figures—Dulles, McCloy, and Ford, likely coopted Chief Justice Earl Warren and chief counsel J. Lee Rankin into tricking the other members into believing there would be such a record. In fact, a woman was there masquerading as a stenographer. But the Commission’s contract with the stenographic company had expired three days prior. (ibid, p. 295) As Gerald McKnight writes about this matter, the obvious reason for this charade was to keep the strenuous objections of the Southern Wing out of the transcribed record, and thereby maintain the illusion that the Commission had been unanimous in its verdict on the case. In other words, here was an almost textbook case of the way institutions tend to ensure the survival of belief in the status quo, one made to order for critics on the Left.

But in an unexplained inconsistency, both Chomsky and Cockburn dropped the structural approach in their analysis of the Commission. Even though it would seem to be perfectly suited for that type of analysis. Why? Because if one did explain who these men were and what they did with the evidence, then one could conclude that they covered up the true circumstances of Kennedy’s death, for the simple reason he was not a member of their club. Which is a direction they do not want to go in.

Yet, David Talbot demonstrates this at length in his analysis of the conflicts between President Kennedy and Allen Dulles during 1961. These were centered on Kennedy’s Congo policy, Dulles’ backing of the revolt of the Algerian generals against French President Charles DeGaulle, and ultimately how Dulles lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs operation. (Talbot, pp. 382-417) In other words, in just one year, the CIA Director had come into conflict with Kennedy over three important areas and events. Finally, Kennedy felt he had to terminate Dulles, along with both his Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Director of Plans Richard Bissell. The first and only time in 70 years that has been done at the CIA. As Talbot also points out, after Kennedy was killed, Dulles lobbied for a position on the Warren Commission (ibid, pp. 573-74)—something that no one else did. As previously referred to, Walt Brown has shown that Dulles then became the single most active member of the Warren Commission. During a meeting with Commission critic David Lifton at UCLA in 1965, Dulles showed utter disdain for any of the evidence that the Commission had ignored or misrepresented to the public, e.g., the Zapruder film frames. (Talbot, p. 591)

Let us use just one other example. Robert Kennedy was the first Attorney General who actually exercised some degree of control over FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The enmity between the two has been well chronicled by more than one author. After JFK was killed, Hoover had Bobby Kennedy’s private line to his office removed. (Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, p. 315) The Warren Report itself says that Hoover and the FBI were responsible for the vast majority of the investigation. (See, p. xii) Therefore, why would such men—Dulles and Hoover—who clearly had no love for JFK, bend over backwards to find out the truth about his death? The fact is they did not. For example, the day after the murder, Hoover was so concerned about who killed President Kennedy that he was at the racetrack. (Summers, op. cit.) To leave out things like this, and much more, is not writing history. And it is not honest scholarship. It is depriving the reader of important information.

V

Chomsky operates his views of both Kennedy and his murder via inductive, closed-system reasoning. It is both banal and simplistic: since the USA operates in a sick political and economic system, no one can rise above it. Therefore, Kennedy was really no different than Nixon, Johnson, and Eisenhower. The underlying problem—as writers like Donald Gibson and Richard Mahoney have demonstrated—is that when one actually studies the record, Kennedy was not part of the Power Elite, and did not aspire to be part of it. This is why, as Donald Gibson has shown, Kennedy and David Rockefeller—the acknowledged leader of the Eastern Establishment at the time—had no time or sympathy for each other. (See Gibson’s Battling Wall Street throughout, but especially pp. 73-76) The reason Kennedy made his historic 1957 Senate speech on the impending doom of French colonialism in Algeria was because he had been in Vietnam when the French empire there was collapsing. He understood that the Vietnam conflict had not really been about communism, but about nationalism. And he said this many times, and took considerable heat for it. (See Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal In Africa, pp. 14-23)

When Oliver Stone’s JFK came out, Chomsky made numerous statements questioning Stone’s thesis about Kennedy’s intent to withdraw from Vietnam. He eventually wrote an essay in Z Magazine on the topic. In essence, he denied all the withdrawal evidence as outlined by Fletcher Prouty and John Newman, who advised Stone on that subject. The problem for Chomsky today is that other scholars decided that Prouty and Newman were on to something. After all, Prouty actually worked on Kennedy’s withdrawal plan in September of 1963. John Newman was writing a revolutionary book on the subject entitled JFK and Vietnam, which was published in January of 1992.

Seriously considering that evidence, these scholars then went to work. And today, a small shelf of books exists on the subject. These authors agree with the Stone/Prouty/Newman withdrawal thesis, e.g., David Kaiser’s American Tragedy, James Blight’s Virtual JFK, Gordon Goldstein’s Lessons in Disaster. One reason these new books are there is that the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) declassified many pages of documents that support the withdrawal thesis. This declassification process occurred in 1997. Any serious scholar has to consider new evidence when it is declassified. Chomsky did not. In 2000, in a book called Hopes and Prospects, in relation to this issue, he wrote: “On these matters see my Rethinking Camelot … . Much more material has appeared since, but while adding some interesting nuances, it leaves the basic picture intact.” (pp. 123, 295)

In other words, the scores of pages of new ARRB documents released on the subject, the recorded tapes in the White House, and the new essays and books published, these amount to “nuances.” The “nuances” include President Johnson confessing in February of 1964 that he himself knows he is breaking with Kennedy’s policy. They include the transcripts of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting in Hawaii where McNamara is actually executing that withdrawal plan—with no reference to a contingency upon victory. (These and other documents are included in this presentation)

In 1997, that last piece of evidence convinced some MSM outlets, like The New York Times, that Kennedy was planning on withdrawing from Vietnam at the time of his assassination. We can go on and on. But the point is made. To any objective person, these are not “nuances”. They are integral.

To show Chomsky’s bizarreness on this point, let us use two other instances of just how intent he is to disguise the facts and evidence of Kennedy’s withdrawal plan. One of his older excuses was to say that Kennedy’s advisors fabricated the withdrawal plan after the Tet offensive. (Z Magazine, September, 1992) Even for Chomsky, this is ridiculous. What is he saying? That Kennedy’s advisors falsified the then classified record while it was in the National Archives? That they also managed to get a voice impressionist to impersonate Johnson, McGeorge Bundy and McNamara discussing this withdrawal plan?

Chomsky’s latest position is a sort of rear action retreat. He now admits that Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara offered up a withdrawal plan. In other words, it was McNamara’s plan, not Kennedy’s. Not so, and let us illustrate why.

In November of 1961, a two-week long debate took place in the White House. The subject was whether or not to commit combat troops into Vietnam. Advisors Max Taylor and Walt Rostow had returned from Vietnam and made that recommendation. From all the accounts we have, Kennedy was virtually the only person arguing against that proposal. (James Blight, Virtual JFK, pp. 275-83) At its conclusion he signed off on NSAM 111 which sent 15,000 more advisors instead.

Kennedy was disturbed that he had to carry the argument virtually alone. So he decided to ask someone who he knew agreed with him to write his own report on the subject. This was Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith did visit Saigon, and he did write a report recommending no combat troops in theater and a gradual American distancing. (Cable of November 20, 1961, which was followed by a longer report; Blight, p. 72, see also David Kaiser, American Tragedy, pp. 131-32) Kennedy later had this report forwarded to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara in April of 1962. This was the beginning of the withdrawal plan. We know this because on his trip to Vietnam in May, McNamara told General Paul Harkins to begin a training program for the army of South Vietnam so America could begin reducing its forces there. Harkins was the supreme military commander in Saigon. (Kaiser, pp. 132-34) Also, McNamara’s deputy Roswell Gilpatric revealed in an oral history that his boss had told him that he had instructions from Kennedy to begin to wind down the war. (Blight, p. 371) This culminated with the aforementioned declassified Sec/Def conference in Hawaii in May of 1963. At this meeting, McNamara requested from all departments—State, Pentagon, CIA—specific schedules beginning a withdrawal in December of 1963 and ending in the early fall of 1965. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, p. 126)

The idea that this plan was McNamara’s is another fanciful Chomsky invention. In addition to the evidence stated above—cables, oral history—there is another undeniable fact. In the November, 1961 debates described above, McNamara was asking for the insertion of combat troops into Vietnam. In fact, his proposal was the largest request of all. He told Kennedy to commit upward of six divisions, or about 205,000 men. And he framed the request in pure Cold War terms. If this was not done, it would lead to communist control over all of Indochina and also Indonesia. (Blight, pp. 276-77) The idea that afterwards McNamara had a personal epiphany and reversed himself on his own is simply not credible. Especially when combined with the above evidence. Plus the fact that it was Kennedy alone who was holding out against combat troops in November. And as with Kennedy, there is no mention by McNamara on any tape or any of the Sec/Def documents, or in NSAM 263, that the withdrawal plan would only be completed as the circumstances on the battlefield improve. Chomsky’s arguments against Kennedy’s withdrawal plan exist in a vacuum created by him and his acolytes.

VI

In Barbour’s film, Chomsky is shown at a seminar saying words to the effect that no one should care if Kennedy died as a result of a conspiracy. The problem with this statement is that, at the time of Kennedy’s death, it’s the people who Chomsky tries to stand up for—residents of the Third World—that felt a sharp pang of loss at JFK’s passing. And very few of them felt that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin. The president of Egypt, Gamel Abdul Nasser, fell into a deep depression and had the films of Kennedy’s funeral shown four times on national television. (Philip Muehlenbeck, Betting on the Africans, p. 228) Ben Bella, the premier of Algeria, phoned the American ambassador in Algiers and said, “I can’t believe it. Believe me, I’d rather it happen to me than him.” He then called in a comment to the state radio station saying that Kennedy had been a victim of “racialist and police-organized machinations”. (ibid, p. 227) When asked about Kennedy’s assassination in 1964, Achmed Sukarno of Indonesia began perspiring. He then said that he loved the man because Kennedy understood him. He ended the reverie by saying, “Tell me, why did they kill Kennedy?” (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, Second Edition, p. 374) Nehru of India called Kennedy’s murder a crime against humanity. He then said that Kennedy was “a man of ideals, vision, and courage, who sought to serve his own people as well as the larger causes of the world.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 231) Two weeks after Kennedy’s death, economist Barbara Ward visited the office of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The president had a photo of John and Jackie Kennedy on his desk. With tears in his eyes he said, “I have written her, and I have prayed for them both. Nothing shocked me so deeply as this.” Months later, when the American ambassador presented him with a copy of the Warren Report, Nkrumah turned to the title page. He pointed to the name of Allen Dulles, and returned it to the ambassador with the one word comment, “Whitewash”. (Muehlenbeck, p. 229; Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa, p. 235)

But it wasn’t just the leaders of the Third World who were shaken and saddened by Kennedy’s passing. It was also its citizenry. As an editorial in West Africa magazine stated, “Not even the death of Dag Hammarskjold dismayed Africans as much as did the death of John Kennedy.” (Muehlenbeck, p. 229) In Nairobi, Kenya, six thousand people packed into a cathedral for a memorial service. A Kenyan politician said that never in his career had he seen this kind of grief registered over the death of a foreigner. (Muehlenbeck, p. 226) In the Ivory Coast, the American ambassador woke early the day after the assassination. There was someone waiting for him at his office. The man said he ran a small business about 25 miles away. He said he didn’t really know why he was there. But he tried to explain anyway: “I came here this morning simply to say that I never knew President Kennedy, I never saw President Kennedy, but he was my friend.” (Ibid, p. 228) According to author Thurston Clarke, upon learning of his passing, the peasants of the Yucatan Peninsula immediately started planting a Kennedy Memorial Garden.

Were all these people wrong?

But there is one person we can add to this list. His name is Noam Chomsky.

In the time period following Kennedy’s murder, writer/researcher Ray Marcus tried to enlist several prominent academics to take up the cause of exposing the plot that killed President Kennedy. In 1966 he wrote I. F. Stone on the subject. In 1967, he approached Arthur Schlesinger about it. They both declined to take up the cause. In 1969, he was in the Boston area on an extended business function. He therefore arranged a discussion with Chomsky. Chomsky had initially agreed to a one-hour meeting in his office. Ray brought only 3-4 pieces of evidence, including his work on CE 399, the Magic Bullet, and a series of stills from the Zapruder film. Which had not been shown nationally yet.

Soon after the discussion began, Chomsky told “his secretary to cancel the remaining appointments for the day. The scheduled one-hour meeting stretched to 3-4 hours. Chomsky showed great interest in the material. We mutually agreed to a follow-up session later in the week. Then I met with Gar Alperovitz. At the end of our one-hour meeting, he said he would take an active part in the effort if Chomsky would lead it.” (Probe, Vol. 4 No. 2, p. 25) Ray did have a second meeting with Chomsky which lasted much of the afternoon. And “the discussion ranged beyond evidentiary items to other aspects of the case. I told Chomsky of Alperovitz’ offer to assist him if he decided to lead an effort to reopen. Chomsky indicated he was very interested, but would not decide before giving the matter much careful consideration.” (ibid) A professional colleague of Chomsky’s, Professor Selwyn Bromberger, was also at the second meeting. He drove Ray home. As he dropped him off he said, “If they are strong enough to kill the president, and strong enough to cover it up, then they are too strong to confront directly … if they feel sufficiently threatened, they may move to open totalitarian rule.” (ibid)

It is important to reflect on Bromberger’s words as Ray related what happened next. He returned to California and again asked Chomsky to take up the cause. In April of 1969, Chomsky wrote back saying he now had to delay his decision until after a trip to England in June. He said he would get in touch with Ray then. Needless to say, he never did. He ended up being a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and this ended up making his name in both leftist and intellectual circles. Reflecting on Bromberger’s words to Marcus, one could conclude that Bromberger and Chomsky decided that the protest against Vietnam, which was becoming both vocal and widespread, and almost mainstream at the time, afforded a path of less resistance than the JFK case did. After all, look at what had happened to Jim Garrison.

But if this is correct, it would qualify as a politically motivated decision. One not made on the evidence. As Marcus writes, it was with Chomsky, “not the question of whether or not there was a conspiracy—that he had given every indication of having already decided in the affirmative … ” Marcus’ revelations on this subject are informative and relevant in evaluating Chomsky, both then and now. For purposes of our argument, it is important to know what Chomsky actually thought of the evidence when he was first exposed to it. This would seem to be a much more candid and open response than what he wrote decades later, when his writings on the subject were just as categorical, except the other way. In other words, Chomsky did a 180-degree flip on the issue of whether President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. And that first conviction lasted at least until 1976. Because in that year, he signed a petition to form the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That is very likely the reason that, in 1971, as co-editor of the Senator Mike Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, he allowed Peter Scott to write an essay addressing the question of Johnson’s alteration of Kennedy’s de-escalation plan in Vietnam.

Try and find an interview or essay in which Chomsky admits how close he was to being the chief advocate for a public campaign to find out who really killed Kennedy. Yet, it is a fact. Maybe Chomsky changed his mind. But if that was the case, he has no right to be so smug and snide about others who came to the same conclusion he once did. Or perhaps, as Bromberger let out, he and Alperovitz and Chomsky decided that Vietnam offered an easier path to prominence. Which, undoubtedly, it did. If that was the case, then it was a practical choice, not an intellectual or moral one. And evidently, Chomsky and his friends did not realize that they could have combined the two.

As we have seen, Chomsky’s recurrent posing as a scholar who has assimilated the entire declassified record on the JFK case, and on the Kennedy/Johnson Vietnam policies, is simply an empty pose. And this is part of a persona that, as we have seen in the case of Faurisson and Cambodia, substitutes an extreme and ingrained bias for what is supposed to be scholarly analysis. If there is any hope of reconstituting this nation around a viable set of values and principles, then the issue of the hijacking of America in the sixties through assassinations will have to be honestly confronted. As we have seen, Noam Chomsky refuses to do that—in fact he deliberately avoids it. He then adopts certain disguises and deceptions to conceal the way he once felt about the subject. Which is, in large part, why he is part of the problem, not the solution.

June 22, 2017
The 2017 Houston Mock Trial of Oswald

On November 16 and 17^th, the South Texas College of Law (STCL) in Houston will be hosting a two-day mock trial titled “State of Texas vs. Lee Harvey Oswald.” For the first time, this mock trial will use 21^st-century technology and apply what has been learned from the Innocence Project and the 2009 National Academy of Science (NAS) report about forensic evidence to the JFK assassination.

Forensic evidence is used in criminal prosecutions to match a piece of evidence to a particular person or weapon. The NAS report1 determined that the absence of precise and objective national criteria and methodologies as well as peer-reviewed published studies coupled with the highly subjective nature of the forensic disciplines renders this type of evidence highly suspect, unreliable and extremely prone to manipulation. The forensic methods that were found to lack sufficient scientific basis included firearms/bullets, fingerprints, hair and fiber analysis and tool marks. This kind of evidence was critical to the determination of the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations that Lee Oswald was the assassin of President Kennedy and calls into question the very foundations of the case against Lee Oswald.

The STCL is not the first mock trial of the JFK assassination but it will differ from the prior events. Following is a summary of those mock trials.

1967 Yale Law School

This 1967 mock trial was held at Yale Law School before 500 spectators. Jacob D. Fuchsberg, a New York lawyer, served as the judge. Unfortunately, he barred a CBS television crew from filming the event. Therefore, the only reports available about this mock trial are a couple of short news clips and an article published in the April 1967 issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine.

Law students served as defense counsel and prosecutors. A law student portrayed Oswald and testified in his own defense. The Oswald defense team argued that there was reasonable doubt Oswald was the actual assassin. The witnesses were principally law students and used the actual testimony that witnesses gave to the Warren Commission. The evidence included reproductions of photographs, bullet fragments, blood-stained clothing worn by the late President, and the alleged murder weapon.

The bulk of the prosecution’s case centered on the testimony of Dr. James J. Humes, who had been in charge of the autopsy and prepared the autopsy report. Over the course of one-and-a-half hours of direct and cross-examination, “Dr. Humes” provided detailed testimony on his examination of the president’s body, the location of the wounds and if the wounds supported the single-bullet theory. Pointing to tests conducted under the supervision of the FBI, Humes testified that a single bullet could have inflicted the throat wound of the President as well as the chest, wrist, and thigh injuries of Governor Connally. On cross-examination, the defense tried to score points by having “Dr. Humes” admit he did not have experience with gunshot wounds and that he had not performed any ballistic tests.

The defense also relied on eyewitnesses to introduce evidence about the number and the origin of the shots. Defense witnesses featured “Lee Bowers”, the railway switchman, who claimed to see strangers milling around the wooden stockade on the grassy knoll and later said he saw a puff of smoke or flash of light in that area. Defense witness “Bonnie Ray Williams” testified he went up to the sixth floor of the depository at noon to eat lunch and did not see Oswald or anyone else on that floor. Other defense witnesses included “Governor Connally”, who maintained that he had been hit by a separate shot from President Kennedy, “Dr. Malcolm Perry”, who testified that he thought the throat wound was an entry wound, and “Ronald Simmons”, Chief of the Infantry Weapons Evaluation Branch of the Ballistics Research Laboratory of the Department of the Army, who tested the assassination rifle and discussed problems with the telescopic sight, bolt and trigger mechanism.

In its summation, the defense reviewed the doubts about the shots, the wounds, and Oswald. The defense closed with an acknowledgement that Oswald fled the assassination scene, concluding, “It is a heinous crime to gun down the President of the United States. It is a heinous crime to find an innocent man guilty.”

The prosecution began its summation with the undelivered Dallas speech of President Kennedy about “not listening to nonsense,” and urged the jury to ignore the nonsense of the defense theory. The prosecution then reviewed the “hard” evidence: the shells, bullet fragments, the bag in which Oswald allegedly carried the murder weapon. As the prosecutor talked, he dissembled the rifle to show that it could have been carried in the paper bag. As the last screws came apart, he held the rifle apart and held it aloft for a moment and then passed the scope, stock, and barrel to the jury for its examination.

A jury of 12 with two alternates comprised of volunteers from a North Haven Presbyterian Church listened to the seven hours of argument. It was 2 AM when the judge completed his charge to the jury on the two counts: first degree murder and assault with intent to kill the President. After approximately 75 minutes, the jury informed the judge that they were unable to agree on a verdict. Six jurors felt Oswald was guilty; three believed that, while he had taken part, there was reasonable doubt he had fired the fatal shot. Three thought there was reasonable doubt as to his participation in the crime at all.

1986: London

This is the mock trial many people recall. A four-day made-for-TV mock trial entitled “On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald” was held in London in July, 1986. The Showtime cable network subsequently culled a condensed two-part, five and one-half hour program from this production in November, 1986. Former Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi served as prosecutor and Gerry Spence served as defense counsel. The jury consisted of 12 Dallas citizens who had been flown in to London. Some of the actual witnesses associated with the JFK assassination and the shooting of officer J.D. Tippit testified, along with certain medical experts and some members of the HSCA.2 After 12 hours of deliberation, the jury returned a guilty verdict. It is generally agreed upon by lawyers that Spence was not prepared for this mock trial and that his performance made a mockery of the event. (For a detailed examination of the program’s shortcomings, see Chapter 3 of Jim DiEugenio’s book, Reclaiming Parkland.)

1992: ABA in San Francisco

In August 1992, the American Bar association conducted a two-day mock trial at its annual Meeting in San Francisco titled the “Trial of the Century: The United States vs Lee Oswald.”3 Evidence was based on testimony derived from the Warren Commission Report and the Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Actors portrayed the witnesses. The prosecution witnesses were Marrion Baker, Domingo Benavides, Howard Brennan, Wesley Frazier, Helen Markham, Harold Norman, Marina Oswald and William Scoggins. Evidence also involved computer animation and enhancement of the Zapruder film.

The prosecution team was comprised of attorneys Jim Brosnahan, Joe Cotchett and John Keke. Representing the defense were Tom Barr, David Boies and Evan Chester. Two federal judges and a state court judge took turns presiding over the trial. The entire proceeding was televised nationwide by Court TV.

A key witness for the prosecution was Dr. Martin Fackler, a ballistics expert. He testified that the bullet found at Parkland Hospital, fragments recovered from the president’s limousine and cartridges taken from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository all, came from Oswald’s rifle. He also testified that the casings found near Patrolman Tippit’s body came from Oswald’s revolver. He then discussed how bullets move in the human body and explained the movement of

the bullet that passed through President Kennedy and into Governor John Connally. Another important prosecution witness was Dr. Robert Piziali of Failure Analysis. He testified about the computer reconstruction developed by his firm and how it demonstrated that the shots that hit President Kennedy came from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.

The defense team told the jury that while Kennedy’s assassination has been the most investigated killing in history, every item of evidence ever assembled against Oswald is still open to doubt.

A key defense witness was Roger McCarthy, another ballistics expert who said the shots that killed Kennedy could not have come from the sixth floor of the school book depository. Dr. Cyril Wecht testified that the president’s wounds had come from more than one gunman.

Prior to the mock trial, the 17 potential jurors were selected from a list of San Francisco area residents. They were paid for their participation and did not know the nature of the trial before they were asked to complete a questionnaire. Included were two questions: (1) How much they agreed with the statement that Lee Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and (2) How much did they agree he acted alone. Sixteen of seventeen jurors indicated they were neutral, or agreed that Oswald assassinated the president. Most of the potential jurors also agreed or were neutral that Oswald acted alone.

The lawyers could strike a total of five jurors: three for the prosecution and two for the defense during voir dire. At the conclusion of the trial, the jury deliberated for 2 ½ hours, but after several ballots was unable to reach a verdict. Seven of the jurors voted to convict Oswald while five favored acquittal. The five jurors that were removed during voir dire constituted a surrogate or shadow jury. They sat through the trial and saw the same evidence as the jury. This group of dismissed jurors voted 3 to 2 for acquittal.

Earlier that year, the jury in a mock trial by the Arts & Entertainment network, found Oswald innocent. No information was available about this proceeding.

2013: Texas

Three mock trials were held in Texas in 2013. One was by the State Bar of Texas, one by the Dallas Bar Association and one by the Bench Bar Conference for the Eastern District of Texas. The case was prosecuted as a federal crime, even though killing a president was still a state crime in 1963.4 The Dallas event was held at the Old Criminal Courts Building.

Toby Shook represented the defense in each of these proceedings. For the Dallas event, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, Sarah Saldaña, served as the prosecutor and State District Judge Martin Hoffman presided.

The mock trials only lasted three hours each, so the attorneys were limited on the number of witnesses and evidence that could be used. Included in the evidence was: the Zapruder film, clips of Oswald speaking to the media, autopsy drawings, and a replica of the assassination rifle.

Because of the time constraints, Shook was limited to cross-examining the prosecution witnesses and was not allowed to put on witnesses to establish the various conspiracy theories. For example, when the prosecution offered that Oswald’s prints on boxes near the so-called sniper’s nest were evidence he was the assassin, Shook countered that Oswald’s job was to move boxes, so it would be natural for his prints to be there.

All three proceedings ended up in hung juries. About three-fourths of the 150 who watched the trial in Dallas County’s Old Criminal Courts Building indicated by a show of hands that they did not believe the gunman acted alone.

2016: Michigan

The Macomb County Bar Foundation and the Society for Active Retirees organized two mock trials in the fall of 2016. The mock trials were two hours. Both sides stipulated that the rifle found on the Sixth Floor was Lee Oswald’s rifle and that he had fired three shots that day. In other words, the question of Oswald’s innocence was not in dispute. There was a single witness who was a local judge who had read numerous books on the assassination. The sole question to be determined by the attendees who served as a grand jury was whether they believed Oswald acted alone or as part of a conspiracy. Given the sparse evidence before them, it is not surprising that both audiences voted overwhelmingly that Oswald was the lone gunman.

Logistics for the STCL mock trial are still being finalized. The presiding judge for the Harris County Criminal Court, Honorable Jay T. Karahan will preside with attorney Gus Pappas serving as prosecutor. The defense team will be led by California lawyer Bill Simpich and New York lawyer Larry Schnapf. Continuing legal education credits will be offered. There will be a dinner following the first day of the mock trial. The planning committee is hoping to announce a very prominent keynote speaker. The event organizers hope to stream the mock trial. The two JFK conferences that will be held that weekend in Dallas are considering live streaming the mock trial. Stay tuned for more details.

NOTES

1 “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward”.

2 The witnesses included Marion Baker, Eugene Boone, Charles Brehm, Johnny Brewer, Ted Callaway, Nelson Delgado, Buell Wesley Frazier, Vincent Guinn, James Hosty, Seth Kantor, Cecil Kirk, Edward Lopez, Monty Lutz, Bill Newman, Harold Norman, Paul O’Connor, Ruth Paine, Charles Petty, Lyndal Shaneyfelt, Tom Tilson, Cyril Wecht, The five- hour broadcast and a 90-minute highlights film are available at: http://on-trial-lho.blogspot.com/ and at: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0O5WNzrZqIOubam491Q_OKBOBzfH7RDi.

3 Excerpts from this trial are available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzWAr91aL-BEZlZyb1NKS3YzMXc/view.

4 An excerpt of the mock trial held in Dallas is available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzWAr91aL-BEY01nZEdIdFE1Y0E/view.

May 19, 2017
JFK at 100

On May 29, 2017, the nation commemorated the 100^th birthday of President John F. Kennedy. As we all know, Kennedy was cut down before reaching the age of 50. Yet, his short term in office still casts a giant shadow over contemporary American history. As author Larry Sabato has shown, the vast majority of Americans believe that something went wrong with America after he was assassinated. We take this opportunity to remind us all of what might have been and to commemorate what was. And it’s important, too, to learn about the many things Kennedy achieved while in office, but which you won’t hear about from today’s mainstream media.

The images below are linked to a four-part slideshow and afterword featuring highlights from the life and political career of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35^th President of the United States, which we hope you will find informative.

~Jim DiEugenio

April 17, 2017
Anatomy of the Second Floor Lunchroom Encounter (excerpts)

Last year at the JFK Lancer Conference in Dallas, Bart Kamp was awarded the New Frontier award. The citation stated that his work in reexamining the second floor encounter of Oswald with Texas School Book Depository foreman Roy Truly and motorcycle officer Marrion Baker utilized “a broad array of new data, including documents and statements of the participants and a variety of TSBD witnesses.” We agreed with this award and the description of the achievement. The second floor lunch encounter is a thread-worn shibboleth of the Warren Report that – like Oswald’s mail order rifle – the first generation of critics simply passed on; the notable exception being Harold Weisberg in his book Whitewash II. In Reclaiming Parkland, I began to question it, largely based on Marrion Baker’s first day affidavit, where the officer does not even mention the episode – or Oswald or Truly. Even though, as he wrote the affidavit, Oswald was sitting across from him in the rather small witness room. In other words, after he had just stuck a gun in his stomach, Baker didn’t recognize him.

But Bart Kamp goes much further than that in his analysis. We are presenting a small part of that long essay here, with a link to the longer version at the admirable group Dealey Plaza UK. The new revised version of the essay, from which this part is adapted, will be posted there soon and we will link to it then. This is the kind of work, daring and original, questioning accepted paradigms with new and provocative evidence, that KennedysandKing.com stands for.

~ Jim DiEugenio

The current, updated version of the full essay can be read here.

If the 2^nd-floor lunchroom encounter did not happen,

then was Oswald encountered somewhere else?

Some researchers think Oswald walked up the stairs inside the first floor vestibule, went through the corridor on the second floor, passed the door, moving from right to left, and got his coke. This is possible, but the news reports and statements, which come in various guises, show Oswald was encountered on the first floor instead, while trying to leave the building. It is even possible that Baker never saw Oswald until he was brought in while Baker was giving the affidavit taken by Marvin Johnson.

Bob Considine of the Hearst Press, for example, was told that Oswald had been questioned inside the building “almost before the smoke from the assassin’s gun had disappeared.” That hardly sounds like an encounter on the second floor does it? It points more to an altercation on the first floor, just where Oswald had claimed to be. Various newspapers made reference to this so-called first floor encounter instead of the second floor lunch room encounter.

Roy Truly was overheard by Kent Biffle, who reported in the November 23 edition of the Dallas Morning News:

“In a storage room on the first floor, the officer, gun drawn, spotted Oswald. ‘Does this man work here?’, the officer reportedly asked Truly. Truly, who said he had interviewed and had hired Oswald a couple of months earlier reportedly told the policeman that Oswald was a worker.”

Biffle mentions overhearing Truly again in the Dallas Morning News, edition from November 21, 2000:

“Hours dragged by. The building superintendent showed up with some papers in his hand. I listened as he told detectives about Lee Oswald failing to show up at a roll call. My impression is there was an earlier roll call but it was inconclusive inasmuch as several employees were missing. This time, however, all were accounted for but Oswald. I jotted down all the Oswald information. The description and address came from company records already examined by the superintendent. The superintendent would recall later that he and a policeman met Oswald as they charged into the building after the shots were fired.”

Ochus Campbell, the vice president of the TSBD, stated in the New York Herald Tribune on November 22:

“Shortly after the shooting we raced back into the building. We had been outside watching the parade. We saw him (Oswald) in a small storage room on the ground floor. Then we noticed he was gone.” Mr. Campbell added: “Of course he and the others were on their lunch hour but he did not have permission to leave the building and we haven’t seen him since.”

Detective Ed Hicks is quoted in the London Free Press on November 23, and in various other newspapers, saying:

As the Presidential limousine sped to the hospital the police dragnet went into action. Hicks said at just about that time, Oswald came out of the front door of the red bricked warehouse. A policeman asked him where he was going. He said he wanted to see what all the excitement was all about.

In addition, from Jack White’s archive at Baylor in a document called “Escape”, city detective Ed Hicks, after intensive investigation of the slaying, drew this picture of the hour surrounding the tragedy:

“As Oswald left the building, he was stopped by Dallas police, Oswald told them he worked in the building and was going down to see what was going on.” [AP, 1:45 a.m. CST]

In the Washington Post of November 23, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry is quoted:

“As an officer rushed into the building Oswald rushed out. The policeman permitted him to pass after the building manager told the policeman that Oswald was an employee.”

The first officer to reach the six-story building, Lieutenant Curry said, found Oswald among other persons in a lunchroom. New York Times, Nov 24^thDallas, [11/23], Donald Jansen (from Jack White’s archive at Baylor in a document called “Escape”)

The Sydney Morning Herald of November 24 reports:

Police said that a man who was identified as Oswald walked through the door of the warehouse and was stopped by a policeman. Oswald told the policeman “I work here” and when another employee confirmed that he did, the policeman let Oswald walk away, they said.

Henry Wade, during a press conference, which by the looks of it was published unedited in the New York Times on November 26, states:

“A police officer, immediately after the assassination, ran in the building and saw this man in a corner and tried to arrest him; but the manager of the building said he was an employee and it was all right. Every other employee was located but this defendant of the company. A description and name of him went out to police to look for him.”

J. Edgar Hoover, in a telephone conversation with LBJ, states:

“at the entrance of the building he was stopped by police officers, well he is alright, he works here, you needn’t hold him. They let him go.”

In Gary Savage’s book, First Day Evidence, Baker states:

“Shortly after I entered the building I confronted Oswald. The man who said he was the building superintendent said that Oswald was all right, that he was an employee there. We left Oswald there, and the supervisor showed me the way upstairs.”

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Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry’s press conference of November 23, 1963

Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry gave a press conference on November 23, 1963, during which he stated a few things that are very interesting:

At 5:25:

Reporter: Could you detail for us what lead you to Oswald?

Chief Curry: Not exactly except uh in the building we uh, when we uh went to the building, why, he was observed in the building at the time but the manager told us that he worked there and the officers passed him on up then because the manager said he was an employee…”

At 6:41:

Reporter: Did you say chief that a policeman had seen him in the building?

Chief Curry: Yes

Reporter: After the shot was fired?

Chief Curry: Yes

Reporter: uh why didn’t he uh arrest him then?

Chief Curry: Because the manager of the place told us that he was an employee, ‘said he’s alright he’s an employee.”

Reporter: Did he look suspicious to the policeman at this point?

Chief Curry: I imagine the policeman was checking everyone he saw as he went into the building.

At 10:42:

Reporter: And you have the witness who places him there after the time of the shooting.

Chief Curry: My police officer can place him there after the shooting.

Reporter: Your officer wanted to stop him and then was told by the manager that he worked there.

Chief Curry: Yes.

So let’s get this straight: Truly and Campbell, TSBD employees, are recorded by the newspapers while at the TSBD. Various ranking officers of the Dallas police are quoted in the corridors of the DPD. And even Hoover and LBJ discuss it!

Oswald’s alibi given just before and just after the shooting

In the second part of this study I will focus exclusively on the interrogation of Lee Oswald; here I will review the parts relating to the second floor lunch room encounter. These are the notes and reports by Robbery and Homicide Captain Will Fritz, FBI agents James Hosty and James Bookhout, Postal Inspector Harry Dean Holmes (who was an informant for the FBI), and Thomas Kelley of the Secret Service. These people were all present during the interrogations either Friday, Saturday and/or Sunday morning.

Captain Will Fritz interrogated Lee Oswald for roughly a dozen hours. Fritz claimed he took no notes, but in fact there were some (probably kept as a souvenir…); these were submitted anonymously in the mid-90’s to the ARRB after Fritz had died. These notes had been ‘buried’ for more than 33 years; until they appeared, researchers had to make do with Fritz’s statement from November 22 and his Warren Commission testimony.

Fritz’s interrogation notes contain a few gems when it comes to Lee’s location just before, during and just after the assassination:

On page 1 is found:

claims 2nd floor Coke when

off came in

Oswald had a coke from the 2nd floor when the officer came in. Came in where? 1st? 2nd?

to first floor had lunch

Oswald had lunch on the 1st floor.

out with Bill Shelley

in front

Oswald knew Shelley was standing in front of the building. And that is before the shooting, not after! As Shelley had departed almost immediately after the shooting from the TSBD steps.

Page 1 of Captain Fritz’s Notes

On page 3 of the same set of Fritz’s interrogation notes:

says two negro came in

one Jr + short negro – ask? for lunch says cheese

sandwiches + apple

Oswald saw Jarman and possibly Norman come into the Domino Room while he was having his lunch.

Lunch consisted of a cheese sandwich and an apple.

Page 3 of Captain Fritz’s Notes

Looking at both these pages, one thing becomes evident: a new sentence does not always start on a new line, but midway as well. This leaves his notes open to interpretation.

In his report to Chief Curry from November 23, 1963, Fritz says:

“We also found that this man had been stopped by Officer M.L. Baker while coming down the stairs. Mr. Baker says that he stopped this man on the third or the fourth floor on the stairway, but as Mr. Truly identified him as one of the employees he was released.”

The undated draft of Fritz’s report states:

“I asked him what part of the building he was in when the president was shot, and he said that he was having his lunch about that time on the first floor. Mr. Truly had told me that one of the police officers had stopped this man immediately after the shooting near the back stairway, so I asked Oswald where he was when the police officer stopped him. He said he was on the second floor drinking a coca cola when the officer came in.”

Fritz’s Warren Commission testimony:

Mr. BALL. Did you ask him what happened that day; where he had been?

Mr. FRITZ. Yes, sir.

Mr. BALL. What did he say?

Mr. FRITZ. Well he told me that he was eating lunch with some of the employees when this happened, and that he saw all the excitement and he didn’t think, I also asked him why he left the building. He said there was so much excitement there then that “I didn’t think there would be any work done that afternoon and we don’t punch a clock and they don’t keep very close time on our work and I just left.”

Mr. BALL. At that time didn’t you know that one of your officers, Baker, had seen Oswald on the second floor?

Mr. FRITZ. They told me about that down at the bookstore; I believe Mr. Truly or someone told me about it, told me they had met him, I think he told me, person who told me about, I believe told me that they met him on the stairway, but our investigation shows that he actually saw him in a lunch room, a little lunch room where they were eating, and he held his gun on this man and Mr. Truly told him that he worked there, and the officer let him go.

Mr. BALL. Did you question Oswald about that?

Mr. FRITZ. Yes, sir; I asked him about that and he knew that the officer stopped him all right.

Mr. BALL. Did you ask him what he was doing in the lunch room?

Mr. FRITZ. He said he was having his lunch. He had a cheese sandwich and a Coca-Cola.

Mr. BALL. Did he tell you he was up there to get a Coca-Cola?

Mr. FRITZ. He said he had a Coca-Cola.

Although he learned from a conversation with Roy Truly at the “bookstore” [sic] that they met Oswald on the stairway, his own investigation shows it was inside the second floor lunch room instead! It has also only recently come to light that Martha Joe Stroud corresponded with the Warren Commission, relating that Fritz was not happy with his statement and that he wanted it changed. So there seem to be two versions of his statement. I would love to see the difference between the two! (This was recently posted by Robin Unger.)

James Hosty and James Bookhout of the FBI state in their joint November 23 report:

“OSWALD stated that he went to lunch at approximately noon and he claimed he ate his lunch on the first floor in the lunchroom; however he went to the second floor where the Coca-Cola machine was located and obtained a bottle of Coca-Cola ‘for his lunch. OSWALD claimed to’ be on the first floor when President JOHN F. KENNEDY passed by his building.”

This report does not mention the specific location of Oswald on the first floor at the time of the assassination, nor does it mention any encounter involving Oswald, a police officer and Truly.

In the solo report by James Bookhout (dated November 24, after Oswald was dead), things are turned around a bit, but not for the better.

“Oswald stated that on November 22 1963, at the time of the search of the Texas School Book Depository building by Dallas police officers, he was on the second floor of said building, having just purchased a Coca-Cola from the soft-drink machine, at which time a police officer came into the room with pistol drawn and asked him if he worked there.

Mr. Truly was present and verified that he was an employee and the police officer thereafter left the room and continued through the building. Oswald stated that he took this Coke down to the first floor and stood around and had lunch in the employee’s lunch room. He thereafter went outside and stood around for five or ten minutes with foreman Bill Shelley.”

First, he mentions “officers”, when Baker was the only police officer in that building for a fair amount of time (5 to 10 minutes is a reasonable assumption); everyone else on the force was busy in the railroad yard. Or is this an indication that Oswald was in the building much later than he has been credited for?

Second, Oswald had purchased a coke, which from a timing perspective makes it already “interesting” (getting the correct change out, putting it in the machine and waiting for the bottle to appear and to take the cap off). But what is more important is that neither Truly nor Baker saw anything in his hands.

Third, Oswald stood around and had lunch after the shooting, and even stood outside with Bill Shelley for 5 to 10 minutes after having had his lunch. So how long was he in that building? According to this second report, for quite some time, which makes one wonder how the bus-to-cab ride transpired, how he changed his clothes, ‘grabbed his gun’ and walked towards 10th and Patton to blow Tippit away. This is impossible from the timing perspective described by James Bookhout! Plus Shelley left immediately after the shooting and did not come back until at least 5 minutes after leaving.

Hosty writes in Assignment Oswald about an exchange he had with Oswald during his questioning while in police custody. No second floor lunch room encounter whatsoever.

Okay now, Lee, you work at the Texas School Book Depository, isn’t that right?

Yeah, that’s right.

When did you start working there?

About October fifteenth.

What did you do down there?

I was just a common laborer.

Now, did you have access to all floors of the building?

Of course.

Tell me what was on each of those floors.

The first and second floors have offices. The third and fourth floor are storage. So are the fifth and sixth.

And you were working there today, is that right?

Yep.

Were you there when the president’s motorcade went by?

Yeah.

Where were you when the president went by the book depository?

I was eating my lunch in the first floor lunchroom.

What time was that?

About noon.

Were you ever on the second floor around the time the president was shot?

Well, yeah. I went up there to get a bottle of Coca-Cola from the machine for my lunch.

But where were you when the president actually passed your building?

On the first floor in the lunchroom.

And you left the depository, isn’t that right?

Yeah.

When did you leave?

Well, I figured with all the confusion there wouldn’t be any more work to do that day.

Hosty tried to pin Oswald’s location down decades after the fact, based on memory and also probably the interrogation report signed by him and James Bookhout, since it coincides neatly with the so-called recollection above. Oswald has gone for lunch and stayed in the Domino Room after he had gotten his coke from the second floor. Many must have seen him, since the ladies from the office all started to have their lunch at 12:00 upstairs in the second floor lunchroom. Some people will claim that this pins Oswald on the first floor, and that he went upstairs via the front of the building and ended up passing the window in the door leading to the small area in front of the lunchroom, thus being spotted by Baker. But why would he do that? The Domino Room was in the back at the east end, where the infamous back stairs were perhaps a little closer, affording more direct access.

The Secret Service was present too. Forrest Sorrels and Thomas J. Kelley were there during some of Lee Oswald’s interrogations.

Thomas J. Kelley is the only one who supplies an interrogation report that actually goes so far as to claim that Oswald explicitly admitted to not having watched the motorcade. In his First interview with LHO, he states:

“I asked him if he viewed the parade and he said he had not. I then asked him if he had shot the President and he said he had not. I asked him if he has shot governor Connally and he said he had not.”

None of the notes or reports – by Fritz, Bookhout, Hosty or even Harry Dean Holmes, who was actually present during that final interrogation of Oswald alongside Kelley – back up the statement highlighted above.

According to Vince Palamara, Kelley perjured himself during the HSCA hearings.

Finally, Postal Inspector and FBI informant Harry Dean Holmes, on page 4 of his report dated December 17, 1963:

“the commotion surrounding the assassination took place and when he went downstairs, a policeman questioned him as to his identification and his boss stated ‘he is one of our employees’, whereupon the policeman had him step aside momentarily”.

In his statement and his testimony (see below), Oswald is being asked to step aside.

Holmes’ Warren Commission testimony:

Mr. BELIN. By the way, where did this policeman stop him when he was coming down the stairs at the Book Depository on the day of the shooting?

Mr. HOLMES. He said it was in the vestibule.

Mr. BELIN. He said he was in the vestibule?

Mr. HOLMES. Or approaching the door to the vestibule. He was just coming, apparently, and I have never been in there myself. Apparently there is two sets of doors, and he had come out to this front part.

Mr. BELIN. Did he state it was on what floor?

Mr. HOLMES. First floor. The front entrance to the first floor.

And later on during the very same testimony:

Mr. BELIN. Now, Mr. Holmes, I wonder if you could try and think if there is anything else that you remember Oswald saying about where he was during the period prior or shortly prior to, and then at the time of the assassination?

Mr. HOLMES. Nothing more than I have already said. If you want me to repeat that?

Mr. BELIN. Go ahead and repeat it.

Mr. HOLMES. See if I say it the same way?

Mr. BELIN. Yes.

Mr. HOLMES. He said when lunchtime came he was working in one of the upper floors with a Negro. The Negro said, “Come on and let’s eat lunch together.” Apparently both of them having a sack lunch. And he said, “You go ahead, send the elevator back up to me and I will come down just as soon as I am finished.” And he didn’t say what he was doing. There was a commotion outside, which he later rushed downstairs to go out to see what was going on. He didn’t say whether he took the stairs down. He didn’t say whether he took the elevator down.

But he went downstairs, and as he went out the front, it seems as though he did have a coke with him, or he stopped at the coke machine, or somebody else was trying to get a coke, but there was a coke involved. He mentioned something about a coke. But a police officer asked him who he was, and just as he started to identify himself, his superintendent came up and said, “He is one of our men.” And the policeman said, “Well, you step aside for a little bit. Then I just went on out in the crowd to see what it was all about.”

Step aside, which does not point to a second floor encounter, as Baker and Truly did a 180-degree turn after this alleged “lunch date”.

Lee Oswald did not lie when he claimed he was on the first floor when the president passed by the TSBD. Not only did Holmes relay this; so did Fritz in his interrogation notes, as did Bookhout and Hosty in their joint report.

James ‘Junior’ Jarman told the HSCA that Billy Lovelady told him that he had personally witnessed Oswald being allowed out of the front entrance by a policeman shortly after the assassination, and that Truly had said he was alright. (See HERE and HERE.)

This is, of course, hearsay – just as Pauline Sanders’ support for Mrs. Reid’s encounter with Oswald in his t-shirt is equally hearsay. But it is worth mentioning. What also needs to be taken into consideration is that Lovelady left for the railroad yard almost straight after the shooting had stopped, and said he went back in through the side entrance and ended taking police officers up in the elevator. Yet Lovelady is filmed standing outside on the TSBD steps afterwards by John Martin and Robert Hughes at about 12:50. And it looks like he is waiting to get in. Danny Garcia is there, as is Bonnie Ray Williams. Did Lovelady see Oswald leave then? Which would mean he left much later than has been acknowledged. Lovelady was extremely economical with the truth during his Warren Commission testimony as I already pointed out earlier.

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James Earl Jarman and Harold Norman saw Howard Brennan talking to a police officer. This by itself shows how quickly they made their way down from the fifth floor.

According to Harold Norman’s HSCA testimony, he states that after starting their descent from the fifth floor, they stopped on the fourth floor for a couple of minutes, because they saw the ladies looking through the windows at the railroad yard activity shortly after the shooting.

This is during the same interval in which Dorothy Garner stayed behind, after “following” Victoria Adams and Sandra Styles, when they started their descent; Garner was then joined by other women from those fourth floor offices. Norman’s HSCA testimony strengthens Dorothy Garner’s statements and also shows that the three African American men, Williams, Jarman and Norman, did not encounter anyone, not even Truly and Baker while they made their descent. Or did they wait much longer? Baker states in his HSCA testimony that he was spotted by them while they hid behind boxes on the 5^th floor. Norman had no recollection of this during his testimony, and couldn’t attest to when he saw Truly after coming down to the first floor.

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April 14, 2017
The Abstract Reality of Edward Epstein

Part 1: “Focus on the Media: Edward J. Epstein”

Part 3: “Edward Epstein: Warren Commission Critic?” (Probe vol 7 no 1, 1999)

On his web site, Edward Epstein preserved his article published in The Atlantic in 1993 on Jim Garrison. To my knowledge, that is the only place one can find it since (thankfully) it does not appear to be available at The Atlantic web site. A few months earlier, in late 1992, he had just published a hit piece on Garrison in the ever-accommodating New Yorker. This was written on the occasion of Garrison’s death. Epstein now used the excuse that Oliver Stone was coming out with a double VHS box set of his film JFK to justify a second hatchet job. This allowed him to widen his focus a bit. Now he could include both Stone and his consultant Fletcher Prouty in his machine-gun strike.

And make no mistake. That is what these two pieces are, out and out drive-bys. One definition of a hatchet job is that the author ignores the record, distorts the record, or even worse, deliberately misrepresents it. All done in order to disguise what is an act, not of reportage, but of propaganda. As we shall see, there is no evidence that Epstein ever once consulted the original records of Jim Garrison’s investigation for either of these two articles.. These were available to him from three sources at that time. First, there was a collection of them at the Assassination Archives and Research Center (AARC) in Washington DC. Second, co-screenwriter of the film JFK Zachary Sklar had many of them. Third, Jim Garrison had what was probably the largest collection of them at his home. I never heard of any attempt by Epstein to consult these records for either of his two articles.

Because of that, this allows him to say, in the second paragraph of his 1993 Atlantic piece, that the idea that Clay Shaw had participated in a conspiracy to kill Kennedy was based on nothing but the testimony of Perry Russo. So right out of the gate, Epstein commits a faux pas. For Garrison did not make Shaw a person of interest because of Russo. The way that Garrison came to be interested in Shaw was through the testimony of lawyer Dean Andrews in the Warren Commission volumes. There, Andrews said that he had been called by a person named Clay Bertrand within 24 hours of the assassination. Bertrand wanted him to go to Dallas and volunteer to defend Lee Harvey Oswald. That call was corroborated by at least four sources, including Andrews’ secretary and his investigator. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 51) When Garrison talked to Andrews, he refused to reveal who Bertrand was. Just as he had previously refused to reveal the man’s true name to Mark Lane, and he would later refuse to do so with Anthony Summers. He claimed he would be in physical danger if he did reveal the name. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 181)

Consequently, Garrison sent out his investigators to find out who Bertrand was. It turned out to be Shaw. Again, there are plentiful references to this in Garrison’s files, which Epstein did not survey. (DiEugenio, pp. 387-88) But beyond that, even the FBI knew that Shaw was Bertrand. And they knew this as far back as 1963, because his name had come up in their original investigation. (Davy, p. 192) Since he is either unaware of, or wants to ignore, this information, Epstein can 1.) Deny this evidence and 2.) Attribute the whole Shaw/Bertrand case to Russo.

II

Before we begin to address Epstein’s over-the-top attack on Russo, let us lay down some facts, which Epstein does not do. Without these facts, there is no baseline to form any kind of informed discussion. And informed discussion is what Epstein wishes to avoid.

Garrison’s assistant Andrew Sciambra first interviewed Russo in Baton Rouge on February 25, 1967. Russo stated that he had attended a gathering at David Ferrie’s apartment in September of 1963. During this gathering, the talk turned to an assassination plot to kill President Kennedy. Some anti-Castro Cubans were on hand as well as Ferrie, a man Russo called Clem Bertrand, and a man he called Leon Oswald. Sciambra gave Russo photos to identify, and he picked out photos of Ferrie, Shaw and Oswald. Sciambra took notes on a legal pad and marked the photos the witness had identified. He concluded by telling Russo he should come down to New Orleans for further discussion.

In the office on Monday, Sciambra began transcribing his notes. He was in the process of doing this when Russo arrived. Garrison wanted to test his testimony, so he was taken to Mercy Hospital and given Sodium Pentothal (truth serum) and later placed under hypnosis by Dr. Nicolas Chetta. Russo told the same story to Chetta as he did to Sciambra in Baton Rouge. (Davy, p. 121) Chetta told Garrison assistant Alvin Oser that there was no chance one could lie under truth serum; what Russo said had to have happened. (Joe Biles, In History’s Shadow, p. 38) Russo’s story was partly corroborated by his friend Niles Peterson, who had left the gathering early but recalled the presence there of a Leon Oswald. On February 28, Sciambra drove Russo by Shaw’s apartment, where Russo identified Shaw from a parked car. Finally, posing as an insurance salesman, he greeted Shaw at his door. This finalized the identification.

Sciambra then drafted his first completed memo based on the Chetta sessions. In fact, it is dated February 28, the day after the truth serum was administered. Later on he finished a second memo. This related the things outside the scope of that gathering at Ferrie’s, and was the actual second memo Sciambra composed. (See Biles, p. 44) When Lou Ivon typed up a search warrant for Shaw’s apartment, he referred to what Sciambra told him about the conversation he had with Russo in Baton Rouge, which was reaffirmed by the truth serum session. This information is right in the warrant, before Sciambra even typed up his second memo. Ivon could only have gotten the information from Sciambra. And Sciambra could only have gotten it from Russo. (ibid)

What Epstein does to confuse matters is to borrow the same scheme that the late James Phelan used back in 1967. After reporter Phelan met with the DA in Las Vegas, Garrison unwisely let him copy the memos. The DA was obviously unaware that Phelan had been a conduit for the Saturday Evening Post to write government-sanctioned stories. And, in fact, Phelan had three meetings with the FBI about Jim Garrison, urging them to intercede with the DA. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, p. 245) Phelan took his copies of the memos and said that, since one mentioned the gathering at Ferrie’s and one did not, this meant that the one that did not came first, and the one that did came second. Therefore all the information about an assassination discussion was induced into Russo by hypnosis. This is rendered false by both the date on the first memo and by Ivon’s search warrant.

But let us go further with Phelan. Phelan went to visit Russo in Baton Rouge and he took photographer Matt Herron with him. He later said that on this occasion, Russo told Herron and himself that he never mentioned the assassination discussion in Baton Rouge, only in New Orleans. Phelan later told author James Kirkwood that Herron would back him up on this point. When this writer contacted Mr. Herron, this was exposed as a lie. Herron told me that Russo strongly stated that he first mentioned the gathering in Baton Rouge. (ibid, p. 246) Even further, Phelan said he had taped this conversation with Russo. Under cross-examination at the Shaw trial, Phelan admitted this was false also. (Biles, p. 46)

But there was still another fallback position that Phelan and Shaw’s lawyers then took. They said that once you looked at the two sessions done by Chetta with Russo, the reader could see that Russo was prompted by Chetta to recall Bertrand. It turned out that this was another deliberate misrepresentation. Only when the second session is placed first and the first session placed second is that the case. But in Garrison’s files they are properly labeled as A and B. When they are read in this order, it is plainly seen that Russo recalls Bertrand’s name without any prompting. (DiEugenio, p. 247)

Now, at the time Epstein wrote this article, in 1993, he could have discovered all this information on his own. He could have spoken to Matt Herron, Andrew Sciambra, and Lou Ivon. If he wanted written evidence, he could have asked Garrison for the memos and the search warrant. Apparently, he did not think that was important. And he also either believed Phelan, or thought that Phelan’s scheme could not be exposed. Well, it was exposed. This proves that 1.) Epstein did not do on the ground research for his article, and 2.) That he had an agenda from the moment he started writing it.

But further revealing his shabby research methods, Epstein does not even seem to understand that Russo was not supposed to be Garrison’s lead witness. The lead witness was supposed to be a man named Clyde Johnson. Johnson was a preacher turned reactionary politician who told Garrison he had met with Shaw, Leon Oswald, Jack Ruby and a Cuban in a Baton Rouge hotel in 1963. Shaw gave him money for his campaign, two thousand dollars, the equivalent of about $17,000 today. When he went to the bathroom, he heard them talking about “getting someone”, and he became apprehensive. But it turned out they were talking about Kennedy, and using Johnson’s attacks on him to lure him to the south. Johnson had a witness who partly collaborated his story about Shaw’s support. He also had a contemporaneous address book, in which he had made notes about Shaw and Ruby. Johnson did not testify at Shaw’s trial even though Garrison had hid him outside of town. His office was so infiltrated and wired for sound that Johnson’s location was discovered. During the trial he was beaten to a bloody pulp. He was hospitalized and could not testify. (Davy, pp. 72-73) Again, Epstein could have found out about Johnson if he had asked Garrison for documents. He apparently did not think it was important.

III

Building on his foundation of sand, Epstein now decides to jump to a scene from the film JFK. This is a scene that focuses on the man who was Garrison’s chief suspect. The film shows us David Ferrie in a panic after Garrison’s investigation had been prematurely exposed in the local press. He calls Lou Ivon at Garrison’s office and says that this is a fatal development for him. Investigator Ivon, Garrison and a third assistant then go to visit him at a hotel room that Ivon has secured for Ferrie. Now, to be fair, let us grant the screenwriters a degree of dramatic license. In reality only Ivon was there (Davy, p. 66), since he was the one person in Garrison’s office that Ferrie trusted. But in terms of the film narrative, one had to have Garrison there since he is the central character. And contrary to what Epstein said at a debate in New York sponsored by The Nation magazine, Garrison did write about this incident in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins. (see pp. 138-39) Epstein can scream until the cows come home, but there is very little in this scene that stretches the facts about Ferrie. Let us do something that none of Stone’s critics have done. Let us break it down.

Ferrie first says he worked for the CIA. This fact was reported to Anthony Summers by CIA officer Victor Marchetti for his book Conspiracy. Ferrie also mentioned it to at least one of his friends. (see Summers, p. 300; also Davy, p. 28) Ferrie then says that Shaw had a high clearance, and this is also true. Shaw had a clearance for the CIA’s Domestic Operations Division codenamed QK/ENCHANT. This was the same clearance Howard Hunt had. (Davy, pp. 195-96) Ferrie then adds that both the Cuban exiles and Oswald were also associated with the CIA. There is no doubt that Sergio Arcacha Smith, Ferrie’s closest Cuban friend, was a CIA operative. He had been sanctioned as such by Howard Hunt for the local leadership of the Cuban Revolutionary Council. This was a sort of a government in exile for Cuba that the CIA set up before the Bay of Pigs invasion. (ibid, p. 9) Eladio Del Valle, another Cuban exile, paid Ferrie for flights into Cuba. (Paris Flammonde, The Kennedy Conspiracy, p. 119)

Ferrie then says that the CIA and Mob had been working together against Castro for years. This is such a commonplace, even back then, that it should not even be noted. But Ferrie was in a good position to know about it since he had a sideline of working for an attorney who represented Carlos Marcello. (Michael Benson, Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination, p. 135) And his aforementioned paymaster for flights into Cuba, Eladio del Valle, had ties to Santo Trafficante, who actually was part of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro. (Summers, pp. 319, 491)

“I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that.” ~Jim Garrison

Concerning Oswald and the CIA, the odds are high that, as Garrison wrote, he was acting as a CIA agent provocateur, especially in light of the revelations in John Newman’s book Oswald and the CIA. But even in 1993, with all that was known about Oswald being at Guy Banister’s office at 544 Camp Street through books by Garrison, Philip Melanson, and Anthony Summers, plus Oswald’s visit to the Clinton/Jackson area with Shaw and Ferrie, most objective people would have had to grant this. What else would a “communist” be doing hanging out with so many right-wingers?

When Ferrie mentions that he knows things about Ruby, there is also evidence for that. This comes from Clyde Johnson, as mentioned above, and also Ferrie associates William Morris and Thomas Beckham. (See Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice, pp. 79, 124) As far as Ferrie saying that Ruby ran guns to Castro in the early days, there were records that Ruby did do that prior to the Cuban revolution. This was even written about by reporter Earl Golz in the Dallas Morning News. (See August 18, 1978; also John Armstrong, Harvey and Lee, p. 177) What this all exposes is not Stone’s flawed writing, but Epstein’s non-existent research.

We now come to the exchange that drove Epstein up the wall. Garrison asks Ferrie, “Who killed the president?” It is clear that he does not mean that Ferrie was in on it. It is simply an exploratory query. Ferrie says he does not know. He says no one knows, not even the assassins. Because these kinds of things are all wrapped up in a layered cover operation. But the odd thing is this. If Epstein had looked, there was evidence in Garrison’s files that Ferrie at least planned an assassination attempt.

Most us know from Garrison’s Playboy interview that Ferrie had a rather rare preoccupation. He measured trajectory angles and distances of shells ejecting out of rifles. (DiEugenio, p. 215) One would not need to do that for guerilla fighting or firefights during Operation Mongoose—which Ferrie was a part of. (Davy, p. 28) But you might need it for a covert operation that included assassination.

Jim Garrison had planted a mole on Ferrie. Actually, two of them. One was named Max Gonzalez and one was Jimmy Johnson. Johnson said that he had gone through some of Ferrie’s documents and come across a folder marked “Files 1963”. In that folder he found a set of papers that looked like a diagram for an assassination plot against Fidel Castro. From the markings on the paper, the plot seemed to have to do with killing Castro from a plane. (DiEugenio, p. 215)

But a different witness found a different diagram in Ferrie’s desk in attorney G. Wray Gill’s office. Clara Gay was a Gill client who knew Ferrie. After the assassination, she called Gill’s office: the word was that Garrison had questioned Ferrie about the Kennedy case. She heard what sounded like some panicky voices in the background. So she went over to Gill’s office. Walking over to Ferrie’s desk she saw what appeared to be a diagram of Dealey Plaza: it depicted a car from the perspective of a high angle with tall buildings around it. When Clara tried to pick it up, the secretary came over and pulled it back. But during the struggle, Clara noticed the words “Elm Street” written on the diagram. (Ibid, p. 216)

Epstein’s idea that Ferrie would somehow be alien to crafting assassination plots is not backed up by the evidence. And clearly, Garrison made a mistake by not listening to Ivon and having Ferrie testify before a grand jury after this tense discussion with him. (Garrison, pp. 139-40)

Once the record is referred to, we can conclude that there really is little or nothing in this scene that cannot be justified by information that the DA had about David Ferrie. Consequently, when the facts are adduced, Epstein’s howls about violations of the record are the equivalent of a stray dog barking in the night. What makes it worse is that there is really no excuse for his journalistic irresponsibility. Because when Stone and co-scenarist Zach Sklar released the volume The Book of the Film in 1992, it included the script’s research notes. On page 88, the text reads that although Garrison’s book refers to this episode in passing, the exchange is actually based on interviews with investigator Lou Ivon. This reviewer called Ivon back in 1993. When Garrison’s investigator was asked if a man named Ed Epstein ever got in contact with him about the Kennedy case, he replied that, back in 1968, yes. I asked him, what about more recently, since Stone’s movie came out? Ivon replied, no, not recently. Epstein thought it was unimportant to consult the primary source.

IV

Epstein couples his howls over this scene with similar complaints about one that shortly follows. After a scene showing Garrison discovering that his office has been wired for sound—which it was—Ivon gets a phone call. (For the electronic surveillance see DiEugenio, p. 232, and pp. 264-65) He is alerted that Ferrie has been found dead. Garrison and some of his assistants rush over to his apartment. As Garrison goes through the place, he discovers an empty bottle of Proloid, which is used for low metabolism. As the photographs taken at the time reveal, there are many other empty pill bottles around. When Garrison had the Proloid drug checked out, his expert said that excessive use of it in someone like Ferrie, who had hypertension at the time, could cause death without a trace. (DiEugenio, p. 225)

What makes this even more suggestive is that two forensic pathologists reviewed the autopsy photos in advance of the film’s release. They both noted contusions on the inside of Ferrie’s mouth. Dr. Cyril Wecht and Dr. Frank Minyard said these could be indicative of someone inserting some kind of tube with the pills in solution down Ferrie’s throat. In fact, one of the cuts is on the inside of the lower lip, where the tube may have been inserted. (DiEugenio, p. 226; Sklar and Stone, p. 102)

There were other oddities about the scene. According to one of the local newspapers, Ferrie’s body was first found by someone who said he did not know Ferrie. He told the police he just happened to wander in, even though Ferrie lived on the second floor. (New Orleans Times Picayune 2/22/67) Ferrie also left two typed, unsigned suicide notes. (Flammonde, on pp. 34-36, features their text) Also, there was the nearly concurrent death of Eladio Del Valle, who was shot and hacked to death within the same 24-hour period. Unknowingly, Garrison had sent CIA infiltrator Bernardo De Torres to find Del Valle in Miami. The note Garrison got back about his death read as follows: “He was shot in the chest and it appears ‘gangland style’ and his body was left in the vicinity of BERNARDO TORRES apartment.” (DiEugenio, p. 227)

Then there was the time of death. First the coroner said that Ferrie had died late in the evening of the previous day. But then reporter George Lardner came forward and stated that he had been with Ferrie until four AM on the day his body was discovered, which was February 22, 1967. (Davy, p. 66) Because of this, the coroner now revised his estimated time of death—by over four hours. This is a real stretch. Most coroners will say that expanding the estimated time of death by four hours is unusual.

Then there were the observations of Dr. Martin Palmer, Ferrie’s physician. He criticized the official verdict of a ruptured blood vessel, or beury aneurysm, as the cause of death. Palmer called the autopsy “slipshod”. He went on to say it was incomplete since they did not open the brain case. Further, there was no iodine test done, and Ferrie’s blood samples were not kept. (Mellen, pp. 106-07)

So why did Coroner Chetta rule as he did, that the cause of death was a natural one, by beury aneurysm? As Minyard told this reviewer, no one could recall a case in which the deceased left a suicide note—in this case two of them—and then died of a seemingly natural cause. (DiEugenio, p. 226) Chetta apparently wanted to play it safe in the face of the tremendous publicity Ferrie’s death had caused. Which included a phone call to him from Robert Kennedy. (Mellen, p. 107))

What Stone and Sklar do in this scene is to contrast Garrison and his staff going through Ferrie’s apartment while picking up some of the odd artifacts, like the two suicide notes, or the empty pill bottles. Stone then intercuts shots of what Garrison was thinking may have happened: some Cuban exiles forcing the drugs down Ferrie’s mouth. The first time we see this, Garrison (played by Kevin Costner) is staring in a mirror; the second time, the coroner literally asks him what he is thinking. These brief cutaways—which include a depiction of the death of Del Valle—are shot in high contrast black and white, as opposed to the actual film, which is in color. In the parlance of film grammar, these are called subjective scenes, since they depict what a character in the film is thinking. Given all the evidence I have presented here, they are completely justified. Epstein ignores it all.

V

Then there are Epstein’s transgressions about the character of Willie O’Keefe, played by Kevin Bacon. Epstein calls O’Keefe a fictional character. This is not accurate. He is a composite character. That is, the screenwriters collapsed certain real life characters into one. This is not an uncommon practice, and most film critics accept it as a way of getting information across while saving time. Again, it is very hard to believe that Epstein is not aware of this, because this information is clearly conveyed in The Book of the Film. This includes the shooting script plus the research notes. It was published in 1992, many months before Epstein’s essay appeared. On page 66 of that book, scenarists Stone and Zach Sklar reveal that O’Keefe is made up of four people: David Logan, Perry Russo, Ray Broshears, and William Morris. Logan was interviewed by assistant DA Jim Alcock. Logan is the source for the dinner at Shaw’s luxurious apartment where a homosexual party follows, which includes Ferrie. Logan’s testimony about Shaw’s sex habits was quite explicit and, if anything, is understated in the film. (Mellen, p. 123) William Morris was in prison when Garrison’s assistant DA found him and talked to him. This is why the first time we see O’Keefe he is in jail. Like Logan, he also knew Shaw as Bertrand. Shaw used him for sexual purposes and he was procured for Shaw by a man who appears to have been Shaw’s pimp, Eugene Davis. (ibid, p. 124) Broshears figures in Garrison’s book and also in the work of author Dick Russell. Except he was closer to Ferrie personally and had only been introduced to Shaw. Broshears said that Ferrie had confided in him what he knew about the JFK assassination. Namely, that he had been marginally involved, was supposed to be an escape pilot and that is what he was doing in Houston on the day of the assassination. (Garrison, pp. 120-21) Somehow we are supposed to believe that Epstein was not aware of any of this.

Epstein ends his hysterical screed with a multiple-page rant against the Mr. X character in the film. This is the former military man who meets with Garrison in Washington. Mr. X, who was originally to be performed by Marlon Brando, is played by Donald Sutherland. This mysterious character is based upon Fletcher Prouty, who was one of the technical advisors on the film. Both Stone and Sklar understood that Prouty did not actually meet with Garrison until after the Shaw trial. But they wanted to convey information to the audience about the reasons for Kennedy’s assassination. And in The Book of the Film, the scenarists actually quote Garrison on this point:

I have found that the assassination was much more complex than anyone believed, and that a corner of it—I’ve never pretended it was more—existed in New Orleans …. John Kennedy was killed because he was against the war in Vietnam. There is no doubt of that. (p. 106)

This is why Prouty is portrayed in the film. Now, in the film, the Mr. X character details his past history in the military. Prouty was the military support officer for intelligence operations and he interfaced with the CIA when they needed arms and munitions they did not have in their supply depots. Therefore he had knowledge of certain of these secret operations, which are briefly described in the film. Since he served until the end of 1963, he had inside knowledge of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mongoose, and Kennedy’s withdrawal plan for Vietnam. And these are the main points he is meant to discuss.

Col. Fletcher Prouty (1917-2001)

Incredibly, Epstein pretty much ignores these. Which is kind of shocking, since the climax of the scene is X/Prouty’s participation in Kennedy’s withdrawal plan from Vietnam in the fall of 1963. Epstein deals with this keystone concept in exactly one sentence. And even that is done tangentially. With Epstein, there is no reference to NSAM 263, the Taylor/McNamara report which was the basis for that Vietnam withdrawal memo, nor does he refer to Lyndon Johnson’s NSAM 273, which, after Kennedy’s death, partly reversed that earlier action memorandum. Nor is there any reference to how the latter memorandum opened the door to direct American involvement in Vietnam, something that Kennedy consciously resisted. (See John Newman, JFK and Vietnam, pp. 445-49) To ignore all of this is simply inexplicable.

As noted in the film, Prouty was directly involved with the Vietnam plans, along with his friend and colleague, Marine officer Victor Krulak. They were so intimately involved that they understood that the whole McNamara/Taylor report was not written in Saigon, which is where Robert McNamara and Maxwell Taylor had been sent in the fall of 1963. It was written in Washington by Krulak and Prouty, under the supervision of Robert Kennedy, upon the orders of the president. (p. 401) President Kennedy was not leaving anything to chance about his withdrawal plan. In October of 1963, he was taking control of it himself, even if he had to write it and ramrod it through some reluctant advisors. That ghost-written report, secretly written by Kennedy, would be the basis for NSAM 263. And that memo would begin a withdrawal of American troops that December, to be completed in 1965. This information is in John Newman’s landmark book on the subject, JFK and Vietnam. Again, since that book was published in 1992, Epstein could have found it in those pages. Or he could have called Victor Krulak, who was alive at that time. Apparently, Epstein had no intention of doing either. Because that would have meant the film was correct and Prouty’s information was accurate: Kennedy was withdrawing from Vietnam, as Garrison had figured out decades previously.

Since he cannot launch a frontal assault, Epstein decides to discredit the information by doing a smear of Prouty. To call it a smear is actually being gentle. Prouty’s career is pretty much well described in more than one source. (Click here) He was a well-rounded, intelligent, candid, curious man. He dealt in banking, military affairs, and education. He wrote both articles and books about his past military experience. And he served as a consultant to several media projects, including JFK. For Epstein to deny some of these things is silly.

Documents pertaining to Colonel Prouty’s service record

But Epstein has to contest what Mr. X says about the Secret Service regulations in place at that time. Or else, what the film implies—that a huge Secret Service failure took place in Dallas—would be accurate. Which, as we know today, is the case. So Epstein says that, contrary to what Mr. X says, the Secret Service manual did not demand that all windows on the motorcade route be sealed, or that teams should monitor rooftops, or there should be a constant speed during motorcades. No one knows more about this aspect than author Vince Palamara. He has written two books on the subject and has a third coming out soon. In an email communication to this reviewer, Vince had the following to say about these topics. After consulting with two top-level Secret Service officers, one who authored the manual, he wrote: windows along a motorcade route were to be, at the least, monitored. Building rooftops were to be guarded. And the motorcade route was to be regulated at a top speed of 35 miles per hour. (Palamara email of April 6, 2017) Obviously, these strictures were all disobeyed in Dallas.

Contrary to what Epstein writes, Len Osanic—who knew Prouty for over ten years—related to me that Prouty was not an editorial advisor to the Church of Scientology. They asked him to look at some documents about L. Ron Hubbard. He did and rendered his opinion. There was discussion of a book, but that never materialized. His association with the Liberty Lobby was that they republished his book The Secret Team. He delivered one of his standard addresses at a seminar of theirs, concerning the Kennedy case and the secret team. But Osanic does not recognize the quotes Epstein attributes to Prouty in his article. By including them, Epstein can now inject the rather standard smear of anti-Semitism. (For Prouty’s actual statements concerning the Arabs, Israelis and the price of oil, see chapter 3 of Understanding Special Operations; after clicking here, scroll down to “The Changing Nature of Warfare: From a Military to an Economic Basis”.) Further, contrary to what Epstein implies, Prouty’s meeting with General Edward Lansdale about sending him to the South Pole was not worked out months or even weeks in advance. As depicted in the film, it was a November, 1963 surprise to him. (Phone communication with Osanic, April 7, 2017) Probably no one alive knows more about Prouty than Osanic, and I refer anyone who is interested in the man to his web site, prouty.org.

Epstein concludes his wild rant against Prouty by saying that the colonel thought that Leonard Lewin’s 1967 book Report from Iron Mountain was a work of non-fiction. This is supposed to show that Stone should never have trusted Prouty. He couldn’t figure out fiction from non-fction. But what it demonstrates is how abstract the reality of Epstein’s warped world is. For if one goes to Prouty’s web site, as posthumously managed by Osanic, one can click on the “more articles” tab and scroll down to the bottom. There you will see a link to a 1972 NY Times report of Lewin saying that the book is not a work of non-fiction. It is a satiric novel. Osanic told me that when he was setting up the site, Prouty insisted on this link. If one goes to the Black Op Radio site, and clicks Archived Shows, and scrolls down to Program 825, one will be able to listen to an interview Prouty did with Sean Mackenzie. If one goes to the 49:00 mark, one will hear a discussion of Lewin’s book. Prouty, no less than four times, calls it a novel. But he appreciated the satiric edge of the novel, since many people he knew in the Pentagon talked as Lewin depicted: we cannot abandon the warfare state.

Anyone familiar with propaganda techniques can see what Epstein has done. To distract from the solid information about Vietnam in the film JFK, he has abstracted certain aspects from Prouty’s life to present them under the worst possible light. That The Atlantic printed this hatchet job says a lot about their editorial standards.

But there is a larger issue here. And it relates not to just how bad the media is in America, but also to certain elements of the JFK critical community. Jim Garrison had his secret JFK murder probe exposed by the local media in New Orleans. From there on in, it was crippled, because the larger media decided to zero in on it, just as they would later target Richard Sprague when he took command of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Reporter/agents like Phelan, Hugh Aynesworth and Walter Sheridan created a barrage of smears and phony stories that the MSM ran with, and much of the public swallowed. This now became the paradigm about the Garrison inquiry—even in the research community! There, the largest proponents of this paradigm were Peter Scott, Paul Hoch, and Josiah Thompson. It was not until the ARRB collected and declassified Garrison’s files that we had an opportunity to look at what his real evidence was. That release, combined with memoranda from other sources, has allowed a different paradigm to now circulate. As I have written elsewhere, we will never really know the complete extent of Garrison’s files, because so many of them were lost, stolen or incinerated by his successor, the disastrous Harry Connick. But what did survive reduces Epstein’s weird world to rubble.

April 7, 2017